Alek dreamt, and in his dream he stood in the crawling shadow of the altar of the golgotha with Teresa before him as still as a stone statue in his arms, his sword at her exposed throat. And the Father said, at a distance, "Show her then, beloved, the kindness that death withheld her." And at those sweet evil words Alek saw his own eyes in the steel of the sword and spoke her name, Teresa, Sister Teresa, and dropped his weapon and buried his face in her shoulder. And with his lips alone he took her, drank her, became her, slowly, painfully, each long swallow of her darkness a labor. And Amadeus roared hoarsely, and the altar at their backs fell to pieces.
Now came a river of skulls, an ocean of them, some ancient, the skulls of Separatists and Colonists and Tories, some little older than he was himself, some younger. And under their assault he was smote and buried alive. And as each of those living horrors with their feral, cheated emotions covered him he felt himself weaken, becoming more a part of the hollow beast, until, at long last, his will was gone.
Hands had him then, two pairs; they dragged him up and finally he looked upon his saviors and slayers, their flesh flawless as ice, their black deathlike coats and long hair and opal alien eyes and the studded silver torcs they wore about their necks that he had never noticed on a slayer before. The slayers hissed his name with their black, unfurling little snakelike tongues. They squealed between themselves in their old language and dragged him free of his prison of bones.
He fought them and he was but a toy in their able hands.
"My children, bring me the Judas," crooned a dry, scouring voice.
The creatures jerked him up, held him high and tight and immovable between them. One of the creatures dragged his head back by the hair to see. And there at the head of the Coventable sat the Covenmaster. And the Covenmaster was Sean Stone in black habit and white hair. He cradled the mystical Hanzo sword in his arms, but the hilt was changed now, not white jade. Obsidian, tainted. Alek looked his master over with wonder. Sean's body was innocent of trinkets, and the purity of the image was the most horrible sight of all.
Had he ascended? Had this lunatic become Covenmaster in his place through the Dominatio?
Sean's smile was demure, his pale eyes devoutly crazed. And when he spoke, his voice carried a vastness inside it that went far beyond his years. "I am the Covenmaster Amadeus," he said.
Not the Stone Man anymore. Of course. He had become the Father as Alek was once meant to be. He was the shell. The...host?
"I am Amadeo, Asmodeus. Aragon. I am the Chosen. I am der Vampir sklavischer. I am the Coven. Who are you?"
"Alek," he heard himself stammer. "Slayer of slayers."
Sean/Amadeus laughed and Alek recognized the music of the ages of the earth in his hollow voice. The boom of the crashing sea, of thunder, the whirr of insects, the creep of a snake and all things elemental. "I am Covenmaster. All this I command. All that you see is mine. Tell me, what do you have, Slayer?"
His voice came unbidden, without thought. "What I have is what I am. Free." He tossed back his hair to show the lack of a torc about his neck.
Sean/Amadeus smiled with his hybrid of a mouth. "Then you have nothing. Your freedom is a lie. Your life has been in vain. And your love is bitter, Slayer. You are nothing. You were always nothing." He nodded solemnly at his Children.
The creatures smiled eagerly. Together they drove Alek to his knees, pinned his arms to his back until his body was striped with pain
Alek choked and cursed the name of Amadeus in the oldest languages of the earth. Yet still the slayers forced his head down, down. And now he saw the currents of ichor lapping in mirrored waves at the pedestal of the Coventable. The creatures pressed his face to the substance and he breathed in its coppery sweetness and its venom. So foul. He tasted the Coven and his master's kisses. He screamed and the ichor filled his throat, choked off and stole his final breath...
"Enough Amadeus. Begone," came a savage little whisper out of the dark.
Amadeus was gone and his Children with him. Just like that. Like magic, an enchantment.
Alek gasped and came up like the drowning man he was. He drank in a greedy mouthful of untainted air and turned to find the owner of the new voice. His true savior. And in that turning the dream turned as well as so often dreams do.
He stood alone in the dark, alone but for a tall woman in a black silk gown and veil, narrow as a stalk, standing at a distance like a mourner at a gravesite, an aura of angel light on her sapphire hair. Savior, he wanted to say, Sweet sweet savior. The woman in her mourning veil and gown beckoned to him, and he rose up immediately and started after her as she began to walk away.
She walked very fast and he had to hurry to keep up with her. He drew abreast of her. He so desperately wished to see the unearthly face of his angel, but her layers of netting veil concealed her features completely from him. All he could see were her eyes. Red, he thought. Red like roses. Yes.
"You saved me," he said.
"Oh yes."
"Why?"
"It waits on you."
"What waits?"
"You know."
"The Ninth Chronicle? The Chronicle is false."
"It waits on you, the false Chronicle."
He touched her arm. "Who are you?"
The woman stopped. "Don't you know, beloved?" she asked and turned to face him and drew away her veils like a bride of the night. She sighed and looked on him with such gentle grief. "I lied," Debra said. "I saved you for myself. I was always a selfish creature, but you know that, my most beloved."
Strange that he should feel no fear or astonishment. Only love--love and regret and the sweetest sorrow he'd ever known. Debra. Yet not Debra. Yet her nonetheless. Some new and different Debra. An older Debra. The woman Debra. Her features ached beauty and her image wounded him like a sword.
He whispered her name like a prayer, the deepest part of his soul begging him to reach out and touch her pale perfect cheek, if only to prove that she was real, that she was really here now, with him.
Yet he held back in the end. He'd failed her, failed her so often in so many ways. He didn't deserve this reunion, if reunion was what this was.
She smiled with infinite sadness. "You never failed me. You promised to love me forever and you kept your promise."
Alek hesitated a moment, contemplated her words. Then he slid to his knees and wept, utterly destroyed by the strength of her absolution. "I believe now, I do. But I can't do it," he wept to her feet. He kissed them. He laid himself prostrate before her like a repentant at the feet of a saint, his body wracked with sobs. "I can't find the book. I don't know what to do, Debra. I can't--"
"Hush. You can't find your way because you do not have the proper map." She touched his hair and he looked up. She was smiling sadly and offering him her hand. "Take it, Alek. Fly with me. One final time. Fly with me, beloved, as if we are still children."
"I don't understand."
"Then don't."
He hesitated only a moment more; then he placed his hand in hers.
They flew, fast and high over rivers of obsidian punctured with stars and silver monoliths corkscrewed into deadly points. They dropped like a breath, soared through darkness and through light, and where they passed he saw daybirds on their wires and ledges and high places pluck their heads from beneath their wings and fly with them. They flocked around the twins, guided and escorted them, above and below and all around them, so that everywhere Alek looked he saw nettles of starlings and pigeons, the loose brotherhoods of crow.
Debra? What is this?
Your spectators, beloved. They wait on the final conflict. They stand at the door you seek.
And that door?
She looked down upon their most sacred altar.
He looked as well and he saw and suddenly he knew. There.
There, she agreed. Byron hid it there in his last moments. Because I told him to.
But that's so easy.
Yes, of course.
Alek felt that familiar stir in his chest, that thrill. He wanted so to spiral down and touch that sacred, magical place, if only momentarily. To visit it with her like children with his young hungry heart, to adventure there, to be with her, to be young and silly and free and full of the power of the night--but now she was pulling him back, drawing him up with her, up and away, as easily as smoke caught on a thorn of the wind.
Debra?
Hush, beloved. There will be time for what you must do. For now let there be only this. Only us.
She drew him to her completely, her arms around his neck, her face buried against his throat. And real, oh yes, all of it. He sensed the demanding friction of her breasts against his chest, her soft, thick, feathery hair real, wreathing them both like her black veils and skirts as they drifted together on the current of the nightwind. And when he kissed and worshipped the redness of her mouth and stroked the long line of her thigh through her gossamer gown and saw the light of mischief and desire in her eyes, it was real, every touch and every sigh. Real, all of it. Real though they clung as ephemeral as wraiths above their midnight metropolis; real though only one of them truly lived.
Impossible, he thought. I dream.
Perhaps. But dream with me now, beloved. Make for us some strange new world and in that world make love to me. I've waited so long.
Alek smoothed away the veil of her hair from her face and kissed her desperately, almost fiercely. And there, she tasted the same, the blood of some immortal saint and the dew on roses at midnight. So good and sweet. His love. I adore you, my beloved, my mate, he told her. And then he made their sacred world and it was down in that infinite other place, a place of light and shadows, color and darkness, that he laid her down and he loved her.
Sean dreamt, and his dreams were all red steel and full of the memory of pain. Pain that bloomed and stretched and turned him inside out, absorbing him, until he was the pain and the pain was him and Sean Stone was only the dream...
He awoke in blindness and in the echo of pain, in confusion. He mewled and pushed himself up against his bed's headboard.
His face ached righteously, man. He touched his face and remembered. Remembered Doc Book's work of putting him back together again, putting together what his feeding could not heal, every screaming, sutured inch of it--and before, what Alek Knight had down to him on the stage of the Empress. The rage, the unfairness of it. Oh, run while you can, man, 'cause you are mine, man. Mine. The memory hurt like pain, like a migraine to all his face...
But there--the pain was going away. Sean found the abrasive end of the sutures and pulled the silvery-red threads from his face one at a time. Then he touched his pretty face, and sure, there were still stitchings of pain and a general tenderness, but, man, he was whole again.
Oh yeah.
Quick--a mirror. He took the sword--Alek's sword lying beside his bed--by the hilt and found his face in its burnished body. Yeah. Double yeah. Gorgeous. He looked like a million bucks again.
His tongue rasped across his fully self-restructured teeth and full pink lips. Whatever else all those slayers bitched and complained about like sorry-for-their-own-asses antiheroes in them books and movies, being a vamp, (even half a vamp) sure as hell had its advantages. Now if only he wasn't so damned hungry. Could feel his own backbone, man. Maybe he'd drive through Mickey D's tonight and pick up that juicy little window girl who always blushed and giggled and bleated like a sheep when he winked at her.
How did that song from Cutting Crew go? "I just died in your arms tonight," Sean sang and giggled, fell back to the mattress, still giggling, rolling with it.
And that's when the body of the whore fell off his bed and onto the floor. Hadn't even noticed it there, man. He looked over the side of the bed, at the redhead's greying face and empty, ceilingward stare. Her throat was gone. Not just chewed and sucked man, but fucking gone. Her head literally hung by strings. The spinal cord, a few ribbons of bloodless flesh and tendon, not much.
Jesus.
Had he done that?
He tried to remember what had happened after the Empress. The march. Trying to catch the rogue. Sucking a few pedestrians in passing to keep the psi going and deadened the pain in his face. The blood. The screaming. But not catching the fuck. Coming back here. Alone.
Alone.
So when had the whore come into play?
Mein Sohn...oh what has become of you?
Sean jerked, remembering now. Remembering...the androidlike woman hovering near like some kind of sacrifice...Amadeus...he shuddered again, more violently...Amadeus feasting, not like some monster in a Hammer film, man, no, not some two-minute Christopher Lee quickie, a lovebite and a few sips. Feasting, man. Like a fucking animal. The blood a sludgy black rouge on his face and chin and throat and chest. The flesh gnashing, the cartilage crunching audibly between the subhuman teeth. Jesus, those teeth...
And then those teeth, that searing hot mouth on his, not biting, but offering the gift of raw red copper-iron strength in a liquid regurgitation of life itself--
Sean swallowed, giggled hysterically and drew back away from the sight of the whore, his fingers on his mouth, feeling the obnoxious crust of dried blood, his and the woman's, all over his lips and teeth and chin. He looked again at the body of the woman and realized he had to make a physical effort not to get down on his knees and bury his face in the awful remains. He bit the ham of his hand to stifle the insane noises his mouth was making, but the action only made him grunt and quickly open his jaws. His teeth felt sharper, more prominent, if that was possible. Was that possible? What the hell was possible anymore? He was some half-human freak living a nightmare inside of a nightmare. And now he had drunk the life out of some cunt who could have been his fucking mother!
Quite abruptly, the whimper gathering in his throat died at the sight of the black bathrobe cast over the foot of his bed. He centered his attention on it because it wasn't his, it was the Father's, and it was something else to look at other than the corpse congealing in a pool of black gore on his bedroom floor. A corpse that had been violated worse than anything that Sean, even with his extensive experience at the Shangri-La, and with Slim Jim, had ever seen.
He crawled like a little boy to the foot of the bed. Curious, he touched the fabric.
Not a bathrobe. A habit.
Put it on, Sean.
With a cry of surprise he leapt from the bed and looked around his room, at the concert posters on the walls, the storybooks and bone collections and CDs scattered wide, at the open-door armoire of falling-out clothes. But no one was hidden here among his things. He was alone.
Put on the habit, beloved, said the voice inside his head more directly.
Oh. Only the Father and his hocus-pocus. Well...all right.
Sean slid out of the sheer, bloodwashed-stiff nightshirt the Father had dressed him in and shrugged into the habit, struggled with some of the little hook and eyelets, gave up on the rest of them, the ones nearest the small of his back where he couldn't quite reach. He stretched and moved around the bed, trying to get a feel for the material and using the bed to block his view of the corpse. Out of sight of the whore, he found he could think a little more clearly. He went to the full-stretch mirror on the backside of his armoire door. There was a little too much drag in the hem and sleeves of the habit, but otherwise it was a pretty righteous fit. Quite nice, actually. Quite... impressive. The black did him up well, gave him almost that same big, pale Reaper look the Father had.
He looked closely and realized that even his eyes looked weird. Too light. Pale, whitish blue.
All right, man, now what?
You must be pure. The trinkets--be rid of them.
And almost immediately, without thought or question, Sean unscrewed his facial studs and earrings, broke the wires of teeth around his neck. The pieces shattered like bone on the cell's floor. He touched his face with wonder. What did he look like barren of his trophies? He knew he felt infinitely more powerful somehow, feather-light and capable of flight. Strange and wonderful. Was this the reason the Father chose to live like a fucking Spartan? Alek too?
He attention returned to the mirror and he was witness to the birth of a new person. He touched the loose yellow silk of his jaw-cut hair, toyed with the idea of letting it go. Long. Rock-musician long. Long enough to plait. Long like Amadeus's was long. He saw himself then: long pale hair and black habit. Pale, somber eyes. A priest? Yeah, a priest, or at least, priestlike. He though yet again of the whore, and suddenly the thought of living like a priest didn't seem like such a ludicrous idea after all. Before the mirror, he genuflected in the invisible presence of his Coven. "Welcome. I am the Covenmaster Stone Man," he stated, tasting the words and grimacing.
That really sucked.
Inspired, he went through the gesture again. "I am the Covenmaster...Amadeus. I am the Chosen. All that you see I comm--"
Yes, my son. The new temple of Amadeus.
Sean choked, caught in mid-bow, stiffening like a little boy caught doing something obscene to himself. He blushed in the face of the Father's shining laughter, lovely and pious and faintly mad, he thought.
The Father was pleased.
Come to me, beloved, commanded the Father. Enter me and become...
The music of the voice drove the dizziness of his hunger away. Drove the nausea of the image of the dead girl on the floor away. It was like in the beginning. This was the lovely coarse voice of the strange man he had found sitting on the sill of his State Institution dorm room one night upon awakening, eyes like white fire in a face as pale as the full moon which had beat down upon them both. That night the Father had come to him and had known him by name and had spoken those words low and so intimately to him: Come with me and come into the arms of the Coven, mein Sohn, into those arms which love you best of all. And who could love such a thing as you but one of your own?
Yes who? His mother? His mother was dead. And better off that way. Better dead than a slave to a neverending procession of strange men night after night. Better dead, he thought with a sideways glance at the girl, than a victim of a monster.
And so, without hesitation, Sean let himself out of his cell and started down toward the Great Abbey. He did not feel the cold of the twisting corridors carrying him along, nor the stone steps under his feet, meeting them so graciously as he descended into the beauty and immortal secrets of the old house. The Abbey would receive him and there he would see his beautiful, white-faced Father waiting on him, speaking low the words he so cherished. My love...my own.
But when he arrived he found the Father did not sit in his usual perch at the head of the Coventable; instead, he was kneeling on the dais in the shadow of his altar, the wedge of his pressed hands resting at his mouth, his sight miles off.
The chandelier had been lit, its whitish power bruising the stone walls of the Abbey and blushing the strong old faces on the tapestries. A halo of it circled the Father like an angelic laser of light. Some alien spotlight capable of practically deitizing a man. Sean took in the sight, the chandelier lit for some ceremony, the Abbey itself vacated but for the two of them and a handful of surviving bats irritated to restless flight by the alien impinge of light. Slowly, almost fearfully, he walked to the nave, then up the steps to the dais, so that the two of them, himself and the Father, existed in the Altar's shadow equally.
Sean looked aside at the Father.
Amadeus spoke.
"Alek knows the location of the Chronicle," said the Father.
Sean shuddered but did not show it. The Chronicle. It was half their problem. Their other half, of course, was Alek himself. But the idea, suddenly, of the two problems coming together, converging--Alek actually getting the damned Chronicle--hung like a dooming storm over Sean's thoughts. That lying piece of shit book was probably enough to totally unbalance the precarious relationship they already had with Rome. Or so said the Father. "Shit. Where?"
Amadeus told him.
"There. Christ, that's dumb."
"It is fitting. It is the place of beginnings, and it is just that it be the place of his defeat."
"Is he there now?"
"Nein. His is with her in a place that is closed to me. I know only that he makes love to her, that he drinks of her power and her passion."
"That Roman whore--?."
"Not her. The other. The first."
"Who?"
"Debra."
"Who is Debra?"
"Death."
Sean's flesh hardened as if touched in every place by a steel sword. He scratched at his collar, his sleeves. "What...what do we do?"
"Prepare. When he is finished he...they will come for me."
"Shit."
The Father was silent momentarily. And then he said, with purpose, "I have been doomed by a prophecy I have no power over. Death has marked me. But I refuse to die at the hands of an infidel."
Sean shivered. "What...can I do for you, Father?"
"Vel caeco appareat."
Sean said, "`It would be apparent even to a blind man.'" And laughed, amazed with himself, that he should understand the words.
Amadeus nodded. "Then too, my beloved, you know what must be done."
"Ah...well, no."
"Take me."
Horrified, Sean looked at him.
But the Father only said, breaking his pose and reaching for him, framing his face in his long hands and kissing him with sad passion, "It is time, no? You have been awaiting this. Your desire. The Rite of Covenmaster is yours. Drink of me and be complete. Drink until I move within you, my beautiful slayer."
Sean hesitated, groaned, shivered. He wanted to protest, but then came his master's lips on his throat, caressing his thirst, his need, his hunger to be...more. More than some little whoregirl's punching bag, more than Slim Jim's young prey or Alek Knight's rebellious little acolyte, more than the Stone Man. More than a punk stereotype with cotton between his ears. More--
But he would be what?
And all at once, Sean was afraid. Amadeus had lied. He was not a vampire, at least not the kind he had come to understand as real, the kind he was and Alek was and all or most of them were. He was not a victim of Lilithine blood. A subspecies of the human race. He was less, and more. A servant to strange forces, stranger understandings. A demon, a wraith. A beast and a priest and both borne of a savagery he had never known in all his life. Hungry. Starved. Incomplete. And some part of Sean's expanding intellect tried to reason this out, what Amadeus was with what he did, and failed.
After this Communion, this passionate exchange of blood, what was he--Sean--to be?
What in hell was he to be?
The cold kiss. The stab of bone-sharp teeth. The hiss of an uncoiling nest of snakes all about them. And in the spinning private cloister of Sean's mind he heard the answer: You will be everything you have always wanted to be...and everything you have ever feared. You will be Amadeus.
"But..." He gasped. That mouth. It was on him, in him, a living thing, separate from the Father, with its own hungers and desires. Sean shuddered yet again, leaned against the Father as the Father fed off of him, giving up the strength and red life so easily that the Father had lent him earlier. Yes, he understood how that had happened now. What drove it. What had driven them both to destroy the girl. The hunger...nothing was like it in the whole world, nothing at all. Love was like that hunger. And now it was as if he were being loved by some underworld god. Hades. Satan. Set. It was as if he were being eaten alive by a cannibal lover. The girl...she had know this and willingly endured it. The hell that was heaven...
Through the veil of passion, Sean fought for his thoughts, his fears. "But...I only...only wanted to be something...more."
The mouth let him go. The beautiful and bloodslathered and unkind teeth let him go. "You will be everything."
"Everything..." Sean murmured as Amadeus held him close and stroked his throat, kissed his mouth and the chains of his tears, laid upon his face his bloody lip prints until the touch and taste and smell was so great, his hunger so far greater, he thought he might weep or die or simply implode from the force of it. Sean leaned into his master, felt no desires but that for giving in. The choices had all been made and be understood that the time for protest was over. It had ended the day he took the Father's hand and escaped the dorm with him. It had ended the day Slim Jim died and left a child with blood and mucus all over his face sitting on the floor, afraid to move, to even breathe.
And strange that in this moment of which he'd dreamt so long and so hard that his thoughts be filled not with images of Amadeus, nor even his mother, but of Alek Knight.
Alek. He had run. He'd escaped this.
Why?
"I will make of you a god on the earth," the Father whispered against his mouth, "a god whom none will again harm. No more hurt. eternal and unstoppable and accountable to no god for your sins."
"No hurt," Sean repeated, and he was not surprised that he wept keenly into the frost of his masters' hair, the sight of a dead man's shredded bloodless throat glowing at the center of his mind like an ember. And the woman--the woman torn like a doll. "Oh Jesus, Father, I love you. Save me, please. Please save me." The words did not seem foolish and they did not embarrass him, and as he worshipped his master's face and hair with his kisses he felt his terror lessen. His soul and savior and power, he thought. How he wanted to die for Amadeus, crack his soul open upon the rock of the Father's divinity.
And when pressure at the back of his skull brought his kisses to the Father's throat he scarcely knew it or cared.
"Drink me," Amadeus invited. "Drink me and become."
Sean kissed him deeply with his every passion, kissed and licked at his master's throat and the thin glass of flesh which was all that separated him from his eternity. His teeth ached and his mind screamed. And when his time came and he could hold off no longer, Amadeus held him fiercely and crooned to him in languages he could not fathom.
Booker dreamt, and in his dreams he walked upon a red desert full of white skulls. They were ancient things beneath his feet, those skulls, thin as eggshells. And where he walked they shattered, and where they shattered came the angry red geysers of their ghosts. The sky above him was cramped and low, a mocking backwards-running river of blood. Horrible, all of it, like something Alek might paint on a good day. Fucking Dali. Where the hell was the exit?
Booker walked on, searching, but he did not hurry, because to hurry would mean to burst more of the skulls under his feet. He walked on and he kept his eyes steady on the flat, hellish horizon far ahead, for he knew if he looked down he would see the millions of empty, screaming eye sockets beseeching him, and that would be too much; that would drive him mad.
He walked in that hell for a thousand years. He walked until, at last, he came upon them. And stopped.
Upon a bed of bleached bones they loved. Booker watched them without shame and without revulsion. It was only proper after all that on their wedding day they should have a witness. They were both naked but wreathed in red silk and in the pearled sweat of their effort. He saw the pale narrow serpent of Alek's back, and he saw Debra beneath him, alive, a woman, innocent and seductive where she clung to her mate, her hair a mystical web of darkness spilling out and out around them, encircling them, binding them together. Forever.
Booker envied Alek his angel. He always had.
And from his angel Alek drank, her precious blood lighting his flesh from within like light though a crimson window. And slowly, as Booker watched, Debra greyed and withered in the arms of her twin, her flesh and bones brittling, cracking herself apart for him, to give and to nourish him. Spent at last, she was all red silk and sand in Alek's hands, her hair like the dark pelt of a fine kill.
Booker frowned. "You've killed her," he said.
Alek looked up at him with his narrow, flushed-red eyes, and Book knew then his mistake. Alek said, "I have become."
And Booker Jefferson jerked awake to the flickering, cinematic darkness of his Lexington Avenue penthouse apartment living room with its Klee originals and French lithographs and sunken Jacuzzi whirlpool. On the flat TV the Saturday night silent film was on, Fritz Murnau's classic, Nosferatu. Lousy joke. Booker stared at the blueness of the screen, at Count Orlock moving like animated death toward a victim all lily-skinned and innocent. He looked away, at his pale, grey, characterless furniture, the weepy neutral carpet and noncolored walls. Again the lithos, every one a mint and worth more than most blue collar workers made in a year.
On the floor by the door was his imported seven-hundred-dollar London Fog where he had carelessly dropped it on entering, and he thought absently, When the hell did this happen? When did I go from being a Spike Lee-inspired tenement homey boy to fucking pampered Donald Trump? When the hell did I stop being an in-your-fucking-face streetsmart kid like Alek?
Alek. He touched his brow and found it misted wet. His hand clenched into a fist, trembled slightly, and dropped onto the wooden armrest of his chair. He split the mahogany finish like kindling.
When did we stop playing streetball and getting subs down at Arnold's Soda Shop, he wondered, and going down to the Hudson in the summer and walking around the old railyard with our shirts off, looking for fun, looking for trouble, looking not to be bored--
I have become.
Become what?
Debra, of course. Fucking idiot.
He rose up from his fashionably anemic furniture in his rumpling of fashionably anemic Armani suit and Italian shoes and began to circle his psychotically tidy living room, seeing it and smelling the five spice curry in the take-out boxes on the coffee table, seeing the movie and knowing it was there, but feeling only a white, heavy, clockless silence.
I have become.
And what have you become, hey, Book? Other than a rich, snobby pain the in the ass like all the folks you and Alek used to make fun of down on Central Park West, hey? What are you other than some black-boy-made-it-good stereotype with plenty money and an internship and a Jag and about three hundred dead vampires to your fucking name?
What the hell are you?
And there, trapped inside his silence and his questions, Booker circled the room once more.