Carmine rubbed the ring on his finger with his other thumb, staring down in silence for several long, thick seconds. His hand dropped away, slowly. Watching him watching me, I hung from the rail and waited.
“That ain’t any of your business.” Carmine stepped back and turned, his shoes tacking gummily against the tiles. “Too bad you don’t know anything useful. Go kiss God’s eternal ass for me in heaven.”
I watched Carmine’s back as he walked to the door. It opened into a fathomless black rectangle; he disappeared, and I heard him quip something in Italian to someone outside. I couldn’t understand him, but made out the tone well enough. Words to the effect of “All yours.”
This was not how I’d planned to die, but I was slipping and couldn’t stop it. This was not going to be a quick death, or an easy death, or a good death. I’d beaten enough men in basement interrogation rooms to know what happened from this point on. If I was lucky, they’d just shoot me. And if I wasn’t? Nothing is more depraved than a man hopped up on a cocktail of testosterone and righteousness. I felt for something, anything I could do, but I didn’t have my gun. There was blood, but no energy. The only sacrifice available was me. This wasn’t a ward I could break or a threat I could contain.
My nose was full of the smell of water. It smelled like glass. I licked my lips and settled into place, grounding in the pain, in the cold, in the wet. I’m not religious, but I’ve seen and done enough to know that magic comes from somewhere. The best hymn to the Higher Self was written by old Aleister Crowley, and it was that long-memorized verse I started to mumble. “You who art I... beyond... all I am. Who has no nature... and no... name...”
Staccato bursts of tense laughter from outside the bathroom punctuated the words. That didn’t bode well. Professional executioners didn’t chitchat and laugh just before the dirty work started. Bullies did. Old jailbirds, the type of guys who liked to rough up and torture.
“Who art, when all but thou are gone... the s-secret and center of... the Sun.”
The invocation continued to pull itself from my lips. It seemed to catch fire and fuel itself. “You hidden spring, of all things known and... unknown, thou aloof alone...”
Thou the true fire within the reed, brooding and breeding, source and seed... Of life, love, liberty and light? You are no Thelemite, my Ruach.
I heard a flutter and the tic-tac of claws as a raven with white eyes landed on the edge of the bathtub. His irises steamed into the humid air, spitting like burning magnesium. “Why quote Crowley’s daemon when you can talk to your own?”
Over the bird’s head, I saw the executioners enter, moving like shadows behind plate glass: two men, a combined four hundred pounds of hurt. Left was bald and Right was bearded and wore a baseball cap, but they both had the same shark-eyed, dog-jawed look I saw every morning in the mirror. These were hardened men, killers.
“Keeps me calm.” I don’t think I managed to speak aloud.
“These men are about to bleed you like a calf in this bathtub,” the raven said. The feathers of its plumage boiled in the air like a black liquid. “You will undergo Shevirah here, or you will die."
Shevirah. Now there was a magical term I hadn’t heard in a long time. That was straight-up Kabbalah: Shevirah, the breaking of the vessels. Supposedly, YHWH created through a series of emanations. Shevirah referred to the point when the divine light of self-awareness within God grew so intense that it burst outwards into nothingness like a harpoon. As it grew farther away from God, it became more solid, more tangible, cooling and creating the myriad layers of reality.
I felt a rough hand haul my face up by the hair and refocused on the arm stretching down towards me. It was the bearded guy. He laughed, lewd and derisive, but the sound seemed to come from far away. The raven was still there, and I fixated on it. It looked back at me, through me, with eyes the color of blazed winter skies. My gaze was drawn into a swirling vortex of pure white that took my breath away, a spiral galaxy contained within a single point.
The tub vibrated under and around me as one of the men climbed in, standing over me. He hauled me up until my jaw was level with his fly. I could smell diesel oil, male musk, the faint odor of unwashed skin through his jeans. For a moment, I was reminded of Moni, the way he’d talked about Semyon Vochin’s wife. With distant disgust, I realized the man was hard, but he didn’t unzip; instead, he pulled a gun and pressed it between my lips as he jeered back at his friend.
“What do I have to do?” I knew I was speaking in my mind now, as the oily point of the gun waggled in past my teeth. “I don’t want to die like this.”
“I can’t lie, Alexi.” The bird had sidestepped around so I could still see it on the rim of the tub, flicking its glossy blue-black wings. “The road to understanding is long and bitter. You will bleed. Your dead flesh will come back to life. You must take holes to be whole. Are you ready to say YES?”
My mouth was full of metal. I felt the shuffling boot soles through the tub, but my whole body, my whole mind, felt like a gas. A floating web, hovering between the black sky overhead and the green sea beneath. The nothing overhead, the no-sky, sucked at me hungrily. The sea was deep and fathomless, patient, and full. I felt like something tiny looking into a well of impossible size.
“Yes,” I replied. The word felt like an incantation, as if it had power all of its own.
“Hang on a sec, Robbie. Don’t shoot him,” said a voice from far away. “I want some target practice. Haul him up.”
“I ain’t taking the cuffs off,” Beard said, laughing.
“You don’t have to, man. Just get him up so I can get his knees.”
The barrel slid out, and my head snapped to the side as I was struck. The light was creeping into my vision. Through filmy eyes, I watched the blond thug heft a baseball bat and start across to the bathtub.
“Yes. I accept.” The raven opened its beak, revealing a blue forked tongue. “You will know me as Kutkha. I am the eye of your I... the one you only half-opened in the time before.”
My vision seared white as Kutkha threw itself forward in a heavy downbeat. It funneled into light so blue it was almost black, and pierced me through the front of my chest. I felt the impact, shaking as coils and loops of it braided itself through my mind, through my spine, through my heart and tongue and fingers. The freezing indigo of its substance meshed through me in a tenth of a second, and suddenly, I understood something I had never known. Some part of me had been caged, all this time. But now, the vessel had broken.
I was lifted higher as the other guy came up on me. I saw his face, a mask of rictus pleasure, and a pair of black, lightless eyes. He swung around, hefting the baseball bat, and then brought it down and around at my left knee.
The contact was like a detonator. As dead wood caved through bone, it tore apart the shredding virgin film over my mind. My will consolidated with an involuntary scream of naked agony, a force that pushed up from under my sternum and out of my mouth—a return thrust that wracked the air of the room in waves. Baldy’s face blanked into a mask of shock. Then, he exploded.
Escape.
The backlash of life force returned to me like iron filings to a magnet, sucked in and transmuted. My veins were hot, thrumming, every part of my body drawn in sharp relief. The handcuffs turned to liquid around my wrists as the air twisted and weirded, distending. Energy boiled white-hot in my mouth, in every bone and muscle, but I wasn’t in control as my hands reached down, grabbed my knee, and wrenched. The bones shifted together with a wet crunch I barely felt. One word hammered through the delirium. Escape.
I got one step forward before the world came back into awful focus and my knee collapsed underneath me. I tumbled over the slippery porcelain, striking the edge of the tub with a heavy crash as silenced gunshots clicked over my head and sprayed the wall where I’d been chained. Whatever heavy magic I’d just done, that was it. It was all I had. My knee seared, and I screamed rawly a second time as I lunged for the bat, the only weapon within r
each, and managed to grasp the handle.
Beard was stumbling up, terrified, covered in minced meat and sprayed blood. The muzzle of the gun was a black hole, a point in space trying to track my head as we slipped uselessly on the wet floor. I got up first and charged him, limping. He got an arm up; I knocked the gun free, and we went to ground, grunting and struggling. His mouth was in my face, gaping; I headbutted him, sending him sprawling to one side, and my oversensitive hand clapped down on the fallen pistol. I pulled the trigger and it clicked, empty. Before he could recover, I rolled over on top of him and hit him in the face with the butt of it. Eyes, temples, skull, until his arms dropped and he stopped moving.
Fuck. Fucking hell. I threw the gun away from me, retching with pain, and fought to breathe. I tried to stand up and limp away, but the fragile healing job the burst of power had given me didn’t hold up. I fell back on my ass. The room was suddenly very quiet, very still, save for the etheric hum of the light overhead.
Jesus Christ. My goddamned knee. My hands hovered over it, not touching. I was terrified of what I’d find. Before I could look down, a filamentary shadow reappeared in my vision, translucent and fluid through the tears.
“There’s no time. Get up.”
“I can’t.” Every movement felt like too much effort. My eyes ran; I heaved, even though there was nothing in my stomach. I was still naked, covered in drying dead flesh.
“You have no choice. Get up, or die.”
Die? No. I didn’t want to die here. I wasn’t meant to die here. He was right. I needed to break each one of Carmine’s stubby manicured fingers and feed them to him. I fixed on this, on the fuel of revenge, while I grasped the bloody baseball bat and used it to lever myself up to my feet so I could shuffle-hop out into the hallway.
Outside, I found my things crammed into a calico shopping bag. With shaking hands, I fumbled with boxers and slacks and then dropped the bat to get my gloves on. The gloves gave instant relief, shutting down the worst of the pain in my torn fingers. The Wardbreaker was there, but the clip was gone. My knife was here. I opened the blade, and a strange, immediate sense of impending safety washed over me. No matter how disgusting I felt, I knew this. The dance of violence and survival, the feel of a knife in my hand and the power of the Art in my blood, however tenuous.
Carmine had taken me to a warehouse. The hall had concrete floors, and the ceiling was cobwebbed and unkempt. The bathroom was part of an open corridor, one of several doors set into the wall to my right, and faceless wood paneling to the left. A bolted door was at the end of the hall behind me. Ahead was the warehouse proper. I could try to unlock the back door and get out that way, but I had no idea where it led. The storage part of the warehouse was a crapshoot. Maybe there was enough cover to make a run for it, maybe there wasn’t. It depended on how many people were out there.
Then I heard the snap and rattle of a large roller door outside, and the lights came on ahead. Decision made. Male laughter followed me as I limped quickly for the farthest door, the sound growing stronger as I pulled the bolt out and flung the door open into the surprised face of a jowly, dark-eyed thug. His hand was cupped around the end of a cigarette, and he reared back like a deer in the headlights as I threw the bat at him as hard as I could. It hit and bounced; there was an expletive and then a short gargling scream as I leaped on him, blade first, and drove the knife through his neck. We spun in a lazy circle and tumbled to the ground, me on top. He was a goner, even if he was still flopping around. I dragged him off, shut the door, and rustled his pockets for keys, money, and weapons. No weapons, no money, but he had keys. The bundle was heavy, and amongst them, I found a white numbered tag and a blue-and-gold burnished keyring with a long, thick key, the squared-off kind that fits a truck or bus. The keyring had a logo on it, a crown with seven points and seven dots. Elite Meats.
The Manelli family front? I snorted blood, looking up ahead. Across the lot was a row of trucks. They were refrigerated cargo trucks, not quite big enough to be semis. I grabbed my crutch and stumbled sideways into a wall. God help me, I was tired.
“No.” Kutkha’s voice hissed through my mind. “Get to the truck.”
Pushing away from the wall cost me energy. Hopping towards the trucks cost more. “I’ve never driven a truck.”
“There’s always a first time.” It sounded like something Nic would say, but I was in too much pain to do anything but fixate and stagger. I had no idea where Carmine was, no idea if there were other men. But that wasn’t exactly correct. As I thought about it, sluggishly, I had a dim sense of their presence on the other side of the warehouse. Carmine’s aura was the largest, a red-and-orange haze in my mouth and nose that lingered like a bad smell. They were hanging around in the storage area, waiting for their buddies to finish with me. They probably had a truck of their own in there, waiting to receive my body so they could dump me out in the bay.
Which raised a good point. Where the hell was I?
We reached the first truck and had a brief battle with gravity and inertia to reach up and try to unlock it. Not that one. The next truck in the row was the one: the key fit. At first, I wasn’t sure I could use the step to pull my weight up to the door, but I felt another wave of subtle pressure from within. My Neshamah, burning the energy of blood sacrifice to save our goddamned lives. Every muscle screamed as I grappled my way up, hauling with my arms and pushing with the good leg until we collapsed across the worn driver’s seat.
“Lev,” I muttered. “We need to get to Lev.”
I didn’t know why I needed Lev. Common sense told me that Lev could have put me here in the first place. He was the one who’d known where I was. In the moment, though, I had genuine, immediate, fully rational problems. The truck had a manual transmission, and I had only one functioning leg.
“Use the bat.”
“You fucking use the goddamn bat!” I growled aloud, finally losing my temper. My body was wracked with pain, nothing but pain, as I pushed and pulled and found my way upright in the seat. I jarred the ruined knee. “Mother of fuck!”
Kutkha fell silent, but I could feel it hovering in the fringes of my awareness. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched a shadow cluster on the passenger’s seat, swirling anxiously as I heaved for air. As the pain settled back to berating my nerves instead of screaming at them, I reached up to stab at the key slot with the key. Once, twice, and then it slid home.
Across the lot, three men burst out of the door, shouting at me, at the dead body, and at each other. One of them was Carmine. They were briefly transfixed by the dead man on the ground, pausing to stare.
Panic surged through my gut like a shock of cold water. Use the bat. Right.
I braced the bat against my leg and down onto the clutch, holding it as I somehow used all limbs to turn the engine and put the stick shift in gear all at the same time. The truck roared to life, stuttering as I fumbled with the controls. Thanks to Nicolai, I’m an excellent driver. Thanks to genetics or memetics or whatever it is that causes me to be so neophobic, I am not excellent at dealing with unfamiliar arrays of buttons and dials. I got the headlights on as the first of the men ran out towards me, gun raised.
That’s right, rabbit. Come on.
I shoved my foot down on the pedal and accelerated at full speed towards him. The Italians scattered in terror; I hauled the steering wheel one-handed as I let off the clutch. Stalling meant death, but now that the machine was working, I knew what I was doing. The truck was more responsive than I expected, and as I spun it, it nearly tipped on its side. My skin flinched as bullets spranged off the hood and struck the windshield, but we had speed and, most importantly, momentum. The vehicle roared straight through a chain-link fence that we mowed down and flung aside, charging across some slippery dead grass and then out onto the road.
“Magic,” I gasped. “Carmine. Can we—”
“He has to be low on Phi,” Kutkha replied, coiling around the cabin like an agitated mist. “He can’t risk much now.”
<
br /> Phi. I had no idea what that was. I gritted my teeth so hard they felt like they were going to crack as we turned out from the warehouse street onto a main road. In the distance, I could see the George Washington Bridge, and my heart sped. We were across the water and over the state line, in Jersey. This was nuts. Talking to my imaginary raven friend was nuts. I was buzzing and fought to not be conscious of anything but the dance of clutch, shift, and the wheel in my hands while I floored the truck with the help of the baseball bat. My knee felt three times its usual size, too large and swollen to be real. I hadn’t looked at it and wouldn’t. Not until we stopped.
An engine roared behind me, revving hard. I swerved to one side on raw instinct as bullets whizzed and pinged off the side of the cab. They were chasing, and they were faster than the truck. One bullet struck the mirror, and it shattered just as I swung back and rammed broadside into the pursuing car. It spun away, screeching, and smashed into a telephone pole behind us. I fought to right the truck before we followed it over onto the side of the road.
“I can’t believe this.” My face flushed. I was furious and shaking. It was finally dawning on me, through the fog of adrenaline, that I was talking aloud to... what? My soul? A hallucination? “I just... can’t fucking believe this. And if you’re my Neshamah, you better explain how the hell I did that and how the hell I do it again.”
“Then listen, and learn. Five parts has the human soul, like a small cell within the greatness of the Cauldron. Your being is a tree. Under and around the roots is GOD itself, and then come the roots, called Chiah. From those grow branches, your Neshamah. Then there is you, the Alexi of this world, who is Ruach. You are the mind, the breath which animates the fifth part, your Nephesh, which is your body.”
That was pure Kabbalah, for the most part. “What do you mean by God?” I replied. We took the next left and merged the bullet-riddled truck into the traffic of Interstate 95. “And Phi?”
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