Thump, thump, thump. Out in front of the apartment, Yuri’s fist pounded on the wood.
“Coming!” I started back towards the front door, a tremor running through my arms. It was inexplicable. I wasn’t scared, was I? Of Yuri? Unnerved, maybe, by his sudden reappearance after he'd been missing for three days. Despite my self-conviction, my palms were slippery against my gloves as I fumbled with the chain on the door and haltingly drew it across.
Outside, Yuri loomed down over me like a coffin on its heel. The old wolf was actually older than Nic, which meant he was cresting his early 60s. He was enormous, the kind of hoary man that could pound the shit out of thirty-year-old prizefighters in the ring without breaking a sweat. Now, his heavy shoulders were hunched in towards his chest, his hands buried in his pockets. His skin was clammy and pale.
“Yuri. You look... dreadful.” I was, for a moment, bereft of words. “Where have you been?”
“Long time explaining.” His voice caught and clicked weirdly, like he was talking through a mouthful of soggy bread and thumbtacks. There were awkward, painful pauses between his words. “Can I sit... down?”
Details filed into my awareness in seconds. The bruises under his eyes. The dried spittle at the corner of his lips. The coat he was wearing was too heavy for the summer heat. My nape prickled. “Perhaps. Tell me where you’ve been.”
“Came back to talk about Vincent.” He finally looked down at me then, and I recoiled slightly from the door. Yuri’s eyes were normally dark, the whites a little yellow from hard years of prison hooch and nicotine. Now, they were black—a blackness that sucked in light and didn’t return it. No reflection, no life, no anything. For a moment, they held me captive with the siren promise of knowledge. I knew somehow that Yuri, or the thing that had once been Yuri, now held more knowledge than my own curious mind could withstand.
Letting him in felt like a bad idea, but the mystery was irresistible. I licked my lips, throat suddenly dry, and opened the door to let him pass. “Shoes on the rack, please.”
Yuri crossed the threshold. He didn’t take off his shoes, and my brief captivation disappeared. Honestly. I really hated it when people didn’t take their shoes off.
The huge man lumbered to the kitchen, turning his head one way, then the other. He stopped, neck craned, and stared at the icebox section of the refrigerator. The icebox. The seal was still in the tin chalice, in the icebox. My heart rate leapt.
“I’ve been underground.” Yuri didn’t look at me as he took his seat, shuffling heavily into a chair at the kitchen table. The table was a small, square thing, no bigger than a card table, and barely sat Vassily and me. Yuri, sitting side-on with his elbow braced down, dwarfed it. “Underground. I figured you might be interested in some new work.”
“That depends on the nature of the work.” I stayed standing. “I assume you don’t want coffee?”
“No.” Yuri swiveled his face towards me just as I was about to step in through the door. The look in the other man’s eyes stopped me. “We have the kind of work you want. The kind you really want. None of this underpaid Girl Friday bullshit.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” In the closeness of the kitchen, Yuri smelled like alcohol. Not liquor, like vodka or whiskey, but pure alcohol. The cold, nose-stinging smell of preservative. Surreptitiously, I rubbed my fingers together and then pitched my own thigh. No, I wasn’t still dreaming. “The Manellis?”
“Manelli.” Yuri ground the word out like a woodchipper. It could have been agreement or just echolalia. “Hell no. I was sent t-to make you an offer. The kind that suits a true magus.”
Now there was an expression you didn't hear every day. I stared at Yuri intently, trying to pick up anything I could. He wasn’t right, but he wasn’t... anything. I was beginning to mistrust things with a lack of aura, and I was beginning to think I’d made a mistake letting him into my house. “That seems reasonable. You have three minutes to make your pitch.”
The big man looked up lazily with his void-black eyes and laid one of his hands on the table. “Power. Instruction. A position of leadership. And an out from the Organizatsiya, and the geas that Sergei has on the whole damn thing.”
A creeping sensation ran up through my spine. I remembered the dream, though I could not recall the face of the pale-skinned, white-haired woman in the circle. I did remember the last stark image before rising: my mouth stuffed full of my own entrails. “You’re not Yuri. Yuri knows nothing about these things.”
“I do now,” Yuri said. The words seemed to carry a weight to them, wielded like a fist through the thickness of his tongue. “And I’ll tell you this, Lexi. You’re so powerful that you could become a god.”
I was rendered speechless. It was partly the awful cliché, but it was also because the thought had never genuinely occurred to me. I wanted to be better at my Art. Who wouldn’t? Godhood was never on the agenda. “Why on earth would I want to be a god?”
“Men like you are either masters or slaves. Most of 'em are slaves. That's why the Vigiles take kids with the gift, Lexi. It's why operations have spooks, and don't let them out of their sight. You don't want to stay here.” In that moment, Yuri sounded more like his old self, halting voice and all. “Living and d-dying... under someone like Sergei? Lev? They all think you belong to them.”
The words hooked in my sense of pride. I tried reaching back inside, towards Kutkha, but I felt nothing there. It was as if I were walled off from him, left with nothing other than the distant sense of beating wings. “I have on good authority that gods don’t exist.”
“They do. Men become gods. Jehovah? He was a war leader and a spook. Alexander the Great? Jason and the fleece? Heroes and mages, the lot of 'em.” Yuri’s black eyes bored into me. “Just like Carmine.”
My eyes narrowed. “How do you know Carmine?”
“Maybe he got the same offer. Maybe he said ‘yes.’ He was tired of being somebody’s bitch. What about you?”
“I’m no one’s ‘bitch’,” I replied, crisply.
“Psh. You’re Sergei’s bitch. I watched you grow up right into his design, kid. Grisha’s skinny little weirdo, accidentally sorted out onto the conveyor belt for fighting cocks before he got thrown into the grinder with the rest of the chicks.”
“Sergei is coming back to Brighton Beach,” I said. “He will likely name Vassily Avtoritet, and I will be his second.”
Yuri leaned in. The prickling was worsening, ringing cold bells through my nerves. There was something wrong about Yuri’s skin. It was distended and tight, and when I looked down, I noticed his tattooed hands were bloated and puffy. “Kid, they haven't even made you a captain. They think you don’t have the experience. Killing people doesn’t put you in line for anything except a bullet between the eyes when the big cats vote you’re too out of control. That’s just cold hard reality. Did you ever wonder what Sergei sees in you?”
Of course I did. Numerous men had been born in or on the periphery of the Organization, and of all of them, Sergei had selected me and Vassily. I have one clear memory of him from my childhood: a memory of being hoisted up in tattooed hands the size of Christmas hams, looking down into his broad, beaming face and bushy beard. Sergei was as much a Slav as Vassily and I were, but he had red hair: red hair and violet eyes. I remember looking down into those twinkling purple-blue irises, understanding even then that they were full of cold humor and equally cold assessment. When he was here, he’d been a shadow over my shoulders, always watching. Every school report, every play, every equestrian competition. He watched everything with indulgent, predatory patience, rewarding the good and being outwardly disappointed by the bad. The same way you trained a dog.
“No. And how would you know?” I asked.
“Son, I was the first guy to bring heroin here from the ’Stans. Me and Nic. We took a convoy of poppy over the border all the way to a ship in Karachi.” Yuri exhaled, and his throat buzzed with phlegm. “I knew Sergei before you were a gleam in your daddy’s eye. Man is a C
lass-A shitbag. A real circus master. He’d fuck you with a razor blade for your jacket if he wanted it.”
I glared at him in sullen, offended silence.
“I know what Sergei sees in you. Same thing he sees in all t-the rest of us poor motherfuckers.” Yuri grinned. “Machine parts.”
The undeniable truth of Yuri’s words made me pause. I rubbed my hands on my thighs, leaning away. My fingers were stinging with salt, rubbed raw within the illusory security of their casings.
“Tiny, fragile, cheap... machine parts.” Yuri’s voice dropped to a brittle hiss. “Itty bitty. And there’s lots of you. Lots of Alexis. Lots of Yuris. You’re already a slave. Just like your mother.”
“You don’t know anything about my mother.” That remark snapped the growing hypnotic fugue short. I reached back and pulled the gun free from my waistband. “Shut up.”
“I know more than you do.” Yuri’s soulless eyes burned under the fluorescent lights of the kitchen. “You think your dad was her only man before she capped herself?”
“SHUT UP!” I barked.
A weird, choked sound bubbled up from Yuri’s throat. It took me a moment to realize he was laughing. “She hated him. Hated you. She hated us. The Organization.”
Shaking, I raised the pistol in a teacup grip. My arms, back, and stomach were taut with rage.
“Yeah. Get angry.” Yuri sat back but didn’t otherwise move. He didn’t give two shits about the gun. “Think about it. You get t-to choose what Sergei did with you? Choose what you were born into? How you turned out?”
My nostrils trembled as I drew a deep, furious breath.
“Had your school paid up, car paid up, all sponsored... so you could do this. Pull a gun on the guy tellin' you how things work. You're a slave, kid. You joined the system, and they got you good.”
It was true. It was all true. Sergei had put Vassily and me through The Knox School together, bought our cars. After my mother’s funeral, Sergei had bought my first horse. They weren’t gifts—they were investments. We’d both known it and worked hard out of gratitude and obligation and maybe more than a little fear. Our patron had checked us into college and assigned us our subjects. Finance. Business. He wanted white-collar leaders with a taste for comfortable living and big money. I had done everything he wanted—except one thing.
“So you tell me, Alexi. Where’d it get you? Your loyalty?”
I lifted my chin. My instincts screamed at me to disengage, but pride wouldn’t let me. I’d taken so much shit from the other muzhiki in this place. “I’ve got everything I need.”
“You work like a dog, live in a shitty apartment, and half the Organization thinks you should be put down. There ain’t no respect for spooks in this place, kid. I know the guys at work, what they say about you.” Yuri didn’t blink. “Rumor is you’re a faggot.”
“Say that again.” Every muscle in my body trembled. It couldn’t be true. My finger tightened on the trigger. In the ensuing silence, the small click seemed very, very loud.
“Faggot.” He sounded it out long and slow, like I hadn’t heard the first time. “You don’t believe me? Ask Nic. Everyone thinks you make out like you’re a big tough guy after killing your dad to hide it. But it doesn’t have to be that way,” Yuri replied. “You want your soul to walk beside you like it was real, like Carmine? You can do that. Want to learn how to walk on water? It’s possible. Create gold? Skullfuck people from across the room? You can. I can sense it, Lexi. You woke up. You’re one of the big boys now.”
There was one thing that Yuri didn't know - and it was something that no one besides Sergei, Vassily and I ever discussed. I had opted out of my Economics degree and studied Psychology at college, without telling my Pakhun. He had shot out my knee for disobeying him, but he let me graduate. That choice had been my one act of defiance against him, and against the system so eloquently laid out by the man in front of me. That training allowed me to keep an objective distance from Yuri's words. His speech tugged half-known feelings and old bitterness, but the rational, affectless part of my mind, the clinical observer I’d cultivated over so many years, ticked over each part of the advertisement. He had, indeed, spun me a sales pitch. The hook. The problem. The soothing empathy, and the inevitable solution. He was playing the Prisoner's Dilemma against me... that would be the next stage, if I listened to him. The only reward was paranoia, and eventual self-destruction.
“Fine. Then tell me where Vincent is.” I lowered my face, as if sighting down along a horn.
“Preparing,” Yuri wheezed. “To become a master of the knowledge of good and evil. We have a fruit from the T-Tree, Alexi. The Tree.”
“As in... the Tree of Genesis? In Eden?” The God talk was definitely beginning to get to me. My trigger finger loosened again, but only slightly. “Yggdrasil? What tree? I’m not religious.”
“I ain’t talking about religion. I’m talking about reality.” Yuri’s face flushed. The slight increase in energy made his skin even more sallow, bringing out the purplish veins of his cheeks. His voice became clearer. “Vincent has joined us. He is the Hound, and he will harvest the fruit. It’s here, in New York. You could be there. With us.”
“And who, if I might ask, is ‘us’?” I asked, cracking my neck.
Yuri’s grin spread. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“You know... Yuri, I never owned a television,” I said, moving back slightly towards the door. “Partially because moving pictures make me queasy, and partially because I really, really hate advertisements.”
Yuri’s gaze fixed, and all of the sick pleasure drained from his face. “I’m not lying, Lexi. You’d be the most powerful man in the Organization.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be the most powerful man in the Organization,” I said. It felt like a weak retort.
Yuri dropped his face slightly, lips parted. Whatever was looking at me definitely wasn’t the terse ex-soldier I had known since my youth. Whatever was looking at me was not human. “Bullshit. If it didn’t interest you, you’d have shot me half an hour ago. And besides... your soul’s already injured. You think you can make it on your own with a gimpy Neshamah?”
Injured? My eyes narrowed, but his words caused an unmistakable, involuntary flush of fear. Injured? How could Kutkha be injured? My expression flattened. “I think you’re wasting my time.”
“You talk like you got time. You are... still weak.” Yuri’s mouth drooped open farther, and the thick buzzing sound in his voice began to intensify.
“And... to what ‘Master’ do you answer to, Yuri Juriovich?” My eyes tracked a trickle of pitch as it wound past his teeth, down his chin, slippery and slick. Shit.
Yuri’s eyes flicked up slowly. “NOthing. He sends his regards.”
My nose and throat flooded with a scent like rotting sugar, like molasses-drowned bloated bodies left out in the sun. The stench was overwhelming; it filled my head with sudden buzzing hatred. Yuri’s stare was relentless. Dizziness washed over me in a wave, and as my vision contracted, the other man’s eyes deepened, distending inwards. The buzzing turned to gnashing and screeching, and the holes of Yuri’s eyes spread into mouths of fanged black teeth.
And then something hit me from behind. Hit hard enough to send me staggering, and then clung on with four sets of very sharp, very strong little claws. Binah. I shouted in surprise and pain and stumbled forward with the sensory shock, but it broke the trance.
“Banish it!” Kutkha struggled past whatever arcana had been spun around my mind from within and shrieked in a voice that filled my head with white noise. “Now!”
My finger convulsed on the trigger. One bullet went wide and spranged off the counter. The other two hit and took Yuri through the head, spraying black ichor behind him onto the sink and the row of potted plants on the windowsill. They hissed, shriveling, as I pumped another round into his chest. Binah detached herself from my back and scrambled away at the sound of gunfire while I stared ahead, breathing hard through my mouth. It was
full of the scent of viscera, reflexively emptied bowels, and the old, half-remembered smell of another kitchen, another death.
"I said banish, not shoot!" Kutkha was panicking. Panicking?
"I don't exactly have time to go and get my chalk and Lotus Wand, asshole!" The corpse lolled in the chair, arms loose. Yuri’s arms hadn’t finished swinging when he slumped, spilling black fluid onto the tabletop. The goop turned into larval branches of living ooze. I backed away, steps punctuated by the anticlimactic blips of each silenced round. I hit two more times, and on the fourth impact, thin, whiplike tentacles burst forth from each bullet wound and every open orifice. They hauled Yuri to his feet like a marionette, kicking the chair back and the table towards me. I swung around the edge of the doorway. The table hit with a splintering crash, flinging slime across the floor. The worms. I couldn’t let them get to my skin. "Fuck!"
"This is why we don't shoot the DOG, Alexi!"
I pressed back against the wall, scraping them from my clothes as I tried to aim with one hand. They were burning through my clothes. As I fumbled, half a dozen thick, prehensile tentacles whipped past the shattered doorjamb, and I fired blindly before remembering that the gun was useless. I threw it with a shout and lunged backwards down the hall, only to topple as something struck me around the ankle. The impact of the floor was more immediate than the grip of the lashing thing that wrenched me down. Struggling, twisting around to my back, I had just enough time to see myself being pulled towards a barbed starfish maw, larger than my torso, that blossomed from the ruin of Yuri’s face.
Chapter 12
I caught the doorjamb as I flew past, kicking with my other foot as Yuri dragged me back into the kitchen. More fleshy limbs snapped around my chest, thighs, and calves, forcing my legs together as I fought and clawed and yelled into the darkened corridor ahead. I was hoisted nearly upside down off the ground. My knife tumbled from my pocket, clattering to the floor. The switchblade popped open, and just as the wooden doorjamb creaked and tore under my fingers, I lunged for the knife.
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