Of course. Blood.
“I always wanted to see something like this.” Jana gestured to my forgotten fly. “An honest Wise Virgin. You’re the real deal. You can’t imagine how I had to contort my magic to stop Rob from killing you on the boardwalk. That DOG wanted you so badly.”
My legs felt like blocks as I stiffly stepped out of my trousers, moving slightly to the side and awkwardly bumping my knee into the corner of the bed.
Jana laughed, but I said nothing, jaw working. My skin crawled. The air felt wet and tacky.
“Socks first. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a naked man in socks.”
The only barrier between my body and her eyes after that were my trunks and my gloves. I had to face it: I had faced worse than this. As my focus grew, the mind-chatter went from turbulent terror to still apprehension, and I pulled off one sock, and then the other, standing in her room on bare, soft white feet. My throat was tight, aching sharply. The bullet graze on my cheek burned cold, but Jana’s intensity was daring me to try something. I knew through the pain in my gut and chest that I wouldn’t be able to get the word of power out before she pulled the trigger in my face.
“And the gloves.” Under other circumstances, her tone would have been teasing, flirtatious. It wasn’t. She was soaking me up with her eyes, consuming my fear and loathing. But I couldn’t do it.
“Please,” I said. “No.”
Jana lifted the gun and raised her eyebrows. “Gloves or your ear.”
I would not fail this. My eyes and face burned red as I shakily pulled the gloves off, one at a time, and threw them angrily on the covers. It brought a soft sound from Jana. I growled back at her, mouth and nose full of the taste of blood. I felt like how I had in the bathtub, helpless and furious, and I stared at the tip of the pistol as I stripped the last off, ticcing, wincing as the waistband rasped over my soft fingertips. Without the protective second skin, my tongue rippled with the texture and the accompanying color.
“Uncircumcised? Look at you, all covered up,” Jana exclaimed, chest expanding as she breathed deeply. Was she smelling me? She adjusted the gun, and it trembled slightly. Not enough.
I said nothing, clenching my trunks in one white-knuckled fist.
“Perfect,” she said. With my gloves off, my body was a live antenna: I could hear every movement of fabric, every shift of her thighs, every small, wet sound made behind her teeth. My vision contracted. If she touched me, I was either going to break her arm or throw up on her before I died. Or both.
Jana didn’t touch me. Instead, she reached into her collar and pulled free a long chain, like the one she had worn in her office. This one wasn’t silver: it was copper, with a drop pendant emblazoned with another Goetic seal, the seal of Ashtaroth. “Just perfect. And now comes the best part, Alexi—the part where you don’t have to think anymore.”
And now, now came whatever magic she had planned. I sighted down at her, pupils drawn to points, and lifted my chin as I sucked in a breath through narrowed nostrils. Chet.
“I’ll brand you tonight, train you up. We’ll find the Fruit, and then we’ll go to Chicago together.” She sucked her lip under her teeth and bit it until red welled up around her tooth. “I know people there that will take the time to break you in just right. Not like Frank—he couldn’t even get it up.”
In my mind’s eye, I saw Yuri again, black tears streaming down his cheeks as he split from the inside. There was nothing worse than what Jana and her people, whoever they were, were going to do to me. My arm snapped out: I hurled the wad of cloth in my hand as I threw myself to the side. As I tumbled, I saw Jana track me with the experience of a hunter.
The certainty of death bore down like a mantle.
“CHET!” I roared as I hit the ground, drowned out by gunshot.
Hot pain seared through my knee: I shouted wordlessly as something cracked above my head. Jana screamed in agony.
Deafened, disoriented, I scrambled up to see Jana’s eyes huge with shock. The front of her dress bloomed scarlet past her clutching hand, but she was already aiming again. I dove down beside the bed and ripped the sheets off, flinging them at her as she fired again and again. A bullet clipped my arm: I heard another tear through the material of her mattress as she spun around after me, tripped, and toppled over my naked chest with a harsh, bestial sound.
“Whore,” Jana rasped, her gaze wandering over my face. “You’re… just a… whore. Like all of them. Amma… Vmm Mmm… emet...gis…”
I fought out from under her dead weight in a panic and scrambled back in a crab crawl that landed me on my ass when I hit the dresser and bounced. I dragged up the sheets, covered myself, and scrubbed her blood from my chest. It clung stickily to my bare skin, and I ticced, spasming through face and fingers. Shaking, I staggered to my feet.
Jana’s mouth was still working, her eyes hooded and dark. Whatever magic she was trying to work, she couldn’t get the words past each wet, sucking breath. She was still looking at me when her head finally flopped lifelessly to the side. Blood welled across the carpet from under her weight, saturating the floor, her clothing, threatening to pool around my feet.
I barely made it into her en suite in time. I stumbled to my knees and threw up, retching until I garbled. That was it: the last straw. I couldn’t do this. I punched the wall ahead of me. There was no strength in it. I could feel the clothes floating on my naked skin, my hands squirming in the gloves, and there was a second’s pause before my heaving started again, every muscle in my body rebelling at the mingled, sickening smell of lilies and blood.
Through it all, I knew there was something I had to do, but I coughed and choked until nothing was left. Only once I stopped being sick did I remember, hazily, what’d I’d come here for in the first place. Vincent. And GOD help me, the police. The police would be here any minute.
Panic urged me to my feet. Vincent. My mouth was burning, a sensation barely relieved by cold water from the tap. Before I left the bathroom, I swilled and spat until I could no longer taste anything in my mouth.
“I did it,” I rasped. “Kutkha. Magic.”
The wraithlike weight of my Neshamah coiled around me in reply, a consoling and weighted presence. It didn’t help much. I felt... dirty. Touched by filth. Jana hadn’t gotten what she wanted, but I felt no triumph at having bested her. My stomach trembled again, but nothing was left to vomit up. I rubbed my hands on my thighs, composed what was left of me, and got back to my feet.
There was a stairwell down to a basement in the sparkling clean kitchen, a plain door with peeling magenta paint and a matte-black circle which contained the eye and cross symbol I had seen in my dream. The air inside the next room was fetid, tropically humid, and smelled powerfully of living plants and rotten meat. I fumbled at the wall inside for a light switch, and flipped it up. Three blue lights flickered on overhead, and then rows of grow lights illuminating a veritable jungle of plants. Marijuana, Angel’s Trumpets, swamp lilies. The scent of decay was powerful, and there were cages about: heavy, roughly welded iron cages big enough for a man. A goat bleated in alarm as my footsteps scuffled on the concrete.
“Let me out of here, you crazy bitch! Hey!” a reedy man’s voice cried out from somewhere deep inside.
I pushed on past the cage with the goat. The cage stacked on top of it had another one, dead, its tongue lolling from its rotting mouth. The pair of cages sat by a shoddily made door. I stopped in the entrance to assess the interior, my hair and clothing plastered to my body with sweat.
The small room beyond was lit by studio lamps, the floor almost wholly taken up with a Goetic summoning circle. The primary figure—the circle and triangle—were lovingly drawn on the whitewashed floor with thick permanent marker, half-filled in with chalk. A thin, unshaven, unkempt man was bound off to one side in a stress position, tied with ropes to a thick bamboo rods that held him like a rack. He was shorter than me, which is saying something – only around five feet tall.
“Who... The fuck are yo
u?” Vincent was gray with shock, shaking, his hair a wet and bloodied mess. His skin had been carved with symbols from chest to beltline.
“Later.” I went to him, dropped to my knees, and sawed at the ropes with my knife. “I’ll get you out of here.”
“Oh. Wonderful.” Vincent grinned, and then his eyes glazed over and he fainted, sagging like a doll against his bondage.
I freed him, laid him out, and looked over his injuries. Other than some deep bruises and the carvings, he looked to be sound: just dehydrated, shocked, and exhausted. I left him on his side and searched around the room. There were no tools in here. Some instinct drove me back out into the greenhouse area. Somewhere in here, I would find answers. Somewhere in here was the heart.
In the farthest reaches of the basement was a plain wooden trapdoor set unobtrusively into the floor. It opened up into a small square cellar that smelled powerfully of incense and formaldehyde. My nose wrinkled as I dropped down the ladder leading in, looking from one thing to the next. The first thing I saw was her altar—or at least, what I supposed was an altar. It was a square black cube table with nothing on it. An eye and cross symbol had been painted on the wall overhead, and I was fairly certain it was rendered in old blood.
Two of the four walls had bookshelves. One actually did hold books: the other carried a collection of skulls. I counted several humans, three cats, a dog, rabbit, and a deer. They had been glazed with amber, a hazed crust of sap over the bone that stained it red.
The fourth wall was home to Jana’s desk. Unlike the altar, it was stacked with immaculately clean notebooks. Each one was bound in white leather. Aware that the cops were likely to turn up within minutes, I took an edgy seat and freed the oldest and newest books from the stack. Jana’s older book, dated five years ago, was full of strikingly beautiful cursive. It was mostly an herbal, interspersed with a variety of notes on summoning, conjuration, and tool creation. Her latest grimoire, by contrast, was a chaotic mess. The writing was quick and scratchy, frenetically rendered in block paragraphs which barely linked together. A number of pages had been dedicated to sigil design. The rest, as I turned each page, was full of increasingly bizarre, fractured drawings. An entire page full of mouths with rows and rows of fanged teeth. Bizarre, hulking creatures formed by negative space in otherwise solid pages of ink. There was a short list of what looked like book titles: Phitonis Harmonia, The Wayfarer’s Rite (Listen), and Ars Phitomatrica.
I re-read them, head swimming. As I had with the sigil used to summon… whatever had helped Jana do her dirty work, I felt I could, should know these things. Ars Phitomatrica. The title was powerfully familiar.
Towards the end of the notebook, I settled on the page which had the design of the solar sigil I’d entombed in my freezer. There was only one word of notation for the sigil itself: Puslicker. She had written below it: “To find the champion of the Fruit, we need the Puslickers. They say Manellis have it. Where where WHERE?”
The Fruit of Knowledge, the Fruit of the Tree? I frowned, skimming the rest of her notes. She had not written anything else about the Fruit, but I found the tipping point of her madness in an entry dated roughly eighteen months ago—December 23, 1989. The entry was full of photos that spilled out when I opened the page. Jana at her graduation, Jana with her friends. Everyone's faces had been cut out, except for her own. I turned back a page, and then another, through lines of grief-stricken, guilt-ridden writing. She had experienced Shevirah when she and her best friend had been in a car accident. She had awoken in a cold white hospital with Hyperion—her Neshamah, I could guess—whispering in her ears. She had murdered her friend.
“She went crazy after she underwent Shevirah?” I spoke aloud, voice high and tight.
“It would seem so.” Kutkha was subdued.
"She lost her mind. This thing, Hyperion—that thing is insane. Are there things that can drive a Neshamah insane?”
For a moment, Kutkha did not reply. He rustled uncomfortably. “There are. But I do not wish to speak of it.”
“Wait, no. You don’t get to flake on me, you shit. Yuri said you were injured.” I had figured he was lying and hadn’t really given it much thought, but now? I opened another book which bulged slightly in the middle. A wave of crushed bees fell out of it onto the desktop, and I dropped it reflexively. "This could have happened to me."
“It is true...” Kutkha sighed. "That I bear a scar."
"So no wonder I was on the magical short bus. What caused this injury, wiseass?”
“You did,” Kutkha said.
The answer caught me flat-footed. “Me? How?”
Kutkha did not reply. His withdrawal from me was as palpable as his contact.
Uncomfortably, I turned my attention instead to the notes Jana had left on the table. I knew I had to go: it was dangerous to be down here. Jana had gone from journaling properly in her books to keeping her thoughts on scraps, the newest left on the top.
“Frank Nacari no knowledge after retrieval. Brother, Robert Nacari, in charge of storage. Rob protected by ward: scry to find out WWHWW.” Beneath it, she had noted in a far more rushed notation: “Puslickers confirm. L says Fruit is local/nearby, secure V.M. to find. V.M. knows/knows who knows.”
L? Lev? I rifled through the stack of loose paper, my pulse trapped under my tongue. Other than vague references to L, an acronym turned up, over and over again. TVS. I could find no explanation.
Frowning, I turned my attention to Jana’s desk drawers. I pushed aside bones and trinkets and dug out a small silver box emblazoned with a unicorn skull. Curiously, I opened it, and when I saw what lay inside, my lips parted in confusion.
Set into a velvet depression was the necklace Jana had worn on our first meeting, the silver teardrop pendant. Beside it was a small glass vial bound in copper wire. It was half-full of silver fluid that seethed and swirled. I touched it and jumped, startled, as it pulsed against my fingertip. Hesitantly, I picked it up.
“Oh…” Kutkha breathed in a hushed, reverent voice. “Oh, my Ruach. This... is Phi.”
Kutkha’s mirror analogy finally made more sense. I could see my reflection in the tiny vial, a miniature, undistorted rendering of my face that split and reformed like an unearthly mirror maze, reflecting many small Alexis under the light. It looked like mercury, but when I held the flask to the light, I saw the fluid crawling and evaporating, dripping upwards to the pool and reforming back into the mass. “It’s stunning.”
“Few men, few magi know the source of Phi. Fewer ever see it.” My Neshamah was wary. Not of the Phi, I realized... but of me. "We must go."
"How do I use this?" I pocketed the bottle and the pendant and rose. My knee was throbbing and hot, my skin crawling with sweat. "I mean... can it be used?"
"Yes. You can consume it, if you wish to take the risk. But not here."
The impulse to uncap it and take the plunge then and there was strong, but common sense was telling me that I needed to collect my drug dealer and that we had to leave before we both ended up in the slammer. I pulled myself up, and collected Vincent, still unconscious, before I picked my way out of the basement, back up the stairs. I went to Jana's room, intending to look for anything that would help me learn more about this Fruit of hers, and froze in the doorway.
She was gone. The carpet was still dark with blood... but her body was gone. The room was thick with a sweet putrefaction smell... and as I searched for footprints, claw prints, anything, I noticed that the bloody carpet was moving, squirming with small purple-black larvae.
The skin of my neck and scalp prickled as I looked up, around, and backed away from the door. Fear drove me down the hall, out into the living room, and then outside into the muggy heat. The air outside was fresh and sylvan in comparison to the smell in Jana's house. The smell of corruption... the smell I was coming to associate with Violet and Black, with demons, and the Gun.
Chapter 19
A storm had broken over the Atlantic by the time I got Vincent home, drenching t
he city in warm summer rain. Vincent was semiconscious, slurring in his sleep. I carried him inside the house, dressed him, tucked him up in a duvet on the sofa, and turned the air conditioner down to let the house warm up a little bit. Once he was seen to, I went to the bathroom and slammed the door hard enough that the hinges rattled.
In the ringing, whining silence, I stared at my reflection in the mirror. Trembling broke out through my body, spreading through my hands, my limbs, and my chest. My eyes were a mirror of my father’s. I hardly recognized them as a part of my own reflection, trapped in the ringing silence of dissociation.
Jana had barely touched me, but she had some kind of power Carmine and his thugs did not. She had cut me into pieces, objects for her scrutiny... and I had an awful feeling that she was out there somewhere, looking for me. I thought of Crina up on stage, in a booth, in a hotel room, performing under the gazes of men who did exactly the same thing. I had no idea how she endured it, night after night.
Shaking, I took the vial out of my pocket, and considered it for a moment.
“You don’t like that I found this, Kutkha.”
“I think it is too soon for you to become a Hound.” My Neshamah’s throaty voice held a bitter note.
Maybe if someone had explained what that was, I wouldn’t have drunk it. With the naivety of the curious, I cracked the beeswax seal on the tiny bottle with jittery hands, and pulled the stopper.
The scent of Phi billowed out. It cleared the room. My bathroom turned into a fragrant temple, holy and sweet with the odor of night-blooming flowers, as if someone had taken the perfumes of honeysuckle, jasmine, and rose and dialed the saturation up until they transcended color and scent. It purified the air and cleared my head, even as it seared the inside of my nostrils with heat. It was the best thing I had ever smelled in my life, but it caused my chest to pang. Waves of wordless emotion gnawed at me... the sensation of loss and yearning was the strongest of all.
The mercurial fluid was pulling up in slender strands, disappearing into the air. It looked like chordae tendineae, heart strings. Before it vanished, I put the vial to my lips, and drank.
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