Blood Hound

by James Osiris Baldwin

  Outside the church grounds, the street was full of gawkers. Police pretended to have a real reason to be there, while civilians clamored like crows at the fence, trying to get a glimpse of a rumored Mafia funeral.

  I found my place by Vassily’s side from the moment the doors opened. Both he and Mariya had open caskets, their bodies buried under piles of flowers. Mourners came to touch, kiss and lay more flowers and flags down over them. Jewish flags, Ukrainian flags, white banners, even dollar bills. They came and left around us in a blur. Their words, their faces and scents bubbled formlessly around me. I only had eyes for my family.

  Vassily was milk pale and sunken, his expression serene, eyes closed. His hands were folded over his chest, and I drank in every detail of his tattoos: the cat and dagger on the left, the snake and skull on the right. Each one commemorated his cunning and loyalty and determination, and for all his flaws, he had earned them. The blue ink seemed to float just under the surface of his skin, as if it had turned to glass. He had taken these images for his father, and Vassily had embodied them with the kind of passion that he’d be proud of, had he been alive to watch his youngest son grow to adulthood.

  The Scopolamine fog made it impossible for me to tell which memories of that awful night were true and which were not. I was sure Zarya was real, and the DOG. I know I worked magic that took my breath away to think about. The rest? I couldn’t say. All I do know is that this place, these people, and these sick men I grew up following are wrong. The Organizatsiya is a disease. Now, I realized why the smell of the DOG was so familiar: Because it smelled like home.

  I only broke from my vigil once, to use the bathroom and check my arm. Two days had passed. My wounds were gone, but something had cut deeper than the DOG’s talons. Zarya had healed me, and the flesh the DOG had chewed out of me was filled in, but the scars still ached. They wound up my forearm like twin serpents. Looking at them made me dizzy, and when I went back out, I lingered in the threshold of the bathroom, paralyzed until I caught a sweet draft of honeysuckle air from the open church door. It was as raw and pure as incense. The scent freed me of my freeze, but my hands remained heavy and hot.

  Nervously, I put my gloves in my pocket and moved bare-handed back into the chapel hall. I wanted to go back to Vassily, but an impulse I could not name drew me outside. I stepped out onto the garden path, breathing deeply of the humid air, and scanned the crowd.

  There was a line of men smoking near the door, killing themselves slowly while they paid their respects to the dead. Sergei’s distinctive raucous laughter boomed from around the corner of the main building. I went around the corner of the chapel to see what he was laughing about, only to see him lift a screaming baby up high over his head, clasping it in huge meaty hands as he cooed and chuckled. Even at this distance, I could see the appraisal on the old man’s face, the calculation.

  He handed the baby back to his mother perfunctorily, praising her, and she blushed. Not thirty feet away, Vanya’s three boys were playing around the only tree behind the church, a sickly looking maple that was shedding its leaves prematurely from the summer heat. The two older boys were bullying the youngest. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I watched them push him to the ground with sticks and feet. The young boy didn’t cry; he got angry, face burning, and picked up a stick of his own to charge them and continue the cycle of violence.

  “Take them in as men and horses, and churn them out as numbered corpses.” Kutkha said, whispering deep within my imagination. It was something I felt like I’d once read, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember the source.

  Even as I tried to remember, something prickled at my skin. I refocused to my left. Sergei was watching me. He was overdressed, as always. The huge man wore a gaudy black velvet suit dressed with a heavy gold medallion that rested over his tie. He caught my eye and smiled knowingly with far too many teeth, then turned and went on to continue entertaining his guests, the couple breeding the next generation of cogs in his machine. Beside him, Vera stood with her hands folded behind her back, feet shoulder width apart, and stared at nothing with dead doll eyes.

  A chill passed through my gut, a lance of unnatural cold that made my mouth itch. I bowed my head and peeled away from the wall, reentering the church with a churning stomach.

  Kutkha fluttered in my awareness with the pressure of protective wings. As I mounted the dais a second time, I felt the gentle indigo-black throb and pulse of his substance as he meshed quietly through my being, silent and supportive. I had my Neshamah. I had Binah, waiting for me at home. I had Zarya’s final words. “We will see you again.”

  For the last time, I looked down at Vassily’s face.

  “Until we meet again.” I leaned in to commit his smell to memory. Without really meaning to, I pressed my lips to the waxy skin of his forehead, lingering just long enough that I would always remember how it felt. Then I turned and walked away.

  I didn’t want to. A part of me wanted to join them down there, in the deep Green sea. I didn’t want to live, alone, in a world where people like Sergei and Nic survived and Mariya and Vassily did not. I didn’t want the loneliness that would come with my decision. But I am a Magus, a Phitometrist, a catalyst. Whatever it is I must do, I would not find it here.

  It was time to go.

  Continue scrolling to read the first chapter of STAINED GLASS, Book #2 of the Alexi Sokolsky series. If you want to jump straight into the next book, buy it here: https://amzn.com/B01J2QT0H6

  Stained Glass: Chapter 1

  Vengeance, like most fantasies, is better in the imagining than it is in the execution.

  Snappy Joe Grassia – Manelli hitman, renowned sadist, and murdering piece of human waste – was hog-tied in my trunk. We were headed north along the Interstate, gunning for a place that a long-dead gangster had nicknamed Bozya Akra, God’s Acre. The Yaroshenko Organizatsiya had been planting bodies there since my grandfather’s day, and if the Feds ever found it, they’d have enough bones to keep the world in human ivory for the next decade.

  It had been a long two weeks, and now that we were nearly there, I felt hollow, sour, even bored. This was the last kill I’d make in the USA, maybe for the rest of my life. I’d expected to feel satisfaction, some kind of relief. All I felt was nothing. When I glanced in the mirror at my face, it was stiff and cold, skin tight and grayish. I couldn’t see anything through that shell of self-containment, the autistic armor I’d grown over the course of a short, violent life. There was only a mask: passionless, hard and proud.

  The trip to Bozya Akra was nearly the reverse of the one Vassily and I had made earlier in August when we’d driven back from Fishkill Correctional. The wind blowing over us from the windows during that ride had been warm, the scents blue and bittersweet with the dog days of summer. He’d come out of prison thinned and brittle. He hadn’t been strong enough to survive the odds arrayed against him when everything had gone to shit. The icing on the cake had been when he was kidnapped and his sister killed…and now, Snappy Joe and I were fated to share this moment.

  The outer fence had rotted to stumps, and the frontage to Bozya Akra was so overgrown that it resembled the rest of the forest. We drove up along that long driveway very slowly, bumping and rumbling over the soft earth, and eventually came to a gentle stop in a clearing not too far from a deep, pre-dug pit. I collected the weapon I’d brought for the job, cut the engine and got out, the pulse in my tongue tap-tapping with the tick of cooling metal. The hissing trees filled the silence as I went around and popped the trunk.

  Joe squealed when he saw me, eyes bugging over the top of his gag. He was a burly dog of a man, tough and bony as dry chicken. My hands itched in my gloves as I reached in and hauled him out like so much meat, rolling him to the ground with a wet thud. He was beaten to within an inch of his life, his body a coagulated mess of broken bones and livid bruises, and he swooned in a fresh faint as I – three inches shorter and a hand broader through the shoulders – grasped the top of his h
ead by the hair and dragged him behind me through the mud.

  In the dark of my mind, I felt something stir… the awareness of my Neshamah. Kutkha roused with dispassionate interest as I set Joe on his knees by the edge of the pit. There was just enough sun left in the day to us to see by. While he swayed and moaned, clawing his way back to consciousness, I cut his gag free, set a piece of razor-sharp broken window glass taken from Mariya’s house against his twitching throat, and waited.

  The sun was wavering red on the horizon by the time he gurked and lurched a little, catching himself before he toppled forward into the hole. The damp earth sighed under his weight. When he finally righted, he drew a sharp, frightened breath.

  "Joseph Grassia," I spoke his name slowly, rolling out the 'ra' a little to taste the ‘s’ that followed. "Do you know why we’re here?"

  Joe's throat worked a little under the blade as he swallowed, mouth working. We were in a clearing behind a thick stand of hemlock and trembling aspen, the trees shivering in the sweet evening breeze. Far from the New York city limit, fifteen miles from the nearest truck stop, we were utterly alone.

  "R..Russian? The Russians?" He croaked. "No way. Come on, man… You-"

  "Ukrainian.” The blade was rocking, rocking, and beginning to draw a little red. “Three weeks ago, you raided an apartment to kidnap my sworn brother. You killed his sister and took him-”

  “Please man, plEEE-!”

  With a small shudder, I yanked the shiv in, and he cried out in a surprisingly high, wavering voice. "Be quiet while I am speaking, Joseph."

  With the click of clenching teeth, he fell silent.

  “You took him and you doped him up, and now he’s dead, Joseph. Their names were Mariya and Vassily Lovenko.” I smelled urine, and shuffled my feet apart so it wouldn't get on my shoes. “They took me in when I was a kid, when I had nowhere else to go. Do you know what that’s like? The desolation of losing your only family?”

  "Oh god. Oh god, stop." Joe rasped now, flesh quivering around the uneven edge of the knife. "Stop. Stop."

  “Did you stop? Have you ever stopped to think about anything in your life? Do you think I had the choice to stop, when your Spook forced me to defile Zarya? The Gift Horse?”

  "Oh god. You're the Spook. You're the f-fucking Spook." Joe’s voice stayed high and girlish, squeaky. "Don't... please, I didn't fucking do it! I d-d- it was fucking Celso, man! He-"

  My eyes narrowed. “Celso Manelli?”

  "Yes… YES-S..." he stammered, unable to find his words for several seconds. "It was Celso, Celso called me in. It was you freakin’ Russkies that started the war, I didn’t have nothin’ to do with it, they just wanted me to drive, all I was doin’ was driving, I was just-!"

  His voice slowly turned to a dim buzzing drone, and the filthiness of him, the un-reality of his being, suddenly became too much. I am not a telepath, but I didn't need any form of magic to see into Joe's mind. The thing in front of me was a man-shaped hole in place of a human being, a sucking void. A NOthing, greedy and craven. The NO was an infection in the world that ran so deep and so virulent that there was no hope of a cure. This was what the Gift Horse had taught me. And in the bittering weeks since Vassily’s death, I saw the influence of the NO in everything.

  I pulled Joe up higher on his knees with the shard. He screamed, and kept screaming as I spoke against the nothingness I felt.

  "’I have done it again. One year in every ten, I manage it. A sort of walking miracle, my skin as bright as a Nazi lampshade, my face a featureless, fine Jew linen.’"

  “What the FUCK!?” Joe was nearly screaming now. He sounded like a frightened hen. “The fuck is this? The fuck-!”

  Sylvia Plath's words continued to roll off my tongue in soft measured cadence, as natural as any wizard's spell. "Peel off the napkin, O my enemy. Do I terrify?"

  “No, no no no, no NO NO-!”

  I punched the shard, a remnant of Mariya’s broken bathroom window, through the front of his throat just beside his Adam's Apple. Gristle bent and ground under the force of the improvised blade. Joe’s lamb-like screams turned to garbles as his blood slopped over the back of my glove. I put the hard sole of my shoe against his thin back and pushed him into the pit, face-first, to suffocate his life out on the loose dirt. This was not a kind kill, a mercy stroke through the carotid artery. He would remain conscious until the end.

  "Dying, is an art." I looked down at him from overhead, pulling the latex gloves off one at a time and throwing them to the ground. "And like everything else, I do it exceptionally well."

  Joe had not known Mariya. The way she picked sour cherries out of the jar with us while we did homework after school, her patience with our grandmother as Lenina’s mind dissolved in the grip of Alzheimer’s Disease. He hadn’t known Vassily: his broad shoulders, his long, tattooed hands, the wicked glint in his eyes or the flash of his smile across a room when he turned to face me. Joe would never know the dryness of my mouth when Vassily stripped off his shirt or laughed at my jokes; his effortless intensity when handling a new gadget, a deck of cards, a cigarette. Snappy Joe Grassia was sick, like everything and everyone in the underworld. And so was I.

  A month to the day ago, I tasted the Gift Horse’s blood and received a revelation. GOD, the Greater Optimistic Direction – was very real. Through Zarya, I’d felt its heartbeat, saw its capillary action, its respiration. I’d glimpsed the way that its body channeled highways of Phi, the stuff of magic, like lymphatic fluid. It was an organism, a flesh-and-blood living thing with tissues so massive that its cells spanned universes. The EveryThing, an all-consuming, and all-encompassing entity of which I was one tiny, tiny organelle.

  But I knew now that GOD was in pain. When I looked into that massive eye, I hadn’t felt chosen. I’d felt dirty. Twisted up. In my visions, I knew instinctively that I was not part of the cure; I was still part of the disease.

  The grave was filled and meticulously camouflaged, every shred of dirty evidence bagged and burned by the time I drove back down the bumpy winding road to the highway. I spent the trip back in a numb fugue: part dissociation, part adrenaline, part realization that no matter how many fingers I broke or how fast I did it, the job would be left unfinished. In perfect accord with Murphy’s Law, Snappy Joe Grassia had named the one man who I could not possibly kill in the short window of time I had left. Celso GODdamned Manelli.

  The Manelli family was the biggest Mafia outfit in New York City and New Jersey. John Manelli, the Don of the family, was a ruthless cut-throat who spurned the traditions of the Cosa Nostra and dealt in drugs – lots of them. Celso was his father’s Consigliere and renowned to be one of the most dangerous non-magical Made Men in the underworld. I didn’t know much about him, and had never seen him in person. Rumor was that he’d killed more than a few Spooks – ‘hitmages’, as Vassily had once called us – and GOD knows how many norms. He was reputed to be smart, cool, and careful. All of the Murder Inc. guys could regularly be found at the club they owned and operated in Manhattan: The Gemini Lounge. It was quite likely that I could find Celso there… along with fifty other allied gangsters, street mages, and a partridge in a pear tree.

  Joe could have been pulling my leg. Questioning someone who is about to die is a terrible way to get information, but something about his insistence that Celso had been there made sense. I had memorized the murder scene in a flash. The position of furniture, blood spatters, the signs of struggle and lack of it. Mariya’s body, slumped like a worn doll over the edge of the bathtub. I’d been sucking on the details like a bad tooth, recalling them over and over. There had definitely been more than one person there. That person could indeed have been Celso.

  If it was true, there was no way I could leave New York. Nicolai would pay. Sergei would pay. After their performance the month before, the Organizatsiya was dead to me. I’d wring every drop of blood from their bodies for Vassily and Mariya, for Zarya, and for me.

  As plans to find Celso began to coagulate, the
cold shadow that had cruised with me for the entire day, from Joe’s capture to beating to execution, finally manifested himself. The cottony, dusty smell of feathers wafted through the cabin like smoke, filling the air with the subtle pressure of Phi, the substance of magic. It was Kutkha, my Neshamah: the conduit of my Art, and a sanctimonious pain in my behind.

  From time immemorial, mages and mystics of all cultures have spoken of the Neshamah, the soul, as a real, conscious presence. It is the part of ourselves that all humans have, but few ever speak to. The Higher Self, the Holy Guardian Angel – call it what you will. Jung named his Thomas. Mine was Kutkha, named for the trickster deity of ancient Rus. Sort of.

  "Alexi, we cannot do this." Kutkha spoke with no single voice. He sounded like the riffling wind, the air thrumming through feathers. "We will not find him in time. Tonight, we must leave."

  I fixed ahead on the dark, wet road. "The Gemini Lounge isn’t too far from our route home. There’s time to cruise by before the flight. And if we miss this flight, I’ll book another. We’re not short of money."

  "You will not find him. He is already gone. They know Joseph has disappeared."

  My throat closed up with a sudden flash of heat so powerful that it flooded my eyes with white and gold. It caused my hands to tic, and I slowed to stop from losing control of the car. "No. You don't know that.”

  “Alexi…”

  “I know you don't know shit about the future. You fucking listen to me, you -"

  The shadows of the cabin quickened. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the ghostly impression of a raven, blue-black, its substance boiling into filaments of vapor. When he next spoke, it was stronger, something I heard with my ears as well as my mind. “Your father used to say that to you, Alexi.”

  “Don’t.” The urge to hit, to bite and grasp and tear at something, anything became overwhelming, but there was no one and nothing left to hurt. I was the only one in the car. "Don’t ever bring Grisha up again, or I swear to GOD..."