King of Thieves

by Jane Kindred

  On the third day of the trip, however, as he was stepping out of the train to stretch his legs and get a bite to eat in Yekaterinburg, he stepped straight into the path of none other than Belphagor himself. He’d never been so happy to see the furious scowl of disapproval in the dark eyes.

  Belphagor grabbed him by the arm and led him away from the train. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Pursuing a lead,” said Vasily.

  “What lead?”

  “Same one you’re pursuing.”

  “Dammit, Vasya.” Belphagor ran his fingers through the spikes of his hair. “I told you to stay in Raqia. I need to do this alone.”

  Vasily folded his arms and shrugged. “We no longer have an arrangement where you tell me what to do and I do it.”

  “You can’t just do something because I ask it of you?”

  “Not really.”

  Belphagor paused to buy the fresh pirozhki a vendor was offering him, handing one automatically to Vasily. “You can’t stay with me in Leningrad. You’ll blow my cover.”

  “St. Petersburg,” said Vasily with a mouthful of pirog. “And I don’t want to stay with you. You’ve made it perfectly clear you don’t want me around.”

  Belphagor paused in taking a bite of his meat pie. “Vasya. You know that isn’t true.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. We’re giving each other ‘space’. And it’s my fault.” Vasily finished off his pie and looked hopefully at the third Belphagor had purchased. “I’m perfectly fine with that.” He paused. “Are you going to eat the other one?”

  Belphagor rolled his eyes and handed over the pirog. “And just where do you plan to stay, then?”

  Vasily shrugged. “Safe house, I guess.”

  “You think the city’s just littered with them? Exactly how do you plan to find one? They’re called safe houses for a reason.”

  Vasily glared and concentrated on his food.

  Belphagor sighed. “Why couldn’t you have just let me handle this?”

  Vasily swallowed the last of his pie and focused just a bit of fire in his gaze. “Because you’re following Silk. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you deal with whoever’s got him on your own.”

  Notably, Belphagor didn’t deny it was Silk he was pursuing. “Vasya, we can’t be seen together. Here or in Leningrad.”

  “St. Petersburg.”

  He could tell Belphagor was grinding his teeth before he continued, his voice carefully controlled. “So when the train arrives, I will arrange to have someone come to meet you. You wait at the station. The password will be—”

  “Seraphim?”

  Belphagor’s jaw twitched. “Oh, now you can say it.”

  Vasily blushed. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been capable of saying the safe word. He just hadn’t needed to. Had he? Doubt needled him, but he brushed it aside.

  “Fine. Seraphim.” The train whistle sounded, and Belphagor turned to board without another word. It was because they weren’t supposed to be seen together, of course, but it hurt nonetheless.

  Vasily returned to his car and spent the next twenty-six hours between Yekaterinburg and Moscow getting and staying blind drunk with the help of his bunkmates. By the time he stepped off the Moscow-to-St. Petersburg train nine hours later, he was sincerely regretting both his poor decision as well as his mode of travel. He saw no sign of Belphagor at Moskovsky Vokzal, but as promised, Belphagor’s contact found him. It wasn’t as if Vasily was hard to spot.

  “Seraphim,” said the gypsy woman who approached him. Vasily picked up his bag and followed her. “Is not good password,” she murmured in rough angelic. “We use to warn if fire angely come. But you prince, he says ‘Seraphim’ is you word.”

  Vasily grunted. “I suppose he figured I wasn’t smart enough to remember anything else.”

  The woman nodded as if this was what she’d suspected, and Vasily sighed, wishing he could just get to his bed and lie down in it before the entire round world, if Belphagor were to be believed, slid him right off the edge. To his disappointment, the short metro ride she took him on led to another train. The train was crowded, and they had to stand.

  Vasily held on to the post in the center of the train aisle. “Where are we going now?”

  “Tsarskoe Selo,” said the gypsy.

  “Tsars what?”

  “Hush. You bring attention.”

  He could hardly avoid bringing attention, but his stomach was churning too much at this point to continue the conversation, so he clung to his post and tried not to think about vomiting. With all the bodies packed into the train in the heat of summer, he was pretty sure he was about to die anyway.

  Half an hour later, they stepped off the train into a quiet, suburban neighborhood. He’d been looking forward to staying in the city he and Belphagor had only briefly visited on their last trip, but this was nice, and if the demons here had a bed for him, he wasn’t going to argue at this point. Belphagor had obviously wanted him out of the way. Vasily would deal with him later.

  They climbed the steps into an apartment complex a block away from the station, and Vasily gripped the railing as they turned about the landings, barely paying attention when the door to the apartment at the top opened.

  “Well, look who’s here.”

  Vasily raised his head at the familiar voice. “Lev?”

  Inside the entrance, Dmitri Ilyich stood behind his partner. They were the demons he and Belphagor had stayed with in Moscow on their last trip. What were they doing in a St. Petersburg suburb?

  The gypsy held out a coin purse, and Dmitri placed a handful of bills in it, frowning at Vasily. “You’re not sick again?”

  “No.” Vasily stepped inside to take off his shoes. As he bent over to remove them and put on the pair of tapochki Lev offered, he swallowed a bit of bile in the back of his throat. “Just had a little too much to drink.” He turned to thank the gypsy woman, but she’d gone.

  Dmitri was still frowning at him. “How much is too much?”

  “Yekaterinburg to Moscow.”

  Lev whistled. “I’d say that’s about twenty hours too much.” Mercifully, he led Vasily to the guest bedroom. “All yours. You can pull the blackout curtains over the window if you like. Sun doesn’t go down much at the moment. And if you puke on the guest bed, you’re buying a new one.”

  “Please,” Vasily groaned as he fell onto the bed and clutched the covers to keep from sliding off. “Don’t say ‘puke’.”

  When he rejoined the world of the living some hours later, Vasily was relieved to find Dmitri had gone out. He didn’t really connect with either demon, but Lev was easier to talk to. And he was a fantastic cook.

  Stacks of fresh mini-pancakes were waiting at the table with sour cream and jam, and as always, a samovar of hot tea. The weather didn’t seem to matter; tea was served hot, and served three times a day.

  Now that his stomach had settled, Vasily gladly drank the cup Lev poured him. “What are you two doing in—where are we?”

  “Pushkin,” said Lev.

  “I thought the gypsy said something about tsars.”

  “Tsarskoe Selo.” Lev nodded. “That was its name before the Bolsheviks changed it. Some people are calling it that again now that communism’s out of fashion. We moved here a couple of months ago.” He gave Vasily a significant look as he poured himself a cup of tea. “Kind of had to, after word got out where we were living.” Lev took a seat opposite him at the little kitchen table. “So how much of a bastard is Bel being this time?”

  Vasily paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. “Sorry?”

  Lev smiled over the edge of his cup. “He’s in the city, you’re here. Doesn’t take a genius to guess he’s fucked up again.”

  Vasily snorted and dug into his blinchiki. “We’re on a break.”

  “A break.” Lev looked amused. But then, Lev always looked amused. Life seemed to entertain him. “Which you both decided to take in the world of Man.”

  “He’s trying
to track slavers trading in celestial demons on the terrestrial plane. Thinks he doesn’t need my help.” Vasily focused on his plate, not wanting to discuss this with Lev, but the demon had a way of making it easy to talk about things Vasily had no intention of talking about.

  “And you disagree.”

  Vasily shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter what I think.”

  “Ah. Yeah. I hate it when Dmitri does that.”

  Despite himself, this got Vasily’s attention. He glanced up. “Dmitri does that to you?”

  It was Lev’s turn to shrug. “He can be kind of secretive. Grigori stuff.”

  “I thought you were Grigori.”

  “I am, but I didn’t grow up with any knowledge of them. I thought I was just a run-of-the-mill demon. Apparently, there’s all kinds of political goings-on—rulings by the Grigori Duma, different clans clashing with one another, Nephilim rebellions. Dmitri keeps me out of the loop ‘for my own good’.”

  “Ha.” Vasily stabbed at a blin. “I’ve heard that one before.”

  Lev gave him a conspiratorial smile. “Guess it kind of comes with the territory when you’re dating a dominant demon.”

  “You and Dmitri…?”

  “Nothing nearly as exciting as what you’ve got going on with Belphagor. But Dmitri definitely prefers to take charge. Anyway, I’ll bet you anything Belphagor’s going out of his mind wishing he could patch things up with you.”

  Vasily shrugged and went back to his breakfast. Whether he was or not remained immaterial so long as the hole that needed patching kept getting wider.

  The address Belphagor was directed to by his contact wasn’t nearly as nice as his own hotel—and his wasn’t all that nice. Like Balam, the others on the Celestial Silk Road referred to “merchandise” and “product”. How delightful that free enterprise had finally come to Russia.

  It was a member of the militsia who greeted Belphagor outside the rundown Soviet tenement. Belphagor balked at the sight of him, ready to take flight, but the officer gave the tattoos on his hands a cursory glance and nodded to him, unsmiling.

  “Thirty thousand rubley.”

  Belphagor wasn’t sure if this was the price for the boy or the bribe, but he handed it over. Sometime in the last year and a half, the ruble had been devalued to a fraction of what it had been worth after the collapse. The requested amount would barely buy a night’s lodging in a youth hostel. The police officer jerked his head toward a dark corridor inside and a set of crumbling wooden stairs that led into a basement apartment. Belphagor took a step down, and the policeman vanished almost as successfully as an airspirit.

  Prostitutes were doing business in what looked to be a condemned building—no doors, no amenities, lots of five-thousand-ruble hand jobs from the looks of it, exposed bosoms for a few extra, some oral trade, but no one daring to disrobe or touch the floor of the dilapidated rooms for any amount of money. It was a far cry from The Cat or even The Suck, as The Succubus was affectionately known.

  At the end of the corridor, a heavy blanket over the doorway announced the seamier trade within. Belphagor avoided eye contact with the patrons lingering in the hallway waiting their turns elsewhere. Someone spat at his back as he reached the blanket door, and for once he was glad to be earning a man’s disgust. He hated to think that buying young boys was commonplace enough to earn any respect, even from the likes of these patrons.

  Inside the curtain, rough pieces of corrugated metal partitioned the room into three, each cubicle again covered with a ratty blanket for privacy. Two of the blankets hung open onto empty cubicles, soiled cardboard flats lining the floors. He rapped on the metal wall of the third.

  “Kto tam?” a rough voice barked.

  He hoped to Heaven he wasn’t interrupting a patron. He hadn’t planned on killing anyone today. “Grigor Vadimovich sent me,” he replied in Russian.

  The blanket was drawn aside just enough for the pimp to stick his head out. “You have money?”

  “Thirty thousand rubley,” Belphagor replied, using the same figure the policeman had asked for. It seemed to be sufficient.

  His host stepped out and took his money, then held the curtain wide for him to enter. “Ten minutes for thirty thousand rubles. You take longer, you pay another ninety thousand.”

  Belphagor waited for the curtain to drop over the opening before he dared to focus on the boy. This was far worse than he’d been expecting. His whole body shook with anger. On the cardboard mat, the boy he could only assume was Silk lay drugged and listless, a long, dirty undershirt his only clothing. His hair had been hacked off, and he stank of urine. The fading bruises from Kezef’s strap were his only positive ID.

  Belphagor crouched beside him and lifted the boy’s eyelids. The pupils were dilated, and Silk flinched from the light. “Can you stand?” he murmured.

  Silk staggered to his feet as if it were a command and braced his palms against the back wall.

  “Nyet, malchik.” Belphagor turned him about with an arm around his shoulder. “Come with me.”

  When he stepped through the curtain with Silk at his side, the pimp sprang forward with alarm. “Nyet, nyet! Chto delaet?” He tried to pull Silk away.

  As much as Belphagor wanted to beat the shit out of the miserable worm, he couldn’t afford to blow his cover this soon. “How much to take him off your hands?”

  The grubby little bastard looked startled. “Take him? Take him where? What are you going to do with him?”

  Nice that he asked. “That’s my business,” said Belphagor. “I can’t imagine you’re getting much for him, or you wouldn’t be hanging about in this shithole trying to sell his time in ten-minute increments for a mere thirty thousand rubles. He’s a little long in the tooth, but he’ll do for my purposes. Don’t worry. There will be nothing to tie him to you.” He pushed up his sleeve to show the dagger tattoo that marked him as an experienced vor well versed in cleaning up evidence.

  The man—no telltale radiance accompanied his spike in anxiety, so not a demon—scratched at his stubble, sizing Belphagor up to see how much he could take him for. “I’m not normally in the business of moving merchandise.”

  “That’s a shame,” said Belphagor. “I was hoping to be able to do more business with you in the future. If you have better product than this, of course. Fresher.”

  “I might—I might know of some. But you’re mistaken about the value of this piece. This one will be quite a loss. It’ll cost you.”

  “Skolka?”

  The worm named his price, and Belphagor halved it, prompting the requisite outrage. “Impossible. Do you know how much I can make in a day?”

  Belphagor took an envelope from his jacket pocket. “My final offer, in cash.” He took a sizeable stack of thousand-ruble notes—a denomination he’d never even seen before this fall—from the thick envelope and held it out. The worm hesitated only a moment before stuffing it into his pocket.

  “You wait and leave in ten minutes,” he said. “I don’t want anyone connecting you two with me.”

  “Where can I find you again to do further business?”

  “I’ll come to you.”

  Belphagor gave him the hotel and room number, and the satisfied pimp ducked out.

  Silk seemed to have barely noticed this exchange. Belphagor took off his duster and put it around the boy’s shoulders. “Just a few minutes,” he told him. “Then we’ll go get you something to eat.”

  Silk roused a bit at that, his stomach growling audibly. Poor kid looked as if he hadn’t eaten since Raqia. And probably hadn’t. Belphagor clenched his fist at his side.

  Getting Silk up the stairs and onto the metro took every bit of influence Belphagor had. He concentrated his energy on drawing attention to his tattoos to the exclusion of Silk’s presence and managed to get him on the train to Pushkin without trouble. They were noticed more in the suburbs, but Belphagor dragged Silk along, berating him for a thief and promising loudly that Silk would find out what happened when someone t
ried to steal from the vory. This seemed to clear the sidewalks swiftly.

  Silk stumbled with him, trembling. Though he was far from fluent in Russian, he seemed to understand the threats and had taken them seriously. Belphagor felt like a heel as Silk pleaded with him in broken Raqia Russian, swearing he hadn’t stolen anything, but they’d reached Dmitri’s place, and they’d be off the street in a moment.

  Lev opened the door when he buzzed, and the Grigori’s eyes went wide with shock. “Oh my God, Bel. Get him inside.”

  “What’s going on?” The firespirit growl came from the kitchen, and Vasily stormed out into the entryway, stopping with a look of dismay. “Silk?” he gasped, coming forward after a stunned moment to take the demon from Belphagor.

  Silk looked up at him, his dilated eyes confused. “Ruby?”

  Lev glanced at Belphagor. “Ruby?”

  But Silk had collapsed in Vasily’s arms.

  Vosmaya

  Vasily swept Silk up like a ragdoll and carried him down the hall to one of the bedrooms. “He can have the bed,” he rumbled as he laid him on it. “I’ll sleep on the floor.” Silk, vaguely agitated, murmured something incoherent and fell back against the pillow as if he no longer had the strength to hold up his head.

  Belphagor leaned wearily against the doorframe. “I don’t think he’s eaten in several days.” Beside him, Lev inhaled a quiet gasp and did an about-face, heading for the kitchen.

  Vasily took Silk’s hand, which seemed to calm the boy. “Where did you find him?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  While Vasily eyed him, no doubt trying to determine whether Belphagor was keeping things from him to be contrary, Lev appeared with a bowl of shchee.