by Jane Kindred
Vasily scrambled down the long way, not wanting to take a chance on flaunting his more visible appendages a second time. He joined the others under the cover of the trees and did a quick count to make sure they hadn’t lost any.
“Where to now?” asked Anzhela.
Vasily stuffed his hands into his pockets, feeling stupid that he hadn’t asked Ivan this before they’d made their escape. “I’m not sure. I guess we just wait here for Belphagor and the others.” He glanced around at the boys; it was odd to see them from his normal, adult perspective after the time they’d spent together at the Fletchery. It seemed best not to try to explain that he knew them. “Where are the girls?”
Anzhela shifted the weapon at her side. “They were sold off before we left Raqia, but I’m a bit old for their trade, so buyers weren’t as enthusiastic.” She glanced around at the young demons. “I call them my Lost Boys.”
“Lost Boys?
“It’s from an English story. Piter Pen. A girl gets whisked away by a shadow boy to an island called Neverland, where no one ever grows up. She takes care of a group of ‘Lost Boys’ who are stuck there and haven’t ever had a proper mother.” This phrase pricked at Vasily’s most tender spot. He could relate. “Masha read the book to me when I was little,” Anzhela explained. “She had a lot of books from the world of Man. She wanted me to learn the stories and the languages. I speak a few of them. Russian. English. French.”
Vasily was envious of her skill. He’d had enough trouble learning proper Russian. Every demon in Raqia knew a smattering. It was their secret “peasant tongue” that eluded the angels so Fallen servants could speak frankly amongst themselves in front of their masters. But learning it fluently was a must for any demon who wanted to pass in the world of Man. “Masha,” he said. “Your grandmother?” Anzhela nodded. “I was sorry to hear that she’d…”
“Died,” said Anzhela. “It’s okay, you can say it.” She glanced off through the trees at the gold line of the sunrise spilling over the glittering Neva and bleeding soft color into the steel of the sky. “Someone poisoned her. When I get back home, I’m going to track them down and—” She paused and looked back at the boys, huddled together and watching her expectantly. “I’m going to make them wish they hadn’t,” she finished. Her eyes darkened. “The whole lot of them.”
Dvenadtsataya
Things had gotten much bloodier than he’d planned. The vory had been aware of his presence the moment he’d crossed the threshold after dispensing with the lock. He’d triggered some kind of silent alarm. Belphagor held his hostage in front of him with the knife to his throat. He hadn’t counted on the fact that his hostage was expendable.
“If it isn’t the Knyaz,” said Andropov, coming into the foyer, where two of his men stood with their guns trained on Belphagor.
Belphagor gave him a curt nod. “Yuri Yegorevich.” He prodded his hostage. “I believe you left something at my hotel.
“This one?” Andropov appeared to look him over. “You told him where to find me?” He adjusted his cuff with seeming disinterest.
“Sergei told him,” the thief wheedled. “I didn’t say a word.”
“Not one of mine,” said Andropov, and before Belphagor had even processed the words, one of the men beside the boss had fired a bullet into his hostage’s skull, right between the eyes. Belphagor nearly shit himself. His reassurance to Vasily that he was nearly impossible to shoot had been a bit of an exaggeration. His airspirit moves only worked if he had ample warning.
His grip faltered on his lifeless hostage, and the body dropped to the ground. The vor who’d shot took the knife from his hand, and the other grabbed him by the arm.
“I made you a perfectly reasonable offer,” said Belphagor, trying to maintain an illusion of calm. “More than reasonable. Do you think you’d be able to find someone willing to pay even half what I can? Someone willing to take them off your hands completely? Or do you plan to set up business here as a brothel for pedophiles?”
Andropov backhanded him with a half-curled fist, the ring on his middle finger making a literal impression as it tore through Belphagor’s cheek. It was an effort to stand his ground.
“You come into my territory and steal from me. Then you come into my home and insult me in front of my family. I’ve never seen you before. I’ve never heard of any ‘Knyaz’.” He yanked on the front of Belphagor’s T-shirt where the tip of his cross tattoo showed above the collar and tore the fabric, revealing more of the mark. “And you blaspheme against my family with stolen ink. King of thieves.” He spat on the floor. “What are you? OMON? KGB? Spetsnaz? You’re obviously not what you say.”
“Or perhaps I’m Upavshiye.”
Andropov’s eyes narrowed. “Fallen? You mean downcast?”
Belphagor lunged at him out of reflex, and the man who held him shoved him back against a table lining the wall and shattered the mirror above it with the back of his head. “Say that again,” he snarled, ignoring the pain, “and you’ll find out how I earned my mark. I’ll make a fucking necktie out of your tongue.”
Andropov shrugged but took an unconscious step back. “You’re the one who used the term ‘fallen’.”
“Zloy dukh-iskusitel, then. Does that ring a bell?”
“You’re a demon.” The vor boss flicked his hand in the air dismissively and turned to walk away. “Get rid of this trash.”
“So you’ve noticed nothing odd about those children,” said Belphagor. Andropov paused. “No flickering fields of energy on their skin. No unusual abilities.” When the vor turned to look at him, he let his radiance prickle at the surface, sending up fleeting black sparks that were little more than static charge, but the man holding him let go and jumped back nonetheless. “I suppose you’re used to getting them when they’re a bit older and better trained to hide it. But the men you deal with…they’re not exactly men, now, are they.”
Andropov folded his arms, his expression grim and his skin a bit gray. “They said they were angels.”
Belphagor couldn’t help the loud guffaw that escaped him. “Well, that’s rich. You’ve been laboring under the assumption that you’ve been pimping out underage angelic whores.” He took a step toward the vor, and no one stopped him, though both guns were still trained on him, and if he didn’t time his moves just right, he’d prove how eminently shootable he actually was. “Let me explain something to you. Angels are not celestial spirits of purity and grace created by your Bog to give Him eternal glory in paradise. They’re nothing more than pureblood demons. And while I suppose whoever’s smuggling these unfortunate peasants out of Heaven may have kidnapped a pureblood or two here and there, by and large, your ‘product’ has been street kids from the demon ghetto, not a steady shipment of the ultimate in virginity for you to enslave so some sick fuck can get off on raping an angel.”
Andropov swiftly crossed himself in the Orthodox fashion and punched Belphagor in the face. Perhaps he’d gone a little too far by invoking the man’s faith. And then pissing on it. He had to remember that however influential the Malakim had been in perverting the spiritual beliefs of Men in their efforts to promote the burgeoning House of Arkhangel’sk, his world had nothing to do with the heaven Men believed in. On the other hand, how pious could a man be who thought he was selling the angels of his own faith into sexual slavery?
As he stumbled back from the blow, another pair of thugs came down the broad, pageant steps behind Andropov, dragging a half-conscious Nephil between them. Dammit. Ivan. He’d been with Vasily.
“Found this one sneaking around upstairs,” said one of them. “The inventory’s missing.”
Andropov turned back to Belphagor. “You son of a bitch.”
Belphagor shrugged. “I offered you ample compensation. You should have taken the deal.”
Andropov swung at him again, and Belphagor held his breath, dematerializing for an instant, but the vor didn’t stumble or pull his hand back—almost as if he’d dealt with an airspirit before—and
as Belphagor breathed out, the meaty fist closed around his throat. Andropov jammed his thumb hard against Belphagor’s jugular and held tight until Belphagor nearly blacked out.
He stumbled to his knees when Andropov released him, his gunmen moving in from both sides. Belphagor knelt, staring up at Andropov, trying to catch his breath, with the cold muzzles of two Glocks shoved against his temples and blood dripping over his lip, waiting to see which side of his head would explode first. Neither, it seemed. Andropov drew his own gun and pressed it to Belphagor’s forehead. His henchmen stepped away.
“Whatever cheap magic trick you used to impress me and my men with your mesmerism and tales of demons, you’re nothing but a con artist and a two-bit hustler. And now you’re a dead one.”
A commotion from the servants’ stairs to the right of the foyer stayed his execution for the moment. Izabella incapacitated the two men holding Ivan with a dizzying move that seemed to involve ramming their heads together followed by a one-two punch to the nads, while Soren vaulted over them and landed with a somersault, firing his gun, taking out the two armed guards with a single bullet each.
“Those are the Spetsnaz,” said Belphagor.
Andropov hauled him to his feet and swung Belphagor in front of him, his gun under Belphagor’s jaw. “I will fucking kill him so many times,” he snarled, “you won’t know which pieces of him to pick up and bury.”
Before they could respond, a loud crack sounded from behind, and a blaze of firespirit wings rushed through the broken door and knocked Andropov away from him. He could feel the heat as Vasily tumbled with the vor over the tile, and the sweet campfire smell filled his lungs, and then a loud pop stilled the roiling forms and Belphagor let out a bellow of disbelief as Andropov scrambled to his feet and Vasily lay bleeding profusely from the center of his chest.
With a burst of strength fueled by grief and rage, Belphagor charged the vor and slammed him twice in the kidney before Andropov managed to swing about with his gun raised. Soren dispassionately shot him in the throat.
Belphagor flung the dying man away from him and dropped to his knees beside Vasily, who was still conscious. “Damn you, Vasya.” He lifted Vasily’s head into his lap. “Don’t you dare die.”
“Not sure I—have a choice,” Vasily gasped. He started to cough, choking on his own blood, and Belphagor raised him to a half-sitting position with his hands under his arms. The boy was damned heavy. His boy. What the hell was he going to do without his boy?
“I’m sorry,” he murmured, rocking slightly with Vasily in his arms. “I fucked up everything.”
Vasily shook his head and tried to speak, but another fit of wet coughing gripped him. He put his hand to his chest, and his eyes widened with fear as he felt the blood soaking his shirt, and then a burst of brilliant vermillion fire flowed from his palm and spread until it seemed to engulf him. Belphagor cried out as the heat seared against him, but he couldn’t let go. He wouldn’t let go. If this was how a firespirit died, he’d die with him.
But in the center of the pool of red at Vasily’s chest, as if the blood had turned to liquid fire, something dripped from the bullet wound that looked like molten metal bleeding out of him. Vasily took a tremendous, heaving breath, and his fire dissipated as he exhaled, the jagged hole in his chest visible through the torn fabric cauterizing itself. Vasily sat up and touched his fingers to what was surely the bullet that had been inside him, melted onto his shirt.
“Yebat,” he growled. “That fucking hurt.”
Belphagor leapt to his feet, hauling Vasily up with him, a rush of conflicting emotion spurting through his veins like a shot of adrenaline. He stared up into Vasily’s sweet hazel eyes and slapped him hard.
“What the fuck?” Vasily’s hand flew to his cheek, but before he could protest any further, Belphagor swung him about and steered him into a nearby parlor and slammed the door, shoving Vasily back against it.
“Not a word!” he snapped as Vasily’s mouth opened. The red bloom on the ruddy cheek looked absurdly like a flower. “You’re going to fucking listen to me. You’re not my boy. I get it. I totally fucked everything beyond belief, and I have no one to blame but myself. But when I say I want you to stay out of something, you will damned well stay out of it, or I’ll put a hole in you myself.”
Vasily’s chest rose and fell rapidly, his breath steaming out of him, his eyes blazing, and both cheeks now red with anger, but it was several seconds before he finally spoke. “Just what are you going to put a hole in me with?” he sneered.
“Bozhe moi, sladostnyi malchik, don’t tempt me.” Belphagor had never wanted him more, an intense, painful desire nearly choking him with the need to affirm that Vasily was alive by fucking the devil out of him. He closed his fist around Vasily’s hair, wanting to turn him about and take him right here against the door. And then strap him with his own belt until he was weeping and begging to be taken again.
He yanked on the fistful, persuading Vasily firmly downward. Vasily resisted. Belphagor jerked harder and hooked one boot around the back of his leg, pushing him off balance with his knee and toppling him into the supplicant’s position despite himself.
“Fuck you, Belphagor,” Vasily growled up at him. “I’m not—”
He bent and silenced him with a kiss, aching at the taste of him, at the rightness of the heat of the sweet firespirit tongue against his own. Vasily melted under his persuasion, whimpering into him, fully yielding, until Belphagor at last tore himself away. “I know,” he said quietly as Vasily blinked up at him with fire dancing in his eyes. “You’re not my boy.”
He tugged him to his feet and opened the door.
“You’re not my boy.” The words were a terrible incantation repeated in his head to mock the kiss that had nearly undone him. He was the one who’d created those words, given them life. He was the one who’d pushed Belphagor away. But to hear it on Belphagor’s tongue was more terrible than he could have imagined.
Heading toward the trees in the park where Anzhela waited with her Lost Boys, he glanced down at his ruined shirt, still a bit dazed at how close he’d come to dying, and at how his own radiance had reversed it. He’d tried it on Ivan—who’d been shot in the arm back at the hotel room, had taken another bullet in the leg and was vomiting from the concussion he’d gotten trying to get to Belphagor at Vasily’s urging—but nothing had happened. Maybe it only worked on mortal wounds, which was a sobering thought.
They arrived at the park, and Vasily breathed a sigh of relief that Anzhela and the boys were still here. He’d wrestled with his conscience about leaving them, but Belphagor had been inside too long, and Vasily had known he was in trouble.
Soren and Izabella stopped under the trees with Ivan between them looking ill. “So where to now?” asked Soren.
Belphagor combed his fingers through his hair. “I’m afraid I didn’t think that far. We obviously can’t go back to the hotel. There wouldn’t be room for all of them there, anyway.” He glanced at Soren. “Think we could get all of them into the limo?”
Soren scanned the group. “Maybe. Without us.”
“Ivan’s injured.”
“I’ll mend,” Ivan managed.
“We have people,” Izabella added mysteriously. “Don’t worry about us. You take the car.”
Belphagor nodded and held out his hand, giving each of theirs an odd sort of ritual clasp. “I’ll let Dmitri know what a great help you were to us. Vasya.” It was the first time he’d addressed him since the kiss, and Vasily jumped. “You wait here with the kids while I get the car.”
It was such an odd sentence that Vasily almost laughed, imagining himself and Belphagor as parents. The laughter died in his throat at the unexpected sense of longing this stirred in him. What if they could have what other people had? What if they could be together, a family, with children of their own? The idea was absurd, and Vasily pushed it away. Demons like them didn’t have families and didn’t father children. And they weren’t together.
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nbsp; He herded the boys inside the long sedan when Belphagor pulled up beside the park, Anzhela climbing in first to pull the youngest of the boys, who couldn’t be more than ten or eleven, onto her lap. They hadn’t seemed that young to him when he’d been glamoured. He’d been the approximation of his fifteen-year-old self, most of the boys just a year or two younger, and even this youngest had seemed somehow something of a contemporary. But he was a child. If he’d been born an angel, he’d still have a nurse—some peasant woman assigned to watch over him and see that he learned his letters and ate his vegetables. He’d still be innocent.
Fuck the whole damned universe.
Vasily climbed into the front seat beside Belphagor after the last of the boys had packed himself in, seated on the floor. He glanced over his shoulder at Anzhela leaning against the darkened window while Belphagor pulled out into the early morning St. Petersburg traffic, her chin on the boy’s head. If he and Belphagor were the fathers, she was the mother of the Lost Boys in this imaginary family. He’d never had a mother, though there was a picture in his head of a strawberry-golden-haired angel bending over him with a tender kiss when he thought of one. It was an embarrassing fantasy, as foolish as the idea of Belphagor and himself being parents.
A green suburban stretch of highway lay before them once Belphagor had wound his way through the city.
Vasily turned his head toward him. “Where are we going?”
Belphagor’s jaw was set in a determined line. “To Dmitri’s. Where I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Are you out of your goddamned mind, Belphagor?” If Dmitri had been a firespirit, Belphagor would have been lashed by the heat of his tongue. Vasily supposed someone ought to be able to, since it looked like he might never have the privilege again. “Where am I supposed to put them all?”