“You know me,” Rod replied “Go big or go home.”
“Hey, Nic… can we turn the aircon on?” Vyacheslav was still fanning himself, flushed red in the face. “It’s hot as hell in here.”
Nicolai looked at him, puzzled. “It is on.”
“What’s the matter, Slava?” Semyon’s moustache bristled with mirth. “You’re hardly halfway done on that bottle, and you’re hot already?”
“Hey, I got started at lunchtime.” Slava laughed uncomfortably, and got to his feet. He was flushed in the face and sweating profusely, sweat staining his collar. “Maybe my blood’s finally turned into vodka.”
“The only solution to that is more drink, my good friend.” Rod poured him another glass from the nearly-empty bottle on the table, and the rest of us followed suit. Diluted, I could tolerate the liquor for a single toast. “Fight fire with fire! Down the hatch!”
Slava caught up the glass, still standing, and drained it before slamming it back down. He shook his head with a short laugh, then sagged forward against the edge of the table.
“Woah, there. That’s the end of the night for you.” Vassily laughed as the other man nearly fell against his knees.
“Gotta go take a piss,” Slava mumbled. He staggered out around the end of the table, nearly colliding with Lev, who leaned back with a polite grimace. A smell strung my nostrils, weird and waxy, and the skin on the back of my neck crawled with a half-formed flash of insight quickly followed by horror.
“Slava! Wait!” I got up, nearly shoving Vassily aside. “Something’s fighting against the amulet–”
I’d barely got out from around him when Slava reeled on his feet, collapsed against the edge of the bar, and burst into flame.
Chapter 9
Vyacheslav did not explode so much as simply ignite. The fire roiled out from deep inside him while he slumped against the edge of the bar, stupefied. As I ran to him, he turned to face me. His mouth opened as if to speak in bewilderment. He vomited flame instead, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by the heat and noise as the bartender, dancer and patrons screamed and shouted around us.
“Slava! What the fucking… SHIT!’ Rodion barreled toward us.
“Get the fire extinguisher!” Vassily’s voice pierced the cacophony.
Everyone was so loud that I couldn’t concentrate enough to try and fight what was happening, but even I had been able to work the Art, there was no helping him now. Eerily soundless, Slava folded in on himself, his body spurting gouts of yellow flame. His face contorted in agony as he first went to his knees, then his face, writhing and popping. The fire was contained to his torso, but it was so hot that the linoleum underneath him liquefied.
It was Nic who came up with the extinguisher, dousing Slava and the bar - also on fire - in a cloud of white foam. The bartender finally got her wits about her and got her own smaller extinguisher from behind the counter.
“What the fuck!?” Petro was hysterical, pacing around with his hands in his hair. “Alexi, why the fuck… what the FUCK, man?”
As we did our parts to fight the fire, Slava finally started screaming: five, maybe six seconds of helpless, raw, bloodcurdling agony. I backpedaled from the writhing pyre, closing my eyes and clamping my will into place as I felt out for the link to my tracer ward. I forced myself to filter the cacophony of the room, focusing on the colors and textures instead of the noise. It all throbbed into a strange background symphony against the threads of magic, burning white and taut in my imagination. I hooked into the flow of magic fueling his immolation, grasped onto the energy I’d woven into his ward, and hauled on it like an angler.
There was a moment of intense resistance, a deep black void of nothingness that fought back against me like a marlin on the line. My will won out, and I was suddenly swamped by the sensation of furious light and heat, the smell of molten metal, burned rubber, and dust. I heard something grinding, a deafening churning, mashing sound, and saw lines of cars tumbled against towering black mountains of debris, all of which disappeared in flame as a maw - part fire, part beast - roared at me and tore the link apart.
I stumbled back with a shout, flailing for something to ground me. My hands found the edge of the dance stage; I righted myself there, panting and enervated, sweat pouring down my chest. When I finally opened my eyes, I saw everyone milling around a smoldering pile of ash and embers. The only things left of Slava were his hands and feet, the ends of the bones charred black. Bizarrely, his shoes were intact, barely burned. Where he had stood, there was only a small round circle of melted slag… and the amulet I had made him.
Mo and Petro crossed themselves. Rodion was paralyzed with shock. Vassily and Lev had disappeared. The only one who seemed unaffected was Nicolai, who looked down at the burn site, then up at the spread of soot across the ceiling with raised eyebrows and a sloped mouth. The only sign of stress was his cigarette, quivering on his lip.
“Jesus and Mary,” he said. “Haven’t ever seen that happen before.”
“What the fuck was THAT, Alexi?” Rodion turned on me. “What the fuck is this shit? Why didn’t you stop this?”
“The magic circumvented the protective ward in the talisman,” I said, quickly. “It’s like… it’s like someone stuck a pistol under his bullet proof vest and shot him. The armor was there, but-”
“You were supposed to stop this!” Rodion roared. “He’s fucking dead!”
“I tried.” I strode over to the amulet. The linoleum was soft under my shoes as I bent down to pick it up. It was warm, but the bone and the magic had held up. “Look. You can see it survived.”
“Then why the fuck didn’t it work!?”
I sighed. “He predicted our move. Fighting another spook from a distance is like playing chess with a blindfold on.”
“Fuck!” Rodion paced like a tiger, and then roared and smashed his fist on the table. “That fucking piece of shit Maslak!”
“I have a trace on the source of the spell’s energy,” I said. I was already shaky, burned out from the rough disconnection. “It came from a junkyard, an auto wrecking site.”
“There’s a million of those!”
Thank you, Captain Obvious. “I can find it. And I’m going alone… if this spook can light people with their own body fat, I don’t want any blanks near the place. Let me handle the spook; get someone else for Maslak.”
“Hey! Boss!” Vassily called from the security entry across the room. “Lev’s got some clown on the phone that wants to speak to you.”
“All of you, come with me,” Rodion snapped. He stalked for the door. “Except you, Petro. Get your big boy pants on and call Vanya. We need a cleanup team. Tell him to… bring an urn or something.”
Nicolai and I followed Rodion to his office, tongues thick and still with tension. Lev was at Rodion’s desk, his face a stiff mask. He looked exhausted, green around the gills. He held out the receiver; Rodion snatched it from him, and took the seat as Lev stood up and moved aside. I tuned into the room, careful not to screw up the line, and felt – and smelled – the same weird, faint odor I’d smelled before. Burned wax or plastic. I drew a cross over myself, like the others had done before, but my cross was not an Orthodox crucifix. I used the Kabbalic Cross, symbolically touching and warding through multiple layers of reality.
Rodion banged the speaker button, broadcasting to the room. “Jacob, you sniveling piece of shit. The fuck do you think you’re playing with?”
The speaker squealed with a sound that went straight to my teeth, and then resolved into a whickering roar of white noise.
“My client demands you withdraw immediately,” a voice rasped out in English. Male, female, it was hard to tell. “To avoid a repeat of what occurred today.”
Vassily murmured aside to Lev and Semyon, translating for them. Their English was haphazard, at best.
“Your ‘client’ and you can hole up in a cell together and fuck each other inside out, big man,” Rodion said. “So check your attitude before we knock you an
d your whole fucking family.”
“Call it off, Brukov, or the next one burns tomorrow.” The phone disconnected with a sharp ‘clack’.
“Who the hell does this guy think he is?” Vassily said.
“Someone who can cause people to spontaneously combust from a remote location,” I replied grimly. “They’re arrogant, but I can probably find them or the place the spell originated from.”
Nicolai’s face rippled with irritation. “Can you find him or not?”
They wanted black and white, but there was no such thing in life or in magic. It was always like this with the Organizatsiya. “I’m fairly sure it was Kozlowski and Sons. I won’t know until I visit the site.”
“Do it,” Rodion flicked toward the door with a dismissive wave, scowling. “Twenty-one grand for this asshole.”
I inclined my head. “Consider it done.”
“Hey boss,” Vassily said. “I didn’t really get a chance before, be we were outside, but we also saw something yesterday. Your man was hanging around Bruno Accorso, one of the Manelli Caporegimes.”
“Are you sure?” Lev blinked, pushing his glasses up along his nose.
“Absolutely sure,” Vassily replied. “It was Bruno and two of his soldiers. Maslak looked pretty strung out about it, too.”
Rodion growled. He and Lev and Nicolai exchanged glances.
“I’m going to call the Pakhun for this one,” Rodion said. “Go do your thing. Take out the spook and we’ll get back to you about Maslak. We can still sell off those shares, can’t we?”
“Our half.” Vassily fidgeted with his zippo, fingers light and quick. “We’ll break just slightly under even if we do, adding up all the costs and the loan to Maslak, but we’ll lose his shares if they aren’t transferred to us. I could probably find someone to forge them over to us, but that’s iffy.”
“Right. Then we’re taking over the company and liquidating it.” Rodion thumped his fist on the table, and sat back. “Bring me that asshole’s hands, Alexi. Once we nab Maslak, I’m going to feed him pieces of his pet spook until he chokes.”
Chapter 10
The drive home from Sirens was tense. Vassily and I were silent, unable to converse while the memory of Slava – burning, screaming – loomed large in our memories. Back at home, my friend radiated displeasure as he watched me dress and arm before the drive out to Long Island. Shoulder holster, gun, knife, and other less standard tools. Salt and chalk, of course; a fire extinguisher, which I had rigged to a military-surplus bandoleer with Velcro and duct tape. I took the bone amulet, too. Scrubbed of Slava’s blood, I was able to quickly tune it back in to my own energy and apply my own to seal the enchantment. His death had charged it more quickly than the moon ever would have.
There was one other magical tool I considered taking with me. My Colt Commander, one of the first guns I’d ever bought, lay on my altar in a three-layer ring of steel wire, oxidized iron dust, and crushed hematite. Sigils were carved into the barrel on both sides, concentrated words of power which were currently still not doing what I wanted them to do.
A hitmage does a lot of wardbreaking. People inevitably seek magical protection as well as physical protection if they suspect their lives are threatened. Maslak, for one, but any man with enough money and common sense would hire a spook to ward him up when word got out that there was a contract out on his head. Wardbreakers like me were less common than you’d expect. The average spook could create and unmake their own wards, but not other people’s. My gift was to be able to find the cracks in the veneer, the tiny errors that were inevitably made by the human hand and mind in the creation of magical objects.
The problem with wardbreaking was how much time it took. Most times, I didn’t have fifteen minutes to screw around under someone’s car with planetary metals and colored chalk. My solution to that was to create a chargeable gun that could shoot bullets that could bust magical shields. In theory, it was an elegant and efficient solution to a common problem. In practice… the results had been less than satisfactory. I could engrave individual full-metal jackets, and they worked fairly well against simple wards – very simple wards – but once they were spent, they were gone. I didn’t want to just plug a small amount of energy into someone’s magical shield with a single shot. I wanted the Wardbreaker to work like a taser: the power came from the gun itself, with the round being an anchor for a powerful stream of energy. I was sure you could break wards by overcharging them, inflating the magic until it ripped itself apart, but I hadn’t been able to make it work.
I frowned down at it. No… for the moment, it wasn’t worth the risk or the extra weight. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be able to get it to work unless I used the gun more, but using the gun more meant taking it on jobs like this one. A misfire was the difference between coming home in the morning, or being delivered to the hospital under a sheet. I took a disposable piece instead, a neatly drilled and filed virgin S&W Model 645, and packed two full magazines: an eight round clip of FMJs marked up in painstakingly etched arcane designs, and eight plain.
“You’re an idiot, Alexi,” Vassily said. “At least let me drive. Did you see what this freak did to Slava?”
“That is exactly why you’re not coming with me.” I said. “I’m not too worried. You heard the guy’s voice. Over-dramatic, arrogant, and so very dire. This guy is probably some kind of stage wizard who’s good at magic and not much else. He won’t know what to do with someone who can kick his ass in person.”
“That’s a lot to assume from one phone call.”
I turned to look back at him. “Do I tell you how to do your job?”
Vassily huffed, leaning back on his hands. “I really don’t want to have to come and collect your ashes from K&S, okay? What am I gonna say to Mariya if something happens to you and I wasn't there?”
“You tell her I died doing what I love,” I replied, checking the bolt action on my pistol a second time.
“What? Perishing in a pyre of your own body fat while some pimply fat kid dances around your burning corpse?”
“Hunting my fellow man,” I said, holstering the pistol. “If you find my ashes, assume I had a mysterious, knowing smile on my face.”
“Oh,” Vassily said. “How very wizardly.”
“Absolutely sorcerous.” I zipped my vest up to the neck. “So, before I’m burned at the stake… Have you gotten something for Rodion yet?”
“I’ve got my eye on something,” Vassily replied. “I managed to find this painting called ‘The Road to Happiness’ by James Dean. Has his signature and everything. He’ll like that, won’t he?”
“I have no doubt of it.” It was better than anything I was going to be able to get him in such a short window of time, short of Maslak’s head. “The question is, are you going to be able to get it before tomorrow night?”
Vassily wagged a finger. “Hey now, Mister ‘I don’t tell you how to do your job’. Of course I can get it. That’s what credit cards are for.”
“They must be quite a hefty credit card if you can buy a… what? Ten-thousand-dollar painting, plus express air freight?”
Vassily sniffed, affronted. “Twenty-five, thank you very much. And they’re not MY credit cards.”
I sighed, turning to face him. “I can’t believe you’re doing this while you’re on remand. You know the Fed is watching you, don’t you?”
“The Fed can kiss my ass,” Vassily said. “With tongue.”
“You’re being reckless.”
“And you aren’t?”
“Perhaps a little. But we both know that this kind of work involves risk.”
“It sure does. So you’re gonna let me drive, right?”
“No!” I threw my hands up and stalked out of the bedroom. “You’re not equipped to fight another mage if it comes down to a confrontation. Stay here and just… don’t end up in jail again, you idiot.”
“Your mom’s an idiot!” He called after me in English. “And so is your face!”
H
ow gratifying to know my sworn-brother’s sense of humor hadn’t changed since he was twelve.
* * *
There weren’t quite a million scrapyards in the greater New York City-New Jersey metropolis, but there were still a lot of them. Some in Brooklyn, some in Long Island, some in Trenton or Newark. My instincts said East. Way east. The sounds I’d heard in the background, the glimpses of rusted metal towers and mountains of metal shred pointed me straight at one of the largest scrapyards in the state: Kozlowski and Sons.
K&S was a sprawling complex in Babylon, Long Island, a cancerous dustbowl the size of a baseball stadium. There was an abrupt transition from clapboard houses set among gardens and trees to this yellow-dirt industrial wasteland, with its broken roads, factories, and warehouses.
I parked off-road at the factory across the road from the main scrapyard, leaving my car behind a stand of chokecherry shrubs. The clouds were low and the roads still had patches of damp, but there was no rain tonight - only a wind that tickled the hairs on the back of my neck and forearms with ghostly, humid fingers.
The size of K&S was a problem. The complex spanned five acres across two sites. Number One had nearly everything: an office, warehouse, a weigh-in center for cars, then the shredder and the huge piles of scrap waiting to be churned through it into tiny shards of recyclable metal. Then there was the autowrecking site, a junkyard with all that entailed. Sheds and a processing line, a crusher, cranes, and tons and tons of buses and cars in various states of operation. The third site was at the railyard, where the shredded metal was loaded into train cars... cars which inevitably ended up at AEROMOR and other similar companies to be shipped overseas.
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