King of Thieves: Demons of Elysium, Book 2

by Jane Kindred

  “I’ll buy him new ones.”

  “But it might interest you to know that nothing else seems to have happened between Vasily and Silk since the shower. Vasily’s sleeping on the couch.” That did ease his mind a bit. “Anyway, I need to run if I’m going to get you that backup tonight. Just…stop being a baby.”

  Odinnadtsataya

  Something was up. Vasily had only caught snatches of what Dmitri was saying on the phone to Belphagor, but it was clear by that evening that something was going down in the city, and Vasily wasn’t going to be left out of it like some child. He knew where Belphagor was staying, and he knew someone was meeting him there at midnight for backup. It didn’t seem to be anything Dmitri was directly involved in, however. By eleven o’clock, he and Lev had gone to bed, and Silk had been asleep for hours, still recovering.

  Vasily slipped out quietly into the soft glowing light of the White Nights with a stack of ruble bills in his pocket. It was too late to take the train, but he caught an unofficial cab and gave the man a sizeable chunk of his stash to drive him to the hotel. He had no idea how much the bills were worth, and he suspected the driver was well aware of his naivety and had taken him for a ride in more ways than one, but he didn’t much care about the value of Belphagor’s money.

  Once he’d determined where it was, he had the driver drop him off a few blocks from the Oktiabrskaya and walked the rest of the way, looking over his shoulder—for what, exactly, he wasn’t sure. The sun was just hugging the horizon when he arrived.

  A trio of dark-clad men—correction, one was a woman, but each had the build of a prizefighter—passed him, heading into the lobby. These were either the backup or the ones Belphagor needed backup against. They were dressed as if they were in the middle of some military training exercise, except their black combat uniforms had no insignia, and one had an object tucked into the back of his waistband that looked suspiciously like a gun. Vasily had seen one in a movie the last time he was here, and it had unnerved him how easily a Man could kill with one. He couldn’t take a chance that the gun was intended for Belphagor.

  He followed them in but was swiftly waylaid by the hotel’s doorman with a hand to his chest. “What’s your business here?”

  Vasily glanced down at the hand and back up at the doorman’s face. “I’m with them,” he growled, nodding toward the trio. The man seemed to blanch just a bit at the sound of his voice, which he couldn’t help but take a little pleasure in. He still wasn’t used to being imposing.

  Despite his intimidation, the doorman stood his ground. “If you aren’t a guest, you sign in at the desk and wait for your party.”

  “But they didn’t sign in.”

  “If you insist on being belligerent, I’m going to have to call the authorities.”

  Vasily wasn’t sure who the authorities were in the world of Man, but if they were anything like the ones in Heaven, he had no desire to see them called. He glared and turned back around.

  As he stepped down from the entrance, a long black sedan pulled up to the side of the road, and an even more questionable-looking group climbed out while the driver kept the engine running. This was definitely bad news. Two of them went in the front—like the military types, virtually ignored by the doorman, Vasily noticed bitterly—but two others headed around the side of the building. He followed this pair at a safe distance, hands in his pockets and head down as if he had no interest in them.

  Behind the hotel, they climbed a metal ladder mounted on the brick of the building, and Vasily watched from the shadows of the alleyway to see which window they entered. When they disappeared inside, he scurried up the flimsy ladder and climbed in through the same open window. There was no sign of them once inside the darkened hallway, but a sudden loud pop that could only be gunfire came from the other end, followed by a swift barrage of return fire.

  Vasily barreled down the hall with radiance roiling over his skin and burst into the room the sounds were coming from. He struck someone with the door and bowled him over only to realize he had Belphagor pinned beneath him as he hit the floor. Vasily scrambled off and looked up to see the dark-clad group had the others subdued at gunpoint. One of the gunmen was bleeding from his upper arm, and one of the thugs had been grazed above the ear, holding a handkerchief to his head. Another lay moaning on the ground clutching his leg, while the remaining two stood warily behind him. Their weapons had been kicked across the room and all four of the thugs looked to have had the crap kicked out of them in the process, despite the fact that it had only taken seconds.

  Behind him, Belphagor grabbed Vasily by the arm and whirled him about. “Vasya, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Making sure you don’t get killed.”

  “I’m an airspirit.” Belphagor shook his head wryly. “It’s actually kind of difficult to shoot me. But you need to get out of here.”

  Vasily folded his arms. “I’m not going anywhere. These are the bastards who had Silk, aren’t they?”

  “They work for the same organization, yes. And they’re going to take us to where they’re keeping the abducted children. I’ve got this covered.”

  “Idi v zhopu,” countered the thug holding the handkerchief to his head wound.

  Belphagor pinned him with a black gaze and then nodded at one of the dark-clad men. “He needs some more persuasion, Ivan.”

  Ivan, apparently, stepped forward with a smooth, efficient motion and landed his fist in the thug’s gut, doubling him over with a groan of surprise, his hand dropping from his head to clutch his stomach.

  “We don’t need all of them,” said Belphagor. The armed man raised his gun, pointed at the thug with the arm wound, and Vasily tensed, but Belphagor put out his hand. “No need to kill them, Soren. We just need to restrain them.” He looked around the room, and Vasily was sure he was using his sadist’s eye to see what could improvise as rope. Crossing to the television set, he yanked the electrical cord from the wall and pulled a knife from his pocket to sever the cord from the set before he went to work tying up the moaning man on the floor. The way he jerked the knots tight behind the thug’s back made Vasily miss him.

  Before Belphagor tore the lamp plug from the wall to utilize the only other electric cord in the room, the female military-type held up a pair of metal cuffs. “Will these do?”

  Belphagor grinned. “I think I can make do with those, yes. Thanks, Izabella.” He fixed a cuff onto the right hand of one of the thugs and dragged him over to the washroom, where he shoved him to his knees and threaded the chain of the cuffs behind a thick pipe feeding into the toilet. “Bring the other one.” He nodded to Izabella, who pushed the thug roughly.

  “Move it,” she snapped.

  “This will be the last thing you ever do,” the thug promised as Belphagor cuffed him—right-handed as well, so he faced the wall beside the toilet, both men on their knees. In other circumstances, the scene would have been incredibly arousing, and Vasily even found himself having irrationally jealous thoughts.

  “You think you can just stroll into Malenkiy Yusupovskiy and steal from Yuri Yegorevich? He’ll cut you into so many pieces, they’ll never be able to find them all at the bottom of the Neva.”

  “Maybe I should cut some pieces off of you to show I mean business.” Belphagor raised the knife toward him, and the man cringed. For good measure, he stuffed flannels from beside the sink into each of the thugs’ mouths and used wet, wound-up hand towels to tie them in place. Vasily was decidedly uncomfortable at this point. He hoped no one noticed his state of inappropriate arousal, but when Belphagor stepped out of the washroom, his gaze lowered slowly and deliberately to Vasily’s crotch before returning to his face, his expression insufferably smug.

  “Much as I’d love to stay and entertain you further, Vasya, we have business to take care of. And you need to get back to Silk.” There was a sudden change in his tone when he added the last sentence. So he was jealous. Fuck him.

  “Silk is perfectly safe where he is,” sai
d Vasily. “If you’re liberating the rest of the boys, I’m going with you.”

  “The hell you are. This is dangerous.”

  “He looks more than capable to me,” said Izabella. “We can use all the able bodies we can get.”

  Tight-lipped and stewing over being overruled, Belphagor led them down the back stairs after Vasily warned him about the gangsters’ car waiting in front of the hotel. Soren snuck around front to incapacitate the driver of the sedan and then circled the hotel to pick them up. In the seat facing Vasily between Belphagor and Ivan, their hostage was compliant but sullen. His comrade had already given away the location of their operations, so he could do little more than go along for the ride.

  A fitting base of operations for a wealthy vor, Little Yusupov Palace faced the street, no private drive or courtyard protecting it from the “commoners” passing by. On one side, a canal bordered it, with a park against the other. Belphagor insisted on taking their hostage alone to the front entrance, while Soren and Izabella “borrowed” a boat to find an opening on the canal side, and Ivan and Vasily came at the palace from the park. At least Belphagor had taken a gun with him. Airspirit or not, if he didn’t move fast enough, a bullet would kill him as dead as anyone else.

  Vasily and Ivan scouted the windows on the park side from within the trees, and Ivan nodded toward the front of the building. “Second story window’s open. Gets pretty hot in these fancy buildings, same as anywhere else. Tsars didn’t plan for electric air-conditioning.” Ivan studied Vasily for a moment. “You a good climber?”

  Vasily shrugged. “Can’t say I’ve ever really tried to climb anything.”

  Ivan sighed. “And I’m guessing your wings aren’t subtle, judging by the flash of pink we saw when you broke the door down.”

  A similar color warmed his skin that wasn’t from radiance. “Not so much. And it’s not pink,” he muttered. “It’s ruby.”

  “Well, try to keep up.” Ivan started forward, moving with a smooth, muscular grace as he darted from the trees to the shadows of the building under the eaves, his dark curly hair as indistinct in the predawn light as his clothing. “You armed?” he asked in the same clipped tone as Vasily reached the wall and flattened himself against it.

  “I was born armed,” Vasily growled, and let his palms glow with firespirit heat.

  “Won’t do you any good from a distance, but the plan is to keep out of sight of anyone we come across until we’re close and put them out of commission before they can defend themselves or sound the alarm. Clear?”

  Vasily gave him a curt nod. He wasn’t stupid. His jaw dropped as Ivan shimmied up the wall like he had suction cups for hands and feet and disappeared into the open window. Vasily grabbed hold of the drainpipe on the front corner of the building and hauled himself up, scrabbling for hand- and footholds. He managed to make the first-story window and clung to the ledge to catch his breath, his knuckles and fingers already scraped raw.

  “Fuck this,” he muttered, flung out his wings and leapt to the second story. The sky was already flush with dawn anyway. It wasn’t as if he were strafing fire across a black sky.

  Ivan yanked him inside, forcing him to retract his wings swiftly as he tumbled onto the floor. “What the hell are you doing?” he hissed, dragging Vasily to the wall beside the doorway just as the sound of running footsteps heralded the appearance of the gangster Vasily had alerted with his unwise choice.

  Before the startled man had time to react, Ivan punched him in the throat, grabbed him by the hair and bashed his head against the doorframe. Vasily winced as Ivan kicked the man in the skull for good measure when he’d slumped to the ground. Ivan was out the door in a flash, and Vasily hurried after him. Wherever Dmitri had gotten this “backup” for Belphagor, he sure seemed to know what he was doing.

  At the end of the hallway, a pair of thugs came around the corner. Ivan charged the first, who’d drawn his gun, and while he disarmed him—and nearly disarmed him—Vasily used his brute strength to take down the other and used a move he’d learned from Belphagor to wrap his arm around the man’s throat and cut off his blood flow to the brain with pressure to the carotid artery, rendering him unconscious.

  At a noise from the room beside them, Ivan threw open the door, his body in a fighting stance, and then stopped abruptly with a look of surprise.

  “I am damned serious,” a woman inside the room shouted. “You’ll sell them over my corpse.” The voice had a distinctly Raqian flavor.

  “I’m not selling anyone,” said Ivan, and then jumped back with an exclamation, totally out of character with what Vasily had seen so far.

  Vasily dropped the thug he’d forgotten to let go of and came forward. Inside the room, Anzhela stood aiming a Kalashnikov at Ivan’s chest.

  She turned it swiftly toward Vasily and then lowered it, her eyes wide. “Vasily? Is that you?”

  “I didn’t think you knew my name.”

  “Oh for Heaven’s sake. Every girl at The Cat knows your name.”

  He blushed to his roots, realizing she’d been among the spectators when a pair of demonesses had initiated him into the pleasures of…demonesses.

  “Besides, we met, remember? When I first fell?”

  “Of course I—” Vasily grunted in surprise at Ivan’s hand between his shoulder blades shoving him into the room.

  “Talk inside.” Ivan stepped in and closed the door. “And do it quietly.”

  Vasily lowered his voice. “Of course I remember. I just didn’t think I was that memorable.” Behind him, Ivan snorted, and Vasily turned to glare at him. Not that he could possibly know why Vasily had really made an impression.

  It wasn’t until he turned his attention back to Anzhela that he took in the rest of the room behind her. The large space had the look of a ballroom, and the floor was covered with scattered mattresses. All the boys from the Fletchery were here.

  Anzhela followed his gaze. “We found ourselves here two days ago. They’d given us something that made us sleep on the journey from Raqia. When I came to, I heard the humans talking about how they were going to ‘unload’ us. I pretended to be asleep until one of them came close enough, and then I hit him with an iron doorstop and took his weapon, and the others backed off.”

  Vasily regarded her with new respect. “And you’ve been defending the rest ever since?”

  “They’ve only come back a few times. I guess the ‘sale’ isn’t final. There are bars on the windows and all the doors are locked, so it’s not like they’re worried about us getting out, but I think they’re a bit afraid of us. I showed everyone how to use radiance.”

  “I didn’t even know you knew about radiance.”

  “Masha told me.”

  Vasily shook his head, imagining the room full of young demons all spreading their wings. It was really kind of adorable—and he’d been in need of adorable ever since this whole business started.

  “This is all very heartwarming,” said Ivan. “But I think the idea is to get them out of here.”

  “But Belphagor will be looking for them.” If he hadn’t been caught. “How do we get word to him that we’ve found them?”

  “I think it’s more important to get them out than to worry about whether he knows they’re here, don’t you?” Ivan sighed at Vasily’s glare. “Okay, you get them out, and I’ll find Belphagor.”

  “Get them out how?”

  “The same way we came in.”

  Vasily frowned. “You want a bunch of kids to climb out a second-story window and hang on to nothing? They’re not spiders.”

  “No, they’re Fallen. They have wings. If they slip, they can catch themselves.”

  The young demons looked rather excited at the prospect. Vasily could just imagine a dozen winged youths soaring across the dawn sky. That would be subtle. Displaying radiance to non-celestials wasn’t just a bad idea; a blatant display would draw the attention of Seraphim, who had arrangements with terrestrial authorities for dealing with the Fallen. Offending
demons might never see Heaven again.

  “It’s up to you,” said Ivan. “Take your chances with going out the window, or take them straight down the stairs where the odds of getting out of here without bloodshed will be significantly diminished. But make up your mind fast. I hear movement in the hall.”

  “We’ll go out the window,” said Anzhela. “Come on, everyone. Let’s move it.”

  Ivan opened the door, swinging it sharply outward to slam it into the thug who’d gotten to his feet. The one Vasily had rendered unconscious was disoriented still, trying to pull himself up against the wall.

  Before Vasily could stop her, Anzhela stepped out and pointed her assault rifle at the man. “Stay where you are,” she warned. “Or I’ll put a hole in your skull.” Vasily gaped at her. She’d seemed like such a quiet, even timid thing. Anzhela shrugged, noticing his surprise. “Masha trained me to be ready for whatever a situation calls for.” She motioned with the gun toward the vicinity of the room where Vasily and Ivan had entered the building. “Get them out of here.”

  “You’re coming too,” he insisted.

  Ivan pulled a handgun from his pocket. “Go on. I’ve got these two covered.”

  Vasily waved the young demons ahead of him down the hall, and then remembered the gangster Ivan had beaten when they’d first climbed in. He hurried past them to the door and looked in to find the man unconscious on the floor. Possibly dead. Dmitri’s backup didn’t mess around.

  “Through here.” He directed the demons into the room, making sure Anzhela joined them, and closed the door. “We’re two stories up,” he reminded them. “Use the brackets on the drainpipe to climb down. Flying is a last resort.” He might as well have said, Flaunt ’em if you’ve got ’em, as every last demon climbed through the window and took to the air. “Dammit, we have to get them down,” he grumbled to Anzhela. “They’ll be seen.”

  Anzhela nodded, grim and determined, and with the Kalashnikov held tightly to her side, she leapt also, wispy, translucent watery wings stretched out, circling the others with a practiced spin he couldn’t imagine how she’d managed without experience. His own first flight had been a bit wild. She pointed a wing toward the trees and headed down, and like a little flock of ducklings behind her, the demon boys banked and followed.