Zero Sum: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 3)

by James Osiris Baldwin

  Once everything was disposed of, I should have gone back to Strange Kitty. Instead, I found myself going west, drawn to Green-Wood Cemetery by a deep, powerful need for... something. I wasn’t sure. It drove me, even though I knew that Vassily’s grave was a stupid, isolated, predictable place that Sergei almost certainly had under watch. If there was one thing the last three months had taught me, it was that there were things more powerful than my common sense.

  Every member of the Lovenko family was buried or memorialized in the same family plot, a small fenced-off yard shaded by a large plum tree. Sergei's men had knocked the tree when they cracked open Vassily's grave and exhumed him, shaking overripe plums everywhere. Fruit had tumbled into the empty pit and onto the broken granite and turned earth to either side of it.

  Hail struck my bare head like pins as I exited the car and climbed the hillock with the Wardbreaker close at hand. I sat down heavily on the edge of Mariya’s tomb, staring at the rotten fruit stewing in the muddy water at the bottom of the hole and shuddering with tremors that had nothing to do with the cold. My face was stony, the skin stiff over a mask of muscle and bone.

  My whole life, I’d taken pride in how much I knew about life. Magic, philosophy, the Occult, my work. I’d treated knowledge like a currency, and sanctimoniously encouraged everyone around me to explore themselves, learn more about themselves, study the Mysteries, pursue wisdom... as if a sheltered Mafiya brat like me could ever know what ‘wisdom’ actually was. I knew that now, but I’d believed my own bullshit for nearly thirty years. When I looked back on Yegor’s death, there was little pleasure. There wasn’t anything except a vague sense of guilt, both for the death itself and for the fact I’d fed right back into the Organizatsiya’s feudal cycle of blood for blood, gold for gold. As ridiculous as it seemed, the blood and meat rain felt like a personal omen.

  I lifted my eyes to Vassily's headstone. Slavic graves normally have a picture of the deceased: A photo, a statue, or an etched image. For the Mafiya, laser-etched portraits are the norm for those who can afford it. When we were in our twenties and planning our future funerals, Vassily had been able to afford it. He had a proper rectangular slab headstone as tall as he’d been in life. He was a sharp-featured man, lean and hawkishly handsome. He’d been etched in his favorite trench coat, leaning on the hood of his car, and surrounded by images of other prized possessions. At my urging, the artist had included a couple of esoteric symbols in the design. Apples and wheat, for Osiris. The ankh pendant I’d given him for his 23rd birthday hung out of his collar on a chain. There was a notebook with the symbol of Saturn on the cover, the planet ruling his astrological chart. The artist had done an excellent job. Vassily's portrait smiled at me with mouth and eyes, but I couldn't smile back.

  Yegor had been right to remind me that I’d been a part of the trade in children. Just because I hadn’t known didn’t free me up. That was where the guilt was coming from—the reflective knowledge that, however unwittingly, I’d enabled these men with my own sweat and sinew, killing for them, protecting them while they kept kids in little cages, fucked them, cut them up. Taking hits on wiseguys, roughing up troublemakers around Brighton Beach, and policing our drug and financial rackets were one thing. What Sergei and the Deacon were doing was something else entirely.

  There was no way to know how long the Organizatsiya had been receiving children for the Templum Voctus Sol. It had to have started during Lev’s reign as Avtoritet, because Jana had been in the picture, and it had to have been approved by Sergei. I’d figured out that’s why he’d wanted me to go to Thailand with him. It was a Mecca for pedophiles, and the Organizatsiya could pick desperate kids off those beaches like gulls hunting baby turtles. My guess was that it had been in the works for at least five, six years... and that Vassily had been taken out of the game because the men who were involved knew Vassily would have done everything in his power to stop it.

  I frowned. In one way or the other, the Organizatsiya had taken all of them. I was the last man standing out of both my families, the family of my blood and the family who’d adopted me. How I’d survived was a mystery. I was plain, dull, and not particularly lucky, while Vassily had been none of those things. Maybe it was as Yuri had told me—we were machine parts, some more bare and essential than others, and I’d simply been a cog instead of a whistle.

  “Alexi...?”

  Whatever feelings had been pushing to come out vanished in the heartbeat it took me to leap to my feet, pistol in hand. It was Angkor. The sight of him here was like a slap of cold water to the face. I snapped around, heart thundering in my ears.

  Angkor was dressed more nicely than I'd ever seen him. A long black wool coat, gloves, suit and shirt, no tie. He was carrying a large black umbrella. I couldn’t read his expression.

  “Sneaking up on men like me is an excellent way to get shot, Angkor.” I scowled, slowly easing down. I holstered the gun, doing my best to mask shaking fingers, and fought the urge to turn around.

  He shrugged. “Sorry. I noticed you were gone from the Barracks. I was worried, so I thought I’d… you know.”

  “It’s fine.” It wasn’t, but some part of me was... flattered? that he’d decided to come and find me. Flattered, and paranoid. I dropped back onto the edge of Mariya's sarcophagus, waiting as Angkor swept as much water as he could off the stone and perched alongside me.

  “They really made a mess of this place, didn’t they?” he asked, with a sigh.

  I resumed my cold contemplation of the grave. "Shortly before he died, Vassily accused me of hating people. He was joking around, as usual. I denied it, but he was right.” I gestured to the hole. “I really do hate people, because they do things like this."

  "You’re not that bad. Everyone hates assholes." Angkor reached into his coat and pulled out a battered cigarette case. "You’re a better person than you think, you know."

  I snorted. "Really? What tells you that? My sparkling sense of humor, or maybe the philanthropic way I just used a hammer to beat a father of two to death in his own office?"

  "The way you treat Binah, actually." Angkor tucked the umbrella between neck and shoulder while he lit up, cupping his hand around the end of the cigarette. He was the sort of man I'd expect to smoke with his wrist cocked back. He didn’t. He pinched the cigarette between thumb and fingers, smoking with the efficient intensity of a soldier or an ex-con. "Binah, Talya, Jenner, me. You care about your friends. I think you’d do anything for them."

  “Perhaps. But I still prefer animals all around. They’re honest by default."

  “I think most people try to be honest if they can be.” Angkor shrugged. “HuMen are a mix of good and bad. Some are DOG-bit. If you grew up in a mafia, a lot of the people you knew were more Morphorde than HuMan.”

  Fair enough. I flexed my fingers against the sharp granite ledge of the tomb.

  "You know, I used to have a horse,” I said, haltingly. “Back in high school, I rode every day. Polo, dressage, show jumping. Her name was Katerina – she was an absolutely stunning Andalusian-Arab mare. We were the 1978 champions at my school, and then we won two years running in college. I used to joke she was my dukh, my spirit. She was my pride and joy."

  Angkor nodded, listening.

  “My father killed her because I wouldn’t loan him money to pay for his drug habit,” I continued. “I got a late-night callout to the barn from the owner. Katerina woke him up with her screams. My father went into her stall with sugar cubes and cyanide and poisoned her.”

  “GOD.” Angkor made a sound of disgust in the back of his throat. “What a piece of shit.”

  A deep leaden weight settled in my chest. I shook my head. “It changed me, because until then, I couldn’t imagine anyone capable of looking this beautiful, guileless creature in the eye and murdering her, not even my father. That was the beginning of the end for my career in the Organizatsiya, looking back. All the men I knew said that my father was a ‘great guy’, that he was a good soldier. They laughed of
f his murdering a horse, and I realized that… that there was something wrong with them. Looking back, maybe I was sensing the Morphorde in them. Yegor, Nicolai, my father. All of them.”

  "Sounds like it." Angkor scowled, drawing deeply on his cigarette. I breathed in the greenish smoky smell of the tobacco, and oddly, my mouth started watering.

  I grimaced, and turned my head away from it to try to banish the odd craving. "Anyway, now that I've set up the rest of the day’s depression, I have to ask – how did you know I'd be here?"

  "You just went and took care of someone in revenge for Vassily. You don't drink, so you weren't going to be at a bar. There’s really only one other place you’d go."

  "Am I that predictable?"

  "Everyone's predictable once you're old enough," Angkor replied.

  Frowning, I glanced across at him. Angkor was just as fascinating in profile as he was from the front. The long sweep of his neck, the strong jaw, the faint freckles just a couple shades darker than his olive skin. He was Korean, but he reminded me a little of the famous bust of Nefertiti from the side. The same grace.

  "Exactly how old are you?"

  "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

  "You're a Biomancer. And you've already told me you're older than you look."

  Angkor's lips twitched. "Fifty."

  "Oh. Is that all?" I sniffed. "Well… you made it sound like it was going to be something outrageous."

  "Sorry to disappoint you." His mouth drew up on one corner, but then he averted his eyes. The humor faded quickly as he looked over at Vassily's headstone. "Is that him? Your friend?"

  The moment of levity passed. I nodded.

  "He looks like he was a lot of fun to have around. The kind of man who could light up a room."

  The tremors returned, the sensation of the world quaking under and around me. My memory, faithfully photographic as always, pressed me down under the weight of the many thousands of moments I'd shared with Vassily over more than half my lifetime. Laughter as we wrestled as children... the smell of him inside a stuffy car while we watched movies at the drive-in as teenagers. Watching him get his hands tattooed. The way light sometimes played over his throat and face when we were driving at night. I remembered him watching me and Katerina take the championship in our last year of high school, whooping and yelling from the stands while the rest of the WASP crowd awkwardly leaned away. We shared meals, homework, games of chess. Vassily lit up parts of me that were normally buried from sight, and starting from the day he'd gone to prison, life had become gray. Gray and dry. I withdrew into the desert of contract killing and Ars Magica, atrophying in place. And to a large extent, I was still there.

  "He was." I croaked out, unable to lift my voice. "But he changed after prison. He went in for… for bloodless white-collar bullshit, before everything with Zarya."

  "Who?"

  "The Gift Horse," I replied. "Vassily never killed a man in his life, you know. He was clever. Inventive. He would have been better off staying at college or going into banking or something… he was too gentle for the life. He had amazing ideas, and I used to listen to him and try to encourage him…"

  I trailed off, not even sure where I was going.

  "And you loved him," Angkor said softly.

  It struck like a slap. I flinched before I could stop it, and was about to snap something and get to my feet when he shuffled in closer, leaning against my side. He tipped the umbrella to better cover us both.

  "My brother died when I was ten," Angkor said, his head now very close to mine. "His name was Jae-Gung. Jae was a standout... good student, good grades, went in for his military service and did really well. I loved him because he was my oppa, my older brother, but I was jealous, because my parents once told me they wished they’d never tried for a second child. I was a disgrace to them."

  "Why?" The sudden contact left me momentarily breathless. My skin crawled under my wet shirt for a moment, but relaxed against the warmth that radiated through his coat.

  "Lots of reasons," Angkor said, his voice turning a dark burnt orange with bitterness. "Jae-Gung was always kind to me. He came to visit me in the hospital when he was on leave that summer. I was in the middle of chemotherapy, and Mom asked him to go to a department store to get a new humidifier for the room, because the air was dry and it was making me cough. He went to the Sampoon Department Store the day the building collapsed."

  “An earthquake?”

  "No.” He snorted. “A fuckup. The building was held together with spit and happy thoughts, and literally just fell down one day. Five hundred people were killed. My brother was one of them."

  I frowned, not sure what to say.

  Angkor sighed heavily. “The point is, I guess, that it can be harder to be the one left behind. That, and it's okay to still love someone when they're gone, but you have to be careful that it doesn't eat you alive. I blamed myself for years, even though there was nothing I could have done and it wasn't my fault. You're going to have to make the same decision I did at some point."

  "And what decision is that?"

  Angkor smiled. "To become your own individual person. I used Jae-Gung as an excuse for my failures for a long time. I didn't have to succeed or become my own person because the shadow of my brother always stretched so far. But one day, I realized it was exactly that: a shadow. I had to become someone. A real person, not just ‘the one our parents didn’t want’."

  I eased down inside my skin. He had a point, because I knew that when I thought about anything, it was filtered through the Organizatsiya’s lens. Reductionist, paranoid, ruthless, medieval. The Russian Mafiya saw itself as a kingdom; the muzhiki were princes, warlords, and bandits in opposition to a repressive society of weaklings. We played pretend with semi-automatics and real blood, but it was all an artifice to justify the avoidance of reality… so why did I still defer to it? To those ways of being?

  “Mm.” My brow furrowed. “You know, I can think back to all the people I knew – other than Vassily and a couple others – and there’s a word I can use to refer to them all. Vacuous. If you asked any guy ‘what are you?’, the answer effectively added up to ‘my dick, this gold Rolex, football, and Adidas’. The women weren’t any better.”

  “Vacuous is a good word to describe Morphorde.” He grunted with amusement, and leaned his head in the crook of my neck. Strangely, I didn't mind that, either.

  A good ten minutes passed that way, his hair soft against my skin, our breath steaming the air. As time crawled by, I could feel it pulling me out of the heavy pall of grief, warring with an entirely different set of feelings. Angkor's increasingly familiar perfume, masculine spice blended with the aromatic sweetness of the Phi bound into his flesh by years of hunting Gift Horses. It stirred hungers I felt in my jaw, in my fingers, the pulse in my crotch. Glancing at Vassily’s headstone, I couldn’t help but wonder if he would have been disgusted with me.

  I shuddered, skin prickling, and pulled back. “Alright… enough of this. Time to go.”

  “Sure. And… I’m sorry if I, I mean I was trying to tell you I relate, but it probably sounded like I was making it all about me.” Angkor forced out a short, unhappy laugh and was suddenly off the ledge and on his feet, patting around for his cigarette case again.

  “No, I understand. But we need to get back to Strange Kitty." I hopped the short distance to the ground, jerking my shoulders back under my wet coat. "Jenner is going to want to debrief, and she’ll already be making noises about those guns. How did you get here?"

  "I walked," he said. "It's only a few miles."

  "You can drive back with me, if you want."

  “I’d love to. And I admit... I had an agenda when I went looking for you.” He handed me the umbrella. “I’m not an expert on this world. Have you ever read about any other blood-and-meat rains like this one? I figured you’d be the person who would know.”

  This world? I nodded. “There was the Kentucky Meat shower in 1876. Meat fell in a 100-by-50-yard
radius on Allen Crouch’s property near Rankin. No piece exceeded 3.9 inches.” I rattled it off like pulling files from a drawer. “The Black Plague in 1348 was supposedly presaged by a rain of blood over Hanover, Germany. So was World War One: Massive blood rain over the village of Whitby. That was determined to be caused by a water twister that sucked up a herd of sheep on the English coast, but it was eerily prophetic, nonetheless. Arguably, the blood rain actually foretold the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, which killed over a hundred million people.”

  “Hmm. The fall today was human remains. I'm positive.” Angkor fell into step with me as we headed down the hillock, careful not to slip on the wet grass. “And that weird moan we heard… that sound is a harbinger of the Morphorde”

  I nodded. “My thoughts exactly. First a Gift Horse Mare turns up, now this. I don’t know what’s happening, but it’s not good.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not.”

  “Any thoughts?”

  Angkor shook his head. “No. I feel like there’s something I should have known before today. Something I have to do, that might be related to all of this stuff. It’s so frustrating that I can’t remember.”

  “The Deacon must have really knocked you around.”

  “Yeah. He did.” The sourness was back, but with it, something oddly vulnerable. It was in the way he suddenly carried himself. Without thinking, I held his door for him when we reached the car. He accepted with a smile, dipping his eyes and sliding onto his seat without a word of protest. The graceful ritual made my pulse jump. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do about how I felt, but I knew I had to do something.