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

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “Yes?” He pulled up hopefully.

  “Wine,” I said. “What do you recommend?”

  “What are you planning to eat?”

  I looked over at the empty place. “Probably nothing. What do you have that’s sweet?”

  “We… uh… well, we have a very nice house Riesling.”

  “Sure.” I had no idea what a Riesling tasted like, but it had been Vassily’s go-to dinner wine. The server brought me a big bubble glass. It had a weird fruit-juice aftertaste, but it was stronger than beer or the mixed drink Jenner had given me. Before I knew it, it was a couple minutes past eight, the glass was empty, and I was swaying in my chair. I waited with faint hope that Angkor would stride in through the door, flush-faced and embarrassed, but hope didn’t have a fighting chance against the humiliating reality. The fucking asshole had stood me up.

  When I motioned for the waiter, he came to the table with his notepad in both hands, like a shield.

  “Bad roads, I guess.” I ground the words out through a vise, taking out my wallet and pulling a ten and a five from it. “I’m sorry for taking up the table for so long.”

  “Not a problem.” The waiter now looked as embarrassed as I felt. “Are you sure you don’t-”

  “No.” I slapped the money down, pushed back from the table, and wove through the tables of laughing people with the weight of their eyes on my back.

  I stumped down the wet sidewalk, realized I’d forgotten the umbrella, didn’t care. I was dizzy, sick, and my head was buzzing with bad noise, like a T.V flicking between channels. On one channel, we had Alexi Sokolsky—short, bullish, beaten around the face—now the hot gossip among the staff at Club 21. Maybe they felt sorry for me. Maybe they thought the ‘girl’ I was waiting on dodged a bullet by skipping the date. Either way, I wasn’t ever going to be able to go back to that place again.

  The next channel was fear that something had happened to Angkor, that he wasn’t just on one of his typical jaunts out into the hills. He wasn’t stupid, and he wasn’t absent-minded. He was, however, not invulnerable. The Deacon had gotten him once before. Fuck.

  I cut down an alley on the zigzag route back to my car. About halfway down, a shadow peeled away from the wall behind me, trembling ahead on the dim pavement. I headed past some windows and used them to look back for my tail: nothing but a lone mugger. Blue-white skin, thin build, black hoodie. He walked with the skulking manner of a coyote, and as soon as I slowed, he called out to me. “Hey! Sir! Sir? You got a light on you?”

  A mugger? They usually took one look at me and… oh, right. I was all dressed up. New suit, nice shoes... I probably looked like an easy meal from the back.

  The prospect of violence turned the heat down on the churning boil of self-loathing, humiliation, and murderous fantasy I’d been stewing. I stopped and turned to face the guy, sizing him up. A bit taller than me, decent reach, the kind of bottom feeder who relied on being too scary to refuse. He moved like a scavenger, not a predator. “Sure. Come here and I’ll fix you up.”

  He was already reaching inside his coat, grin broad and cocky. His tool of choice turned out to be a plain old carving knife. It had been sharpened to a thin crescent.

  The kid held it out level with my face, arm at full extension, elbow locked. “Get your wallet out and hand it over, man, and no one has to-”

  I stalked forward, grabbed his wrist, and pushed it up high as I pulled him into my knee. He was so shocked that I got two good blows to the groin and a headbutt in before he had time to react, and by then, it was too late. He flailed, yelping in alarm as I charged him back into the nearest wall and slammed him back against it. I prized the knife out of his soft fingers and jammed the point of the blade up under the soft of his jaw, like the knife in the dream.

  His eyes were white and wild. Like a frightened... Horse. “Hey... hey man, please... I was just trying... I mean...”

  I was breathing hard. Not from exertion. The world had narrowed down to the smell of terror, the rapid jump of his pulse against the blade. Even with gloves on, the sensation of his living heart carried through the metal to my fingertips. When he reached up to pluck at my arm, I ground the tip of the knife in just enough to draw a thin trickle of blood. His expression, the way his body shifted into abject submission, wasn’t only satisfying. It was exciting. My craving for booze vanished, replaced by bloodlust.

  The Yen. It was the Yen making me do this shit. But just because I knew what it was didn’t mean I could stop it. Or that I didn’t like it.

  “Let me tell you something, you little punk,” I hissed a cloud of wine-scented breath into his face. “Tonight I went out on a limb for someone and was stood up, and you know what I want? Right now?”

  “No!” He squeaked.

  I pulled him down until we were nose-to-nose. “I want nothing more than to take your little pig-sticker right there, slowly insert it into your chest, cut a circle around, pull out your fucking heart like an apple core, and throw it at the nearest fucking wall.”

  “Okay, man! I get it! You’re fuckin’ crazy!”

  In the frozen moment before I pulled him away from the wall, shoved him, told him to get lost, I heard a sharp pafph! of sound. Something hit me in the ass. That was the last thing I felt before my knees wobbled and gave out, and I crumpled unconscious to the wet ground.

  Chapter 8

  When waking up inside of a walk-in freezer is the highlight of your day, you know you screwed up somewhere between getting out of bed and getting nailed by a tranq dart by government stormtroopers. I was betting my screw-up was about five-foot eleven, dark skinned, had long braids, transformed into a belligerent herbivore, and had now officially written herself onto my hit list.

  The freezer wall hummed against my back. They’d partially stripped me, leaving my underwear, undershirt and socks on, barely enough to stop me from passing out with hypothermia. I was groggy, heavy-limbed, and had to struggle out of a weak narcotic haze to get my bearings, such as they were. I was blind, deaf, and dumb. There was a heavy gag in my mouth that depressed my tongue; I had a blindfold on, and earmuffs over what felt like foam earplugs. The only reasons I knew I was in a freezer were because of the sharp biting cold, the vague stale food smell, and the buzzing I felt through my jaw. I’d thrown enough bound men into freezers that I could put two and two together and get four. There was only one reason you chilled guys like this, too. They were softening me up for something, and given the illegal nature of the arrest, I doubted it was a free call to my lawyer.

  The rumble of boots on a metal floor telegraphed through my cold flesh, breaking my reverie. Skin jumping, I turned my head towards the source of the vibrations. I was not surprised when two pairs of hands reached down, scooped me up by the elbows, and set me on feet made painful from the chill. I didn't get to stay on them for long: the Vigiles dragged me out of the freezer like a carcass headed for the saw room. I didn’t help them any. Instead, I hung like a dead weight as I sharpened my teeth, gathered my wits, and prepared to duel.

  I had no idea where I was, and no idea where I was going. As far as I could tell, twelve hours had passed since my arrest, maybe fifteen. Wherever we were, it was wet and cold. The air had the damp, chilly, almost-but-not-quite moldy smell of an ice skating rink. I didn't mind New York winters, but I generally wore clothes, not my boxers and ten pounds of cold iron around hands and ankles. After what felt like half an hour of pushing and pulling, we passed a threshold with a ward so powerful that the hairs on my skin lifted as we passed. Dizziness washed over me in a leaden wave, and for a moment, I was sure that the magic laid on this place had cut my link with Kutkha. A spike of fear shot through my gut as I groped for him, vanishing when he reached back to me and cool clarity returned.

  After a few stops and starts, the enforcers pushed me down into a chair with straps on the armrests and legs, holding me down with unnecessary force. They left the mitts on even once my arms were bound. The tension was just beginning to ebb from my chest when
my nose stung with the smell of alcohol, just before latex-gloved fingers swabbed the inside of my elbow and then inserted a needle and catheter. A few seconds later, a cold sensation spread through the vein and up my arm.

  My whole body armored with base animal fear, ears ringing, mouth and eyes drying up. No one I’d heard of who’d been arrested and sent to Silverbay had ever returned. There was a possibility that it was because they put down spooks with lethal injection by default. But then why the beating and the cool down? I swallowed around the gag and focused back on my breathing as they taped over the IV and left.

  Someone pulled the earmuffs off, then pulled out the plugs. The blindfold was next. I squinted at the flood of white light that replaced the warm darkness, unable to see anything for several eye-watering moments. The gag was loosened and then worked out past my teeth. It was the ratchet kind, with a short tongue depressor some Inquisitor had designed to keep us warlocks from mumbling hocus-pocus when we were supposed to be quiet. Blinking away involuntary tears, I turned and squinted down at my elbow to see what they’d done. The IV was attached to a tube that wound up and away behind me. As far as I could tell, it was plain old saline.

  There were only three other things in the room besides me. A mirror on wheels, directly in front of me, and two identically dressed, but very different-looking men. The one on the left was a pinch-faced egghead: tall, slender, young but balding, he looked like the human incarnation of constipation. He wore a pair of frameless glasses on his beaky nose. The other man was Hispanic, dark-complexioned and handsome in a heavy, sullen way offset by how dim he looked. The guy might as well have been a wax figurine. He stared vacantly at a spot just below my nose. The lights were on, but no one was home.

  “Alexi Sokolsky. What a pleasure to finally meet you.” Egghead had a stiff, formal Gold Coast lockjaw accent. He was so WASP-ish that I was pretty sure he built nests out of chewed-up tax returns and old copies of the Wall Street Journal. “I am Agent Keen, and this is Adeptus Black. I’m sure you have at least some idea of why you might be here?”

  “You’re really into macrobiotics, aren’t you?” I squinted at him. “Bowel health.”

  Agent Keen’s brows contracted slightly, like he’d smelled something unpleasant. “You assaulted an FBI agent today, Mister Sokolsky, which is more than enough for me to rule you unfit for release today. I suggest you listen and comply.”

  The KGB used this exact tactic to erase political prisoners under Stalin: accusing them of things the government had actually done. If you’d been beaten and robbed by a cop, you were the one who’d committed an ‘assault’. Fuck that. “You illegally detained me.”

  “Human beings are ‘illegally detained’,” Keen replied, cocking his head at an angle. “You are an unregistered warlock, and by using your magic to assist with murders, kidnappings, torture, and other lovely adventures, you put yourself into the special extrajudicial process also reserved for other kinds of terrorists.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I don’t even have a parking ticket to my name.”

  Agent Keen looked down his nose at me. “But you have been identified as the practitioner who killed Yegor Gavrilyuk, and are a suspect in at least twelve other murders on behalf of the so-called ‘Brighton Beach Mafia’, Mister Sokolsky.”

  Only years of experience in The Game kept me from freezing up.

  “We have first-hand testimony of your role from multiple sources, after the arrests made in September in connection with the Wolf Grove kidnapping,” Keen continued. “And not only testimony. Several members of your old Organization were able to give us quite detailed descriptions of your magical and non-magical activities and provide artifacts you’d made for them.”

  My only reply was stony silence. He took an honest-to-god silk monogrammed handkerchief from his pocket and unfolded it, revealing a pendant engraved with old Slavonic runes.

  “Recognize this?” He arched a thin eyebrow.

  “It’s a protective talisman,” I said. “And?”

  “The nature of the talisman isn’t the reason it interests me.” Keen motioned to Black with an ivory cold-fish hand. Black hadn’t moved for the duration of our conversation. “Adeptus Black here is a very specialized type of magus, Mister Sokolsky. Tell him what you do, Tomas.”

  “Arcane Forensics.” Tomas’ voice sounded like a recorded message.

  “Tomas can ‘match’ the residual resonance of magical workings to the person that cast them. Every warlock has a kind of fingerprint to their magic, you see. We call it a matrix. A warlock’s matrix is unique to him or her, and can be matched over a series of scenes until we find the practitioner.” Keen wasn’t even trying to conceal how smug he was about this. “You’ve been leaving your fingerprints all over the place for years, and we have a record of every one of them. How many people, Sokolsky? Fifteen? More?”

  I didn’t feel like anyone was trying to get inside my head, so I had a think about it. I’d killed my first man at sixteen – in self-defense – and taken my first hit at nineteen. I’d averaged four hits a year for ten years, plus collateral when times were crazy. The crack boom in the mid-80s was the worst for that, so my headcount was really closer to forty. “That’s the biggest load of horseshit I’ve ever heard. Some mages work with specific formulas and magical patterns with endurance in mind, but the energy itself doesn’t hang around indefinitely waiting for your pet automaton to come along and match it up. I’m a practitioner, I won’t deny that – and I’m a good enough practitioner to know you’re talking out of your ass.”

  Joshua smiled indulgently. “I’m very sorry to burst your bubble of incredulity, but individual Phitonic matrices are a very well-established form of evidence. For example, the tangled mess you left behind at the murder site of Eric Kovacs.”

  Well, shit. I had killed Eric Kovacs back in 1986, and there was only one person still alive who knew that I had – Nicolai Chiernenko, my old Kommandant[4]. “So why are we here, then? Summary execution?”

  “If you are sent to our facility, execution is a possibility,” Keen replied. “But we understand that magical ability of your level is rare, and we prefer rehabilitation when possible. Your cooperation could earn you a more lenient sentence. Tomas used to be a warlock for the La Familia Michoacana, actually. Now he’s one of us.”

  I glanced at Adeptus Black. “Tomas looks like he had a bad back-alley lobotomy.”

  He frowned. Maybe there was someone home after all.

  “Fine. Keep on with this infantile behavior, Mister Sokolsky. See where it gets you. We have a cult to disband and a cop killer to catch, and I would be more than happy to send you off to meet your maker, write up the incident report, and then get back to work.” Keen’s self-congratulatory manner faded into sobriety. He stood, hands folded behind his back. “There is a pump ready to administer a very large, one might even say ‘lethal’ dose of cyanide and tetrodoxin behind you, in the event you were to try and perform magic. I could claim your hands twitched the wrong way, and my superior would give me a slap on the wrist and have me interviewed before I was sent along my merry way. But the fact of it is, you have real experience with the Templum Voctus Sol, and I’d prefer to reach a deal rather than claim self-defense. Work for us, and you get to assist Agent Richardson with her case. You may even get conditional freedom as a valued asset on the street. Wouldn’t you prefer that, too?”

  I ground my jaws together. No matter how much I hated The Deacon, Nicolai, and Sergei, I wasn’t a snitch. I was preparing a retort when Kutkha’s eyes flashed into my inner eye, along with his voice. Submit.

  Keen’s bland, murky blue eyes glinted with the cold patience of a killer. He’d probably taken out spooks who’d done half the shit I’d done, and felt good about his role in cleaning up the streets. His conviction in my inherent lack of humanity was clearly absolute.

  “What do you want, then?” I ground the words through my teeth.

  Keen smiled. He almost looked relieved… or disappointed. “Complianc
e with Ayashe Richardson, to the letter. We need someone who can take out this ‘Soldier 557’ person without needing to jump through a million hoops. There are operatives capable of it, but they don’t have the required leeway on US soil.”

  “You want me to kill him,” I said.

  “A flock of little birds told me that you’re very good at it,” Keen said. “And like you, Soldier 557 has forfeited his rights under conventional law. Unlike you, he’s murdered one Federal Agent and kidnapped another, and there is no chance of a deal. He will be put down like a dog at the first opportunity. We know the Templum well enough to believe that a chance of interrogation is slim to none. We can infer a lot of information from his body.”

  “You’re sure it’s a ‘him’?”

  “Our first victim was raped,” Keen replied. “The sex of the perpetrator was very obvious.”

  Well, I guess that cleared that mystery. “I’m not convinced Soldier 557 is human.”

  “It doesn’t matter, as long as they’re taken down. Treat this seriously, Mister Sokolsky. Your life is conditional on this investigation, and you have three days to make a report. We will reassess your role at that time.”

  “Three days isn’t long enough to do anything.” The moment of inner reconciliation evaporated then. “You don’t even know where he is, let alone if he even was-”

  “We know it was this ‘Soldier 557’, and the Templum Voctus Sol. That is not in doubt.” Agent Keen inclined his head to the side and glanced past me with a small nod. I tensed, searching the mirror reflection, but only saw a shadow stir at the edge of the glass. A human silhouette, tall and broad-shouldered, but lean. “But first, something to remember this by.”

  “What-?” I couldn’t move in the chair they’d bound me to, not even to twist around. I was searching for a way to move when my face and scalp began to itch. Cheeks, chin, upper lip, my bare brows… they crawled like a carpet of insects. My hands twisted painfully inside the metal gauntlets as I squirmed. There was rippling, creeping pain as hairs twisted out the pores of my skin, growing with unnatural speed. The sensation of itching built to a fiery extreme as my hair erupted, lengthened, and curled. I shook and twisted, cursed, sobbed, broke my nails against the inside of the gauntlets. If I’d been able to reach my face, I would have torn it off. Agent Keen watched on in amusement while Adeptus Black stared with flat black eyes.