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

by James Osiris Baldwin

  It wasn’t as bad as I expected. It was worse.

  Ali had clearly been dead for days, if not weeks. He was pinned to the wall beside his refrigerator, body sagging off the cutlery that skewered his limbs. Butter knives, not even knives with a point. They’d been rammed through his wrists, calves and ankles. I couldn’t tell what had killed him. The window had been left open, and his corpse was crawling with maggots, flies, and ants. He’d had large chunks of flesh torn from all over his naked body, gaping holes scissored out of his dark skin. Something in his mouth glinted gold.

  My heart sunk. Ali had been a kind man. Street-hardened, full of private pain, but kind. And they had reduced him to this flyblown hunk of meat

  “Ali. My GOD.” Sick with anger, I edged forward and used a fork to gently pull his jaw down. The object inside spilled to the floor with a thump. It was a gold Zippo. I picked it up with a dishcloth and rubbed the ichor off the monogram. ‘V.S.L’, in Cyrillic letters. One of Vassily’s old lighters, taken from my house. I curled my fingers around it, hand trembling as my intuition began to pound at me from behind the fury... the wordless voice of my Neshamah, which suddenly swelled into a scream of warning, just before a shotgun blast took me in the back.

  .

  Chapter 24

  The shield took the worst of it. The barrier absorbed buckshot with less difficulty than a single high-powered round, but the force of the blast sent me sprawling. I bounced off the edge of the sink and staggered against Ali’s corpse, dragging it down off the wall. It didn’t fall, and that took me aback just long enough for his cold, rotted arms to clutch me in a bear hug and pull me forward against his chest.

  I shouted wordlessly and shoved myself away from him, even as the time dilation of adrenaline hit me. Several details imprinted themselves in a single moment of terror. The first was that the maggots infesting Ali were not white, but orange. The second was that his stiffened frame was inhumanly dense, like hardwood, and drier than it looked. The third was that someone was behind me, and they had anywhere between one and five rounds left in the shotgun.

  Ali’s jaws unhinged soundlessly and he lunged forward to bite me. The MiB suit saved my neck. His blunt, gore-covered teeth slid off the weird toughened fabric, unable to pierce or tear it. He was obscenely strong. I gave up trying to get him off of me, and instead grabbed him by his waist and swung us both around just as the shotgun filled the small room with explosive white noise. It cut my vision and made my hands seize painfully. Ali didn’t even flinch as the shots hit him, but they made him break his vise-like grip around my body. He lunged for me with teeth bared as I stumbled back, threw up a hand, and barked the word for fire. “Aysh!”

  The magic responded like a striking snake. There was a weird sub-audible screech as my Will bent reality against itself like a match against sandpaper and used the friction to explosively ignite the dust in the air, a flashbang that burst my eardrum. Ali shoved away from me and the sudden flash of intense heat and light that washed over us and the room. The fire ignited his ragged clothing and hair. It also hit the walls. The greasy wallpaper went up in flames with a roar.

  Behind him, Vera threw the empty shotgun and fled down the hall with an inhuman sound I never hoped to hear from a human throat again, a cross between a scream and a hiss in two voices - one human, cracked and dry, the other terrifyingly alien. The thing wearing Ali’s face reeled out of the kitchen with a deeper version of the same sound, rolling against the walls to put himself out. I lost track of him: the tiny kitchen was full of smoke, and the flames were already licking at the ceiling. My only way out now was the window. I threw it up, awkwardly pulled myself through, and kicked down at the bloody sink to find some kind of leverage.

  There was the sharp bang of a silenced pistol from behind me, then searing pain as Vera unerringly aimed, fired, and shot me in the ass through the curtain of smoke and flame.

  “Fucking piece of horse shit!” I snarled in Ukrainian, pulling through and out onto the gutter ledge as the next round grazed me, scoring the suit and skipping off my hip. The further I got away from her, the wider her margin of error. For a marksman as good as Vera, any margin of error drastically increased my chance of survival.

  I was on the ledge between the first and second floors. There was no fire escape. It wasn’t a massive drop, but my injured leg would crumple when I hit the ground. I’d smack face-first into the pavement before I had time to roll.

  The decision was made for me when Vera vaulted the window onto the ledge with inhuman alacrity, pistol in hand. Her hair was smoking, skin flaked with ash, but otherwise unharmed. She screeched at me, lips peeling back from top and bottom rows of razor-sharp iron teeth. The only way was down.

  “Chet!” I channeled my fear into a shield and leaped off the building.

  My hope was that the shield spell would soak my fall in the same way it soaked the momentum of a bullet. What actually happened is that I hit what felt like an invisible cushion of air about two feet off the ground that depressed and then sprang back, flinging me forward and up. I barely got into a roll in time, tumbling over myself on the asphalt. A round struck the ground half a foot from my nose, sending asphalt flying. I scrambled up as more bullets struck the ground around me, then dove for cover behind my car as three louder shots blew holes into the empty street. A much larger gun. A sniper rifle?

  I heard a thump from across the street, then two more shots. I pulled the Wardbreaker and a compact mirror out of my bag and looked out around the edge of the trunk, mystified, just in in time to see Vera stagger up to her feet like a broken puppet. Dust poured from two large holes in her torso. She clutched at her gut, trying to hold it in like blood.

  The rifle cracked, and Vera’s form blurred as she practically teleported away from the plume of dirt as the next round struck the pavement instead of her. She moved so fast that I caught my breath, astonished.

  Vera hissed, a high whistling, banshee keen, and fled down the alley. I listened to my heart thudding against my ribs, panting with pain and stress. Ali’s building was now his funeral pyre. Smoke billowed out every entry and exit, flames licking out from the windows. There were no sirens yet, but somewhere nearby, there was a sniper.

  I squinted at the ruined apartments, but couldn’t spot anyone in the black, gap-toothed windows. Warily, I rolled over onto my good side, and as silence reigned, reached back and felt around where I’d taken the bullet. The jacket and pants had technically stopped the round, because the suit material - and the slug - had punched into my glute. I was looking at a puncture as deep as my little finger instead of a five-inch tunnel and a perforated bladder, but I didn’t dare pull the material free until I got to my medical kit.

  I crawled around the car to the doors opposite where the sniper’s rounds had come from, gritting my teeth as I opened it and hauled my first aid kit out onto the road. The shaking was so bad that I could hardly get the bag open, let alone the gauze wound pads I needed.

  “Ohh... now this brings back memories. You, my sweet bargain-basement virgin, up against the side of a car on a ruined highway after thinking you could kill me. Me, breaking your wrists, my cock in your mouth.”

  I froze, my breath catching in my throat, and turned around on my knees to find a very small man standing barely an arm’s length from me on the road. He had to have been exceptionally handsome once, with features and a bone structure that evoked a Platonic ideal of HuMan form... a form which was decaying and patched, like a porcelain doll that had been dropped, shattered, and glued back together again. He had a huge fall of matted white cornrows and a scrabbly, stained Fu Manchu mustache the color of dirty bone. His dark red-brown skin was scoured with open sores weeping grayish fluid; his cheeks were concave, the fine straight nose dividing the sunken pits of his eyes, but it was the eyes themselves that caught and held me. They were wide violet pools encrusted with frothy black muck, like pond scum. The NOthing screamed at me from those eyes. His pupils were Black, empty gnashing mouths. In them,
I saw the Rape of Eden as clearly as I’d dreamed it.

  I blanched, recoiling from him against the open door. “What the fuck?”

  “Exactly! The first time we fucked! Remember?” He grinned with a mouth full of snaggled, dirty teeth set like pieces of broken glass in his gums, a leer that abruptly transmuted to a thoughtful scowl. He scratched his cheek. “Ahh... wait. No… different story. That was someone else.”

  My eyes narrowed. “Listen to me, you little punk. I don’t know what the fuck you’re on, but-”

  “You’re a different Alexi,” he rasped, craning his head forward. A wave of stench, the sour smell of rotten fruit, hit me like a slap to the face. He sniffed, deeply. “I see, I see. Well... I could get that bullet out for you if you’d like. Suck it right out of that tight little ass of yours.”

  I’d jumped from the fire into the creepy Morphordian frying pan, apparently. I felt back for the car door, the gun pointed away from him. The Wardbreaker didn’t feel right in my hand. It felt... pregnant. Too heavy, stirring with a sick energy in the presence of this man. “No, thank you. I’m very grateful for your assistance, but my gratitude will have to suffice.”

  He sucked his bottom lip, and let it go with a last, lingering look at the blood pooling underneath me before he sighed. “Oh no... I can’t leave. This one is a messenger, my silver-eyed boy. You’ve been invited to a party. A ‘do’.”

  It took me a moment to realize that he was speaking fluent Russian. “I... who are you?”

  “Don’t be an idiot. I’m glorious.” He gathered his long mane of ratty braids and slung them back over one shoulder. There were bruises all down his neck, the imprint of human teeth, and ragged punctures seeping a pewter-gray fluid down his throat. Vampire fang punctures. “Come with me? I make a great date.”

  “Go with you where, exactly?”

  The stranger smirked, a grin like a broken windowpane. His teeth reminded me very much of StainedGlass, and my skin crawled. “To church. That’s where you usually find Deacons, is it not?”

  My gut chilled. “The Deacon?”

  “The only one who matters,” the man said. He suddenly seemed more lucid than before. “He wishes to extend his hospitality, in the traditional sense. A favor repaid, a professional inquiry made.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what the favor in question was. “By hospitality in the traditional sense, you mean a guarantee of protection and goodwill?”

  The stranger looked up at me, lips parted. “Absolutely. Hospitality is taken very seriously, on my Father’s life. Oil for the wheels.”

  My eyes narrowed. In the Eastern European tradition, hospitality was a big deal. If formal hospitality was invoked, it was respected, even for enemies or rivals: at least, for as long as you were inside the quarters of the host. If someone hosed you down on the street outside the door, that was your bad luck. “Why does he want to see me?”

  The small man smiled a different way, and it transformed his face. He still looked like he had leukemia with a dash of leprosy, but suddenly, his thin face was... almost winsome. “Why, he wants to ask you to kill somebody, of course. Someone you don’t like very much.”

  “Who?”

  “That is the Deacon’s business.” He flashed me another crooked, charming little smirk. “I might have the answer, but I’m so weak... a swallow of your blood, given freely, might restore my memory?”

  My stomach wobbled, turning with revulsion. “No. No blood. And I want a guarantee of safe passage to and from this meeting.”

  “I suppose these are terms that can be agreed to.” The small man looked me up and down. “The ruined chapel on Charlotte Street is where you shall be received.”

  “When?”

  He flashed me that fractured, broken-glass smile. “Alexi, Alexi... that’s a dangerous question for a Temporalist. When-ever you arrive, of course. He will intersect you. Or... I could take you now.”

  “I’ll take the car. Alone.”

  “I could make the ride so much more pleasant.” He took another step forward, nose still working. “No boring New York traffic with me in the jump seat.”

  “Thank you, but no.” I resisted the urge to lean away from the man in front of me. “Leave.”

  He smacked his lips, but there was no saliva in his mouth. Without another word, he turned and padded away on dirty bare feet, hips loose, back straight. The way he walked was incredible, and... eyecatching. Sensual, inhumanly fluid. It was impossible not to notice, even with the pain and the brainfog and the panic.

  I rubbed my eyes and snorted out the rotten fruit smell, and when I looked up again, he was gone. The back of my neck crawled as I got my first aid materials together, doused three gauze pads in wound powder and saline, and then slowly, carefully pulled out the trapped suit material from my buttock, snarling with agony. I was going to have to go to an urgent care center with some stupid excuse - like falling on a spiked fence. With Ali’s corpse-blood all over my suit, the likelihood of infection was beyond my ability to treat.

  “I’m glorious.” I repeated his words, dragging myself up and into the car. I groaned as I eased down to the seat... and then it hit me.

  Glory. The gematria... the old-fashioned speech and custom, the diminutive, childlike height. The stench of DOG on the wind hit me too late. Soldier 557 was already gone, vanished into the city like a bad dream, and with him my last hope of appeasing the Vigiles Magicarum.

  Chapter 25

  It’s amazing how much time to think a trip to hospital gives you. While I lay on my face and let a doctor pick over the bullet puncture and a week’s worth of minor injuries—the result of an unfortunate household moving accident involving a spiked iron fence, I told them—I brooded on the best way to screw Sergei into the ground, get one over the Deacon, and survive my seven o’clock appointment with Joshua Keen. I was supposed to be helping Jenner set up for the fight, too. Fat chance of that. I was still lying pantsless on the table when the Men in Black arrived.

  These MiB were trying to disguise themselves as normal people. Instead, they looked something like window mannequins. Artificial hair poked awkwardly out from under the brims of their hats. They had makeup on, intended to give them a more life-like appearance. It made them look more like airbrushed crash-test dummies, or bad cross-dressers.

  “Mister Sokolsky?” Agent Tweedle-dee asked from just inside the doorway.

  “You’re early.” I made sure that the starched white sheet covered my ass. “And in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m in hospital.”

  “Mr. Keen sent us to collect you, Mister Sokolsky,” Agent Tweedle-dum replied in the same lifeless voice. “There has been a development. He desires you to be briefed on the changes to your assignment.”

  While he talked, Tweedle-dee stared blankly at the suit hanging over the back of the chair beside my bed, obviously confused and possibly disturbed by the sight of it. Maybe it had belonged to the guy who shared his nutrient tank once upon a time.

  “What? Would it offend Keen’s delicate sensibilities to mingle among the hoi polloi?” I replied. “He knows I’m here. Why doesn’t he come and pay a visit?”

  The Men in Black blinked, both of them, at the same time. My skin crawled.

  “This is only a mission briefing, Mister Sokolsky,” Tweedle-dum said. “Please don’t be unreasonable.”

  “What part of my having an injury requiring IV antibiotics and professional care makes me ‘unreasonable’? How about you go back to Mister Keen and tell him that I’ll meet him in a neutral third-party location, and he can update me there?”

  “We have orders to take you to the mission briefing.”

  I struggled with the urge to roll my eyes. “Then I express my deepest regrets, but I will not be traveling with you in the corporate hearse today. Where does he want me to go?”

  The MiB glanced at each other, as if unsure what to do about someone who didn’t respect the sanctity of ‘orders’, then looked back to me.

  “We can dispatc
h an escort,” Agent Tweedle-dee said. “If you would prefer.”

  “It would be a great waste of taxpayer resources,” Tweedle-dum added helpfully.

  Fucking hell. I was trying to keep a low profile at this place. Somehow, I doubted the arrival of a full Vigiles SWAT team and a cavalcade of identical homunculi was going to keep me out of the staff room chatter here. I’d left the Wardbreaker in the car, but stashed my backup pistol under the bed while the nurse had been out. It was tempting, throbbing with power barely six inches away.

  “No. Submit to this.” Kutkha’s contribution was a push of sensation, wordless, but easily understood.

  I made a face. “What do you mean ‘submit’?”

  “Mister Sokolsky? If you don’t comply-”

  “I mean ‘submit’,” Kutkha said. “And have faith.”

  “Look, I’m very familiar with what your sort does to people like me, alright?” I gestured down at my sheet. “Can I at least get some clothes on and get the needle out of my arm?”

  The Man looked down at my elbow. “You will receive a cannula in the interview room. If you already have a cannula in place, you should leave it in to avoid risk of infection.”

  “Oh yes - infection is my number one priority while in custody.” Oy gevalt, but these things were stupid. “Turn around.”

  “We cannot let you out of our line of sight.”

  Annoyed, I threw the sheet back and stood, careful to cover myself—in the front. “Then you can kiss my supporating ass the whole time I get dressed.”

  I disconnected the cannula from the IV and capped it off, got dressed, and then limp-shuffled out with my collective fourteen feet of bodyguard. People stared at us on the way out—at the Men, at the way I was walking—but no one stopped us. One of the Men in Black held the door to their black Cadillac open for me, polite to a fault, and we motored off.