He was right. I knew he was right, but I wanted to resist. His blue fur voice made me twitch all over. It was so tactile that every word made my skin feel like it was being rubbed by sound. I flexed my nails against the porcelain sink and drew a deep breath.
“You okay?”
“Just...” The adrenaline had worn off, energy extinguished. Words blurred in my mouth, came out all wrong. Instead of trying to speak, I reached back, hand dripping wet, and awkwardly half-groped, half-clapped Vassily on the arm. I felt like a clumsy assembly robot, unable to coordinate my limbs properly. “Over... stimulated. Dark. Need dark.”
“All right. You get to bed, then.” Vassily knew what “overstimulation” meant. Knew it meant I couldn’t deal with too many words, too many sounds. He shortened his sentences automatically. “But food, soon.”
“Soon,” I echoed. I focused on my breathing, staring at my soggy hands under the water. They looked drowned, dead, too white. There was still blood under my nails. Goosebumps crawled over my arms, and I reached for the scrubbing brush. “Wash. Shower first.”
Vassily sighed and moved aside, and I lost track of him while I scrubbed at my hands, back and forth, back and forth. It hurt, but it felt good.
“You got real close to the Reaper this time, didn’t you?”
The sudden sound broke my momentary trance. I dropped the brush convulsively, and it clattered into the sink. It was several seconds more before I could speak. “Yes.”
“Turn the water off. You’re bleeding.”
Numbly, I complied. The mirror showed me my own heavy-boned face, shadowed and pitted under the white light. I looked exhausted and dirty.
“I’m gonna talk to Lev. Get you off the hook.” Vassily’s voice was very low and unusually serious. “I can tell by looking at you, Lexi. You got the death-mark. You looked down the barrel of a gun.”
My hands hurt. I gently shook my head and opened the mirror cabinet to look inside. The tumbler where I usually kept my spare pair was empty.
“Did you hear me? I’m gonna get you off this contract.”
“No.” Dry-mouthed, I gingerly patted my palms over with a clean towel. He was right: they were bleeding. They were clean, at least. “Don’t you dare.”
“No, you gotta understand me. I just got out of the fucking slammer, Lexi, and I didn’t spend five years rotting in the boonies to get out just in time for your funeral. All right?”
The depth of anger in my friend’s voice shocked me. I turned to face him, hands wrapped in terry cloth. Vassily was sweating like he had a fever, beads shining on his forehead. “Vassily, the men already disrespect me. Someone tried to bomb my car. I can’t lose any more face. They’ll kill me just for that.”
“Right. So I’m gonna talk to Lev, and I’m gonna look at setting you up with something better. Something we can work on together. Fuck the three hundred G’s. We’ll make a million by the end of the year if we get back into credit cards. You remember the serial generator I was working on? That’s the way of the future, man. Not this neighborhood racketeering shit.”
“This is my duty,” I said. “This is my responsibility.”
“No!” Vassily threw his hands up. “You’re two days into this gig, and look at you! Two days, Alexi! Look at you!”
“They weed out the weak. You want me to look weak in front of everyone?” I asked, incredulous.
“No one believes you’re weak. They think you’re a fucking psycho, but they don’t think you’re weak.” Vassily’s face was stormy.
“You do,” I said. “You interrupted me when Petro was giving me shit. You think I’m weak.”
“Petro was stomping all over you. What was I supposed to do? Stand by? Is that what you’d do if someone was doing that to me?”
“Of course not.” The very idea was an affront. “I’d never abandon you. But I need to find Vincent.”
“No, you don’t. You need to survive. That’s what we do.” Vassily advanced on me, stabbing his finger against my chest. If I’d been stronger, I’d have caught his wrist. But I was tired, and this was too much already. “The graveyard is full of cowboys who tried to rush off into the sunset, Alexi. You think you’re any better than them?”
My eyes narrowed. “I’ll finish what I started. What kind of Vor v Zakone talks this way?”
“One who’s had to bury his mother, his father, and the rest of his whole fucking family!” Vassily shoved back from me and stalked out the open door, slamming it behind him.
In the sudden silence, Binah jumped onto the sink and arched against my arm. I stroked her as I listened to Vassily curse his way down the hallway. The cat jumped when his bedroom door slammed, then resumed purring.
The outburst left me windless. Not angry. Anger made me stronger, not tired. I picked up Binah, draping her over my shoulder, and cast one sidelong look back at my haggard face and slumped shoulders before I limped away to the cold solace of my room.
The empty room seemed to hold the ghosts of every voice, every interaction I’d had in the past twenty-four hours. I set Binah on the bed while I found a spare set of gloves and looked down at her. She looked up at me with the same quiet wisdom I’d seen in Semyon’s apartment. That was what her name meant. Wisdom.
I saw the same depth in her eyes that I'd seen in Kutkha's... and that reminded me of him. As my attention shifted back, I could see him in my mind's eye.
“So,” I said aloud. “Kutkha. You have some explaining to do.”
The faded awareness of my Neshamah sharpened in the moment before his voice returned to me in the stillness of the room. “Do I, now? Do you think your own immortal soul is some fetch to be ordered about the place, Alexi?”
I walked to my altar and eased down to the floor in front of it. I couldn’t kneel, not with my knee the way it was, so I sort of leaned over until I could drop to my ass on the ground, legs in front. “Please, then.”
“Well, never let it be said that I did not care for my Ruachim. I will do my best to explain your circumstances, on one condition.”
"I didn’t know one’s own immortal soul set conditions for information." I reached across to beckon for the cat. "Before I make any more contracts with you, spirit, you need to prove you are what you say you are. ‘Kutkha’ is not even a real name. Kutkh was a Siberian culture hero and, I might add, a trickster.”
“That he was: I am an admirer of his. You could just as readily call me Prometheus or Lucifer—it matters not. None of them are my true name, but you don’t have a larynx capable of pronouncing the words which comprise it, Hu-Man.”
A ruffling passed through the room, a small breeze. Binah hopped down to the floor and came to sit beside me. She was watching something, her eyes tracking motion I could not see.
“What you do not see, Alexi, is that you must prove yourself to me. You feel the truth of my being here. You accepted the bargain. I am not yours: you are mine.”
“So, what is your condition, then?” I spoke cautiously. It was true that I had felt his arrival like a shattering, an epiphany, but spirits were often deceptive. I have never trusted feelings without evidence. I looked over at the collection of books around the altar table. Not a single one held the knowledge that could help me.
“You must eat eggs,” Kutkha said, after a suitably dramatic pause. “As many eggs as it takes to feel full. Then, you must shower and put yourself to bed.”
That was it? Before I could ask, the sudden desire for food overwhelmed all other thought. Fried eggs and sour cream. Ten minutes ago, I would have thrown up if I’d smelled food, but I found myself staggering up on my feet and limping to the kitchen before I really knew what I was doing, possessed of an impossibly strong desire to eat. Eggs, onions, sour cream. Greens, oh yes. Kale or spinach. How long had it been since I ate?
Aware that I’d been struck around the head, I started with two eggs. Five eggs later, I finally turned the stove off and leaned back from my plate at the kitchen table with a bulging stomach and surprisingly l
ittle nausea. I didn’t feel Kutkha’s presence again until we were back in the darkness of the bedroom and sprawled on top of the covers, stomach bulging. The rhythmic sound of the air conditioner washed over me in cool thrumming waves. I did feel better.
“So.” Kutkha seemed to speak from the ceiling over my head. “I suppose the first thing you want to know is how I come to be with you.”
“I want to know how to cast magic properly,” I replied tersely. “And why God, or this G.O.D figures into this.”
“Patience,” Kutkha replied. “GOD is a living organism which spans all known realities, of which every living thing is a single particle in its many billions of strands of genetic material. It does not have a HuMan face. It heeds no religion and knows nothing except itself.”
Having it laid out so blandly, so efficiently, was oddly challenging. “I think we’re talking about different gods.”
“There are no gods as you understand,” Kutkha said. “No heaven or hell. No angels, though there are demons.”
Just as well I was an atheist. I’d never found meaning in Judaism, the religion of my mother, or entertained joining the rest of the Brighton Beach locals at their stuffy Ukrainian Eastern Orthodox church. I had a powerful sense of there being more “something” within myself, and possessed theoretical knowledge of a lot of different faiths, and that was the sum total of my spirituality.
“And is this... information that Carmine knows?” I was dubious. He hadn’t really seemed like the philosophical type.
“That depends on his Neshamah and whether or not he listens to it,” Kutkha said. “Its age and experience. Its... motives... for empowering him. He seems like a powerful Phitometrist to you, but I suspect he has little Pressure behind his Art.”
“Pressure.” And Flow, which my Neshamah had remarked on before. I frowned, thinking. “If Flow is the ability to... release or control Phi, which I assume is magical energy, then I can make an educated guess and say that Pressure has to do with how much is in reserve.”
“Yes. A mage’s power is dependent on their Pressure. Phi is a fluid, like water. It is the sap that flows through your being, which is a mirror of GOD’s. Pressure is the amount of Phi you can keep in reserve. Flow is how that reserve is released. Though this feels like a revelation now, it has always been this way. Before Shevirah, Flow is… limited. The gate is closed. The key is pain of a very certain kind… the kind that exposes you to the concept of the Other. The kind which your shaman ancestors sought when they exiled themselves to the steppe.”
“I had shaman ancestors?” Binah hopped up beside me on the bed, folded herself into my armpit, and began to knead my shoulder. I closed my eyes, drinking in the sky-blue image-texture of her purr.
“Your mother’s blood is that of the People of the Reindeer in the far East, through her mother’s line,” Kutkha replied. “Your father’s line bears the Eyes of Tengri from the West. Have you never wondered at their strange color?”
I hadn’t. ‘The Sokolsky Eyes’, as my father had called them, were a very, very pale gray, almost white. At most, they were something people sometimes used to open a conversation with me. “And is that why I’m a mage?”
“No. Blood merely shapes the colors of your Art, and your blood is why I, of all possible creatures, am your Neshamah.”
Kutkh was the Promethean spirit of the Chukchi, the indigenous people of Eastern Siberia. He was a trickster, a creative, a fire-bringer and innovator – and if memory served – a pervert with a voracious sexual appetite. In other words, he was the least suitable Neshamah for a boringly routine virgin in New York. “Does this mean I need to change the way I do magic?”
“The language you use and the symbols you make are irrelevant,” Kutkha’s voice was more strident now, though still sibilant and ethereal. “You must merely free up the energy to fuel your will.”
I felt the corners of my eyes crinkle as I squinted up into the dark. “How? Carmine has magical tools, and those... summoned dogs of his. Can you do that?”
"No. And do not envy him, my Ruach." Kutkha was suddenly very serious and... uncomfortable. "The hounds are his own Neshamah. He is like a deformed baby born with their organs exposed to the air. He fancies himself and his Neshamah to be powerful, but only because his exposed virgin flesh has not yet been touched by infection. His time might come... whether in this lifetime or the next."
"So tell me how to do what he does," I said. "Don't hide from me, Kutkha."
"I plan to." In my mind's eye, he tucked his head under his wing. "But it is time for you to sleep."
"God, not you too. Kutkha-"
“‘Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?’” Kutkha recited the half-remembered verse in a softer voice. “‘Can you remain unmoving until the right action presents itself?’”
“The Tao Te Ching.” A pang shot through my chest. It reminded me of Vassily, alone in his room down the hall. “Verse Fifteen.”
“Yes.” Kutkha formed the word strangely, like an incantation.
“In other words, you’re telling me to shut up.”
There was no reply, save for a vague sense of amusement which might have been my own.
I had a feeling that my sleep was destined to be restless. The black sucked me under like thick mud, but I was lucid. I knew I was asleep when I could no longer hear the air conditioner or Binah’s rumbling purr. The brief period of unconsciousness ended when I was ejected from nothing onto a dusty sandstone floor.
The dust in my nose felt very real as I snorted it out. The hallway was cool, and as I lifted my face, a perfumed wind danced across my skin and ruffled the downy hairs of my face.
Ahead of me was a doorway, hung with gauzy drapes that ballooned shallowly on the air. Beyond them was a darkness so deep it throbbed. A flight of stairs was behind me, and I knew without a doubt that they led up to the usual site of my lucid dreams, that childhood house with the haunted, empty rooms. I turned back to face the passage ahead. I could see nothing past the threshold, and for some reason, my throat clotted with fear.
I pushed myself to walk, pass the drapes, and enter into a blackness so thick it pressed into my nose and mouth like fingers. It sucked me into a bell-shaped chamber, a natural cavern with walls that ran with pure water. A plain silver ring was set into the polished black floor, thrumming like a dynamo core. A small woman with her wispy mousy hair up in a twist stood in the center, stripped to the waist, a proud cant to her jaw, neck, and shoulders. In one hand, she held a crescent sickle. In the other, she grasped my father’s head.
“Nikla.” My hands ached. I stepped to the edge of the circle in disbelief, my feet wooden and klutzy. “Mother... you’re dead.”
My mother was a tiny woman, tiny and thin. I looked more like her than I did my father, her prominent cheekbones and the same large, fine-bridged nose. My eyes were the same odd white-gray as my father’s. Nikla’s eyes were the blue of a summer sky, and they blazed with a radiant inner fire.
“Oleksiy.” She uttered my name thickly, stressing it in the way it was actually meant to be spelled, instead of the way I’d learned to write it at school. “It is time for you to choose.”
“I already chose.” My voice rang out, echoing. I tried to move towards her. When my toes touched the silver line, it rippled, halting my advance. “I told Kutkha that I agreed. What else is there?”
“Understanding.” My mother’s voice was as I’d always imagined it, light and dry and sweet. “The NO-thing X’d me. It wants to X you, too.”
“Ex’d you?” I was rooted to the spot, staring at my father’s head. “Who?”
Nikla threw the head on the floor in front of me, beyond the threshold of the circle. It landed with a dull crack on the stone.
Grigori Sokolsky was a bulldog of a man, even in death. His violet tongue lolled from behind his teeth. His eyes were missing, torn from his skull, and ichor gushed from the empty sockets. As I watched, Hebrew letters etched themselves across h
is brow, as if they were being drawn through the pallid flesh with the tip of a knife. אמת. Truth.
“DOG is GOD backwards,” my mother said. “They’re coming for you.”
The black substance that leaked from Grigori’s eyes gurgled, slopping out with sudden force. The Aleph turned to an X. The remaining letters formed a wholly different word. Met. Death.
My extremities were buzzing. I took a step backwards. “You need to stop speaking in riddles. I can’t...”
The black stuff was creeping across the floor towards me in slow motion, crawling like a twist of worms. Grigori’s mouth worked, fishlike, and then retched a great ball of the stuff, hacking it onto the marble. The stone was black, but in the presence of the creeping oil, the marble seemed colorful, nuanced and reflective. Wide-eyed, I backpedaled as it reached for me from the ground. The dead man’s skull was beginning to dissolve and wheezed a tiny sigh as it crumpled. Metallic, insectoid things moved around inside the remains, stamping and needling one another as they strove to escape the brood.
“The Hunt.” When I looked up, the woman who had been my mother no longer resembled her. This woman was tall and dark-skinned, the good red-brown of rich earth. Her hair was the brilliant white of burning magnesium, falling in a straight liquid pour down her body to her waist. I couldn’t meet her eyes. They were a blue that had never existed in nature, impossible and terrifying. “The Hunt, Alexi, the endless question quest. They will X me. They X’d you!”
The black substance reared and lunged at me as I stumbled back and fled the room, back through the shrouded entrance and out into the sandstone hallway. It was strung in steely cobwebs, and in them hung chittering, shrieking insects. They had flat matte bodies and gaping pincer maws with needle-thin proboscises.
Let us X you, Alexi... X you X you X you X you X YOU X YOU X YOU X YOU!
I shouted at them wordlessly, covering my head. Things with too many legs fell on me, biting and sucking and feeding. I pulled one from my arm, and it came out with a thin plume of blood. The insect had my father’s face. I crushed it with a snarl, barreling up the stairs. On my way past, I rubbed myself against the walls, the doorway, trying to scrape them off. “Fuck you both! You’re dead! You’re all dead!”
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