“What?” His eyes narrowed at my hesitation.
“Nothing, Avtoritet, just refreshing some incantations appropriate for sticky situations,” I said. “Tell me what’s happened while I go get my tools.”
For a fleeting moment, Nic was taken aback. His shoulders jerked as he stuffed his hands in his pockets. Binah tried to stick her head outside the apartment, and Nic pushed her back with the flat of his boot. “One of our couriers was gacked tonight… went out to pick up a regular delivery.”
“And?”
“And the guys he was picking up from turned on him and tore him apart. Literally. They left some symbols drawn in blood on the ground. None of the other guys will go near it.”
This was literally the last job I wanted to have sprung on me on the morning of my departure. As I flew around my room and packed enough gear to look passable, I hastily cobbled together the only plan I could think of – shoot Nic in the back of the head, hide him in his car, get my disguise on and my things out of the house, and then fly out of New York as fast as possible.
My Neshamah's agitation was a continual rustling in the back of my mind. My stomach tightened, sour and tense, but I forced a nod and a grimace. “Fine. Wait downstairs. I’ll be ten minutes.”
To my surprise, he turned and swaggered off down the corridor without a backward glance. Nice to know he still had some kind of respect for me.
I closed the door and cruised back to my room in the dark. I hauled the bags to the door and went to my closet. It was still full of things I didn’t plan to take to Germany, including my shoulder rig, my Wardbreaker Colt Commander, ammo, and a suppressor. The Wardbreaker was an unnaturally silent weapon when charged and silenced, perfect for the job I needed to do. Most suppressed guns were still too noisy in close urban spaces, but the Wardbreaker’s purpose was to scatter and dissolve energy. When activated, the pistol sounded like an air gun or a Hollywood assassin’s pistol: nothing more than a flat ‘blip’ of sound. The magic reduced the Commander’s range, but not its torque. It still had plenty of that, enough to turn Nic’s head into a mashed tomato.
“Something is wrong,” Kutkha said. “I cannot see ahead.”
“In what sense?”
“I strive to perceive the near future,” my Neshamah replied. “Filaments of time lashing back and forth across our path. From these fractional glimpses, I may infer much of what is to come… but the Waters have become muddied.”
I fit a clip and screwed on the silencer, motions so rote that I didn’t have to look down at either one. My synesthesia translated the smell of oil and metal into a violet color-texture, a sensation I felt somewhere between my soft palate and tongue. I strapped it in to the shoulder harness, and pulled down a rarely used tool: a kukri. The heavy curved knife was over a foot long, oiled, the edge honed to perfect sharpness. It nicked the leather of my glove when I pressed my finger to the edge, no pressure required. “So be it.”
That was all I took with me downstairs. I emerged into the misty night, jacket open, and glanced across the street to place Nic. He was leaning against the driver’s side door of a white Cadillac Seville, smoke trailing off into the air. The back of his head faced me. I drew the Wardbreaker, and held it low against my thigh as the ghosts of the last month flickered through my memory. Nicolai smirking as he revealed masterstroke after masterstroke: Hooking Vassily on coke, keeping me indebted while he talked shit about me to the other men in the Organizatsiya. He’d been our mentor growing up, a friend to Mariya. She’d given Nicolai the keys to her car. He taught Vassily and I how to drive… raising us like wheat to harvest when the time was right. I had liked him, respected him. Now, I was going to cut him down. My hands weren’t even shaking.
I was about two thirds of the way across the street when time rippled… and stopped.
My foot did not fall on the ground ahead. Suddenly, I could hear everything in my body, feel things I couldn’t normally feel. My heart, contracting. My stomach, squeezing. My throat working, muscles bunching as I instinctively exerted with all my strength against the sudden inertia. My head, thrown up in alarm, moved in fractions of an inch through a single soupy drawn out second, and for that moment, I wondered if I had accidentally manifested magic I didn’t know I had.
Through the haze, I saw a tall, dark shadow move out from around the trunk of my car, standing and turning. His outline blurred and shifted, too fast for my slowed-down eyes to follow, but I glimpsed the shadowed plane of a featureless, flat mask through the fog. Nicolai was turning, his words made incomprehensible by slowness, as the half-seen stranger raised a pistol and pointed it at my face.
Nic lunged at the mage’s arm, shoving it across. My hand wouldn’t lift, and my mouth wouldn’t move fast enough around the word of power as the bullet flew from the barrel and pulsed through a cloud of smoke towards me.
My mind was not slowed. I forced the word forward through my will alone. “Chet!”
A thin blue cornea-like membrane, half-seen and fragile, spun itself ahead of me. With time slowed, I had the chance to see what it was that my intention created. The bullet hit the flimsy shield, shattering it like glass, and as it shattered, the projectile rebounded from it, flying straight back at the gunman. Right as Nic finally grabbed his sleeve.
The temporal vortex snapped with the mage’s concentration. I stumbled forwards at high speed, tripping over my own mass and smashing nose-first onto the road. White light flashed up behind my eyes. Blind with pain, I scrabbled up to hands and feet, only to be knocked down again by something heavy falling across my back. The blow sent me straight back to the ground and took the wind out of my lungs. I rolled over, drawing the kukri and lashing out with it. The thick blade barely turned the pipe Nic swung down at my face. It jarred my wrist: he knocked the knife away on the backstroke, and then he was on top of me.
Nic was strong and wiry, but he was old. As his fist came down, I turned my head, and he drove his knuckles into the bitumen instead of my nose. I bought my knee up between his legs and flailed with the hilt of the kukri, snarling with the effort. He guarded his face; it took him in the wrist, then the neck as his arm failed under the blows. I shoved him off and stumbled up to face the charging spook bringing the butt of his pistol down where my neck had been. I couldn’t see him clearly for his speed – unnatural speed disguising him in a tumble of dark clothes and bright red blood.
Blood. The bullet had cut him. I threw a hand up and tried to cast a spell, but the spook was supernaturally fast. Twice, I managed to dodge the corner of the pistol, but it finally took me in the temple and sent me staggering away.
My vision looped. Retching with sudden nausea, I wasn’t fast enough to evade the arm that wrapped around my throat from behind and cut off my voice.
“’Blyat! You didn’t hear Sergei, damn idiot suka!?” Nicolai spat from behind me as I struggled to keep my air and prize his arm from my neck. “Alive! He wants him alive!”
“Don’t speak to me like that. I advised your superior that he needs to be put down,” was the cool reply. “You saw what he did when-”
I got my jaws between Nic’s arm and my body, and bit as hard as I could. His flesh split under my teeth, and he howled. Blows landed against my back and head, and the world narrowed to that central point as both men closed on me. I ripped flesh from Nicolai’s wrist and turned, bestial, on the stranger. His hand got too close to my mouth. I snapped at it, biting down until something crunched.
But I was going down. The gravel on the road pierced my skin through my slacks as I fought up against their combined weight – the man who’d taught me everything, and the one who had no name. My teeth went numb, and the world turned black as they brought me to ground.
Chapter 3
Cold. Everything was cold, and stiff, and aching. The world returned in pieces, brittle moments of sensation. My hands and throat hurting. My head bumping rhythmically against something hard. My cheek was pressed against crunchy carpet, damp and prickly, vibrating with every
dip in the road. Then Nic turned a corner, hard, and my head rammed into the side of the trunk. Damp darkness overtook all.
The next sensation was shivers, cold metal, and then blinding hot light. The lamp burst through my eyelids like a punch to the face. As the world swayed into focus, recognition filtered in past the pain and incessant itching. I knew this room. The AEROMOR warehouse interrogation room was small, square, tiled white on the floor and all four walls. There was a drain set in the center. I was stripped to the waist, chained to a bar mounted near the rear corner of the room, on a hard seat that was bolted to the floor. The man and woman in front of me, they were also familiar. Terribly so.
Sergei reclined on a rickety office chair from the upstairs warehouse, hands folded on his belly. He had one leg crossed over the other, leaning back on his too-small seat with the presence and nonchalance of a king. And a king he was. He was pushing seventy and was still usually the largest man in the room, with a thick red beard and oiled red hair pulled back into a short ponytail. The Pakhun of the mafiya that bore his surname looked more Viking than Slav – a Viking in a gaudy red velvet suit that clashed violently with his hair.
Vera Akhatova stood at parade rest beside him, straight as a rail and just as hard. She was sinewy and strong, with taut freckled arms, a short bob of brown straw hair, and no obvious humanity. She carried two revolvers on her belt, one on each side. They were both loaded and primed.
“Well,” Sergei finally said. “Alexi Grigoriovich Sokolsky. We have come full circle.”
My head was clearing, slowly. Too slowly. I tried to call anger, energy, a word of power. Nothing formed in my mind, an empty echoing cavern. I felt empty, small, weak. Alone. Alone?
Where was Kutkha?
"We are presented with temptations in life, Alexi. Tests." Sergei laced his hands on his knee as he leaned forward. "Tests by which we judge a character of a man. Men in this business have to have mettle, hmm? The kind that lets them permit someone else to take charge without shame or suspicion. Someone who plays the long game, Alexi. Who knows what they are doing."
I lunged at him a little, snorting like a bull, and reached back for the core of me, for my magic… and failed. It was like trying to catch fish with my hands, and the slippery inability to turn inward sent a spike of panic straight through my chest. Adrenaline woke me up. "What… what have you done?"
Sergei blinked, once. "You went against your orders earlier this month. The men you nearly killed didn't remember that you broke into the safehouse, but that doesn't mean the memories weren't there. I examined them. I know you tried to take Vincent to the Manellis in exchange for Vassily."
Mealy-mouthed, I stared back at him in sullen, furious silence.
Sergei leaned forwards. “And then… what happened, Alexi? What was in that factory worth dying for?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
Sergei cracked a grin. His teeth were sharp… unnaturally sharp. Sharper than any human’s teeth had a right to be. “Come now, Alexi. No need to be sarcastic with me. Not when you’re here like this.”
Kutkha was not there. He was still linked to me – he had to be. I was alive, but I couldn't feel or hear him. I lowered my face, nostrils flaring.
“There wasn’t anything in that damn warehouse,” I growled. “Just a DOG.”
The word stirred him to his feet. Sergei sighed. He put his hands to his thighs and stood, creakily, looming over me. “I wanted to make princes out of you and Vassily. Lev warned me that having you grow up here, in America, would make you selfish and untrustworthy. Disobedient. He was right. You’re worse than a stray dog, Alexi. An ungrateful, worthless little bitch. Let’s try once more. What was in the warehouse?”
“The DOG that ate Lev.” I glared from under my brow. “So it seems like he wasn’t much of anything, either.”
Sergei chuffed, clapping his hands. “Did you hear that, Vera? Listen to this cockerel’s smart mouth, eh?”
Vera hadn't looked away from me, her thumbs hooked on her gun belt. At mention of her name, she straightened from her slouch like a puppet on its strings. I was still staring at her when Sergei swooped into my vision, caught my jaw in his calloused paw, and squeezed.
“Look at me.” His tone was guttural, and utterly compelling. My skin crawled, and pain lanced through my skull as my eyes were unwillingly forced to focus in on his own. They were a deep blue-violet, cornflower blue. The whites were yellow. The veins… the veins were black.
Sergei licked his bottom lip, and then bit it, pushing the point of a tooth through the thin skin. It cracked like glaze, and as the seconds passed, blood began to well up from his flesh. It was very, very dark brown. Orange-black, not red. It smelled… strange. Powerful. And despite myself, my mouth began to water even as my nose stung with the sudden, acrid odor, like ammonia and burned wax.
“What you don’t understand…” Sergei said, reaching up to dab his lip with his finger. “Is that I won’t just kill you, Alexi. I know you’re brave. Plucky, but weak. So no, I won’t kill you. I will erase you. One by one, you and your little incarnations across time and space will start to die, while you suck from my mouth like a crack-baby. You will do anything for my blood, and you won’t be able to stop yourself. You’ll do it until you, your soul, and your mind are nothing but dry, hollow puppets.”
Zarya had told me, her face bloody silver, that there were many Alexis. She had known one of them, but it beggared belief that Sergei knew this, not unless he’d ripped something out of my mind. I tried to twist away, but I might as well have fought the sky. Sergei smiled like Santa Claus as he shoved his fingers in my mouth and swiped his blood across my tongue. It was as sweet as opium, burning a hole into the nerves of my mouth. A rush flooded through my head and chest like ice water. The veil of glamour was pulled away from my eyes, and for the first time, I saw.
His face was the pallid cream of old parchment, and the violet color of Sergei’s eyes was lurid, his pupils drawn to thin vertical slits under the light. Trembling with chills, I forced myself to across to look at Vera. I saw her – really saw her – for the first time. She wasn’t just thin and weathered. She was taxidermied, her tanned skin pulled taut over her bones.
"She's dead." My voice cracked. Sergei’s lip was still bleeding, and I was drawn back to it, iron to the magnet. The dark orange trickle ran down to mix with the ginger curls of his beard. The smell was chemical and toxic and sweet, like someone lighting a crack pipe with a burning crayon. “And so are you.”
Sergei roared with sudden laughter. He had iron teeth set like bullets in his jaws, top and bottom. “It only took you thirty years to work that out, boy!” He slapped his thigh. “Human after all, aren’t you? Vera, show him your scars.”
She complied without question, hooking her thin hands under the edge of her tank top and lifting it up to her chin. Her torso was peppered with old scars and bullet holes, the latter stuffed with yellowing wool caulk. She had a single enormous tear from sternum to flank, on the heart side. It was dark and knotted, pulled together with rusted metal stitches, and sealed with a sigil burned into her flesh. Her dusky skin was puckered, like old leather. And no one had known. Not even me.
“It’s good work, isn’t it?” Sergei leered at me. “My lovely Vera. You are looking at one of Mother Russia’s unsung revolutionary heroes, Alexi. She was shooting Tsarists with a one-shot rifle when your grandfather was an infant. I recruited her just before the first World War.”
“Recruited.” All my life, I’d known Sergei was a monster of a kind. I’d known that the Organizatsiya laid machination atop machination, a constantly scheming, writhing morass of men trying to one-up each other while they one-upped the world. I knew that Brighton Beach was a tiny backwater, established in the USA like a military base, or a sleeper cell. But this… this was not what I’d expected. “How… old… are you?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” He mimicked my voice.
In shocked silence, Sergei returned to his cha
ir. He shucked his jacket off before he sat, and thumped his arm down on the armrest, staring at me haughtily as he turned it, palm up, to bear the inside of his elbow. Vera broke her place and went to him, mechanically rolling his sleeve up to expose the skin. He was tattooed from fingertips to bicep… cats, daggers, skulls, crowns, spades. The marks of kingship in the GULAG.
“What was in the warehouse, Alexi?” Sergei sounded calm, now. Reasonable, save for the audible clack of his metal fangs.
Vera was unwrapping a needle and syringe. My shoulders crawled with tension. “I told you.”
“Try again.” Sergei looked up, fixing me with a shark’s blank stare. As his eyes met mine, something clicked in my throat. My tongue twitched.
“Ah…Rr.. Rrrr…” I couldn’t stop. The words came up like contractions, like waves of nausea. I fought it, but was like struggling against the urge to vomit. “A… Rind. A Gift… Horse Rind.”
“Hrrrn.” Sergei made a sound low in his throat, and did not flinch as Vera slid the needle into his flesh. Now that I could see him for what he really was, Sergei’s skin was pallid, his muscles the texture of clay. There was no twitch of the skin as the needle slid in – only the tiny squeak of the syringe as Vera drew a full barrel of thick brown fluid. “Finally. And what was in this Rind?”
I fought for my Art, for a word or a gesture or something, anything, to spit in Sergei’s face. As his eyes blazed from across the room, the Hebrew letters would not resolve in my mind’s eye. There was no resisting him, not after he had made me taste his blood. “A… woman,” I said. “Not… human.”
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