“I’m not one of your membership, but I understand you need to take action,” he said, in a voice that was both remarkably light and remarkably calm. “Just remember that Lily and Dru are gone. It’s the children that matter now. Be careful.”
He left at a more sedate pace than his partner, audibly sighing as he closed the door behind him.
Spotted Elk stood from his chair. He was only an inch taller than me, which put him on the shorter end of the man-scale, but he had striking posture. Straight-backed, long-necked, head lifted and proud, I was strongly reminded of Zarya. It made my mouth water and my stomach pang.
“I want to meet with you alone, Rex,” he said. “When you’re ready, tell Talya that it is time… I will work it in to my schedule in the coming days.”
“As you say.” I inclined my head. As much as Ayashe talked over him, argued and raged, this man had still given the final order and she had still listened. There was something about these group dynamics I didn’t understand… something that was beyond my experience.
“Please let me know what your plans are as you make them. I have to get some sleep, or this week will be unbearable. Well met.” Spotted Elk bowed his head, motioned to Talya and the other Fires people, and left the room.
Talya smiled at me as she moved to follow, and mimed a phone beside her ear with little finger and thumb with a bird-like cock of her head, leaving me alone with four shapeshifting bikers in an otherwise empty room.
“Well, wasn’t that a blast?” Jenner clapped her hands together. “Now that Agent Asshat and Officer Jeebus have left the building, I think it’s time for a drink. You smoke, white boy?”
“Me? No.” The sudden quiet was more than just psychological relief. I felt more at ease around these people: Bikers were just another kind of muzhiki, tough guys, though I had never met a mixed gang with a female leader before. “No smoking, no drinking, no drugs.”
“No joy,” Duke said.
Mason laughed briefly, a warm, deep sound. “Is that why your name’s Rex? Are you a good boy?”
“Perish the thought,” I said.
Jenner flicked a Camel out of her pack, and offered it to Mason. He took it and pulled a banged-up Zippo from his vest pocket. Zane passed on the cigarette when his President did the same for him, a motion as ritualistic as Jenner taking it for herself.
“So,” Jenner said, leaning over so that Mason could light for her. “Give us the real deal. Who are you?”
“I didn’t realize I was so transparent,” I replied.
“I’ve been around the block a few times, Rex.” Jenner leaned back, eyes hooded. “More than a few times. Give it to us straight.”
“As a preface, I ask you give me the benefit of the doubt.” I began to move surreptitiously towards the window. “When I told Zane, and he nearly jumped his skin.”
“Haha, funny,” Zane said.
“Sorry. That wasn’t intentional.” I opened the window. The runners were stiff, and the frame squealed as I let in the fresh air. “My name is Alexi. Alexi Sokolsky, formerly of the Yaroshenko Organizatsiya.”
Jenner drew deeply on her smoke, exhaling out her nose. “The who-in-the-what now?”
“The Russians,” Zane replied. “That Red Hook and Brighton Beach Mob.”
“Ohh.” Jenner’s eyes lit up. “Ohhhh. Well, yeah. Consider my doubt given.”
“What’s your story?” Mason crossed his arms, chewing something on the inside of his lip.
Selling the benefit was hard when you didn’t have any benefits to offer. I hadn’t told them about losing my magic… but then, if I got hold of my tools and a first aid kit, I wouldn’t need to. “I was… this July, there was a murder in our territory, a murder which could have led to a war between us and the Manelli and Laguetta familia. I had to look into the death and also find another missing person. I found out what was going on, but I decided to put the health and safety of the people endangered by these events over my boss’ plans for conquest. He decided I needed a forcible retirement about three, four weeks ago.”
“Right. So was it four or three weeks ago?” Mason asked.
I shot him a dark look. “I’ve been hiding out on the street since I escaped my boss’s torture dungeon. Timekeeping hasn’t been my number one priority.”
“Huh.” Mason looked unconvinced, but he was tuned in to Jenner, and she was unperturbed. Zane was watching me watch them.
“I cruised my apartment last week. It was occupied,” I continued. “They might have someone camped there, waiting for me. But I don’t imagine there are many people by this point. My familiar may be dead, but if nothing else, I can reclaim the tools that will help me do this job for your people.”
Jenner’s nose wrinkled. “You can’t tell if your familiar’s alive or not? No spooky action at a distance?”
I shook my head. “No. And I’m sorry, but if she’s dead… I’m going to kill every man in that apartment, and none of you will be able to stop me.”
“You’d kill people over a cat?” Zane seemed genuinely surprised.
I stared back at him. “That cat is worth five of those ava’ram assholes.”
“Hell yeah,” Jenner said. “Suits me. I can’t stand to leave a fellow pussy in danger.”
Mason actually smiled. “I get it, Rex. Believe me. You had her a long time?”
I wasn’t sure if they were trying to make me justify my price for helping them, but it sure felt like it. “Not that long. I picked her up during one of my last high-profile jobs. A traitor to the organization… he sold out my best friend and had about five other guys killed. The Italian Mafia, the FBI… he didn’t care. Binah was his cat. I felt responsible for her.”
“Yeah.” Jenner sighed, “I know that feeling. Well, we got flak vests, machetes, and shotguns, so let’s get moving. Duke! Go get the shotguns!”
“Ay-ay, captain.” Duke drew his feet together and saluted, then turned to march out the door.
“Wait. No.” I held up a hand. “Shotguns are out. Guns are out. This is an apartment. And I’m not able to do this tonight. I need to sleep in a bed for a change, I need to get my things… and I want to review the case file. Once I’ve seen the photos and read the Vigiles file, I’ll know if this is something I can handle.”
“What? You been sleeping rough?” Jenner frowned.
Unable to reply, I nodded. Once.
“Guy like you, I figure you’d just whack someone with money.”
“I prefer the street to prison,” I replied. “The food is better.”
“Fair enough. Well, you can crash here.” Jenner shrugged her thin shoulders. “It’s no skin off my ass. Zane’ll put you to bed. Get you some hot chocolate and your woobie, tuck you in.”
“Maybe a little cuddle.” Duke wrapped his arms around his own chest and did a little pirouette.
“My foot could give your face a little cuddle,” Zane growled.
The four of them laughed and I smiled, but there was a bittersweet sting to the scene and the moment of pleasure passed. Shit-talk had been one of the things that characterized the old life, and all gangs had in-jokes and things that got everyone laughing. It had taken me a long time to get used to it, to know when I was really being disrespected and when it was an invitation. It was part of the Thieves’ World, and I was no longer included.
Jenner grinned toothily. “Seriously though, Zane can show you around. He’s camping out here, too. House rules are pretty simple. First rule is-”
“Don’t talk about bike club,” Duke said.
Jenner shoved him. “Don’t kill anyone on the carpet, don’t drink all the beer, don’t stink up the place with crack, and don’t give anyone an STD. Easy.”
“I assure you that there’s no chance of that,” I replied. “I’m practically a monk.”
Duke grinned. “You get down on your knees for old guys every night?”
“Hey now, don’t be judging a man’s fetish,” Jenner said.
I arched an eyebrow. “If you ne
ed to confess, I can fix you up with a Hail Mary and a high speed nine-millimeter indulgence.”
That earned a laugh. Mason smiled, and it reached his steely gray eyes. “Looks like you’ll fit right in here, Rex. Think you can do the apartment job tomorrow?”
Something hardened in me. It was a curling sensation in the mouth, a predatory pressure in the teeth. It was the feeling of impending revenge, served cold and bloody. “I’ll be ready by tomorrow night… you can count on it.”
Chapter 10
That night, I had my first shower in close to a month.
The showerhead was old, sputtering out the sides, but I stood under the streaming hot water and shook until my bones rattled. I had been washing in the rain, in the sinks of corner store bathrooms and public toilets, but it had not been enough. I scrubbed the built-up calluses from the backs of my heels until they turned pink, and gave my head a fresh shave. The water turned gray with dead skin and the detritus of the street, and I was wracked with spasms of relief so intense that they bought sounds from my throat. Short, huffing moans, tics and shivers… not only of pleasure, but of painful release.
The mirror over the sink revealed the damage done. I had always been short, burly and pale, but now my eyes were sunken, my cheeks hollow. My skin was bad: dry on the brow and chin, oily everywhere else. I looked hard and feral and disused. The comfortable polish of suburbia had been worn away, layer by layer, until only the animal remained.
When I was ready, I decided to finally try to get a proper look at my stomach. This was the first time I’d really dared to look at or think about the seal that Sergei had placed on me. I hadn’t been willing to try to operate in the conditions I’d been surviving in – an open wound and no antibiotics was not my idea of a good time.
The blood used to draw the sigil was long gone, as were the stitches. What remained was a strange symbol that looked like a fanged mouth with a connected crown. It was slightly raised, a shape formed by black-violet ropy cords of something that was eerily visible under the fluorescent tube light. They were only just under the skin.
It had to come out. I was no stranger to self-surgery: everything from digging out splinters to setting bones and removing bullets. There was sterile equipment here, but for a shallow incision like this, I could make do with the straight razor, tweezers, and soap.
I washed the tools in the sink and then sat on the edge of the bathtub, pressing around the lines to feel the contour and depth. As if sensing my intent, they creeped and wriggled against my fingers.
“Shut up.” With steady hands, I brought the edge of the razor to my belly, got the tweezers ready, and pressed in to make the first cut.
The lines jerked, and my abdomen spasmed. I doubled over with the sudden flash of cold stinging pain. The urge to claw at my stomach was nearly overwhelming, but the more I pawed at it, the more it hurt. I gulped for air and forced myself to stretch it out the way you would any other muscle cramp. When I took the blade away, the pain stopped.
“You want a fight? I’ll give you a fight.” Flushed with adrenaline, I tried it again with much the same result. This time, the parasite – good GOD, it really was a parasite – thrashed until I retched with pain.
I stretched out through the cramping again, clutching the towel around my waist. In the mirror over the sink, the legs of the corona moved like tentacles as they settled back into place. It wasn’t coming out.
I scowled at my reflection. “Wait until I get Lidocaine and a scalpel, you little son of a bitch.”
Now that I was clean, my clothes looked faded and worn, and they smelled bad – like metal and old sweat. They were still all I had to wear. Grimacing, I pulled on the t-shirt, jeans and sweater, rolling the sleeves to my elbows before I pulled on the gloves. The cable-knit sweater had fit me once. Between wear and weight loss, it was baggy in the body and sleeves. I hadn’t looked this poor since I was a boy.
From deeper within the house, I heard voices and smelled cooking. There were probably more boarders here besides me and Zane. I waited in the darkened hallway outside the bathroom for a little while, uncertain if I should join them or not. After so much solitude, my social navigation was at an all-time low. It wasn’t going to get better without practice, though. With a deep sigh, I headed for the kitchen.
Zane was alone. He was prowling restlessly around the kitchen, a cordless handset jammed between neck and shoulder while he listened and ‘mm’hmm’d to whoever was on the other end of the line. He had stripped down to a black wifebeater, revealing arms that were covered in greenish-black tattoos. A mandala disappeared around his shoulder. Tiny, intricate, beautifully executed calligraphy wound around his upper arms and forearms in a solid sheet of lettering. It almost looked like magical scripture of some sort.
Belatedly, I noticed there was a pan of bacon and eggs on the rusty gas stovetop. I pointed at it enquiringly, and he gave me the thumbs up. Grateful for the reprieve, I slid some onto a plate and took them to the other side of the table.
“Yeah, alright. Next Saturday. I’ll let you know if anything comes up, alright? Okay, thanks.” Zane held on for another couple of seconds while the handset yammered, then clicked. With a sigh, he hung up.
“Must be urgent if they’re calling you this late,” I said. “It’s after four.”
“That was work,” he replied. “Got a fight booked next weekend. About time, too – I haven’t had a gig in a couple of weeks.”
“You aren’t on a roster?” I doused my eggs in Tabasco, pepper and salt. They smelled so greasy that I wasn’t sure I could hold them down, not after weeks of monotonous sandwiches.
“I’m still building a rep in New York,” he said. “A lot of these fights aren’t really formalized until the week before. If I’m lucky, I’ll land an agent. Kickboxing isn’t exactly mainstream, though.”
“Using your feet in boxing is generally frowned on.”
“Nah, kickboxing isn’t English boxing. Kickboxing is a whole other thing… its proper name is Muay Thai. Comes from Thailand, as you might have guessed.” He smiled. “Jenner got me into it.”
“She’s Thai?”
“No. Vietnamese. But her family relocated to Thailand after the war. She ran her first gang in Chiang Mai, then she came over here. Funny thing is, the first time I met her was when I was in Thailand on holiday. It’s funny how that kind of thing happens… she says that Weeders always find a way to meet each other.”
“Shapeshifters subscribe to fate?” I arched an eyebrow, and tried my first forkful of eggs.
“I think it’s the reincarnation thing.” He glanced at my plate. “Is that okay? I probably should have asked if you ate bacon.”
I held up a hand for a moment’s pause, savoring the taste and the glide of yolk on my tongue. “You have no earthly idea how much I’ve missed real food.”
Zane sat back, watching me eat with his arms loosely folded across his broad chest. He was as muscular as I’d suspected, gym-cut and sculptural. “So… how does a guy like you end up on the street?”
“Any number of ways,” I said. “The current Avtoritet of Brighton Beach is ex-Spetznaz, and far too intelligent for my continued health. Hotels were the first place he’d look, and half the hotels in New York are mafia-operated. Sleeping rough is something he’d never expect me to do. Secondly, I was kidnapped from my home before I could get any of my belongings, money included. Someone found my go-bag. I spent so much of my life paying off my father’s debts that I never really invested in property.”
“I have to agree with Mason, though. I figured a guy like you would just kill someone and take their stuff.”
“There’s security cameras and cops everywhere since the Central Park Jogger incident.” I chewed thoughtfully for a space. “Besides that, killing people you don’t know is murder. It is not something you undertake lightly.”
“What? And killing people you know isn’t murder?”
I paused for a moment. “Not the kind of people I knew.”
Zane snorted, and shook his head.
“It’s irrelevant now.” I shrugged. “More relevant are you and your people. I don’t know the first thing about shapeshifters.”
“We’re secretive as all hell, even among ourselves,” Zane replied. “Privacy is a big deal, and for good reason. Witch hunters, Inquisition types. Some crazy pred shapeshifters seek out prey shifters to hunt, specifically because they think eating them will make them stronger. The Covenant of Ib-Int is meant to protect us from each other as much as from norms.”
“Huh. That makes a certain sick sort of sense.”
“I guess. The government used to hunt us down, poison bullets and everything. Now they corral us into programs like the one Ayashe was talking about. It’s pretty classified stuff, too… that’s why she’s always so strung out. She’s trying to balance two secret worlds that are still in conflict.”
“I never knew.” Shapeshifters were common lore in the study of magic, but the lore conflicted across different books and different time periods. “Would you say shifting is a form of magic?”
“Not really,” Zane said. “But I can’t say any more. That’s part of the Ib-Int, the ancestral laws. They’ve been passed on from Elder to young for like six thousand years, at least. Only Elders are allowed to talk about this stuff, and I’m not an Elder.”
“What defines an Elder?” I folded the bacon and took a mouthful. Whatever cultural guilt I might have felt passed as soon as the flavor hit.
“Like Michael said, the human changes, but the animal stays the same. You reincarnate over and over again. Each time, the Ka gets a bit smarter. Enough times around the wheel, and it starts to remember things from lifetime to lifetime. Someone like John or Jenner can have memories reaching back eight hundred years or more.”
I tried to imagine it. Maintaining a single set of memories was difficult enough. Everything I’d learned growing up, all of the mistakes I’d made, the people I’d known, the things I did. I had an excellent memory – practically photographic – but too much thinking on the past was tiring and difficult. What would it be like to have a second set of memories overlaid over the top of all of that? A third? Five? Twenty? Entire human beings, their experiences linked only by the animal soul that ran, unchanged, through each cycle. It was a wonder they weren’t all as mad as hatters.
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