Hound of Eden Omnibus

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “That is remarkable,” I said. “What about Lily and Dru Ross?”

  Zane’s wry expression crumpled into a frown. “They were first generation Elders. This was the first life where their Ka passed the initiation tests. Michael screened them for the Pathfinders, and John made them honorary Elders in his. They were very good people, you know? Really churchy, but they were never pushy about it. They just lived their lives… all the kids they raised never say a bad thing about them. A lot of them stay on at this boarding school in Texas.”

  More big words. This huge tattooed biker across from me had the vocabulary of an academic, soft-spoken and precise. “Did they have any enemies?”

  “Not that we know of,” Zane said. “That’s part of the problem.”

  I considered him while I ate, reluctant to let the food get cold. Every bite was ambrosia: fat and protein had been in short supply. “Lily could transform into a hyena. Female hyenas are powerful animals, perfectly capable of defending themselves if need be. I assume you can’t just… change on command?”

  The other man glanced to the side, discomforted. He was struggling between duty and necessity, an expression I could read on any face. I usually had difficulty with new faces, but his broad, bony features were surprisingly easy to watch. Zane’s features were very symmetrical and his voice was very deep, characteristics that helped my eyes to focus and bring the moving parts together with less difficulty.

  “Don’t tell Jenner I said anything about this, not until she gives the all clear,” he said, haltingly. “Okay?”

  “Men in my line of work don’t stay out of prison by being yentes.”

  Zane gave me the kind of odd look that meant he didn’t know what I’d just said, but he seemed to take it as a reassurance anyway. “Alright. Yeah, they could have changed any time they wanted. But like I said, they were only just initiated, and not that long ago. They’re sentient when they’re in Ka-Har, but a new Elder still isn’t able to control themselves the way Spotted Elk or Jenner can.”

  “I see.” Frowning, I motioned for him to continue. “So they would just become regular animals?”

  “We prefer to say ‘Ka-Har’ – ‘Soulform’ – but yeah.” Zane grimaced. “She turned into this barely sentient, huge, super-strong predator that eats antelope alive. They were probably worried about the kids.”

  “Well, yes… but even in dire circumstances?”

  “Shifting burns a lot of calories. Not that any scientist has ever studied it or anything, but I know that if you shift too many times too fast, you can starve to death… so I figure that must be what it is. The first thing you want to do is kill monsters. If there are no monsters or you were too hungry to begin with, the first thing you do is eat. If it’s bad enough, even an Elder can’t control it. You eat anything.”

  Even other human beings. I finished the unspoken part of the sentence. “I see. And this is universal to all shapeshifters?”

  “That I know of.” Zane shrugged his broad shoulders.

  I sat back, thinking it over, but the gnawing in my belly and the ache in my body was making analysis difficult. “Alright. I’ll sleep on all of this. Ayashe will be here GOD knows when, and we have a big job tomorrow. Today.”

  “I’m sure we’ll ace it.” He smiled, reserved and almost a little shy, and rose. “Come on… I’ll show you to the bunks.”

  I followed him through the house, closer to the ‘front’, where it faced out onto 5th Street. A wall had been knocked down between two rooms to turn it into one large room, and they had set it up like a post-apocalyptic barracks. Bunk beds were lined up along one wall end to end. There were lockers, a TV, and a row of glass museum cases. They held old uniforms, militaria, folded flags and banners, collections of Vietnam and Gulf War patches. There was a book with photos. It had been left open down the center to a grainy colored photo of four soldiers, standing in a line with their arms looped over the shoulders of the fellow next to them. They were all young, smiling, but already haunted with the entropic shadow common to Vietnam Vets. Mason was on one end, handsome but brittle. The man in the middle of the group was much younger and much lighter, but I recognized him as Big Ron.

  I moved to the next case while Zane got the bed ready. Another case held photos of a Vietnamese girl I assumed was Jenny. These photos were much poorer quality. She was wearing a hat that was too big for her, carrying a rifle that was far too heavy for her slender hands, standing between two American soldiers. She looked as square-jawed and proud in that image as she did now.

  “Jenner was a child soldier?” I turned back to find Zane stripping his shirt up over his head, and immediately turned back, red-faced.

  “Yeah. She’s had a pretty wild life.” His voice drifted back to me, while clothes continued to rustle and fall. I could smell him now, the sharp cologne I’d caught at the door to the club. “You should talk to her over a drink sometime. She loves to talk about all the things she got up to. Over and over and over.”

  “I don’t drink.” She was almost certainly the King of Swords I had identified in Talya’s tarot reading.

  “What? A Russian who doesn’t drink?”

  "Ukrainian.” I forced my hand flat on the glass to stop it from fisting up. Like I’d never heard that before.

  "What's the difference between a Russian and a Ukrainian?"

  I looked back sharply, expecting a punchline, but Zane's face was open, expressive. He was genuinely curious, and fortunately, he had redressed in pajama pants and a loose shirt.

  "Ukraine was annexed by Russia in a genocidal invasion soon after the 1918 Revolution," I said, clearing my throat. "They tried to destroy our language and culture, installed a puppet government, and claimed parts of the country because the people were already Russian speakers. My blood relatives fought against both Russia and the Nazis from the time they entered to the time they left, even while we were part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine is now independent."

  "Damn.” Zane blinked. "When did the occupation leave?"

  My mouth sloped to one side. "Earlier this year."

  "Right. Well, I get it now." Zane sat on the edge of his bed. It creaked under his weight. "Must have been a rough place to grow up."

  "I didn’t grow up in Ukraine." I shrugged. It was a land which I had never seen, but which had defined my life and Vassily's – socially, linguistically, culturally, gastronomically – from a great and shadowy distance. "But every man I know from there swears it is the most beautiful land in the world."

  “My dad said the same thing about South Africa.” Zane regarded me with the quiet curiosity of someone who knew they shouldn’t ask a question, but who wanted to regardless.

  I looked away first. “Are there any clean clothes I can borrow? What things I have are still in the Bronx.”

  “Sure. Check the locker. We can pick them up tomorrow, if you need.”

  Grateful he didn’t try to continue the conversation – and grateful that I didn’t have to say something curt – I went to investigate. There were some clean shorts in the locker, and a Metallica t-shirt which smelled like strange men. I could hardly bear to touch them, but they were still cleaner than my clothes.

  "You know, I always figured hitmen did lines of coke off their favorite strippers for kicks." I heard Zane roll over onto the bed. "Go gay-bashing or something."

  "Men with that kind of temperament don't last long," I said. "There're plenty of them – the city chews them up and buries them. Hardly any wet workers make it past their twenties."

  "You look a bit older than that. You're some kind of professional, then? Mafia James Bond?"

  I got a towel, wrapped it around my hips, and skillfully changed while staying mostly covered. It was a skill I’d learned going to the gym, the ability to strip and dress without showing skin. “As General James Mattis once said, ‘be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.’”

  “Lord help me, Alexi.” Zane groaned, and slung his arm over his face. “Turn ou
t the damn light.”

  I was already on my way there, and eagerly returned to my new bed. This was a moment to savor: the smoothness of relatively clean sheets, the spring and give of a real mattress, my first soft sleep in months. As I lay down, an ache spread through my lower back, my knees, my feet. Why my feet? Everything felt cold, stiff, in a way that made me wonder if my body was now irreparably damaged.

  Zane did not say a word once the lights dimmed. His breathing was audible in the sudden heavy silence, slowing with remarkable speed. Rain drummed on the roof, distant white noise wholly unlike the continual banging, rolling cacophony of droplets thundering on the thin metal shell of the dumpster.

  The weight of the last several weeks lay over me like a shroud. Vassily, Celso, Sergei, the escape. Huffing, I closed my eyes and tried to drift off… efforts that became more difficult as a muffled moan vibrated through the walls from the next room across. Mason and Jenner, by the sound of it.

  I pulled the covers up around my ears, jammed my head down on the pillow, and stared into the well of warm darkness ahead. Not long ago, I would have been able to see Kutkha in my mind when I relaxed enough, and as I thought about him, the sense of loss, of failure, threatened to drown me. Overlying that aging pain was the knowledge that I was lying to these people who were offering me charity. I wasn’t really a mage anymore, and I couldn’t really help them in the capacity they expected. Not without my magic. I could only hope we got it back before they noticed.

  Chapter 11

  I didn't remember falling asleep, and couldn’t remember what I dreamed. There was nothing but the dark and a terrible, roaring loneliness. When I roused, my eyes were gummy, mouth thick. The light coming in through the windows was reddish, an eerie and lurid New York City sunrise.

  "Morning, sunshine," Zane called to me from further back in the room. "I just got off the phone with Ayashe. She’s on her way with the file."

  Everything hurt. Everything. Arms, legs, spine. Very slowly, I peeled myself from the bed and sat on the edge of the bunk, staring at my toes. Survival had clearly come at a price. It is all very well to entertain ideals of self-sufficiency, to be resourceful... but it had cost me. “Already? What time is it?”

  “Six,” he said. “P.M.”

  I squinted at the window again. Sunset, not sunrise. Right. “When will she be here?”

  “About forty minutes. She had to pick up her kids and still has to cross the bridge to get here.”

  That gave me enough time to shower – again – and eat breakfast, exquisite luxuries after so much time spent scavenging. Zane had bought chicken and eggs and tomatoes, and by the time I was finished, I was ready to go back to bed. It wasn’t possible. First there was a Vigiles to deal with. Then, a firefight that would probably destroy whatever remained of my home and my health. Even with backup, it was going to be a long night.

  Ayashe arrived in a dark, sleek, expensive car that she parked right outside the garage window. Zane had left to go and do something, leaving me at the bar to nurse a cup of coffee in my now-relatively clean clothes. The Agent walked in jaw-first, short heels tapping across the floor. Her badge was still pinned to the front of her crisp black suit, and her collar was high and clean. My brief notion of having regained my dignity evaporated in its entirety before she’d finished crossing the room.

  “I’m not happy with this,” she said by way of greeting. She slapped a fat manilla file on the counter, and then a second sealed plastic case on top of that. “You have to read it here. I’ve got to take it back before ten.”

  The folder was blank, but the opaque plastic case was stamped with the symbol of the Vigiles: a stylized lion with a mane of sun-rays contained within a circle. “That won’t be a problem. Please open the case.”

  “What?” She squinted at me, nose wrinkling. “It ain’t warded.”

  “Call it a matter of habit, but mere street magi like myself don’t often feel the need to break the enchanted seal of a major arcane organization.”

  Ayashe huffed impatiently, but cracked it open for me regardless, laying out a collection of photographs in zip-sealed paper baggies. “Read the summary report first, then look at the photos. It’s better to have the background before you try to draw any new conclusions.”

  She was trying to teach her grandfather to suck eggs, but I said nothing and simply obeyed. While I read and digested the contents of the summary report – still a good forty pages of forensic legalese – Ayashe restlessly roamed the clubhouse. It was empty save for the two of us, and only she made noise, rooting through the room like a ferret hunting snakes. Every now and then, she went to peer out the window at her car.

  The shifters had summed it up fairly well the night before: The Vigiles had found a whole lot of nothing. It was a rare opportunity to look at their investigation process, and I was at least as interested in their methodology as I was in their report. They still relied heavily on physical forensic techniques, using acronyms that were familiar to me through my studies, with a shorter roster of non-standard protocols. They had bought a ‘verified occult expert’ onto the scene – and who knew what background they had – as well as a ‘transitional witness communicator’. All personal details of the experts and the victims had been whited out of the report – by Ayashe, no doubt. “Am I correct to assume that a ‘transitional witness communicator’ is a spirit medium?”

  “Yeah,” Ayashe grunted the word as she roamed around the pool table, fiddling with the triangle.

  The medium had not been able to contact the murdered victims or anything else in the house, though numerous ‘cold spots’ were located. The expert had identified the symbols drawn on the wall as a reference to Beelzebub and had left it at that. The organs I had listed off had been harvested from the bodies, and in addition to that, their eyes were also missing. The bed and bodies had been full of broken glass, and a second symbol had been found in the ensuite.

  I noted that Ayashe wasn’t on the investigation team – she was listed as a ‘Supernatural Community Liaison’, not as an active agent involved in the case. No wonder she was nervous and shifty about bringing the file here.

  Once I finished the report, I cracked open the first labeled pack of photographs and was confronted by a scene of slaughter. The photographer had started at the end of the bed where Lily and Dru had been found. Lily had been a fair-skinned, wavy haired woman, her face black with gore and obscured by wheat-brown locks that clung crazily across her eyes and neck. The man was swarthier. His mouth was open, his skull split, his face compressed into the waxy, slug-like pallor of death. They were lying side by side on the bed, as if they’d been deliberately arranged, and their bodies bristled with impaling spears of glass. Large shards, small shards, shards through their hands and the sockets of their eyes. The sheets were rumpled, the heavy iron rails of the bed scuffed and dented. Pictures had been torn off the wall for the killer to leave their message. It was the sigil of Beelzebub, easily recognizable, but it was surrounded by an incredible piece of geometry: a nineteen-pointed star within a circle, rendered with near perfection with nothing more than blood and patience. It was nearly five feet around. A ring of tiny flies were drawn around the ring – a hundred and fifty-eight of them, according to the accompanying notes.

  “Pretty impressive shit, huh?” Ayashe swung back around at my gasp. “They think it must have taken them a couple of hours, at least.”

  “You’re convinced it was multiple people?” I continued to browse. The close up images of the body weren’t so relevant to my work, but I studied them all the same. To my amateur’s eye, the corpses looked like they’d been hacked apart, not cut. Hacked… or just torn.

  “Had to have been. All the kids are missing, and there were footprints everywhere.” Ayashe rocked back onto her heels, leaning against the edge of the table. “I was called in because some of them were footprints from animals.”

  I glanced up at her.

  “My theory is maybe a bunch of the kids slipped their skins
from stress and started running around in panic. The people that did this rounded them up.” She drummed her fingers rapidly, nails clicking on wood. “None of those kids were Elders. No control after the change.”

  I found a picture of the second symbol. It was just basic text: ‘SOLDIER 557’. Someone had sketched it on the mirror over the bathroom sink, which was spattered with blood and shredded flesh. My first impression was that something had vomited there.

  “Were there any flies in the house?” I compared it with the larger design in the bedroom, frowning.

  “Nothing alive that anyone found. Pets and plants were dead.”

  I still had vivid memories of shooting Yuri Beretzniy in my apartment kitchen. When his blood spilled, every one of the plants on the kitchen sill had died. The smell of the magical corruption that animated his corpse had never quite left the room. “What about the smell? Was there a weird sugary sweet smell around the place?”

  “Yeah. Now that you mention it.”

  “Well…” I licked my bottom lip, leaning back on the stool. “The numbers they’ve used are very specific. Did your expert look into gematria?”

  Ayashe’s nose twitched. “No idea. If it’s not in the report, probably not.”

  “What is his area of expertise?”

  “He’s a priest. Part of the Order of Saint Benedict,” she replied. “One of those Catholic exorcist types. He identified all of the symbols for us and is chasing up the religious persecution angle… he thinks the kids were kidnapped by some dead serious Helter-Skelter cultists. He says they were juiced up on some kind of summoning magic. Maybe one of the perps was possessed. He thinks the symbol means that they’re tied up in Satanism… they might have hit Wolf Grove because of their church involvement.”

  “No, no…” I stared at the big symbol, the one that could have been rendered by an architect with tools. “No, this has nothing to do with religious persecution. There are many umbrellas of ‘Satanism’, but the majority of Satanists in America are either LaVeyan, who are atheists, or eclectic occultists. The latter tend to be young and poor… they become interested in Satanism because they’re disempowered, not because they have money for an op like this. This is the work of well-funded, well-trained people.”