Each word ground harder and tighter, until a choked sound of wordless fury forced itself out and I had to, HAD to lash out. My foot hit one of the cheap fold-out chairs and kicked it across the room to smash into the far wall. It wasn't enough. "FUCK!"
I swept the table and turned it, kicked it. Only when it was broken, the glassware destroyed, did I return and remember that Zane was watching in silence from the doorway. Duke was back further down, rattling the door to Vassily’s room. It was locked.
"We need to get in and out of here, Rex." Zane’s voice was low and solemn. "These guys aren't the kind of men we want to have to shoot out with. Not in a-"
My ears twitched, and I held a hand up, trying to see if I was hallucinating in my fury. But then I heard it again, the sound of a distressed cat meowing from a distance. “Wait. Can you hear that?”
“I hear it,” Jenner said. She passed me, turning her head. If she’d had a tail, it would be flicking. “Is it outside?”
“The balcony.” I drove past her back into the laundry, and pushed the curtain away from the glass doors that led outside, heart hammering. I cracked the door, and the muffled wailing sharpened in volume and pitch: the frantic, deep-bodied ‘waow, waow, waow’ ambulance siren call of a Siamese cat.
Binah’s intelligent white eyes gleamed at me through the narrow mesh of a cramped hutch strewn with splintered chicken bones, dried and fresh feces, and bits of rubbish. She looked like an anorexic rat: skinny, covered in sores, and – as I closed in and got a good look at her – mostly bald. Her fur had been shaved off in uneven patches. The sores were from where she had been burned with cigarettes. The lock was just a simple slide bolt, but not anything a cat could open.
“Binah...” With shaking hands, I pulled my gloves off and opened the cage. The pain of the cold metal against my fingers was inconsequential. “Come here, Binah.”
I extended a hand in towards her, but not too far. Binah’s nostrils worked as she meowed, but for several long seconds, she didn’t approach. When she finally did reach her head forward to sniff properly, her flanks began to vibrate with shivers. As awareness filtered in through her pain, she tentatively butted my hand with her head and began to purr.
“That’s a girl.” I dropped my voice, low and soothing. “Come here, Binah.”
Slowly, very slowly, Binah came forward, a skeleton held together with skin and tendon. Carefully, I scooped her up and held her to my chest.
“Alright, Rex. I take it back.” Zane’s voice rumbled out behind me. “We kill those fuckers. Every last one.”
“We need the bags.” The rage was starting up in me again. My face and hands were hot. “Search. Bags. We'll leave. Go secure the front door.”
“Hey, guys?” Duke called from back in the house.
Zane looked back for a moment, then refocused on me. “Where are the bags?”
"Bedroom." Every word pulled from my throat with hooks. I wanted to wait in here like a trapdoor spider for the miserable shitstains to return. They’d tortured my familiar. "Closet. Up top. Suitcases… a briefcase, silver. The medical kit. Get them all."
I tried to put Binah inside my coat, but she immediately wriggled free. She clawed her way to my shoulder the way she always did, and her purr grew in intensity and power as she arched her body against the side of my head. I could feel her ribs through her skin as they pressed into my cheek.
“Hey! Rex!” Duke called from the kitchen a second time. “This door here is locked. Jenner wants to know if we should smash it open or what.”
There were only two doors in my house that had key locks: The front door and Vassily’s room. My chest tightened painfully. There were still things of his in there. The thought of Vanya using his room for anything made me sick to my stomach. “Wait. That’s my friend’s old bedroom. There’s a trick to the lock.”
The front door was open. Zane was out loading goods – Jenner and Duke were waiting for me by Vassily’s bedroom door, Kir sprawled out at their feet. Their expressions were grim.
“Here.” I passed Binah to Duke, and then braced myself in the threshold. I took a step back, twisted the knob, and rammed my shoulder into it. The lock clicked and gave way under the force, sending me stumbling in, where I stopped cold in confusion and horror.
Chapter 13
The sheets were rumpled and… bloody. All of the photos had been swept off the dresser, replaced by bottles of vodka, bourbon and red pepper horilka. Vassily’s things had been carelessly thrown into the corner in a pile. There were handcuffs attached to the head of the bed… there was a video camera on a stand.
“What in the fuck..?” Duke trailed off as he and Jenner followed me, circling out and around.
“Was, uh… was this always like this, Rex?” Jenner drew up beside me, machete in one hand, Kir’s H&K slung over her shoulder.
“No.” Haltingly, I went to the camera and turned it on, swiveling the replay screen out from the side of the camcorder. I rewound the cassette tape back until it clicked, and then set it to play.
A young girl with a sprawl of waist-length, curly red hair was handcuffed to the bed. She was ten, if that. She was in her underwear, her face slathered in makeup, and she was crying.
“Jesus Christ.” Duke was watching over my shoulder. “That’s Josie. That’s one of the Wolf Grove kids.”
I wanted to switch the camera off and turn aside, but I forced my mind calm and waited. After a minute or so, an adult man walked onto the screen. I paused it on the clearest frame of his arms and back, trying to ignore the girl in the background. The man was hooded and masked, but he was also tattooed. I leaned in to examine the grimy picture. It took a few seconds before the image resolved: a five-point onion-domed cathedral set over a grinning leopard’s head. It was brandishing a knife in one paw, set below a banner that I knew read: “Take out bitches, stool pigeons, and traitors!”
“That’s Kir. The guy Jenner knocked out in the hall.” I was sick to the pit of my stomach, my voice dull with shock.
“What the fuck was that?” Jenner came up beside me, her face drawn. The mischief was gone. Her eyes were hard and dark. “Who’d I knock out?”
“Kir was filmed with this little girl.” I rubbed my face. “Give me the machete and drag him in here. He’s going to answer some very pointed questions.”
Jenner bared her teeth, a double sneer that momentarily transformed her face into something bestial. “I can do it.”
“No.” I extended my hand to her. “These are my people. I’ll do this.”
Jenner’s eyes were black and hard with anger, but she handed the oiled blade to me and turned without a word. Duke gave Binah back, then went out and dragged the semi-conscious man into the room by his ankles. Zane followed behind, having returned from outside, and watched in confusion as Duke and Jenner threw Kir onto the bed. They cuffed his hands and locked the bracelets.
While he recovered, I got some of Vassily’s old clothing out of his wardrobe and lay them on the ground, setting Binah on top of the makeshift bed. She was so tired and weak that she simply lay down without any protest, her flanks heaving.
I went back to the bed. Kir moaned, writhing slowly on his back. I slapped his cheeks, then reached across for the bottle of horilka on the stand and tipped it over his face. The spicy liquor splashed him in the eyes and up his nose, and he came up gasping and spluttering, swallowing blood and booze. His eyes opened… and when they focused on my face, his pupils pinned.
“You,” he rasped. “How the fuck are you still alive?”
“They called me The Magician for a reason, Kir.” I spoke Russian, our shared language, while I tapped the blunt edge of the machete across my other palm. “How have things been? Raped any children lately?”
“Fuck you. Lousy bitch!” He spat at me.
I used the machete like a shield, caught the wad of mucus before it hit me, then bought it down broadside onto his nose. He yelped, rattling the bed. Blood burst from his nostrils like juice from a berry. I
poured more of the pepper-infused spirits across his face, and he shouted in fresh pain.
“Speak when you’re spoken to,” I said. “Where are the kids you took from Yonkers?”
Kir strained up towards me, his face a mask of blood and fury. “How the fuck do you think I’d know that? The fuck you think I’d tell you anything, you fucking homo, you traitor-dog…”
I used the point of the big knife to press him back down by his Adam’s Apple. Then, I left off his throat, and leveled the point of it right against the crotch of his pants. He sucked in a sharp breath.
“Shut the fuck up before I cut this off and feed it to you so that you can taste cock one last time,” I said. “Where. Are. The children?”
He snarled and lunged at me, but stopped short when the point of the machete dug into the nerve bundle it was set against, a nexus of nerves just above his pubis. I looked back to Zane.
“See if you can find a blank tape, and set the camera to record,” I said in English. “Kir is going to tell us a little story.”
Zane nodded and began to mess with the camera. I looked across to see Duke frozen in the doorway. His jaw was clenched so hard that the muscles in his neck bulged.
“Blyat’, pizda.” Kir spat again, spraying his own chin and chest with spittle.
“Do you remember why they call me Molotchik, Kir? Do you remember what I did to my father?” I looked down at him, twisting the point of the machete until the tip worked through the weave of his sweatpants and dug into the delicate skin of his groin, right in the join of pubis and thigh. He jerked against the handcuffs and froze. “You have five seconds to tell me what operation Vanya is running here. For every second that goes by, I will push this knife in deeper.”
“Fuck your–”
I twisted and pushed until I felt the skin of his pelvis bow, then give under the relatively dull point of the machete. He broke off into a scream.
“Four.” I pushed again, deeper.
Kir screamed a second time, his voice dry and hoarse. The others were hovering behind me, stunned into silence.
“Okay, what!? Stop… What do you want from me-AAAHHH?!?
“Three,” I said. “How did you get the children, Kir? Speak English.”
Panting quickly, Kir looked down. Blood was beginning to spread through the weave of his pants. It was only embedded into his body a quarter of an inch or so, but that bundle of nerves just below the surface was to protect the bowel wall from traumatic injury, and they were very twitchy. I twisted the point, just a little.
“Drugs! Cargo!” He stuttered the words out in a thick accent. “Kids! Take it out, Molotchik. T-Take it out!”
I kept my hand on the haft, feeling the muscles of his abdomen spasm around the blade. “Tell me about the kids.”
“They is f-for movies,” he stammered. “Vanya Kostyovych… he sells the movies. The kids.”
“Where does he keep them?” I lifted the knife a little, permitting him with some relief. He exhaled sharply. If he’d known how small the wound really was, he’d be ashamed.
“Everywhere, Alexi, I don’t fucking know!” He babbled in Russian, unable to keep his English in his terror. There was blood on the tip of the machete.
“English.”
“Ask him! Ask Vanya and Avtoritet. We just… hold them here… we film the fuck…”
Before I could stop him, Duke surged forward. “You fucking mongrel piece of SHIT!”
He got in two good punches on Kir’s head before Zane was on top of him and pulling him away. Duke snarled, writhing in the larger man’s grasp and thrashing like a wildcat. His eyes turned bright gold, pupils drawing to slits.
“Duke!” Jenny shouted his name as Zane hauled him back. “Duke! Cut it out!”
But he couldn’t hear her. He snarled again, deeper and throatier as he shoved himself away from Zane’s chest with an explosive burst of strength. Zane stumbled and hit the wall hard enough that a crack tore through the plaster, and Duke’s back bowed, distending like an underwater explosion before his body burst with a wet welter of clear fluid and shredded clothing. The transformation from man to leopard was so fast, so incredibly fast, that I didn’t actually see it: just the two hundred and fifty pounds of tweaked-out fanged fur and muscle flying at my face.
Chapter 14
I stumbled out of the way of the oncoming leopard, swiping with the machete. He wasn’t interested in me: he landed on Kir. The trapped man screamed a blood-curdling, high-pitched pig squeal that cut when Duke slapped his lower jaw with his forepaw and almost casually tore it off his face. It hit the opposite wall in an arc of gore and bounced, sending Binah scattering from her nest of clothes.
A tiger – fully twice the side of the cat who had quite literally ripped this man’s face off – charged past me as I backed as far as the floor allowed for. The tiger leapt onto Duke’s back, pulling him off to the floor to roll, snarl and tumble over the ground. The camera was taken to the floor, smashing open.
Duke was no match for the bigger cat, but fought anyway. They hit the window and burst through it in a shower of glass and plaster, screeching out on the fire escape. The leopard, bloody and panting, tried to clamber back into the room as the tiger caught it around the torso with paws the size of dinner plates and lay on top of it, pinning its comparatively small body to the floor. Comparatively. One was the size of a very large mastiff; the other, the size of a pony.
“Fucking hell, Duke!” Zane’s shouting finally cut through the racket. He surged forward, trying to help Jenner restrain the hissing, spitting leopard. The Twin Tigers moniker made sense now.
I rushed to Kir’s side. He was convulsing, fingers opening and closing spasmodically as his body flopped on the bed. His lower face was simply gone, his throat open, his guts torn out from his belly like so much offal. He was going to die, and I wasn’t much inclined to try and help him.
Duke was helpless under Jenner’s bulk. He yowled and clawed at the floor, but the club president, in her animal form, was far larger and far stronger. When he finally calmed down, she let go of the scruff of his neck and looked at me with an alien intelligence. It was Jenner and not-Jenner at the same time. It was like looking at someone’s Neshamah.
"How the hell are we going to clean this up?" Zane's voice had a note of hysteria. He pushed both hands over his shaven head. “Jenner, Duke just fucking killed someone!”
“Forget about him. We have to get out of here,” I said. “The cops will be here any minute. Don’t touch anything, for GOD’s sake. The more we touch, the longer we stay, the more evidence we leave." If we were lucky, the Mafiya itself would be blamed. I wasn’t stupid enough to have bought an apartment under my own name, but the police had any number of ways they could identify me. I’d lived here for most of my life. They’d find something I had missed. “I have to get some things.”
“I got your suitcases and the medical kit. They’re in the car. Give me the cat.” Zane held his arms out.
I bundled Binah up in Vassily’s old suit jacket and handed her to him. She was too tired to resist or care, and her frailty was evident in his huge hands. “Don’t waste too much time.”
Lights had turned on in the house across the street. Shit.
Duke shuddered, and went limp under Jenner’s weight. When she was satisfied, the Siberian tiger stood upright on her hind-paws. Limbs and fur folded back into her center mass as bones popped and changed shape, expelling clear, sweet smelling gel that splattered to the ground. It was both grotesque and oddly elegant, every part moving smoothly into place. The clear gel fell to the floor in clumps, vanishing almost as soon it touched the bloody carpet and taking the blood and dirt with it. I recognized the high, mouthwatering floral smell of the stuff over the stench of viscera. It was Phi. Weak Phi, compared to Zarya’s blood, but it was Phi nonetheless.
Duke followed soon after. The leopard crawled on his belly towards Jenner, shifting back in the same oddly mechanical way. When he was back in human shape, the naked woman
kicked him in the jaw and sent him sprawling.
“You fucking idiot!” Jenner shouted at him. She bent down and hauled him up by the arm. Duke didn’t have cat ears anymore, but if he had, they would have been laid back flat along his skull. “What the fuck? WHY the fuck?”
“I’m s-sorry, Prez, I-”
“You fucking lost your shit, is what you did. Get up and get out! Into the car!” Jenner shoved the much larger, much taller man like he weighed nothing. Without a word, he picked up his sword – still nude – and stumbled out the door.
“There are coats in the wardrobe,” I said. I was sweeping up anything that the cops could use to identify me or Vassily. Photos, his zippo, but there were just too many things that could be used to incriminate us. A dull radiating pain ached through my hands with the knowledge of what I was going to have to do.
Jenner sniffed. “You think I’m worried about being naked? I was born this way.”
“No, but the NYPD may be less than impressed by your assets if we’re pulled over.” I didn’t turn around to look at her, but I wasn’t able to put any force in my voice. “Get out.”
“What about the tape?”
“The tape that now ends with Duke turning into an animal and murdering someone?” I pointed at the floor. The cassette was shattered amidst the ruins of the camera, the tape pulled out in a mockery of Kir’s corpse.
“Fucking hell.” I heard the wardrobe bang open as Jenner went to search for something to cover herself. “They’re just going to have to take our word for it, then.”
My eyes were hot as I pulled open the dresser and rifled through Vassily’s underwear, clean and untouched since he’d died. There was a money clip in there, monogrammed but empty. I added it to the collection of his tokens in my pocket. “Get out. I’ll finish up in here.”
“Whatever.” I heard a rustle, and then Jenner strode out past me into the hall, slinging a trench coat around her shoulders. I pocketed what I could, took what photos I could carry, and picked up the ruined cassette. Brown celluloid tape was flammable, and I had a gas stove.
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