“Yes.” I closed my eyes for a moment, swallowing.
“I miss him.” She slid to the floor and stood, straightening her back and cracking her knuckles. “Mason was a good man. He treated me right all these years. We hunted together, we rode together… but every time I walk on the soil of this country, I’m always aware of the bones under the earth, Rex. All the people fighting and dying, coming to life, traveling into the Light or giving themselves to the Big Black. There’s people I loved who are buried here, and in twenty other countries. The cycle moves on. If he’s as tough as I think he is, Mason’s Ka will heal and come back to me.”
I remembered what Kutkha had said to me about the way that Morphorde dissolved the structure of a soul, but didn’t have the heart to bring it up with her. Maybe she knew, maybe she didn’t. Either way, it didn’t matter. Some things were not worth crushing. “One can hope.”
Jenner didn’t stop me as I disconnected my IV. I taped it across and got to my feet. The floor was cool linoleum, real and firm. I hurt, but I could move.
“So, what’s on from here?” She watched as I went to investigate the drawers, looking for my clothes.
“As you said, the war will follow me wherever I go.” I sighed. “Ten years, twenty years down the track, Sergei will find me, and I will be too old and too soft to defend myself. I brokered some information from the contact who told me about Moris Falkovich that I’m going to follow up. Which reminds me. Did Zane fight on Saturday?”
“Nope,” Jenner replied. “He called it off. Threw the semi-final… he was too upset by everything.”
A vague sense relief washed through me. “Right.”
“Speaking of fighting, I want to go down to Texas,” Jenner said, her expression hardening. “Lily and Dru and their fucked up buddy list have been sending kids down there for years, and who knows what’s happened to them. Problem is, we’re weakened. The Pathfinders are gutted. The Four Fires are reeling, and Ayashe’s trying to work two jobs. Their leadership goes to vote. She’ll probably get it, but it’s a serious conflict of interest. Besides that, Michael was the second-oldest… well, I guess he was the real Elder of New York, given that John was full of shit. That means I’m now the oldest Weeder in the city, and a dozen of my best men are dead.”
“A vulnerable position,” I said.
She grimaced. “Yeah. We got a meeting set up for tomorrow with some allies of ours in the Mid-West. Now that we know this cult of freaks is real, we’re going to hunt them down and tear them up while we can. They’ll be licking their wounds, but I bet they can replace their members faster than we can replace ours.”
“I thought it might have had something to do with the Voicers, but I suppose they were a strawman for the Voctus Sol.” I found my stained and torn pants, belt, tie and shirt in a plastic bag, and a set of clothes in the drawer next to the bag. There was a plain white envelope on top of the neatly folded trousers. “What’s this?”
“Eh?” Jenner looked around me. “No idea.”
“Probably an invoice I have no intention of paying.” I set it aside, and laid out my what I found: an undershirt, a sweater, trousers and gloves. The sweater was the one I’d worn while I was homeless, but it was no longer shapeless. The wool was a little crisp under my fingers, and it smelled of lavender. “If you would excuse me, then. We can check out.”
“They wanted you to stay in three days after you woke up. Head trauma, or something.”
“They’ll live, and so will I. Now please, excuse me.” I pulled my gown around myself, as modest as I could manage, and looked back at her. Pointedly.
“Right-o, tough guy.” She held up her hands. “I got your gun back, by the way. And Zane’s been feeding the cat.”
I said nothing, waiting until I heard the door click shut. Only then did I strip my gown and begin to dress.
“Did you know I’d do this?” I closed my eyes, looking inward as I pulled my trousers up and belted them. I saw Kutkha sitting there when I withdrew into the temple of my mind. The raven spirit was perched on an arching stand of silver that poured up from the floor, but there was something wrong. Something out of place.
“You made your decision.” Kutkha ruffled his wings, fluffing out. He was acting as if he were cold. “You are a Magus. Your Will is the deciding factor of our fates. We were fortunate enough to have allies with us. But now, we are ill.”
Frowning, I put my hands on the bed and immersed more deeply into the symbolic inner-space, the Astral chamber I’d constructed of my mind through years of meditation and discipline. It was a small temple, a black bell-shaped dome with a mirrored black floor as smooth as water under glass. There was a silver circle in the center, where Kutkha made his rest. Otherwise, it should have been largely featureless and austere.
On one side of the temple dome, roots had pushed themselves in through cracked patches of wall. I went across to them, moving like a ghost through the mental space, and bent to examine them. They were pink and white, brachiating like neurons. I recognized them. They looked like the roots of the trees on Eden.
The opposite wall had a patch of what looked like crackling frost from the floor to about waist-height. As I watched, the fissured pattern replicated fractionally at the edges, spreading like a bruise. The Yen.
I pressed my lips together. “I won’t let it take me, Kutkha. Not after what I’ve seen it do to others.”
“You say that now, my Ruach.” Kutkha shivered again. “Remember these words when it comes to tempt you. See to it you never underestimate the lesser Morphorde, Alexi. Greater men than you have fallen to a simple Yen, reveling in the temporary power and release it brings.”
Power? Like the explosion I’d generated, the fireball?
My gut twisted painfully enough that it shook me out of my impromptu meditation, gasping. I licked my lip, and focused on getting my belt through the loops of my trousers. The thought of it, the loss of control to something capable of infecting the HuMan mind and soul, was terrifying… but whatever was going to happen would happen, and there was little I could do except act to manage the symptoms until I found the cure: Zarya, the Gift Horse.
Chapter 42
About an hour later, we left the hospital and emerged into prismatic sunlight. It was a damp and cloudy day, and the city smelled like rain and dust. The texture of passing cars rasped on my tongue. For the first time in a very long time, I felt alive.
Zane gave me a ride on his bike back to the Strange Kitty clubhouse, and I spent the trip clinging to his back like a barnacle lest I sway too hard to one side and fall off. Strange Kitty was still zoned off with yellow and purple scene tape, evidence of the Vigiles Magicarum’s need to territorially piss on everything supernatural, but we were able to get into the Tigers clubhouse. When I opened the garage door, Binah leaped from the pool table, meowing and chirping, and jumped up onto my shoulder. She was beginning to fill out again. Her fur was growing back, cream-white and sleek. I caught her, scratching just above her tail as she tried to wrap her entire backside around my face.
More surprising were the children. Josie and another small boy, a face I vaguely recognized from the case file photographs, were playing Legos with two girls who had to be Ayashe’s children. Ayashe was ostensibly watching the four of them from the sofa, twitching her toe like a tail and glancing up from her copy of Cosmopolitan when we filtered inside.
“Well, look who the cats dragged in,” she drawled. “Weren’t sure you were ever going to be back with us, Rex.”
“I am notoriously resilient,” I said.
“Angbutt here probably helped,” Jenner added.
Ayashe’s mouth sloped across. “You mind your mouth around these kids here, Jennifer Tran.”
“It’s my freakin’ clubhouse.” Jenner sniffed, lifting her nose on her way to the bar. “I’ll friggin’ slag off in my clubhouse if I friggin’ want to.”
Talya broke away and made for the group of oblivious children and crouched down on her heels, her face alight
with ready interest. “Oh my goodness! Are you building a house? Look at all these little horses. What are they doing, Mary?”
“Nooo, that’s not a house. That’s the pirate ship, and this is the island, and those are the cowboys that are res’king the princesses from the pirates,” one of the two dark-skinned girls said, lisping through her missing front teeth. “But they’re all girls.”
“No they’re not!” The boy whined, but it was clear that he knew he was outnumbered.
“Nuh-uh. Girls is what Josie wanted! You got the island!”
“There’s boys on the island!”
Josie looked up at Talya, but then gazed on past her to stare at me. She was dressed in fresh clothes, a pink t-shirt and jeans that hung a little loosely on her emaciated body. Her hair was clean, a shoulder-length red tumble of curls, and her cuts were healing into scars on her pale freckled skin. The haunted, gaunt lines were fading from her face, but as her eyes met mine, I felt a flash of something low in my gut. It was not an emotion. It was an instinct.
The little girl clambered to her feet under the watchful eye of Ayashe, who didn’t stop her as she crossed the room towards me. I bent to one knee, holding Binah to my shoulder so she didn’t fall. The cat jumped off anyway, and flopped onto the floor in front of me to present her belly for worship.
Josie drew up about a foot from Binah’s recumbent, purring form. She looked up at me, brow furrowed. “You look sick.”
Up close, I met Josie's eyes a second time, and I saw it again: the glimpse of something numinous and golden and powerful. Her Neshamah. Josie had undergone Shevirah.
“So do you,” I replied. “But I hope we’ll both get better.”
Josie’s lips twitched nervously. “Tally said you were in the hostipal… umm… hos-pi-tal. But I don’t think that’s what you got sick with.”
“The doctors had to do some surgery.” Could she sense the Yen, now? This was a novel experience, one of the few times in my life that I had actually spoken to a child face to face. “I’m feeling better. What do you see?”
She glanced down, almost coyly, and then looked back up at me with her lip in her teeth. “It’s the lady with the rope around her neck.”
I felt it like a blow to the stomach and drew a sharp breath. I couldn’t help it. Her words should have drawn up a memory, but all I saw was blackness, and all I felt was the urge to wash my hands.
“Can I pet your kitty?”
Her voice startled me out of the moment of inversion. I cleared my throat, and didn’t try to smile. “Of course you can. She would like nothing more than for you to pet her.”
“Okay.” Josie didn’t smile much, and she radiated concentration as she knelt to pet Binah. The girl hadn’t been identified as a mage before her kidnapping, but she was now a spook in the making.
My tongue ached. I wanted to tell her how to hide her power, help her shield her mind and fake the tests that the Vigiles were sure to run on her if they ever noticed. Given what she had been through and what she had done to survive, there was a good chance they wouldn’t. The only reason I could see it was because she trusted me. As soon as Josie looked away, she was guarded, her mind shielded by the brittle barricade of dissociation. Her guilelessness was gone, and she would be reluctant to share knowledge of the comforting voice in her mind with adults. Shevirah was the shattering of innocence. For better or worse, Josie’s was gone.
Somewhat disconcerted, I left her to play with Binah and made a beeline for Ayashe. She set down her magazine and stood, and we shook hands. She motioned to the sofa beside her in offering.
“Please excuse me, but bending at the waist is painful. I prefer to stand.” I let go of her long fingers, and crossed my arms. Carefully. “Jenner told me what you dug up on John.”
Ayashe scoffed, and her lip curled in disgust. “You know what the worst part is? Me and Michael and Jenner, we were the ones who accidentally fed him all that knowledge about the Laws. Every damn… uh… durn thing. All he had to do was talk to the young Weeders he met, and listen to us at the Convocations. He somehow learned enough to lie his way into our inner circle. His real name was Harold Ryan, we think. He wasn’t even Native American. One of the Pine Ridge elders is flying out here to make sure he didn’t desecrate anything the tribes donated to the Museum.”
“What a mess.” I stretched the muscles of my neck, popping something in my shoulder. “What about the Deacon? Vanya?”
“We made some arrests,” Ayashe said, “But we can only hold the men that were in the pictures. We nabbed Ivan – Vanya – and about ten other guys. We’ll probably be able to charge four or five of them once we verify they match the pictures.”
“There is some merit to the way I do things.” I smiled a thin, grim smile.
“Maybe. If the images are admissible in court.” Ayashe seemed to waver between speculative approval and irritation, which I suspected was as much a rhinoceros thing as it was an FBI agent quality. “We have no fuuu-freakin’ idea who this ‘Deacon’ is. He’s not in any of the photos. There’s some texts from a ‘Deacon’ on the UseNet logs on the computer, but no way to follow them back to a sender. All his messages are encouraging the others to keep things down low, too.”
I bowed my head. “Unfortunate. From my own experiences, I can warn you that he is an extremely powerful mage, one that Vanya knows personally. Besides that, the Organizatsiya has excellent lawyers. Be careful.”
“You ain’t got no idea how careful I’m gonna be.” She pointed at the girls. “See those two fluffalumps? They’re ten. I’ve worked this job for twelve years and I’ll work it for twelve more. By the time they’re twenty-two, they’ll be some fine young women and I’ll be looking to retire. Anyone comes near my kids, I don’t care how powerful they think they are. I’ll trample the son-of-a-bitch.”
“Momma, you said a bad word.” Mary turned around, solemn in the way that only children admonishing adults could be.
“Yeah, momma.” Jenner called out from the bar, a bottle of Jack Daniels in hand.
“Uhhg.” Ayashe rubbed at her eyes. “Fine, yeah, okay. You got me. Just ignore your momma’s fat mouth and go back to playing with your horses, baby.”
The girl nodded, satisfied. “When’s daddy coming?”
“He’ll be here at six to pick us up, sugar.” Ayashe waved her back to her game with a hand.
Both Josie and the boy on the ground tensed visibly at the word ‘daddy’. I understood all too well.
Neither Zane or I were really feeling the cowboy-pirate Legos and parenting thing, so we withdrew into the inner part of the house, leaving Talya to play and Jenner to drink herself blind. Angkor had the good sense to sneak away and was already asleep in the bunkroom, half-naked and snoring. He had a washcloth over his eyes, and he was lying on top of the covers. Like a bum.
“My GOD, that’s annoying,” I said, glaring at him on the way past.
“What? Why?” Zane glanced down as well, but his expression wasn’t so much one of disapproval as open admiration.
“Covers are meant to… well… cover things.” I gestured at Angkor’s recumbent form, trying very hard not to look. He was well-muscled and entirely too aesthetic. “Like shirtless Korean men.”
“Lighten up, Mrs. Grundy.” Zane smirked, the first real humor I’d seen out of him since my first night at Strange Kitty.
I sat down heavily on the edge of the opposite bed and set my bag of ruined clothes and knick-knacks on the floor. “You really do come from an academic household. Where did you pick that up? Nabokov?”
“Uhh…” Zane cleared his throat, and rubbed his hand back over the dense stubble on his head. “Absolutely Fabulous, actually. TV show.”
Zane’s discomfort was mildly intriguing, but not as much as the letter I’d picked up from the hospital. I took it out of the bag and tapped it against my hand. The envelope was stiff. “I see. So, in matters unrelated to television, I was wondering: Can you teach me to ride a motorcycle?”
Z
ane perked up a little, turning back from his locker to face me. “Sure. Be happy to. We can go do it once you’re back on your feet properly. I mean… I guess we have a few spare bikes now.”
“I wouldn’t want to use anything that belonged to someone’s estate.”
“Duke’s chopper is still in the yard.” The light in Zane’s eyes dimmed, and he turned back to pull out his towel and shower kit. “He didn’t have anyone else in his life besides the club. He’d want someone to use it… it’s a great bike.”
“I’ll put it to good use.” I ran my nail under the seal and opened the envelope. There was a Polaroid photo inside, face down. Handwritten on the back, someone had scrawled: ‘Thanks for all the help. Your move.’
I turned it over, puzzled. My ears began to ring. I stood up from the bed slowly, my face stiff and cold, skin tight.
Vassily and Mariya Lovenko were buried next to each other under their own headstones: tall rectangles of black granite laser etched with their names and portraits, and flat slabs of stone laid over the top of their graves. Vassily’s cover stone had been moved to the side and shattered, exposing the sarcophagus wall and the mound of soil inside. Beside the grave was a small Bobcat excavator. Sitting inside of it, his foot braced up on the frame, was Nicolai. He was looking at someone out of the frame, grinning, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.
“What?” Zane had stopped in the middle of the room, towel in hand. His brow was furrowed. “What’s the matter?”
“They’re dead.” I ground out each word, fighting the urge to crush the photograph in my hand.
Zane stared at me, dumbfounded. Angkor sat up, startled awake by the rage in my voice and in the energy of the room.
“Every one of these motherfuckers is dead. Sergei, Nic, this Deacon. All of them.” The cold was spreading through me, blooming through my limbs like ink in water. “They’ve stolen Vassily’s body. I need a ride to Green-Wood Cemetery.”
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