Ayashe’s voice soured. “Alexi-”
“Let him go. There’s nothing up there.” Mattson joined us, and lay a comradely hand on Ayashe’s shoulder. “You said he’s worked on things like this before, right?”
I tuned her reply out, following my familiar up the narrow staircase to the second floor. The house had an odd, unlived-in feel to it. The den was obviously the place where Agent Cross spent the most time, because her bedroom was less personal than the average hotel room. White sheets, no pillowcase on the pillows, a double bed with no evidence of a sleeping companion, a full-length mirrored wardrobe with sliding doors and hardly any clothes inside. What little there was here had been ransacked, up to and including the mattress. It had been cut open in places, the stuffing pulled free.
I set Binah on the floor and went into the bathroom one door down. It was also fairly sparse. A suitcase had been set down near the cabinet, the tags still on the handle. She’d only just gotten back from Washington?
Binah’s resonant meow echoed from the bedroom, the deep urgent squalling that I’d come to associate with her distress or warning. Frowning, I went back to the bedroom and found her pacing back and forth in one of the corners of the room, pausing to claw at the edge of the carpet.
“Hmm? What is it?” Curiosity piqued, I joined her and crouched down. The carpet had some bare staples where she was pawing at it, like they’d been added as an afterthought.
“Mrrr! Mraaw-aoo!” They were the noises she made when she was bringing her toy to me for me to throw for her. She liked to play fetch.
I used my pocketknife to jimmy the staples out and peel the carpet back. Tucked between the underlay and the floorboards was a small white paper packet with a single word, all capitals, written on the outside in ball-point pen. ‘ZEALOT’.
“Zealot...?” I opened it and looked inside. Down in the bottom of the packet, jammed down along the seam... were seeds. They were large, almost squarish in shape, and black.
“Huh.” I held the packet out to Binah. “What do you think, girl?”
The cat sniffed it over, then arched her head and flank against the packet and my hand. I snorted and almost smiled. “Hmm. Important, I guess.”
There was the dull thump of feet in the staircase outside. I stood quickly, pocketing the packet, and was just hoisting Binah up to her perch when Ayashe threw open the door. “Rex, what the hell do you think you’re playing at?”
“I’m not playing,” I said. “I told you what I observed, and followed the magic I sensed to this room.”
“She wasn’t a mage. This is, what, the third time I’ve told you that?” She scowled. “So did you find anything?”
“No, unfortunately.” I breezed out the door, turning my shoulder to avoid hitting her on the way out, and headed for the stairwell. “Not a damn thing.
Chapter 11
We returned to an empty house. I turned the garage lights on, then cooked dinner in the cold, leaden silence while Binah played with her favorite bumblebee toy on the floor around my feet. I used to think I’d go nuts if I ever had to share my space with anyone else other than Vassily, but I’d gotten used to the routine of Strange Kitty and the presence of the human Tigers and the Big Cat Crew. I’d found a quiet pleasure in sharing my table with Angkor and Zane and Jenner, when she wasn’t out managing the club’s business in parts unknown. Talya would often be at her desk in the living room, tapping away on a keyboard, or outside with Zane as she learned the ins and outs of the Harleys. There were small annoyances—messy stacks of books, toilet paper put on the roller the wrong way, dishes not stacked correctly, the odd discarded needle and syringe—but I’d found something here I hadn’t known I’d missed. The absence of other people hung over the house like a shroud.
It was that pall that led me to avoid the bedroom. Instead, I set up in the den, a room which looked and smelled like it had been decorated by college students who’d gone around with a truck and collected furniture off the sidewalk. It was surprisingly comfortable all the same, and I’d spent more than one evening here whiling away the small hours in conversation with Jenner. It was also the best place to get some room to perform a ceremony. The bunk room was too large and impersonal for me to concentrate, especially when the risk of interruption was so high, but the den was rarely accessed at night during the week.
To me, Agent Cross was just a dead cop: one less crusading arcanophobe. I could pity her for having died the way she had, but if Soldier 557 wasn’t involved, it wasn’t my circus. I don’t know who hit Kristen Cross, but it sure as hell wasn’t Soldier—even if she was investigating the Templum Voctus Sol. It was possible she’d been killed by some sort of DOG, but I’d never smelled that ammonia-acid reek around DOGs before. They had a very recognizable stench, like candied rotten meat. It left you feeling sick, too, in the sense of being unwell—like the early stages of the flu. There was none of that at Agent Cross’s house: just diffuse Green energy and a packet of ordinary seeds stashed in an unorthodox place. They would live in my locker for the time being. Maybe ‘Zealot’ was the name of the flower that grew from them. Some kind of fancy petunia.
My first business was finding what had happened to Doctor Levental. He was one of my people, and he’d done me a solid the month before. His information eventually led to us recovering the majority of the missing shapeshifter kids, and if the Organizatsiya had somehow found this out, then I had a duty to help him—or avenge him.
The first step was to focus. I arranged beanbags in a makeshift circle on the bare wooden floor, then got my chalk and string and set about creating a circle, immersing into the ritual geometry as inspiration kindled into determination. I was going to try dowsing.
As I understood it, the basic formula for map dowsing was to take a map, rule it into quadrants, and then use a pendulum to determine the direction of the desired person or thing. Then you ruled that part of the map into four, and so on and so forth until you had an approximate location. Then you went there in person and dug around. The map was easy enough: The Tigers’ clubhouse had plenty of maps, all of which were well-worn and marked with rest stops and symbols representing coded information I didn’t have the key for. I only had one pendant to use as a pendulum: Vassily’s old ankh necklace. It was a good tool for this work, given how much energy had gone into the thing over the years.
Once everything was ruled up and ready, the circle cast, I hummed a simple rhythmic rising and falling tune under my breath and focused in on the pendulum. The tune made me think only of what I was doing, giving my brain something to gnaw instead of imagining where Leventhal might be in New York. The actual invocation was said only in my mind, each word thought in time with the cadence of the tune. It gave Kutkha a clear path to release the energy required for the pendulum to swing in the accurate direction.
I set up a little cross-stand out of books and a coat hanger, and hung the pendulum over the center of the map. It dangled from its chain, trembling a little as I focused power into the metal… and at the conclusion of the chant, I held my hands up over it and waited.
The pendant jerked, once, and then fell still. The charge peaked and died too fast for it to gain traction.
I sighed. “Well, then.”
During the second attempt, I tried holding the chain in my fingers over the map. This was something I’d have preferred to avoid, mostly because of the way my hands ticced and twitched, but once I zoned in on the magic, the pendant began to wobble and then, slowly, swing back and forth. The feed of Phi was a small, low flame, like the pilot light of a gas stove.
“There we go...” I tried to keep my eyes on the middle of the map as the ankh began to circle aimlessly around. Then I felt it—a distinct tugging sensation, as if something was pulling the end of the ankh toward the southwest.
My heart sank as I reluctantly refocused in the center of the quarter that encompassed the oceanside parts of Brooklyn, and once the pendulum began to swing, I had to check myself from fixating on its likely target: Red Hook. This was
a problem I'd heard about with dowsing. The hand was naturally unsteady, and, guided by the mind and imagination, more likely to be motivated by the subconscious than the objective truth.
A cool shiver of magic passed through my fingertips, as delicate as a bursting bubble. I shuddered, that someone-walking-over-your-grave feeling, and the pendulum began to wander... just before it jerked so hard that the chain slid from between my fingers and the ankh clattered to the map over Red Hook.
A wave of weird dizziness flushed through me, transforming into an intense, burning cold sensation in my hands and feet... which was followed by the acrid smell and taste of burned wax crayons. I startled up to my feet from the floor, breathing hard as the reek grew in intensity. A second chill passed through me, stronger this time.
There was a flicker of motion out of the corner of my eye. I spun, arming a word of power, but there was nothing. Another flash from the opposite direct made me twist on my feet, flickers of color and a gathering whisper that seemed to come from the walls. The lines on the wallpaper started to wiggle and crawl up and down, skittering like kaleidoscopic lizards.
“Not this again.” I backed up a step, glancing around so as not to cross the edge of the chalk circle inscribed on the floorboards. The magical design was spinning slowly, the lines morphing and jumping under my feet. The acrid wax smell was burning my sinuses and in my mouth, and as I shook my head, I accidentally glanced down at my arm. Black. The veins visible on the underside of my forearm were black, undulating like worms. “No!”
The room breathed around me, the walls exhaling Sergei’s voice. Two more infusions of blood from me, and you'll do anything I say.
He’d said that to me after the first taste of his blood, when he’d been mining me for information on the Gift Horse. One dose had been enough to force me to talk. He’d shot a second into the crook of my arm, but that was over a month ago.
The blood doesn’t just disappear, my boy. I heard him speaking from every surface, his jovial, booming voice hissing through a mouthful of needle-sharp iron teeth. You’re mine.
“No! Leave!” My heart sloshed in my chest. Every time I blinked, I saw Sergei's gaze boring into me, staring at me with the heartless, murky eyes of a deep-sea predator. “I am a Magus, and my Will is the-”
A billowing, translucent shade lunged across the circle toward me. I caught a glimpse of a screaming, fang-filled mouth and stumbled away from it. My shins hit a chair I didn’t know was there. I tripped and fell on my chest, arms and head outside the circle.
You’re mine. I raised you, taught you, led you, and now you will return to me. It’s time to come home, Alexi.
Shaking my head, I pushed up to hands and knees before I knew what I was doing. I fought against the urge to get up to my feet, breathless. The wax smell was making my mouth water now, and as I shook through waves of icy chills, visions of Sergei offering me his bloody hand shot through my mind’s eye.
I invested in you, Alexi. He loomed above like a mountain, his face receding into the sucking darkness of the ceiling. His blood was a dark russet orange, trembling, almost floating from his skin with bittersweet Phi. I don’t want you to do as I say. I want you to WANT to do as I say. And you do WANT to, don’t you?
Oh GOD. The compulsion to walk out of the room, get in my car, and drive myself to Red Hook was getting stronger with every passing moment. Fear surged, and as it peaked, I lost the battle. My feet finally got under themselves and I lurched like a drunk toward the living room door, desperately catching on to anything I could grab on the way past. My fingers clutched at the doorframe, then slipped off as the next wave of compulsion and irrational, powerful hunger pulsed through my body.
Fuck this. Fuck this to Hell. He was going to turn me into a slave. I couldn’t stop it. I had to stop it. What had I done to let him in, and how the fuck did I get him out again?
A shape darted in front of me, ramming into my legs. Awkwardly shambling, twisted up in a battle against my own body, I tripped without any ability to break my fall. It knocked the wind from me in the split second before the ground mashed my nose and broke it.
“Fucking SHIT piece of crap... motherfucker!” I rolled onto my back with my hands over my face, blind with agony. I pinched the bridge of my nose and tipped my head back before I bled any more over the Tigers' Clubhouse floor. Fear took a sideline to pain, and I realized that I had control of my limbs again. For now.
In the dim light coming from the kitchen, the blood pouring from my nose was black, gleaming and iridescent like oil. My chest spiked through with a wave of fresh anxiety, and as it did, I felt the control of my limbs become more tenuous.
Fear, I realized. He feeds off fear.
But fear didn't turn off like a switch. My hands spasmed, forced away from my face as my body rose, swaying. I tried to think of something, anything besides the terrifying loss of control as I lurched off down the hallway. Binah leapt on me this time, digging into my back with her claws and raking my skin with her back feet, and the pain once again served as a distraction—but it wasn’t enough to stop the inevitability of my staggering out into the sleeting rain toward my car.
Chapter 12
It was fear that made my hands unlock the car door and haul it open. Binah leapt in ahead, meowing like an air-raid siren, but focusing on her didn’t stop me from lurching into the driver’s side and jamming the keys into the ignition. I tried to think of my friends: training with Zane, the thrill of my first motorcycle ride, the brotherly affection I’d come to feel for Talya. My hand shook on the keys, rattling them against the dash, but slowly, haltingly, it turned them and started the ignition.
Panic swelled again. It was no good: I was afraid of what they made me feel. Memories of Vassily didn’t help, either, given what Sergei had done to his body. I had to search back further to find the antidote to terror.
The car thrummed to life. My feet and hands operated smoothly now, robotically, and I couldn’t even shut my eyes as I lit on the painful, bittersweet memories of my horse. I could still remember the dark gentleness of her eyes as she followed me like a dog from her stall to the round pen, no halter required, and the smell of her sweat as I leaned into her flank, sweet and green. It made my heart ache with a pain I’d done my best to bury. But it banished the fear.
I drove out onto the street, and my body fought to turn the wheel right, toward Brighton Beach. I grit my teeth, mouth watering helplessly for the poison in Sergei’s veins, and forced the wheel left onto 5th to merge into the light traffic heading for the Williamsburg Bridge.
Pain lanced through my skin, an electric shock that nearly startled my hands off the wheel. My hands were wet with sweat, or at least I thought it was sweat until I looked down and nearly ran myself off the road at the sight of blood: a lot of blood. It was squeezing out of my pores in dark droplets from the DOG-scars on my left arm, running down to drip on my already-fucked-up slacks. When I glanced in the mirror, more of it was forcing its way through the pores of my cheeks, the corners of my eyes. My nose had bled all the way down to my chest.
I had some notion of what I was doing by heading north—but if I was wrong, I was going to bleed out and run myself into the side of the bridge tunnel. This was punishment. I was defying Sergei’s orders, and he was trying to kill me from a distance now. If I’d been given the third dose of his blood, he surely could have. My only hope of breaking the hold: getting across the flowing water of New York City Bay.
I hurtled across the Williamsburg Bridge, twenty miles over the speed limit for the first part of it, blinking blood out of my eyes as I tried to think of everything I knew about upir. Vassily’s grandmother had told us monster stories growing up, stories traditionally told by wise old women in Ukraine. The vampire can walk in the sun with impunity, dressed and smiling like any other man, she said. You knew an upir by his red hair and face. During the day, vampires hid their iron fangs. They ate raw fish and human flesh, preferably the flesh of children, who they devoured in front of the
ir parents. A vampire could be kept from entering a village by plowing an egg into a freshly-turned field. Vampires didn’t like garlic or salt, or hallowed ground. They could enter graveyards but not churches, and they couldn’t cross running water unaided.
Once I was past the halfway point on the bridge, the dark cloud of needling, furious magic wobbled, then snapped like a broken rubber band so suddenly that I nearly swerved into the side of the bridge tunnel. When I glanced in the rear-view mirror, I saw a pale, panting ghost of a man with a broken nose, a face mottled in bruises and covered in fine tracks of blood. Thicker trails leaked from the corners of my eyes. I looked like I’d been slugged in the face.
“How the hell did that happen, Kutkha?” I barked aloud, keeping my eyes on the road. “Why couldn’t we stop him, and how do I stop this from happening again?”
“You ingested his blood, my Ruach. It cannot be undone.” Kutkha said. “You could not see my work, but I fought to seal the gate... He was trying to make your brain bleed. I forced it to the skin instead.”
“Fuck.” He could have killed me from a distance, just like that. “How do we stop it? I don’t know any of the metaphysics at work here. The spell wasn’t even related to him... unless...”
“Unless he has your doctor and has ensorcelled him as part of a trap, counting on your loyalty and your reliance on remote methods of seeking him,” Kutkha finished.
“Suka blyad!” I struck the wheel with both hands. “That motherfucker!”
“My knowledge of Feeders is limited,” Kutkha said. “None of your Ruachim have great experience with them... but they do have experience with the Animus at the heart of every Feeder—Wrath’ree, and by extension, the Hive.”
“Wrath’ree. That was the thing that was used to bind my magic away from me,” I said. “I have no damn idea what a Wrath’ree actually is. And what do you mean by animus?”
“Wrath’ree are GOD’s inflammatory immune system response,” Kutkha replied, his voice gaining clarity as we came off the bridge and into Manhattan. “Macrophages. They are the children of the Suffering GOD, the I after it was violated by the Morphorde. They function now as white blood cells do in HuMans.”
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