James Osiris Baldwin

BURN ARTIST

HOUND OF EDEN: A PRELUDE

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”

– C.G. Jung

Chapter 1

Two nights before Vyacheslav Nazrenko burned to death, Vassily and I were at the movies. It was a week after the premier of Aliens, and we were watching it together for the third time.

“Ohh… ohhh… here it comes.” Vassily, mumbling around a mouthful of popcorn, pointed at the screen with the straw of his soda. “The screaming cock of doom, Alexi. Right out of her fucking chest.”

I didn’t reply, eating popcorn one kernel at a time. I flicked one into my mouth and caught it with a crunch.

“This is why you never let anything over five inches near your mouth, man. Bananas, squids, nothing. Before you know it, BAM, something’s rammed its dick right down your throat and is pumping you full of alien spooge.”

“Shhhhh.” Someone behind us hissed.

“Vassily.” I stared fixedly at the screen, keeping my voice down. “They’re eggs.”

“Yeah, eggs. Which is basically just spooge in a shell.” He made a face. “Worst M&Ms flavor ever.”

“SHHH.” The hissing behind us was louder, this time. A man’s voice. It was lost in the sudden shriek of the chestburster exploding, the cocooned woman screeching, the Marines on screen yelling, and the whoosh of a flamethrower.

“YEAH! Barbecue that sucker!” Vassily called out in Ukrainian, bouncing in his seat.

The man behind us reached forward to shove at Vassily’s head. He flinched away as I dropped my popcorn and snatched the stranger’s wrist, catching it before he made contact. I cranked it back, and he yelped.

“You. Don’t touch my friend,” I rumbled.

“Then tell him to shut the fuck up!” The stranger – a red-faced, stocky Brooklynite of indeterminate European ancestry – tried to pull his wrist back. He had a can of beer in his other hand. “Leggo my arm!”

“You know, it’s really rude to touch people’s heads in some cultures.” Vassily turned in his seat, blinking with wide, innocent eyes. “So how about you go fuck yourself in the ass with that can and let me enjoy my goddamn movie?”

The guy turned a nasty shade of purple. All at the same time, he threw his beer into my face, I lunged forward and punched him, and Vassily reflexively dumped popcorn over the both of us.

The screaming and screeching on the screen drowned out the sounds of our fistfight as the guy pulled me over the seat and into the next row. He’d made a mistake in dragging me to him. I’m nearly always shorter than every other man in the room, but I’m also often the strongest. And Sokolsky men know how to brawl.

It was 1986 in Brooklyn, and summoning an usher was the last thing on anyone’s mind as I took the guy down to the floor. Confined between the rows of red padded seats, there wasn’t much room to wrestle on the sticky carpet. I got on top of him and beat him until he stopped trying to knock my teeth out and began to fight for escape instead. The people who’d noticed the fiasco in the aisles around us cheered us on.

The man crawled out from under me and under the legs of our fellow moviegoers, stumbling up at the end of the row as I did my best to stalk toward him. Difficult, when you have to turn and sidle like a crab past the knees of laughing, bewildered, and irritated people. Eying me like a wild deer, our assailant turned tail and ran.

I gave up and rejoined Vassily, glaring at him in the gloom as I took my seat and used paper towel to wipe beer out of my hair. In the spirit of brotherhood, he offered me his soda. I accepted a mouthful, sweet as it was.

We lasted another fifteen minutes before the staff came in. Vassily nudged me, and then motioned to the door at the corner of the theater. “Hey, check it out. Time to make our daring escape.”

Ugly and a few of the cinema staff were congregating at one of the exit doors. They were waiting, which meant they were probably hanging on the police. I nodded, and together we picked our way stealthily down the aisle in the opposite direction, headed up the back of the theater, and vanished into the tacky Art Deco hallway outside.

“Well, that was a fuck up.” Vassily rolled his eyes. “You head to the car. I’m going to the box office.”

“What?” I brushed down my wet dress shirt, which smelled strongly of alcohol. “Why?”

“Because I’m getting our money back, is why.” He slapped me on the shoulder, and gently steered me toward the front door of the cinema. As we were going out, the police were coming in. They passed us in the foyer with a brief glance at my disheveled hair.

“Hey, Sir,” Vassily called out to them, lifting his voice above the small milling crowd. “Excuse me. Are you looking for the drunk guy?”

“Yeah. What’s it to you?” The cop called back.

Vassily pointed back down the hall. “They’re that way. The ushers are holding him by the door downstairs.”

“No worries.” The other cop held up a hand to him, and they passed us on by.

“Are you out of your mind?” I hissed.

“Crazy as a snake on a hot road,” Vassily replied cheerfully.

“You’re on remand!”

“This whole case is stupid white collar shit. You know as well as I do that Marco will get me off. Go on, man. I’ll meet you at the car.”

There was more than one reason Vassily insisted I leave, and more than one reason why I was happy to do so. I wasn’t great around cops. It was like they could smell the violence on me… the lingering ghosts of illegal magic, old blood, cold metal, and bleach.

Due to the nature of my profession, I always kept a towel and spare clothes in the car, including a nicely pressed white shirt and black leather gloves. I also had a bottle of Dramamine in the glove box, which I was grateful for after the sensory assault of the cinema on my synesthesia. Aliens was worth every minute, but it was still hard going when every high-pitched sound burned like acid on my tongue.

After fifteen minutes or so, Vassily strolled out of the building and popped the passenger side door, dropping into his seat. He had a shit-eating grin and a deep dancing light in his dark blue eyes.

“VIP passes for our next film, my fine, prickly friend.” He winked and clicked his tongue. “They had the guy in handcuffs. He was ranting about some ‘Russkie dwarf that don’t speak American’ trying to punch his lights out, but he was pretty drunk.”

“My goodness,” I said, tugging my clean gloves up along my wrists. “What is this city coming to, Vasya?”

“Some people are just nuts, right?” Vassily stretched like a cat in his seat, and yawned. “Well, let’s get back home. I have to work out what the fuck I’m getting our mighty Avtoritet[1] for his birthday party. I’m looking forward to it, don’t get me wrong, but everyone is going to get him a Rolex and I just… I mean, how many Rolexes does a man really need?”

“We have the money if we get something together,” I said. “We could get him a car, maybe a Hot Rod or a Corvette. Some kind of 1950s showpiece.”

“And show up Lev or Vanya in front of the boss? Are you kidding?” Vassily rubbed his thumb across his lips. “Nah, nothing quite that extravagant or obvious. Let me think about it some more. Besides, I want to go home and jerk off to the image of Ripley with a flamethrower while it’s still fresh in my mind.”

I rolled my eyes, and abruptly reversed the car onto the road. Vassily pitched forward with a yelp, fumbling for his seatbelt, and then laughed uproariously as the momentum threw him back against the headrest.

‘Home’ for me was a small third-floor apartment on Banner Avenue, a red-brick building that looked like a meatlocker with balconies. It was small, neat, and Spartan, insofar as an occult library crammed with exotic magical tomes could ever be said to be ‘Spartan’. I sacrificed furniture and aesthetics for floor to ceiling shelves of fiction, non-fiction and esoterica in every room. My collection focused on the Jewish ritual magic dating back to King Solomon’s court, which along with John Dee’s Enochian ceremony, was the backbone of my craft as the Yaroshenko Organizatsiya’s[2] only hitmage.

“So… wait, I’ve got it.” Vassily waved his hands up ahead of me on the stairs as we climbed. “He likes sweet stuff, right? What about a box of Forrey & Galland?”

“What are those?”

“Really fancy chocolate. About five hundred for a box of ninety.”

I grimaced. “You buy women chocolates. Rodion is too old-fashioned.”

“Caviar?”

“The party is at The Russian Tea House. There’ll be more caviar than we can stand. What about a horse? As in, a racehorse? It’s less grandiose than a car.”

“He really prefers cars to horses,” Vassily replied. “I dunno. I know he likes jewelry. Maybe something with diamonds, but it’s hard to find manly shit with diamonds on it. The Rolex thing is looking better and better.”

We reached the blank concrete corridor that led to my door, and I spun my keys around my thumb as I brooded. “Like you said, we’ll think of something. But given that his birthday is in three days…”

I trailed off as I heard a tinny sound through the door. The phone.

“Goddammit…” I unlocked the house, and turned to find Vassily with his hands cupped and ready. I threw him the keys, hurriedly shucked my shoes outside, and ran for the office, where I snatched up the phone and jammed it against my shoulder. A burst of sound crackled out of the receiver: men yelling, arguing with raised, angry voices.

“Sokolsky speaking?” I groped around for the chain to my desk light.

“Alexi. Rod wants to see you.” Nicolai Chiernenko, senior captain of Brighton Beach and one of the hardest men in the Organizatsiya, was a weathered man with a scratchy, flat voice as dry as straw. If he was bothered by the violent racket behind him, it was not apparent. “Can you make it to the office?”

My stomach dropped. “Of course. Should I bring my paraphernalia?”

“Yeah. Rod’s really pissed. Bring some holy water and whatever you’ve got for the evil eye.” And then he hung up.

The evil eye? Holy water wasn’t really my style, but it at least gave me some inclination of what to expect. I stood back from my desk for a moment, thinking, and then stalked out of the office.

Vassily was waiting for me on a sofa in the den. He technically had his own apartment, but Vassily stayed here so often that it was practically his house, too. Had his own bedroom, and had even brought his pet to live here. Sir Purrs-A-Lot, his obese tuxedo cat, was sprawled across his knees like a baby seal.

“What was all that about?” Vassily quirked a dark eyebrow.

“We have to go to Sirens,” I replied, walking on past. “By the sounds of it, someone has been cursed.”

Chapter 2

It was a Saturday night, which meant that the Budweiser-scented hellhole that was Sirens was well and truly open for business. It had been murderously hot during the day – 92 degrees – and a late afternoon thunderstorm earlier in the night had turned Coney Island into a swamp. The cinema and car had been cool, but my hands were sweating under the wrist when we got out at the club and ran into a wall of hot, humid air.

Sirens was a two-story building that was longer and wider than it was tall. The wall facing the street had been painted white, with a roped off cattle chute for guests and a large purple canopy with the club’s name on it. The staff lot was unobtrusive by comparison, playing host to an array of scooters, convertibles, and numerous black BMW jeeps. The smaller vehicles almost universally belonged to the strippers. The army of jeeps belonged to the other men of the Yaroshenko Organizatsiya, New York City’s largest and oldest ‘Russian’ mafia.

The term ‘Russian Mafia’ is a poor analogue for the many unallied brigadi[3] that make up Slavic organized crime. For one thing, any given Organizatsiya has members from all corners of the Eastern Bloc, as well as Turkey, Israel, and Chechnya. For another, the term ‘mafia’ conveys a certain sense of conservative, orderly unity, evoking images of hereditary Families led by a single Don. Every one of the organizations that could be described as ‘Russian mafia’ do things their own way. If the Italian Mob is a family business, then the Russian Mafia is a fast-food franchise: a cluster of para-military cells unified around a team of managers, with each cell branching out further into a web of patsies, fall-men, bookies, dealers and common street thugs. Vassily and I occupied a strange position within our own brigada. We were both immigrant children born in America to long-time Thieves in Law. Our hereditary position conveyed a certain hollow prestige, in that the senior authorities invested more time into us, but they also expected more.

“Ugh,” Vassily said. “Jesus Christ. I almost forgot how hot it was out here. It feels like something is wiping its dick all over my face.”

I blinked a few times, trying to digest the metaphor as I pulled my briefcase from the back seat of the car. “I’m mildly alarmed that you have a reference for that sensation, Vasya.”

“I don’t.” Scowling, he plucked at his shirt, trying to stop it from sticking to his chest. “I just watch a lot of porn and I know I’m making the same face that the chick does when the guy jacks off on her.”

“You’re very single-minded tonight, aren’t you?”

“Hey, don’t give me any shit. Daddy didn’t get his bathroom time, and now we have to be back at work.”

The security post out the back of Sirens was usually the cruisiest place to work on any night. You stood at the door, smoked, read the newspaper, talked to your friends, and – if you were so inclined – hit on the strippers as they went in and out for shifts and smoke breaks. There were two guards out here tonight, and they looked anything but relaxed.

“Alexi, Vasya, thank Mary and all her little saints.” Roman was the taller of the two: a large man with a small face and big ears. He would have been handsome if he’d been crafted to be more proportionate. “You need to get in there, man. Someone’s hit Slava with the evil eye.”

Vassily arched an eyebrow. “The evil eye? Like, the curse? Did he piss off some gypsy’s grandma?

“It’s not funny. Someone’s cursed him, I swear to God.” The other man at the door, a guy I’d always known as Ottarik the Turk, looked deeply unsettled. He had a hand-shaped hamsa[4] pendant hanging outside of his collar on a thick silver chain. “I was standing right next to him on the floor, and then this mark appeared. I felt it like the Devil passed me, then he started screaming and tearing off his clothes. No one could keep him calm.”

Ex-Soviet muzhiki[5] are some of the toughest muscle in the world. Every one of them was a thief, a murderer, a jailbird, a current or former drug addict, and often ex-military. These were men who’d cut their own grandmother’s throat for a dram of good Chinese opium… but they couldn’t deal with the evil eye. The evil eye was one of those curses that led to financial and physical ruin followed by an unavoidable, lingering death. Your business would crash, someone would run over your puppy, your woman would die in childbirth. Then you’d get prostate cancer or some other similarly gruesome condition, and you would go mad in the months or years before you died alone in poverty and misery. Hexes like this probably did exist, but the description of events – burning, screaming, pain – didn’t sound like the usual superstitious hysteria to me.

“I’m sure we’ll be able to do something for him.” The briefcase I carried contained enough occult paraphernalia to give both Roman and Ottarik heart attacks if they ever had chance to look inside. Cards, knives, ritual spell components, powders and talismans, and glue gun for affixing permanent magical inscriptions to smooth surfaces. It was the 20th century, after all. “Are they in the manager’s office?”

“No way. Security office. Lev and Rodya won’t let him into the upstairs, man. He’s cursed,” Ottarik said.

Roman spat on the ground to banish the evil force gathering around the door at talk of curses and the Devil, and ruefully shook his head.

The door to the security office was usually open. Tonight, the door was closed, and all three of the bouncers on duty were clustered around the entryway, gossiping to one another in hushed tones. When they noticed us, they stopped talking, watching me like a dangerous viper slithering down the hallway toward them. As far as the average tough guy muzhiki was concerned, the only thing more terrifying then the Evil Eye were those capable of cursing people with it. People like me, a Volkhv:[6] a magus, able to affect magic through his will alone.

“The Ghostbusters are here, never fear!” Vassily strolled ahead, breaking some of the tension, as I drew up alongside. “Who’s in there?”

“Rodion,” Demyon replied. He was a rangy Ukrainian with a shaved head, his scalp marred by old chemical burn scars. “Nic. Slava, of course. Petro, Lev, Semyon and Grisha.”

“Grisha? Oh jeez,” Vassily said. He knew what was coming.

My skin tightened and my gut clenched with a nasty, cold sensation. The world withdrew; I was suddenly empty, ringing and numb. “What the hell is Grigori doing here?”

“He IS the Kommandant,”[7] Demyon said, sullenly. “Be pretty fucked if he wasn’t there for his man.”

Whatever chill I had vanished in a cloud of angry steam. “Rodion knows I can’t work with him around. I need this like I need teeth in my ass.”

One of the katsap,[8] a Russian who didn’t speak Ukrainian, eyed me suspiciously and crossed himself as I barged on past the trio through the door, Vassily on my heels. We emerged into a scene that would have been hilarious to the point of absurdity on any other day.

Everyone seemed to be yelling at everyone else. Vyacheslav Nazrenko – Slava for short – was a skinny, heavily tattooed, hairy man, currently sitting on a wooden chair in a circle of salt. He was shirtless and rigid with fear, both hands theatrically clamped over his heart. Papers and shed clothing were scattered everywhere on the ground. An ashtray had been overturned. Petro sat at the round staff table, putting down a double shot of vodka as he watched Rodion, our Avtoritet, drunkenly chew out his Advokat,[9] Lev, and Lev’s friend Semyon. Clouds of cigarette and marijuana smoke billowed out of the security manager’s office.

“Fucking Christ, what the fuck took you cocksucking fucks so long?” Rodion turned on Vassily and I as we reached the table. He was big bear of a man with a big voice, big sideburns, and a pompadour that would have taken pride of place at any Greaser convention. By contrast, Lev was a dead ringer for Bill Gates: slim, a little soft in the arms, but his sea-green eyes were always flinty and calculating. His best friend and companion Semyon was a white-collar gangster as well, but considerably less attractive than Lev. He had sandy hair and a high forehead, his features seemingly squashed down near the bottom of his face.

“Good evening, Avtoritet.” I replied, setting my case down. “You’re looking well.”

Rodion seemed to swell another half foot in size. “Don’t be a smartass. Did I tell you fuckwits to crawl here?”

“Fuck off, Rodya. We got here as fast as could.” Vassily laughed him off and plopped down in a chair across from Petro. “Hey beautiful, is that bottle of Khortytsa for me?”

“Knock yourself out,” Petro mumbled.

“This is that bitch piece of shit pindos’[10] fault!” Rodion snarled. He pointed at Slava with a sausage-sized finger, and the skinny man paled even further. “All that happened was that Slava and Mo went to go remind somebody to go pay up, and now this stupid Yankee is putting the evil eye on MY men!”

“Am I gonna die?” Slava squeaked.

“Could everyone please calm down?” I rubbed the bridge of my nose. The noise was causing my vision to swim with bursts of light and color.

“I don’t know what to say to you, Rodya.” Lev pushed his glasses up along his nose, his face a mask of displeasure. “This is what happens when you try to solve these kinds of problems with violence as first resort, when we could have—”

“You can go fuck off with your patronizing bullshit, is what you can do,” Rodion snapped. “I’ve been twisting wrists since before your mother spread her legs for your daddy, you cumstain. And YOU.” He turned on Petro, who shrank into his chair. “What did you do to the guy, Petro? Did you murder his fucking dog in front of him and steal his favorite car or something?”

“We put him against the wall with a razor and told him he needed to pay up.” Petro was usually a tall, strikingly handsome man with a deep tan and tragically fashionable hair. He currently looked like a whipped puppy. “How many fucking times—”

“Could someone please help me?” Slava added.

“WILL YOU ALL JUST SHUT! UP!” I finally raised my voice.

As my shout reverberated off the walls, everyone fell silent. Every one of them stared at me in shock.

“If you want ANYTHING done tonight, then everybody except for Slava and Rodion needs to get out,” I said, pointing at the door. “NOW.”

“I’ll leave when I want to.” Petro sat up in his chair, suddenly possessed of something resembling a spine. “You don’t get order me around, you spooky piece of shit.”

Vassily’s long, handsome face froze into hawkish lines as he got to his feet. “Yeah, well I do. Calm your tits, and get the fuck out.”

Petro’s expression soured. “Hey, just because you’re working with Rodya doesn’t mean—”

“What the hell? You brats are trying to order my soldiers around now?” A very deep voice, whiskey-hoarse and as dry and black as old tar, spoke from the other side of the room. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

Chapter 3

My back stiffened painfully as I turned to square off with the speaker. “I’m the only person capable of dealing with this particular problem, father.”

Looking at Grigori Sokolsky was like looking at my own reflection in a funhouse mirror. I was short, muscular and compact. My father was simply enormous, with the paunchy muscle gut, thick arms, and extremely broad shoulders of a lapsed bodybuilder. We shared the same hard, square features, and most characteristically, the same piercing white-gray eyes. From that point onward, we shared little in common. I was polished, pale and polite, well-educated through a combination of merit and good luck, and intentionally well-spoken. Grigori was not. He was a thuggish alcoholic gorilla with a seaman’s tan and oily hair the color of coal. The sight of him was enough to turn my stomach.

He chuckled. “What was that? I can’t hear you up here, short stuff.”

“Wonderful, yes. Very funny. Now please leave.” I fought the urge to snap at him. “I need to work.”

“What kind of hello is that for your old man?” Grigori grinned. He had several gold teeth, several black teeth, and a couple missing. “Do you see this, Rodya? You just gonna stand there and let him order around his Kommandant?”

“I’m going to stand around and wait for everyone to clear out so that something can be done about Slava,” Rodion said. Rodion was a big guy who’d done his time in the Red Army and in prison camps, but even he was nervous around my father. Among the rough and tumble of the Organizatsiya, Grigori went beyond the pale. He’d killed his own father as a teenager, become a wrestler for the State, was sent to the GULAG[11] for nearly a decade, then had gone on to beat, strangle, knife and rape his way from Siberia to New York.

“I knew I should have stuck with jerking off,” Grisha said, gesturing to me. “After all those years spent feeding this ungrateful son of a bitch, this is what I end up with.”

“Get out,” I repeated.

“Or what?” He leered at me. “You feeling froggy, kid?”

Just those three words were enough to send a flush of adrenaline through my head and chest. I heard a creak: my gloves, as my fists tightened beside my thighs. If I backed down, no one would respect me. If I stood up to him, I was defying the law of the hierarchy. My father outranked me in social capital and by title.

“The Kommandant would let me help his cursed soldier,” I said, trying to keep the shake out of my voice. “I have a job to do. Leave.”

Finally, my father’s eyes narrowed to smoldering white slits. “Now you listen to me, you little faggot—”

“Grisha, don’t worry about it.” Nicolai came up on his right and clapped him on the arm, halting him as he began to advance. He was a dry, thin man who looked like a corn stalk beside my father’s bulk, but Grigori stopped all the same. “Leave it. Let’s go get a drink.”

“Suits me.” Petro glanced uncomfortably at me, then Vassily, and then stood back from the table.

I regarded Grigori with arrogant disapproval as shivers tried to spread through my limbs. He sneered knowingly, and then he, Vassily, Nic, Petro, Lev and Semyon left the room as one. I stared at their backs until the door slammed shut.

When I was sure they were gone, I turned on Rodion. “You knew this would happen. Why was he here?”

“Hey, don’t you give me any shit. Grisha came in with Slava.” Rodion shuffled his shoulders back under his leather jacket, his heavy features set and unreadable. “I know you and he have some personal beef with one another, but he’s got as much right to be here as you do. And he’s right. Don’t show up your Kommandant in front of the others again.”

I wanted to scream at him. He didn’t understand. My father was like a sleeping bear. When it was out of sight, it was out of mind. When you poked it – when he was reminded of something he was supposed to hate – he didn’t go back to sleep. A single personal encounter with my father led to weeks of continual abuse. He’d turn up at my apartment and shout at me from the street or outside my door and pick fights, which he still often won. He’d shit-talk me to everyone in the Organizatsiya, and tell lies about me that I would be forced to defend. Once, he’d taken a dump on my car and wiped his ass over the windshield. Eventually, he’d get bored of tormenting me, succumbing once more to the memory-wiping comfort of the bottle and the pill, but my life was going to be hell until he was over being shown up in front of his friends.

I couldn’t find the words to reply. My face felt hot, my stomach cold.

“Are you gonna help me or what?” Slava’s whining broke the ice that had frozen over the room.

Magic. Magic was the panacea. Besides Vassily and Mariya, magic was the one constantly empowering, pleasant thing in my life. Shuddering, I turned away and broke the circle of salt around Slava's chair with a toe. It was useless – salt was a good enough focus for protective magic, but it hadn't been spread around by a mage. A salt circle cast by a frightened superstitious gangster wasn't going to stop anything except slugs. “Uncover your chest.”

The scrawny man finally dropped his hands, uncovering his left pectoral. My eyebrows nearly reached my hairline when I saw what he'd been concealing. It was a kolovrat, a sun wheel, an ancient Indo-Slavic symbol related to the swastika. It was burned into his flesh like a new brand, and as I watched, the weeping wound crawled with a tiny spark of bright orange energy.

“This isn't the evil eye.” I went to one knee on the ground before him, studying the mark from half a foot away. It had a prickling resonance to it… the emanation of strong magic. “What on Earth were you doing to end up with something like this?”

“I wasn't doing nothin',” Slava replied. “I didn't see nobody, no one came near me, nothin'. I was on shift and my chest started hurting like someone stabbed me, man.”

“But you went and roughed someone up,” I said, flatly. “Who?”

Slava looked up past me, to Rodion.

“No one who can do magic, if I'm even right at all. I'll tell you about it later in the office,” he grunted.

I refocused on the injury. “Can you think of anyone else you might have ticked off over the last week or two? Anyone’s girlfriend cheat with you? Debts? Did you sell bad dope to anyone…?”

“No man. No way.” Slava shook his head emphatically. “Only thing I did was the job on Maslak.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rodion frown. His eyes darkened and went distant. You could almost hear the gears grinding inside of his skull. He had been shouting about someone before… something about Slava and Petro laying the thumbscrews on some Yankee.

“When did this mark appear?” I glanced back at the door, making sure that my father was no longer there, and pulled one of my gloves off. I kept my hands covered at all times, including during the heat of summer. Waking, sleeping… there were only three reasons I ever took my gloves off. Two of those reasons involved the bathroom; the other instance was when I needed maximum contact with fields of arcane energy.

Slava sniffed. “Tonight, about forty-five minutes ago. I was out on the floor, just walking around on the railing. Then this hit. It hurt like getting shot… and now I feel really fucking weird. Like something’s wrapped around my heart.”

“Did you notice anyone acting strangely? Staring at you, following you around the room?”

Slava shook his head again.

Closing my eyes, I held my hand out a couple of inches from Slava's chest, and relaxed my body along the straight rail of my spine. As my hand got closer to the mark, the hairs on his chest prickled with a tiny sound, like embers crawling through paper. The sound – and the energy – was orange, bittersweet and sharp. You could tell a lot about a static enchantment just by those first sensory impressions. It was hot, fiery, and the energy had a bated, unpleasant feeling about it. The spook behind this curse was waiting for a trigger, perhaps, or simply the right time to finish the spell. Whoever was behind this, they were using the mark to maintain a line of connection between themselves and Slava.

I knelt back, pursing my lips, and stood. Both men in the room watched me in uncomfortable silence as I went to my briefcase and popped the lid. Immersed in the white-noise trance of magic, I could feel their stares playing over my exposed skin. I drew a small knapped obsidian knife, a flat, blank piece of human bone on a red cord, a metallic silver Sharpie, and a tiny hooked graver with a fine, sharp point.

“So. What’s the verdict?” Rodion had his arms folded loosely across his chest.

“It’s a curse,” I said. “The more serious kind. I’ve heard of mages who are capable of affixing hex marks to someone from a distance, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen it in person.”

Rodion winced, clicking his tongue. “So, what? Does this mean his dick is gonna fall off or something?”

Slava’s hands gripped the sides of the chair. He made a weird, strangled sound in his throat.

“It’s impossible to know exactly what it’s intended for. My first inclination is to say that it’s a warning and possibly a surveillance tool… magic that feeds information back to the spook who cast the spell.” I knelt back down in front of Slava, this time on both knees, and spread my tools out.

“What’s it going to do to me?” Slava watched me, his eyes rolling like a spooked horse. It was hard to say what frightened him more: me or the curse.

“I literally just explained that I don’t know.” I couldn’t keep the irritation from my voice as I considered what we needed to do. “I’m going to draw on your skin around the symbol. It will work something like a tracking device… if the Spook tries anything on you, the ward will trigger and I will be able to find the mage performing the spell. I need you to make sure that you don't shower. No showering, no bathing until we find the guy that did this. Do you understand?”

Slava swallowed, and glanced past me to the others. “Okay.”

“The second thing I’m going to do is take a drop of your blood and create a protective talisman,” I said. “I’ll work on it tonight and bring it in tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow? Can’t you get it to him any sooner?” Rod said.

“Tomorrow is pushing it as it is.” I shook my head. “Talismans require a great concentration of effort. The standard charging time is a full lunar cycle; we're doing one in less than twenty-four hours.”

“Will it work at all, then?”

“It's better than nothing,” I said. “A dustbin lid will work as a shield if you're in a hurry. It won't stop a bullet, but the bullet won't go as deep.”

“Jeez. That's fucking reassuring.” Slava rubbed his hands over his face.

I knelt back. “It's the difference between injury and fatality.”

“Amen to that. If it’s the best we can do, it’s the best we can do, eh, Slava?” Rodion chuckled, but it sounded tense and reddish, too high-pitched to be a real laugh. “You'll be alright.”

That remained to be seen. I took the knife in one hand, the talisman in the other, and drew the point through the air over my chest, then over Slava's. He went still as I worked through the words of power needed to bind the sigil. The man was frightened, energy that radiated out from him in invisible waves I felt as a pressure in my mouth and sinuses. Fortunately, fear was the perfect tether for a ward designed to monitor and track. Like bodies, magic needs energy to stay alive. As long as Slava had this mark, he would be afraid of it. As long he was afraid and focused on it, the gathering ward would have an energy source.

I took his hand, exposed the pale skin of his wrist, and lay the point of the knife where his spider-and-web tattoo ended. He sucked in a sharp breath as I pushed it in and twisted the tiny wound open. Dark venous blood welled up slowly, and I used it to sketch first rendition of the ward around and over the curse mark. With the other hand, I pressed the bone flake over the small injury and held it there as I filled in the geometry for the ward with the silver Sharpie. The original cartridge was long gone: the replacement contained real colloidal silver.

It went on faded, dulled by the drying lines of blood, until I finished the figure and carefully closed the seal. Then it rippled and flared briefly before settling into a bright, metallic glow on his chest.

Both men were struck dumb. No matter how many times they saw it, magic was always startling for blanks.[12] Their focus aided the spell, contributing force I didn't have to draw from myself.

“There.” When I was sure the circle was integral, I pulled the talisman away. The smooth bone now had a fine film of dried blood, which I quickly sketched on with the graver. “I will take this home and work on the actual protection tonight.”

“So what do I do now?” Slava said. “Go say my Hail Marys?”

“What does any red-blooded man do when he's facing down death, Slava?” Rodion laughed and clapped him on the back, nearly knocking him off his seat. “You drink and fuck. You’re off for tonight and tomorrow. Go visit the bar. There’s a new girl doing her public audition for us out there tonight, this little bitty brunette. She’s easy to pick out… huge rack, dances in all of this fancy lingerie.”

Slava perked up at the thought of lingerie, then turned to look at me with renewed concern. “This shit isn’t going to kill me, is it?”

“It might,” I replied. “However, I doubt whatever curse has been placed on you is going to kill you tonight at the very least, so try to stay calm and keep up your usual routines. I’ll bring the talisman after sunset tomorrow.”

“You fucking try to stay calm.” He rolled his eyes and got to his feet.

“Don’t be a dickhead, Slava. Go join the others and have a drink. I have to speak to Alexi in private.” Our Avtoritet was smiling, but it was forced. “Come on, Lexi… we'll go to my office.”

Slava shook my hand, and that was the extent of his gratitude. He and Rodion kissed cheeks, and I studied the larger man as they milled. Rodya was the kind of leader who appeared to wear his heart on his sleeve: down-to-earth, open, casual. In truth, he was a shrewd and intelligent man, but to my interrogator’s eyes he currently looked like someone under pressure. Someone was tightening the vice on my Avtoritet. There was something happening that Rodya wasn't talking about to his adviser or his commander, and it was bad. It was quite bad, and I didn't have to be a wizard to know that it was about to become my problem.

Chapter 4

I followed my Avtoritet from the security office – a twin suite of plain plasterboard and fluorescent tube lighting – to the VIP manager’s office upstairs. Every man who’d been through here in my lifetime had done up the place differently. Sergei Yaroshenko, our founding patriarch and Pakhun,[13] the real boss of the organization, had renovated the office in gold and purple. He was responsible for the purple carpet in the upstairs lounges. When he'd left us to our devices and traveled back to Ukraine to manage our continental branch, Rodion had come into leadership. He and Lev were the muscle and the brains, and despite their differences, they’d created a good, stable platform for us to do business.

In line with his fixation on the 1950’s, Rodya’s office was a shrine to muscle cars and Elvis. His pride and joy was his jukebox collection, three of which were installed in his office. He went straight to the largest of them, a rainbow arch of neon and gleaming chrome, and affectionate patted the side of the machine before he began to dial in his music of choice.

“Tell it to me straight, Alexi,” he said, his back facing me. “Slava's going to die, isn't he?”

I took the edge of my seat across from his desk, folding my hands in my lap. They felt strange after their brief exposure to the air, cold and furry. I rubbed them against one another to try and bring them back to normal. “It's possible. This curse is quite a serious piece of magic. Powerful. Sustained. I can't imagine it is going to do him any good if it is activated.”

“Will your sorcery help?”

“The talisman may soak some of the impact. I lay a tracking spell over the curse,” I said. “There's no way to un-make the curse now that it's embedded in his… life-force, I guess you could say. It's like a virus. Once you've caught it, you caught it. If there is a way to tear it free, I don't know it.”

Needle touched to vinyl, and the minimalistic strains of Heartbreak Hotel filled the small room. Rodya turned it down to background level, and then plopped down into his desk chair with a sigh, tipping his head and leaning back.

I cleared my throat. “With all respect intended, Avtoritet… why was Slava hit?”

“Good question,” he said.

“You know who might have done it.”

“I might. But I'm not talking about this without a drink.” Rodion spun around on his chair and straightened up. I watched unhappily as he set out two glasses taken from a drawer, and poured me half a glass of Borovička, a horrible juniper spirit that looked and smelled like turpentine. Cheap liquor had a nauseating acrid, violet smell, a synesthetic odor that the juniper did nothing to help. And I had to drink it. I could turn down a drink from anyone else in the Organizatsiya, but Rodya was the penultimate authority.

“To good health, and no more fucking curses.” He raised his glass, and I suppressed a grimace as I did the same and took a reluctant sip. My Avtoritet threw back half the glass before he came up for air.

“Now, I don't know for sure, but I'm about ninety percent convinced that I know who did this.” Rodya's boar eyes gleamed above his ruddy cheeks as he leaned forward, drink in hand. “If I am right, though, this is a pretty big job. And if you breathe a word of what I'm about to tell you to anyone – anyone – I'll kill you myself. You understand?”

“Perfectly,” I said, leaning back. “My discretion is absolute, Avtoritet. Give me a quick rundown.”

“Right. So, at the beginning of the year, we adopted this little pharma business by name of CelGen,” he said, setting his glass down. “It’s one of those stupid little yuppie start-ups; they research anti-aging drugs and shit like that. Guy that heads it up is named Jacob Maslak. He's from San Fran, originally, and he heard about us from guys I know over there. He came to me and borrowed some money from us to get this thing off the ground. He got a board together, did prospect reports and everything. Made a big song and dance about it.”

“I see.”

“When it was time to claim on his loan, of course the asshole can’t pay me back. Seven hundred and fifty K, Alexi.” Rodion sneered, and rolled his eyes as he lounged back into the chair again. “I talked to Lev and Vassily about killing him or roughing him up, but Vassily had a great idea. Really great. He said that instead of trying to shake him for the money he doesn’t have, we turn CelGen into a pump and dump. The company went to shit within a year and their stocks are worthless, pennies on the dollar, but the anti-aging thing is easy to sell to people with money. Vassily said that we loop in our brokers, pay them off to hype the stocks until they’re up like two-fifty, three-hundred percent, and then we cash out. We front half, Maslak fronts half – way less than what he owed me – and the proceeds go to us and the brokers to cover this idiot’s loan and interest.”

Inwardly, I smiled. It was exactly the kind of clever, bloodless solution that Vassily would suggest. Outwardly, I kept my business face on. “And is Maslak now getting cold feet?”

“Worse than that,” Rodion said. His eyes were black with manic intensity. “The little son of a bitch is trying to threaten us. Says he’s got new scary friends who will help him cut and run unless we split him half the money. We’re talking three, four million dollars here… the rat hasn’t even paid back his original loan, and he wants two million and change? Fuck him.”

“Guy has chutzpah.”[14] I had another tiny sip of Borovička. It was like drinking pine-scented toilet cleaner. “Too much chutzpah for his ongoing health, I presume. Do you want him buried?”

“I want my fucking money. You need to convince him to stay in the deal. I want you to scare the piss out of him, and I want him to know that he’s dealing with people that can kill him any way we want. Guns, explosions, magic. I want him to feel like there’s nothing he can do that’s going to keep him safe from me. But I want him alive.”

Pressing my lips together, I looked down as I considered my options. “I can do it. If it comes to putting out a contract, is it an open or an exclusive deal?”

“Exclusive if you think you can pull it off.”

I was almost insulted. “Of course I can. What’s the pay for the scare?”

“Ten K,” Rodion grunted. “Plus commission when we cash out.”

I really wasn't happy about working on commission, but at the same time the money that the management paid me for larger, messier jobs had to come from somewhere. I made a show of thinking about it, and then nodded and spread my hands.

“Alright,” I said. “Expenses paid?”

Rodion grinned, flashing a mouthful of gold teeth. “Of course. What kind of man do you think I am?”

A conflicted, bombastic man who forbade me from standing up to my father because it makes him uncomfortable. “A generous employer,” I said. “When do you need it done by?”

“As soon as possible.” he replied. “I'd prefer that it was done before Saturday.”

Saturday? As in, three days from now? I frowned. “I'm sorry, Avtoritet, but if you want a major spectacle to occur before Saturday, you're going to have to pay me more than ten thousand dollars. At least fifteen, plus commission to cover the risk. An operation on Saturday means I only have a day for reading and planning, maybe one for surveillance, and one for the operation.”

“You're a tough man, Alexi Sokolsky,” he said. “So tell you what. I'll agree to that provided I pay you only half up front, and the other half once the job is done. If the job is done before my birthday party on Saturday. You lose three grand per day, every day after that.”

I nodded. “Agreed. Write me down his details, and I’ll start tomorrow. Home and work address, everything.”

“I’ll leave it on Nic’s desk. Go join the others and have some fun for the time being, eh?” He smiled pleasantly – as pleasant as a hammerhead shark in human form ever could be described as pleasant – and we shook hands and kissed cheeks. I stood and let myself out of the office, followed by the voice of the King as he crooned his way through Suspicious Minds.

Fun, he said. If I was lucky, Vassily hadn’t taken up the opportunity to party in the nightclub… but when I reached the security office, I saw that my fortunes had failed me. He and the other men who’d been in the office were still gone. That meant they were in the front of house: specifically, the bar and the center stage.

Resigned, I went into Nicolai’s office and scrounged through boxes of ammunition and old paperwork until I found some earplugs. I put them in, and then took a tin of Altoids from my pants pocket, popped the lid, and folded two of them into my mouth. Peppermint oil was one of the more reliable methods to turn the acute agony of loud music into a dull roar.

Sirens was a strip club, first and foremost, but it did have a dance floor and surprisingly good acoustics that also attracted a small disco crowd. The sound of The Jets pounding through the walls was muffled by the earplugs, but I could feel it in my teeth. Bass throbbed on my tongue in choking waves, thick as Karo syrup. Treble caused screechy, needle-like pinpricks of pain all the way down my throat. Synesthesia was truly the worst superpower in the world.

I stepped out into the wall of sound and the blast of fans. Even on a Wednesday, the place was hopping at three a.m. The smaller parlors and the main stage were occupied and surrounded by a thin crowd of eager men, as were the shower booths – boxed stages where girls danced in bikini bottoms and pretended to clean themselves as they pressed various body parts to the Perspex walls. I glanced at them on the way past, mostly out of habit, and continued to where I knew my colleagues were going to be.

Between the bar and the stairs leading up to lap-dance rooms was a corner booth with a long padded bench and small tables currently cluttered with bottles and ashtrays. To my relief, there was no sign of Grigori. Vassily and the others were laughing uproariously, cheering on Slava while he got head from a dancer pulling him a favor.

I slunk in around the edge of the night’s entertainment, taking a seat beside Vassily. He was all too eager to switch his attention from Slava to me. “Hey, Lexi! How’d you go?”

“Interesting night.” I fixedly ignored what was happening down the row, and found my eyes drawn to the catwalk. Three girls were finishing up their set: a busty blonde cowgirl, and two tall, thin Grace Jones lookalikes in bikinis that left nothing to the imagination. I settled for staring at the floor between my knees instead. “I have to head back. There’s work to do.”

“And I’m going to court on Monday and want to have some fun, so I’m gonna stick here for at least a couple hours,” Vassily shouted over the music. “You head home if you want, man. I’ll follow you later.”

“Ladies and gentleman, new to Sirens and all the way from Germany… Crina Jay!” The MC’s blurry microphone was nearly drowned out by the beat.

It was hard to articulate why the notion of leaving disappointed me. Maybe it was that I was twenty-five and wanted nothing more than to finish the book I was reading at home, while everyone here had the ‘real fun’ that I’d never understood. Maybe it was because Vassily was going to court soon, and he was enjoying himself and would enjoy himself more if I stayed. Maybe it was because it felt like I was running away.

The boppy music had shifted to something harsh and minimalistic, a transitional beat spun by the DJ. I fought past the reserve, and lifted my head to say that I was leaving just as Vassily elbowed me in the arm. Confused, I followed the jerk of his head and his quizzical expression.

A tiny woman in very high heels and a very severe bun was striding down the catwalk that led to the poles on the center stage, dressed in a full-length gray wool greatcoat. She was unsmiling, her pretty, boxy face hard and sultry behind a fine black lace veil. Her unorthodox appearance had silenced the whole club, drawing titters from a few of the men in our corner. For the first time I could remember, I found myself curious. The dancers often wore coats out back, but I’d never seen a girl fully dressed on-stage before.

As her song began to play – Laura Branigan, I was sure of it – Crina spun lazily around the pole, once, and then tore the coat open and threw it the ground on the second time around. She was still mostly dressed underneath: corset, thigh-highs and knee-length skirt, all black and glittering under the cheap stage lights. She flung a leg up along the pole, stretching herself up until she was in full splits, and leaned forward from her hips until her head touched her toes.

He says that he can read my mind, the power to turn iron into gold…

She says she’s seen the other side, and knows the place the fire burns all night…

“Well… uh…” Vassily blinked several times. “I uh… guess this is the new girl Rod was talking about.”

I found myself smiling, just a flicker at the corner of my mouth as this new woman stalked around the pole like an Art Deco sculpture, hooking her ankle and twirling herself around and then up… and soon, I found myself captivated as she clung with her legs and shed the gloves one at a time, throwing them down into the gathering crowd with the subtle challenge and sudden alacrity that she’d shed her coat. Once they were off, the dancing really started, and Crina flung herself around the pole, her skirt managing to cover her crotch at strategic moments, climbing up until she was almost to the ceiling. She straightened out there, and undulated back down horizontally, as if running in slow-motion through water. It was not something I’d seen anyone here do before. Her slender muscularity was evident, and when she swirled around and touched the floor, light as a fairy, I saw her tuck the balls of her feet and arch her heel. She was ballet-trained.

“Wow.” Vassily rubbed his hand over his mouth and jaw. “We must be getting classier or something, because—”

“Quiet.” I didn’t want to be distracted.

The audience was crowding up around this woman, hands waving bills as she crawled forward on her knees, unlacing her corset as she went. She tore it open and shoved it down as she reached the edge of the stage, snaking out and forward so that she could accept the first round of offerings down her cleavage.

Vassily shoved at me. “Go up and tip her, Lexi.”

“Well, I don’t know if I need to do that…” I didn’t look across at him, too busy watching Crina roll sinuously across the stage.

“Seriously, man, I’ve never seen you look at a chick like this. Go get her, for reals.”

He was thinking sex: I was thinking power. Her song was about magic, and as she flirted with revealing her breasts – never quite showing anything – and turned into a broadside splits with her head turned, eyes dark and intense from over her shoulder, my smile broadened. Tiny as she was, she commanded the room… and I knew a fellow ceremonial artist when I saw one.

Quite abruptly, I rose and pushed toward the stage. Jeering and cheers followed from behind me. As if I’d never spoken to a woman in my life… I’d never had sex with a woman – that was true – but the approach had never been the hard part.

I had to strategically elbow larger, hornier men out of my way to get where I could be seen, just in time to watch the lady launch back into air. She arched backwards, practically upside down, and dropped her corset to the stage with a thump. It left her in her lingerie and garters, which she made full use of when she dropped back down to collect her next round of tips, crawling like Catwoman on hands and toes. For a moment, she met my eyes, and I saw hers widen in the second before I held up a folded twenty in my gloved fingers. I tapped my watch and motioned toward the stairwell with my head, and she gave a subtle nod on her way across. She was expecting to give me a lap dance. I wanted to talk, and the money was the same either way.

Her eyes hooded, and she rolled her scarlet lip under her teeth on her way across to me. I made to feed it under her garter, but she leaned in toward me and very delicately, very deliberately took the note between her teeth. We were eye to eye for a few seconds, and then her ass was where her head had been, and I was suddenly able to count the rhinestones sewn into the seat of her panties.

She turned to look at me, smiling enigmatically, before her expression froze and then, briefly, dropped. My instincts kicked me in the stomach, and I smelled something sour in the second before I saw my father’s shadow sway into view. He was tall enough that he didn’t have to press in close to the stage the way I had, but he was working through to the front anyway. I heard him snarl at someone and push them out of his way. He wasn’t even within five feet of me, and I could still smell how drunk he was.

My heart sped. The momentary satisfaction of connecting with the woman on stage disappeared as my stomach dropped out. Before Grigori could see me, I pushed back and wove through the pack in the opposite direction to his approach. My father was drunk, randy, and practically guaranteed to pick a fist-fight with me on the stage if he saw me flirting with the woman he had his eye on. Crina, sensible creature that she was, strode back to her pole and clung to it like a dryad fleeing to her oak tree. She had a good instinct for self-preservation. Six and a half feet tall and nearly three hundred pounds, my father radiated violence and filth wherever he went.

I tried to believe I was retreating for everyone’s sake, that if he had picked anything with me, I’d have put him to the ground and kicked him for good measure. For that matter, if killing him wouldn’t spell the end of my career and totally ostracize me from my peers, I’d have done it years ago.

It was no good. I’d never been a slick liar, even to myself. As I slunk through the door and into the empty concrete halls of the back-of-house, I knew in my heart that the abused child in me had run away from his father, again, and the victory belonged to him.

Chapter 5

The rest of the night was spent in more monastic pursuits. Tired and pent up, I consecrated Slava’s bone amulet in a circle drawn on the top of my apartment roof. There was a reason I had bought out the third floor, and that reason was to have a magical workspace in full view of the sun and moon. When that was done and the amulet was charging in a bowl of salt, I slept until Vassily stumbled into house, put him to bed, and immersed back into my nightmares. Between Grigori, Aliens, anxiety, and curses, there was no relief to be found in sleep. Instead, I dreamed of my father and the cat.

When I was very young – maybe six or so – Grisha drove me to one of the projects in Red Hook that was owned by the Organizatsiya. He dragged me by my arm from the car, all the way down the stairs to the basement. In my dream, the walls throbbed red hot.

It was one of father’s ‘lessons’: excursions where I was supposed to ‘toughen up’ and ‘learn how to be a man’. From the age of five onwards, he exposed me to everything he did. He beat people unconscious in front of me. He killed a guy outside of a bakery with a tire iron while I waited on a dustbin, watching every blow. For this particular lesson, he’d brought a cat in a potato sack. He was drunk, of course.

“You have to learn one thing about this world, kiddo. You wanna know what that is? It’s that nothing matters. Not a fucking thing. Everything is like everything else, and it’s all shit. You think anything makes sense?”

“No, sir.” It was hellishly hot down here, and stuffy. The furnace clanked.

“All that matters is being strong, kid. You know why? Any day, the government can just up and throw your fag ass in prison. Your old man was famous. He was gonna go to the Olympics. Then suddenly, bam! My ass was in GULAG! You want to know what I did? Fucking nothing, that’s what. Someone that didn’t like me made shit up to the police, and that was it.”

The question formed in the dream as I had spoken it. “Why would somebody do that?”

“Why? Because humans are garbage. There is no ‘why’. I nearly died twenty times in that hellhole. It ruined my body, and now I’m never going to wrestle again. You think there’s things worse than dying, Alexi?”

“No, sir.”

“What if someone fucks you in the ass? You think you’d rather be somebody’s bitch instead of being dead?”

“No, sir.” I didn’t understand him, but I knew I was supposed to disagree. The words coming from his mouth, huge and distended in the darkness, were meaningless. He looked like an alien, saying alien things.

“Good, because I swear to God, if you turn out to be some kind of sissy faggot, I’ll choke you to death myself.”

“Yes, sir.”

In the dream, as in life, I was paralyzed as he pulled the struggling cat from the bag. It was one of mother’s alley cats. We weren’t allowed to have cats in the house, but she fed close to twenty strays in the yard every night, and every couple of weeks, several of them would go missing. Now, I knew where they went.

“You don’t even fucking know what I’m talking about, do you? Let me show you what happens to pussies in this world, Alexi.”

I was rooted to the floor, cold with black terror. I was an adult in my dream, but I still couldn’t move as he flung open the pig-iron door and threw the cat inside. It screamed, and as it screamed, I screamed.

The earth quaked. A dark shadow bore down on me from above, and I blindly threw a punch out as hard as I could. There was a startled shout, but the shrill yowl and awful stench of the burning cat was still there, blurring slowly into the piercing honk of my alarm clock going off at full blast.

“Morning, sunshine.” Vassily scowled down at me. His wiry hands were wrapped around my wrists. He had an angry red flush across his jaw where I’d punched him.

As I got my bearings, I realized that I was still in bed. The sheets were damp with sweat. “Hhh…What…?”

“You nearly knocked me out. And then what? We’d be late to your… uhh… whatever you set this alarm for.”

Oh, right. “Mariya.” My voice was thick, gluggy and rough. I coughed, winnowing out the present reality from past memory. They were receding already, sliding back down under still mirrored waters. Now that I was awake, I could remember without feeling. “Mariya’s. Brunch. And then we have to… surveillance. Want to come?”

“Surveillance? Oh boy oh boy, do I ever.” Vassily rubbed his face. I couldn’t read his expression.

“Get ready, then. We have to be at the location by three.”

“No worries.”

I got to my feet, wooden and dizzy, and stumbled to the bathroom. The first thing I did was throw up. It was loud and painful and unpleasant, but I felt better afterward. Once I had purged, I showered, brushed my teeth, and tried to plow through the fugue toward wakefulness. Food would help; coffee would help more. By three p.m., I would hopefully be reasonably alert and ready to go hunt our man.

Mariya’s deli was an oasis in the chaos of Brighton Beach. Shadowed by the railway overhead and a blue and white awning, the glass-fronted corner store was always cool in the summer. There was no menu on the wall and little decoration inside, but it always smelled like fried butter, sugar, vanilla and tea. Mariya was Vassily’s elder sister. By extension, she was my adopted sister, and the only maternal figure I could ever remember having.

We had keys, so we went in through the cramped back hallway. I closed the door on the hot bustle of the street outside, and we moved through the cool darkness of the corridor to the kitchen. Mariya was in there, busily boiling pelmeni[15] and chopping onions. Vassily knocked on the door frame, and she looked over with arched eyebrows and then a gracious smile very much like her brother’s.

“My boys!” She left her food to meet us halfway across the kitchen. She kissed Vassily briefly and platonically on the lips and face, and then bent down to kiss me on both cheeks. “Look at you both! Alexi Grigoriovich, you have dark rings around your eyes. You’re exhausted. Why aren’t you sleeping more?”

“Life and work,” I replied, shrugging. I tried to be nonchalant, but my stomach was hot and dry after the morning’s nightmare and subsequent puking. Mariya’s warm, blue-fur voice was a balm over the memories of my father.

“You know how it is. No rest for the wicked,” Vassily added.

Mariya clucked her tongue in disapproval, reaching out to straighten my collar. I let her. She was one of two people in the world I let touch me beyond a handshake or a pat on the back. “I swear, the pair of you look thinner every time I see you. You’re working too hard. Do I need to go and kick Rodion in the tuches?”[16]

“You could try.” Vassily grinned at the thought of it. “He’s got a pretty hard ass, though. I bet you could swipe a credit card down the middle of that thing.”

“Oy gevalt. I swear, these friends of yours are going to kill you both one of these days.” Mariya tutted, hustling back to the stove. It was still early afternoon, and she was managing the kitchen by herself. The rush didn’t start until after four. “So, you’ve come here to eat my food and dirty my chairs, have you?”

“And drink your kompot,”[17] Vassily said. “Pretty much. Me and Alexi figured you’d want to see us before Court on Monday.”

“Nonono, Semych. Don’t remind me of that.” Mariya shook her head, scowling as she strained the dumplings out of the pot and heaped them on a plate. “I don’t even want to think about you in that place. Not to mention, prison. What a nightmare.”

“I’m not going to prison, Mari.”

She turned to look back at us. Like Vassily, she was black haired and blue eyed, tall, handsome, and hawkish. Brother and sister were almost the same height, an even six feet. Unlike Vassily, she had no tattoos and no scars gained from combat. She had lost both parents and three brothers to the criminal life, and the Organizatsiya was not for her. “That’s what Antoni thought, too.”

“Toni was put away for murder. The Fed arrested me for tax and credit card stuff.” Vassily waved her off with a long hand. “It’s not a big deal, sis.”

“It’s a big deal since RICO,” she retorted. “But ayy, let’s not talk about it. I don’t want to bring bad luck on us before we go to the courtroom. What do you boys want to eat?”

“I would dig the hell out of a chicken sandwich and some blintz,” Vassily replied.

Despite the heat, I was in the mood for something warm. “Veal pelmeni would be wonderful, Maritka. And coffee.”

“Go out back and wait, then.” She resumed dishing up, shooing us away with a hand. “I’ve got Vanya and his goons out front all wanting their food. After that, I’ll bring it out with some kompot.”

“Everything all right out there?” Vassily’s eyes narrowed imperceptibly. “They aren’t treating you badly, are they?”

“No no.” Mariya laughed, a warm, rich blue sound. “They’re all just hungry, Semych. Don’t worry about a thing.”

Nearly every day after elementary school, we had gone to Mariya’s shop to eat dinner and do our homework in the same empty storeroom. Mariya kept bulk ingredients in there these days, but the same wooden table and chairs Vassily and I had used as children was still in here. It was a pleasant, relaxing start to what was bound to be an interesting day scoping out Jacob Maslak and seeing what we could do to make his life a living hell.

Chapter 6

The better part of any operation like this was surveillance. Surveillance is time-consuming and requires an earnest wetworker to be well prepared. Coffee is mandatory, as are binoculars, a notepad or tape recorder, and a hospital bedpan: the kind with the long neck and water-tight screw-on cap. All that coffee has to go somewhere, and I assure you that there is nothing worse than being six hours into a twelve-hour surveillance gig and knocking your improperly capped bedpan onto the floor of your car.

This job wasn’t likely to take twelve hours, but we stocked up just in case. Early Monday afternoon, Vassily and I rented a car under fake names with a fake credit card, a Town car with tinted windows and a low profile. Then, we headed for Maslak’s office.

CelTech was based out of an office two streets across from the Columbia University Medical Center. The building looked like a sapling struggling in the shade of a giant tree: or in this case, the monolithic parking garage just behind the building. We cruised down 163rd, looking out over the beige cube dug into its pit, but it was still a little early for the workers to be leaving.

I sucked on a tooth as I slowed for traffic. The street was one-way, narrowed by solid lines of parked cars to either side. “You know what he looks like, don’t you?”

“Yeah. White, five-foot eight. Trim build, dark hair, short beard. Ivy League cut, square face. He looks Hungarian to me, drives a black luxury sedan.” Vassily was in the back, watching the rear windows while I focused on the road.

“Which only narrows it to around eighty percent of all cars up and down this street,” I replied. “I really hope he doesn’t park in that multistory jungle we passed on the way here.

“Well NOW he has.” Vassily rolled his eyes. “Good one, Alexi. You jinxed us.”

“I can avert the jinx with a sacrifice,” I replied. “But the ritual has very particular requirements. For one thing, the sacrifice must be a smart-mouthed hohol—”[18]

“Hey! Fuck you!”

“- And he must be defenestrated at high speed on a New York City highway,” I continued, turning the corner. We had to go around again until we found a spot to set up.

“God, I hate you so much.”

“I know you do.” I eyed the huge parking garage on the way past it again. “You don’t have his home address? I know that neither Nicolai or Rodion do.”

“Nah. He gave an address, but Nic says he went to check it out and Maslak doesn’t live there. Makes sense to me… would you give your address out to people like us?”

“An excellent point.”

It was just after five when the first wave of staff poured out through the gate. We were able to mount a search while waiting for people to load into their cars and pull out onto the street. I finally grabbed a spot not too far down, and we began the anxious game of trying to spot our man in among the spreading streams of people.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait long. I was keeping an eye forward and to my right, but it was Vassily who hissed with recognition. I turned around and followed his pointing finger as a knot of suits clambered up the stairs from building to gate, chatting and smoking. The man matching Maslak’s description was among them. He was a waspish, shrewd looking yuppie with a side-part and a suit which looked too expensive for his dowdy workplace. He also had the mannerisms of a nervous squirrel in the company of hawks: three larger, swarthy men who hung back at the fence line to finish their cigarettes.

“Hey, wait. Holy shit.” Vassily peered through the grayish window film, brow furrowed. “I know that guy.”

“Who? What?” I squinted, trying to see if I recognized any of his coworkers.

“That big guy, the fat one with the comb over. Fuck, what’s his name… it’s Acardi, Accorso, something like that. He’s a Mafia headhunter. Works for John Manelli’s crew over in New Jersey.”

There were five Italian Families that ruled the north-eastern United States. The Manellis were a subfamily of the Scappeti Mafia, a blue-collar industrial mob based in Newark. There’d been a hundred and sixty-one murders in 1981 in that city: The Manelli Crew had been responsible for quite a few of them. I frowned. “Last I heard, Don Scappeti and Rod had an agreement. They buy our gasoline.”

“Yeah. A couple million dollars’ worth of gas.” Vassily’s tone was dark as we watched Maslak shake hands with the capo[19] and his men and then stalk off down the street. Our mark was headed toward Fort Washington Avenue, and the Central Parking garage. “Go out there, man. Go follow him and make sure he’s going where we want him to go. I’ll drive around the block.”

“Good plan.” I waited, tense and wary, until I saw the three goons head for their cars. Feigning calm, I opened the door and got out, brushing down my shirt. Vassily scrambled over the seat and plopped down behind the wheel. I set off after Maslak at a purposeful walk while Vassily pulled out of our bay and out onto the street, cutting off a car that had been trying to creep past us.

Fortunately, I passed well in a crowd of suits. Neatly dressed and self-contained, I pretended to pay attention to a pager as I followed the man around the corner, all too aware that wherever there was Mafia, there was Mafia security. Manelli’s men were watching this street. If they were protecting Maslak, they knew that Rodion and the Yaroshenko Organization would be out for him. I could almost smell the garlic on the wind.

Sure enough, Maslak went into the shade of the garage jungle. Built to serve the hospital and the many smaller laboratories clustered around it, it was reminiscent of the concrete sarcophagus that the Soviet government was currently building around the ruins of Chernobyl. I followed him in, keeping a bead on him while I waited for Vassily to catch up. Every second that passed, every moment we headed deeper in the building and closer to the stairwell, the more tension gathered in my shoulders. It was an eternity before the town car rolled past, Vassily concealed by the tinted windows. Maslak turned a corner, and I took the chance to throw open the door and jump in.

“Where’d he go?” Vassily craned his head, rolling forward.

“Left,” I grunted. “If he goes upstairs, I’ll get out again.”

Vassily sped up and hauled the wheel left, pitching me against the door. A car screeched to a halt to avoid broadsiding us, honking loudly.

“What are you doing?” I righted myself, resisting the urge to grab the wheel.

“I’m trying to follow him!”

“Do you want to play the Soviet national anthem out the window while we do it?” I leaned around him catching glimpses of Maslak weaving through the lines of cars. He crossed the next aisle, then the next… and then got his keys out, twirling them around his finger has he closed in on a black Renault.

“There we go. Get the plate!” Vassily’s voice rose in excitement as we slowed to a creep, as if searching for a spot.

It was my turn to roll my eyes. “You are the worst kind of desk jockey. I already have the plate, Vassily.”

“Write it down!”

“I don’t need to write it down.” I watched as the man pointed something with his hand, and the car flashed its lights and chirped. He had some kind of new electronic entry system, one that didn’t require a keypad on the door. It probably worked with radio waves. Interesting.

We circled around, and then followed him at a distance out into the nightmare that was Manhattan rush-hour. While we were stuck in gridlock with every other poor schmuck on the road, Vassily and I took the opportunity to change seats. It was well understood that I was the better driver, and tailing marks was an art form.

It took us nearly an hour and a half to drive eleven miles. By mile nine, Vassily began to grimace and glance out the window. “We’re headed to that Battery Park development area. If this guy lives where I think he might live, I don’t think we’re going to be able to get him at home, Lexi.”

“Why?” My focus was on the road. Even with air con, the sun through the windshield had turned my gloves into a sauna. As traffic thinned out and headed for the Brooklyn Bridge, we were able to pick up some speed.

“This guy’s New Money, and he’s still pretty young.” Vassily rapped his fingers against the door, frowning. “He wants the best of everything, right? The Concrete Club owns some of the biggest apartment towers near Battery Park and Wall Street. And who runs that?”

“The Mafia. But he might not be going home at all,” I said.

“On a Thursday night?”

“Well, I don’t know. Don’t yuppies all go to each other’s apartments and eat sushi on Thursdays?”

Unfortunately, Vassily’s hunch was right. Maslak turned right at the World Trade Center, then left onto South End Avenue to pull up in front of a sectioned off apartment complex with its own boom gates, skywalk, and three skyscrapers’ worth of luxury housing. Ruefully, I watched the black Renault disappear into the dark maw of an underground parking garage. An attended parking garage. We cruised on by and found a place to park down the road, crestfallen.

An apartment complex like this meant security, and it meant cameras: lots of cameras. It didn’t make the job impossible, but it definitely made it harder. I could take out cameras easily enough – electronics don’t really like magical resonance – but not a whole building’s worth. There’d be a trail of fuzzy video. Talented mediums working with forensic videographers would possibly be able to extract the ghostly images of my passing. Besides that, if Maslak could afford a five thousand dollar-a-month apartment, what kind of magical security was he able to contract? And where was he getting the money?

“What are you thinking, Alexi?” Vassily said. “My guess is we pretend to be contractors or pizza boys or something, and go up there and beat the piss out of him.”

“No, no.” I shook my head, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel and staring at the dash as I thought. “No, Rodion wants something more dramatic than that. I’m going to have to do it alone, and I’m going to have to do it tonight… but I have an idea.”

Chapter 7

You had a choice when it came to enforcement work: you could do it fast, or you could do it slow. Slow meant days of surveillance, building up patterns and routines so you could pick the best moment to act. Fast meant more risk during the actual job, but you had the advantages of surprise and spontaneity. I usually preferred slow. This particular job called for fast.

Much later that night, I returned to Gateway Plaza in a different rented car, which I parked down the road and forgot about. I had a duffel bag with everything I was likely to need, including a siphon tube, a bucket of children’s chalk, a can of mace and a telescoping baton, no gun. I was also disguised. One of the advantages of being a short man is that it’s far easier to look taller than it is to appear shorter. Shoe lifts and a padded-out ski cap over a good wig could add a full four inches of height. With coveralls and boots, anyone seeing me would report a well-built man, around six feet tall, brown eyes and brown hair – assuming they even remembered.

The underground lot had an entry boom and a manned attendant booth. The guard was in there, reading a tabloid and smoking out the window. We were going to have to engage… there was no route to sneak past him, and my gift for magic did not extend to invisibility.

As I strode toward the gate, he looked up and frowned. I made a beeline for the window, hands in my pockets.

“Hey, uh, Sir.” The man folded his paper and pushed his cigarette to the corner of his mouth, puffing on it. “Sorry, but this isn’t a public access garage.”

“Hey, buddy. I’m here to work on a car,” I said. “What’s it take for a man to get a guest pass?”

To my surprise, his eyes narrowed. “A guest pass? Hang on… wait. Did you just try to bribe me to let you in here?”

“Yes, sir.” I nodded, pulled out my keychain canister of bear spray, and maced him in the face.

He threw his hands up, but the mace got in his eyes and caught the cigarette with a small fireball that set his carefully teased and moussed hair alight. The shout of alarm turned to a scream. As he thrashed back and forth in the confines of the booth, eyes streaming and hair burning, I leaned in, grabbed him by the collar and shoulders, and hauled him through the window. He wasn’t too big, so he didn’t get stuck. Instead, he slithered to the ground in a sobbing, smoking heap, his Maglite clattering to the ground.

“Your job cannot be worth this much trouble, puttanta.”[20] I grasped him by the collar and hauled him up. I frisked him, searching for a gun and cuffs, and then doubled over as he landed his fist in my gut.

Besides dogs, the greatest impediment to a good night’s work was competent security. I kneed him in the face, sending him sprawling back against the security booth. He went for his gun and radio; I went for the Maglite and a word of power. “Tzain!”

The radio squealed and popped with a bang and a puff of smoke, surged well beyond capacity. The guard dropped it with a startled sound, his gun half out of his holster. I slung the Maglite like a club, bringing it down on his wrist, and then up across his jaw on the backhand. He pitched to the road like a ragdoll.

“Honestly… You could have just read your magazine and had your five hundred bucks.” I grumbled, picking him up by the armpits and dragging him around the back of the booth. We were guaranteed to be on camera. Whether or not the camera center guy was as motivated as Captain America here remained to be seen.

I tore the guard’s shirt up and used it to tie him hand and foot to the railing behind the booth, blind and gagged. Then, I finished my frisk, took his keys, and left him to stew. Today was not his day to die, but he was going to have one hell of a headache when he woke up.

That taken care of, I jogged down the ramp, getting my bearings among the forest of color-coded concrete pylons. I knew Maslak’s apartment number thanks to some strategic phone calls made earlier in the evening, but the blood was pounding in my temples and my gut was cramping, and I had to pause to search for cameras as I zoned in on the bay I needed. Eventually, I found the gleaming black Renault, parked between a Landcruiser and a motorbike. The garage was blessedly still and silent. Now it was time for the fun part: rigging the car with enough explosives to wreck the car and cause a big bang, but not enough to kill anyone.

First things first. I dropped down, and using my well-earned Maglite, had a look under the chassis to rule out exotic anti-theft features. Most nouveau riche had someone do up wards on their cars, and this one was no exception. On the floor just under the driver’s seat was a circle drawn in white paint. It had three concentric rings formed by the body of a snake that twisted around and held its tail in its mouth. An arrow outside the circle pointed to the right of the car. There was a six-pointed star in the center of the circle, and the planetary symbol of Mercury inside that.

Wards are essentially small magic circles that are pre-charged with energy. They are almost always protective magic, and the energy only discharges under certain programmed circumstances. White was the color of the Moon, which made perfect sense to me: The Moon and Mercury are planets associated with thieves and the protection of items against theft. If this ward had been consecrated with those two planetary symbols in mind, then the ward was fueled by emotion and concentration, the Moon and Mercury respectively.

I rolled out, had a look around, and then went back under to pull my glove off and hold my hand out near the design. It ‘fizzed’, and with some concentration, I felt myself connect with the cycle of energy. There was a silver and mercury talisman under the driver’s seat, the material anchor of the ward. It was charged by the focus, anxiety and day-to-day emotions of the driver. The talisman almost certainly contained a hair or a drop of Maslak’s blood. It was quite a nice little piece of magic… any thief who tried to steal the car would be unconsciously fueling the ward with their feelings and focus, making the magic more powerful. The same was true of anyone who tried to banish the magic, such as myself. By concentrating on it, I would make it more powerful and more resistant to deletion.

Wardbreaking was typically a case of opposites: black for white, Sun for Moon, Saturn for Mercury. I got out my travel kit of magical tools and dusted a few ingredients onto the oily concrete: gold filings, white lead base powder, charcoal and ground red pepper. I mixed them together, spat on it, and mixed it some more. It turned into a dark grayish paste that I daubed around the ward, encircling the magic with my own. The underside of the car hummed like a wasp’s nest, and as it did, I was able to search for the gap in its armor, the weakness that was always present in every static ward where the mark of the mage’s finger or brush ended the circle. The more I concentrated, the angrier the ward became… it was soon too close to triggering for me to continue, so I kicked the ground and focused on the sensation of my foot banging against the inside of my shoe to calm it down. When the heat laid off, I got my knife and made a small, moderately deep cut on the inside of my arm. Then I squirted mace on it.

The pain took my breath away, but it certainly drew my attention away from what I was doing. Writhing, cursing, eyes watering, I jammed my fingers into the remaining paste, felt out for the break in the circle, and swiped my gloved fingers across it. There was a small pop, more felt than seen, then the muffled sound of bursting glass from overhead. Ward broken.

The mechanical act of breaking into the car was considerably less exhausting than dealing with the magical part. I pressed my sleeve against my bleeding arm and used a rag to mop up my remaining poultice, then rolled back out and picked myself up. I was still alone.

Satisfied, I got a screwdriver and used that to pop the hood, then cut the car alarm cable with a pair of shears. I closed the hood hard, bracing in case an alarm went off. There was only the heaviness of still air. That meant that I could let myself into the cabin with a shoelace and get busy on wiring up the ignition. The keyless entry system he’d used was something new to me. After some poking around, I found a set of wires I wasn’t accustomed to finding, and got busy with tin snips, electrical tape, wire and a small tube of shake-and-bake explosive, the kind you mixed together from a powder and a liquid.

My next job was to siphon out some of the gas and use it to flood the car seats. After that, all that remained was to affect the appearance of magic, which I did by scribing the same Sun wheel sigil that had been burned into Vyacheslav’s chest on one of the pylons beside the car. The police wouldn’t know what it meant, but Maslak would.

The last step was the most dangerous. I hooked up the detonator to the radio box, locked up, and beat a hasty retreat, watching over my shoulder the entire time. The security guard was already awake, howling behind his gag at me. It wasn’t going to be any good to leave him there, so I pulled him off the rail – still bound, and dragged him to the basement entry door, unlocked it with his keys after some trial and error, and rolled him into the dark room beyond. I left the keys on the door handle. The police would find him easily enough after the fact, and he would be able to give a rousing account of his heroism against the six-foot, brown-on-brown Long Island goon who had, for some mysterious reason, let him live to see another day.

Chapter 8

Naturally, I desired to see the results of my handiwork.

I spent the rest of the night disposing of my equipment, one piece at a time. I filed the security guard’s pistol, pulled it apart and drove a big circle across the Brooklyn Bridge and back to throw bits and pieces out the window and into the water. Gowanus was always a good place to dump things; so was East Williamsburg. Everything went overboard: shoes, gloves, coveralls, wig. It was coming up on dawn by the time I was done. I used the last of the gas to drive to a friendly scrapyard, where I filled in a form under a fake name and sent my temporary ride to the shredder. Back to my blond, short, white-eyed self, I took the subway back to Gateway Apartments, set up in front of the office across the road with a newspaper and a cup of coffee, and waited for the fireworks.

At a quarter to eight, there was a dull crumpling sound. The road vibrated briefly under my feet in the split second before a dozen car alarms went off all at once down in the depths of the parking garage. I jumped up as people stopped, cars slowed, and the parking garage spewed a cloud of black smoke around the people fleeing the fire.

Another advantage of being short is being able to blend into crowds, but it wasn’t much good when you were trying to see what was happening at the front. As escapees gathered by the entry to the apartments and sirens wailed, I stood up on tiptoes and anxiously searched for my mark. When he stumbled out up from the ramp – crispy around the edges, but very much alive – I let out a tense breath, turned, and pushed my way back through the knot of gawkers, heading toward the World Trade Center and Cortlandt Street train station beneath. The subway was packed, the crowd swirling enough to make me nauseous. I was sick with fatigue and thirst, and well overdue for sleep.

I got off at Brighton Beach station and walked several blocks to my apartment, stumbling into a wall on the way up. I exited the stairwell onto my floor, yawning, and was hit with the pungent smell of male urine and trash. It bought me up cold.

“Oh for God’s sake…” My fears were confirmed when I reached my door and found it streaked with and wet with urine. My trashbag was torn open on the welcome mat. Grigori had pissed over that, too. There were gouge marks around my lock, but he’d been too intoxicated to finish whatever he’d planned to do.

Flushed with anger, I checked around the corner to make sure he wasn’t still lurking in the building with his sledgehammer, then set my workbag down with a sigh and started to pick everything up. There was more than one reason I always wore gloves, and most of those reasons related back to Grigori fucking Sokolsky.

* * *

A huge storm broke in the late evening, waking me before my alarm. The rumble of thunder, loud as gunshot, started me out of a dream that had been rolling me down and under a wave of dark, hot anger. I scrambled upright in the sheets, flailing across for my knife. Lighting flashed beyond my window, briefly illuminating the room, and alarm turned to awe as I relaxed and listened to the rain drumming against the window. Then, I remembered Slava’s amulet, still sitting on the roof. In between the rush to do Rodion’s job as quickly as possible and cleaning my father’s piss of my front door with a bucket of bleach water and a squeegee, I’d forgotten all about it.

I called Sirens and arranged the meet with Nic, got ready, and let Sir Purrs-A-Lot inside for the night. The cat, as usual, wanted nothing to do with me, so I let him into Vassily’s room and then set out for the drive to Queens.

The club was busier on a Thursday, though nowhere near weekend capacity. One woman gyrated around and arched against the tall pole on the center stage, dancing for a thin crowd of diehard perverts and wannabe pimps. She was not nearly as good as Crina.

My brat’ye[21] were at their regular table, belting out songs as a unit and banging their glasses on the counters in a vague approximation of tempo. I searched the room for Grigori before I joined them, doing my best to swell in size on my approach. He was not there, to my great relief.

“Haha, look who’s here! Alexi, my man!” Rodion stood to greet me, hands spread. I went to him, kissed cheeks, and then did the same with the others.

“Have you seen the papers yet, you ballsy son-of-a-bitch?” Vassily said. He was still mostly sober. Of all of our ‘brothers’, he was inevitably the most temperate.

“No time,” I replied. I pulled the amulet from my breast pocket, and handed it out to Vyacheslav. “Slava, here.”

“Thanks.” He didn’t look especially thankful, and fiddled with it before slipping it into his breast pocket instead of over his head.

“You’re supposed to wear it.” I stared at him, speaking slowly.

He did at least have the courtesy to look embarrassed. “Oh.”

While he fiddled with the pendant, I turned my attention back to Vassily. “Was the explosion in the news?”

“You bet it was in the fucking news.” Vassily motioned to the seat beside him. I sat down, and Lev took up the paper and slid it down to us.

“Page three,” he said.

My lips quirked as I picked it up and flipped it open, scanning the headline and text. “A car exploded in a Battery Park community Tuesday morning in what appears to be a random act of arson, injuring several people and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to the Gateway Apartments complex. The owner of the vehicle, Jacob Maslak, says that the car exploded and then caught on fire when he went to unlock the vehicle for his usual morning commute.”

“Wait wait,” Rodion said. “Read the part about the people that did it.”

“Hmm…” I searched the columns. “Ah, here we are. When asked whether or not the bombing appeared to be an act of terrorism, New York Police Department spokesman Garry Koln said: “This crime has some hallmarks of a terrorist attack. Fortunately, the explosion was only small, and it only resulted in minor injuries to those surrounding the car. We believe it may be related to Italian organized criminal activities.”

“The best professional is the one who tricks everyone into thinking someone else is a fool.” Vassily put his arm around my shoulder, and I felt the skin of my back lift with gooseflesh under the weight.

Everyone laughed, so I arched my eyebrows and continued. “In their efforts to catch the arsonist, the NYPD is working with the newly formed Vigiles Magicarum, an FBI agency dealing with crimes of an unusual nature, due to several exotic elements found at the crime scene. Police report they are looking for a well-built white male – possibly of Italian or Mediterranean ethnicity – in his early thirties, six-foot tall, brown haired and dark brown or blue eyes.”

That earned another round of laughter. Down the row, Slava pulled his collar out and began to fan himself with another one of the newspapers.

“How the fuck did you manage to grow five inches, Alexi?” Petro said. “You’re the shortest motherfucking man in New York.”

“I am not,” I replied, throwing the paper down onto the table. “Danny DeVito is. As for your question… no comment.”

“Everyone knows Danny DeVito is actually three babies in a trenchcoat, Lexi,” Vassily said, and handed me a glass that had been waiting beside his. “What’s your excuse?”

“I’ll never tell.” I accepted the drink without hesitation, and threw half of it back in a long swallow. It was water, not vodka… though no one but Vassily and I would know that.

“So now, Lev, Nic and Grisha just have to go visit Maslak tomorrow.” Rodion lifted his glass and drank as well, followed promptly by everyone else. “Make sure the little worm knows it’s business as usual. What’s the timeline for the sell-off, Lev?”

“The stocks are rising precipitously in value, thanks to Vasya.” Lev looked alongside at Vassily. “He’s the one to ask.”

“We’ve already doubled. I’m expecting at least another hundred-and-fifty percent rise,” Vassily said. “We might even double it over again. People are going nuts for this anti-aging stuff… I’ve got Yegor Gavrilyuk on it on one side. He’s farmed out the speculation to guys in Miami, Texas and LA, three big cities with lots of old people that wish they were young again. Me and Semyon are working together in the office with the brokers to make sure that the stocks get snapped up by prospectors. The point you decide to cash out depends on your tolerance for risk, Avtoritet.”

“You know me,” Rod replied “Go big or go home.”

“Hey, Nic… can we turn the aircon on?” Vyacheslav was still fanning himself, flushed red in the face. “It’s hot as hell in here.”

Nicolai looked at him, puzzled. “It is on.”

“What’s the matter, Slava?” Semyon’s moustache bristled with mirth. “You’re hardly halfway done on that bottle, and you’re hot already?”

“Hey, I got started at lunchtime.” Slava laughed uncomfortably, and got to his feet. He was flushed in the face and sweating profusely, sweat staining his collar. “Maybe my blood’s finally turned into vodka.”

“The only solution to that is more drink, my good friend.” Rod poured him another glass from the nearly-empty bottle on the table, and the rest of us followed suit. Diluted, I could tolerate the liquor for a single toast. “Fight fire with fire! Down the hatch!”

Slava caught up the glass, still standing, and drained it before slamming it back down. He shook his head with a short laugh, then sagged forward against the edge of the table.

“Woah, there. That’s the end of the night for you.” Vassily laughed as the other man nearly fell against his knees.

“Gotta go take a piss,” Slava mumbled. He staggered out around the end of the table, nearly colliding with Lev, who leaned back with a polite grimace. A smell strung my nostrils, weird and waxy, and the skin on the back of my neck crawled with a half-formed flash of insight quickly followed by horror.

“Slava! Wait!” I got up, nearly shoving Vassily aside. “Something’s fighting against the amulet—”

I’d barely got out from around him when Slava reeled on his feet, collapsed against the edge of the bar, and burst into flame.

Chapter 9

Vyacheslav did not explode so much as simply ignite. The fire roiled out from deep inside him while he slumped against the edge of the bar, stupefied. As I ran to him, he turned to face me. His mouth opened as if to speak in bewilderment. He vomited flame instead, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by the heat and noise as the bartender, dancer and patrons screamed and shouted around us.

“Slava! What the fucking… SHIT!’ Rodion barreled toward us.

“Get the fire extinguisher!” Vassily’s voice pierced the cacophony.

Everyone was so loud that I couldn’t concentrate enough to try and fight what was happening, but even I had been able to work the Art, there was no helping him now. Eerily soundless, Slava folded in on himself, his body spurting gouts of yellow flame. His face contorted in agony as he first went to his knees, then his face, writhing and popping. The fire was contained to his torso, but it was so hot that the linoleum underneath him liquefied.

It was Nic who came up with the extinguisher, dousing Slava and the bar – also on fire – in a cloud of white foam. The bartender finally got her wits about her and got her own smaller extinguisher from behind the counter.

“What the fuck!?” Petro was hysterical, pacing around with his hands in his hair. “Alexi, why the fuck… what the FUCK, man?”

As we did our parts to fight the fire, Slava finally started screaming: five, maybe six seconds of helpless, raw, bloodcurdling agony. I backpedaled from the writhing pyre, closing my eyes and clamping my will into place as I felt out for the link to my tracer ward. I forced myself to filter the cacophony of the room, focusing on the colors and textures instead of the noise. It all throbbed into a strange background symphony against the threads of magic, burning white and taut in my imagination. I hooked into the flow of magic fueling his immolation, grasped onto the energy I’d woven into his ward, and hauled on it like an angler.

There was a moment of intense resistance, a deep black void of nothingness that fought back against me like a marlin on the line. My will won out, and I was suddenly swamped by the sensation of furious light and heat, the smell of molten metal, burned rubber, and dust. I heard something grinding, a deafening churning, mashing sound, and saw lines of cars tumbled against towering black mountains of debris, all of which disappeared in flame as a maw – part fire, part beast – roared at me and tore the link apart.

I stumbled back with a shout, flailing for something to ground me. My hands found the edge of the dance stage; I righted myself there, panting and enervated, sweat pouring down my chest. When I finally opened my eyes, I saw everyone milling around a smoldering pile of ash and embers. The only things left of Slava were his hands and feet, the ends of the bones charred black. Bizarrely, his shoes were intact, barely burned. Where he had stood, there was only a small round circle of melted slag… and the amulet I had made him.

Mo and Petro crossed themselves. Rodion was paralyzed with shock. Vassily and Lev had disappeared. The only one who seemed unaffected was Nicolai, who looked down at the burn site, then up at the spread of soot across the ceiling with raised eyebrows and a sloped mouth. The only sign of stress was his cigarette, quivering on his lip.

“Jesus and Mary,” he said. “Haven’t ever seen that happen before.”

“What the fuck was THAT, Alexi?” Rodion turned on me. “What the fuck is this shit? Why didn’t you stop this?”

“The magic circumvented the protective ward in the talisman,” I said, quickly. “It’s like… it’s like someone stuck a pistol under his bullet proof vest and shot him. The armor was there, but—”

“You were supposed to stop this!” Rodion roared. “He’s fucking dead!”

“I tried.” I strode over to the amulet. The linoleum was soft under my shoes as I bent down to pick it up. It was warm, but the bone and the magic had held up. “Look. You can see it survived.”

“Then why the fuck didn’t it work!?”

I sighed. “He predicted our move. Fighting another spook from a distance is like playing chess with a blindfold on.”

“Fuck!” Rodion paced like a tiger, and then roared and smashed his fist on the table. “That fucking piece of shit Maslak!”

“I have a trace on the source of the spell’s energy,” I said. I was already shaky, burned out from the rough disconnection. “It came from a junkyard, an auto wrecking site.”

“There’s a million of those!”

Thank you, Captain Obvious. “I can find it. And I’m going alone… if this spook can light people with their own body fat, I don’t want any blanks near the place. Let me handle the spook; get someone else for Maslak.”

“Hey! Boss!” Vassily called from the security entry across the room. “Lev’s got some clown on the phone that wants to speak to you.”

“All of you, come with me,” Rodion snapped. He stalked for the door. “Except you, Petro. Get your big boy pants on and call Vanya. We need a cleanup team. Tell him to… bring an urn or something.”

Nicolai and I followed Rodion to his office, tongues thick and still with tension. Lev was at Rodion’s desk, his face a stiff mask. He looked exhausted, green around the gills. He held out the receiver; Rodion snatched it from him, and took the seat as Lev stood up and moved aside. I tuned into the room, careful not to screw up the line, and felt – and smelled – the same weird, faint odor I’d smelled before. Burned wax or plastic. I drew a cross over myself, like the others had done before, but my cross was not an Orthodox crucifix. I used the Kabbalic Cross, symbolically touching and warding through multiple layers of reality.

Rodion banged the speaker button, broadcasting to the room. “Jacob, you sniveling piece of shit. The fuck do you think you’re playing with?”

The speaker squealed with a sound that went straight to my teeth, and then resolved into a whickering roar of white noise.

“My client demands you withdraw immediately,” a voice rasped out in English. Male, female, it was hard to tell. “To avoid a repeat of what occurred today.”

Vassily murmured aside to Lev and Semyon, translating for them. Their English was haphazard, at best.

“Your ‘client’ and you can hole up in a cell together and fuck each other inside out, big man,” Rodion said. “So check your attitude before we knock you and your whole fucking family.”

“Call it off, Brukov, or the next one burns tomorrow.” The phone disconnected with a sharp ‘clack’.

“Who the hell does this guy think he is?” Vassily said.

“Someone who can cause people to spontaneously combust from a remote location,” I replied grimly. “They’re arrogant, but I can probably find them or the place the spell originated from.”

Nicolai’s face rippled with irritation. “Can you find him or not?”

They wanted black and white, but there was no such thing in life or in magic. It was always like this with the Organizatsiya. “I’m fairly sure it was Kozlowski and Sons. I won’t know until I visit the site.”

“Do it,” Rodion flicked toward the door with a dismissive wave, scowling. “Twenty-one grand for this asshole.”

I inclined my head. “Consider it done.”

“Hey boss,” Vassily said. “I didn’t really get a chance before, be we were outside, but we also saw something yesterday. Your man was hanging around Bruno Accorso, one of the Manelli Caporegimes.”

“Are you sure?” Lev blinked, pushing his glasses up along his nose.

“Absolutely sure,” Vassily replied. “It was Bruno and two of his soldiers. Maslak looked pretty strung out about it, too.”

Rodion growled. He and Lev and Nicolai exchanged glances.

“I’m going to call the Pakhun for this one,” Rodion said. “Go do your thing. Take out the spook and we’ll get back to you about Maslak. We can still sell off those shares, can’t we?”

“Our half.” Vassily fidgeted with his zippo, fingers light and quick. “We’ll break just slightly under even if we do, adding up all the costs and the loan to Maslak, but we’ll lose his shares if they aren’t transferred to us. I could probably find someone to forge them over to us, but that’s iffy.”

“Right. Then we’re taking over the company and liquidating it.” Rodion thumped his fist on the table, and sat back. “Bring me that asshole’s hands, Alexi. Once we nab Maslak, I’m going to feed him pieces of his pet spook until he chokes.”

Chapter 10

The drive home from Sirens was tense. Vassily and I were silent, unable to converse while the memory of Slava – burning, screaming – loomed large in our memories. Back at home, my friend radiated displeasure as he watched me dress and arm before the drive out to Long Island. Shoulder holster, gun, knife, and other less standard tools. Salt and chalk, of course; a fire extinguisher, which I had rigged to a military-surplus bandoleer with Velcro and duct tape. I took the bone amulet, too. Scrubbed of Slava’s blood, I was able to quickly tune it back in to my own energy and apply my own to seal the enchantment. His death had charged it more quickly than the moon ever would have.

There was one other magical tool I considered taking with me. My Colt Commander, one of the first guns I’d ever bought, lay on my altar in a three-layer ring of steel wire, oxidized iron dust, and crushed hematite. Sigils were carved into the barrel on both sides, concentrated words of power which were currently still not doing what I wanted them to do.

A hitmage does a lot of wardbreaking. People inevitably seek magical protection as well as physical protection if they suspect their lives are threatened. Maslak, for one, but any man with enough money and common sense would hire a spook to ward him up when word got out that there was a contract out on his head. Wardbreakers like me were less common than you’d expect. The average spook could create and unmake their own wards, but not other people’s. My gift was to be able to find the cracks in the veneer, the tiny errors that were inevitably made by the human hand and mind in the creation of magical objects.

The problem with wardbreaking was how much time it took. Most times, I didn’t have fifteen minutes to screw around under someone’s car with planetary metals and colored chalk. My solution to that was to create a chargeable gun that could shoot bullets that could bust magical shields. In theory, it was an elegant and efficient solution to a common problem. In practice… the results had been less than satisfactory. I could engrave individual full-metal jackets, and they worked fairly well against simple wards – very simple wards – but once they were spent, they were gone. I didn’t want to just plug a small amount of energy into someone’s magical shield with a single shot. I wanted the Wardbreaker to work like a taser: the power came from the gun itself, with the round being an anchor for a powerful stream of energy. I was sure you could break wards by overcharging them, inflating the magic until it ripped itself apart, but I hadn’t been able to make it work.

I frowned down at it. No… for the moment, it wasn’t worth the risk or the extra weight. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be able to get it to work unless I used the gun more, but using the gun more meant taking it on jobs like this one. A misfire was the difference between coming home in the morning, or being delivered to the hospital under a sheet. I took a disposable piece instead, a neatly drilled and filed virgin S&W Model 645, and packed two full magazines: an eight round clip of FMJs marked up in painstakingly etched arcane designs, and eight plain.

“You’re an idiot, Alexi,” Vassily said. “At least let me drive. Did you see what this freak did to Slava?”

“That is exactly why you’re not coming with me.” I said. “I’m not too worried. You heard the guy’s voice. Over-dramatic, arrogant, and so very dire. This guy is probably some kind of stage wizard who’s good at magic and not much else. He won’t know what to do with someone who can kick his ass in person.”

“That’s a lot to assume from one phone call.”

I turned to look back at him. “Do I tell you how to do your job?”

Vassily huffed, leaning back on his hands. “I really don’t want to have to come and collect your ashes from K&S, okay? What am I gonna say to Mariya if something happens to you and I wasn't there?”

“You tell her I died doing what I love,” I replied, checking the bolt action on my pistol a second time.

“What? Perishing in a pyre of your own body fat while some pimply fat kid dances around your burning corpse?”

“Hunting my fellow man,” I said, holstering the pistol. “If you find my ashes, assume I had a mysterious, knowing smile on my face.”

“Oh,” Vassily said. “How very wizardly.”

“Absolutely sorcerous.” I zipped my vest up to the neck. “So, before I’m burned at the stake… Have you gotten something for Rodion yet?”

“I’ve got my eye on something,” Vassily replied. “I managed to find this painting called ‘The Road to Happiness’ by James Dean. Has his signature and everything. He’ll like that, won’t he?”

“I have no doubt of it.” It was better than anything I was going to be able to get him in such a short window of time, short of Maslak’s head. “The question is, are you going to be able to get it before tomorrow night?”

Vassily wagged a finger. “Hey now, Mister ‘I don’t tell you how to do your job’. Of course I can get it. That’s what credit cards are for.”

“They must be quite a hefty credit card if you can buy a… what? Ten-thousand-dollar painting, plus express air freight?”

Vassily sniffed, affronted. “Twenty-five, thank you very much. And they’re not MY credit cards.”

I sighed, turning to face him. “I can’t believe you’re doing this while you’re on remand. You know the Fed is watching you, don’t you?”

“The Fed can kiss my ass,” Vassily said. “With tongue.”

“You’re being reckless.”

“And you aren’t?”

“Perhaps a little. But we both know that this kind of work involves risk.”

“It sure does. So you’re gonna let me drive, right?”

“No!” I threw my hands up and stalked out of the bedroom. “You’re not equipped to fight another mage if it comes down to a confrontation. Stay here and just… don’t end up in jail again, you idiot.”

“Your mom’s an idiot!” He called after me in English. “And so is your face!”

How gratifying to know my sworn-brother’s sense of humor hadn’t changed since he was twelve.

* * *

There weren’t quite a million scrapyards in the greater New York City-New Jersey metropolis, but there were still a lot of them. Some in Brooklyn, some in Long Island, some in Trenton or Newark. My instincts said East. Way east. The sounds I’d heard in the background, the glimpses of rusted metal towers and mountains of metal shred pointed me straight at one of the largest scrapyards in the state: Kozlowski and Sons.

K&S was a sprawling complex in Babylon, Long Island, a cancerous dustbowl the size of a baseball stadium. There was an abrupt transition from clapboard houses set among gardens and trees to this yellow-dirt industrial wasteland, with its broken roads, factories, and warehouses.

I parked off-road at the factory across the road from the main scrapyard, leaving my car behind a stand of chokecherry shrubs. The clouds were low and the roads still had patches of damp, but there was no rain tonight – only a wind that tickled the hairs on the back of my neck and forearms with ghostly, humid fingers.

The size of K&S was a problem. The complex spanned five acres across two sites. Number One had nearly everything: an office, warehouse, a weigh-in center for cars, then the shredder and the huge piles of scrap waiting to be churned through it into tiny shards of recyclable metal. Then there was the autowrecking site, a junkyard with all that entailed. Sheds and a processing line, a crusher, cranes, and tons and tons of buses and cars in various states of operation. The third site was at the railyard, where the shredded metal was loaded into train cars… cars which inevitably ended up at AEROMOR and other similar companies to be shipped overseas.

I turned into the wind and tuned into the great radio silence that hung in the air, filtering the taste and smell of the air. I didn’t really know what I sensed, exactly… something like a tug out from my tongue and my eyes. As I immersed in the invisible flow of energy, the raucous call of ravens from the north-west and swiveled toward the sound, eyes still closed. When I opened them, I saw birds lift from the roof of the shredder, wheeling around in agitation. Lot number one it was then.

The gate was open. When Big K and his kids closed for the day, they took all the cash and locked up all the non-ferrous metal, the really valuable stuff. I kept an eye out for junkyard dogs and security as I jogged into the dusty yard, pistol drawn. I found the dog around the first towering pile of scrap. It was burned black, skin split from heat, its lips pulled back over its half-bare skull. The smell of cooked meat was fresh, and when I crouched to hold a hand over it, warmth radiated through the leather of my glove.

As I stood, something occurred to me… a vague, unformed theory on how the other mage had worked such an energetically intense spell from a distance. Animal sacrifice. Death was a potent fuel for magic. Revelation, birth and death… three of the most powerful events in existence, when it came to curses and wards.

I set off for the shredder, warier and quieter now that I was on the approach. The huge machine was an awkward tower with several jutting conveyor belts and a central crane-like ‘office’ where the overseer could monitor the procession of hulks that were pulled up the largest belt, fed into the shredder, and then sorted along different belts that ran out from underneath the tower. There was a huge engine shed underneath. The door was ajar, the padlock and chain hanging loose from the rusted iron handle.

My sense of unease only grew. The first thing I did was look up: when you were dealing with animals or the supernatural, ‘up’ was always a potential site of ambush. When I was satisfied that there were no pyromaniac demons hanging from the rafters, I drew up to the side of the door, the pistol cupped and ready to fire, and tuned into my full range of senses. The shredder was turned off, and would have been turned off since four thirty in the afternoon, but the air billowing from the entry to the engine room complex was distinctly warmer than the outside. There was no sound. I drew a deep breath, then spun around the doorway gun-first, staring down the sight.

My boot crunched down on something gritty and hot.

I paused, breaking the trance of trigger discipline to look down. A triangle-within-a-circle of iron filings twisted apart under my sole. I frowned for a moment before the shock of adrenaline hit me, and rapidly backpedaled out of the engine room, turning quickly as the nearest pile of shredded steel ignited with a loud phwoompf, the sound of a gas pilot lighting a heating element, but larger. Much larger.

Fire caught the thin flakes of steel alight with weird, eerie blue flames. As I watched, the scrap flashed orange and white as it rapidly ignited, liquefied, and flowed together into a vaguely humanoid shape. It was lean and angular, the metal cracking and setting into brittle blades in the places where it wasn’t under pressure from the intense, hot magic. Its joints spurted flame, flowing with molten metal.

As I fumbled to bring the extinguisher around – a tool that suddenly felt a lot less useful than I’d imagined – the fire elemental rushed me in a cloud of boiling heat.

Chapter 11

I blasted a cloud of frosty white gas into the face of the thing before it got within ten feet. It screeched like broken metal rubbing against itself as its charge slowed, but then a gout of flame lashed past me like a whip. It took the sleeve of my t-shirt off in a cloud of fibers and ash, scalding the skin beneath.

I didn’t bother to check what had happened to it: I turned tail and ran, dodging broken strollers and aluminum siding and car doors, fleeing heedlessly toward open ground and away from the combustible piles of shred.

Who the hell had Maslak hired that was capable of summoning an elemental? No names came to mind as fire tore over my head and splashed to the ground, roaring across the dirt gravel before extinguishing. I dodged from side to side, ducking and covering as we careened toward a dark complex of open sheds. Crushed cars were stacked up in huge piles, while others waited on suspension platforms waiting to be drained and compacted. I pelted into the darkness of the nearest shed and turned a corner, heaving for breath, and used the moment of reprieve to furiously sketch a ward against spirits on the blank sketchpad I’d bought. I got the design down, but not the charge. I heard a deep-bodied rumble from somewhere outside, and the elemental roared on the other side of the wall, too close for comfort. I needed to start running again.

My hope was on the other side of the junkyard. There was a canal next to the rail line, and if I could get there and over the fence, I could probably lose it at the stream. Spirits didn’t like moving water, and the canal – while sluggish – would be moving.

I kept my pistol in one hand, the extinguisher cable and pump in the other, got down low, and began to crab crawl through the shadows behind the suspended cars. The elemental was in the main open area of the shed, and I could hear its joints screeching as it twisted one way, then the other, searching for me with what passed for its eyes. My personal wards were confusing the spirit: it knew I was in here, but it apparently needed line of sight to find me. I slunk between a row of cars, keeping the under the height of the windows and away from the beating hot light that radiated out from the elemental’s mass. When I was at the end of the line, I broke for it, expecting it to pursue as it had before. Instead, it whirled in place and threw its next fireball straight at the car at the end of the row. That wasn’t fair. It was smart.

The car exploded in a shower of unsiphoned gas, glass and metal, a huge smoking conflagration that threw me off my feet and set off every fire alarm in the building. Regularly, the sound would have deafened me. Fortunately-unfortunately, only one ear drum ruptured as I hit the ground and tumbled inelegantly across the dirt, coming to a stop on my side. Scraped up and bleeding, I pushed myself to hands and knees. My head was ringing, and my back hurt more than was normal. Worse, I’d lost the gun: it lay in the spreading cloud of dust that billowed out of the now-burning building.

“Dammit!” I scrambled up to my feet as the elemental, glutted on its native substance, walked out of the conflagration a foot taller than it had been before. I still had the extinguisher, and blasted it full in the face as it wound up to fling another fireball.

The cloud of halon and CO2 engulfed the figure as it bore down on me, causing its body to slow and screech. I grit my teeth against the pain and kept the hose trained on it. The extinguisher didn’t stop it, but it was slowing it down. Not enough. The nozzle began to sputter, and the elemental was still on its feet.

There was a massive, throaty roar from the siphoning shed, which was now beginning to billow with flame. I stumbled back as the fire elemental surged forward. A poorly aimed fireball careened and splattered at my feet, showering me in a rain of red burning sparks, as a bulldozer burst through the smoke and dumped a metal trough full of water over the elemental’s head.

Coughing, I scraped flecks of hot metal and rock from my arms and cheeks. The elemental’s high whistling scream rang through the scrapyard. I pulled out the paper I’d written the seal on, slapped it against my bleeding arm, and barreled straight at the trapped spirit. Even with the steam still billowing from its skin, it was fighting against its brittle metal prison, gouting jets of flame through the open joints. I slapped the paper on it and barked the incantation aloud. “SATOR! Omeliel! Anachiel! Araochiah! Anazachia!”

With each name, the steam kettle shriek intensified, but the seal – powered by blood and terror – burned into the metal as the paper ashed, crackling with strange, lurid black fire for a moment before it settled into a crude engraving on the surface.

Peevishly, I looked up to the bulldozer as Vassily hopped out, brushing white dust off his tracksuit and t-shirt, then taking his peaked cap off and dusting it against his thigh.

“Hang back,” I said, unhappily. I pulled the bag of salt, and chewed a corner off of it so that it began to pour out in a thin stream. The elemental wailed, rattling against its charred metal shell.

“Just as well they left the keys in this thing,” Vassily said. “And that I don’t listen to you.”

I began to walk a circle around the struggling elemental. It was trying to find leverage against the Third Seal of Saturn, but old King Solomon knew his stuff. “Coming here was stupid, Vassily.”

“Your face is stupid. And what the hell is this thing?” He did, at least, hang back while I closed the circle and went to my knees in front of it, holding my hands out in a gesture of invocation. “I saw it on fire and you on fire, and everything on fire, and there was water, so—”

“Probably the smartest thing you could have done. Be quiet.” I closed my eyes and concentrated.

Quite suddenly, I felt something rush up from deep inside of me: a hidden leviathan, a formless shadow coasting beneath the surface of my mind, unseen. A ripple of energy, stronger than anything I’d ever felt before, thrilled up and down my spine and out through my fingers. I shuddered; my jaws snapped together, teeth clacking. It felt like a release, like a catch coming undone. Suddenly, I felt the circle seize and hold.

When I looked up, Vassily was watching me strangely. He’d lit a cigarette, smoking with it pinched between thumb and forefinger, and his consternation was visible through the smoke. “What was that?”

“Sealing the circle and the ward on this thing,” I said. “It’s a fire elemental.”

“Huh.” Vassily frowned. “Well… alrighty then.”

The creature was weakening inside its cocoon. There was no fuel for it, and only the will of the spirit was keeping it kindled. I sighed, slumping on my knees. “I need to work with this alone, Vassily… I…”

“This is the point you say: ‘Thanks for saving my ass, Vivi.’”

I looked up at him. “Thank you. For not listening to me, this one time.”

“Good enough.” He flashed a broad, sly grin.

“But it was still stupid. I can’t defend two people from this kind of magical firepower.” I motioned him off irritably, two-thirds focused on magic and the push of the elemental as it struggled itself to extinction.

Vassily held his hands up in a posture of surrender as he wheeled around and swaggered off, leaving me to my work. I reached out to the spirit, and narrowed my eyes.

“Who bound you here, salamander?” I said, protecting command into my voice. “Who cursed you to remain in this place?”

Elementals were, by their nature, neutral entities. As I understood it, they were essentially thoughtforms, imbued by the collective imagination of the billions of humans who had lived, died and worshiped since prehistoric times. It had no allegiance to the man who summoned it, or specific enmity toward me: this creature of fire was as much a victim of the spook as Slava was.

“Kovacssss.” The voice was not spoken aloud. I heard its crackling, hissing whisper in my mind, as clear as a radio picking up a signal. “Eric Kovacsss.”

It was using my own patterns of speech. I kept my focus on it, and watched the flames briefly flare in response to my own energy. “Where is Eric Kovacs in the present moment?”

Images flashed through my mind: the back of a limousine, a nightclub, a meeting room, then a modern block of condos. The building squatted like a glass cube between a line of old Brooklyn factories on one side, and a triad of distinctive, flower-shaped projects on the other. I could smell dirty water, and – most tellingly – see the shadows cast by the Brooklyn bridge over the building. The vision flickered into the interior of his apartment… it faced the street, with big windows and a big porch behind glazed glass doors.

“DUMBO,” I said. “He is in the district of New York City known as DUMBO?”

Its reply was a feeling of desperate affirmation.

“Are you still under his compulsion?”

“No compulsion,” the elemental hissed. “We failed our imperative. The geas is spent.”

“Then I release you on two conditions, salamander: that you withdraw to your realm of habitation without delay, and that you never harm me or my sworn or blood kin, including every member of the Yaroschenko Organizatsiya.” I had to be as careful as a lawyer with my wording. Any gap in the conditions could or would be exploited by a clever magician. “You will accept no geas or offer which would result in harm to the Yaroshenko Organizatsiya. Am I understood?”

The spirit was in no way chastened by my demands. It was emotionless and efficient. “We abide by your terms, magus.”

I broke the circle of salt with my toe, and then reached out with the marker to cross out the seal. The impure steel cracked like an egg, shattering and pattering to the ground in a shower of sparks and red-hot shards, and then the elemental – now a ball of fire the size of a basketball – shrunk in on itself and vanished.

Chapter 12

On a Friday night, Sirens was bustling. The main room of the security office was busy, with most of the bouncers clustered around the table with Nicolai for muster. Vassily and I both stalked inside and found ourselves walled off by a row of broad backs and black t-shirts. Nic was at the front of the room in what passed for his uniform – a blue and white striped tank and black cargoes instead of the usual camo print. My father lounged indolently on a chair beside him, and looked up at us with flat, white eyes.

“Alright. Any questions? No? Good. Get out there and report any weird shit straight back here,” Nic said. He waved his hand, and the small black t-shirt-and-slacks army rose and filtered out past us, some of them glancing at my seared and ragged clothing. We smelled like sulphur and rusted iron.

“How’d you go?” Nic asked, once everyone had left.

“We have reduced the threat at least. Where’s Rodya?” I focused on Nic, refusing to look at Grigori.

“Out,” Nic grunted by way of reply. He took out a pouch and filters, and began to deftly assemble a cigarette. “What happened?

“There was a trap set for us at K&S.” I wanted to sit, but didn’t dare to. Adrenaline was all that was keeping me on my feet. “A fire elemental. It was probably what was used to cause Vyacheslav to self-combust… it’s dead now.”

“So that’s it? All clear?”

“Maybe,” I replied. “We still have to find the spook who summoned it, but—”

“So you’ve come back after doing half the fucking job?” Grisha spoke up from the back. “What do you want? A pat on the head?”

Finally, I settled on him. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

“You’re fucking talking to me now, you little shit. I’m a starred Commander in this organization, and you’ll talk to me if I fucking tell you to.” Grisha sat forward, resting his hands on his knees. “So the spook is still running around. You killed the puppet, not the puppeteer.”

“The elemental gave me his address,” I said acidly. “If you’d shut up for five minutes and let me finish my report to Nicolai.”

Grigori got to his feet. He could still tower over me. “Nic is part of MY crew. MINE. Don’t you ever speak to your Kommandant like that again.”

“I’ll show my Kommandant – and my father – respect when he gives it.”

His eyes paled, pupils contracting into tiny black points in a sea of gray-white. I knew that expression well. My eyes did the same thing when I was furious. I felt a thrill of… fear? shoot through me as my father balled his fists and advanced a step toward us. But it wasn’t the kind of cowering, nauseous fear I usually felt when I faced him. I had a knife, loose in its sheath on my hip. If he got on top of me, I could stab him. I WOULD stab him.

“Grisha, come on…” Nicolai reached out to steady him the way he had the other day, but my father brushed him off and threw his chair aside as he bulldozed his way across the room. A took a single step back, but before I even thought it through, the knife was in my hand.

Grigori’s forward charge halted for a moment, breaking stride as his face flickered with some emotion I couldn’t read. And then he continued, snorting like a bull. I braced to weave for the punch, but he didn’t strike – instead, he feinted, and then his other hand shot out and grabbed my knife hand wrist. He squeezed and pulled me forward, putting the point of the blade against the side of his throat.

“So that’s how it’s going to be?” He said, grinning. “You want to kill me?”

My eyes narrowed. This close, I could smell the sour ghosts of alcohol and cheap tobacco on his breath.

He laughed in my face. “Go on then, pussy. Go on, stick it in.”

Strong as I was, I still had nothing on my father. I bared my teeth, clamping my tingling fingers down to keep my hold on the hilt, and stared him in the eye as I pushed forward against his grip. His fingers tightened, but not enough to stop me.

“Do it,” he hissed. I saw his skin dimple beneath the point of the blade; his eyes were wild and thrilled.

“Alexi! Jesus Christ, man!” Vassily’s hands were on my shoulders, pulling me away. Nicolai was doing the same thing on the other side, hauling Grisha back. I’d never drawn a weapon on him before. Nicolai was pale, spooked. Vassily tried to put himself in front of me, and he was similarly shaken. My father wasn’t shaken: he was laughing, his face flushed dark. A thin line of blood tracked down the front of his throat.

“Jesus, Alexi, relax. I was just messing with you,” he said. “I’m gonna have words about this with Rodya tonight, kid. We can’t have you messing up the chain of command.”

“Tell him whatever the fuck you want, and tell him I said that I’ll kill your fat fucking ass, too!” My temper, already frayed, broke down completely. I tried to lunge around Vassily, hand white-knuckled around the knife, while Grigori laughed loud enough to almost drown me out. “I’ll kill you, you disgusting piece of shit!”

“I could break your neck in three seconds, kid. Get the fuck out of here.” My father gestured to the door. His voice was deep, low and dark. “Don’t come back.”

“You don’t have the authority to eject me from the Organizatsiya. So I will be back.” I stared at him over Vassily’s arm. “I have as much right to be here as you do.”

“You really think so? You think Nic will just stand here and let my limp-dick faggot son just fuck me up in front of him?”

Nic’s expression was graven. At mention of his name, he grimaced.

“Alexi.” Vassily put his hand on my shoulder. “Come on, man. We have better shit to do.”

“Yeah. You do.” Nicolai’s thin face was drawn, mask-like and unreadable. “Both of you.”

My father’s expression was unreadable. He said nothing, but I knew that his estimate of me had changed. I had moved from being a weak object to torment to a threat… and Grigori only knew one response to physical threats.

I shook Vassily off, and left the room ahead of him, straight-backed and buzzing with adrenaline. The nerves only hit me when we were out in the corridor, and even then, I felt giddy. Elated. I would have done it. For the first time in my life, I could imagine myself killing him. Really killing him, and I smiled a small, frosty smile, the knife still in hand.

“Put that thing away, Lexi,” Vassily said. His voice was hushed, like we were in church. “That was not okay. He could have broken your wrist, he could have—”

“I’m going to kill him.” I kept walking. I didn’t even bother to keep my voice down.

“You can’t. He’s your dad, for one thing, and he’s Kommandant, for another…”

As Vassily continued justifying the many reasons that I couldn’t murder my own father, I found myself tuning out. Something had changed in that split second moment where I’d drawn the knife. I’d seen it in his eyes, felt it in the way he’d pushed the point of the blade against his neck. My father hated himself as much as he hated me and the rest of the human race. He wanted release, but he was too cowardly to do it himself.

We reached the crossroads of the back-of-house. The exit to the car park was in one direction, the entry to the club on the other. Vassily jerked his head toward the club. “You want to go out and like… go watch the girls or something? Bet you could talk that goth chick into the best lapdance of your life.”

“No,” The thought of touching a stranger – having a stranger touch me in ways I had never been touched, ways which were bound to be painful – made my skin crawl. “I need a shower. After that, I need to go for Kovacs.”

“Oh, come on,” Vassily said. “You literally nearly just got fried by that fire thing. You’re not the Terminator. You need to sleep.”

“I need to stop any more of our men from dying by conflagration.”

“A what in the who now?”

I sighed. “Dying in a fire, Vassily.”

“When you stop speaking real words, it’s time to go home.”

“I’m not tired,” I replied. “I’m hopped up. I need to find Kovacs tonight, before the party tomorrow. You know Rodion won’t buy it if I’m out in the field and skip his birthday. He’ll think I’m avoiding him, now that Grigori is going to go and bitch me out.”

“Yeah, well, unlike Grisha, you actually do your job. Rodya won’t care if I tell him where you’re at.”

“That’s not the point.” I turned and started for the door to the parking lot. “The point is that I’ve left a job half done.”

“Alexi… don’t listen to your dad. He was trying to get a rise out of you.”

“I got a rise out of him.” The high was fading. Now, I was irritable and hungry, hopped up and in need of something to punch, preferably more than once. “Shower. Change of clothes, then Kovacs. It’s a Friday night, and at the very least, I can find out where he lives.”

Chapter 13

I found the apartments that the elemental had shown me without much trouble. Gold Street Apartments were new, renovated warehouse condos, fancy modern apartments bankrolled by the Mob. They were entirely out of place between the drab public housing towers on one side of the block, and old waterfront factories on the other. Fifteen minutes of note-taking and some surveying was enough for me to decide what to do about him. It involved a pair of binoculars and a sniper rifle.

If I’d marked Kovacs correctly, he was an Arrogant Douchewizard, T.M. Spooks generally come in three varieties: The Crazy Street Shaman, the Secretive Professional, and the Arrogant Douchewizard. They’re the guys – and they’re nearly all men – who wear robes to restaurants, carry carved staves or amulets out on the street, and generally make a scene of themselves at every opportunity. They can be overt, with the robes and Staff of Power thing, or subtle. The subtle kind are those annoying Freemason types who have a nudge and a wink for every bit of ‘hidden’ esoterica, no matter how mundane.

The condos were on Gold Street. I found them by orientating with the three public housing towers and then driving around the nearby blocks until the elemental’s image overlay reality. The setting was almost too good to be true. There was an old disused building right across from the balcony that I’d seen, a gutted factory with no security to speak of. There was no guard patrolling the condos themselves, and I was quite sure that the extent of Kovacs mundane security was a passworded entry into his fancy new apartment building. If he was counting on magical defenses sunk into the foundations, he was kidding himself. The consecration of buildings hadn’t been a standard practice since the 1880s.

I found and disarmed a single ward on the warehouse across the street. There were the usual locks and physical security measures on it – a padlock, which was easily removed with bump keys – and only one bump-proof lock on the door that I had to pick. Once I was in, I took the stairs to the roof and set up, the wind blowing my hair across my eyebrows. It was warm and breezy, and while the wind wasn't expressly in my favor, it was soft enough to not be a huge handicap for a high-powered rifle.

The sniper rifle wasn't a gun I got to use often, but it had several advantages. For one thing, it had completely interchangeable, replaceable parts. I'd never used the same barrel twice on this gun, which was important for not getting done for murder. For another, I had no doubt that Kovacs had festooned himself with magic designed to protect against magical and physical attack – at close range. Wards designed to turn a bullet could only take so much kinetic energy and were nearly all designed with pistols in mind. In addition, the gun was quiet despite its size, and the single, precise crack was rarely interpreted as a threat even within an urban jungle like this one.

The biggest impediment I faced was myself. As I assembled the piece and fixed the stand, I found that my heart just really wasn't in it. I was tired and burned out. Vassily had been right about my fatigue and the need to rest, but time was not on our side. Besides, killing Kovacs would solve the problem of my Avtoritet’s birthday present. Nothing says ‘happy birthday’ like giving someone the severed hands of their enemy in a fancy box.

I set the muzzle of the rifle as far back from the edge of the warehouse as I could. When I had a good, steady position, I lay on my belly with the binoculars, braced the weapon in against my shoulder, and settled down to wait for life to stir behind the curtains of Kovacs’ bedroom window. And wait I did… two hours of nothing, in fact, before a light turned on further back in the apartment and shadows began to move across the walls inside.

“Finally.” I shuffled around on the ground, stiff and uncomfortable, and swapped out the binoculars for the scope of the rifle. After several tense minutes of inactivity, I began to hum a half-remembered song under my breath to pass the time, waiting for the first physical glimpse of this warlock who could curse a man to burn to death.

I was just getting into the refrain when the light turned on and a person stumbled into the room, spinning around to face the door where they had just come from. My heart sped, and my finger tensed on the trigger, freezing in place when I saw the hair – long, blonde, teased and curled. A woman, not a man. Frowning, I forced my finger light and resuming squinting down the scope, redoubling my concentration.

The woman was tall, leggy and laughing with a model's white smile as she spoke to someone out of my sight. Quite abruptly, she reached down and pulled her tank top off over her head and took her bra with it, spilling her breasts from underneath. My face flooded with heat; my head jerked up and back, and I cursed as I nearly took my own eye out on the edge of the scope.

Fantastic. With my eye itching and smarting, I refocused on the other side. There was another woman in there now – dark haired, small and buxom. She was kissing the blonde passionately and, I thought, drunkenly. I found myself feeling increasingly lost as I watched the pair of them tumble onto the bed in a heaving wave of long hair and limbs. Neither of these women looked like anyone named Eric.

My cheeks were burning as I forced myself to stay at the scope, and on the scene in the bedroom. If the women cared that the blind was open and their privates were on public display to all and sundry, it didn’t show. Clothes went flying, and the blonde reared up on her knees – fully nude, by this point – and laughed as she turned to face back toward the entry to the bedroom.

And then, finally, a man appeared in my narrow round frame. He was further back in the room and out of focus, lurking in the shadows on the far side of the bed. Just enough of him was visible that I could tell he was male. I screwed the eyepiece around to zoom in on him, chewing a flake of skin off my lip as I looked back down and recoiled. Yes. Definitely male. Definitely naked, and judging by what he was doing with his hand, apparently impressed by the cavorting taking place on top of his bed. He was hairy, trim but fleshy, with a sullen, heavy face and curly black hair. Not unattractive, under other circumstances… but my god. I should have listened to Vassily and just gone to bed.

Exasperated, I lined up the shot, exhaled, and was about to squeeze the trigger when the blonde sat bolt upright and put her back between me and Kovacs. My face ticced. She bent down toward him, ass to the window, while the brunette got up against him around her girlfriend and started to kiss him.

“Oh, for fuck's sake…” Shooting a mafia contractor like Kovacs would attract the NYPD just long enough for them to figure out his identity and then blow it off in favor of pursuing other, livelier criminals. Shooting two women along with Kovacs was the basis of a major investigation, complete with media circus and grieving families. They wouldn't stop until they'd followed the trail all the way back to CelTech and my boss, and if Homicide turned up on Rodion's doorstep, he would be greatly displeased.

I peeled myself away and sat back on my rump, rubbing my eyes, and just left my face in my hands for a while. It was dark in there. Dark was nice.

After I’d done my best to scrub the imagery from my mind, I had another look down the line of sight. They were so tangled up that it was like trying to aim at a jellyfish swarm. There was no way that I was going to get a clear shot for at least half an hour. I settled for rolling over onto my side, where I drank my cold coffee in surly silence and waited for my target to finish disporting himself so that I could do my job and get home, hopefully before five am.

Now and then, I rolled back and peered through the scope, regretting it more each time I looked, but there came a point where they finally seemed to be wrapping up… and that's when I regained my focus. It was possible to take the shot tonight, but that was reliant on the women being gone.

Naturally, pair of them got under the covers and snuggled up together. Of course. If I was going to take the shot, there would be witnesses to the actual death, but my chances of escape were good. When the women lay down and Kovacs sat up, the back of his head facing the window, my eyes narrowed as I found my will, centered within the stillness of my mind, and fired.

There was a dull crack through my earplugs. The bullet hit the glass and… stopped. A vivid, bright violet pattern flared across the window, an intricate alien geometry visible from my position across the street. Kovacs jumped to his feet wildly, lighter and everything else in his hands thrown up and away with shock. I felt the backrush of energy even as I yanked the rifle back and down, rolled with it, and scrambled away with my bag and the gun.

I hadn’t missed. The line of sight was perfect. I knew a ward when I saw it… but the shockwave of energy, the taste of the magic was not the same as the curses and the fire elemental trap, I was sure of it. It was stronger, deeper, more powerful… richer, for lack of a better term. And darker, much darker. The magic left a bad taste in my mouth, though I couldn't have said why. The magical backlash had a smell, too: an awful rotten, putrid sugary smell, like five-day old meat left in the trash.

Choking back bile, I ran down the stairs and onto the street to find someone standing outside my car. He looked up in alarm as I burst out of the warehouse. There was someone inside the cabin, fumbling inside the steering column. As if the night couldn’t get any better, some asshole was trying to steal my rent-a-car.

I leveled the sniper rifle at the lookout and locked the bolt in place with a loud ‘snak snik'. “Hey!”

The lookout shouted as he turned tail. The guy inside the car hit his head on the way out, and the pair of them both stumbled away, gawping, as I threw my gear, got inside, and slammed the door. I jammed the key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing. The piece of dog shit had cut the ignition wire.

Sweating, trying not to fumble, I got a flashlight and had a look to see how far he'd gotten on hotwiring my ride. Genius here had cut and prepped the battery wire, but not connected the ignition. After a headcheck to see if anyone had followed me out, I set about finishing the job. It was times like this I wished for real eldritch might. In my fantasies, I spoke a word of power and the car would surge to life. In reality, I was trying not to let the sweat from my forehead drip onto the wires as I fucked with them in the near-darkness, flashlight clamped between my teeth.

I heard a shout, and then the triple rapport of a handgun going off around the corner of the warehouse, followed by return fire from the would-be car thieves. I ducked instinctively, dropping the wires, and then came up again to finish wrapping them. They were almost done, so close to being done…

In the rear-view mirror, I saw Kovacs – barefoot and in a bathrobe – running down the road with both of the women he'd been fooling around with. The blonde was now back in her jeans and tank top and toting a hunting rifle; her girlfriend had a pistol and was wearing nothing but lacy pink panties which were in stark contrast to her dark olive skin. Now I could see them up close, I was fairly sure they were Sicilians. Mob molls.

Finally, I touched the wires together, and the car roared to life. The noise and sound drew fire: my rear windshield took three, four, five plugs before it burst in across the back seat with an explosion of glass rubble. I put the car in gear and floored it, fishtailing a little before I threw the handbrake and roared off down the road. Straight down the road, and only straight, because I tried to turn the corner and realized I'd forgotten to break the steering lock.

“God dammit!” I struck the wheel as hard as I could, screeching to a halt in the middle of the road while the three musketeers ran up the pavement behind me, guns blazing. I jammed the key in the ignition and turned it until I could control the wheel, but by then, they were on me. The blonde sighted down like a hunter behind me, and I barely got down and against the driver’s side door as a round blew through the cabin and smashed my front windscreen as efficiently as it had the rear. Half blind and navigating mostly by feel, I backed up at full speed to scatter them, then floored it and tore off forward again. I swung around the next corner, checking back to see where my pursuers were headed. They were still on foot, and only the rifle now had enough reach to nail me. I saw the woman aim and fire, but no bullet came for me. She dropped the muzzle and began to mess with the bolt. It had jammed.

I drove further and faster than they could run. Once it was safe to get a breather, I pulled over into a dark alley and allowed myself the luxury of hyperventilating for several minutes, shaking my hands and rocking in the throes of overstimulation. That activity burned itself out into tics and grimaces of pent-up frustration by the time I pulled my gear over and broke up the gun, filed the barrel, and stashed the rest behind the back seats. Rodion wasn’t paying me enough for this shit. I was out and alive, but if I wasn’t pulled over tonight, it would be a miracle.

Barely thirty minutes later, the tell-tale red and blue begin to strobe behind me. I slowed the car of my own accord with a sigh, pulling over to the side of the road so that the cops could catch up to me. So much for miracles. It was times like these I remembered why I was an atheist.

Chapter 14

By the time I got home – exhausted, sweaty, and six hundred dollars poorer after bribing the cop who pulled me over – the last thing I wanted to think about was the party I was supposed to be preparing for tonight. But think about it I did, because it was at least as important as the issue with Maslak… at least as far as the Organizatsiya was concerned.

My Avtoritet was hosting his birthday bash at The Russian Tea Room, which I personally thought was in poor taste. For one thing, most people in the Organizatsiya were Ukrainian or from the countries south of Russia – Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan – and were emphatically not Russian and even more emphatically not Moskvichi, people from Moscow. I imagined that visiting the Tea Room as a Ukrainian was a bit like going to a Confederate-themed restaurant as a Black person: not particularly dangerous as of 1986, but full of disquieting reminders of the past. The overwrought Imperial theme was tacky for someone who’d grown up angry on stories of national revolts, genocide, and the suppression of our language and literature.

After four hours of unquiet sleep and a day spent making talismans, I got my best suit together and stocked up on caffeine. I was well and truly buzzed by the time Vassily and I arrived, fashionably late and without a hair out of place. We had to line up for a minute while the doorman checked off names, and before we went in, I pulled Vassily aside and pressed a silver Hand of Fatima pendant into his palm.

“Eh?” He looked down at it. “What’s this?”

“To stop you from gaining a curse mark, if Kovacs decides to target you.” I folded his fingers around it, and held them until I felt him grasp it properly. “I have one for Rodya as well, but… you should keep this discreet. Under your clothes, and don’t tell anyone. If I were prudent, I’d have made one for Lev or Nicolai instead. As far as they know, I only created the one for Rodion.”

Vassily glanced toward the door as we shuffled forward a few steps. “I don’t want to shit on your ability or anything, but it uh… this kind of jewelry didn’t work real well for Slava.”

“He already had the curse,” I said. “It was like giving a man a shield after he’d been stabbed. This will stop the curse from gaining a foothold.”

“Makes sense. Prevention’s better than cure, right?” Vassily’s lips quirked at the corners. He obligingly passed the braided red string over his head and tucked it and the talisman under his shirt. “You need blood for this?”

“No. I already have some of yours stored, and I bound the original amulet to my own blood. These two pendants are linked to me, so that they draw off my power in the event of an incident. It will allow me to track where the spell is coming from. I’m wearing the one I gave to Slava, so I’m trusting my own life to these as well.”

“You don’t have to explain it any, Lexi. I believe you if you say it’ll work. I know you watch out for me.” Vassily clapped my shoulder. “You’re a good friend. You know that?”

I blinked. “What?”

“You are. You’re… I just realized I never really said it out loud.” Vassily laughed a short, awkward laugh. “I mean, you always look out for me and everything, and I’m this giant man-child, basically, so…”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I replied. “Don’t be an idiot. Being your friend is not a burden.”

Vassily’s face suffused with a vivid smile. “Can’t you just take a compliment for once in your life?”

I glanced at his eyes, saw that he was looking at me, and dropped my gaze to his shoes instead. He laughed, whapped me between the shoulders again, and then led me toward the doorman and his clipboard.

We entered a crowded party in full swing, a cacophony of lop-sided noise that made my burst eardrum throb painfully. Even with the summer heat, the crowd was made up almost entirely of leather jackets, suits and black tracksuits. The Brighton Beach Organizatsiya was here, all fifty-odd men save for a few apologies. Many of our associates – the Sixers who helped us with everything from medical care to accountancy and industrial cleaning – were accounted for, as was the waterfront arm of the Organizatsiya, the managers of AEROMOR and the Red Hook Maritime Union. They’d brought their family and friends, along with at least fifteen made men from two different Mafia families. Security was intense, though discreet. Here and there, I saw the half-hidden muzzle of a H&K glint under the edge of a suit jacket.

“Ho! Our Magus and our Little Snake! Been a while since I saw you boys somewhere other than Sirens, haha. How's it goin’ in the office?” The manager of AEROMOR and Kommandant of Red Hook, Vanya Kazupov, was an obese, beaky-nosed and abrasive man. He wobbled his way across to us as we cleared the gauntlet of dark-suited bodyguards and enforcers, hand extended. Vassily pulled his gloves off, but I kept mine on as we all shook politely and kissed cheeks. I grimaced as I almost touched his sweaty skin and pulled away as quickly as politeness allowed for. He reeked of liquor.

“It'll be a whole lot better once Alexi's done the paperwork tomorrow.” Vassily forced a smile as he lay a hand on my arm. “So, where's the boss at?”

“Rodya? Where do you think?” Vanya laughed at himself again, a sound that never failed to set my teeth on edge. “He's in that room with the bear and the decorations… there's games at the bar going on.”

“Games? Fuck yes. Come on, Lexi, let's go kick ass at poker.” The reassuring weight left, and Vassily began to weave through the crowd. People moved for him in a way they never did for me, and I gave Vanya a stiff, rueful little nod as I trailed off down the empty path that my far taller, far more charismatic friend left in his wake.

I couldn't deny it… I was dispirited. My self-esteem had taken a hit after the previous night, and now that we were here, it was impossible to shrug off the pall as we passed knots of chatting, laughing people. The room was rich with the smell of food. As Vassily stopped to talk, I snagged canapes off a passing tray and set about relieving my depression with little bites of thick bacon and mustard cream on crunchy toast.

Rodion was going to find out that I’d fucked up somehow, somewhen. It would be better if I told him first, but as we passed the gift table and drew up to the ring of laughing, chattering people, it occurred to me through the sleep-deprived fugue that it was probably better that I didn’t mention it tonight. It was bad luck to talk about negative things at a party, and how much less impressed would he be if I ruined his birthday with bad news? If nothing else, that excuse would give me time to think of a better way of framing my report.

My decision was uncertain, at first, but rapidly cemented as we pushed upstairs and found Rodion playing poker with Nicolai, Semyon, and Grigori. Our Avtoritet looked happy and lively, sitting next to my father at the table. Grigori seemed practically jocular, but he looked up at me and his eyes darkened, it was very clear that our spat the night before was still playing on his mind.

“Vasya!” Rodion stood to greet him as we closed in on the table. “My main man! That painting is amazing… I could hardly believe my eyes!”

“I saw it, and knew it was yours.” Vassily kissed cheeks and shook hands easily. “You know, I didn’t even know that James Dean painted anything before I went looking for memorabilia.”

“Yeah, he was real talented.” Rodion’s turned wistful, an odd expression on a man with a face as bullish as his. “He did all kinds of shit. Painting, racing, drawing…”

Rodion’s amulet was burning a hole in my pocket, but I waited without interrupting while Vassily got him talking. Watching him at parties was like watching a dolphin sport in the ocean. He was a natural in places like this. I was not. People had too many moving parts that were confusing at best and obnoxious at worst.

“- Alexi brought you something, too. Alexi?”

I started out of my rumination at the sound of my name to find Vassily paused, eyebrows arched, and Rodion and looking at me inquisitively.

“Oh, yes.” Belatedly, I fished around for the amulet and pulled it out. “I didn’t wrap it, Avtoritet, because you I thought you’d want it immediately. It will protect you from gaining the curse. It should also be marked with some of your blood.”

“You don’t say?” Rodion handled the hand of Fatima pendant the way someone might handle a live grenade. “Thanks. You got the knife on you?”

Of course I had the knife. I drew the little obsidian blade, and motioned for his wrist. Rodion didn’t hesitate to give it to me, and I drew barely a drop of blood that I discreetly scraped on the surface of the amulet. As I did, I felt it flare to life, stirring the pendant that pressed in against my chest. My confidence lifted a little.

His brow creased, eyes dark and worried. “So uh… you’re sure I won’t go out like Slava did?”

“I’m sure,” I replied, dropping my voice. “Wear it as long as Eric Kovacs is alive, and for a week after his departure in case he has set up any delayed spells that trigger after he’s gone.”

“Kovacs?” My Avtoritet licked his lip and leaned in toward me. “You have a name for him now?”

“Yes, sir.” I nodded a little. “We can discuss it later.”

“Get him. I want it done within the week,” he hissed back. “We’ll definitely be talking.”

Instinct caused me to glance away while he was speaking. Grigori was glowering at us from Rodya’s other side, his jaws clenched, eyes as flat and murderous as a shark’s. The expression fluidly returned to warm mirth as Rodion turned and focused back on his brigada, rejoining the game as if nothing had transpired between us.

“I’m going downstairs,” Vassily said. “I want to go see how much caviar mousse I can fit in my mouth at one time.”

“I haven’t had anything with caviar in quite a while, so…” I trailed off as I glimpsed a swirl of black skirt at the bar. It was Crina, the dancer from Wednesday night. A pleasant little flutter passed through my chest. Here was a chance to be seen in the company of a woman, in public, under lights where everyone I knew could observe us. “Actually, I’ll stay here for the time being.”

“Eh?” Vassily followed my gaze, and his face flickered through a complex expression I couldn’t read. “Oh, right. I see. Well, go get her, man. I’ll be up later.”

Crina was half-leaning, half sitting on a stool against the bar, lost in thought and only smiling whenever someone looked in her direction. She was dressed 1950s style – a flared black dress and rolled hair – but it was her shoes that really caught my eye. She was wearing a pair of spit-shined, two tone Oxford pumps with very high heels. I usually only noticed female beauty belatedly, but the shoes and her poise in them stirred some dark, hidden part of my psyche. I cleared my throat and straightened my jacket, and then went to join her. She turned her head as I pulled up at the bar, and this time, I thought her smile reached her eyes a little more.

“Well, hello there.” Crina spoke first, leaning back on her stool. She was smoking a clove cigarette in a long holder. “I remember you.”

“And I you.” I struggled not to look at her feet, but it was an effort. “Thought I’m surprised you’d remember anyone from the money pit, given how busy you were on your first night.”

She bit her lip with a low sound of amusement, poking a straw at the cherry in her drink. It was something bright red served in a martini glass, and it looked sweet. “Well, usually you’d be right, but it’s not every night that I see a man with eyes like yours. Is that your real color?”

“It is,” I replied. “I was worried you remembered me because I’m short.”

She laughed, and held her hand out to me. Mariya had always told me to kiss a girl’s hand when she offered it, but that felt far too intimate, so I shook it as I would have done a man’s. “Everyone looks pretty much the same height from the stage, to tell you the truth. What’s your name?”

“Alexi.”

“Crina.” Her square face suffused with quiet pleasure. “My stage name. I hope you don’t mind.”

“I’m comfortable with mystery. Every woman in the world has a right to her secrets,” I replied.

Her lips twitched with mischief, and she glanced at my gloved hands. “And every man has a right to his?”

She thought I was hiding hand tattoos, which meant she knew about the nature of the club management. Interesting. “Absolutely.”

“You know, I was wondering if you were some kind of ghost,” Crina said. “One moment you were there, all pale and still, and then the next you weren’t.”

I inclined my head. “Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.”

Crina’s eyes lit up with delight and recognition, and suddenly, my interest in her deepened. “That’s Arthur C. Clarke. 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“Did you read the book, or see the film?”

“Both,” she replied. “I like science fiction.”

I sucked on one of my teeth for a moment. “Well, if you’re not on call, would you like to find a booth to talk further? I really don’t like large crowds or liquor, and the bar has both.”

“I’m drinking a mocktail as we speak,” she said. “Let’s go upstairs. There’s a dining room on the third floor that’s a bit quieter than this place.”

I looked back to Rodion and company, and felt a twinge of duty. He had physical protection, but if something magical were to happen… “I can’t leave this room, unfortunately, but one of those booth tables near the stairwell would be ideal.”

“Suits me.” Crina slid from her stool, and happily took the lead away from the bar. She sashayed ahead of me across the floor. I could finally watch her feet under proper light, and didn’t fail to be impressed. She had good taste in a lot of things, it seemed.

We found out seats, and promptly and easily fell into conversation over a carafe of kompot and the plates of food that passed us by. I found Crina easy to talk to. She reminded me of Mariya, and because of that, the rituals of chivalry came readily enough. We talked books, Glasnost, the sorcerous assassination of President Rutherford in 1983 and the formation of the Vigiles Magicarum, and her eloquence rapidly put me at ease – not something I was used to when talking with strangers. Crina kept her personal details and life firmly out of our talk, which suited me just fine, but I was certain that she was well-educated and had left Europe out of necessity, not necessarily out of desire.

The Tea Room was boozy and delirious around us by the time Vassily came back up the stairs. He was weaving a little, cheerfully drunk as he plopped down beside me and threw an arm around my shoulders.

“Well hey, this isn’t something you see every day.” He grinned rakishly. “Look, I’m so sorry to interrupt, but I have to talk business with my main man here. Mind if I borrow him?”

Crina laughed, a little awkwardly, and looked to me. “I’m… fairly certain that’s up to Alexi.”

“Business is what it is.” My stomach jerked unpleasantly. Had something happened downstairs? I looked back to see that the poker table had been vacated, and a new group of people were playing cards. Rodion was at the bar, talking to two older men in pin-stripe suits who had the reptilian composure of old mobsters. The others had vanished into the elevator without my noticing. I turned back to Crina, and drew a deep breath. “Well, Crina, I enjoyed talking with you for the evening. Are you continuing at Sirens?”

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” Crina said. “Lev wanted to start me on a couple of slower days. He wasn’t sure the regulars would like my act.”

“Oh he of little faith,” Vassily intoned. He put a hand to his heart. “I thought your dancing was elegant AND sexy. Even fifty-fifty split.”

“Thank you. You’re sweet.” She smiled pleasantly, but the openness she’d had during our conversation was already sealed away behind her carefully painted mask.

“And Alexi here, man, he went nuts for it. If you’re good enough to crack this shell, you’ll be a millionaire before the month is over.” Vassily began to tug me toward the end of the booth. His sudden and forceful physicality made me stiffen, but I ended up going with him anyway. “What are you going to be doing for the rest of the evening, ma’am?”

“Rodion.” Her eyes danced with hidden mirth as she got to her feet.

Vassily managed to chuckle and snort at the same time, while I coughed, getting to my feet.

“Godspeed, good lady.” Vassily saluted her. “Needless to say, I don’t envy your position. Any of them.”

“He’s fine. He’s a good man.” She laughed. “I hope I see you around, Alexi.”

We watched her stride away. I frowned a little. “Did she just use me to pass the time?”

“Pfft. She’s a hooker. Who knows.” Vassily pulled on my sleeve. “Come on, man, let’s go outside.”

We went down the stairs, sidling between people on their way up, and emerged into the most raucous part of the party. I had an earplug in my good ear and could hardly hear out of the other, but the physical vibration of the music drilled right into the nerves in my back teeth.

The street was comparatively cool, leaden with humidity and the lingering, radiant warmth trapped in the concrete. There was now a smaller party going on out here. The old gopniki[22] jailbirds were out here, squatting along the edge of the gutter like a line of crows. Nicolai, my father, Ovar and Mo – two of the security guys and protection racket toughs – and three of the Red Hook union guys were drinking, smoking, and laughing uproariously at something we’d just missed. Knowing them, it probably involved guns, their dicks, or things they did while in prison together. Vassily and I moved down the street a ways and stood under the shadow of a dark green awning, where he lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall.

“What’s the problem?” I watched him, hands jammed in my pockets.

“Nothing specific, to be honest.” Vassily drew on his smoke with a low sound of pleasure. “Well, maybe. I don’t know.”

“What?” I frowned. “I… that makes absolutely no sense. Do you or don’t you know?”

“Don’t worry about it. You seemed to be getting along great with that girl.” He laughed uncomfortably, fidgeting with his hands. “Think you’ll take her home?”

“No.” I pursed my lips, annoyed. “So the business you so urgently needed to talk about was a drunken ramble on my lack of a sex life? Again?”

There was a loud whoop from down the road. He paused, and both of us looked over to see our brat’ye setting a beat with their hands while Nicolai did his best to dance within their circle. Further down the road, there was a large and loud group of black kids coming down the road from the corner, ten or eleven mixed men and women. A bad combination, though it wasn’t the newcomers that raised the hackles on my neck. All the men celebrating outside were drunk, prickly and intensely racist.

“Nah, that’s not it.” Vassily broke the moment of alarm, waving his hand as he struggled for his words. “It’s the court thing on Monday, I guess.”

“I thought you weren’t worried about it?”

He ran his hand back through his thick hair. “Well, I’m not. It’s just like… the possibility, you know? And if I was sent to the slammer—”

“You’re not going to prison.”

“If I was going to prison, it would be for the stupidest fucking thing possible. Money laundering? Credit cards? Corporate credit cards, no less. After all the shit we’ve done, that’s what I was nabbed for? The totally bloodless shit.” He sniffed, eyes narrowing. “I bet the Fed wouldn’t care half as much if you or me were killed, or if one of those chicks down there got raped or something. I’ve heard of guys getting six months for a rape, and you know what I’m facing? Ten fucking years for credit fraud. Says something about the world, doesn’t it?”

“You’re going to be fine, Semych. You’re drunk and maudlin.” I crossed my arms, putting my back to the wall. I didn’t lean. Instead, I looked over to the antics down on the road. The big group of clubbers had stopped, and I had the awful feeling they were laughing at the drunken dancing. When I turned back to Vassily, I found him looking down at me, and there was something wild and fearful in his eyes. Of all the faces in all the world, Vassily’s was the one I could most reliably read and interpret… but not right now.

“What?” I was beginning to feel peevish now. “Spit it out. You know I’m not a mindreader.”

“I know, it’s just…” He pressed his knuckle to his mouth, squeezing his eyes shut as he searched for what he wanted to say. “Before this whole court thing, I wanted to—”

“Hey! The fuck you looking at? Shakhtor!”[23]

“Fucking chernasty,[24] fuck you want to do that again?! Put your finger up at me again!?”

We turned to see my father and Anton, one of the Unionists, stalking across the road, bottles in hand, weaving through the moving cars like they weren’t even there. The clubbers were on the other side, some of them laughing, some of them posturing, others trying to pull their friends away.

“I ain’t done shit! Y’all think you gonna get anywhere by coming over here?” The ringleader – a tall, fit jock with the clothes and build of a basketball player was doing exactly the wrong thing by pointing and jabbing at the direction of the two men who were closing in on him like a pair of rhinos. “You’re gonna get your teeth knocked out, is what’ll happen!”

“Jesus haploid Christ.” Vassily pinched the bridge of his nose. Whatever he’d been about to say was lost as their friends got to their feet. Nic ran inside, while the rest jogged over to join Grigori and Anton. Before the theoretical offender could even really get his guard up, Anton drove a ham-sized fist into his face like a pile driver and then shoved him, putting him to the pavement. The others in the group converged on him, and suddenly, he was fighting for his life.

“It never ends, does it?” Vassily called out to me as we broke at a run to join the brawl, shucking our coats off on the way.

No, it didn’t. And I doubted it ever really would.

Chapter 15

We closed in with the others as 57th Street dissolved into a warzone. Women screaming, men fighting, women fighting, men trying to drag their girlfriends away from the collective thousand pounds of angry Slav who all too happily engaged with the lot of them. Vassily and I joined the fray without any uncertainty, setting on one of the guys who had managed to get Ovar in a headlock. We pulled him off and beat him from both sides, then threw him to the ground. No matter who started the fight, your people had to be the ones to finish it.

The guy who had flipped off Grisha was now on the ground getting the shit kicked out of him by three men. In front of me, Mo lurched and dropped with a punch to the jaw. The man he was fighting came at me next, fist pulled back. I wove and ducked the haymaker, slammed him in the sternum and then up under his chin. He went forward instead of down, yelling furiously as he bore me to the ground. We kicked and punched all the way to the pavement. Vassily hauled him off by his cornrows and gave me enough room to knee him square in the balls and scrabble out and up to continue on.

The fight was over as soon as Nicolai got out with our allies: close to twenty drunk, excited Eastern Bloc muzhiki who descended on the fight in a wave of peaked caps, Adidas tracksuits and leather. The clubbers did the sensible thing and hauled ass, pulling their fallen friends up off the ground and running as a hail of empty vodka bottles, screams and obscenities followed them down the road. As soon as it was obvious they weren’t coming back, the laughter and cheering resumed.

“Nothing like a fight to finish a good party, eh?” Ovar offered me a hand up from where I’d been sitting. Sitting?

“Oh, absolutely.” Nothing like watching your father hassle random passersby on a public road, more like it.

Laughing, he hauled me up to my feet as though I weighed nothing. Ovar was a Georgian and was approximately the size and shape of a door, with the build and mustache of a circus strongman. “You almost fight better than your old man, son.”

“Give me another year, and I’ll be better.” I was bleeding from some part of my face, and shook my head just before Vassily pressed a handkerchief into my hand and then pushed my hand against my nose. Punchy must have clipped me, but I hadn’t even felt it. “There’s no way we’re getting back in the restaurant.”

“Fuck the restaurant! There’s stripclubs down on 8th.” Ovar flung an arm around Vassily, and cheerfully manhandled him off into the crowd. My friend gave me a mournful little wave on the way past, and I knew I was never going to hear what it was he’d been about to confess to me. All because of one man.

Grigori was easy enough to find: he was throwing up noisily in the gutter. When he rose back up to one knee, he found me glaring down at him.

“The fuck do you want?” He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. The vinegar reek clung to his tracksuit.

“You’re a disgrace,” I said. “Take a goddamn look at yourself, Grigori. Just for one night.”

“You’re asking to get hit in the head with a hammer while you’re in bed, kid.” His eyes paled, draining of life and light, and he lumbered up to his feet. “You come here like… like you’re somethin’. I made you. I made you.”

I rolled my eyes. “Of course you won’t. You can’t reflect on yourself. You’re a narcissist. When you look in the mirror, you see some… some goddamn hero, but you’re an alcoholic, racist, slobby has-been.”

“Big talk coming from a little man.” Grisha sneered. “You finished playing with your boyfriend over in the alley over there? Think I wouldn’t notice? If I told you once, I told you a million times that I was gonna wring your neck if you ever turned out this way.”

“How creative.” I stood back, readying myself for his longer reach. “But you made me. If I’m gay, I must have inherited it from you. Something happen in prison you never told me about, father?”

Grigori’s face purpled in the split second before he swung at me. I dodged the punch, and he roared with wordless fury, aiming at my face. I dodged that, too, and backed up into the thin crowd of people who had turned to face the noise. They split around me like water, freeing up space.

“You useless fucking piece of shit! I should have kicked your whore of a mother in the stomach before you were born!” Grigori fumbled at his jacket zipper, yanking it down. He was going for his pistol.

I pulled my little obsidian knife and fell into stance, my other palm held up in a vaguely arcane gesture. “You want to try me? You might be my ‘Kommandant’, but I’m your Volkhv, and I swear I will gut you here and go to prison with a smile if you pull that gun on me.”

He sneered on both sides of his mouth. “Yeah, right. What are you gonna do? Curse me? I was cursed the moment you shot out of Nikla’s cunt, you little fuck!”

It wasn’t the first time my father had threatened me with a gun, but it was the first time I’d ever threatened him with magic. The presence of the weapon only steeled something inside as I started toward him. “To Chernobog I will offer your breath—”

Grigori had the gun out in his hand, but he faltered before pointing it at me. His pupils contracted. “Hey, what are you-?”

“Your head. Your limbs. Your heart. Your liver, your seed.” I spat out each part of the incantation in Ukrainian, advancing on him. My father – already pale and jowly – turned the color of milk. He raised the pistol, and I shot out with a hand and grabbed it, turning it upwards and back toward his own face. “I offer all of you to the only God you’ve ever worshipped, father. Nothing. You’re a shell, shambling through every day to avoid your self-inflicted suffering.”

“Grisha! Alexi!” Rodion called from somewhere further back.

“I am your curse. I am your curse from today and forever.” I fixed my eyes on Grigori’s, possessed of a singular, crazed manic strength. He was sweating, and his arm trembled as I forced the gun up under his chin, his own finger still on the trigger. “You’re a hole. A NO-thing. You’ve been waiting for me to kill you your whole god-forsaken life.”

At that exact moment, a wave of magic struck at me like a snake: a wave of fiery heat that roared against my magical shield, then over and around me like the plume of a comet. I pushed away from Grigori in shock, teeth gritted as I fought against the wave of invisible pressure and felt back through it, groping for the mage trying to curse me. This was my chance, my only chance to find him. I could smell sulphur, and once again heard the scrape and clang of metal, the sound of ravens laughing on top of the shredder at K&S. He was there again.

Alarmed and angry shouts rose up around us as I refocused on the moment. I looked up through watering eyes to see my father’s pistol pointed at my face, until the energy of curse recoiled from my amulet and tunneled into Grigori Sokolsky’s heart.

Chapter 16

Grigori screamed and dropped the pistol, clawing at his jacket and shirt as murmurs and shouts of horror bubbled up around us. Men stared at me in fear, crossing themselves and refusing to meet my eyes, as my father tore his clothing to reveal a blazing sun wheel, charred and bleeding.

“It was you!” He pointed at me, looking between his friends. “You all saw it! You saw him curse me! He killed Slava!”

“Don’t be an idiot,” I snapped back.

“Get the hell out of Alexi’s face.” Vassily spoke up from behind me.

But the damage was done. There was a bad charge building in the crowd, dark eyes and dark intent, and suddenly, I knew what it must have felt like to be accused of witchcraft within the confines of a village.

“I’m going to blow your fucking brains out on the street!” Grisha roared, but he was in agony and I knew it. His clumsy swing missed entirely, and I turned just as Rodion burst through the crowd.

“What the hell’s going on?” Rodion snarled. “Alexi, my chain started burning… was that fucking spook trying to hit me again?”

“He tried to attack me as well,” I said firmly, lifting my voice so that others could hear.

“He cursed me! He fucking cursed me!” Grigori lunged at us, but the presence of our Avtoritet broke the gathering storm. Three men came forward to collect him by the arms and keep him away, lest he punch Rodion instead of me in his drunken temper.

“What the hell did I walk in on?” Rodion looked between the two of us, arms crossed. “The manager came down and asked everyone to get out… did you curse Grigori? What?”

“I emphatically did not put that curse mark on my father.” I sniffed. “He was waving a gun in my face when Kovacs made his next attempt to mark us. The talismans worked, but the attempt made on me deflected onto Grigori somehow.”

“You fucking freak! You fag! You little bottom bitch!” My father, red-faced and screaming, had lost any ability to contain himself or pretend well enough to be persuasive. He was terrified. It was the best thing I’d ever heard, and I only had one working ear.

“Fucking hell.” Rodion rubbed his face. “That means he’s going to call and—”

There was a double ‘whoop-whoop’ from down the street, and the crackle of a speaker radio from one of two NYPD cruisers that had reached the scene. “Everyone move off the road! Off the road! Break it up!”

“Fuck this.” Rodion ground his teeth, and waved at everyone who still remained. “Get out of here, you slags! Anyone who wants to keep going, we’re moving it to the Fox!”

“Come on, Lexi. Let’s get the hell out.” Vassily shoved my jacket into my hands, and pulled me away as Grisha continued to curse and spit in my direction.

We jogged over to my car and clambered inside, slamming the doors and locking them. Now that the adrenaline had worn off, I was shaking, not from fear, but from a deep, savage joy. Kovacs’ curse had deflected onto my father. He was going to spend the rest of his short, miserable life in terror, unable to control what was to come, and then he was going to burn to death. I wouldn’t even have to touch him. He could and would try to kill me before the inevitable… but all I had to do was hold him off for twenty-four hours, max, and then he was gone forever. It felt unreal.

“I don’t think I want to go home just yet,” I said, pulling out onto the street and away. “Did Rodion say he was continuing the party at the Sly Fox?”

“Eh?” Vassily looked over at me. “What? Are you serious?”

“Am I ever not serious?”

He shook his head. “Something’s gotten into you, man. Flirting with chicks, standing up to your old man, and now you want to go to a bar? Where’s Alexi, and what the fuck did you do to him?”

“Someone is about to incinerate my father tonight or tomorrow. I think it’s a cause for celebration,” I said, too cheerfully.

“Oh. Right. Jesus, you’re creepy when you smile.” Vassily sighed. “Okay, so. Let’s celebrate this morbid shit, but I want you to have a drink with me. A real, proper drink.”

“No.” It was a reflex as much as a real denial. “No, you know I won’t drink.”

“Well, you need to. You’re wound tighter than a watch spring and you have been for sixteen fucking years. You grind your teeth in your sleep, for fuck’s sake.”

I recoiled a little. “I do?”

“You do. I’m surprised you still HAVE teeth.”

Self-conscious, I ran my tongue over them, checking for damage. “That still doesn’t mean—”

“Seriously. I just want to see you relaxed for once,” Vassily said. “Let go of the badass monk act and live a little. You said it yourself: Grisha’s toast. There’s nothing you could do for him, even if you wanted to, and I dunno about you, but all this cursing shit is making me remember my mortality.”

“I know what alcohol does to people. You know I don’t—”

“Alexi.” Vassily’s voice hardened. “You’re not your dad. You’re not going to turn into a psycho rage-beast after a couple glasses of vodka and beat up someone’s puppy, okay?”

I frowned, tongue-tied.

“That, and the Fox is boring as shit without anything to drink.” He waved a hand, still scuffed from brawling, and lit up a cigarette out the window. “Not unless you’re looking for some old Chinese broad to sell you bootleg smokes and porno magazines. Which you can get there, by the way, if you go down that hallway in the back.”

He was not exaggerating. The Sly Fox was a seedy dive in the old Ukrainian part of East Village, part of our wide-ranging protection racket and a favorite of our muzhiki. It was a pigsty on its better days, and tonight, it was two steps removed from a midden. I could smell urine out on the street. People weaved around and laughed outside. About twenty other people from Rodion’s party were there, laughing with the bouncer – not one of the crew, but friendly enough with the Organizatsiya to pass as one. I jammed my earplug in as we went down the stairs, descending into red-lit darkness.

The Fox was also always busy. Rodion was already inside, as were Lev and Semyon. They both looked quite out of place in their fine linen suits. I went and found a booth while Vassily went to go and get drinks, trusting him to bring something I might find tolerable. A few passersby stopped to greet me with a mixture of shock and surprise. No one had expected me to follow the party.

Vassily returned, and banged a short tumbler down on the table as he took his seat beside me. He had a beer and a tumbler of the same stuff, which was dark and smelled strongly of blueberries.

“What’s this?” I regarded it warily.

“Rakija. Blueberry moonshine. Totally up your alley.”

My mouth drew across. I didn’t touch the drink.

“Look, if you start trying to beat on me, I’m fully capable of pounding your ass into the pavement, alright?” Vassily slid his arm over my shoulders, and I was suddenly hyperaware of how close he was. My mouth went dry, heart pounding in a way I usually only experienced in the heat of a kill.

Slowly, I picked up the glass and sniffed. It smelled yellow and purple to me. I took a single swallow, and to my surprise, the painful noise of the bar momentarily receded. The berry flavor was dry and sharp, a little sweet, and strong enough to numb the tongue. It was the combination of taste and texture that did it, working just like peppermint oil.

Vassily laughed at my expression. He smacked me between the shoulders, and I nearly snorted the stuff out my nose. “See? Is that so bad?”

I looked up to see Lev watching us from the central table. He was leaning on his linked forearms while Semyon talked to Ovar and Nicolai about something, and when he noticed me observing him he averted his gaze. But he had seen me drink.

“It’s alright,” I replied. I had another mouthful, and a strange fluttering sensation passed through my chest. I thought it was nervous butterflies at first, until I realized that the feeling was actually the muscles of my chest relaxing. Feeling oddly, slightly competitive, I drained the rest of the glass and slammed it down.

“It doesn’t kill you to let the reins loose now and then, Lexi.” Vassily pushed the other glass to me and raised his beer. “I’ll make a hedonist out of you yet. Bud’mo!”[25]

“Bud’mo?” I echoed him, and fought down a twinge of baseless anxiety as I followed his lead. I already felt a bit dizzy, but Vassily was unfazed. Happily tipsy and far more at ease than he’d been at the Tea Room, Vassily looked more handsome than ever. I was fairly sure that I was flushed red, like a boiled crab.

While he was at the bar, Lev left his place and took the seat in front of me, a small smile playing over his mouth. In the red light, his green eyes looked black.

“I see you’re having fun, Alexi,” he said. “I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen you let loose.”

The Rakija had gone down smoothly. I was a little dizzy, but could still speak properly. “Apparently it happens on occasion.”

“Indeed. Look… I wanted to talk with you about something.” His expression turned a little serious, and he leaned across the table so that I could hear him. Half-deaf, I did the same. “Something about Grigori.”

Just his name was enough to sour my belly, until I remembered that he was on the fast track to the crematorium. “Go on.”

“Rodion is angry with him,” he said, his voice thick with conspiracy. “All of the activity with Maslak has… put him in a difficult position. Your father has been racking up debt after debt, borrowing money from his friends, and hasn’t been paying them back.”

My eyes narrowed. “For how long?”

“Three or four years now,” Lev replied. “It’s… a bad state of affairs. Our Avtoritet asked him to repay him some of the money to cover the costs of this operation, but he has been making excuses.”

Owing money to your Avtoritet was generally not good for one’s health. Refusing to pay him back was almost a guarantee. “What is he borrowing for?”

“We don’t know, exactly.” Lev tilted his head, drumming his fingers on the table. “There is… some concern that he’s investing in a side business. Gambling, maybe. Drugs.”

That was not good news, and whatever fractional relief I’d gained from a couple of drinks evaporated. Merit was not hereditary in the Organizatsiya, but debts were.

“My point being, Alexi, that you should make sure you have plenty of money saved for the short term, depending on what happens tonight and tomorrow. If not then, then in the coming twelve months or so,” Lev continued. “I’m aware that there is growing tension between father and son… so I’d like to advise you to let nature take its course instead of interfering directly. You could turn current events into a good opportunity for a promotion in the coming years. Naturally, if you were to learn anything about the money and what your father has been spending it on, you should consider reporting it to me directly.”

I got what he meant, and was both puzzled and slightly threatened. Why would he help me? “I see. I’ll take it under advisement, Advokat.”

Lev glanced over my shoulder, and then rose as Vassily returned with Nicolai. I filed Lev’s information to the back of my mind as they sat, setting down a bottle and two more glasses to play the time-honored Slavic game of ‘drink the bottle dry’.

Somehow, one bottle turned into three. After that, we were out of the booth and playing some kind of game involving dominos at Rodion’s table with him and our other brat’ye, who clearly didn’t regret Grisha’s absence. My memory began to get spotty at that point, the same point where I began to feel good – very good. Warm, limber, even loud. The sense of inclusion was markedly different like this, and Vassily had been right: I didn’t suddenly want to beat up on women or scream obscenities at black people. Loosened up, I was relieved of an undercurrent of pain in knees, back and shoulders that I hadn’t even realized had been there. And while Vassily wasn’t always next to me, I was always able to find him in the room by his sly sloping smile, wicked and playful.

It had to have been 4am that we left, because the doors to the bar were closed and we were suddenly outside. The remaining ten or so Yaroshenko men were belting out Russian rock songs at the top of our lungs while we waited for taxis, much to the amusement of unrelated patrons.

“And dream we not of the thunderous spaceport, not of this icy void! We’re dreaming of the grass outside our homes!” Vassily and I were mostly on key, but that was probably a subjective matter as we broke off and tried to find our way to the car.

“Goodbye, brave cosmonauts!” Vassily called back to the other men, who hooted back to us.

I managed to open the door after a few tries, and sunk down in front of the wheel, shaking my head to try and clear it as I fired the engine. The wheel swam in front of my eyes. It was no good.

“Can you drive?” I said – or, more accurately, tried to say. “I’m… I will run us into a telephone pole.”

“I’m an expert at driving!” Vassily pulled me out, and we changed places, and resumed singing a modified version Trava u Doma, the song about cosmonauts. “The risk and bravery is justified! The music of space is flowing into our conversation, and Rodya is getting head in the alley beside Vaselka!”

A weird, stiff spasm bubbled up from deep inside my chest. A laugh? “That is… that is the funniest thing I have ever heard. Why do that call it that, anyway? ‘Getting head’?”

Vassily mimed the act with his hand, and the laugh came out again: harder, this time. I collapsed back against my seat, cackling, as we wobbled our way down the road. Intoxicated I felt like a different person, like some other, more human Alexi sharing the same body with me, but when I looked across at my friend and saw him laughing and happy, I didn’t mind.

I remember reaching the bridge, and I remembered – vaguely – the complicated process of getting from the car to our apartment. It seemed to involve a lot of vertigo and the strange desire to be as physically close to Vassily as possible.

“What was it… what were you saying before?” I couldn’t find my keys in my pocket with my gloves on, and ended up fumbling around for what felt like an hour as I leaned against the threshold.

“What?”

“When we were at the, the restaurant. You were saying something, before my piece of shit, cocksucking excuse for a father started the fight on the street, but I can’t remember.”

“I don’t fucking remember. Jesus, what do you think I am?” He laughed.

We stumbled into the warm darkness of the hallway together, and then I found myself pinned against the wall and unable to breathe. Vassily was kissing me. Heavy, full-mouthed kissing, blue and sweet and delirious, an action I had no idea how to respond to. Everything smelled like blueberry Rakija. I’d never kissed anyone before, but I couldn’t tell where I ended and he began as we slid along the wall and turned around the edge of my bedroom door.

It was pitch black in here, and I fell back onto my bed dizzy and queasy, my skin rippling with the sensation of fur. I felt hands – long, fine boned, and strong – push me down and begin to unbutton my shirt. A great weight pressed down over me, submerging me in the sweet smoke and peppermint scent of Vassily’s breath and the faded cologne of his neck. Even though I knew something was wrong, that I was doing something wrong, I didn’t want it to stop… but underneath the relief and pleasure of a touch that didn’t hurt was nausea so profound that I knew if I didn’t sit up, I was going to throw up.

“Vasyl… my stomach…” Urgently, I pushed up and I scrambled back along the sheets as I tried to avoid being sick, and then my head spun and I plummeted into a single moment of dark nothingness.

Chapter 17

The dream continued in fits and starts: dreams of hands turning into birds that drilled into my temples and the back of my neck, attacking me as I fled down a black stone corridor away from some nameless terror at the other end. Pain and dehydration roused me from an unquiet sleep.

I woke on my back, half-on, half-off the bed. My shirt was still buttoned up, contrary to my memory, and I was hard: an uncomfortable congested erection that showed little sign of abating. My head was pounding in time with my hot, throbbing stomach. It felt like the worst food poisoning I’d ever had, except that food poisoning generally didn’t involve embarrassing hallucinations and priapism.

“Good God.” I moaned aloud. My voice was still slurred. I rolled onto my side, and then slowly pushed myself up on my hands. The movement only reminded me of the discomfort downstairs, made worse when I sat up the wrong way and accidentally pulled something the wrong way with a sharp, tearing pain. That woke me up. Wincing, I reached down and tried to adjust to a more comfortable position. It was partly successful, in that I no longer felt like I was going to punch through the end of my foreskin like the Kool Aid Man, but it only reminded me of other kinds of discomfort as my dream faded back in in fits and starts. I closed my eyes, confused and ill.

I could still feel Vassily’s mouth against mine. It had felt so real that I could hardly believe I’d dreamed it. It was humiliating… I wouldn’t do that. HE wouldn’t do that, not in a million years. Vassily never stopped talking about women, and he’d had girlfriends all the way through college… why would he do that? My conclusion was that he hadn’t. Most of my memories after leaving the Tea Room were simply gone. My dreams had been very surreal in other ways… that kind of fantasy wasn’t a stretch to imagine.

Despite that, my cock throbbed insistently. It crossed my mind to find some way to get it to settle down and clear the pipes, so to speak, but then the first wave of nausea hit and all I could think of was getting to the bathroom before I threw up on my bed. I stumbled down the hall and fell to my knees on the cold tiles in front of the toilet, puking until I was blind and semiconscious. I heard the door open, and felt Vassily’s hands on my shoulders and hair before I awoke a second time. I was on my knees in front of the toilet, kneecaps grinding uncomfortably against the floor. The bowl was clean, and Vassily was moving around behind me. How had I gotten here?

“Easy, Lexi. Can you hear me?”

“Why do people do this to themselves?” That was what I tried to say, but it came out as a garble around the next wave of sick.

“Don’t worry, just do what you’re doing. You’ll perk up after some tea and toast. I got toast in the kitchen, okay?”

I managed a thick moan. THIS is what I’d been missing out on for the last twenty-five years?

“Nothing makes you feel more alive than your first hangover,” Vassily said cheerfully. “Hang tight. I’ll get you some water, okay?”

“Metoclopramide… Maxolon,” I gasped. “White bottle, green lid. In First Aid kit.”

I might have blacked out again. At some indeterminable time later, Vassily returned with three pills and a glass of water that was the temperature of fresh blood. I sat down against the wall to take them and sip at the glass, the question I wanted to ask burning on the tip of my tongue. Had I been dreaming? But how could I ask when it was a blur, and when everything else had felt just as real?

“Come on, man. You got this.” Vassily squatted in front of me, his face a mask of sympathy. “Need a hand up?”

“Did… did…?” I tried, but the words wouldn’t come out. “Did Rodya call? About the spook, the curse?”

“Yeah. But you need to be functional before we talk about it.”

Tongue-tied, I reached out and let him help me to my feet. He led me out to the kitchen and sat me down at the table. The light was too bright. The meowing cat outside the window was too noisy. I rested my face in my hands, and tried not to retch up the pills.

“You went pretty hard for your first time,” Vassily remarked. I could hear him working the kettle and the toaster. “The guys were real excited to see you partying for a change. You have no idea. Rodya was talking about it on the phone to me.”

“Oh. Wonderful.” The smell of food cleared my head and set my stomach to rumbling, but not in the usual expectant-hungry food way. It was more like the warning tremors at Mt. St Helens. I didn’t look up until I felt him set a plate and a mug in front of me. Plain buttered toast and strong tea with strawberry jam, no milk.

“We should go over to Mariya’s today.” Vassily sat down across from me, a piece of toast in his hand. “This isn’t the stuff we should be talking about with Rodya on a private line. He was calling from Vanya’s new safehouse, I think.”

Carefully, I had a single sip of tea. It was too sweet, but I needed the sugar after throwing up as much as I had. “What did he say before?”

“That Kovacs guy left another message. He said that Grisha burns tonight unless we back off, and the next time, he’s going to lay the curse on the whole Organizatsiya.”

“They’re really not giving us any time to pull out, are they?” I tried a bit of the toast next, and discovered that I was surprisingly hungry underneath the nausea. “It’s a Sunday. What does he expect us to do?”

“Fucked if I know.” Vassily grimaced. He looked pale and pinched, stubbly, the skin of his forearms a clammy blueish-white. Maybe he’d done his puking before me. “So… you planning to wait, until he like…?”

I rose my eyebrows at him, chewing my dry toast in silence.

“You know. Grigori.” Vassily rubbed a hand through his messy hair. It was puffy with old mousse. “I dunno, man. Do you really think anyone deserves to die like that?”

“Yes,” I said. “Without question.”

He looked at me, disquieted. “I know he beat you and shit, but he’s your blood. A bullet through the head is one thing. Death ala flambé is seriously kind of screwed.”

“He didn’t just beat me.” I had another sip of tea. “I didn’t run away from home because of the beatings. I ran because he tried to kill me multiple times, in multiple ways, and that’s all he’s ever done. If he can’t kill someone physically, he kills their soul and tries to grind them into the dirt. That’s what he did to my mother, and that’s what he’s been trying to do to me.”

“I… Uh…” Vassily frowned. “You’ve… kind of hinted that he tried to whack you, but to be honest, you never told anyone anything about what happened.”

“I told Lenina and Mariya. That’s why they adopted me into the house.”

“Why DIDN’T you ever tell me?”

I shrugged, glancing down at the table. “I don’t know.”

Silence hung between us for a short time before Vassily spoke again. “What’d he do?”

“I used to go out a lot at night to get away from the house,” I said, chewing thoughtfully. “I’d go down to the beach and hide under the boardwalk, do my homework under there. Neither of them wanted to feed me, so I’d usually come back around midnight and fix something myself before bed. Both parents were generally unconscious by then.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I came back through my window that night, and found my dad sitting on my bed with a crowbar. He went on one of his drunken rants… something about me being a parasite, about ruining his life and making my mother cheat on him, and all this other nonsense. He… projects. Whatever he believes about something is the absolute truth, as far as his concern. Somehow, it turned into Nikla and I being responsible for him ending up in the GULAG, and then he chased me around the room trying to kill me. Smashed up all my things.” I motioned with the mug of tea. Now that I had some fluids and the Maxolon with me, my appetite was coming back. “He was going to kill me, then my mother, then himself. I knew what he was trying to do, and I knew he was serious. He’d been taking me on his hits for years.”

“You’re joking?” Vassily stared at me, eyes wide, lips parted. “What were you? Seven?”

“Mm. You remember Jay Brewski? That Polak who ran the bakery uptown?”

“Yeah. Vaguely.”

“Grisha took me with him when I was five. That’s how he got Brewski to go out the back with him… he figured that because he’d come with a little kid holding his hand, he was safe.” I shook my head. “My father brained him with a tire iron right in front of me. Got me to hold it while he went and got his sledgehammer to finish the job. That was the first time I ever saw anyone die. I think that’s why I ended up doing that thing to Jan Murphy’s hand with the scissors… Grisha used his hits to make an example of it to me. He did other stuff, too… tortured animals, fucked people in front of me, that sort of thing.”

“Jesus.” Vassily let out a taut breath. “Fuck. I had no idea. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

I shrugged. “Maybe because I don’t remember very much of it. The memories have been coming back in fits and starts since we really started working for the Organization, and when was that? Eighty-two?”

“Yeah. No wonder you’re so steady during work, though.” Vassily didn’t quite seem to know what to make of the confession. “Most of the guys who started around the same time as us are gone already. They shit their pants or didn’t clean up after themselves, and bam. Dead or locked up.”

“Yes.” I was already feeling better – better being relative to how I’d felt before. If there was one good thing my father had given me, it was his iron constitution. “But you see why I have no desire to stop Kovacs. Father’s made it so that it was either him or me, and I intend to see it through.”

Vassily exhaled thinly through his nose, cupping his mug and looking down at it. After a while, he nodded.

I stretched, grimacing as my back clicked. “I’ll shower and get dressed. Then we should go to Mariya’s and call Rodion. I can fill him in with how I expect to deal with the crisis in a reasonable timeframe, which will be some point between the point Grigori combusts and three a.m. tomorrow night.”

“What do you think caused the curse to turn on him?” Vassily pushed back from the table, collected our plates, and took them to the sink.

“Well… I’d assume that this spook has built a set of failsafes into his magic,” I said. “That’s normal procedure, when you’re enacting things like curses. It’s obvious that a mage will expect opposition and plan accordingly for things like counter-curses and protective wards, so that the spell will find some way to get around them, destroy them, or…”

I trailed off as an ugly realization struck me cold.

“What?” Vassily turned. The Hand of Fatima was framed by the collar of his bathrobe, the lapis and pearl eye staring out from his chest.

“Or he’s keyed it so that if the curse is turned by a ward, it defaults to the next closest blood kin of the intended target,” I said. “The guy works for the mafia. It makes total sense… if you can’t twist the target’s wrist with his own life, twist his wrist with his family’s.”

Vassily froze, the tap still running over the plate in his hands. “Your only relative is your dad. Which means—”

“Mariya.” I finished. “Your only living relative is Mariya.”

Chapter 18

I sat at the table in stunned silence for a moment as hope began to fade, then fear and disappointment dawned. The tension I’d lost in my stomach and shoulders knotted back into my muscles as the seconds crawled on by. There was a risk of Mariya being hit if Vassily kept the medallion on, and a risk of Vassily being hit if he took it off to try and save his sister’s life: the exact predicament that Kovacs hoped for, in the event of him encountering a mage strong enough to fend off his magic.

“Well…” I licked my lips, and rested back in the chair. “It’s unlikely that Kovacs will try to curse you within twelve hours. He tried and failed to lay magic on two people last night, and he only targeted one before that…”

“No!” Vassily slammed the wet plate down onto the metal counter, and I winced at the painful, sharp sound.

“Vassily, I’m not saying—”

“I can’t fucking believe you! I know you’re a stone cold motherfucker, but I don’t care how much your hate your dad. This is my sister we’re talking about! Your sister!”

I held up my hands. “I wasn’t saying I wouldn’t go do the job. I was just thinking about the level of risk relative to—”

“Relative to what?” He turned on me, eyes flashing. “Relative to your fucking blood feud? We don’t have twelve hours, Alexi. Rodion called at midday. It’s four in the fucking afternoon. We have six hours, at best, before this guy regains enough mojo to try again. And then what? How many people would have to burn alive so that you can breathe easy?”

“I’m going to do the job,” I repeated.

“But you needed to think about it.” Vassily stared at me.

“I think about everything.”

His mouth sloped to the side. “I know you do. And I also know that you’re a terrible fucking liar. You were sitting there weighing it up.”

I flushed, shoulders hunching in, and fought past a wave of irritation and self-righteousness while staring at my remaining tea. He didn’t know what it was like to have to deal with Grigori, and he never would really get it.

“Part of the problem is that we now have no idea where Kovacs is casting his magic from,” I said. “We literally have to catch him in the act of performing the curse to locate him. By that time, Grisha could be dead and you or Mariya could have been attacked.”

“What’s the likelihood of him going back to K&S?” Vassily’s voice was still sharp, but he seemed at least somewhat soothed by my discomfort. Strange how that worked.

“Moderate, but not certain. I know that if it was me doing this kind of magic, I’d have multiple sites of power, places where everything as set up to facilitate the Art that I typically worked… I’d have one at home, and several others scattered around the city. It really depends on just how arrogant he is.”

“How arrogant is he?”

I sighed testily. “Arrogant enough to have a threesome in front of a sliding glass door leading out onto his balcony – with the curtains open – when he knows there's people gunning for him.”

Vassily’s mouth stopped moving for a moment, hanging open, before he squinted and returned to his seat. “Hang on… What?”

“That’s why my first attempt went bad. The events in the room made it very difficult to get a clean shot. There were two women in there, and they kept… getting in the way.”

Incredulousness replaced some of his anger. “Wait. Are you telling me that you watched this guy bang two chicks through your scope?”

“The women were doing most of the… things… with each other.” I stared down at the tabletop.

“That’s like… a one in a million chance event, man. Just think about the twisted probability involved in that scenario.” Vassily leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands linked in the space between his thighs. “… Were they hot?”

I threw up my hands. “Look, no. I didn’t look at them, and… if I’m to go and do anything about this tonight, I really don’t need the Technicolor motion picture of Kovacs’ sex life running through my head while I’m putting rounds through his face.”

“Well, say there’s a moderate chance of Kovacs being at K&S. That means we need to run multiple operations across different sites.” Vassily began to patter his hands on his knees, thinking. “I’ve got an idea of how to organize this. Rodya’s at Vanya’s place down Coney Island way… so let’s pack up and go there instead of Mariya’s. I don’t want to worry her.”

“I have to face Kovacs alone,” I said. “Confronting a mage in his place of power should only be attempted by another mage.”

“What? Is it like some wizard code of honor? Wands at fifty paces?” Vassily got to his feet again, agitated and animated, and strode off past me out of the kitchen and down the hall.

“No. I have to wrest the energy of the circle from him and claim it for myself.” I also got up, not half as spry as he was. “Bystanders are at risk of being exploited, and there’s not enough body armor in the world to stop this kind of magic at close range.”

“The amulet won’t help?” He called back from his bedroom door.

“No. I will be hard pressed enough to defend myself, let alone other people.” I rolled my shoulders back, heading in the same direction.

“Well, I trust you. Just tell me that you’re going to do this tonight. I don’t want to risk Mariya, not now, not ever. This isn’t her life.”

“I’ll fight with everything I have to stop her from getting involved.” And I would, but it hurt to have to think about it.

Dry-mouthed and headache, I left the kitchen and went to my room to prepare for what was surely going to be a long, violent night. Of all the things that happened at the Fox, I could still hang onto Lev’s words. Let nature take its course. There was still hope. The wheels of politics would continue to turn in the background, and Vassily was right. This wasn’t Mariya’s life, not at all. She was as innocent as anyone could be in this business.

Chapter 19

“The asshole gave us until nine p.m. tonight to make the call to Maslak,” Rodion said. “And there’s no way in hell we’re going to. Vassily recommends that we send one team to the spook’s condo, one team to nab Maslak, and then we make him speak on the phone to his pet spook while we have him bent over a barrel. Even if he’s being protected by Scappeti’s crew, they ain’t shit against Nic’s team when we get the guys together.”

We were gathered with him, Nicolai and Petro, Yuri Beretzniy – a great grizzled mountain of a man and one of Nic’s old war buddies – Semyon and Lev in the swanky den of our newest safehouse, a penthouse apartment in a highrise overlooking Luna Park. There was horilka,[26] of course. The purple rotten smell of it challenged my tenuous hold over my stomach.

“Alexi is going to K&S to do the Gandalf and the Balrog thing,” Vassily had a drink, though I had no idea how he could deal with it after the night before. When his remark received blank looks from around the table, he had a sip and tried again. “He’s going to go face down the spook on his own turf, in other words.”

“Is Grisha able to go with us to get Maslak?” Nic rasped. “I’ll send men out to check his house, his office, and a couple of the Scappeti safehouses that were leaked to me, but I could use the muscle.”

“You can go to 6th Street and ask him,” Rodion said. “But you know what he’s like. This ain’t something he can fight. He’s trying to stay calm.”

Calm? Grigori, calm? If they meant that he was torturing someone’s Golden Retriever while drinking himself unconscious, then yes, I supposed he could be described as being in a state of calm. When my father holed himself up like that, it was a prelude to a late-night homicidal rampage. No matter how emasculated he felt by his fate, my father only had two responses to anything that happened to him: uncontrollable rage and displacement of responsibility onto the nearest convenient target.

“If he’s bitching and moping, I’ll pull him out of it,” Yuri rumbled. “The old bear listens to me.”

Rodion nodded. “Then you better get your ass down to his house. We’ve got to time this right.”

“I have preparations I must make in the time we have,” I said, almost interrupting. “To coordinate it correctly, I should reach K&S while he’s conducting the rite at around 9pm. For your bluff to be effective, you’ll need to have secured Maslak before that time.”

“Then we better get a move on,” Nicolai said. “It’s already 1600.”

“I’ll go to check the condo with Lev and Semyon,” Vassily said. Semyon nodded.

“Then let’s do it. Old soldiers to the fore, intelligence to the rear, our spook to the avant garde. Let’s sweep these fuckers up.” Rodion smacked his hands on his thighs and stood. We all rose, and I turned to Vassily and Semyon.

“I’m going to have to be at home by myself for a period of time, undisturbed,” I said. “This requires preparation.”

“Do what you have to do, oh Jedi Master.” Vassily saluted me. “May the Force be with you.”

Preparations consisted of painkillers and B vitamins, first of all, because I was still hungover. Once my eyes stopped throbbing, I settled into meditation and planned out my strategy. Magic written onto my skin was the first line of defense, followed by the bone amulet. A knife, soft body armor, and other basic weaponry went on over that. And then there was the mental preparation, the most important part of all.

I knelt in front of my altar, and considered the arrangement of occult paraphernalia that surrounded the Wardbreaker, still lying in its preservative circle. My tarot card for the week, set out last Sunday, was The Sun: the card of friendship, hope, positivity. I’d been trying to stay hopeful about Vassily’s court date.

To do this, I had to banish my petulance and disappointment, and that meant that I had to do something that Grigori was incapable of. I had to think about him and myself and come to peace with the reality of our situation. As I dwelt on the matter, I realized that for all the things I hated about Grigori, it had been him who had unwittingly guided me into piercing the veil between material reality and the metaphysical. As I’d watched him kill with the open question of a child’s wonderment, I’d come to understand the fragility of life. The first time I watched the lights fade out of a man’s eyes led to the question of: “Where did he go?” My father’s narcissism made me wonder what the alternatives were available to me, and his violence had toughened me, even as it had turned me cold. His nihilism had resulted in my interest in fate and self-determination, which resulted in my investigation of the occult and then my first moments of magical awakening. Tiny acts of telekinesis, at first, and then the creation and destruction of wards. I’d learned magic in the library at college, and practiced it while stealing cars for Nicolai. I would never love him, and the day he died would be one of the happiest and most victorious days of my life… but I could deal with it for a little while longer.

My mind fell still, and I could lapse into a proper trance. Meditation on The Sun and myself let me open up to the reality beyond New York, beyond the small world of the Organizatsiya. There was a sense of presence that came to the fore in meditation, a presence with many names. Aleister Crowley called it the Holy Guardian Angel. Jung called it Anima or Animus. The Romans called it Genius. Some other, more powerful mages described this presence like another being, but I’d never been able to access it beyond vague glimpses of something locked away deep inside. Even so, when I opened my eyes and lit on the Wardbreaker, that silent voice of intuition nagged at me. I reached toward it, and the hairs on the nape of my neck prickled as the laughter of crows outside broke through the thick silence in the room. The crow and raven were the creatures of the Sun in Slavic lore: a trickster god, an inventor and a Promethean. Wordlessly, I understood the compulsion. It was time to take the pistol in combination with my knowledge of wards and the flow of magical energy, and bet my life on it.

* * *

I was not surprised to discover that the entry to K&S now had a large chain and padlock, along with a new white and red sign that read: ‘TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED'. The gate was ajar, and the padlock was blasted and melted around the keyhole, hooked over one of the chain links. Kovacs was hoping his final move would be his last, pinning his hopes on being confronted in his place of power – that, or he had planned a setup. He had good reason to be confident. Despite meditating and drinking three cups of coffee, I still had a hangover, and this was guaranteed to be a fight.

I pulled my newly empowered talisman out of my shirt and let it hang on the outside of my body armor, then drew a deep breath and pulled the glove off my right hand. My skin crawled as I took up my little ritual knife and cut a short, deep gash in my palm. White and black spikes shot up behind my eyes and left my ears ringing as I loaded and primed the Wardbreaker. Holding onto the grip hurt – a lot – but this was a tool that needed to be blood-bound.

With the gun in hand, I slipped in through the gap in the gate. As soon as I passed the threshold and entered the scrapyard, I knew he was here. The momentary line of sight outside his apartment and my analysis of his magic had imprinted his particular magical signature in my senses, physical and not. All energy had a smell and taste to me, as audible and tactile as the buzzing static of a TV in a quiet room or the hum of overhead wires on the street. I followed the ripples caused by Kovacs' weirding of the local area, nosing through the scrapyard like a shark tailing the overripe orange-peel and sulfur scent of the other man's magic. Here and there, I passed signs of his passing and his desperation. The new junkyard dog was as dead as the last one, its neck broken and its skull caved in with a deep, long depression. There was no sign of burning. Three days of high-powered cursing had tired my opponent out and drained his magical reserves.

The circle was in a clearing between towering rows of baled metal, lit by the roaring glow of barrel fires. Kovacs stood in the middle of a precisely rendered circle of ground chalk, ash and salt, tall and imperious. Now that I could get a look at him, he was a leonine, proud-looking man, with a big nose and a full, dark mouth. He had his arm wrapped around a tall, thick staff engraved with Hebrew letters, but he'd skipped the dramatic robe for a dress shirt and jeans. It was a bit too hot for flowing black velvet tonight.

“It was you that I sensed. I knew you'd come,” Kovacs proclaimed. He had a notable Israeli accent.

“Wonderful. And I knew you'd be compensating for something with a giant stick,” I replied, holding my pistol down in both hands. The rough grip burned against the cut in my palm. “If I’d known this was going to be some kind of Sephardic versus Ashkenazi wizard grudge match, I’d have bought my teffillin.”[27]

Kovacs laughed, and I felt the power he'd built in his circle ripple around the perimeter of the design in a smooth wave. It prickled the hairs on the nape of my neck. He had drawn a traditional design, a geometric, Yahweh-centric circle as old as the Seals of Solomon, and he commanded the energy like a skilled musician.

“What do you hope to accomplish by coming here, really?” His poise and control communicated nothing but arrogance. “You couldn't shoot me before, and you can't shoot me now.”

“You've got your job to do, and so have I.”

“Oh, I see.” His smugness only intensified. “Come to try and save your blood kin? Your family? Your gang of Russian potato farmers?”

“Ukrainian barley farmers, thank you.” I stared at the circle until I could visualize and observe the pattern formed by the other mage's willpower. The longer he talked, the better. Everyone commanded the Art differently, and it took time to unweave the strands and gain mastery over the rhythm. “You really have no idea how much I don't want to stop you.”

“What?” The smarmy smirk curled into something that might have been confusion.

“Your curse ended up hitting my father,” I said, tapping my finger on the trigger. “You can kill him, raise him, and kill him again if you really want to. It's the ones after that who are problematic. So go ahead, incinerate him. I'll watch. What's Scapetti paying you for this, anyway? I might be able to match it, if you agree to walk away from the job.”

“More than what you or your Soviet thugs could ever afford,” he sneered. “My right shoe is worth more than your entire wardrobe.”

“That's probably true. I don't like to spend much on clothes,” I replied. “So go on then.”

He blinked. “What? Go on what?”

I gestured to the core of the circle with the point of the pistol. “Go on and wave your broomstick around, and do whatever you need to do to make my father self-combust.”

“Are you joking?” He seemed affronted, maybe anxious, but I couldn't really tell. Parts of his face seemed to move independently from one another, never cohering into a single, readable expression. I often had that problem with new faces.

“No, so off you go. Yod hey vav hey! Phoomph! Pillar of fire!” I gestured with my other hand, miming a rising flame. “I have no discernable sense of humor and I am utterly and completely serious.”

“You're bluffing.” His eyes narrowed. “You're making fun of me.”

I sighed. “Please kill him.”

“You're not fooling anyone. There's nothing you can offer me that Mr. Maslak’s protectors can't provide,” he said brittlely, his mouth turning down at the corners. “And nothing I'd do to benefit your predatory, conniving scumbag of a Don.”

It had been worth a shot. I sighted down at him, jaws clenched, and then ran at the circle with my gun ready to fire.

The other mage flung his hand out, stamping the staff on the ground as he yelled his Enochian word of power. “Dobrax!”

The swimming magic in the circle accelerated under the pressure of his will and snapped out like a lightning strike, a flash with a burning sulphuric stench. I charged into it like a bull, straining physically and psychically against the wave of heat and force. Eye to eye, Kovacs' cursework was markedly more powerful than it had been when we'd been separated by time and distance. I focused my will to a fine point, clamped it down and forward, and then activated the spell on the amulet. “IAL! ALDON!”

The amulet burned against my clothes, the bone barely holding solid form as the reflective ward reacted to the trigger, and the magic snapped back toward the caster. Kovacs' eyes widened as he swung his hand and staff around, his primary tool. His hair singed, but he caught the torrent of magic back into his circle of power and spun it around the perimeter of the design before flinging it back at me like a spear.

“RRAAAGH!” His face was a mask of concentration, pouring with sweat as we vied, will to will. The amulet hissed and spat as the energetic barrier between us seemed to buckle and war. He stepped back, and I felt his attention waver… and then my talisman exploded in a shower of blasted charcoal as Kovacs found the gap in the design and my concentration. There was a moment where my feet seemed to sweep forward along the ground before the cursed slammed into my chest with physical force: a blastwave that flooded my body and surrounded my heart before tearing the flesh of my pectoral with the kolovrat, the Sun wheel, which was to seal my fate.

Chapter 20

I could see why my father had screamed. The pain was excruciating, nerve pain that ripped through my torso and shoulder as the anchoring sigil manifested on my body. I reeled: my muscles cramped like I'd been shot. The air was suddenly too hot to breathe.

“Hah!” Kovacs, sweating and pale, gestured at me with his staff. His eyes were bright with gloating avarice. “I'll give you one chance to live. You said you want to deal? Get on your knee, and swear your money for your life.”

“Go shove your staff up your ass.” A fresh wave of heat passed through my body. I struggled through it, palm throbbing against the grip of the Wardbreaker as I fought to bring it up and aim at the mage's chest.

“Suit yourself.” He drew himself up. “You think this is an Indiana Jones movie, do you? That you're just going to be able to shoot me?”

I sighted down the barrel and fired off a round in reply. It hit an invisible barrier at the edge of the circle. The powdered chalk danced on the ground with the mage's effort to hold it intact, but it still held.

“Have it your way.” Kovacs laughed. He raised his arms. “Adre, addron, galvah…”

I braced a second time, closed my eyes, and focused on the link he was expanding between the two of us. He wielded his magic like a harpoon, a spear on a chain linked back to his own body. As he continued the incantation, I felt my heart race as my muscles heated, but the river flowed both ways. My teeth began to chatter as I searched for the rhythm and pattern and found it in a flash of tactile inspiration. As soon as I understood his magic, I could direct it to my own magical circle: a hidden transmutation sigil carved into my skin over my heart, where I’d known the sigil would manifest.

“Galvarah, YOD!” He finished his chant, and enacted the curse.

“IAL!” I roared my command word at the same time.

The column of magic looped through my body and then slung back into the circle carved into my flesh, following the path of least resistance as I rejected Kovacs intent and subverted his force into my own. The charge flashed through the channel of crusted blood winding from left pectoral to right hand, and slammed into the weapon I was holding. The Commander became painfully hot as the glyphs etched into the barrel flooded with brilliant red light, and I had, had to shoot. “ALLAR VOD!”

The shot was nearly soundless: an anticlimactic ‘blip', the sound that hitmen's guns make in Hollywood movies, but the blastwave that followed the little 9mm round ruffled my smoking hair and blew the dust up off the ground below, white-hot and propelled by the full weight of Kovacs' curse. I glimpsed his expression drop with shock as the round struck the circle and shattered it like a glass house around him. He shouted with mingled confusion and rage in the split second before the next round struck him in the center mass and blew out through his back. He dropped his staff and staggered away, falling to his knees on the dirt.

Shivering and sweating, I stalked through the damaged circle, stepping over the charred chalk line with the pistol extended. Kovacs' chest wound was smoking, cauterized all the way through. He tried to crawl backwards, his face a red so dark that I knew he was boiling from the inside out. “I curse you! I curse you with—”

His guttural snarl and his last flickers of power were lost as he coughed fire from nose and mouth. His eyes widened as the curse, unable to find a foothold on me, turned back and consumed the caster. Like Slava, Kovacs went strangely quiet and still as the fire roiled up out of his flesh. I watched in mystified, disgusted silence as his clothing ashed and his skin ruptured, belching gouts of flame so hot that they began to melt the ground underneath him. There was no screaming, because no one was trying to put him out. He died in roaring silence.

I looked at the gun in my hand. The Wardbreaker was still unnaturally warm, flickers of red flashing and glancing through the sigils. They were feeding greedily on the blood oozing from my palm, pulling it out of my body and channeling it up through the grooves that led to the first symbolic invocation to Mercury in Mars, the opener of locks and all things sealed and secret.

“Geburah to Gedula,” I murmured. I reached with my mind and found the gateway between the weapon and my life's blood. It took a moment of intent to shut it down. The connection severed easily enough, and the weapon stopped feeding, and went still. The same small extension of will was enough to activate it again, and I smiled despite myself. The Wardbreaker now work on time, every time, but perhaps not for me alone. It hummed with hot, seething power, but the power itself felt… impersonal. It was not the distinct color-scent of my own magical energy, which was dark, cold, blue-black and smelled like fresh rain. That was why I had not been able to create it myself, perhaps. The pistol's only function was to harm, much like a curse, and its fundamental purpose was not energetically compatible with anything still living.

I holstered the Wardbreaker, and watched as Kovacs' body turned to scattered chunks of charcoal. Only his hands and shoes and staff were left. Fussy as ever, I used the gravel and rubble around us to cover up all physical traces of the circle, and then picked up the charcoal, still seamed with embers, and threw it in the burning barrels. I wasn’t sure what to do with the rest. The mage had a chunky gold and star sapphire ring on his middle finger that I hadn’t noticed before. The fire – which only consumed the core of the body and left peripheral limbs intact – had not destroyed it.

I broke the finger off, brittle from the heat, and after several moments of deliberation, stripped down to my undershirt and wrapped the rest of the waste in my vest. I could take it to Bozya Akra, the Organizatsiya’s unofficial graveyard, or even just throw them out to sea. I was so hot and so exhausted that rational planning was almost out of the question. Dried blood had crusted on my upper lip. I’d gotten a nosebleed from the effort of battling Kovacs’ impressive will, and I felt like my brain was leaking out my ears.

A deep bodied caw broke me out of my momentary fugue: a raven's cry. It was too resonant to have been a crow. Wearily, I squinted up at it.

The animal was perched up on the edge of one of the bales, looking down at me from high above. Its eyes glowed white in the light of the fire, as it cocked its head from side to side.

“What do you want?” I frowned, wiping my face with my shirt. My eyes throbbed and twitched whenever I accidentally looked into the light.

The bird wiped its beak against the edge of the compressed metal, and then resumed staring at me. A vague haunting sense of recognition caused my stomach, already weak, to lurch with nausea.

I frowned and pointed the gun at it. “Go on. I’m not dead yet, you stupid thing.”

“Roorck!” The raven bounded back, and launched itself into the air.

“Same to you. Asshole.” Now that I was recovering, the site of Kovacs’ death was beginning to creep along my skin. The site of a mage’s death – especially when the death was by magic – was weirded in a way that made it uncomfortable for the living. There would be a cold spot here tomorrow, and forever after that. Or maybe a hot spot, given the mage’s predilection for fire.

Slowly, I rose to my feet, and wended my way back toward the gate leading to the road. I usually felt something like satisfaction after a victory of this magnitude. Kovacs was easily the toughest spook I’d faced in a duel, but I felt like I had heatstroke; I was tired, and heavy with the knowledge that even though Mariya and Vassily were safe – for now – I was not. If my father was now free of the curse, I knew better than to expect gratitude for saving his life.

Chapter 21

I called Sirens and then AEROMOR from a payphone, and learned that Nicolai and his team had taken Maslak to our Red Hook interrogation and execution room. There was a sub-basement underneath one of the old brownstone dockside warehouses, a floor practically level with the waterline. It was cold, industrial, and intimidating, and had everything you needed in a prison: small cells, discreet entry points, great insulation and soundproofing, and a drain that washed out into the ocean.

Unsurprisingly, Maslak was screaming and cursing up a storm when I got there. They had him locked in the hole, a blocked-off vertical sewer access drain with an iron grate, and he was in full freakout mode. The room that contained the hole had a door that faced a wide concrete corridor with a low ceiling and two small rooms. One of them was also used as a cell. The other was the interrogation room, which was white-tiled on all surfaces. A chair was bolted to the floor, and shower rails were bolted to the walls. A lot of people had died in that room.

Nicolai, Ovar, Yuri and Rodion were gathered in the corridor, loitering around the entrance to the cellroom, and they turned as a unit as I came clumping slowly down the metal stairs. Nic’s eyebrows nearly reached his hairline when he saw me.

“You got fried,” he said.

“Kovacs is dead.” I limped to join them, reeking of burned hair, and held out the ring to Rodion. It was still attached to the mage’s finger. “I took this from him. Happy birthday.”

“Aww, you shouldn’t have.” My Avtoritet grinned wolfishly, taking the finger and yanking the ring off it. “He give you much trouble?”

“He gave me thirty thousand dollars’ worth of trouble,” I said sourly. “Not twenty-one.”

“Fair enough. Call it a nine-thousand-dollar tip for a hard night’s work.” Rodion chuckled, turning the ring over to look at the inside of the band. “Huh, not bad. Real gold, real… wait a second.”

“Ey?” Ovar leaned in, as if he could possibly see whatever it was that Rodion had noted.

Rodion’s jaw dropped. “Lexi… oh man. Do you… you can’t have…”

“What?” I was curious now, as were the others.

“This ring,” Rodion said. “It belonged to Elvis fucking Presley.”

Yuri scoffed. “How the fuck do you know that?”

“The maker’s mark. And I’ve seen photos of him with it on, I’m sure of it.” Awestruck, Rodion tested his fingers until he found one that fit. It went on perfectly over his left ring finger, and his delight was palpable. “Holy shit, Alexi.”

“Guess you’re married to the King now.” Nicolai smiled a thin, papery smile around his cigarette, clapping Rodion on the back.

“Haha! Holy freakin’ shit!” Rodion grinned from ear to ear.

Yuri snorted and shook his head, and then rolled his eyes to look at me. “Hey kid. The bitch down in the hole has some kinda protection on him… something that stops bullets. We tested it out just to make sure, you know? Think you got the stomach to take care of it?”

I regarded him levelly. “Of course. Do we need him for the operation?”

Rodion sobered a little, rubbing the new ring to settle it on his hand. “We need some details extracted before we make an example of him, if you think you’re up for it.”

Interrogation was an art as subtle and ritualistic as magic, and I was definitely up for it… but not tonight. “The bulletproofing is not a problem, Avtoritet, but I don’t have it in me after the fight with Kovacs. Vassily’s going to court tomorrow during the day time, and I need what sleep I can get. Can Maslak stew for twelve hours?”

“Nothing seasons a man up for interrogation like solitary,” Nic grunted.

“Yeah, what Nic said. We’ll post someone down here to keep an eye out, but I don’t think Scappeti’s going to be too keen on retrieving him.” Rodion airily waved a hand. “Go rest, Lexi. You did good work.”

The momentary praise was gratifying, but the glow only lasted for a moment as I cleared my throat. “What happened to Grigori?”

Nic shrugged. “The burn mark disappeared around nine thirty. I figured you’d killed the spook.”

My face settled into pleasant nothingness. “I see. Well, I am sincerely glad that no one else perished. It feels like success.”

“Yeah, it does.” Rodion gave me a curious, expectant look.

I inclined my head and left without saying anything else. I didn’t want them to see how disappointed I was.

* * *

I arrived home to find that I had no front door. Or, more accurately, that I had a pile of splintered green-painted wood in place of a door, and the concrete hallway smelled of male urine, old blood, and vomit.

“Marco?” I drew my gun and stepped over the wreckage with a grimace.

“Polo.” Vassily called back from the living room.

I looked into my bedroom with a sinking heart. It was untouched, thank goodness, so I continued on to the den. Vassily was sitting on the sofa in his bathrobe. He was pale, and smoking with nervous, shaking hands. His gun was laid out on the coffee table by his ash tray.

“What on Earth happened?” I checked and then holstered the Wardbreaker, searching him for injuries. He looked fine, though the room had taken a beating. A number of my books had been pulled down and torn apart.

“Sir Purrs-a-Lot,” he said dully.

I blinked, realizing what was missing from the scene. Vassily’s cat was gone.

“Grigori brought the sledgehammer here and killed the cat,” I said.

“He killed my cat, Alexi.” Vassily’s voice was steady, save for the quiver of furious orange I could taste under the usual rich blue. “I came back and found blood all over the kitchen and laundry. He threw him off the balcony. The head was still up here on the kitchen floor.”

As Vassily talked, the dissociation started up. I felt like I was a million miles away from my own body. My head and heart pounded, my hands itched. I took a heavy seat on the sofa beside him.

“I’m going to kill him for this,” I said. My voice sounded far away. “One day. Not too far off.”

“It’s… Purrs was just a cat, Alexi. A cat’s not worth a human life.”

I ground my teeth, sharpening the cusps. “I beg to differ.”

“Just stop, okay?” Vassily ground his cigarette into the tray and sat back. “I can’t listen to it right now. Do whatever you want to do, but I don’t want to hear about it.”

This was the one thing that Vassily would never understand about me. Vassily saw death as cruel and arbitrary, and my job as being necessary, but fundamentally horrific. I saw death as the entry to the true underworld, Reality in all its scalding honesty and mystery. My job was to enact fate. With this action of violation and needless cruelty, my father had sealed his. He was a rabid dog, and he always would be. No matter what Lev said, it was time for him to move on.

“I’ve already called someone about the door.” Vassily sniffed, breaking the thick, tense silence that had clotted the air of the room. “So don’t worry about it. They’ll be here at eleven.”

I swallowed my rage and my intent, and bowed my head in acknowledgment. “Alright… thank you. I’m sorry about Sir Purrs-a-Lot.”

“Me too. I’m going to tell Rodion about this, believe me. Grisha’s out of control.” Vassily’s mobile face twisted through a flickering parade of emotions. Anger, hesitancy, fatigue. He looked as tired as I felt. “So now you know all about that, uh, I was wondering—”

Already most of the way to the door, I turned to look back at him. “I’ll set up the chessboard in the kitchen. I doubt either of us are actually going to get to sleep now.”

He grinned, and some of the energy finally returned to his eyes. “You read my mind. You really are a wizard, huh?”

“Fortunes told, charms and benedictions,” I said, flatly, as I turned and walked out toward the bathroom.

“Hey, you know what? In between choking people with their own underwear and throwing them into the bay, you should totally set up a fortune telling stand. ‘Alexi’s Psychic Readings, five bucks a pop.”

“Five? My readings are worth at least twenty.”

“Only if they have a happy ending,” Vassily trailed after me. “If you know what I mean.”

I rolled my eyes, collecting a clean towel and throwing it over my shoulder. “People don’t come to have their fortune told because they’re happy, Vassily.”

He stuck his head out the door as I began to pull off my outerwear. “So you make them happy. Tell them they’ll get their perfect job, their true love, all that bullshit. You could get into celebrity consulting like that.”

“Tell them fantasy stories, in other words.”

He grinned, face as sly and handsome as a cartoon fox. “What? You don’t believe in twu wuv?”

“I believe that love is illusory and unattainable.”

He cocked his head, leaning a little further into the bathroom. “What? What’s illusory about it?”

The robe had slipped. He was shirtless underneath, and I glanced across the stars emblazoned on his shoulders, the diamond back python tattoo that wound up his long arm. Vassily was a leanly muscled man, long-limbed, with striking hands made more so by the rings of blue and black ink he wore. The question I’d wanted ask him lingered on my tongue, but it couldn’t move past the wall of my own hesitation.

“Love is always a narcissistic fantasy. We project what it is we really want in ourselves onto other people.” I smiled a small, bitter smile, turning away into the bathroom. “We have to be at the courthouse by eleven, don’t we?”

“Yeah.” Vassily replied. He scratched his head.

“How you feeling?”

He smiled, eyes deep and blue in the mirror. “I was talking with Lev about it when we were scoping that apartment down in DUMBO. He thinks it’ll be nothing, really… a slap on the wrist, a big fine and maybe some community service. Marco Goldstein’s a good lawyer… unless we have a rat in the ranks that no one knew about, it’ll be a piece of cake.”

I snorted, regarding his reflection behind my own. “Go brew some coffee. No matter what happens, we can play chess until we’re ready for bed.”

“Sounds good,” he said. “And hey, after the court thing’s over… I’ve got two VIP movie passes burning a hole in my wallet. Let’s go see Big Trouble in Little China again. This time with one hundred percent less drunk asshole. Then we can go make a toast to Purrs to send his soul onto kitty heaven, yeah?”

And plan for my father’s execution. I grimaced and closed my eyes, drawing a deep, tired breath as I squared my shoulders.

“I’m willing to suffer another film for the good company,” I said.

He grinned, the lines around his eyes creasing, and some hidden tension in my chest loosened. Despite myself, I was also worried about Vassily’s trial. Besides that, I was already ruminating on Maslak, my father, the dead cat, Kovacs and Slava, and the blurry, anxious recollections of the night before. The events of the last week – perhaps the most difficult of my life – marched through my head in a confused tumble. It all needed to be put aside to face the dawn. Revenge and the plan for my father’s death could wait. My best friend needed me in the now, and that was all that mattered.

Get Book #1 & #2 of the Alexi Sokolsky Series with these handy links:

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Find all my books on Amazon.com: James Osiris Baldwin Books

Afterword

There are times when I really have to wince my way through depicting the realities of criminal chauvinism and the bull-headed, black-and-white thoughtlessness of organized crime in general. Criminals can be complex and sympathetic people, like Vassily or Alexi or Lev, or dismayingly simple people – violent, racist, misogynistic – like Grigori. Regardless, organized crime is fundamentally based on toxic machismo and greed, and anyone involved it becomes sick.

I grew up within the confines of Australian organized crime. I was born to someone involved in the Irish mob, and spent a lot of my early life in women’s shelters and protective services with my mother. I developed an interest in the Soviet underworld after spending years studying World War and Soviet history, and noting how the criminal element in Russia so often evolved in opposition to repression: first by the Tsars, and then by the Soviet Union. There were periods where the underworld and the black market were the most efficient systems in the country. This has led to Russia essentially turning into a kleptocracy, and the Russian mafia into the dark shadow of the global capitalist business world – which is why they are currently the most numerous and successful of the all the ethnic organized criminal operations currently in operation.

Alexi, through dint of being a mystic, is fated to always remain on the fringes in many respects. He cannot not think about the things that his peers take for granted. Why are we racist, sexist, homophobic? Why do we hate, and kill, and why do we value the things we do? Why do we fear what we do not understand, instead of trying to understand them? A mage, by his very nature, cannot gain power without seeking deeper meaning to things. The life expectancy of spooks in Alexi’s universe is generally very low for this reason – it’s impossible to function properly in the underworld while seeking out a greater understanding of reality. To have survived to his mid-20s, Alexi is better at lying to himself than he realizes.

The point of this, I suppose, is that I’m not actually endorsing anything that happens in Burn Artist or my future books in this series. I don’t endorse racism or celebrate gangster culture: indeed, my childhood was destroyed by it. A few people have emailed me to tell me how uncomfortable the language and attitudes of people like Grigori and Nicolai make them, and my only reply to that is to say: “I tell stories to explore the human condition, and remind myself and other people of our ability to overcome crisis, ignorance, and grief. This is the reality of how many people still think and speak. If it makes you uncomfortable, then I’ve done my job – go outside or go on Facebook and stand up to someone who says these uncomfortable things, and continue to be part of the solution.”

If you choose to keep going with the series – and I hope you do – you will not always be comfortable. I write to entertain, but I also write to challenge. There’s plenty of fluff in the world already, and I do not shy away from difficult language or themes, such as racism, child trafficking, the abuse inherent in the justice system, cartel massacres or modern-day slavery. Across the books in this series, there is fun, and love (eventually), and heroism… but there is the Shadow, too. Men like Grigori are real. I know, because I was raised by one.

A huge thanks to the Facebook NaNoWriMo group, especially Eric K’s excellent performance as a snotty Israeli pyromancer. My wife and Heather, for putting up with my 4th book-related hibernation of the year. All friends for support and encouragement, and Stacy for her patient and generous feedback.

Structure of the Yaroshenko Organizatsiya

The Yaroschenko Organizatsiya is actually two gangs: the largely autonomous Brighton Beach/USA faction who identify with Sergei’s surname, plus a larger Organizatsiya in Kiev, Ukraine who call themselves the Sviatoshyn Gang. As of 1986, the hierarchy is as follows:

Pakhun:

Sergei Yaroshenko

Avtoritet

Rodion Brukov

Vassily Lovenko (under apprenticeship/in training)

Brighton Beach Advokat

Lev Moskalysk

Alexi Sokolsky (in training)

Volkhv/Spook

Alexi Sokolsky

Brighton Beach Kommandant

Grigori Sokolsky

Brighton Beach Street Captain/Head of Security

Nicolai Chiernenko

Red Hook/East Village Kommandant

Vanya Kazupov

Red Hook Advokat

Yegor Gavrilyuk

Red Hook Street Captain

Ivan ‘Ivanko’ Andreichenko

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Books in the Alexi Sokolsky series

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Burn Artist | Book 0

Blood Hound | Book 1

Stained Glass | Book 2

Translation Guide

1

Authority. The ‘ground commander’ or 4-star general of any given Organizatsiya. They effectively rule, but generally answer to a Pakhun or a board.

2

Organization. Along with ‘Bratva’ and ‘Brigada’, Organizatsiya is the self-identifying term for the ‘Russian Mafia’.

3

Brigade. A slang term for a gang, especially a small, violent clique within a larger Russian mafia.

4

The hand of Fatima or Hamsa is a hand-shaped pendant with an eye in the center of the palm. A common good-luck or protective charm in the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, India and among the Roma.

5

Literally just means ‘men’ in Ukrainian, but has a specific rural, blue-collar context. Used to refer to one’s brigada.

6

A magus. There are many words for ‘mage’, ‘wizard’ and ‘sorcerer’ in Russian. A volkhv is specifically a magus, a learned sorcerer capable of creating and destroying protective magic.

7

A cell commander or the leader of a brigada, who answers to an Avtoritet. They are generally hands-on street commanders who lead small teams and directly supervise criminal operations. They also tend to do (and farm out) a lot of enforcement work.

8

A rude Ukrainian term for ethnic Russian people.

9

‘Advocate’. A senior advisor to the Avtoritet. Somewhat like a Consigliere in the Italian mafia.

10

A rude, racist term for Americans in general and African-Americans in particular.

11

Soviet prison work camps. They were notoriously brutal, and millions of people, mostly men, died working in mines or on railroads for Stalin’s Soviet Union.

12

A slang term for non-magical people.

13

The ultimate authority of an Organizatsiya. The Pakhun (literally ‘prince’) is generally a thief-in-law with great seniority. They are often involved in government and high-level corporate work, especially in gas and energy ventures. They may manage multiple Avtoritets and multiple criminal ventures and are rarely ever involved in street-level work.

14

A Yiddish word for audacity. Ballsy.

15

Filled dumplings common in Eastern Europe. Ukrainian-style pelmeni usually have pork, veal, potato and cheese or sour cherry fillings.

16

Butt. Another Yiddish word.

17

A sweet, usually non-alcoholic drink made from fresh fruit steeped in sugar water and boiled. Steep it too long, and it might turn into Rakija.

18

A racist term Russians typically use for Ukrainians.

19

Italian mafia term meaning ‘Captain’. Short for ‘Caporegime’

20

Italian word meaning ‘whore’.

21

Brothers. The term ‘comrade’ is almost never used, if at all. Brothers and brotherhood mean a lot more to the average criminal.

22

A mildly derogatory slang term used to describe young, poor, working-class men who typically hang out in small gangs. The stereotype is of an Adidas-loving, gay-hating, heavy drinking kid who spends a lot of time squatting in the middle of the road with his friends and committing petty crime. For men from that background, it can be a reclaimed title and an in-joke.

23

A really rude, racist term for anyone with dark skin.

24

‘Cherni’ means ‘black’. Another nasty racist term.

25

Common Ukrainian toast. ‘To health!’

26

Ukrainian style vodka, typically flavored with spicy peppers, fruit, or herbs.

27

A small box on a strap that contains Torah scripts that is worn during prayer by Jewish men.

Content

James Osiris Baldwin
BURN ARTIST
HOUND OF EDEN: A PRELUDE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Get Book #1 & #2 of the Alexi Sokolsky Series with these handy links:

Afterword

Structure of the Yaroshenko Organizatsiya

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Translation Guide