“The Greater Optimistic Direction. The Giant Organism of Dimension,” Kutkha replied. “The YESbeast. It is the Great I.”
“It?” This sounded mad. “That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t believe in God.”
“You don’t have to.” Kutkha chortled. “The YESbeast doesn’t care. You are one atom in a single cell of its body. You could destroy everyone on this world but yourself, and it would not notice.”
I scowled but had no answer. The whole exchange was so fluid and strange—semi-telepathic, hyper-real—that I couldn’t piece the information together. “Great. My Neshamah is some kind of Mormon.”
Kutkha guffawed. “Was I not being mystical enough? Pardon me, your humble soul. I am the gate and the key. I am the watcher, your guardian.”
“And a smartass.” Fantastic. The road ahead was swimming in front of my eyes, wobbling like a black ribbon. I checked the rearview mirror, but I didn’t see any especially suspicious cars. I certainly didn’t see Carmine’s flaming black dogs. “Guardian? If you’re my guardian, why weren’t you there when my dad was thrashing the shit out of me and my mother?”
“I was waiting,” Kutkha replied, wistfully. “Waiting for you to see me. But you were afraid... you only saw me briefly, Alexi.”
“Well I—shit!” As I spoke, the engine stuttered, and I worked the clutch, hissing through my teeth. Few people have ever heard me curse, but the words boiled up from a dark and angry place deep in my chest before I could stop them. “Don’t you fucking fuck up now, you no good piece of shit!”
The traffic slowed as we rolled up to the toll gates, and it took every shred of concentration to keep the truck moving. We rolled up to the window, and I set my jaw, resolving to breeze on through. When no one asked for my toll, I looked out and down. The woman in the booth stared back mutely, her eyes bulging slightly in the bright lights. That’s when I remembered I was covered in shredded meat and dried blood, gunpowder, and sweat. And I was half-naked. In a bullet-hole riddled truck.
“Same old New Jersey, huh?” I peered at her dark face, trying to open both my eyes. One of them was swollen shut tightly enough that it was going to need a crowbar to get it open. “How much?”
“Four dollars. And, uh, sir... do you—”
“No.” I glared at her with all the dignity I could muster and fumbled for my wallet—or maybe the dead guy’s—one-handed as the truck shuddered and lurched a little. I fought to keep the balance on the accelerator and clutch and ended up pulling out a twenty. “Just... you just take that, ma’am. Tip.”
Her eyes tracked me as we rumbled off, the engine coughing. The cabin was warm now and brighter than I remembered. The pain was getting worse, not better. The magical outburst had probably saved me from permanent brain damage from Carmine’s beating, but I wasn’t sure if it was the lights of the bridge blurring into one another or the aura preceding the worst headache I’d ever have.
“We are deplete,” Kutkha said, picking up on my silent query. “The sacrifice was our fuel.”
“You mean every time I want to cast big magic, I need to kill somebody?” I hoped not. I had done a good job of staying out of the hands of the law, but that was only because I killed infrequently and well. And, of course, I guessed that killing people just to cast spells probably raised some ethical concerns.
“No,” Kutkha replied. “But you’re so blocked up that you have next to no Flow. The magic worked because you were close to death.”
Oh, right. So I had to die, or nearly die, to be a proper wizard. Do zla boga.
We got the truck most of the way to Central Park before I passed out at the wheel. One moment, I was intent on the lines and whirring tarmac, and the next, I was hanging from my seatbelt and the hood of the truck was folded around a lamp post. I was pleasantly, distantly surprised to find that my legs weren’t crushed as I hauled myself out of the smoking cab and tumbled bonelessly to the pavement, the bat still in my hands.
My heart shlupped in my chest. It sounded as squishy as I felt, and I was glad that it, at least, was able to move. The rest of my body refused to respond. My brain was a sheen of white noise. Carmine and friends could drive up beside us right now, step out and put a bullet in my head, and there was nothing I would be able to do. Whoever killed Frank Nacari could take me off the street. At least I had made it back to New York.
“Get up,” Kutkha hissed in my mind.
“I can’t.” Its urgings were like prickling claws. I struggled to rise, but my wrists buckled from my weight.
“Get up or shut up. You’re almost there.”
My vision swam, but I still didn’t want to die. Sleep, yes; die, no. I tried again and managed to clumsily roll up to my ass and get a look around where we’d crashed. It was a clean, broad boulevard, full of high-rises. It smelled green. Cast-off newspapers rustled down the nearly empty road. Someone was running away towards the park, away from the scene of the accident, and some apartment lights had turned on overhead. Of course, I’d crashed the truck in one of the few neighborhoods in this city where the people cared what was going on outside. The cops would be there soon, and if they found me, I was worse than dead.
I choked a curse, set the butt of the bat on the ground, and used it to push myself up to the better knee. They were both screwed up by this point. With some shuffling and a lot of growling, I got to my feet. Took a step forward. Again. I lost awareness of my surroundings as I fixed my eyes on the pavement and walked towards the payphone at the end of the street.
I careened into the door before getting inside, dropped my change when I tried to feed it in the slot, and settled on digging the wallet out to find another quarter instead of contorting myself to find the first one on the ground. I tried the house first, but no one picked up. Vassily was out, of course. Next I tried the other number that came first to mind: Nic’s office number. I had to think about it, stabbing out with clumsy fingers, trying to moisten my lips as I summoned the words.
“Sirens Office.” Lev’s fluted voice crackled over the line.
“Lev. ’S Lexi.” My tongue felt too big for my mouth. I slumped against the side of the booth. “Ambushed. Manellis.”
“Alexi? The Manellis?” Lev’s shock was mild, almost affected, but that was Lev for you. “Where are you? I’ll send someone right away.”
“No idea.” I heard the slur in my voice and swallowed, glancing around. Park. Green. It had started to rain, heavy pattering drops that formed a mist around the tall buildings. I looked up at the skyline, orienting myself. “No... wait. Central Park. South.”
“Tell me the number on the payphone.”
I peered at it, but it took a while to make it out. My eyes were refusing to focus. “Two... four, five... nine, seven...nine... zero.”
“Okay, I’ll look it up. Stay down, stay safe.”
Was that it? I held onto the phone for several seconds after it clicked, not certain I’d heard my Avtoritet correctly. Then I dropped the receiver, staring at it numbly until the wail of sirens pierced the night air, getting closer. Shit. My fuzzy-headedness was abruptly cleansed by fear. Fear of arrest tapped reserves of energy I never knew I had, and I hobbled desperately out of the booth, across the street, and into the park, like a wounded cat. I huddled down in a cluster of bushes, burning and freezing under the metallic summer rain, peering out through the green wire netting at the road as it began to flash red and blue. My gut tensed to something the size of a walnut as the siren hooted and then went silent. Voices called out, cops getting out of the car. God help me.
“Kutkha?” My mental voice was very small. “Please tell me that I didn’t just go through all that to get pulled up.”
The response was a subtle fluttering of pressure around my shoulders, like someone’s consoling touch, the kind of touch I had never been able to stand. Kutkha felt weak and distant now, but even the smallest sense of his presence somehow balmed my mind and took my attention, however briefly, off the relentless and otherwise all-consuming pain. I th
ought back to Vassily in the car, the long stretch of his throat and the words of the Tao Te Ching. The man who walks without fear. I wasn’t dead. Not by rhinoceros or tiger, or Guido hellhound, or NYPD.
It was an age until the street outside my green sanctuary descended into silence. The doors slammed, the sirens flashed and then withdrew. The cops had likely called a tower in to get the truck, but with no one around, there was no reason for them to linger. My heart beat rapidly and shallowly in my chest, and lurched when a car door slammed outside the park fence not too far from the ruined truck. I heard a pair of old army boots hit the pavement. The change roused me from my damp fugue.
“Marco.” Nic lifted his voice a little higher than usual, gravelly and tired.
“P-polo.” I choked on the word. It wasn’t loud enough. “Polo.”
The boot step swaggered over in my direction. A few minutes later, the foliage over my head rustled, and Nic’s dry, wiry fingers snapped around my forearms. I was too exhausted to protest as he hauled me out, except to snarl and chomp my teeth as I put weight down on my foot and felt an invisible knife wrench from sole to knee.
He clicked his tongue. “Shit, Lexi. They fucked you up.”
“Lev.” I turned my head to the side and spat blood. “Need Lev. I have to... have information... the operation. Vincent.”
Nic paused for a moment, looking at me with narrowed eyes, and then hmmph’d and shrugged, offering his arm. I accepted, and he helped me hobble to the car. I let him load me face-first onto the backseat and lay there watching the world spin in an elegant loop ahead of my nose.
“Lev,” I croaked.
"You're real beat.” Sympathy never really touched Nic’s voice, but his tone held a certain urgency I’d never heard before. He’d mentored Vassily and me in our teens. Maybe he cared. “Keep talking. What happened?”
I couldn’t talk. Instead, I rolled over, struggled up to my elbows, and finally looked down at my leg. I immediately regretted it. It was stuck out to the side, the kneecap pushed up strangely from underneath my pants. Legs weren’t meant to look like that, so I lay back and stared at the lines of leather on the ceiling overhead. “Had to kill a couple of guys. Lev.”
“We're on the way to Lev. Don’t sweat it. You’re tough.” Nic revved the engine and backed out of his space too fast for anyone’s comfort, least of all mine. “We got your car fixed.”
You’re tough. He’d given that same piece of encouragement since he started teaching me how to box and shoot and boost cars. “Okay.”
Dizzy, dry-mouthed, I covered my eyes and tried to relax on the backseat, bumped forward and back by Nic’s flippant one-handed steering. We turned a corner, and I had to bury my teeth in my own arm as my leg jerked, bracing the other hand against the seat in front. The longer I lay there, the greater the shock. It flushed like a wave of hot anger but without the accompanying energy. I had been naked. My mouth was still oily and sour from the gun. It wasn’t anger. It was disgust. My body was full of holes, my flesh weak and bloodied, invaded. And yet... past the slow and continual shattering of my remaining dignity, past the stench of blood on my wet clothes, I could feel the crooning, cold presence of Kutkha. He enfolded my consciousness with wings as breathtaking as the clouds passing over a wild steppe. Every touch, every brief synaptic moment, carried a litany that slowly overwhelmed my thoughts.
...LoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYou...
I could smell night-blooming flowers. Jasmine, maybe, or honeysuckle. Was I dying? Drifting, distant, I was surprised to find my vision fading to green.
With no other recourse, I surrendered. Maybe death wasn’t so black after all.
Chapter 9
One moment, I was watching the orange lights of the highway marching through the back windshield of Nicolai’s car; in the next, I was hanging off his elbow in a white-lit elevator. The unlit buttons were numbered into the thirties. Foggily, I stared at them, unsure where I'd been taken. I could distantly smell Nic beside me, a brown and green and muddy blue scent, and was mulling over the weird mouthfeel of his cologne when I fainted again.
The next sensation was one of lapping water against my cheeks. When I opened my eyes, I found myself floating on the surface of an endless expanse of water, looking up through a passing gallery of luminous white aquatic creatures extending far up into the green sky above like a field of stars. Or... not quite endless. Somewhere very high overhead, the green turned abruptly to black, a blackness so deep it looked less like a form and more like the absence of form. It was vacuuming up the eerie, peaceful fauna that swam innocently back and forth, hoovering them in like a screaming mouth. It hurt to look at for long.
I closed my eyes against the darkness. When I opened them a second time, there was light. My face was running with streams of water. My gaze met one overhead, as placid and calm as the green sea at dawn.
“Ah...” Lev said. He wiped my face with a hand towel. “There we go. Back with the living.”
My knee wasn’t hurting nearly as much as it should have. I lurched up to try to look at it, and it was Lev’s clammy, firm hands that pushed me back down. I was lying on a black leather sofa as big as a single bed.
“Nothing’s wrong.” Lev’s prim voice was firm. “It wasn’t as bad as you thought it was. I reset it... it will be fine. It doesn’t even hurt.”
And for a moment, it was true. Lev’s words washed away the pain and doubt like seafoam, but like seafoam, the wave vanished as my memory swept clear and my own thoughts, my own knowledge, flooded back into place.
“You...” I rasped. “I don’t... believe you.”
Lev’s face froze into neutral lines, but he slapped the mask over his expression of shock just a split second too late.
“My knee.” My chest ached as I drew another ragged breath and struggled up to my elbows. Dizzy, yes, and sore. My lips were parched and I was uncomfortable, exhausted, but I was not in agony. I looked down at my leg. My trousers had been cut up and taken off around mid-thigh, baring my legs. The knee still didn’t look right: it was puffy and swollen, purpled up, but it was mostly straight underneath the swelling and bruising. I tried to flex it and immediately let out a harsh bark of pain as it reminded me that, yes, it was still royally fucked up.
“Stop that.” Lev swatted my hand away. “The bones are still setting. Whatever you did to it, it will take time.”
Whatever I did to it? I lay back, nostrils flaring. Lev stood up, carrying a bowl of water and a green cloth away with him.
“You tried to control my mind.” I glared up at the ceiling. The paint was smooth and new. I had no idea where I was. The room smelled clean and air-conditioned, vaguely oceanic, and mild. What furnishings I could see were expensive and new-looking. Brown leather, cream carpet, mahogany cabinetry. Was I at Lev’s house? “Why? How?”
Lev sighed from across the room. “The how and why is not really your business, I’m afraid. In general terms, though, I tried to suggest that perhaps your pain isn’t as bad as you suppose. Apparently, it was ineffective.”
The blank canvas of the ceiling danced with spots and flecks of light that stung my aching, itching eyes. “You’re a spook,” I said, flatly.
“Not as such.” Lev’s footfall was soft on approach. A straw was touched to my lips. Water. I tongued the straw into my mouth and drew greedily. The cool liquid chased some of the scratchy tightness from my throat. “Do you remember anything?”
“Yes, but I have no idea what happened. By the time I roused, I...” The taste of the gun barrel flooded my palate, my body reliving the humiliation and pain. The muscles of my face tightened. I clamped my jaws together until the enamel squeaked, flexing them until the taste and smell of Carmine and his buddies passed over and through me. “What day is it?”
“The morning of the twelfth.” Lev tugged the straw from my gritted teeth and set the glass aside. “Monday.”
Monday. So, I’d been out at least a good six hours. I knew there was som
ething I was supposed to be doing on Monday, but the faint shadow of memory flitted just out of arm’s reach. Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been that important.
My eyes flickered open. I locked my gaze with Lev’s, struggling to sit up higher to face him. “With all respect, Avtoritet, I want an explanation as to why you think it acceptable to make ‘suggestions’ to me.” The sense of violation that had started in the bathroom and haunted me all the way to this apartment curdled and grew. “I’ve worked for you in good faith all these years. Or have I?”
“I’ve never risked this with you before, Alexi. The only reason I tried was to relieve your pain. Please.” Lev pursed his lips, weighing his words. “Look... anything I say on this matter must never be repeated to anyone. Anyone. Not even if you suspect them of being a... spook. Not Vassily, not Nicolai. No one and nothing. Do you agree?”
This had to have been the first time he’d stuffed up like this, met someone who hadn’t just let their mind be rolled. He was a spook, a different breed of mage to me. Lev had played his magical cards so close to his chest that he practically stuffed them in his mouth and chewed. “Fine. Agreed.”
Lev sighed. He rose from his kneel, dragged a chair across, and set it by the sofa. When he sat, he perched on the edge and crossed an ankle over his other knee. “Sergei knows. He’s always known. I discovered my ability after nearly dying in prison and honed it while serving with Sergei and your father in Kolyma.”
Kolyma. Just the mention of the place made Lev’s face gray and his fingers twitch while he moved, as if reflexively looking for the stub of a cigarette or the end rind of a piece of bread. That he had some magical ability explained how this soft, effeminate intellectual had survived the gold mines of northeastern Siberia. The name made my mouth turn dry and my palms itch. Perhaps it was an ancestral memory, inherited through the blood. “I understand why it is a secret, Avtoritet. No one else knows?”
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