I could do nothing except go along for the ride. Water was rushing down the length of a progressively smaller and more constrictive corridor, flowing like blood from a wound where the demon had struck. Kutkha waded forward, and just before it narrowed into a doorway, we reached a sigil burnt into the wall, a single Hebrew letter. Chet. The letter was filled with mercury that swam and swirled as we approached. Beyond that point, the space was nebulous and indistinct, a cacophony of sound, shade, and color.
“I will not go beyond here.” My Neshamah pulled back and turned, coalescing into his raven form. On wings of shadow, he glided back down the very tangible corridors of this other reality. “Our job is done, but… that is Ocean. We are in the Drink. This is already far too dange—”
The astral matter beyond the cliff’s edge of my psyche began to resolve into points of light. I heard a dim buzz, like insects—the sound of their mandibles and legs rubbing together, and Kutkha swelled in size, his face sharpening to a bladed muzzle as he swiveled his head back to face the doorway. We watched a honeybee crawl onto the edge of the portal, and then another: ten, a hundred, a million. Their wings whined with a building shrill, and behind them came a looming figure, blazing like a torch in a cave.
“This isn’t an angel. You said they don't exist,” I said, dragged back with Kutkha into the black stone passage. Fear hammered my intuition into overdrive. “What the hell is it?”
The bees could not get past the sigil, and they crawled out over the empty doorway as if it were a plate of glass. Each one shone like a tiny sun. The water stopped flowing along the floor as the bees covered the entire threshold, and there was a push, like a hot knife lancing through my insubstantial being.
“Fight it.” Kutkha’s body lifted up with a bristling layer of spines. “It’s attacking you. Fight it!”
I struggled for focus as the penetration deepened, fought to ward back the heat, but it was slippery, and it felt its way in through the cracks of my psyche with inexorable, incredible force. To my horror, I realized that I could not stop the invasion. “I can’t!”
“You must!”
Through the film of insects, a figure emerged: tall and thin, radiant, and remarkably, impossibly beautiful. It dragged along sheets of light as a garment, and as it emerged, a flush of heat as soft as sunlight spilled across us. My breath caught, and Kutkha stopped, eyes widening as light flooded the labyrinth hall. The pushing stopped. The angel-faced being was comforting, like a needy embrace that I had never been able to stand but somehow always craved. So close, so hot, that it might have been able to get into my skin, and I would never be alone again.
Alone. God help me, but I was sick of it.
Unwittingly, I yearned towards it, and Kutkha took a halting step forward. The tall figure reached out its hands. It sung a Solar song, pure and bittersweet, a silent bow that played the violin of my repressed emotions and coaxed me to run in, grasp it, hide my face—
“It’s a DOG!” Kutkha snarled. “Do you want to die? Do you want Vassily to die?”
As Kutkha and I struggled to gain control over the other, the being opened its eyes, rolling them down from the back of its sockets to stare down at us. They were as bright and heartless as jewels: endlessly needy, greedy green eyes. The angelic thing smiled beatifically and spread its long arms open like an old friend. An old, false friend.
I knew the look of false friendship well, and as it fixed on us, I bared my teeth. Kutkha’s hackles rippled, and he grew fangs of glass as he shrieked defiance, a thing of bright flashing claws, shadow, and ice.
The green-eyed being was fighting in its own way, wheedling its way under the skin into the channels of fatigue and pain, chipping at the hard shell that made me what I was. With a jolt of terror, I felt it trying to replace my ego with itself. It was everything I could need or want, a sympathetic virus. The creature didn’t judge me for my longings, for all the people I’d killed or the lies I’d told. It only wanted me. To possess me—to consume me.
United in desperation with Kutkha, we became a bestial thing. Lips peeled back from double rows of razor-sharp teeth, and we snarled, filling the corridor with a freezing, boiling presence. This time, the command to leave was wordless, a spear of pure will and intent. Like a caul, shadow encapsulated the penetrating radiance and pushed it back. For a moment, the pressure wavered, the siren call replaced by a quarterback rush of energies as the other magus rallied behind their countermagic, pushing against my fierce and sudden will.
And then I realized something. This thing, this viral, deceptive thing—it wasn’t a demon. It was someone else’s Neshamah.
With a roar of defiance, we charged in a surge of spines and shade and salt mist towards it. The other Neshamah’s smile split its face in two to bear rows of long, needle-sharp fangs, and it screeched at us as the dark coldness shoved it away. Screaming, spitting, it was inexorably pushed back from where it had come, and when we battled it past the threshold, the gaping energetic wound it had left sealed up and threw us back into earthly reality.
I came to with the point of my onyx knife pressed up under my breastbone, the blade grasped in shaking hands. Gasping for air, bathed in crystallizing sweat, I was bent backwards over my own heels in grand mal, my hair brushing the ground. My knees ached viciously where they had hit the floor.
“Not... not Carmine.” I gasped. I threw the knife aside and then carefully, slowly collapsed my body to the side. “That was not Carmine.”
“No,” Kutkha replied softly, a ruffled presence of shadowy plumage and bright, nervous eyes. “It was not Carmine.”
I groaned and managed to slowly bend forward into a normal human shape. The muscles of my back were so tight they threatened to snap. Lying on my side and wracked with spasms, I felt like a honeybee after it had stung something, half-dead, its entrails embedded in its target as it slowly suffocated under the cold creep of death.
When I was able to pick myself up, I wearily surveyed the contents of the circle, wiping at a thin trail of blood oozing down from my sternum. The tin cup had splattered, liquefied, forming a spindly arc into the air where it had frozen solid. It had taken the dim shape of a tormented figure straining for release, clawing at itself in a contortion of agony.
It wasn’t Carmine. I had looked into his eyes and known that his Neshamah was canine. The Hellhounds were his soul. When I thought back to Vincent’s mansion, man and hounds had had the exact same colored eyes, just like me and Kutkha. At least it meant I knew who I had to kill, because I knew only one green-eyed mage. Lev Moskalysk.
As I recovered in the circle, exhausted, confused, and vaguely triumphant, I heard the tinny shrill of the phone from my office. My jaw worked, clenching tightly enough I felt the muscles of my face all the way up to my temples. After that bit of arcana, whoever was calling was not going to be anyone I wanted to talk to.
A sense of simmering dread deepened on the way from the bedroom to my office. When the phone stopped ringing, the answering machine clicked, but didn't record anything else. The phone hesitated only a second before the ringing started again. I switched on the light and watched the handset vibrate in its cradle before reaching out.
I heard no sound from the other end when I picked up the receiver, save for soft, raspy breathing.
“Lev,” I said.
“I’m appalled, Alexi. All that effort, and you didn’t even get my name.” A polished mezzo-soprano, thick with dark, cruel amusement, spoke after several moments’ pause.
For the second time that night, and the umpteenth time that week, I had been wrong. It wasn’t Carmine. And it wasn’t Lev.
“You just couldn’t listen to me, take my advice to leave well alone, could you, sweetheart?” Jana was excited, but I could hear barely concealed strain in her voice. Whatever I had done, it had hurt her. She wasn’t the only one hurt, though. The horrifying sensation of my mind leaking out from between my ears had ceased, but every one of my limbs trembled with exhaustion. “Alexi, you have half an hou
r to bring yourself to my house, or Vincent dies.”
“I don’t give a damn if he dies.” My eyes narrowed. She thought she could ransom me, of all people? “He’s a drug dealer. A leech.”
“Don’t be dumb. No one wants Vincent for the drugs.” I heard her press and wet her lips, rubbing them against each other. Over the phone, the sound turned my stomach. “Maybe the mundanes in your two-bit protection racket, but there’s more at stake than yuppie-dust. No, if he dies, you’ll care a lot, Alexi, because that will leave you, and you alone, as the most precious resource in the city. You will never know peace again.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” My hand turned into a fist on the desk.
“Why would I tell you that?” Her voice lightened and smoothed. She was clearly enjoying the game. “You and Vincent share some… peculiar circumstances. But no one really knows, other than me. Yet. Carmine Mercurio, for example, doesn’t know you’re just what he’s looking for... but I’m sure he’d like to.”
I said nothing, nostrils flaring. “What are you talking about?”
"I told you. He said 'yes'."
My chest tightened.
“Carmine knows of you, zolotka, yes. When I told him that someone was using his uncle’s family name for business, and was helping the Russian Mafia, he was keen to find out who that was. I gave him an address.”
“Did you rig my car, too? Because that didn’t work.”
“Yuri set that up for me. He was a good host, better than Robert Nacari. Before we knew what you were, I was supposed to remove your piece from the board.” Jana sighed. “So now, you have a choice. You come to me, or I dispatch Vincent, use his sacrifice to kill your butt-buddy while he's at your sister’s place, and then tell Carmine where he can find you.”
“Go fuck yourself.” My face flushed hot.
“16 Brown Street, Sheepshead Bay. Half an hour.” She laughed and hung up on me.
I closed my eyes for several long moments and then looked down at the desk. If I only had thirty minutes, I needed to make them count.
Chapter 18
I spent fifteen minutes studying a single letter, the same one I had been studying and meditating on the way to Atlantic City. Chet, the barrier. I armed myself, pistol and knife, but doubted I’d get to keep them. Jana was right—I didn’t really have much of a choice but to play her game. If I called for help, it was as good as telling Lev and Sergei I couldn’t be relied on. One “aw-shit” was worth more than a hundred “attaboys.” If I was going to do this, I’d have to do it myself.
The address she gave me looked like a perfectly normal Brooklyn row house, white clapboard with a chain-link fence, and unremarkable save for the exceptionally healthy red petunias she grew along her windowsill and over her stoop. They were a brilliant color, a red darker than blood. I didn’t knock and didn’t have to. As soon as I set a foot on the third step, the door opened of its own accord.
Jana’s house was very well furnished, tasteful and decorated entirely in shades of white and cream with careful, small contrasts. Splashes of red in places, ambers and tawny browns. Her smell led me to her sitting room: it was all open-plan and white. Pure white. Everything was immaculately clean, white as polished bone. The woman herself was reclining on a white leather armchair in full view of the front door, seated with the stiff imperiousness of a nervous queen. She held a semiautomatic pistol in a loose, confident grip, the only black thing in the room.
“Come in.” Her mouth curled at the corners. “But if I see you reach for anything, I’ll blow your head off.”
I edged inside, keeping my hands loose and my eyes slow. There was nothing at all to indicate that she was a magus. There had to be a room with tools and paraphernalia somewhere, an altar or a circle. My gaze fell on the sculptural lamp by her elbow. The base of the fitting was an inhumanly beautiful gazelle-like figure who arched like a gymnast, holding the spherical lamp on her shoulders. She was neither animal nor human and had long curving horns, like an antelope’s.
The air ruffled strangely, warping from the power of an invisible, powerful will. Behind me, the door slammed shut.
“Coffee?” She arched a brow.
“No.” I looked back at her. “Thank you.”
“Don’t feel like buying time?” She rose, neat in her prim dress and low heels, and moved around me in a slow circle.
“Would there be any point?”
She disappeared out of my peripheral vision, and I tensed. When she was behind me, she stopped. The cold muzzle of the pistol pressed in against my kidney.
“Not really,” she said. “Walk ahead.”
She pressed the gun in, and I moved off slowly, waiting for an opportunity. Waiting for inspiration. It was like my father always said: you could be the hardest sonovabitch in the neighborhood, but it didn’t mean nothing at the business end of a piece.
Jana pressed me towards her bedroom. I looked over it with numb consternation as the door shut behind us. The bedroom, even more so than the living room, was white. Her bed, walls, carpets, everything. The blond wooden dressers had white sheets over them, with only the ankles showing. The only break in the monotony was dead things: Jana collected antlers, insects, bones, and pieces of amber mounted in wooden cases on her walls. White wooden cases.
“You like them?” she asked, girlishly. “I pictured you as a bit of a collector, you know.”
“Oh, yes.” What the hell was I supposed to say? Basically, the room had no cover, save for the bed. Nowhere to duck and shoot. “Just… lovely.”
“Aren’t they? Turn around.”
Jana had a weird half-smile fixed on her lips, her eyes wide. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement, her lips moist. I regarded her sullenly, running over the word of power in my mind. Chet, the Gate. The letter of the shield. Chet.
“You know, I tried to ask nicely. I had Yuri visit and everything.” She flashed a sympathetic, wholly insane grimace, wide-eyed and plaintive. “And that was before I knew what you are. But you didn’t listen to me. They usually listen, you know, other mages. We love the magic for its own sake.”
I thought back to the boardwalk. “So you killed Yuri and Frank. And what about the other guy?”
“Frank’s brother? He was the one who found the Fruit.” She said the word like it had a capital, like a title. “But he forgot where it was by the time I finally spoke to him. They do that, the norms—they forget. It’s a defense, you see? If the unworthy behold the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they forget where it is.”
“I really have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I was going to have him kill you,” she said. “But then I finally got to touch you. Skin to skin. And I realized, Alexi—you’re the real deal, better than Vincent. A true Wise Virgin. Do you have any idea how rare that is? A fully fledged mage with a clean cock?”
My face flushed with heat before I could stop it, and she laughed with delight.
“Strip.” She dropped her chin slightly, her eyes locked with mine.
My mouth opened and then closed. I sputtered. “What!?”
She motioned slightly with the barrel of the gun, the black void at the tip never wavering below the neck. “I want to get a proper look at you. Strip. Make it slow.”
The flush spread down my neck, and I bared my teeth, like a cornered animal. I was sick of being violated. “No.”
I had no time to react before Jana fired. The bang caused my vision to white out and my mouth to sear with sensory overload. The air bowed with pressure. I was sure I’d been hit, but my heart continued to rush slickly in my chest while the bullet graze on my cheek began to bleed.
“I said strip.” Jana’s voice was cold.
“Where did... you learn to shoot like that?” I had to distract her while I searched for the out. I wasn’t certain I could bring my hands up to start on my shirt collar buttons, but I was certain that I wanted to live. With shaking, fumbling fingers, I started on my clothes.
“I used to go
hunting with my pa,” Jana said languidly. “A real long time ago.”
“You’re... from the South?” I loosened one button and then the next, unable to stop my trembling. No one, nobody, had seen me like this. She was watching me hungrily, like food that hadn’t died. Her nipples were hard. They stood out against the fabric of her dress.
“Tennessee.”
I reached the last button on my shirt and let it drop behind me. My skin prickled with gooseflesh. “Why—”
“Shut up.” She snapped, and her finger tensed. “No talking. Only time I want your mouth open is when there’s something going in and out of it.”
A tremor passed through my spine. I uncomfortably, unhappily stripped my undershirt up over my head. It brought an approving sound from Jana.
“That’s it.” Her voice had dropped, low and heated. “You’re so shy. I never thought I’d see a shy Vor v Zakone.”
I wasn’t a Vor v Zakone, but she didn’t look like she was receptive to being corrected. Haltingly, I forced my hands towards my belt, and when they reached it, they shook uncontrollably.
“You ain’t ever shown anyone your little man before?” Jana’s mouth spread in a crooked, lewd smile.
“No.” I tried to pull the buckle out, but my hands were wooden. Jana twitched the gun warningly, and I somehow managed to undo it. My teeth chattered until I wired my jaws tight. “And I never want to.”
“Oh, I know. I know, honey. And that’s exactly why I need to see.” She licked her lip and let her tongue linger, dark red on orange. “You’re perfect. So pale.”
I glared at her in hot defiance as I toed my shoes off. My cheek bled freely, and I licked at the corner of my mouth. The blood was a sweet iron tang. It felt effervescent on my tongue, crackling with some kind of subtle force.
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