Chapter 3
Cold. Everything was cold, and stiff, and aching. The world returned in pieces, brittle moments of sensation. My hands and throat hurting. My head bumping rhythmically against something hard. My cheek was pressed against crunchy carpet, damp and prickly, vibrating with every dip in the road. Then Nic turned a corner, hard, and my head rammed into the side of the trunk. Damp darkness overtook all.
The next sensation was shivers, cold metal, and then blinding hot light. The lamp burst through my eyelids like a punch to the face. As the world swayed into focus, recognition filtered in past the pain and incessant itching. I knew this room. The AEROMOR warehouse interrogation room was small, square, tiled white on the floor and all four walls. There was a drain set in the center. I was stripped to the waist, chained to a bar mounted near the rear corner of the room, on a hard seat that was bolted to the floor. The man and woman in front of me, they were also familiar. Terribly so.
Sergei reclined on a rickety office chair from the upstairs warehouse, hands folded on his belly. He had one leg crossed over the other, leaning back on his too-small seat with the presence and nonchalance of a king. And a king he was. He was pushing seventy and was still usually the largest man in the room, with a thick red beard and oiled red hair pulled back into a short ponytail. The Pakhun of the mafiya that bore his surname looked more Viking than Slav – a Viking in a gaudy red velvet suit that clashed violently with his hair.
Vera Akhatova stood at parade rest beside him, straight as a rail and just as hard. She was sinewy and strong, with taut freckled arms, a short bob of brown straw hair, and no obvious humanity. She carried two revolvers on her belt, one on each side. They were both loaded and primed.
“Well,” Sergei finally said. “Alexi Grigoriovich Sokolsky. We have come full circle.”
My head was clearing, slowly. Too slowly. I tried to call anger, energy, a word of power. Nothing formed in my mind, an empty echoing cavern. I felt empty, small, weak. Alone. Alone?
Where was Kutkha?
"We are presented with temptations in life, Alexi. Tests." Sergei laced his hands on his knee as he leaned forward. "Tests by which we judge a character of a man. Men in this business have to have mettle, hmm? The kind that lets them permit someone else to take charge without shame or suspicion. Someone who plays the long game, Alexi. Who knows what they are doing."
I lunged at him a little, snorting like a bull, and reached back for the core of me, for my magic… and failed. It was like trying to catch fish with my hands, and the slippery inability to turn inward sent a spike of panic straight through my chest. Adrenaline woke me up. "What… what have you done?"
Sergei blinked, once. "You went against your orders earlier this month. The men you nearly killed didn't remember that you broke into the safehouse, but that doesn't mean the memories weren't there. I examined them. I know you tried to take Vincent to the Manellis in exchange for Vassily."
Mealy-mouthed, I stared back at him in sullen, furious silence.
Sergei leaned forwards. “And then… what happened, Alexi? What was in that factory worth dying for?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
Sergei cracked a grin. His teeth were sharp… unnaturally sharp. Sharper than any human’s teeth had a right to be. “Come now, Alexi. No need to be sarcastic with me. Not when you’re here like this.”
Kutkha was not there. He was still linked to me – he had to be. I was alive, but I couldn't feel or hear him. I lowered my face, nostrils flaring.
“There wasn’t anything in that damn warehouse,” I growled. “Just a DOG.”
The word stirred him to his feet. Sergei sighed. He put his hands to his thighs and stood, creakily, looming over me. “I wanted to make princes out of you and Vassily. Lev warned me that having you grow up here, in America, would make you selfish and untrustworthy. Disobedient. He was right. You’re worse than a stray dog, Alexi. An ungrateful, worthless little bitch. Let’s try once more. What was in the warehouse?”
“The DOG that ate Lev.” I glared from under my brow. “So it seems like he wasn’t much of anything, either.”
Sergei chuffed, clapping his hands. “Did you hear that, Vera? Listen to this cockerel’s smart mouth, eh?”
Vera hadn't looked away from me, her thumbs hooked on her gun belt. At mention of her name, she straightened from her slouch like a puppet on its strings. I was still staring at her when Sergei swooped into my vision, caught my jaw in his calloused paw, and squeezed.
“Look at me.” His tone was guttural, and utterly compelling. My skin crawled, and pain lanced through my skull as my eyes were unwillingly forced to focus in on his own. They were a deep blue-violet, cornflower blue. The whites were yellow. The veins… the veins were black.
Sergei licked his bottom lip, and then bit it, pushing the point of a tooth through the thin skin. It cracked like glaze, and as the seconds passed, blood began to well up from his flesh. It was very, very dark brown. Orange-black, not red. It smelled… strange. Powerful. And despite myself, my mouth began to water even as my nose stung with the sudden, acrid odor, like ammonia and burned wax.
“What you don’t understand…” Sergei said, reaching up to dab his lip with his finger. “Is that I won’t just kill you, Alexi. I know you’re brave. Plucky, but weak. So no, I won’t kill you. I will erase you. One by one, you and your little incarnations across time and space will start to die, while you suck from my mouth like a crack-baby. You will do anything for my blood, and you won’t be able to stop yourself. You’ll do it until you, your soul, and your mind are nothing but dry, hollow puppets.”
Zarya had told me, her face bloody silver, that there were many Alexis. She had known one of them, but it beggared belief that Sergei knew this, not unless he’d ripped something out of my mind. I tried to twist away, but I might as well have fought the sky. Sergei smiled like Santa Claus as he shoved his fingers in my mouth and swiped his blood across my tongue. It was as sweet as opium, burning a hole into the nerves of my mouth. A rush flooded through my head and chest like ice water. The veil of glamour was pulled away from my eyes, and for the first time, I saw.
His face was the pallid cream of old parchment, and the violet color of Sergei’s eyes was lurid, his pupils drawn to thin vertical slits under the light. Trembling with chills, I forced myself to across to look at Vera. I saw her – really saw her – for the first time. She wasn’t just thin and weathered. She was taxidermied, her tanned skin pulled taut over her bones.
"She's dead." My voice cracked. Sergei’s lip was still bleeding, and I was drawn back to it, iron to the magnet. The dark orange trickle ran down to mix with the ginger curls of his beard. The smell was chemical and toxic and sweet, like someone lighting a crack pipe with a burning crayon. “And so are you.”
Sergei roared with sudden laughter. He had iron teeth set like bullets in his jaws, top and bottom. “It only took you thirty years to work that out, boy!” He slapped his thigh. “Human after all, aren’t you? Vera, show him your scars.”
She complied without question, hooking her thin hands under the edge of her tank top and lifting it up to her chin. Her torso was peppered with old scars and bullet holes, the latter stuffed with yellowing wool caulk. She had a single enormous tear from sternum to flank, on the heart side. It was dark and knotted, pulled together with rusted metal stitches, and sealed with a sigil burned into her flesh. Her dusky skin was puckered, like old leather. And no one had known. Not even me.
“It’s good work, isn’t it?” Sergei leered at me. “My lovely Vera. You are looking at one of Mother Russia’s unsung revolutionary heroes, Alexi. She was shooting Tsarists with a one-shot rifle when your grandfather was an infant. I recruited her just before the first World War.”
“Recruited.” All my life, I’d known Sergei was a monster of a kind. I’d known that the Organizatsiya laid machination atop machination, a constantly scheming, writhing morass of men trying to one-up each other while they one-upped the world. I kne
w that Brighton Beach was a tiny backwater, established in the USA like a military base, or a sleeper cell. But this… this was not what I’d expected. “How… old… are you?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” He mimicked my voice.
In shocked silence, Sergei returned to his chair. He shucked his jacket off before he sat, and thumped his arm down on the armrest, staring at me haughtily as he turned it, palm up, to bear the inside of his elbow. Vera broke her place and went to him, mechanically rolling his sleeve up to expose the skin. He was tattooed from fingertips to bicep… cats, daggers, skulls, crowns, spades. The marks of kingship in the GULAG.
“What was in the warehouse, Alexi?” Sergei sounded calm, now. Reasonable, save for the audible clack of his metal fangs.
Vera was unwrapping a needle and syringe. My shoulders crawled with tension. “I told you.”
“Try again.” Sergei looked up, fixing me with a shark’s blank stare. As his eyes met mine, something clicked in my throat. My tongue twitched.
“Ah…Rr.. Rrrr…” I couldn’t stop. The words came up like contractions, like waves of nausea. I fought it, but was like struggling against the urge to vomit. “A… Rind. A Gift… Horse Rind.”
“Hrrrn.” Sergei made a sound low in his throat, and did not flinch as Vera slid the needle into his flesh. Now that I could see him for what he really was, Sergei’s skin was pallid, his muscles the texture of clay. There was no twitch of the skin as the needle slid in – only the tiny squeak of the syringe as Vera drew a full barrel of thick brown fluid. “Finally. And what was in this Rind?”
I fought for my Art, for a word or a gesture or something, anything, to spit in Sergei’s face. As his eyes blazed from across the room, the Hebrew letters would not resolve in my mind’s eye. There was no resisting him, not after he had made me taste his blood. “A… woman,” I said. “Not… human.”
Vera stood by Sergei, stock still, as he leaned forwards on his too-small chair. “Dark skin? White hair? Blue eyes?”
“Pale skin. White hair. Blue eyes.” The description ground out of my throat like gravel.
“Tall?”
“Yes.” I was grateful that her face was a blur. I could remember Zarya, the things she said. I’d know her scent if it blew to my nose from a mile downwind. But there was nothing for me to describe. “Yes.”
Sergei smiled, and a flicker of some half-hidden emotion flashed over his face, too elusive and too subtle for me to understand. “And was she… healthy? Young and innocent?”
His questions stopped my tongue. “Healthy, yes…”
He waited.
I swallowed again, and the words came up without my being able to stop them. It was everything I could do to steer the course of what I blurted. “Not especially young. She… was articulate. Knew how to fight. She… cursed a few times.”
“What was her name?” His pupils pinned.
“Z.. Ts… Tss…” Ticcing, struggling, I couldn’t look away from his eyes, and I couldn’t stop my tongue from forming the word. “Zar..ya.”
“Ohhh.” His eyes narrowed. “Zarya. What a lovely name for a Mare.”
The syllables tripped off his tongue like a caress, like was lingering over a candy. GOD help me, he knew what she was. They had a history. My hands shook, clenching on the armrests of the interrogation seat. “No.”
“No what?” His lips cracked with a gun-metal smile.
“You stay away from her,” I choked the words out. “Pizdha. Don’t you-”
“Pfff, look at you. Moonstruck, aren’t you?” Sergei bared his teeth. “I knew you must have eaten her, Alexi. I smelled it on you. People who eat those soaking cunts always turn out the same way. This is why I decided that you weren’t coming with me to Thailand. Not like this, not after listening to her lies. Not after eating her heart, and you did, didn’t you? They like that. They beg for it.”
It X’d me. It wants to X you too. Zarya’s voice, fluted and soft, rang from some half-forgotten niche of memory.
“No. I didn’t eat her heart. I killed her to free her from the DOG that killed Lev.” I wasn’t sure why that was important. Maybe it was because I knew, somehow, that the DOG had taken his soul as well as his body. Like Sergei wanted to do to me.
“Changing the subject, are we?” Sergei chuckled, and stood. “So it did. So it did. What a shame it didn’t take you instead.”
His change of position broke our eye contact, and my guts churned with sudden, renewed terror. I jerked my restraints, shook them, and when I glanced down in my fear, I saw what had been itching on my belly all this time. My stomach was streaked red and black. A seal the size of a dinner plate had been burned into my skin, touching my waist on either side. There was a crudely sewn incision just under my navel, a deep incision. There was something underneath the skin there… and the stuff that crusted the edges and ran down my belly was black.
“What did you do to me?” I flinched back against the chair as he stepped forwards. “WHAT DID YOU DO!?”
“Okh, stop it.” Sergei motioned back to Vera. “In all my years, boy, I’ve only met four starets’ with your kind of ability. Lev Pavlovich was a good man, very good… but he was a sixer, eh? Not very powerful for a sorcerer of his type. I’m not going to kill you, Alexi, now that I know you’re not strong enough to hold out on me. Two more infusions of blood from me, and you’ll do anything I say. You’ll bend over when I tell you to bend over. You can still be useful.”
“Fuck you.”
“Funny you should say, eh?” Sergei grinned. “You know how an upir is made?”
I dropped my chin, sighting down at him. “An upir is created when an evil sorcerer dies an unclean death.”
“Indeed. And you have been murdering men all your life, haven’t you? You’re already in the transit lane to Hell.” Sergei clapped his hands, and reached out. Vera handed him the needle and syringe. “It’s a little more complicated than that, but yes… an unclean death, and then the abuse of the corpse afterward before a ritual burial at the crossroads. So fucking is part of the equation, boy. I will be sure to get you a Jack of Hearts tattoo so that everyone knows your place with me.”
“Don’t.” I shrunk back, as far as the back of the chair allowed for.
“I was dragged by horses down a road when I died, Alexi. Dragged naked down the streets in front of my entire kingdom, like rotten meat.” Sergei sighed, and stepped in close. He lay the point of the needle against my throat. “Just imagine what I will do to you.”
Chapter 4
Vampire blood is a powerful hallucinogen that does two things to those who consume it. It puts you under the power of the upir who fed it to you, and it heals wounds. Even terrible wounds.
I roused into wet, cold darkness, stirring from a dream where a red star broke through a white mirrored sky. A stream of black figures descended from the hole, dripping and dropping to the land and sea. I was naked. My mouth was bitter with the taste of burned wax.
The cell walls crawled in every direction, seething with what I first thought was a mass of prismatic spiders. Everything writhed and hissed, lashed and scuttled. It took me a few groggy minutes to realize that none of the ‘spiders’ ever reached their destinations. The churning wet sounds were from my body as it healed in quick-time: the snap and pop of my ribs and broken ankles resetting, the sub-audible squeak of tissues as my bruises swelled, blooming like stopmotion flowers before dwindling away. I was painfully aware of all of my bodily functions, the sensation of a billion tiny organic engines wriggling on and through my bones. My guts, crawling with peristalsis. My heart, squeezing. I felt like a discordant orchestra, and over everything was awful, skin-wracking pain.
The spiders turned to lizards as I stared at the walls, wrists clamped between my thighs, then looked up through the filtered light coming down from overhead. They’d taken me to the basement hole. This was the hole where we kept guys lined up for execution. It was a converted sewer drain in the lower level of the AEROMOR warehouse, a nine-
foot vertical shaft bricked off from a large sewer tunnel, part of the complex that shunted effluence into the ocean. There was a barred steel grate overhead, the only way in or out. The pit was bottle-shaped, with a narrow neck spreading out into a five-by-five foot square of space. If I had magic, I'd be out in five minutes. Cut off from Kutkha, I had nothing.
Nothing. Nothing wasn’t good enough. I had to make something. Sergei could take my magic from me, but there were some things that no one could take. My will. My pride.
There was a patch of wall in front of my face that was different from the rest. While every other part of the shaft was covered in wrigglers, there was a round cutout where they passed around the bricks and mortar, deviating like a river channel. This cutout part looked soggy, like moldy bread. As I stared, the patch of wall grew orange tentacles that yearned towards my face. Boils studded the limbs like flowers. They burst open with steaming pus that dripped down to the floor, and the wounds turned to little babbling mouths.
Hit me, they whispered.
The grout looked mossy, fuzzy… soft enough to push through. Curious, I inched towards it. The weird, furry electrical warmth of static passed over the skin of my face, causing my hair to bristle. The illusion wavered. I took a deep breath, and slung a weak fist into the writhing mass. I misjudged the distance, smacked my fingers awkwardly against hard stone and rolled back, clutching and cursing as everything whited out. I roared, and kicked out in temper. The wall ahead of me shuddered. Dirt rained down from somewhere up high.
I discovered that upir blood has a third property. It makes you monstrously strong.
As I watched, my skinned knuckles sealed over to pink shiny scabs, then smooth skin. It was not the clean, swift healing I’d once gotten from Gift Horse blood. My flesh itched, tingled and crawled as my cells chewed at themselves.
Shuddering, I rolled up to hands and knees, flinching as my uncovered palms scraped against concrete. I snorted a clotted mess of dirt and dried blood onto the wet ground. My limbs were taut with a weird, feral energy.
Stained Glass: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 2) Page 3
