Stained Glass: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 2)

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “-you helped me out once, you got me out of one bad situation, Kutkha. Every other time, it was just me. I coped just fine without you before, and I’ll do it again-” My own voice echoed back to me, interspersed with the same two words, repeated over and over again.

  Hit me.

  “Shut up!” The writhing mass of tentacles split apart for my fist as I slammed it into the mortar. The blow rattled something loose in the wall, but the pain was sublime. Awful, awful pain… the sensation of my hand being eaten by something with sharp teeth. I recoiled, snapping my jaws to vent the tension without screaming.

  There was a sound from somewhere outside, a soft ‘crack’, like something dropping to the floor. I was out of time.

  I roared, and slammed the soft spot on the wall again and again. Pain retreated, overwhelmed by fear. My knuckles wore out and reformed. Bones snapped and popped back into place with wet gristle sounds I felt in my mouth. Everything was black, dancing with white spots, as I tore myself apart against the wall with primitive fury. And yet… I healed. I healed as fast as I could mangle myself, fist and foot and tooth and shoulder. After an eternity of agony, my twisted fingers found a small empty space behind the facade.

  Fresh heat shot through my face, blood pounding in my temples. I locked my jaws, and began to kick at the damaged mortar with everything I had. The first pebbles came away, then small chunks of sandstone.

  "YES." I hissed under my breath, scrabbling, clawing, stabbing and shoving. "Come on… Come on!"

  The first brick rasped in its slot. I wiggled it back. It fell with a dull, heavy clink into what sounded like at least an inch of water. Even though the source of the sound was right in front of me, it made me freeze, ears buzzing with strain. I broke off the next brick beside it, reached through the hole into the sewer pipe and dragged a chunk of rock up with my fingertips until I could pull it through. A few hard bangs with the makeshift chisel, and the whole thing came apart. The tunnel ahead was darker than Schrodinger’s asshole.

  Sweating, streaked with filth, I crawled into the new space. My hands felt twice their normal size, singing with pain as the soft palms, bleeding, pressed into the rubble. I roughly reconstructed the wall behind me. Haphazard, yes, but in the gloomy light of the basement, the appearance of an empty pit and no immediate route of escape could buy precious time.

  I was only six feet in, blind in the darkness and pressed on all sides by hanging slime, when I heard the basement door clang open from somewhere above. I dropped to my belly and pulled myself forwards, arm over arm. It was completely black down here, and it smelled like thirty years of dead bodies and decomposing blood. Fish blood, human blood, some of it waste I’d hosed from the floor of the interrogation room myself. Ropes of the same stringy stuff in the narrow shaft hung loose here, gelatinous and fetid. Synesthesia was not my friend. The slimy texture of the tunnel on my bare skin made my tongue throb and my eyes flash violet and olive green, colors I saw and felt in my mouth.

  Someone shouted from somewhere behind, a bark of sound that bounced weirdly off the walls. They’d found the empty pit.

  I turned into the direction of the wind and half-crawled, half-scrambled towards it. Fetid rotten flesh and sewerage gave way to the comparatively fresh smell of the Upper New York Bay. There was light ahead, the prismatic swirl of the night sky, the sound of rain and thunder. From behind, there were more shouts, and then a distant crumpling sound, the sound of a boot being put through a flimsy brick facade.

  At the end of the tunnel was the ocean, the same murky iron-red color as the clouds. Slick with oil from the ships trawling up and down the bay between New York and Jersey, it rushed up against the embankment. I had come out underneath the AEROMOR docks. A ship was moored to my right; to the left, the container cranes looked out over the loading area. There was nothing to do but swim.

  I tensed and threw myself out, jumping higher and faster than normal human strength allowed for. The water was surprisingly warm, but the current was strong. After flailing to the surface, I paddled and limped towards the shore, trying to hide among the waves. Every moment that passed was a potential bullet to the head. Being unafraid of dying and desiring to die are two very different things: the need, the driving need, was to live. My lungs labored, striving in time with heart and eyes and arms and legs. I fought the water, ducked beneath the layer of rubbish to swim as far and as fast as I could.

  Along the embankments in the docklands, you could find old metal ladders bolted straight into the concrete. Covered in oil, I splashed along until I found one and hauled myself up to peer over the side. The yard had a scattered crowd of people milling around. Most of them were gawking at the fuss going on in the AEROMOR yard, Yard #3, where all the searchlights were turned onto the water. I had come out near Yard #5, the one used by the big Chinese carrier, Ying Shao. Their loading stage was stacked up with shipping containers and pallets. There were forklifts moving on and off the boat moored at the end of the pier where I'd surfaced. It was good cover, busy, but not necessarily neutral.

  In the shadow of the barnacle-covered wall, I waited until the pier was clear before pulling myself up and over. A short run brought me behind the first stack of pallets, where I tried to crouch and promptly collapsed in a pile of jellied, shivering limbs. Flat on my rump, I looked down at my hands and recoiled in panic. They were ripped down to bone and tendon, black and bloodied, and they were still healing. As I watched, shuddering with the effort to keep my eyes on them, the sinew knit together, the muscle pulsed and squeezed pus and dirt out of my flesh, the ragged tendon sheaths stretched and snapped back into place over bone. The process was slower than it had been back in the cell, which made the recovery all the more sensuous, all the more disturbing. Distantly, I realized what the problem was. I was hungry. Starving. Everything was beginning to smell like meat.

  I slunk out into the scintillating air like a rat, navigating through boxes that swam with insectoid shapes. I didn’t dare look up at the sky again, not while my senses were stricken with crawlers. I chose my route with an instinct I didn’t understand, wending unsteadily towards the a red-brick warehouse behind the shipping crates. I came around the back. There was a row of dumpsters out here, reeking with a damp sour milk and rotten vegetable smell that carried to my nose. Stupidly, my mouth began to water as I forced the dumpster back from the wall, set myself in the space behind it, and fell very still.

  It wasn't too long until a man came up from the stacking yard, and then another. They trailed by in twos and threes, chattering and smoking, throwing shadows across the ground, throwing cardboard into the trash above my head. Concealed by the dumpster lid and the darkness of the warehouse, no one thought to notice the filthy naked man cowering at ankle-height.

  Eventually, the traffic slowed. As the excitement at Dock #3 trailed off, the Ying Shao workers got back to loading their ship while I waited, cold, hungry, and patient. After a long humid silence, my skin prickled with sudden sound: boots scuffling on the pavement, marching closer and closer to the warehouse door. One pair of boots, punctured by melodic whistling. My prey was swinging a chain with keys. I could hear the links click, the keys rattle. Like a spider, I stirred only to refocus my attention, waiting for the fly's legs to pluck the right strands at the right time.

  He was a fast walker, striding by so fast I nearly missed my chance. I lunged out, and struck him in the back of the knees with a fist and the blade of my hand. He went down with a short cry of surprise, quickly silenced with a smack to the back of the head. I seized him by the ankles and dragged him away into the shadows to strip his clothes. I left his underwear, but took everything else. Taking another man’s underwear was against the Code.

  His coveralls were tight over my chest, bagged at the waist, and strained over my thighs. His boots pinched, but I was no longer unclothed. Even better, I had gloves: They were fingerless, but they were leather. I pulled them on with a shudder of relief. My eyes and tongue stopped throbbing, and the hallucinations, wh
ile still vivid, reduced in intensity.

  I pulled my new wool cap down as far as I could, left the unconscious man behind some pallets for his workmates to find, and slouched away with my hands in his pockets. There was a pack of cigarettes in there. A lighter. A ten-dollar bill in a clip, no wallet. A piece of thin red rope braided with jade beads and a bronze Chinese coin, some kind of talisman... and car keys, with an electronic tag. Never had I felt anything as beautiful as these keys, and the means by which to find his car. I could go and get my cat, my passport, a gun… all of which were at my apartment. The apartment that was almost certainly being watched.

  My momentary elation vanished. Nicolai would be in charge of recovering me: Sergei would not trust such an important job to anyone else. Nic would be organizing his men quickly and efficiently. I knew Nic, had trained under him. He’d taught Vassily and I how to fire guns, boost cars, make tools. The skills I had used to escape, he had taught us. One of the things he’d taught me? If you ever try to kill someone and the guy manages to run, check his house. Nearly every fugitive makes a last stop at home to grab those vital, necessary things before they flee for good. Nine times out of ten, you catch your mark coming back out of his front door.

  I would not be able to get on my flight. The Laguetta Family owned the airport, and the security union was headed up by one of the Don’s captains. Nic could and would reach out to him for a favor. The Avtoritet of Brighton Beach would be calling everyone he could think of, including the people who generally regarded me favorably. No one I knew was trustworthy enough to stand up to Nic for me. My passport, my papers, Binah, everything... Nic would make them tempting and unreachable. GOD damn him, but he was good at his job.

  Move. The inner voice was not Kutkha, but it was compelling all the same. Find the car.

  They had my fucking cat. My tools. The Wardbreaker. Everything. A tremble started in my fingers. Angrily, I clenched around the bundle of keys until the points bit into my fingers, hissing through my teeth as a jolt of hot pain lanced through my hand. It freed me up to move on, one foot in front of the other.

  Ten bucks, one tank of gas, a pack of cigs, and one go-bag hidden in Gravesend. If they weren’t going to let me run, I was going to have to fight.

  And once I could see straight? I’d fight them to the death. Sergei didn’t know who the fuck he was dealing with.

  Chapter 5

  Somehow, I found the go-bag. It was well hidden in the grounds of an old tenement landmark near Sheepshead Bay station, wet from the runoff rain. As I pulled it from the cold fireplace, all I could think about was food. Deliriously, I rifled through the bag, searching for something to eat. I found a couple of protein bars and a small bag of snacks, food intended to see me through a short drive or a day on the run. Whatever flavor they were, I didn’t taste them as they went down.

  Still chewing on something, I heaved the bag over my shoulder, staggered back to the car, and drove away to the north, fleeing to the furthest place I could think of within New York’s City limits: The Bronx.

  Between the green sprawl of Yonkers and the sterile, gothic beauty of Manhattan lay an ulcerated crescent of poverty. While yuppies turned over millions on Wall Street, the homes of the people they foreclosed, ripped off, conned, and milked were left to rot in The Bronx, Hunt’s Point, and Harlem. Fifty years ago, this had been a nice enough area. Systematic racism – in the form of the government neglecting infrastructure and private interests ruining families – had rotted it from the center out. Gutted apartment buildings studded the scorched land like burned trees. Uncollected trash bags spilled their guts over the sidewalks. Potato chip bags, old clothes, and newspapers gathered like tumbleweeds against chain link fences, which themselves leaned crookedly against piles of concrete rubble. The roads were pockmarked and worn. The violet, chemical stench of industry hung over the Harlem River, while the sour orangeness of human filth blew in from underneath the bridge. The Bronx looked and felt like a warzone, but it was a great place to disappear.

  My car was one corpse among many in the dusty lot where it finally perished, coughing to a halt next to a stirring vortex of trash. The air outside was cold and clammy, the wind thick with the smell of burning tires, dust, and hot grease. Dawn was only just beginning to come in from the east. There were lights glittering to the south, but there was nothing to illuminate the old ruined projects save for the crescent moon overhead. When I opened the door and got out into the darkness, the distant white glow shifted and traced. It was impossible to say if it was upir blood or fatigue, but my vision was screwed and getting worse. It was a miracle I’d made it without running myself off the road.

  I hefted the go-bag, took it to the nearest patch of loose dirt and dropped it there, where I kicked it around a little, rolling it in the dust and gravel until it was ratty enough that no one would want to steal it. I took it back to the car and opened it up. My head was clearer now, and as I rummaged through, a new sick feeling began to rise in my throat. A number of the things I’d packed in here were missing. The pistol, ammunition, I.D, cash and cards – none of them under my own name, fortunately – were gone. Someone had found it and been through it. They’d left all of the clothing and the things they couldn’t fence: a pearl handled razor, a fixed-blade knife, soap, a calico bag with underwear and other miscellany, and my notebooks.

  So that was it, then. No money, no bank cards, no credit cards. Nothing. I took a deep breath and sat back, trying to keep my heart rate under control. Neither fear or anger were my friend, not right now. There was nothing to do except hit the streets, cool off, and hoped that I wasn't important enough for Nic to hold out longer than a week or two. When I was fit enough to start mugging, I could get my hands on some cash. Until then… I wasn’t sure.

  Dutifully, I took stock of what I did have. The ten bucks I’d taken from the dockworker could last seven days, if I was careful. The car could be sold if I found the right guy in this part of town. For the time being, though, I tried to stay in the moment and set out clean clothes, the knife, razor and soap. There was an old Coke bottle on the passenger's side half full of water. I drank most of it, used the rest to wash my hands and face and dampen my hair, then hacked at it until I was left with a spiny, tattered mess. I lathered it up, and started shaving.

  When I could finally bring myself to glance up at the mirror properly, it was into the iron eyes of a stranger. I’d looked mean enough with hair. Now, I looked like strung-out poster child for the Aryan Front. My face was already thinner, hollowed out. My cheekbones formed sharp points under pallid skin. Sergei’s blood had healed the worst of the injuries I vaguely remembered receiving, but it had taken a toll. My eyes were sunken and bruised, my lips dry. Puffy violet and yellow blotches marred my jaw, neck and arms.

  After the shave, my eyebrows sat like dark caterpillars on my brow. It looked strange, so I nicked them off as well. The complete hairlessness made my face even harsher, but that wasn’t a bad thing around these parts. I changed out of the coveralls into jeans and a sweater, drank the rest of the water, lay my head back, and closed my eyes.

  When they opened again, the sky was turning gray and spittling ahead of a fresh wave of rain. The car was warm and tempted me to stay longer, but it was going to attract interest from the locals as soon as the sun rose. If I was there when they came, it wouldn’t only be the car that got stripped down and junked.

  Reluctantly, I abandoned the vehicle and shuffled across the lot with the bag over one shoulder, picking my way between the piles of rusted hulks. I made it ten steps before my gut twisted nastily and I retched, coughing into my hand as I staggered to one side and hit something. When I pulled my hand away, it was wet… wet, and streaked with dark orange slime. Without the need to escape goading me, I was once again painfully aware of a billion tiny engines writhing on and in my bones.

  I stumbled into a narrow alley between an Eee-Zee-Pawn and an empty bodega with looted shelves. The mouth of the alley looked out across another improvised jun
kyard, its mountains of refuse indiscernible in the morning gloom. There was an empty dumpster here, and alongside it, stacks of bound, flattened cardboard that had turned hard and brittle through the summer. Bone-weary, I dropped the bag and began to separate the sheets. There was no planning, no strategy: I just pulled them out and lay them down. A bed, at least. Maybe a lean-to? I could build a lean-to. If I could make it out here for a week, I could go scope out my apartment. No, actually... nine days. People naturally thought in threes, fives, sevens, tens and fourteens when it came to the passage of time. Nic was likely to watch the house for three days, then run patrols at the five and seven day marks. That meant nine days on the street, minimum, before I went to check in.

  Halfway through stamping the cardboard flat, I slowed, then stopped. My vision was thick, like looking at the world through a foot of frosted glass. Thick and distant, everything unreal. Removed. I tried to remember how I had gotten here. What the hell was I doing? Preparing to sleep on some old boxes like a hobo? This wasn't a rest-stop. It wasn't home. It wasn't anything. Bewildered, I looked down at my bare fingertips. My nails were chipped and broken, clogged with old oil. Forty-eight hours ago, I’d been something. Now, I was only dirty, filthy, and cold.

  "God, Kutkha." My voice was a rasp. "What the hell am I doing?"

  There was no reply, not even a whisper of contact. My Neshamah wasn't there, and neither was the magic. None of it.

  My hands shook, and no matter how much I willed it, they didn’t stop. They didn't feel like my hands, my arms. Painful heat pushed up slowly from my chest, and this time, it wasn’t just nauseating hunger. I imagined Nicolai and Vanya and their thugs turning up my house, riffling through my things, ripping up my books, hurting my cat. My blood boiled.

  “SHIT!” A ripple ran through me, a violent twitch. I felt the veins in my temples throb. The sound of my voice ripped through the air of the alley, and a battered trashcan flew across the pavement and struck the chain-link fence at the end of the road. I knew it was my foot kicking it, crammed into boots that weren't mine, but I couldn’t feel it. All I felt were my joints aching, my cells regenerating, my stomach gnawing at itself. Why couldn't I feel it? “You cock-sucking ginger piece of SHIT!”