I was drenched from my sleepwalk, and worse, the ground was sodden. The sloped roof was keeping the worst out, but it was still dripping through the seams of the cardboard around me. I rolled back, huffing as I tried to sit up, and accidentally put my foot through the wall. Water splashed down and hit the makeshift mattress.
"Blyat’ suka!” It was hopeless. With a sheet of cardboard over my head as a makeshift umbrella, I rolled the empty dumpster to the end of the alley and pitched it onto its side. There was nothing in it but crumpled plastic sheeting and soda cartons. I gutted it and crawled inside with my bag. It was bigger than the lean-to, thought the reek of old milk clung to the walls and floor. It didn't matter: I already smelled like a graveyard ghoul, and the dumpster was dry.
Curled on my side, the knife resting under my hand, I slept for a third time. This time, I did not dream.
I knew as soon as I woke up the next morning that I did not have the strength to mug a newborn kitten. I barely had the strength to drag myself out of the dumpster. To my disgust, my body yearned to go back to the raccoon and finish what I’d started. I was still crouched on my heels outside my new residence, wondering what the fuck to do, when someone rounded the corner and started down the alley: A bearded black guy, thin, with rolling white eyes and big white teeth that were both on display.
"Hey!” He called out. “The fuck you think you’re doin’ out here?"
What to say? I cleared my throat. "This is your shop?"
"Damn right this is my shop, my alley, and my fuckin’ dumpster. Now get the hell out." He pulled a set of keys from his jacket, staring me down. There was a wire-screen door set in the wall to my left.
"People giving you trouble around here?" I jerked my head to the door.
“I ain’t worried about no trouble.” His eyes narrowed.
“I stopped three guys from robbing your store last night,” I shot back. “How about that?”
He paused for a moment, wavering in place. “You did what?”
“Kids were trying to steal your shit. I stopped them.” I shoved the fatigue and the pain and the loss down under the mask, the game face. Talking my way out of things had never been a native talent. It was Vassily who had taught me how to spin, with his easy grin and expressive hands. He was a consummate salesman, the kind of man who turned money out of other people's fantasies. A magician in his own right. My heart ached.
"You did? You ain't no fuckin' bum." The pawnster’s mouth quirked to one side. Curiosity, I hoped.
I shrugged. "It’s true. Help me out, and I’ll keep people away from your store."
"What? You for fuckin' real?" He grinned broadly, but his shoulders relaxed. "You fuckin' serious?"
Pitch a benefit, Vassily told me. Never look away from their eyes. Don't touch your nose. Try and smile, when they do. Don't tell them that you need anything – make it all about them. Make them feel good, powerful, and you'll get whatever you want.
"Of course," I said. "There’re all kinds of things in your store people around want, right? TVs, jewelry. I'll watch this place."
"Well, I don’t want no drugs near my shop, okay? You a junkie, you know, a drug addict?"
"Americans don't like anything that's too free, if you know what I mean. So you pitch someone, and they ask you what it'll cost. So give them another benefit, then a high price." Vassily had told me to expect this question, in its many variants.
"High?" I asked him. I remember clearly how little sense it made.
"High prices are more believable," he'd replied, smooth as an oiled razor over soft leather. They give you room to cut a deal.
My price wasn't that high right now. "I’m no junkie. All I want is food. A sandwich or something, for trade."
"So you gonna live in my dumpster and chase off gangbangers for sandwiches?" He regarded me with plain disbelief. "And that's all you want? No girl or crack or anythang?"
I grimaced. "Only drug I want comes in a cup with cream and sugar."
He laughed out loud, and moved further in to the alley. "Man, you one funny son of a bitch. Right, fine. You watch the street as much as you want, shorty. I'll get you a damn sandwich and some coffee. What’s your name?"
I was mildly disgusted at how pleased I was: the risen feeling of expectancy, the raw, base need to eat. When he asked me my name, I blurted out the first I could think of. “Rex. You?”
"Me? Ali. You Italian, Rex?" Ali watched me from the corner of his eye as he unlocked the door. "You look Italian."
I shrugged in a way that could have meant yes or no. “Just not from around here.”
"Fuck if I don't believe it. Insha’Allah." Ali shook his head as he went inside, the door banging shut behind him.
There was nothing to do except rest and recoup, and hope he'd bought the deal. I lay down again, but was too tired and too wired to sleep, so I glanced at the bag across and rifled through it properly. There was a five-dollar bill in a jeans pocket, and my spirits lifted briefly before slumping again. I'd packed proper full-finger gloves, at least. Tucked deep into the corner of the calico bag was a blue velvet pouch I didn't recognize. Frowning, I pulled the cord and tipped the contents into my palm.
It was a tarot deck: a fresh black-and-white set of BOTA cards. The Builders of the Adytum were an Occult organization who published small, uncolored tarot cards. The Wheel of Fortune was on the top of the stack. Amused and somewhat disconcerted, I turned the next card. The Chariot, card of mastery, and beneath that, the five of pentacles. Kutkha couldn't speak to me directly... but perhaps there were other ways we could communicate.
The thought brought an odd smile to my mouth, and a stirring in my belly and chest that had nothing to do with hunger. I shuffled the cards, nearly fumbling them with clumsy cold fingers, ran one slowly along the edge of the deck, and drew one out. The Star; the 17th Major Arcana card of the tarot. One of the cards of hope.
"Alexi's psychic readings.” I repeated one of the jokes Vassily had made when he was still alive, echoing him without irony. “Five bucks a pop.”
I slot the card back in the deck and sighed, leaning back into my makeshift shelter. The fullest extent of my hope, at that moment, was that Ali wouldn’t flake out on me and he’d come back out with the coffee and his promised sandwich.
Chapter 7
The urges caused by the upir blood peaked on the dawn of the second day, leaving me unable to rise, arms wrapped around my tearing, aching abdomen. My dreams felt prophetic, even portentous, but they were confusing and disconnected from any greater meaning. I dreamed of the Garden. I saw places I’d never been, heard the names of people I’d never met. The vision I’d had the first time I’d touched Gift Horse blood, down in Jana’s oratory, haunted me from a million different angles. Another me chased Zarya to the ocean’s edge over and over again.
True to his word, Ali bought me food and coffee in the mornings. He was a recent convert to Islam and a Gulf War veteran who’d been discharged with chemical burns, and it turned out that he really was having trouble with the store. On the third night of my stay, the kids who’d found me eating the raccoon came back around and tried to smash in Ali’s windows with a brick. I went at them with razor in one hand, knife in the other, and chased them all the way down to the waterside. When I told Ali about it the next morning, he started adding steak to the sandwiches.
Fifteen bucks was enough to buy a sharpie, some colored pencils, a cheap cushion, soap, vinegar and baking soda. The first thing I did when my energy began to recoup was clean out the dumpster – my kennel, Ali joked – and wash my body and my clothes. On day four, I took the subway to Times Square and set up camp in the mouth of a narrow alley facing the street. On one side, I lay a bowl of salt. On the other, I set up a sign: Fortune Telling and Tarot Readings – $5.
While I waited, I started coloring in the monotone tarot cards. I was well onto The Emperor when a yuppie in a navy suit and white loafers stopped and looked down at me.
"Hey buddy, wanna tell me my fortune?
I'm a, uhm, a Taurus, I think."
I rolled my eyes up from the card, pencil poised. "Lay down the five and ask a question."
"Fuck you." He threw up his finger and stalked off into the swirling crowd of suits, umbrellas, and teased hair.
After that, the sign read: Fortune telling and tarot readings – $5. No stupid questions.
It worked well enough. I began making money, ridiculously small amounts of money I fed into food, water, packing tape, and a screwdriver.
The tape and screwdriver were for boosting cars. On the evening of the ninth day, I jacked a hatchback and drove out to Brighton Beach to case my apartment. I pulled up along Banner Avenue, hunched down in the seat with my cap pulled low, and watched the upstairs window. The plants that lined the kitchen windowsill were still green, and sure enough, the lights were on. Someone started moving around inside come six o'clock.
I knew of a prolific Polak hitman called The Iceman, one of the top names who worked with one of the big Italian families out of the Gemini Club. He'd had a long, successful career, mostly due to a policy of periodically culling all of his friends. Watching the shadow passing back and forth in my kitchen, I wished I’d thought to do the same thing. Nic was too thorough by half. But how had they gotten in past the wards? Ah... dammit. The Wardbreaker.
Nine days turned into two weeks. I got to know the gangs in the area. They were more curious than hostile: everyone wanted to know why some crazy Euro bum was living in a dumpster near Ali’s store, hounding off anyone who tried to fence his TVs. The cigarettes I'd taken from the Yao Shing dockworker came in handy. Guys with names like Dogg – with two G’s – Kenny Main and Choonie got smoking and talking with me during the daytime. My low opinion of the police and my ability to teach them some Krav Maga went a long way.
As time dragged by, the days got shorter and the weather was got wetter and colder. Every day, I set up at Times Square and read the secondhand newspapers to keep track of the date. I lost weight and put on sinew, keeping up my fitness routine as best I could while I scraped and saved for the two things I needed most: a first aid surgery kit, to get whatever Sergei had implanted in me out from under the skin of my stomach, and a gun. Dogg had fixed me up a filed Browning for two hundred and fifty and I was at one ninety-five. Another week, and it would be mine. With a gun, I stood a better chance of mounting an assault on my apartment.
Before I knew it, it was the 20th of September, a Friday. I set up as usual in the blustery afternoon, and it wasn’t long before the first client of the day passed by on her way back from work: a chubby office woman with big hair and too much makeup. She put my fee down in change.
“Okay, look. My boyfriend and I broke up last night. He broke up with me because… well, he says he just found someone else and he doesn’t love me anymore. I just can’t believe it. Is it true?”
She had a voice like a nasal buzzsaw. Dutifully, I shuffled the cards and laid three of them out on the cloth in front of me. “Unfortunately, ma’am, it seems to be the case. He’s not coming back.”
“What do you mean he’s not coming back?” Her eyes widened.
I tapped the Ten of Pentacles. “He’s made his decision. This is the card of happy families. I’m sorry.”
The first hint that something was off was when her eyes darkened and her features pinched. I was already moving when she kicked out with her foot at my bowl, upending coins, bills and salt across my altar cloth. "Here's what I think of your fucking gypsy bullshit, asshole!"
Rage burned a thin tunnel of fire straight to the pit of my stomach. Slowly, I rose. I wanted the knife. I wanted to draw it through the soft flesh under her chin. It had been weeks since I'd killed, weeks since I'd touched anyone in that solemn, thrilling way. I looked through her, to her bones. Maybe she saw it in my eyes, because her whole manner turned rabbity, quick and frightened. She fled with a scream of impotent rage, handbag flying out from her arm.
The ruckus turned heads, the crowd murmuring and milling. Snorting angrily, I chased my money and crammed it back into the bowl, then set about scraping up the salt from the baseboard I used as my office. I was dusting my hands off when the next person came forwards, a small, old man with a trembling lower lip and a face like a walnut shell.
“In all my days, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “Look at you.”
“What’s your problem?” My eyes narrowed.
“You and your filth, just down the road from a house of the Lord!” He pointed at me, stepping closer.
“Hey, back off.” I left off cleaning to stand again. Old as he was, I was cut from weeks of street living and hard exercise. He was taller, but I had twice his bulk and half his age.
“The Voice tells us to bring flaming fire and everlasting destruction to the ungodly and those who obey not the gospel of Christ,” he proclaimed. “The righteous will wash their feet with the blood of sinners like you!”
I regarded him in stony silence while he ranted. “I care more about ear wax than I do about your ‘voices’. Go away.”
“Don’t think I don’t know you! I know because I believe and God’s secret is with those who loved Him. God is true and all men are liars!” He was getting up in my face now. “So repent before God’s judgment be upon you!”
This was definitely going to draw a crowd, and if the law came in, it wasn’t going to be on my side. “What? You lose your handler? Go to your church or the old folks home or whatever you need to do, but get out of my face.”
"The Lord have mercy on you," he said, in a surprisingly loud and effective voice. "Why do you defile this street with the sign of the Illuminati? Do you think you can stand against me, the Anointed?!”
What Illuminati? I glanced aside at the prominent pentacle on my sign. After finishing the deck of cards, I’d drawn on the sign itself out of boredom. I did my best to loom over him, taut with the dark knowledge that my tolerance for human bullshit was at an all-time low. "One last time. Back it up."
People began to stop and stare, gathering for the fight.
“Ever since I was born again into the Holy Spirit, I keep running into things like you. Even though I send out love to everyone in my presence, you, YOU don’t like it. You don’t want it! Satan’s tool! Reptile!”
The blood beat in my temples. I was hungry, I was cold, and after nearly a month of living like a junkyard dog, bereft of magic, alone and numb from the driving need to survive, I was going to lose my temper. "Let me tell you what. Go pick up a big fucking rock and throw it at me with everything you got. Cast the first stone. Then I’ll have something other than my fist to cram down your gaping cockhole.”
“Evil!” He spat at me venomously, a big yellowish glob of slime that struck my still-reasonably clean sweater with a wet 'splat'.
I punched him hard enough to knock him off his feet and pitch him into a squealing pack of people, who screamed and moved out of the way as he tumbled to the pavement. A younger man advanced on me uncertainly, expression puzzled. He wasn’t sure who he was meant to be helping.
“I received the love of God! I received the love of God!” Bleeding from the nose, red in the face and glowing with self-righteousness, the old man picked himself up off the ground. He spat at me again, but he was further away and he missed. Onlookers were restraining him, catching arms and pulling him away. “How dare a sorcerer touch someone chosen by God! The Voice will show me the way!”
“You want another one, govno?” I cocked a fist and stepped forwards again, even as the younger man put his hands up and warded me back.
“Pervert! Thug! I’m an old man!” He spat, frothing at the lips, and clutched his arm as if I’d broken it. “This is assault! Someone call the police!”
Several people gave me dirty looks. I stared at them until they couldn't meet my eyes anymore, and they left.
I was shaking with rage. If I hadn’t been cut off from my magic, I’d show them sorcery for real… but my rage and my Will were as useful as a cut brake cord. There
was nothing to do but pack up and move on. Disgusted, I crouched in front of my bag to find something to wipe the mucus off my shirt.
"Excuse me?"
The voice was feminine, melodic and girlish. Hunched over my bag, I turned my head and looked up at her. The girl was only a little taller than me, small, neat, and nervous in a brown skirt-suit. Her hair was a shoulder-length tumble of dark gray waves pressed down under the rim of her fur hat. Her eyes were narrow, almost Asiatic, her cheeks ruddy and round, her lips full and cushiony. I would have picked her as Far-North Native American, save for her eyes. They were a vivid gold-gray color, like big cat’s eyes. The details filtered in one at a time, marching mechanically through the filter of cold fury and adrenaline shock.
"What?" I couldn't muster anything more verbose.
"I... uh..." she started, stopped, bit her lip. She clutched a large leather clutch in front of her, larger than a purse. "I was just listening to what you said to that man back there, about God... I was wondering if you'd read the cards for me."
"Not here." I returned to gathering my things, packing them away into the bag which contained my life. "Too many whackjobs."
"I was going to suggest we go somewhere more private." As she kept speaking, I was finally able to make out the accent under her English. The inflection of the 'r', the difficulty with 'w' and '-ng'. My hackles rose.
"U menya net chastnogo doma." I said in Russian. “I don't have anywhere more private.”
Her expression flickered, and I knew I had bitten her in just the right place. But then, she smiled, and when she spoke, it was with the enthusiastic relief of someone who hadn't heard their mother tongue in some time. Her accent was provincial. "You speak Russian?"
“Russian is my mother tongue. One of them.”
She pressed her lips together for a moment, smiled, and shrugged her shoulders in what I supposed was an expression of pleasure. “It’s strange how things work out sometimes. Come on, we can just go to a McDonald’s or something... no one else will be able to hear us. It's got booths."
Stained Glass: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 2) Page 6
