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

by James Osiris Baldwin

  I was already on my way there, and eagerly returned to my new bed. This was a moment to savor: the smoothness of relatively clean sheets, the spring and give of a real mattress, my first soft sleep in months. As I lay down, an ache spread through my lower back, my knees, my feet. Why my feet? Everything felt cold, stiff, in a way that made me wonder if my body was now irreparably damaged.

  Zane did not say a word once the lights dimmed. His breathing was audible in the sudden heavy silence, slowing with remarkable speed. Rain drummed on the roof, distant white noise wholly unlike the continual banging, rolling cacophony of droplets thundering on the thin metal shell of the dumpster.

  The weight of the last several weeks lay over me like a shroud. Vassily, Celso, Sergei, the escape. Huffing, I closed my eyes and tried to drift off… efforts that became more difficult as a muffled moan vibrated through the walls from the next room across. Mason and Jenner, by the sound of it.

  I pulled the covers up around my ears, jammed my head down on the pillow, and stared into the well of warm darkness ahead. Not long ago, I would have been able to see Kutkha in my mind when I relaxed enough, and as I thought about him, the sense of loss, of failure, threatened to drown me. Overlying that aging pain was the knowledge that I was lying to these people who were offering me charity. I wasn’t really a mage anymore, and I couldn’t really help them in the capacity they expected. Not without my magic. I could only hope we got it back before they noticed.

  Chapter 11

  I didn't remember falling asleep, and couldn’t remember what I dreamed. There was nothing but the dark and a terrible, roaring loneliness. When I roused, my eyes were gummy, mouth thick. The light coming in through the windows was reddish, an eerie and lurid New York City sunrise.

  "Morning, sunshine," Zane called to me from further back in the room. "I just got off the phone with Ayashe. She’s on her way with the file."

  Everything hurt. Everything. Arms, legs, spine. Very slowly, I peeled myself from the bed and sat on the edge of the bunk, staring at my toes. Survival had clearly come at a price. It is all very well to entertain ideals of self-sufficiency, to be resourceful... but it had cost me. “Already? What time is it?”

  “Six,” he said. “P.M.”

  I squinted at the window again. Sunset, not sunrise. Right. “When will she be here?”

  “About forty minutes. She had to pick up her kids and still has to cross the bridge to get here.”

  That gave me enough time to shower – again – and eat breakfast, exquisite luxuries after so much time spent scavenging. Zane had bought chicken and eggs and tomatoes, and by the time I was finished, I was ready to go back to bed. It wasn’t possible. First there was a Vigiles to deal with. Then, a firefight that would probably destroy whatever remained of my home and my health. Even with backup, it was going to be a long night.

  Ayashe arrived in a dark, sleek, expensive car that she parked right outside the garage window. Zane had left to go and do something, leaving me at the bar to nurse a cup of coffee in my now-relatively clean clothes. The Agent walked in jaw-first, short heels tapping across the floor. Her badge was still pinned to the front of her crisp black suit, and her collar was high and clean. My brief notion of having regained my dignity evaporated in its entirety before she’d finished crossing the room.

  “I’m not happy with this,” she said by way of greeting. She slapped a fat manilla file on the counter, and then a second sealed plastic case on top of that. “You have to read it here. I’ve got to take it back before ten.”

  The folder was blank, but the opaque plastic case was stamped with the symbol of the Vigiles: a stylized lion with a mane of sun-rays contained within a circle. “That won’t be a problem. Please open the case.”

  “What?” She squinted at me, nose wrinkling. “It ain’t warded.”

  “Call it a matter of habit, but mere street magi like myself don’t often feel the need to break the enchanted seal of a major arcane organization.”

  Ayashe huffed impatiently, but cracked it open for me regardless, laying out a collection of photographs in zip-sealed paper baggies. “Read the summary report first, then look at the photos. It’s better to have the background before you try to draw any new conclusions.”

  She was trying to teach her grandfather to suck eggs, but I said nothing and simply obeyed. While I read and digested the contents of the summary report – still a good forty pages of forensic legalese – Ayashe restlessly roamed the clubhouse. It was empty save for the two of us, and only she made noise, rooting through the room like a ferret hunting snakes. Every now and then, she went to peer out the window at her car.

  The shifters had summed it up fairly well the night before: The Vigiles had found a whole lot of nothing. It was a rare opportunity to look at their investigation process, and I was at least as interested in their methodology as I was in their report. They still relied heavily on physical forensic techniques, using acronyms that were familiar to me through my studies, with a shorter roster of non-standard protocols. They had bought a ‘verified occult expert’ onto the scene – and who knew what background they had – as well as a ‘transitional witness communicator’. All personal details of the experts and the victims had been whited out of the report – by Ayashe, no doubt. “Am I correct to assume that a ‘transitional witness communicator’ is a spirit medium?”

  “Yeah,” Ayashe grunted the word as she roamed around the pool table, fiddling with the triangle.

  The medium had not been able to contact the murdered victims or anything else in the house, though numerous ‘cold spots’ were located. The expert had identified the symbols drawn on the wall as a reference to Beelzebub and had left it at that. The organs I had listed off had been harvested from the bodies, and in addition to that, their eyes were also missing. The bed and bodies had been full of broken glass, and a second symbol had been found in the ensuite.

  I noted that Ayashe wasn’t on the investigation team – she was listed as a ‘Supernatural Community Liaison’, not as an active agent involved in the case. No wonder she was nervous and shifty about bringing the file here.

  Once I finished the report, I cracked open the first labeled pack of photographs and was confronted by a scene of slaughter. The photographer had started at the end of the bed where Lily and Dru had been found. Lily had been a fair-skinned, wavy haired woman, her face black with gore and obscured by wheat-brown locks that clung crazily across her eyes and neck. The man was swarthier. His mouth was open, his skull split, his face compressed into the waxy, slug-like pallor of death. They were lying side by side on the bed, as if they’d been deliberately arranged, and their bodies bristled with impaling spears of glass. Large shards, small shards, shards through their hands and the sockets of their eyes. The sheets were rumpled, the heavy iron rails of the bed scuffed and dented. Pictures had been torn off the wall for the killer to leave their message. It was the sigil of Beelzebub, easily recognizable, but it was surrounded by an incredible piece of geometry: a nineteen-pointed star within a circle, rendered with near perfection with nothing more than blood and patience. It was nearly five feet around. A ring of tiny flies were drawn around the ring – a hundred and fifty-eight of them, according to the accompanying notes.

  “Pretty impressive shit, huh?” Ayashe swung back around at my gasp. “They think it must have taken them a couple of hours, at least.”

  “You’re convinced it was multiple people?” I continued to browse. The close up images of the body weren’t so relevant to my work, but I studied them all the same. To my amateur’s eye, the corpses looked like they’d been hacked apart, not cut. Hacked… or just torn.

  “Had to have been. All the kids are missing, and there were footprints everywhere.” Ayashe rocked back onto her heels, leaning against the edge of the table. “I was called in because some of them were footprints from animals.”

  I glanced up at her.

  “My theory is maybe a bunch of the kids slipped their skins from stress and sta
rted running around in panic. The people that did this rounded them up.” She drummed her fingers rapidly, nails clicking on wood. “None of those kids were Elders. No control after the change.”

  I found a picture of the second symbol. It was just basic text: ‘SOLDIER 557’. Someone had sketched it on the mirror over the bathroom sink, which was spattered with blood and shredded flesh. My first impression was that something had vomited there.

  “Were there any flies in the house?” I compared it with the larger design in the bedroom, frowning.

  “Nothing alive that anyone found. Pets and plants were dead.”

  I still had vivid memories of shooting Yuri Beretzniy in my apartment kitchen. When his blood spilled, every one of the plants on the kitchen sill had died. The smell of the magical corruption that animated his corpse had never quite left the room. “What about the smell? Was there a weird sugary sweet smell around the place?”

  “Yeah. Now that you mention it.”

  “Well…” I licked my bottom lip, leaning back on the stool. “The numbers they’ve used are very specific. Did your expert look into gematria?”

  Ayashe’s nose twitched. “No idea. If it’s not in the report, probably not.”

  “What is his area of expertise?”

  “He’s a priest. Part of the Order of Saint Benedict,” she replied. “One of those Catholic exorcist types. He identified all of the symbols for us and is chasing up the religious persecution angle… he thinks the kids were kidnapped by some dead serious Helter-Skelter cultists. He says they were juiced up on some kind of summoning magic. Maybe one of the perps was possessed. He thinks the symbol means that they’re tied up in Satanism… they might have hit Wolf Grove because of their church involvement.”

  “No, no…” I stared at the big symbol, the one that could have been rendered by an architect with tools. “No, this has nothing to do with religious persecution. There are many umbrellas of ‘Satanism’, but the majority of Satanists in America are either LaVeyan, who are atheists, or eclectic occultists. The latter tend to be young and poor… they become interested in Satanism because they’re disempowered, not because they have money for an op like this. This is the work of well-funded, well-trained people.”

  “Alright. I’ll take it on board.”

  “I think this is a message from someone who knew and maybe even shared their faith. Beelzebub’s number is one-hundred and nineteen. He is Lord of the Flies, Prince of Flesh, Satan’s most loyal lieutenant. One hundred and fifty-eight… one-nineteen, one-fifty-eight… what’s Psalm 119:158?”

  Ayashe turned on me, eyes wide. “Uhh…”

  “Wait.” I closed my eyes and turned away from her, sifting through some fifteen years of memories. When I was concentrating, the sight of other humans made me nauseous. I turned the coffee cup around in my hands, focusing on each precise twist. “‘Psalm 119:158: I behold the treacherous and loathe them, because they do not keep their word.’”

  Ayashe’s narrow features drew in. She chewed her lip for a moment. “Not persecution. Retribution, revenge.”

  “I believe your murderer was aiming for irony,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Well, count me impressed. And a little creeped out. What about ‘Soldier 557’?”

  “Nothing immediately comes to mind,” I replied. “I suspect it has to do with gematria or numerology, but I need the books from my apartment to figure it out.”

  She scowled at mention of the apartment, but nodded curtly and crossed to the window. I watched her out of the corner of my eye: she waved to someone outside, and then briefly smiled. Her kids were still in the car? Must be.

  “Five-five seven.” I ran my tongue over my teeth. “Hmm. Did they ever work out what the murder weapon was? The report says it was still being assessed.”

  “Yeah.” Ayashe looked back to me. She seemed a little more relaxed while camped out by the window. “Shards of broken glass. All the cuts and everything were done with glass. They found it everywhere. The bodies were full of it. Carpet was full of it. Walking around the crime scene was a damn nightmare.”

  “What about the children? The report doesn’t cover them.”

  She sighed, reaching up to adjust her collar. Ayashe wore a fine silver chain that disappeared under her clothes: a crucifix, I could guess. “The bedrooms were trashed. No one took anything.”

  “No older kids?”

  She shook her head. “Lily and Dru homeschooled them with other Elders until they were twelve, and then they get sent to this boarding school place in Texas. The center was sponsored by this big old church.”

  “What denomination were they?”

  “Pentecostal-Charismatic.” She jerked her shoulders. “The Church of the Voice of the Lord. They’re-”

  “A big deal in Chicago and the north Mid-West, I hear.” I set the photos down, and absently skimmed the first page of the report again. “And wealthy, if they can afford to host their congregation in a theater downtown, run a group home in a mansion, and a school. One of a few, I imagine.”

  “Yeah. It’s a big money church. They’re into that whole ‘prosperity gospel’ thing, but I mean, there ain’t nothing wrong with believing what you want.” Ayashe didn’t sound like she bought it.

  “Have the Vigiles looked into the Church?”

  “You bet.” She nodded. “Interviews with their pastor, friends of theirs – norms, not other shifters. The Church is well established in every major city and it checks out. If you want my opinion, that kind of Christianity is kooky, but Lily and Dru were very good people. They never did wrong by anyone that didn’t believe what they believed.”

  I studied the names of the agents in charge of the case. Adept Lance McClaine, Agent Diana Moss. The Vigiles partnered their mages with a Blank agent? I hadn’t known that. “What’s McClaine like?”

  “Solid guy. Pretty good Wiz. He mostly works with wards and seals and shit, the standard stuff.”

  Same as me. While I digested that, I unsealed the second pack of photographs. They were portraits of the missing children. Each one was named and numbered. They looked semi-formal, like yearbook photos.

  Before now, the notion of missing children had been an intellectual thing. A puzzle. A mystery, something to toy with in the mind. Now, they had names. They had hair, which was all different, and easier to look at than their faces.

  One of the boys in the stack of pictures was a small, tired wisp of a child in an overlarge blue sweater and jeans. He was staring just below the camera lens and fixated on something out of sight, his mouth a perfectly formed, sullen cupid’s bow. This kid had a face that was otherwise horsey and awkwardly proportioned, his cheekbones too big for his slender neck. Even at this age, his anger was evident. Terrible anger, bottled deep under the opaque absence of his stare. This was a life characterized by the need for control in the face of chaos.

  Frowning, I turned the picture over. His name was Peter Kaminski. He was one of the mage children, and he was only eight years old.

  Ayashe was saying something, her voice full of flashing red and white spines, aggressive candy stripes of color that shot through my mouth and up behind my eyes as I studied Peter’s last portrait. He did not look like me, but I recognized my reflection in the boy’s thousand-yard stare, in the way he protectively wrapped his hands in the floppy cuffs of his sweater.

  “Was his family alcoholic?” I asked.

  “What? Who in the what now?” Cut short, Ayashe leaned over to look at the Polaroid.

  “This one. Peter Kaminski.”

  “Aaron’s the one who’d know best, but I think so. I know he was one of the ones that Lily worked one-on-one with a lot. High-risk kid, lot of physical abuse in his history. I can’t remember if it was his mom or his dad who was on the sauce.”

  “Both,” I replied. My face was numb, nose and fingertips tingling. “He was probably the only sober one in the house.”

  Ayashe hovered near me a moment, her breath souring the air. Maybe she sen
sed my sudden, irrationally strong desire to punch her and drive her from the room, because she moved back of her own volition. “You okay, Rex?”

  I glanced up at her. “Me? I’m fine.”

  Her full mouth pulled across to one side. “Juvenile cases are hard. They aren’t for everyone.”

  “I said I’m fine.” Annoyed, I resumed looking through the stack of pictures. “Did your mage ever mention anything he called ‘Shevirah’? Phitometry, ‘awakening’… anything like that?”

  “Not that I’ve heard,” she replied. “I first heard about ‘Phitometry’ was from Michael. He says that it’s something that’s been part of the mythic stories in the Ib-Int since Babylon was still a big deal. He told us that we needed a Phitometrist for this job, not just any old spook, and that’s why we got Angkor on board.”

  “Angkor.” She pronounced the name like ‘Aun-guar’. “That was the other Phitometrist who tried to help you?”

  “Yeah. Weird name for a Korean guy. He was a bolt from the blue, but he was sure he could dig something up for us. Then he vanished. I tried to find him on immigration and border entry records, but no luck.”

  I sat back, frowning. “What can you tell me about him?”

  “We brought him on because he was able to give us an early lead on the way the couple were killed.” Ayashe rubbed her jaw, grimacing as it popped. “John screened him without putting it to vote. They had a private meeting and we all got told he was on the case. That’s not how the Fires are supposed to work. We’re supposed to vote… but John and Michael just keep on making all these big-shot decisions since Lily and Dru died.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. Getting her back on topic was enough. “What did Angkor do before he vanished?”

  “First thing he did was visit the house soon after the murders, and I remember him saying something about running tests on some of the blood. He said he’d explain after he got the results. Those just came in yesterday, but pathology hasn’t written up the report yet. Other than that… he said he was from South Korea. He wore a lot of leather, and his English was really good. Had a kind of weird manner about him.” Ayashe shrugged. “He said he was going to go visit this cabin and come back, but he never did. Told us to give it five days before we gave up on him, and it’s been seven. I was arguing we go look for him since Wednesday, but John vetoed. Says it’s probably too dangerous.”