“Speak when you’re spoken to,” I said. “Where are the kids you took from Yonkers?”
Kir strained up towards me, his face a mask of blood and fury. “How the fuck do you think I’d know that? The fuck you think I’d tell you anything, you fucking homo, you traitor-dog…”
I used the point of the big knife to press him back down by his Adam’s Apple. Then, I left off his throat, and leveled the point of it right against the crotch of his pants. He sucked in a sharp breath.
“Shut the fuck up before I cut this off and feed it to you so that you can taste cock one last time,” I said. “Where. Are. The children?”
He snarled and lunged at me, but stopped short when the point of the machete dug into the nerve bundle it was set against, a nexus of nerves just above his pubis. I looked back to Zane.
“See if you can find a blank tape, and set the camera to record,” I said in English. “Kir is going to tell us a little story.”
Zane nodded and began to mess with the camera. I looked across to see Duke frozen in the doorway. His jaw was clenched so hard that the muscles in his neck bulged.
“Blyat’, pizda.” Kir spat again, spraying his own chin and chest with spittle.
“Do you remember why they call me Molotchik, Kir? Do you remember what I did to my father?” I looked down at him, twisting the point of the machete until the tip worked through the weave of his sweatpants and dug into the delicate skin of his groin, right in the join of pubis and thigh. He jerked against the handcuffs and froze. “You have five seconds to tell me what operation Vanya is running here. For every second that goes by, I will push this knife in deeper.”
“Fuck your–”
I twisted and pushed until I felt the skin of his pelvis bow, then give under the relatively dull point of the machete. He broke off into a scream.
“Four.” I pushed again, deeper.
Kir screamed a second time, his voice dry and hoarse. The others were hovering behind me, stunned into silence.
“Okay, what!? Stop… What do you want from me-AAAHHH?!?
“Three,” I said. “How did you get the children, Kir? Speak English.”
Panting quickly, Kir looked down. Blood was beginning to spread through the weave of his pants. It was only embedded into his body a quarter of an inch or so, but that bundle of nerves just below the surface was to protect the bowel wall from traumatic injury, and they were very twitchy. I twisted the point, just a little.
“Drugs! Cargo!” He stuttered the words out in a thick accent. “Kids! Take it out, Molotchik. T-Take it out!”
I kept my hand on the haft, feeling the muscles of his abdomen spasm around the blade. “Tell me about the kids.”
“They is f-for movies,” he stammered. “Vanya Kostyovych… he sells the movies. The kids.”
“Where does he keep them?” I lifted the knife a little, permitting him with some relief. He exhaled sharply. If he’d known how small the wound really was, he’d be ashamed.
“Everywhere, Alexi, I don’t fucking know!” He babbled in Russian, unable to keep his English in his terror. There was blood on the tip of the machete.
“English.”
“Ask him! Ask Vanya and Avtoritet. We just… hold them here… we film the fuck…”
Before I could stop him, Duke surged forward. “You fucking mongrel piece of SHIT!”
He got in two good punches on Kir’s head before Zane was on top of him and pulling him away. Duke snarled, writhing in the larger man’s grasp and thrashing like a wildcat. His eyes turned bright gold, pupils drawing to slits.
“Duke!” Jenny shouted his name as Zane hauled him back. “Duke! Cut it out!”
But he couldn’t hear her. He snarled again, deeper and throatier as he shoved himself away from Zane’s chest with an explosive burst of strength. Zane stumbled and hit the wall hard enough that a crack tore through the plaster, and Duke’s back bowed, distending like an underwater explosion before his body burst with a wet welter of clear fluid and shredded clothing. The transformation from man to leopard was so fast, so incredibly fast, that I didn’t actually see it: just the two hundred and fifty pounds of tweaked-out fanged fur and muscle flying at my face.
Chapter 14
I stumbled out of the way of the oncoming leopard, swiping with the machete. He wasn’t interested in me: he landed on Kir. The trapped man screamed a blood-curdling, high-pitched pig squeal that cut when Duke slapped his lower jaw with his forepaw and almost casually tore it off his face. It hit the opposite wall in an arc of gore and bounced, sending Binah scattering from her nest of clothes.
A tiger – fully twice the side of the cat who had quite literally ripped this man’s face off – charged past me as I backed as far as the floor allowed for. The tiger leapt onto Duke’s back, pulling him off to the floor to roll, snarl and tumble over the ground. The camera was taken to the floor, smashing open.
Duke was no match for the bigger cat, but fought anyway. They hit the window and burst through it in a shower of glass and plaster, screeching out on the fire escape. The leopard, bloody and panting, tried to clamber back into the room as the tiger caught it around the torso with paws the size of dinner plates and lay on top of it, pinning its comparatively small body to the floor. Comparatively. One was the size of a very large mastiff; the other, the size of a pony.
“Fucking hell, Duke!” Zane’s shouting finally cut through the racket. He surged forward, trying to help Jenner restrain the hissing, spitting leopard. The Twin Tigers moniker made sense now.
I rushed to Kir’s side. He was convulsing, fingers opening and closing spasmodically as his body flopped on the bed. His lower face was simply gone, his throat open, his guts torn out from his belly like so much offal. He was going to die, and I wasn’t much inclined to try and help him.
Duke was helpless under Jenner’s bulk. He yowled and clawed at the floor, but the club president, in her animal form, was far larger and far stronger. When he finally calmed down, she let go of the scruff of his neck and looked at me with an alien intelligence. It was Jenner and not-Jenner at the same time. It was like looking at someone’s Neshamah.
"How the hell are we going to clean this up?" Zane's voice had a note of hysteria. He pushed both hands over his shaven head. “Jenner, Duke just fucking killed someone!”
“Forget about him. We have to get out of here,” I said. “The cops will be here any minute. Don’t touch anything, for GOD’s sake. The more we touch, the longer we stay, the more evidence we leave." If we were lucky, the Mafiya itself would be blamed. I wasn’t stupid enough to have bought an apartment under my own name, but the police had any number of ways they could identify me. I’d lived here for most of my life. They’d find something I had missed. “I have to get some things.”
“I got your suitcases and the medical kit. They’re in the car. Give me the cat.” Zane held his arms out.
I bundled Binah up in Vassily’s old suit jacket and handed her to him. She was too tired to resist or care, and her frailty was evident in his huge hands. “Don’t waste too much time.”
Lights had turned on in the house across the street. Shit.
Duke shuddered, and went limp under Jenner’s weight. When she was satisfied, the Siberian tiger stood upright on her hind-paws. Limbs and fur folded back into her center mass as bones popped and changed shape, expelling clear, sweet smelling gel that splattered to the ground. It was both grotesque and oddly elegant, every part moving smoothly into place. The clear gel fell to the floor in clumps, vanishing almost as soon it touched the bloody carpet and taking the blood and dirt with it. I recognized the high, mouthwatering floral smell of the stuff over the stench of viscera. It was Phi. Weak Phi, compared to Zarya’s blood, but it was Phi nonetheless.
Duke followed soon after. The leopard crawled on his belly towards Jenner, shifting back in the same oddly mechanical way. When he was back in human shape, the naked woman kicked him in the jaw and sent him sprawling.
“You fucking idiot!�
�� Jenner shouted at him. She bent down and hauled him up by the arm. Duke didn’t have cat ears anymore, but if he had, they would have been laid back flat along his skull. “What the fuck? WHY the fuck?”
“I’m s-sorry, Prez, I-”
“You fucking lost your shit, is what you did. Get up and get out! Into the car!” Jenner shoved the much larger, much taller man like he weighed nothing. Without a word, he picked up his sword – still nude – and stumbled out the door.
“There are coats in the wardrobe,” I said. I was sweeping up anything that the cops could use to identify me or Vassily. Photos, his zippo, but there were just too many things that could be used to incriminate us. A dull radiating pain ached through my hands with the knowledge of what I was going to have to do.
Jenner sniffed. “You think I’m worried about being naked? I was born this way.”
“No, but the NYPD may be less than impressed by your assets if we’re pulled over.” I didn’t turn around to look at her, but I wasn’t able to put any force in my voice. “Get out.”
“What about the tape?”
“The tape that now ends with Duke turning into an animal and murdering someone?” I pointed at the floor. The cassette was shattered amidst the ruins of the camera, the tape pulled out in a mockery of Kir’s corpse.
“Fucking hell.” I heard the wardrobe bang open as Jenner went to search for something to cover herself. “They’re just going to have to take our word for it, then.”
My eyes were hot as I pulled open the dresser and rifled through Vassily’s underwear, clean and untouched since he’d died. There was a money clip in there, monogrammed but empty. I added it to the collection of his tokens in my pocket. “Get out. I’ll finish up in here.”
“Whatever.” I heard a rustle, and then Jenner strode out past me into the hall, slinging a trench coat around her shoulders. I pocketed what I could, took what photos I could carry, and picked up the ruined cassette. Brown celluloid tape was flammable, and I had a gas stove.
But before that, I had to get my tools.
The study was still mostly intact. To my surprise, the Wardbreaker was just lying there, unholstered, the silencer still screwed onto the barrel. I checked it over and then jammed it through my waistband. A deep tension I hadn’t known I’d been carrying ebbed away, replaced by determination.
My desk had been disemboweled, but someone had stuffed my papers and books back into the drawers and had left their own files on the desktop. Quickly, I went to the smallest of my bookshelves, a low deep-bellied shelf, and pulled out a photo album, a copy of the mishnayot, and half a dozen particularly rare books, including the copy of Das Rote Buch that Crina had pilfered for me before she’d vanished to parts unknown. My wastepaper basket had a trash bag in it: I shook the trash out, threw the books into it, and tied it shut.
The last thing I needed was in the glass hutch beside my desk, cradled on a folded rectangle of crushed purple velvet. My father's old prison sledge. No one had touched it, which wasn't surprising. There was something naturally unpleasant about this weapon, the hammer my father had liberated from Kolyma, the gulag where he served – and survived – for seven years. The head was fifteen pounds of cold iron, more than enough to crush a man's head in with a single solid blow. And it had crushed a lot of heads.
The sledge thrummed with a subtle siren call, and even with my magic crippled, it still made the stubble on the back of my neck stir. It had first been imbued with my father's desperate will, his fierce need to survive. Every iron spike he'd driven had symbolized a camp guard, a snitch, a pimp or a foreman. He'd carried the hammer and his hate with him through the German underground railroad, onto the ocean liner he and my mother took from Hamburg to New York, the ship where I was conceived. Grigori Sokolsky had terrorized the Beach – and me – with this hammer for fifteen years. I had ended his life with it, closing the circuit. The peculiar magic of sacrifice was etched into it as indelibly as my father's prison number was burned into the wooden haft.
Reverently, I lifted it out of its case, ran my thumb over the burnished grain, and slung it over my shoulder. As the only surviving Sokolsky man, it sung its Phitonic song for me and me alone. I had been prepared to let it go, like the photos. It was too heavy and cumbersome to travel with, but the Organizatsiya had called me Molotchik after this hammer, and the Organizatsiya was going to remember why.
With the Wardbreaker, hammer, my cat, and my key grimoires, I felt better, stronger. I passed by the desk, and lifted the cover of a dirty, finger-stained Manilla folder to glance over the contents. They were informal receipts penciled in Nicolai's rough handwriting, with a note to read the instructions for pickup and delivery. Frowning, I flipped the page.
There was a honk from outside, then another. The Tigers had spotted something.
I slapped the folder closed and shoved the entire thing into the core of the photo album inside the trash bag, grabbed the lot, and ran. As I reached the balcony exit, the front door banged open from the other end of the house. There was a burst of male laughter, and then a shout of alarm. They smelled death.
Images of my tortured cat and the red-haired girl, her wrists bleeding from the handcuffs, flashed in my mind’s eye. A tic rippled next to my mouth. I threw the glass door open on its rails, threw the books over the side, and stalked back into the house with my father’s sledgehammer in my hands.
A month ago, I’d been desperate to run from the Organizatsiya, but now I didn’t think I could – not without making them hurt first.
Chapter 15
These men were ex-soldiers, lifetime criminals, but they were in my house.
They whirled to face me as a unit as I charged out of the laundry. They had the wrong guns for a space as small as this one: before they knew what had hit them, I was already up in the first man’s face with the hammer. I used the haft end to knock his pistol aside, the head to fend off his fist, and then rammed my forehead into his nose. Cartilage gave way with a satisfying crunch. As he stumbled away into the table, I ducked and weaved the next half-seen fist, rammed the end of the hammer into his belly below where his vest ended, and swept him up in a choke with the haft just as the other two finally opened fire. His shaven head snapped back in a bloody haze; I shoved him off into the other two, frozen with horror as they realized what they had done, and followed up behind with the sledge.
I knew their names. The corpse that slumped to the floor was named Vadim; Anatoly was the one closest to me. He instinctively tried to block the swing that broke his arm and slammed it back into his face, toppling him. Marko popped off three panic rounds at us. One hit the flak vest and staggered me like a baseball bat to the gut; the other two went wide. I gestured sharply with my hand and barked an arcane-sounding word at him: he threw his hands up in brief terror of impending magic, and then I was on him. One strike to the belly, two and three to the face, and he was down with the others.
I dropped the hammer and went to my knee to pick up a gun, bracing beside the kitchen door. We were screwed anyway, so I double-tapped each man lying on the ground. Anatoly, Marko, and Vadim. One, two, three.
“Ivanko!” I called back into the hall. “Going to come out before you burn alive?”
There was no reply. I waited until a count of seven and risked a look around the corner. The hall was empty, the front door hanging open. The only sound was the shrill whine of tinnitus in my ears.
Outside, one of the Weeders laid into the horn. I dropped the gun and broke away from the door to snatch up the hammer and cross to the stove. I hefted it up, sticking to the wall, and slammed the head of the hammer into the gasline. It broke with a high whistling noise, and then the powerful sulphuric stench of methane gas began to pour into the kitchen. I was headed back to the balcony when something flickered in the corner of my eye: Ivanko, who swung around the edge of my bedroom door and opened fire.
I barely cleared the doorway, holding my breath as bullets shattered plaster and brick veneer. He wasn’t using a suppress
or, and it was loud. I careened out onto the balcony, plaster chips stinging the back of my neck, and dropped the hammer down to the sidewalk. I vaulted over the railing, found my grip on the edge, and then let go.
I glimpsed the shocked face of my downstairs neighbor as I caught the edge of their balcony, jolting my arms from shoulders to wrists, and then let go a second time. I cursed with pain as I caught the last railing, let go, and tumbled to the ground. The impact against the pavement rattled my teeth and sent me sprawling to land on my ass. I looked up and saw Ivanko high above, teeth bared in a victorious grimace. He opened fire on the street as I scrambled up and dove for cover, and got a half a burst out before the top of the building exploded.
Bullets by themselves aren’t enough to trigger an explosion. Unless you’re using steel jacketed rounds, ammunition doesn’t spark – but dodgy third-hand Russian submachine guns with worn out snub noses most certainly do. The right mixture of methane and oxygen and a moment of muzzle flash was all it took.
The detonation blew Ivanko off the balcony in pieces. Broken glass and chunks of meat rained down over the street, and then a second, duller explosion tore through the rest of the house. It would burn. My house was full of books, after all.
The throaty roar of the Buick’s engine and the squeal of tires pierced the roaring of the fire. Duke – still naked – pulled up hard right in front of me. Zane flung open the door as I staggered up with my hammer and the books and lunged in over the seat. Duke tore off with the door still flapping open. Two other Organizatsiya men were running up the road, guns raised, but they were too late. Even better: there were sirens in the distance, getting closer.
“FUCK!” Duke roared, and slammed the wheel as we took off down Banner Avenue, hurtled out onto Coney Island Avenue, and sped up towards the intersection of Coney and Avenue Z. When we rounded the corner, I seized the chance to reach back and slam the door closed.
“Slow down, Duke! Come on, show some fucking sense!” Jenner, just as tweaked as Duke, was flopping around in Vassily’s overlarge trench coat and yelling at him from the passenger’s side.
Stained Glass: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 2) Page 14
