The body hung there, motionless and mottled, his head grotesquely swollen. Moris was dressed for bed. The corpse hummed like an angry hive, bristling with the small wet sounds of chewing mandibles. The dresser on the other side of the room had been smashed open, the drawer flung at the walk-in wardrobe on the other side of the room. The shattered wood was half embedded in the door. Whatever had come in here was too strong for my blood.
But what caught my eye and held it were the symbols eked out in blood – or red paint that looked like blood – over the headboard of the bed. The number 13, drawn above two interlocking rings with eight spokes each. Underneath them, was the signature from Lily and Dru’s house. ‘Soldier 557’.
I passed my hand back over my head, staring at it foggily. Circles were a figure of completion, each one representing one whole. Two of something. Eight plus eight was sixteen. Two-eight-eight? No… two-sixteen. The corpse twitched as the bugs continued to feed. I couldn’t stay here.
I slammed the door behind me and coated the knob and lock with oil, keeping the tiny bottle close to my nose. With the knife ready, I thundered down the stairs and back into the abandoned den. I’d come here to find evidence. I needed to take something away, anything at all.
Falkovich’s office was a large room offside the den. Compared to the rest of the house, it was spotless – or it had been before someone had trashed it. The plants inside were dead, shriveled to nothing. Filing cabinets were overturned. His answering machine was torn from the wall, the cassette missing from inside. Only one thing had been left intact on the desk: a personal computer with a built-in screen. The person – or people – who trashed the office had pushed it to the edge of the desk, but hadn’t smashed it up.
Gingerly, I approached. I’d never touched a computer in my life. I knew what they were, vaguely, because I’d seen them in use in offices and warehouses. As far as I understood, they were interactive machines that stored documents, documents which might incriminate Falkovich. So why had it been left here, undamaged?
The first rule of electronics was to find a way to turn it on. After a protracted search, I flipped a switch and then pushed in a power button. The interface lit up and began to rumble and mutter to itself. I hung back warily, checking over my shoulder for the swarm, and nearly jumped out of my skin when the entire computer honked loudly, then ground in the way that some munitions did just before they exploded. I was already out the door by the time it had finished. When nothing happened, I peered back inside in time to see a company logo flash up, a picture that transitioned to a blank black void with a flickering cursor. I jumped again as the machine beeped and spooled text out down the screen of its own accord, and then loaded another image with four distinct panels. They read: Information, Microsoft Works, Your Software, and IBM DOS.
The most complex piece of technology I’d ever owned was a radio. Cautiously, I slipped back into the room and touched the Information heading on the screen, but nothing happened. Crestfallen, I looked over the keyboard and lit on the click-and-pointer to the side of it. I tried touching that to see if could be used to look at the Information doubtlessly stored on the computer, but accidentally hit a button. I suddenly found myself in ‘Your Software’, which was nothing but a confusing jumble of lists and pictures of manilla folders. I was officially out of my depth.
There had to be someone who knew how to access the information on this machine, but it wasn’t me. The thing I could do was take it with me. I tore the cables from the wall and hefted up, then took it outside to the car. It was tempting to leave it at that and drive away, but I steeled myself and went back into the house to continue the search. My eyes watered as I walked back into the sensory assault of dog piss, dead bodies and rotten food. Underneath that, there was the faint skin-ruffling reek of human desperation.
It was only once I closed the back door that I noticed that the swing was within the arc of another door set flush with the wall. They were on acute angles to one another, and set so close together that I hadn’t noticed it when I’d first entered the house. The back door had to be shut for this one to be accessible. I tested the handle. It was locked, but nothing that I couldn’t open. After a few minutes and a few taps with the knife hilt against the bump key, I turned the lock and pushed the door in to reveal a flight of stairs leading down. An earthy, musty stench rolled out into the sourness of the kitchen: very human smells of sweat, feces, and rotting food.
I braced the entry open with a bag of trash, stomach turning, then stripped off my wet jacket and then my shirt. I tied the wet tee around my face, pushing the knot around the back, and kept the knife down low on the way down. I didn’t want to be caught in nothing but a wifebeater, but if I didn’t have something over my nose and mouth, I was going to puke again.
There was a light switch which snapped when flipped, lighting a dim yellow bulb at the bottom of the stairs. The staircase was narrow, damp and squeaky. Underlying the hollow clomping of my boots was a heavy silence that hung in the dead air, until my foot turned a particularly creaky board and I heard something gasp from much further down. The sound quickly cut.
“Who’s there?” I stepped off onto the floor. Even with the damp rag around my face, it was hard going. Medieval gibbets probably smelled like this. “Come out, and no one needs to get hurt!”
There was no reply. With the knife held ready, eyes fixed ahead on the darkness, I patted the wall beside me for more switches. When I found them, the whole room lit up with flickering fluorescent strips that clunked to life, every other one dim or dead. It was enough to see what was causing the smell.
Cells. Rows and rows of cells, like the kind they keep dogs in at the pound. There was a camp bed at one end of the room with a gym mat laid on top in place of a real mattress. The center of the basement was cleared to make room for an ornate magic circle drawn in permanent black marker. The focus of the circle was an autopsy tray on a plain steel frame, and that was all. No blood. No tools. Just stark, clean metal.
I looked up. The basement ceiling was heavily insulated with exposed fiberglass batts. There was a bracket for fitting a surgical lamp, but no lamp was in evidence. My bet was that they borrowed and returned the equipment for whatever they did down here. The circle was like nothing I’d ever seen before: a triple ring executed with the same precision as the designs left with the body upstairs. The ring around the outside was the containment layer. Just inside of that, smaller circles had been interspersed around the ring like stations, each one emblazoned with an unfamiliar sigil: a squiggle something like an insect’s leg. They in turn were linked by the inner ring. The central design under the table was not geometric – or more accurately, it was not symmetrically geometric. The lines were precisely ruled, but the vaguely-star shaped design was off-center, with uneven points. There was scrawled writing inside and around the whole thing, alien and unintelligible. I was staring at it, trying to make individual words out, when a small whimper punctured the thick silence.
Slowly, I turned in the direction of the sound. It had come from the pen closest to the bed. I drew up beside to the door, flexing my fingers around the hilt of the knife, and glanced around through the wire.
It was the girl from the video. The one with the waist-length mop of red curls.
“Bozhe moi.” I uttered the oath before I could contain myself, coming around to stand before her. She shrank back until she was pressed to the far wall of her cell, legs drawn up, her cheek pressed against her hands. Her eyes were huge with animal terror. She was bound to a ring bolt by a heavy black collar and chain.
Over all the years I’d worked for Sergei, Rodion and Lev, I’d done and seen my share of horrors. I’d broken wards that sucked the life out of people, made a man spontaneously combust, and knocked my father’s brains out with a hammer. But when this girl looked up at me with nothing but feral, exhausted certainty, I knew that this was the limit. This was the line that I’d draw in stone, and anyone on the other side of that line was fair game for the rest
of my life.
“Josie?” I dropped my hand and pulled the shirt away from my face, letting it hang around my neck. “You’re Josie, aren’t you?”
Her stare did not waver. She didn’t nod, or even blink, but a tremor passed through her thin limbs.
“It’s going to be okay.” I spoke to her the way I would a stray animal, checking behind me in case something had decided to use her as bait and set me up. “Just… hold on a couple more minutes.”
I sheathed the knife and ran my hands over the door, searching for a bolt, something to pull across or flip up. There was nothing that sophisticated. The gates were padlocked and chained shut. The keys weren’t downstairs, but after rummaging around near the bed, I found a cardboard box with tools, including a pair of rusty boltcutters – for emergencies, I guessed. It took every bit of remaining strength I had to snap the lock on the doors. Josie pressed in closer to the wall, clinging to it with her hands.
I crouched down at the entry to the cell, and held my shirt out to her. “My name’s Alexi,” I said, slowly. “Some people sent me to help you. Do you know the Twin Tigers? The people who ride the motorcycles?”
After a moment, Josie nodded, a single jerk of her head. Her breathing was quick, like a small bird.
“I will come in here, and I will cut that chain off. Here… cover yourself with this.” I motioned with the shirt again.
Slowly, she reached out and took it. She didn’t put it on: she hugged it to her chest as I went inside, rolling her eyes to track my position as I cut her free. The collar was fixed in place with a screw that was too tight to get out with my fingers. We’d have to deal with it at Strange Kitty.
“Josie, we have to go outside in the rain.” I slung my jacket back on over the holster. “I’m going to carry you upstairs, but if there are any bad guys up there, I’ll have to drop you. You just run outside, okay? Run for the car.”
She nodded mutely, sagging against the wall.
Josie looked up at me, the shirt wrapped around her body. “Where is everyone else? Did they cut them up?”
“I don’t know, zolotsye’. But we have to go now.” I offered her a hand. After a moment, she accepted. Her fingers trembled against my palm.
Before now, I’d thought of the Morphorde as something blunt and simple. Demons flying at your face, monsters under your bed. People like Jana, whose Neshamah was damaged and crazy, or Lev, who was merely power-hungry. Committed misanthropes like Sergei and Nicolai. What I hadn’t considered was that some Morphorde, maybe most Morphorde, wore masks. Maybe they didn’t know they were evil, or maybe they could live two lives, one wholesome, one tainted. A man could walk into a spotless hospital with a clean lab coat and a white smile, and come home to… this.
As I expected, Josie could barely stand, let alone walk. When we reached the stairs, I didn’t even pause to think, to resent the contact or the responsibility as I swung her up into my arms, bundled her under my coat, and carried her out of Hell.
Chapter 25
I reversed the car into the driveway besides Strange Kitty and all the way back to the garage entry, scattering bystanders loitering under umbrella stands and tarp marquees. The rain was still hammering down as I flung the doors open, collected Josie into my arms, and ran with her – limp and exhausted beyond consciousness – into the relative warmth and safety of the clubhouse.
Talya was in some kind of intense conversation with Zane on one of the sofas against the far wall, watching three of the Tigers shoot pool. When the door banged open, they were first up on their feet.
“Rex!” Talya cried out as I swept past the confused pack of Weeders and headed for the door leading into the house. “What is- oh my god.”
Both of them were right behind me on our way to the bunkroom. I lay Josie down on one of the spare beds, limp and unresponsive. She’d lapsed into a faint sometime on the way home.
I checked her pupils and her breathing, stripping my gloves to feel for her pulse. “She needs fluids and careful warming. Get me the first aid kit… I have a bag of saline in there.”
“Where is it?” Talya asked, her voice high and panicked.
“Here, Tally. I got it.” Zane was already pulling it across the floor from the end of my bed. The street surgery kit was far too large to fit underneath.
I worked quickly, vaguely aware that I still smelled like a charnel ground. I doused my hands in alcohol, pulled on gloves, and set up the needle. We hung the bag from the ladder leading up to the top bunk. I had swabbed Josie clean and was just sliding the needle into the crook of her arm when Jenner stalked into the room.
“Jesus Christ,” she said, out of breath. She smelled of liquor and cigarette smoke. “You found them? Where the living fuck did you-”
“Only one,” I said, concentrating on landing the needle in the vein.
“Oh God. Jesus fucking Christ.” Jenner crouched down by the head of the bed, one of her hands matted through her hair. Behind me, I heard the soft sounds of someone crying.
I tapped the needle, and a small amount of blood flushed back into the tube. I connected the line and opened the flow, and fluid began to wind its way down from the drip chamber. When I was sure it was working the way it was supposed to, I crouched back on my heels and let out a harsh, tense breath.
“’Research’, huh?” Jenner said. She was staring at me, her eyes hard and black.
“I told you. I hit up one of my contacts today.” My voice was cracked, breaking on every other word. “He pointed me to a dodgy transplant surgeon who recently started making a lot of money off children’s organs. I went there to pay him a visit, thinking I could get a lead. He was dead. There was… it… Lily and Dru’s murderer got to him first. Josie was in his basement. She was the only child in the place.”
“Those fucks. They knew we’d find him and they shut him up,” Jenner bounced to her feet, wire-strung. I could hear and smell a clamor of people gathering at the open bedroom door. “What about the others?”
“Two dead,” I said. I swallowed: my throat felt like it was full of sand. “The Blank boys. Moris Falkovich killed them.”
“What the fuck, Rex?” Jenner was pacing back and forth. “What the actual fuck is wrong with people?”
How could I tell her? That the men I knew – Nicolai, Petro, Sergei and Vanya – knew that car parts sell better than whole vehicles? That a healthy kidney was worth a hundred grand on the street? That at least one young mage’s organs, innocently charged with Phi, were being stripped and loaded into the sons and daughters of wealthy people, people who felt their children deserved life more than an anonymous stolen child?
I swallowed, trying to wet my mouth. “I took Falkovich’s computer. He had a computer in his office… it might have evidence on it. Whoever was in there took or destroyed all his paperwork. I don’t know how to search for information on the machine.”
“I do. I’ll find any files that are on there.” Talya sounded thick, her voice tearing like yellow paper in my mouth. “If anything was deleted, I can recover them.”
“Where on Earth did you learn that?” I knelt back, dry-mouthed and woozy.
“I manage I.T at the Museum,” she replied. “That’s my job there… I’m part of the I.T systems project team for the Smithsonian. Can we set up a table near an outlet?”
The question was directed at the room more than it was at any one person. I stood and swayed, catching myself before I stumbled and hit my head against the railing of the bunk. Everything turned black for a moment, and I suddenly found myself on the other side of the room, my arm resting over Zane’s shoulder as he sat us down.
“You need to rest,” he said. “You’re about to pass out.”
“The house was really very unpleasant,” I said. It made sense in my head to point that out. “The computer is in the car outside. You should probably take it somewhere else and leave it far away from here. The car, that is.”
“No worries. But you need to lie down.”
“I’m not
sure that’s a good idea,” I replied. “I might have hit my head a few times.”
He and Talya ended up arranging pillows into a mound and resting me back against them. My head was pounding with slow, thunderous pain that gathered between my eyes and knocked in time with each heartbeat. When someone gave me pills and water, I didn’t bother to check what they were. I took them, and as soon as the light was turned out, I fell asleep.
It was still dark when I next roused. The moon was full and fat outside the window, and while it was still windy enough to make the panes rattle, the rain had stopped and the clouds had cleared. My headache had gone from an eight to a five, but I felt queasy and parched. Binah was curled in a tight ball between my ankles, while Josie slept on her bed on the other side of the room. Her saline bag was nearly empty.
Groggily, I threw back more painkillers and chased it down with an anti-nausea tablet, then rummaged through my medical supplies. I’d been doing more healing than killing since leaving the Organizatsiya, and I had fewer bags of sterile fluids than I had boxes of ammunition. The necessity of going to a pharmacist and restocking was on my mind as I stumbled out into the house, expecting it to be quiet. Instead, the lights were blazing and the common room was laid out like an armory.
Jenner, Zane, Duke and Talya were still awake. The Tigers were finishing getting ready for a bear-hunt: soft body armor, leather jackets, boots, helmets, crossbows and shotguns. They had assembled the computer on the bar counter. Talya was working at the keyboard, scanning lines of white text as it tumbled down a featureless black screen.
“Has something happened?” I moved forwards, relatively steady on my feet. Sokolsky men have always been notoriously resilient to head trauma.
“It’s five in the morning and Mason hasn’t come back,” Jenner said, her voice flat with forced calm. “Neither have John or Michael. Something’s wrong. We’re going there to search, now.”
Stained Glass: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 2) Page 23
