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

by James Osiris Baldwin

  As quickly and quietly as I could, I crossed the open space and pushed myself in through the broken window frame. It let me into a single long concrete chamber that had to be nearly five hundred feet long. Twin rows of concrete pylons marched off into utter darkness; the canal gurgled to our left through gaping, broken windows. The entire floor was empty, but the stench was incredible. It was the smell of meat left to rot in the sun, the cheap perfume and vomit reek of un-life.

  I had a full pint of milk and a dozen eggs – the weirdest shit I’d ever taken on a hit, but after the Animal-Heads and DOG wasps, I doubted I’d ever be without eggs again. I pulled one out of my pack and palmed it in my throwing hand as I started out cautiously towards the end of the building nearest the water, following my nose and watching as Binah dashed from shadow to shadow. The guys outside were laughing at something: I heard them as I passed on the way to the stairwell. I was just about to break away from the pillars when a scuffle echoed through the huge room. The sound bounced off the walls like a rifle shot, and I froze mid-breath, scanning the darkness ahead for life – or not.

  After a few seconds of waiting, another sentry swaggered out of the entry to the stairs, looming in the stark light. My chest twinged. I recognized him. Ovar was six and a half feet of Georgian muscle, impossible to miss. He was dressed in a puffy jacket and hunter’s cap, cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger of one hand, the other resting on top of his machine gun. He was smiling as he swept the room and turned away from me, heading back in towards the stairs. It was all I could do to control my gorge. I thought he’d been one of the better men in this place. He was funny, he was friendly, and he’d always been polite and affable to me… and he’d raped a girl on camera, because he was all-in on the Organizatsiya and everything it did.

  And then, something pushed through the air around me. Even Ovar stopped, his back to me as he shivered in the wave of sudden cold that rippled through the still air of the grain elevator. Another mage was coasting through the waters like a shark filtering blood through its sinuses, turning this way and that. He had Mass, a real heavy presence… a presence that I instinctively recognized. It was the Spook that Nic had bought to take me down. He was here, upstairs, and Ovar was in the way.

  I wanted to kill him, but I’m five foot five in shoes and he was far too big for me to stab. Gunning him down would alert every person inside and outside the building. I clamped my jaws together until my teeth creaked, then turned and threw the egg down the aisle. It sailed out, and broke against something with a wet ‘splotch’.

  “Eh?” Ovar turned, eyes scanning the room. “Bors? That you?”

  For several long moments, I said nothing. Every sound in here was amplified, and any motion I made would crack out into the air. As Ovar waited, looking for anything out of the ordinary, another push of magic rippled over us. I was running out of time.

  “Fuck, this place is creepy.” He muttered, and turned back.

  I hissed. And tried to throw my voice. Ovar whipped around again, advancing to the door this time.

  “Hey,” he said. His voice echoed, the word ringing out multiple times against the walls. “Cut it the fuck out!”

  As quietly as I could, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the first thing I found: a quarter and the dime that Christopher had given me. The coin didn’t mean that much to me, so I flung them both, close to the ground. They rolled and skittered, and Ovar started forward. Sweat was rolling down his face now. He had his finger on the trigger, gun braced against his shoulder as he advanced into the room in the direction of the noise. If he heard or saw me, I was deader than the canal outside.

  As he left, I half-scrambled, half-crawled into the stairwell, waiting a moment until Binah caught up. What remaining fur she had was standing on end. The magic was only getting stronger, whipping down the channel of the stairs. I ran up them, trying to be quiet on the rusted steel treads. At the top of the stairwell was a door.

  My eyes were still adjusting as I got to the landing. I reached for the handle, and stopped at the last moment as a hot buzz, like static electricity, crawled up my arm from my fingertips. In the gloom, a figure loomed out at me from the wood. It was an eye. The iris was blank, and struck through with a cross.

  Swallowing, I lowered my hand and stepped back. I couldn’t break this sigil, not if it was really charged. There was a bated darkness about it, and the eeriness I felt from it – and the room beyond – made me wonder if someone had already spotted me. If it had alerted someone on the other side, I had a machine gun capable of putting a few rounds into their skull… assuming that’s not what they wanted me to do.

  From downstairs, I heard Ovar call out to the other guards that he’d heard something in the building, followed by quick, heavy footsteps that grew closer every second. He was heading for his post, and he was going to see and hear me.

  Anxiously, I reached out towards the handle. As I did, a creeping, prickling chill passed through the leather of my gloves, through my fingertips. I jerked my hand back, frowning. Lips pursed, I slung my bag around and pulled the carton of milk. It was a long shot, but I had gotten the milk on a hunch. Close to fifteen years of sorcerous wet work had taught me that the symbolic properties of things were as important as the materials. Eggs were symbols of fertility, birth, nourishment, perhaps femininity – and the effect on DOGs probably also extended to other egg-like materials. Seeds were at the top of my list, though the only seeds at the bodega had been toasted sunflower seeds and I doubted they would have any effect. Milk was something I decided to try on a whim: the full-cream, unhomogenized stuff that was as close to the substance used to feed calves as was possible.

  Feeling somewhat awkward, I opened the carton and splashed it over the door. The sigil sizzled. Sizzled. I watched a complex tracery of violet light rush through the crude black paint and then fade. When I doused it the second time, there was no response, though the ‘paint’ was sloughing off in a very un-paintlike fashion. I depressed the handle and waited for a few breathless seconds before entering, carton in one hand, my other hand bracing the machine gun against my less-injured ribs. As quietly as I could, I slunk out into the top floor: another huge single room with bottomless, circular black holes spaced across the floor. At the other end of the room, at the far western corner of the building, a human sacrifice was in full swing.

  Chapter 29

  The assembled TVS members were clustered around a makeshift altar that had been mounted in front of the gaping remains of the corner window. The priest’s back was to me. The others in the room – six or seven people – were standing in a rough circle, staring up towards a ring of black lights hung from the old trolley rails on the ceiling. Those were running off a small kerosene generator which made enough noise that my footfall was unlikely to be heard.

  I left the door ajar, searching for cover in the semi-darkness. There were old machines left here, and short stairwells that led up to the next floor of the grain elevator, but nothing that was going to offer real protection. I took what I could on my way across until I was crouched behind a narrow steel pillar and able to see and hear what was going on.

  The black lights distorted all color that might have been present, but I recognized at least two faces. Vanya was staring up at the light overhead, his jowly face smeared with black from eyes to sagging jawline in a parody of tears – or blood. At the far end of the altar was Mason.

  Jenner’s partner stood with his back to the shattered window. He was not robed like the others. He was stripped down to a bloodied wifebeater and jeans, his clothes torn, his skin striped with gore. If not for that, he looked like he’d been in a bar room brawl and come out barely on his feet. There was a huge, spreading dark stain across his shirt, radiating from his heart on the left. Mason was the only one looking down at something. He was staring at the featureless, motionless black bodybag that was lain on the table, feet pointing at the setting moon.

  “-to celebrate a new brother entering the fold,” th
e priest intoned, mid-sentence. The speaker was masked and hooded, and I couldn’t make out any details from my position. “The price of your admission to the Anointed is to cleanse the world of an affront to the Father, Ivan Kazopov. Will you purify this abomination with your body and strength, and swear your fealty to the Eternal Light?”

  “I will,” Vanya replied.

  I frowned, utterly at a loss. There was something not right about Mason. He swayed in place, and as far as I could tell, he wasn’t blinking.

  “The windows of Heaven are opening for you, Vanya.” The priest turned to face me, hands lifted. The mask was white, flat and featureless, save for three thin, grim slashes where the eyes and mouth should have been. Despite that, I know that it was the Spook, the one I had glimpsed on Ribbon Street through the distortion of his weird magic. His power was over the cold, inexorable twin pressures of time and gravity. “Praise the Father, blessed be his many names…”

  As the praying and affirmations continued, echoed by the others in the room, I shifted the PP-90 around to hold it at the ready and tried to cobble together a plan of action. There was no obvious warding around the circle, but I couldn’t discount it. The magic on the door had been very real, and the effect of the milk very noticeable. If I was lucky, the gun would be safe to use on the humans. If I wasn’t, I was probably going to get gunned down while I tried to stop something infernal from eating me and my cat.

  “Are you ready to be baptized in blood, to become a true follower of the All Father, to speak with fire and serve Him for all your days?”

  Vanya nodded. “I am.”

  As I watched, The Deacon – he was really the only one who could claim a title like that – took up a featureless silver box at the end of the altar and opened it. The inside was lined in black velvet. It held a knife like no other I had ever seen. The blade was glass, or crystal. As he lifted it, I saw it catch and gleam in the blacklights. The UV lighting revealed a matrix of flaws in the glass. It was hazed, like it had been broken and the pieces glued together.

  “You all know me, brothers in the spirit. You know me, your brother.” The masked priest held the knife to Vanya. “You have seen his miracles wrought through me. You know that I can see past, future and present, because though the Father in his wisdom caused me to be blind, I can see. I am wise because I am following him, and following his voice.”

  The proclamation was echoed by muttered ‘amens’ from around the circle, and as he spoke, Binah flattened her body against the floor. I glanced at her. My familiar was a barometer of magic, and whatever that thing was, she didn’t like it.

  While the blind priest continued his dark sermon, Vanya moved around the table, holding the knife like it was going to bite him. He began to undo his belt and his fly, while the rest of the men joined hands. I was watching some bizarre mockery of a prayer circle, where the faithful touched, swayed, exclaimed and threw themselves into the holy spirit… or in this case, the unholy demiurge that apparently demanded rape and sacrifice, not necessarily in that order. If I was guessing right, it was Angkor in that bag.

  As the others moved to give Vanya room, I noticed something. What I hadn’t seen, and that I could see now, was that Mason had no eyes. His sockets leaked a black, viscous fluid down his hollowed cheeks. The man on Vanya’s other side also had no eyes. His face was deeply scarred – one could even say mutilated. Even under black lights, the scars looked fresh. He was a big guy, too… six feet of lean compact muscle. He was currently singing in gibberish, and if his lack of eyes bothered him at all, I couldn’t tell.

  Mason looked like a wolfish parody of the man I’d seen laughing and talking with Jenner in the clubhouse. He stood in paralyzed silence as Vanya dragged the body-bag closer and zipped it open from the feet up. The cultist next to him took the knife and held it in a ritual posture while the Kommandant heaved his bulk up onto the table and got into position over the prone man on the altar. The crazed glass blade glowed black and purple under the black lights.

  My eyes narrowed. Time to end this.

  With the lips of the carton clenched in my teeth, I came up around the pillar and unloaded the clip in three short bursts from right to left and back to center before ducking, rolling, and coming up behind the grain shuttle hanging from the ceiling. There were screams, piercing through the haze of propellant and smoke. I slammed the spare clip into the gun and came around again, glanced a flash of purple light reflecting off a muzzle, and ducked down as three deafening shots sucked my eardrums in and blew the chute off the shuttle. Head pounding, I dropped to my belly on the floor, braced, and fired off a second spray at knee-height.

  Three men went down. Two cowered behind the altar, but the blind priest stood tall amidst the chaos. He had his hand raised, the bullets trapped in ageless suspension in front of him, and I had an awful feeling as to what was coming after that.

  The bullets vaporized, bursting into inky liquid that splashed and hissed across the floor. As the fluid whipped up from the floor in ropey strands, called by the mage’s conducting hands, Mason fixed on me and snarled. His teeth glowed in the black lights. Vanya was down and scrabbling away from the gunfire behind the altar. The big blind guy was getting back up at a run. I threw the empty PP-90 at him as he barreled towards me, and ran for new cover as the black tendrils suddenly focused on me like hydra’s heads and lashed out from across the room, tearing the grain shuttle apart on their way across. I dove and rolled: a piece of metal caught me across the calf on the way down, slashing open my pants leg and the flesh beneath. Then something cold caught around my ankle and took me to the floor. The bottom of the milk carton hit the concrete and splashed up into my nose.

  “Get him! Get him!” Someone was screaming from the back of the room as I was dragged kicking and struggling from behind a metal pillar and into the open. A wild glance showed me that G.I No-Eyes could still somehow ‘see’ well enough to train me with his pistol. Fighting not to cough from my milk bath, I fumbled for my knife and threw myself forward, rolling underneath the shots. The first went over me; the second was so close to my head that powder burned my face as I rolled to my feet and charged.

  I was not afraid. I was angry and sick after what we’d found on the computer. And I still had half a carton of milk.

  The Deacon slashed with a hand, and I let the black mass of tendrils rush around me in a slithering wave… a wave that screeched and fled as I dumped the rest of the milk on it and myself and pushed to close in, the knife in hand. The priest dodged away from the blade as I swiped for him, better than anyone wearing a mask like that had a right to, put his guard up, and slammed me in the side of the head. Wonderful. A fellow boxer.

  Years of training kept me on my feet as I bit my tongue and came right back at him, knife in hand. The blade unzippered his guarding arm from wrist to elbow and sent him stumbling away with a shout, clutching at the wound. I stumbled back, briefly disorientated, and put my foot right into one of the empty black pits that peppered the floor. I tripped to one knee, and got a ringside view of Mason’s festering heart wound as he rushed me. It was all I could do to pull my leg free and scoot back on my ass as the tackle connected.

  Mason’s dead weight carried us in a slide against the cold concrete, enough of a ride that I was able to get a hand between him and me and ram the knife straight into his ribs. The blade went in like I’d punched it through a side of beef. He snarled in agony, then roared. Roared, like a lion or a tiger might. His body pinned me from the hips down, hands on my neck even as I stabbed and struggled, driving the blade into his shoulder, lung and neck. Mason faltered on the sixth stab, collapsing onto me as his boots kicked out between my legs in a position far too intimate for sanity.

  Still clutching onto my throat, his eyeless face only inches from mine, he threw up. He threw up blood and shards of broken glass onto my face with a garbling howl of agony, and then, he transformed.

  Chapter 30

  When I’d witnessed Duke and Jenner change from human to ani
mal and back, it had been a fluid process, a smooth and untraumatic transformation from two legs to four. Features distending, hands turning into paws, that sort of thing.

  Mason exploded. His body ruptured with spines of shattered glass flung in all directions, shards that punctured my flesh with such ease that I barely felt anything at first, just the deep pressure of penetration in belly, thigh, neck and hand. It was the impalement through the hand I felt first, because my vision cut in a white torrent of sensory noise. Then the pain hit.

  A filthy white tiger the size of a pony staggered off my chest to its feet, leaving its payload of broken glass behind. I tried to scramble back, hiccoughing with shock and agony, and accidentally put my hand on the ground. The glass pushed deeper and my arm collapsed out from under me, and GOD help me, I screamed.

  “It’s over!” The priest shouted.

  The tiger advanced low to the ground, its face a twisted mask of rage. But it was wrong. The body of it was misshapen and distorted, the spine arched too high, the chest too deep and narrow. Mason’s hindquarters and the left side of his upper breast bristled with jagged, bloody, crazed glass. Every stalking step was accompanied by the weirdly mechanical sounds of glass breaking, reforming, and tinkling to the hard floor.

  “It’s not over until I say it is, pizdets.” I limped back on ass and elbow, drawing the Wardbreaker with my left hand.

  The tiger roared, drooling blood and foam onto the floor, and was on me faster than I could move. I almost saw the paw that slapped the gun from my hand, but not the one that took me across the face and knocked me into the floor. It was just a pat, really, no claws. As my skull bounced off concrete, I remembered all too vividly how Duke had nearly decapitated Kir.

  Mason put one dinner plate-sized foot against my chest, pushed, and flexed his claws. They pierced my ruined shirt and the skin of my pectoral, right over my heart. The hint finally got through. Yes… I was done.