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

by James Osiris Baldwin

I snorted. “It turned up in Jersey Bay, of all places. Two Mafia soldiers fished it out while dumping a body off a boat. It killed a bunch of wiseguys when they tried to crack the shell. They needed a Wise Virgin to break in and fish out the woman inside, and I was unlucky enough to be the only viable candidate.”

  “Oh my god.” The other man clapped his hand to his mouth and let go of my arm, sitting back. “You’re a virgin? And a mage?”

  “Huy na ny,” I groaned. “Not you too.”

  “No no, I mean… euhhn… I mean that I’m really sorry for coming on so strong before, you know?” Angkor covered his teeth with a hand, blushing a delicate rose-gold. I noticed, quite arbitrarily, that he had freckles. I hadn’t seen them before, but his skin was not only naturally brown, it was sun-kissed. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have just, you know… I would have not done that.”

  I grunted, and jerked my shoulders back. “It doesn’t matter now. I’m mostly just grateful that I don’t have to live with a colostomy bag for the rest of my life, thanks to you and your efforts to heal me more than once.”

  “Like I said, I’m a doctor. Hippocratic Oath and all that.”

  I drew a deep breath. “You didn’t answer me about Jenner and the other Tigers.”

  “Uh… well… they’re due back here any minute now.” Angkor checked the clock on the wall. “So-”

  “SCHWARMA, BITCHES!” The door flew in and banged against the opposite wall, admitting a wall of leather, spikes, and combat boots. Jenner was in the lead, a foil-wrapped kebab in each hand. Her face was twisted up in a scar-slashed grimace, the keloid still pink and new. She had an eye-patch on that same side. “Oh, shit. You’re alive!”

  Zane was right behind her, and Talya was behind him. She’d changed out the brown wool and tweed for a white tanktop and jeans. To my surprise, she now had tattoos and several piercings: three rings through her bottom lip, and a fall of vertical lines and black-work from just under her mouth all the way around her chin. When she saw me staring, she smiled prettily and flushed.

  “Feel like you can eat something, white boy?” Jenner came up to bed and pushed herself up to sit on the end of it. “I didn’t get you anything, but you can have Ang’s.”

  “Over my dead body.” Angkor groped for his food, and Jenner held it back and away. I couldn’t deny it: I was glad to see she was still alive.

  “So, wanna hear some gossip?” Jenner passed the wrapped kebab to me, and though he pouted, Angkor didn’t stop me from opening it. The sterile room was now redolent with the smell of lamb and garlic sauce as the others took their seats where they could find them. “Not only was John not an Elder, or even a fucking Weeder, he wasn’t Nakota. All the photos of him at Pine Ridge were when he visited once as a tourist. None of the people there know him or kept records of his birth or naming.”

  “He didn’t have any degrees or anything.” Talya shook her head. She was cross-legged on the floor, hands gripping her ankles. “The Smithsonian is so pissed off. They’re making everyone go through background checks.”

  “He’d faked everything,” Jenner said, cramming food into her face. “So I was right. All these privacy rules in the Laws are total crap. He would have been screened out if people weren’t so prudish about changing and sharing and shit.”

  “That degree of deception and persistence is… quite spectacular. Did the Vigiles turn this up?” I knew the ins and outs of using fake identities – it was one of the key survival skills of the career killer, after all. But faking a life, making up achievement after achievement instead of living them?

  “Yeah,” Zane said. In contrast to the others, he seemed tired and morose. “Ayashe went digging. He was just a poor white guy from this po-dunk town out West.”

  “Sth Drrkota,” Jenner mumbled. Yogurt ran down her chin.

  “Pretty amazing how far some people will go for a fantasy.” Zane jerked his shoulders.

  Suddenly, I was considerably less hungry. I handed the barely touched shawarma to Angkor, who cocked his head curiously even as he accepted.

  I bowed my head. “Jenner. Do you mind if we speak in private for a moment?”

  “Sure thing. Scram, kids.” Jenner made a little shoo-shoo motion towards the door.

  “Yes, mom.” Talya got to her feet, rolling her eyes, and headed out with Zane in tow. Angkor’s eyes gleamed with interest, but he bowed from the waist to Jenner and then followed the others out, closing the door behind him.

  Jenner sighed, and some of the tense energy left her shoulders once the others were gone. “Phew. Well… glad to see you made it, Rex. It was a bit touch and go there.”

  “How many of the Tigers survived?” I asked her calmly, hands resting on my lap. They were ungloved, but the cotton blanket was soothing against the smooth skin of my palms. I could tolerate it.

  Her lips pressed together in a grim line. “We lost all but five of the Big Cat Crew, counting Talya. It was a fucking bloodbath, but everyone left says they feel like they did something right for the world. Eleven kids are having warm meals in safehouses now. And that was always the point.”

  I looked down at my fingers, considering what I should or could say. In truth, I was at war with myself. Kutkha’s scintillating omnipresence had returned to me, and I could feel the stir of magic in my blood. I had money, and my familiar. Europe and an escape into anonymity was still possible, and I knew without hearing that these relationships were still at a point of potential severance. There would be no debt between us.

  “I had planned to leave the country before I got drawn into this,” I said, haltingly. “It wasn’t just the children. To be frank with you… this is the first time I have ever done anything like this. For anyone.”

  “Well, you sure as hell stuck it out.” I could tell that Jenner wanted a cigarette, but she continued to occupy her mouth with food. After a bite of her wrap, she swallowed and leaned back on her hand, pointing at me with her shawarma. “Lemme tell you something though, Rex. You can run from the Third War, but you’ll never escape it. You don’t even escape it when it’s over and done with. Mason never got away from it. I never got away from it. Sometimes, I wake up and I smell this horseshit-and-plastic smell on everything. You know what that is? Agent Orange. That memory’s just from the war in this lifetime. I know what the trenches smell like. I know what the French Revolution smelled like. I’ve gone from war to war to war. Every one of them has stuck with me, and you know why?”

  I thought for a moment. “Because there’s a bigger war underpinning all of them, and your Ka knows.”

  Jenner kicked her feet into the air. “Bing-bing. You are correct.”

  “Against the Templum?”

  “You’ll always find something like the Temple Vox Sol, or whatever they are,” Jenner said. “I can tell you that things have been headed somewhere bad for the last three hundred years. That’s the limit of my memory, and most of that’s short and nasty. Twenty Years War, Chinese Revolution, Ethiopia, Vietnam, fuck… but I tell you now, this lifetime has been the worst by a long shot”

  “Why?” I frowned.

  “Because we drank the Kool-Aid.” Jenner’s face was eyepatch side-on to me, the blank leather inscrutable in a way her face never was. I could tell she was still in pain from the impalement, but she was being tough about it. “It started with Game Theory, the idea that HuMans can quantify everything they do with formulas, and that altruism – real HuMan compassion and cooperation – doesn’t really exist. Not only that, it’s bad for us. The Prisoner’s Dilemma. The Coordination Game. The guy that formulated this shit, John Nash, was schizophrenic. Want to take a guess why?”

  “Mister Patroclus helped him with his theorems,” I replied. “The Big Black, as you call it.”

  Her mouth quirked up at the corner. “He looked into the Void, and the Void gave him Game Theory, Rex. He made it sexy. He made it appealing to the people with money, with power. They really like the idea of a Zero-Sum Game with an outcome they can control. They want all
of the money, all of the power. They think they’re better and they deserve better. Everyone else is just there to lube their way up Jacob’s Ladder.”

  Itty-bitty machine parts. “I believe that when Nash’s theories were tested with real subjects in face-to-face situations, that they didn’t instinctively act out the Zero-Sum Game. The math predicted that the only path they could take was to sabotage one another. Instead, people in the Prisoner’s Dilemma experiments tried to assist one another. They were altruistic, not paranoid. They only engaged in the theorized course of action when directed or coerced.”

  “Yeah. But the powers that be, they love this shit.” Jenner shook her head. “Thatcher. Regan. The current fuckwit in office. All of them… doesn’t matter what party they’re in. They want the Great Zero. They don’t want reality, altruism, or courage. They want obedience and fear. They want a fucking Apocalypse, because they think they’re the chosen few and the Sky-Daddy’s going to come down and take them to the land of eternal ice-cream and ponies while everyone else screams and burns.”

  Her words hung in the air for several minutes. She ate, I brooded on what she’d said, and Kutkha watched on in patient silence.

  “My Ka had a story for me, Rex. They tell you things, sometimes.” Jenner crumpled up the foil and threw it at the trashcan. It hit the edge and tumbled in. “Tiger’s got her own mind, you know. She tells me the same thing every time I change, every time we hunt. ‘Don’t look up’.”

  I frowned, puzzled.

  “Up is where the NO is,” Jenner said. “Queen Tigger says that if you look up at the Void, it sucks your eyes right out of your head, and then you’re gone. That’s how I knew I’d lost Mason. When I saw him that first time, and his eyes were missing, I knew he was walking dead.”

  “Yes.” I closed my eyes for a moment, swallowing.

  “I miss him.” She slid to the floor and stood, straightening her back and cracking her knuckles. “Mason was a good man. He treated me right all these years. We hunted together, we rode together… but every time I walk on the soil of this country, I’m always aware of the bones under the earth, Rex. All the people fighting and dying, coming to life, traveling into the Light or giving themselves to the Big Black. There’s people I loved who are buried here, and in twenty other countries. The cycle moves on. If he’s as tough as I think he is, Mason’s Ka will heal and come back to me.”

  I remembered what Kutkha had said to me about the way that Morphorde dissolved the structure of a soul, but didn’t have the heart to bring it up with her. Maybe she knew, maybe she didn’t. Either way, it didn’t matter. Some things were not worth crushing. “One can hope.”

  Jenner didn’t stop me as I disconnected my IV. I taped it across and got to my feet. The floor was cool linoleum, real and firm. I hurt, but I could move.

  “So, what’s on from here?” She watched as I went to investigate the drawers, looking for my clothes.

  “As you said, the war will follow me wherever I go.” I sighed. “Ten years, twenty years down the track, Sergei will find me, and I will be too old and too soft to defend myself. I brokered some information from the contact who told me about Moris Falkovich that I’m going to follow up. Which reminds me. Did Zane fight on Saturday?”

  “Nope,” Jenner replied. “He called it off. Threw the semi-final… he was too upset by everything.”

  A vague sense relief washed through me. “Right.”

  “Speaking of fighting, I want to go down to Texas,” Jenner said, her expression hardening. “Lily and Dru and their fucked up buddy list have been sending kids down there for years, and who knows what’s happened to them. Problem is, we’re weakened. The Pathfinders are gutted. The Four Fires are reeling, and Ayashe’s trying to work two jobs. Their leadership goes to vote. She’ll probably get it, but it’s a serious conflict of interest. Besides that, Michael was the second-oldest… well, I guess he was the real Elder of New York, given that John was full of shit. That means I’m now the oldest Weeder in the city, and a dozen of my best men are dead.”

  “A vulnerable position,” I said.

  She grimaced. “Yeah. We got a meeting set up for tomorrow with some allies of ours in the Mid-West. Now that we know this cult of freaks is real, we’re going to hunt them down and tear them up while we can. They’ll be licking their wounds, but I bet they can replace their members faster than we can replace ours.”

  “I thought it might have had something to do with the Voicers, but I suppose they were a strawman for the Voctus Sol.” I found my stained and torn pants, belt, tie and shirt in a plastic bag, and a set of clothes in the drawer next to the bag. There was a plain white envelope on top of the neatly folded trousers. “What’s this?”

  “Eh?” Jenner looked around me. “No idea.”

  “Probably an invoice I have no intention of paying.” I set it aside, and laid out my what I found: an undershirt, a sweater, trousers and gloves. The sweater was the one I’d worn while I was homeless, but it was no longer shapeless. The wool was a little crisp under my fingers, and it smelled of lavender. “If you would excuse me, then. We can check out.”

  “They wanted you to stay in three days after you woke up. Head trauma, or something.”

  “They’ll live, and so will I. Now please, excuse me.” I pulled my gown around myself, as modest as I could manage, and looked back at her. Pointedly.

  “Right-o, tough guy.” She held up her hands. “I got your gun back, by the way. And Zane’s been feeding the cat.”

  I said nothing, waiting until I heard the door click shut. Only then did I strip my gown and begin to dress.

  “Did you know I’d do this?” I closed my eyes, looking inward as I pulled my trousers up and belted them. I saw Kutkha sitting there when I withdrew into the temple of my mind. The raven spirit was perched on an arching stand of silver that poured up from the floor, but there was something wrong. Something out of place.

  “You made your decision.” Kutkha ruffled his wings, fluffing out. He was acting as if he were cold. “You are a Magus. Your Will is the deciding factor of our fates. We were fortunate enough to have allies with us. But now, we are ill.”

  Frowning, I put my hands on the bed and immersed more deeply into the symbolic inner-space, the Astral chamber I’d constructed of my mind through years of meditation and discipline. It was a small temple, a black bell-shaped dome with a mirrored black floor as smooth as water under glass. There was a silver circle in the center, where Kutkha made his rest. Otherwise, it should have been largely featureless and austere.

  On one side of the temple dome, roots had pushed themselves in through cracked patches of wall. I went across to them, moving like a ghost through the mental space, and bent to examine them. They were pink and white, brachiating like neurons. I recognized them. They looked like the roots of the trees on Eden.

  The opposite wall had a patch of what looked like crackling frost from the floor to about waist-height. As I watched, the fissured pattern replicated fractionally at the edges, spreading like a bruise. The Yen.

  I pressed my lips together. “I won’t let it take me, Kutkha. Not after what I’ve seen it do to others.”

  “You say that now, my Ruach.” Kutkha shivered again. “Remember these words when it comes to tempt you. See to it you never underestimate the lesser Morphorde, Alexi. Greater men than you have fallen to a simple Yen, reveling in the temporary power and release it brings.”

  Power? Like the explosion I’d generated, the fireball?

  My gut twisted painfully enough that it shook me out of my impromptu meditation, gasping. I licked my lip, and focused on getting my belt through the loops of my trousers. The thought of it, the loss of control to something capable of infecting the HuMan mind and soul, was terrifying… but whatever was going to happen would happen, and there was little I could do except act to manage the symptoms until I found the cure: Zarya, the Gift Horse.

  Chapter 42

  About an hour later, we left the hospital and emerged int
o prismatic sunlight. It was a damp and cloudy day, and the city smelled like rain and dust. The texture of passing cars rasped on my tongue. For the first time in a very long time, I felt alive.

  Zane gave me a ride on his bike back to the Strange Kitty clubhouse, and I spent the trip clinging to his back like a barnacle lest I sway too hard to one side and fall off. Strange Kitty was still zoned off with yellow and purple scene tape, evidence of the Vigiles Magicarum’s need to territorially piss on everything supernatural, but we were able to get into the Tigers clubhouse. When I opened the garage door, Binah leaped from the pool table, meowing and chirping, and jumped up onto my shoulder. She was beginning to fill out again. Her fur was growing back, cream-white and sleek. I caught her, scratching just above her tail as she tried to wrap her entire backside around my face.

  More surprising were the children. Josie and another small boy, a face I vaguely recognized from the case file photographs, were playing Legos with two girls who had to be Ayashe’s children. Ayashe was ostensibly watching the four of them from the sofa, twitching her toe like a tail and glancing up from her copy of Cosmopolitan when we filtered inside.

  “Well, look who the cats dragged in,” she drawled. “Weren’t sure you were ever going to be back with us, Rex.”

  “I am notoriously resilient,” I said.

  “Angbutt here probably helped,” Jenner added.

  Ayashe’s mouth sloped across. “You mind your mouth around these kids here, Jennifer Tran.”

  “It’s my freakin’ clubhouse.” Jenner sniffed, lifting her nose on her way to the bar. “I’ll friggin’ slag off in my clubhouse if I friggin’ want to.”

  Talya broke away and made for the group of oblivious children and crouched down on her heels, her face alight with ready interest. “Oh my goodness! Are you building a house? Look at all these little horses. What are they doing, Mary?”

  “Nooo, that’s not a house. That’s the pirate ship, and this is the island, and those are the cowboys that are res’king the princesses from the pirates,” one of the two dark-skinned girls said, lisping through her missing front teeth. “But they’re all girls.”