“No they’re not!” The boy whined, but it was clear that he knew he was outnumbered.
“Nuh-uh. Girls is what Josie wanted! You got the island!”
“There’s boys on the island!”
Josie looked up at Talya, but then gazed on past her to stare at me. She was dressed in fresh clothes, a pink t-shirt and jeans that hung a little loosely on her emaciated body. Her hair was clean, a shoulder-length red tumble of curls, and her cuts were healing into scars on her pale freckled skin. The haunted, gaunt lines were fading from her face, but as her eyes met mine, I felt a flash of something low in my gut. It was not an emotion. It was an instinct.
The little girl clambered to her feet under the watchful eye of Ayashe, who didn’t stop her as she crossed the room towards me. I bent to one knee, holding Binah to my shoulder so she didn’t fall. The cat jumped off anyway, and flopped onto the floor in front of me to present her belly for worship.
Josie drew up about a foot from Binah’s recumbent, purring form. She looked up at me, brow furrowed. “You look sick.”
Up close, I met Josie's eyes a second time, and I saw it again: the glimpse of something numinous and golden and powerful. Her Neshamah. Josie had undergone Shevirah.
“So do you,” I replied. “But I hope we’ll both get better.”
Josie’s lips twitched nervously. “Tally said you were in the hostipal… umm… hos-pi-tal. But I don’t think that’s what you got sick with.”
“The doctors had to do some surgery.” Could she sense the Yen, now? This was a novel experience, one of the few times in my life that I had actually spoken to a child face to face. “I’m feeling better. What do you see?”
She glanced down, almost coyly, and then looked back up at me with her lip in her teeth. “It’s the lady with the rope around her neck.”
I felt it like a blow to the stomach and drew a sharp breath. I couldn’t help it. Her words should have drawn up a memory, but all I saw was blackness, and all I felt was the urge to wash my hands.
“Can I pet your kitty?”
Her voice startled me out of the moment of inversion. I cleared my throat, and didn’t try to smile. “Of course you can. She would like nothing more than for you to pet her.”
“Okay.” Josie didn’t smile much, and she radiated concentration as she knelt to pet Binah. The girl hadn’t been identified as a mage before her kidnapping, but she was now a spook in the making.
My tongue ached. I wanted to tell her how to hide her power, help her shield her mind and fake the tests that the Vigiles were sure to run on her if they ever noticed. Given what she had been through and what she had done to survive, there was a good chance they wouldn’t. The only reason I could see it was because she trusted me. As soon as Josie looked away, she was guarded, her mind shielded by the brittle barricade of dissociation. Her guilelessness was gone, and she would be reluctant to share knowledge of the comforting voice in her mind with adults. Shevirah was the shattering of innocence. For better or worse, Josie’s was gone.
Somewhat disconcerted, I left her to play with Binah and made a beeline for Ayashe. She set down her magazine and stood, and we shook hands. She motioned to the sofa beside her in offering.
“Please excuse me, but bending at the waist is painful. I prefer to stand.” I let go of her long fingers, and crossed my arms. Carefully. “Jenner told me what you dug up on John.”
Ayashe scoffed, and her lip curled in disgust. “You know what the worst part is? Me and Michael and Jenner, we were the ones who accidentally fed him all that knowledge about the Laws. Every damn… uh… durn thing. All he had to do was talk to the young Weeders he met, and listen to us at the Convocations. He somehow learned enough to lie his way into our inner circle. His real name was Harold Ryan, we think. He wasn’t even Native American. One of the Pine Ridge elders is flying out here to make sure he didn’t desecrate anything the tribes donated to the Museum.”
“What a mess.” I stretched the muscles of my neck, popping something in my shoulder. “What about The Deacon? Vanya?”
“We made some arrests,” Ayashe said, “But we can only hold the men that were in the pictures. We nabbed Ivan – Vanya – and about ten other guys. We’ll probably be able to charge four or five of them once we verify they match the pictures.”
“There is some merit to the way I do things.” I smiled a thin, grim smile.
“Maybe. If the images are admissible in court.” Ayashe seemed to waver between speculative approval and irritation, which I suspected was as much a rhinoceros thing as it was an FBI agent quality. “We have no fuuu-freakin’ idea who this ‘Deacon’ is. He’s not in any of the photos. There’s some texts from a ‘Deacon’ on the UseNet logs on the computer, but no way to follow them back to a sender. All his messages are encouraging the others to keep things down low, too.”
I bowed my head. “Unfortunate. From my own experiences, I can warn you that he is an extremely powerful mage, one that Vanya knows personally. Besides that, the Organizatsiya has excellent lawyers. Be careful.”
“You ain’t got no idea how careful I’m gonna be.” She pointed at the girls. “See those two fluffalumps? They’re ten. I’ve worked this job for twelve years and I’ll work it for twelve more. By the time they’re twenty-two, they’ll be some fine young women and I’ll be looking to retire. Anyone comes near my kids, I don’t care how powerful they think they are. I’ll trample the son-of-a-bitch.”
“Momma, you said a bad word.” Mary turned around, solemn in the way that only children admonishing adults could be.
“Yeah, momma.” Jenner called out from the bar, a bottle of Jack Daniels in hand.
“Uhhg.” Ayashe rubbed at her eyes. “Fine, yeah, okay. You got me. Just ignore your momma’s fat mouth and go back to playing with your horses, baby.”
The girl nodded, satisfied. “When’s daddy coming?”
“He’ll be here at six to pick us up, sugar.” Ayashe waved her back to her game with a hand.
Both Josie and the boy on the ground tensed visibly at the word ‘daddy’. I understood all too well.
Neither Zane or I were really feeling the cowboy-pirate Legos and parenting thing, so we withdrew into the inner part of the house, leaving Talya to play and Jenner to drink herself blind. Angkor had the good sense to sneak away and was already asleep in the bunkroom, half-naked and snoring. He had a washcloth over his eyes, and he was lying on top of the covers. Like a bum.
“My GOD, that’s annoying,” I said, glaring at him on the way past.
“What? Why?” Zane glanced down as well, but his expression wasn’t so much one of disapproval as open admiration.
“Covers are meant to… well… cover things.” I gestured at Angkor’s recumbent form, trying very hard not to look. He was well-muscled and entirely too aesthetic. “Like shirtless Korean men.”
“Lighten up, Mrs. Grundy.” Zane smirked, the first real humor I’d seen out of him since my first night at Strange Kitty.
I sat down heavily on the edge of the opposite bed and set my bag of ruined clothes and knick-knacks on the floor. “You really do come from an academic household. Where did you pick that up? Nabokov?”
“Uhh…” Zane cleared his throat, and rubbed his hand back over the dense stubble on his head. “Absolutely Fabulous, actually. TV show.”
Zane’s discomfort was mildly intriguing, but not as much as the letter I’d picked up from the hospital. I took it out of the bag and tapped it against my hand. The envelope was stiff. “I see. So, in matters unrelated to television, I was wondering: Can you teach me to ride a motorcycle?”
Zane perked up a little, turning back from his locker to face me. “Sure. Be happy to. We can go do it once you’re back on your feet properly. I mean… I guess we have a few spare bikes now.”
“I wouldn’t want to use anything that belonged to someone’s estate.”
“Duke’s chopper is still in the yard.” The light in Zane’s eyes dimmed, and he turned back to pull out
his towel and shower kit. “He didn’t have anyone else in his life besides the club. He’d want someone to use it… it’s a great bike.”
“I’ll put it to good use.” I ran my nail under the seal and opened the envelope. There was a Polaroid photo inside, face down. Handwritten on the back, someone had scrawled: ‘Thanks for all the help. Your move.’
I turned it over, puzzled. My ears began to ring. I stood up from the bed slowly, my face stiff and cold, skin tight.
Vassily and Mariya Lovenko were buried next to each other under their own headstones: tall rectangles of black granite laser etched with their names and portraits, and flat slabs of stone laid over the top of their graves. Vassily’s cover stone had been moved to the side and shattered, exposing the sarcophagus wall and the mound of soil inside. Beside the grave was a small Bobcat excavator. Sitting inside of it, his foot braced up on the frame, was Nicolai. He was looking at someone out of the frame, grinning, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.
“What?” Zane had stopped in the middle of the room, towel in hand. His brow was furrowed. “What’s the matter?”
“They’re dead.” I ground out each word, fighting the urge to crush the photograph in my hand.
Zane stared at me, dumbfounded. Angkor sat up, startled awake by the rage in my voice and in the energy of the room.
“Every one of these motherfuckers is dead. Sergei, Nic, this Deacon. All of them.” The cold was spreading through me, blooming through my limbs like ink in water. “I need a ride to Green-Wood Cemetery.”
Thanks for reading!
Want to keep going? Join my mailing list and get a free copy of BURN ARTIST, the prequel novella to BLOOD HOUND, and also download the first Advance Reading Chapter of Book 3, COLD CELL: http://eepurl.com/ch_6Jn
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More Books by James Osiris Baldwin
The Alexi Sokolsky Series
Available now from Amazon and Kindle Unlimited
Burn Artist | Book 0
Blood Hound | Book 1
Stained Glass | Book 2
Join my mailing list and get your free copy of Burn Artist, the Hound of Eden Prequel: http://eepurl.com/ch_6Jn
Other Titles
God Has Heard – Available in Paperback and Kindle
When God is used as a weapon, nothing is sacred
Fix Your Damn Book! – A Self-Editing Guide for Authors
Paperback, Kindle & Hardcover. Read on Kindle Unlimited!
Afterword & Acknowledgments
I have known several pathological liars over the course of my life, the preeminent one being my own father.
My dad’s big thing was lying about his medical training and experience. His lies rarely deceived me, because I knew not to trust him, but he constantly and effectively bullshitted his way into everything from crime scenes to car accident recovery scenes. He made friends with policemen and EMTs, learned their language and shorthand, found clothes that matched that community, and slipped into it with hardly a ripple.
GOD knows how many people’s health he sabotaged with this behavior. My father was a drug addict with no serious medical experience whatsoever. He was untrained, uneducated, but charismatic and clever. He was extremely bigoted, violent and abusive. He was also a big fan of Donald Trump. Make of that what you will.
This book was written during dark and exciting times. Dark, in that the international stage and politics in particular has taken a hard swing to the Right, where facts mean nothing and one man’s ignorant opinion is considered to be as important – if not more important – than facts. Exciting on a personal level, as I was married to my beloved Canth and am seeking to live with her in Seattle permanently.
As always, this book could not have been written without the help of my family and friends. All of House Decided and #House_Whitebird, Stacy, who did the copyediting, Toni and Aaron for their laughter and generosity, Tom R. for keeping me sane during 2015, Joey for dialogue sketches so funny they make me puke, and to all my other online and IRL friends for their many individual contributions to my mental and physical health.
I hope you'll join me for the rest of the series. My mailing list is where I send out art, previews, free short stories and microfiction and other news. I will be soon be writing an Alexi novelette, BURN ARTIST, which is free for mailing list subscribers.
You can sign up here: http://eepurl.com/ch_6Jn.
If you enjoyed STAINED GLASS, please consider leaving a review on Amazon to share your thoughts. Reviews are a great way to help other readers find new books and new authors to enjoy.
Here are the links to post a review:
Amazon: http://amzn.com/B01J2QT0H6
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You can also get in touch with me (outside of the mailing list) at: [email protected].
The hashtag on Twitter is #StainedGlass. If you want to chat, add me with @Jamesosirisb in your Tweets.
Find me on Facebook at: www.facebook.com/jamesosirisb
While you’re waiting for Cold Cell, here are some recommended titles: all available on Amazon!
Guilty By Association: Supernatural murders in a modern Wild West. Get it here: http://amzn.to/2dstVQk
Charm School: A young mage must fight his demon master and find his own purpose and freedom. Get it here:
http://amzn.to/2dsuZn1
Grave Beginnings: Vincent Graves is a body-hopping detective. Incarnated into the bodies of the slain, he must solve their murders in a race against the clock. Get it here: http://amzn.to/2dhoxPc
Vincent Graves wakes up in the body of a man who died in an asylum and has to find his unearthly murderer. Get it here:
http://amzn.to/2dyLbRd
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Osiris Baldwin has been a bouncer, worked as a magazine staff editor for the Australian Journal of Dementia Care, and is a freelance writer, web-designer, ghostwriter, and journalist. He works as an advocate for people living with dementia.
A global nomad who moves from country to country and cafe to cafe, he divides the year between travelling the world and living in Seattle, WA, with his beautiful girlfriend and a hopelessly codependent, prissy parrot. Occasionally, he sleeps.
In no particular order, he loves cats, the Occult, war history, dinosaurs, space and Carl Sagan.
Contact James by email: [email protected].
View more books at: http://amazon.com/author/jamesosiris
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Hound of Eden: Book 2
Books in the Alexi Sokolsky series
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
More Books by James Osiris Baldwin
Other Titles
Afterword & Acknowledgments
&n
bsp; While you’re waiting for Cold Cell, here are some recommended titles: all available on Amazon!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stained Glass: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 2) Page 38
