Burn Artist

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “I could break your neck in three seconds, kid. Get the fuck out of here.” My father gestured to the door. His voice was deep, low and dark. “Don’t come back.”

  “You don’t have the authority to eject me from the Organizatsiya. So I will be back.” I stared at him over Vassily’s arm. “I have as much right to be here as you do.”

  “You really think so? You think Nic will just stand here and let my limp-dick faggot son just fuck me up in front of him?”

  Nic’s expression was graven. At mention of his name, he grimaced.

  “Alexi.” Vassily put his hand on my shoulder. “Come on, man. We have better shit to do.”

  “Yeah. You do.” Nicolai’s thin face was drawn, mask-like and unreadable. “Both of you.”

  My father’s expression was unreadable. He said nothing, but I knew that his estimate of me had changed. I had moved from being a weak object to torment to a threat… and Grigori only knew one response to physical threats.

  I shook Vassily off, and left the room ahead of him, straight-backed and buzzing with adrenaline. The nerves only hit me when we were out in the corridor, and even then, I felt giddy. Elated. I would have done it. For the first time in my life, I could imagine myself killing him. Really killing him, and I smiled a small, frosty smile, the knife still in hand.

  “Put that thing away, Lexi,” Vassily said. His voice was hushed, like we were in church. “That was not okay. He could have broken your wrist, he could have-”

  “I’m going to kill him.” I kept walking. I didn’t even bother to keep my voice down.

  “You can’t. He’s your dad, for one thing, and he’s Kommandant, for another…”

  As Vassily continued justifying the many reasons that I couldn’t murder my own father, I found myself tuning out. Something had changed in that split second moment where I’d drawn the knife. I’d seen it in his eyes, felt it in the way he’d pushed the point of the blade against his neck. My father hated himself as much as he hated me and the rest of the human race. He wanted release, but he was too cowardly to do it himself.

  We reached the crossroads of the back-of-house. The exit to the car park was in one direction, the entry to the club on the other. Vassily jerked his head toward the club. “You want to go out and like… go watch the girls or something? Bet you could talk that goth chick into the best lapdance of your life.”

  “No,” The thought of touching a stranger – having a stranger touch me in ways I had never been touched, ways which were bound to be painful – made my skin crawl. “I need a shower. After that, I need to go for Kovacs.”

  “Oh, come on,” Vassily said. “You literally nearly just got fried by that fire thing. You’re not the Terminator. You need to sleep.”

  “I need to stop any more of our men from dying by conflagration.”

  “A what in the who now?”

  I sighed. “Dying in a fire, Vassily.”

  “When you stop speaking real words, it’s time to go home.”

  “I’m not tired,” I replied. “I’m hopped up. I need to find Kovacs tonight, before the party tomorrow. You know Rodion won’t buy it if I’m out in the field and skip his birthday. He’ll think I’m avoiding him, now that Grigori is going to go and bitch me out.”

  “Yeah, well, unlike Grisha, you actually do your job. Rodya won’t care if I tell him where you’re at.”

  “That’s not the point.” I turned and started for the door to the parking lot. “The point is that I’ve left a job half done.”

  “Alexi… don’t listen to your dad. He was trying to get a rise out of you.”

  “I got a rise out of him.” The high was fading. Now, I was irritable and hungry, hopped up and in need of something to punch, preferably more than once. “Shower. Change of clothes, then Kovacs. It’s a Friday night, and at the very least, I can find out where he lives.”

  Chapter 13

  I found the apartments that the elemental had shown me without much trouble. Gold Street Apartments were new, renovated warehouse condos, fancy modern apartments bankrolled by the Mob. They were entirely out of place between the drab public housing towers on one side of the block, and old waterfront factories on the other. Fifteen minutes of note-taking and some surveying was enough for me to decide what to do about him. It involved a pair of binoculars and a sniper rifle.

  If I’d marked Kovacs correctly, he was an Arrogant Douchewizard, T.M. Spooks generally come in three varieties: The Crazy Street Shaman, the Secretive Professional, and the Arrogant Douchewizard. They’re the guys - and they’re nearly all men - who wear robes to restaurants, carry carved staves or amulets out on the street, and generally make a scene of themselves at every opportunity. They can be overt, with the robes and Staff of Power thing, or subtle. The subtle kind are those annoying Freemason types who have a nudge and a wink for every bit of ‘hidden’ esoterica, no matter how mundane.

  The condos were on Gold Street. I found them by orientating with the three public housing towers and then driving around the nearby blocks until the elemental’s image overlay reality. The setting was almost too good to be true. There was an old disused building right across from the balcony that I’d seen, a gutted factory with no security to speak of. There was no guard patrolling the condos themselves, and I was quite sure that the extent of Kovacs mundane security was a passworded entry into his fancy new apartment building. If he was counting on magical defenses sunk into the foundations, he was kidding himself. The consecration of buildings hadn’t been a standard practice since the 1880s.

  I found and disarmed a single ward on the warehouse across the street. There were the usual locks and physical security measures on it - a padlock, which was easily removed with bump keys - and only one bump-proof lock on the door that I had to pick. Once I was in, I took the stairs to the roof and set up, the wind blowing my hair across my eyebrows. It was warm and breezy, and while the wind wasn't expressly in my favor, it was soft enough to not be a huge handicap for a high-powered rifle.

  The sniper rifle wasn't a gun I got to use often, but it had several advantages. For one thing, it had completely interchangeable, replaceable parts. I'd never used the same barrel twice on this gun, which was important for not getting done for murder. For another, I had no doubt that Kovacs had festooned himself with magic designed to protect against magical and physical attack - at close range. Wards designed to turn a bullet could only take so much kinetic energy and were nearly all designed with pistols in mind. In addition, the gun was quiet despite its size, and the single, precise crack was rarely interpreted as a threat even within an urban jungle like this one.

  The biggest impediment I faced was myself. As I assembled the piece and fixed the stand, I found that my heart just really wasn't in it. I was tired and burned out. Vassily had been right about my fatigue and the need to rest, but time was not on our side. Besides, killing Kovacs would solve the problem of my Avtoritet’s birthday present. Nothing says ‘happy birthday’ like giving someone the severed hands of their enemy in a fancy box.

  I set the muzzle of the rifle as far back from the edge of the warehouse as I could. When I had a good, steady position, I lay on my belly with the binoculars, braced the weapon in against my shoulder, and settled down to wait for life to stir behind the curtains of Kovacs’ bedroom window. And wait I did... two hours of nothing, in fact, before a light turned on further back in the apartment and shadows began to move across the walls inside.

  “Finally.” I shuffled around on the ground, stiff and uncomfortable, and swapped out the binoculars for the scope of the rifle. After several tense minutes of inactivity, I began to hum a half-remembered song under my breath to pass the time, waiting for the first physical glimpse of this warlock who could curse a man to burn to death.

  I was just getting into the refrain when the light turned on and a person stumbled into the room, spinning around to face the door where they had just come from. My heart sped, and my finger tensed on the trigger, freezing in place when I saw
the hair - long, blonde, teased and curled. A woman, not a man. Frowning, I forced my finger light and resuming squinting down the scope, redoubling my concentration.

  The woman was tall, leggy and laughing with a model's white smile as she spoke to someone out of my sight. Quite abruptly, she reached down and pulled her tank top off over her head and took her bra with it, spilling her breasts from underneath. My face flooded with heat; my head jerked up and back, and I cursed as I nearly took my own eye out on the edge of the scope.

  Fantastic. With my eye itching and smarting, I refocused on the other side. There was another woman in there now - dark haired, small and buxom. She was kissing the blonde passionately and, I thought, drunkenly. I found myself feeling increasingly lost as I watched the pair of them tumble onto the bed in a heaving wave of long hair and limbs. Neither of these women looked like anyone named Eric.

  My cheeks were burning as I forced myself to stay at the scope, and on the scene in the bedroom. If the women cared that the blind was open and their privates were on public display to all and sundry, it didn’t show. Clothes went flying, and the blonde reared up on her knees - fully nude, by this point - and laughed as she turned to face back toward the entry to the bedroom.

  And then, finally, a man appeared in my narrow round frame. He was further back in the room and out of focus, lurking in the shadows on the far side of the bed. Just enough of him was visible that I could tell he was male. I screwed the eyepiece around to zoom in on him, chewing a flake of skin off my lip as I looked back down and recoiled. Yes. Definitely male. Definitely naked, and judging by what he was doing with his hand, apparently impressed by the cavorting taking place on top of his bed. He was hairy, trim but fleshy, with a sullen, heavy face and curly black hair. Not unattractive, under other circumstances... but my god. I should have listened to Vassily and just gone to bed.

  Exasperated, I lined up the shot, exhaled, and was about to squeeze the trigger when the blonde sat bolt upright and put her back between me and Kovacs. My face ticced. She bent down toward him, ass to the window, while the brunette got up against him around her girlfriend and started to kiss him.

  "Oh, for fuck's sake..." Shooting a mafia contractor like Kovacs would attract the NYPD just long enough for them to figure out his identity and then blow it off in favor of pursuing other, livelier criminals. Shooting two women along with Kovacs was the basis of a major investigation, complete with media circus and grieving families. They wouldn't stop until they'd followed the trail all the way back to CelTech and my boss, and if Homicide turned up on Rodion's doorstep, he would be greatly displeased.

  I peeled myself away and sat back on my rump, rubbing my eyes, and just left my face in my hands for a while. It was dark in there. Dark was nice.

  After I’d done my best to scrub the imagery from my mind, I had another look down the line of sight. They were so tangled up that it was like trying to aim at a jellyfish swarm. There was no way that I was going to get a clear shot for at least half an hour. I settled for rolling over onto my side, where I drank my cold coffee in surly silence and waited for my target to finish disporting himself so that I could do my job and get home, hopefully before five am.

  Now and then, I rolled back and peered through the scope, regretting it more each time I looked, but there came a point where they finally seemed to be wrapping up... and that's when I regained my focus. It was possible to take the shot tonight, but that was reliant on the women being gone.

  Naturally, pair of them got under the covers and snuggled up together. Of course. If I was going to take the shot, there would be witnesses to the actual death, but my chances of escape were good. When the women lay down and Kovacs sat up, the back of his head facing the window, my eyes narrowed as I found my will, centered within the stillness of my mind, and fired.

  There was a dull crack through my earplugs. The bullet hit the glass and... stopped. A vivid, bright violet pattern flared across the window, an intricate alien geometry visible from my position across the street. Kovacs jumped to his feet wildly, lighter and everything else in his hands thrown up and away with shock. I felt the backrush of energy even as I yanked the rifle back and down, rolled with it, and scrambled away with my bag and the gun.

  I hadn’t missed. The line of sight was perfect. I knew a ward when I saw it... but the shockwave of energy, the taste of the magic was not the same as the curses and the fire elemental trap, I was sure of it. It was stronger, deeper, more powerful... richer, for lack of a better term. And darker, much darker. The magic left a bad taste in my mouth, though I couldn't have said why. The magical backlash had a smell, too: an awful rotten, putrid sugary smell, like five-day old meat left in the trash.

  Choking back bile, I ran down the stairs and onto the street to find someone standing outside my car. He looked up in alarm as I burst out of the warehouse. There was someone inside the cabin, fumbling inside the steering column. As if the night couldn’t get any better, some asshole was trying to steal my rent-a-car.

  I leveled the sniper rifle at the lookout and locked the bolt in place with a loud 'snak snik'. “Hey!”

  The lookout shouted as he turned tail. The guy inside the car hit his head on the way out, and the pair of them both stumbled away, gawping, as I threw my gear, got inside, and slammed the door. I jammed the key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing. The piece of dog shit had cut the ignition wire.

  Sweating, trying not to fumble, I got a flashlight and had a look to see how far he'd gotten on hotwiring my ride. Genius here had cut and prepped the battery wire, but not connected the ignition. After a headcheck to see if anyone had followed me out, I set about finishing the job. It was times like this I wished for real eldritch might. In my fantasies, I spoke a word of power and the car would surge to life. In reality, I was trying not to let the sweat from my forehead drip onto the wires as I fucked with them in the near-darkness, flashlight clamped between my teeth.

  I heard a shout, and then the triple rapport of a handgun going off around the corner of the warehouse, followed by return fire from the would-be car thieves. I ducked instinctively, dropping the wires, and then came up again to finish wrapping them. They were almost done, so close to being done...

  In the rear-view mirror, I saw Kovacs - barefoot and in a bathrobe - running down the road with both of the women he'd been fooling around with. The blonde was now back in her jeans and tank top and toting a hunting rifle; her girlfriend had a pistol and was wearing nothing but lacy pink panties which were in stark contrast to her dark olive skin. Now I could see them up close, I was fairly sure they were Sicilians. Mob molls.

  Finally, I touched the wires together, and the car roared to life. The noise and sound drew fire: my rear windshield took three, four, five plugs before it burst in across the back seat with an explosion of glass rubble. I put the car in gear and floored it, fishtailing a little before I threw the handbrake and roared off down the road. Straight down the road, and only straight, because I tried to turn the corner and realized I'd forgotten to break the steering lock.

  “God dammit!” I struck the wheel as hard as I could, screeching to a halt in the middle of the road while the three musketeers ran up the pavement behind me, guns blazing. I jammed the key in the ignition and turned it until I could control the wheel, but by then, they were on me. The blonde sighted down like a hunter behind me, and I barely got down and against the driver’s side door as a round blew through the cabin and smashed my front windscreen as efficiently as it had the rear. Half blind and navigating mostly by feel, I backed up at full speed to scatter them, then floored it and tore off forward again. I swung around the next corner, checking back to see where my pursuers were headed. They were still on foot, and only the rifle now had enough reach to nail me. I saw the woman aim and fire, but no bullet came for me. She dropped the muzzle and began to mess with the bolt. It had jammed.

  I drove further and faster than they could run. Once it was safe to get a breather, I pulled over into a dark alley and al
lowed myself the luxury of hyperventilating for several minutes, shaking my hands and rocking in the throes of overstimulation. That activity burned itself out into tics and grimaces of pent-up frustration by the time I pulled my gear over and broke up the gun, filed the barrel, and stashed the rest behind the back seats. Rodion wasn’t paying me enough for this shit. I was out and alive, but if I wasn’t pulled over tonight, it would be a miracle.

  Barely thirty minutes later, the tell-tale red and blue begin to strobe behind me. I slowed the car of my own accord with a sigh, pulling over to the side of the road so that the cops could catch up to me. So much for miracles. It was times like these I remembered why I was an atheist.

  Chapter 14

  By the time I got home - exhausted, sweaty, and six hundred dollars poorer after bribing the cop who pulled me over – the last thing I wanted to think about was the party I was supposed to be preparing for tonight. But think about it I did, because it was at least as important as the issue with Maslak… at least as far as the Organizatsiya was concerned.

  My Avtoritet was hosting his birthday bash at The Russian Tea Room, which I personally thought was in poor taste. For one thing, most people in the Organizatsiya were Ukrainian or from the countries south of Russia - Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan - and were emphatically not Russian and even more emphatically not Moskvichi, people from Moscow. I imagined that visiting the Tea Room as a Ukrainian was a bit like going to a Confederate-themed restaurant as a Black person: not particularly dangerous as of 1986, but full of disquieting reminders of the past. The overwrought Imperial theme was tacky for someone who’d grown up angry on stories of national revolts, genocide, and the suppression of our language and literature.

  After four hours of unquiet sleep and a day spent making talismans, I got my best suit together and stocked up on caffeine. I was well and truly buzzed by the time Vassily and I arrived, fashionably late and without a hair out of place. We had to line up for a minute while the doorman checked off names, and before we went in, I pulled Vassily aside and pressed a silver Hand of Fatima pendant into his palm.