Burn Artist

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “You’re going to be fine, Semych. You’re drunk and maudlin.” I crossed my arms, putting my back to the wall. I didn’t lean. Instead, I looked over to the antics down on the road. The big group of clubbers had stopped, and I had the awful feeling they were laughing at the drunken dancing. When I turned back to Vassily, I found him looking down at me, and there was something wild and fearful in his eyes. Of all the faces in all the world, Vassily’s was the one I could most reliably read and interpret… but not right now.

  “What?” I was beginning to feel peevish now. “Spit it out. You know I’m not a mindreader.”

  “I know, it’s just…” He pressed his knuckle to his mouth, squeezing his eyes shut as he searched for what he wanted to say. “Before this whole court thing, I wanted to-”

  “Hey! The fuck you looking at? Shakhtor!”

  “Fucking chernasty, fuck you want to do that again?! Put your finger up at me again!?”

  We turned to see my father and Anton, one of the Unionists, stalking across the road, bottles in hand, weaving through the moving cars like they weren’t even there. The clubbers were on the other side, some of them laughing, some of them posturing, others trying to pull their friends away.

  “I ain’t done shit! Y’all think you gonna get anywhere by coming over here?” The ringleader - a tall, fit jock with the clothes and build of a basketball player was doing exactly the wrong thing by pointing and jabbing at the direction of the two men who were closing in on him like a pair of rhinos. “You’re gonna get your teeth knocked out, is what’ll happen!”

  “Jesus haploid Christ.” Vassily pinched the bridge of his nose. Whatever he’d been about to say was lost as their friends got to their feet. Nic ran inside, while the rest jogged over to join Grigori and Anton. Before the theoretical offender could even really get his guard up, Anton drove a ham-sized fist into his face like a pile driver and then shoved him, putting him to the pavement. The others in the group converged on him, and suddenly, he was fighting for his life.

  “It never ends, does it?” Vassily called out to me as we broke at a run to join the brawl, shucking our coats off on the way.

  No, it didn’t. And I doubted it ever really would.

  Chapter 15

  We closed in with the others as 57th Street dissolved into a warzone. Women screaming, men fighting, women fighting, men trying to drag their girlfriends away from the collective thousand pounds of angry Slav who all too happily engaged with the lot of them. Vassily and I joined the fray without any uncertainty, setting on one of the guys who had managed to get Ovar in a headlock. We pulled him off and beat him from both sides, then threw him to the ground. No matter who started the fight, your people had to be the ones to finish it.

  The guy who had flipped off Grisha was now on the ground getting the shit kicked out of him by three men. In front of me, Mo lurched and dropped with a punch to the jaw. The man he was fighting came at me next, fist pulled back. I wove and ducked the haymaker, slammed him in the sternum and then up under his chin. He went forward instead of down, yelling furiously as he bore me to the ground. We kicked and punched all the way to the pavement. Vassily hauled him off by his cornrows and gave me enough room to knee him square in the balls and scrabble out and up to continue on.

  The fight was over as soon as Nicolai got out with our allies: close to twenty drunk, excited Eastern Bloc muzhiki who descended on the fight in a wave of peaked caps, Adidas tracksuits and leather. The clubbers did the sensible thing and hauled ass, pulling their fallen friends up off the ground and running as a hail of empty vodka bottles, screams and obscenities followed them down the road. As soon as it was obvious they weren’t coming back, the laughter and cheering resumed.

  “Nothing like a fight to finish a good party, eh?” Ovar offered me a hand up from where I’d been sitting. Sitting?

  “Oh, absolutely.” Nothing like watching your father hassle random passersby on a public road, more like it.

  Laughing, he hauled me up to my feet as though I weighed nothing. Ovar was a Georgian and was approximately the size and shape of a door, with the build and mustache of a circus strongman. “You almost fight better than your old man, son.”

  “Give me another year, and I’ll be better.” I was bleeding from some part of my face, and shook my head just before Vassily pressed a handkerchief into my hand and then pushed my hand against my nose. Punchy must have clipped me, but I hadn’t even felt it. “There’s no way we’re getting back in the restaurant.”

  “Fuck the restaurant! There’s stripclubs down on 8th.” Ovar flung an arm around Vassily, and cheerfully manhandled him off into the crowd. My friend gave me a mournful little wave on the way past, and I knew I was never going to hear what it was he’d been about to confess to me. All because of one man.

  Grigori was easy enough to find: he was throwing up noisily in the gutter. When he rose back up to one knee, he found me glaring down at him.

  “The fuck do you want?” He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. The vinegar reek clung to his tracksuit.

  “You’re a disgrace,” I said. “Take a goddamn look at yourself, Grigori. Just for one night.”

  “You’re asking to get hit in the head with a hammer while you’re in bed, kid.” His eyes paled, draining of life and light, and he lumbered up to his feet. “You come here like… like you’re somethin’. I made you. I made you.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Of course you won’t. You can’t reflect on yourself. You’re a narcissist. When you look in the mirror, you see some… some goddamn hero, but you’re an alcoholic, racist, slobby has-been.”

  “Big talk coming from a little man.” Grisha sneered. “You finished playing with your boyfriend over in the alley over there? Think I wouldn’t notice? If I told you once, I told you a million times that I was gonna wring your neck if you ever turned out this way.”

  “How creative.” I stood back, readying myself for his longer reach. “But you made me. If I’m gay, I must have inherited it from you. Something happen in prison you never told me about, father?”

  Grigori’s face purpled in the split second before he swung at me. I dodged the punch, and he roared with wordless fury, aiming at my face. I dodged that, too, and backed up into the thin crowd of people who had turned to face the noise. They split around me like water, freeing up space.

  “You useless fucking piece of shit! I should have kicked your whore of a mother in the stomach before you were born!” Grigori fumbled at his jacket zipper, yanking it down. He was going for his pistol.

  I pulled my little obsidian knife and fell into stance, my other palm held up in a vaguely arcane gesture. “You want to try me? You might be my ‘Kommandant’, but I’m your Volkhv, and I swear I will gut you here and go to prison with a smile if you pull that gun on me.”

  He sneered on both sides of his mouth. “Yeah, right. What are you gonna do? Curse me? I was cursed the moment you shot out of Nikla’s cunt, you little fuck!”

  It wasn’t the first time my father had threatened me with a gun, but it was the first time I’d ever threatened him with magic. The presence of the weapon only steeled something inside as I started toward him. “To Chernobog I will offer your breath-”

  Grigori had the gun out in his hand, but he faltered before pointing it at me. His pupils contracted. “Hey, what are you-?”

  “Your head. Your limbs. Your heart. Your liver, your seed.” I spat out each part of the incantation in Ukrainian, advancing on him. My father – already pale and jowly – turned the color of milk. He raised the pistol, and I shot out with a hand and grabbed it, turning it upwards and back toward his own face. “I offer all of you to the only God you’ve ever worshipped, father. Nothing. You’re a shell, shambling through every day to avoid your self-inflicted suffering.”

  “Grisha! Alexi!” Rodion called from somewhere further back.

  “I am your curse. I am your curse from today and forever.” I fixed my eyes on Grigori’s, possessed of a singular, crazed manic streng
th. He was sweating, and his arm trembled as I forced the gun up under his chin, his own finger still on the trigger. “You’re a hole. A NO-thing. You’ve been waiting for me to kill you your whole god-forsaken life.”

  At that exact moment, a wave of magic struck at me like a snake: a wave of fiery heat that roared against my magical shield, then over and around me like the plume of a comet. I pushed away from Grigori in shock, teeth gritted as I fought against the wave of invisible pressure and felt back through it, groping for the mage trying to curse me. This was my chance, my only chance to find him. I could smell sulphur, and once again heard the scrape and clang of metal, the sound of ravens laughing on top of the shredder at K&S. He was there again.

  Alarmed and angry shouts rose up around us as I refocused on the moment. I looked up through watering eyes to see my father’s pistol pointed at my face, until the energy of curse recoiled from my amulet and tunneled into Grigori Sokolsky’s heart.

  Chapter 16

  Grigori screamed and dropped the pistol, clawing at his jacket and shirt as murmurs and shouts of horror bubbled up around us. Men stared at me in fear, crossing themselves and refusing to meet my eyes, as my father tore his clothing to reveal a blazing sun wheel, charred and bleeding.

  “It was you!” He pointed at me, looking between his friends. “You all saw it! You saw him curse me! He killed Slava!”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” I snapped back.

  “Get the hell out of Alexi’s face.” Vassily spoke up from behind me.

  But the damage was done. There was a bad charge building in the crowd, dark eyes and dark intent, and suddenly, I knew what it must have felt like to be accused of witchcraft within the confines of a village.

  “I’m going to blow your fucking brains out on the street!” Grisha roared, but he was in agony and I knew it. His clumsy swing missed entirely, and I turned just as Rodion burst through the crowd.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Rodion snarled. “Alexi, my chain started burning… was that fucking spook trying to hit me again?”

  “He tried to attack me as well,” I said firmly, lifting my voice so that others could hear.

  “He cursed me! He fucking cursed me!” Grigori lunged at us, but the presence of our Avtoritet broke the gathering storm. Three men came forward to collect him by the arms and keep him away, lest he punch Rodion instead of me in his drunken temper.

  “What the hell did I walk in on?” Rodion looked between the two of us, arms crossed. “The manager came down and asked everyone to get out… did you curse Grigori? What?”

  “I emphatically did not put that curse mark on my father.” I sniffed. “He was waving a gun in my face when Kovacs made his next attempt to mark us. The talismans worked, but the attempt made on me deflected onto Grigori somehow.”

  “You fucking freak! You fag! You little bottom bitch!” My father, red-faced and screaming, had lost any ability to contain himself or pretend well enough to be persuasive. He was terrified. It was the best thing I’d ever heard, and I only had one working ear.

  “Fucking hell.” Rodion rubbed his face. “That means he’s going to call and-”

  There was a double ‘whoop-whoop’ from down the street, and the crackle of a speaker radio from one of two NYPD cruisers that had reached the scene. “Everyone move off the road! Off the road! Break it up!”

  “Fuck this.” Rodion ground his teeth, and waved at everyone who still remained. “Get out of here, you slags! Anyone who wants to keep going, we’re moving it to the Fox!”

  “Come on, Lexi. Let’s get the hell out.” Vassily shoved my jacket into my hands, and pulled me away as Grisha continued to curse and spit in my direction.

  We jogged over to my car and clambered inside, slamming the doors and locking them. Now that the adrenaline had worn off, I was shaking, not from fear, but from a deep, savage joy. Kovacs’ curse had deflected onto my father. He was going to spend the rest of his short, miserable life in terror, unable to control what was to come, and then he was going to burn to death. I wouldn’t even have to touch him. He could and would try to kill me before the inevitable… but all I had to do was hold him off for twenty-four hours, max, and then he was gone forever. It felt unreal.

  “I don’t think I want to go home just yet,” I said, pulling out onto the street and away. “Did Rodion say he was continuing the party at the Sly Fox?”

  “Eh?” Vassily looked over at me. “What? Are you serious?”

  “Am I ever not serious?”

  He shook his head. “Something’s gotten into you, man. Flirting with chicks, standing up to your old man, and now you want to go to a bar? Where’s Alexi, and what the fuck did you do to him?”

  “Someone is about to incinerate my father tonight or tomorrow. I think it’s a cause for celebration,” I said, too cheerfully.

  “Oh. Right. Jesus, you’re creepy when you smile.” Vassily sighed. “Okay, so. Let’s celebrate this morbid shit, but I want you to have a drink with me. A real, proper drink.”

  “No.” It was a reflex as much as a real denial. “No, you know I won’t drink.”

  “Well, you need to. You’re wound tighter than a watch spring and you have been for sixteen fucking years. You grind your teeth in your sleep, for fuck’s sake.”

  I recoiled a little. “I do?”

  “You do. I’m surprised you still HAVE teeth.”

  Self-conscious, I ran my tongue over them, checking for damage. “That still doesn’t mean-”

  “Seriously. I just want to see you relaxed for once,” Vassily said. “Let go of the badass monk act and live a little. You said it yourself: Grisha’s toast. There’s nothing you could do for him, even if you wanted to, and I dunno about you, but all this cursing shit is making me remember my mortality.”

  “I know what alcohol does to people. You know I don’t-”

  “Alexi.” Vassily’s voice hardened. “You’re not your dad. You’re not going to turn into a psycho rage-beast after a couple glasses of vodka and beat up someone’s puppy, okay?”

  I frowned, tongue-tied.

  “That, and the Fox is boring as shit without anything to drink.” He waved a hand, still scuffed from brawling, and lit up a cigarette out the window. “Not unless you’re looking for some old Chinese broad to sell you bootleg smokes and porno magazines. Which you can get there, by the way, if you go down that hallway in the back.”

  He was not exaggerating. The Sly Fox was a seedy dive in the old Ukrainian part of East Village, part of our wide-ranging protection racket and a favorite of our muzhiki. It was a pigsty on its better days, and tonight, it was two steps removed from a midden. I could smell urine out on the street. People weaved around and laughed outside. About twenty other people from Rodion’s party were there, laughing with the bouncer - not one of the crew, but friendly enough with the Organizatsiya to pass as one. I jammed my earplug in as we went down the stairs, descending into red-lit darkness.

  The Fox was also always busy. Rodion was already inside, as were Lev and Semyon. They both looked quite out of place in their fine linen suits. I went and found a booth while Vassily went to go and get drinks, trusting him to bring something I might find tolerable. A few passersby stopped to greet me with a mixture of shock and surprise. No one had expected me to follow the party.

  Vassily returned, and banged a short tumbler down on the table as he took his seat beside me. He had a beer and a tumbler of the same stuff, which was dark and smelled strongly of blueberries.

  “What’s this?” I regarded it warily.

  “Rakija. Blueberry moonshine. Totally up your alley.”

  My mouth drew across. I didn’t touch the drink.

  “Look, if you start trying to beat on me, I’m fully capable of pounding your ass into the pavement, alright?” Vassily slid his arm over my shoulders, and I was suddenly hyperaware of how close he was. My mouth went dry, heart pounding in a way I usually only experienced in the heat of a kill.

  Slowly, I picked up the glass a
nd sniffed. It smelled yellow and purple to me. I took a single swallow, and to my surprise, the painful noise of the bar momentarily receded. The berry flavor was dry and sharp, a little sweet, and strong enough to numb the tongue. It was the combination of taste and texture that did it, working just like peppermint oil.

  Vassily laughed at my expression. He smacked me between the shoulders, and I nearly snorted the stuff out my nose. “See? Is that so bad?”

  I looked up to see Lev watching us from the central table. He was leaning on his linked forearms while Semyon talked to Ovar and Nicolai about something, and when he noticed me observing him he averted his gaze. But he had seen me drink.

  “It’s alright,” I replied. I had another mouthful, and a strange fluttering sensation passed through my chest. I thought it was nervous butterflies at first, until I realized that the feeling was actually the muscles of my chest relaxing. Feeling oddly, slightly competitive, I drained the rest of the glass and slammed it down.

  “It doesn’t kill you to let the reins loose now and then, Lexi.” Vassily pushed the other glass to me and raised his beer. “I’ll make a hedonist out of you yet. Bud’mo!”

  “Bud’mo?” I echoed him, and fought down a twinge of baseless anxiety as I followed his lead. I already felt a bit dizzy, but Vassily was unfazed. Happily tipsy and far more at ease than he’d been at the Tea Room, Vassily looked more handsome than ever. I was fairly sure that I was flushed red, like a boiled crab.

  While he was at the bar, Lev left his place and took the seat in front of me, a small smile playing over his mouth. In the red light, his green eyes looked black.

  “I see you’re having fun, Alexi,” he said. “I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen you let loose.”