Burn Artist

by James Osiris Baldwin

Chapter 18

  I sat at the table in stunned silence for a moment as hope began to fade, then fear and disappointment dawned. The tension I’d lost in my stomach and shoulders knotted back into my muscles as the seconds crawled on by. There was a risk of Mariya being hit if Vassily kept the medallion on, and a risk of Vassily being hit if he took it off to try and save his sister’s life: the exact predicament that Kovacs hoped for, in the event of him encountering a mage strong enough to fend off his magic.

  “Well…” I licked my lips, and rested back in the chair. “It’s unlikely that Kovacs will try to curse you within twelve hours. He tried and failed to lay magic on two people last night, and he only targeted one before that…”

  “No!” Vassily slammed the wet plate down onto the metal counter, and I winced at the painful, sharp sound.

  “Vassily, I’m not saying-”

  “I can’t fucking believe you! I know you’re a stone cold motherfucker, but I don’t care how much your hate your dad. This is my sister we’re talking about! Your sister!”

  I held up my hands. “I wasn’t saying I wouldn’t go do the job. I was just thinking about the level of risk relative to-”

  “Relative to what?” He turned on me, eyes flashing. “Relative to your fucking blood feud? We don’t have twelve hours, Alexi. Rodion called at midday. It’s four in the fucking afternoon. We have six hours, at best, before this guy regains enough mojo to try again. And then what? How many people would have to burn alive so that you can breathe easy?”

  “I’m going to do the job,” I repeated.

  “But you needed to think about it.” Vassily stared at me.

  “I think about everything.”

  His mouth sloped to the side. “I know you do. And I also know that you’re a terrible fucking liar. You were sitting there weighing it up.”

  I flushed, shoulders hunching in, and fought past a wave of irritation and self-righteousness while staring at my remaining tea. He didn’t know what it was like to have to deal with Grigori, and he never would really get it.

  “Part of the problem is that we now have no idea where Kovacs is casting his magic from,” I said. “We literally have to catch him in the act of performing the curse to locate him. By that time, Grisha could be dead and you or Mariya could have been attacked.”

  “What’s the likelihood of him going back to K&S?” Vassily’s voice was still sharp, but he seemed at least somewhat soothed by my discomfort. Strange how that worked.

  “Moderate, but not certain. I know that if it was me doing this kind of magic, I’d have multiple sites of power, places where everything as set up to facilitate the Art that I typically worked… I’d have one at home, and several others scattered around the city. It really depends on just how arrogant he is.”

  “How arrogant is he?”

  I sighed testily. “Arrogant enough to have a threesome in front of a sliding glass door leading out onto his balcony – with the curtains open – when he knows there's people gunning for him.”

  Vassily’s mouth stopped moving for a moment, hanging open, before he squinted and returned to his seat. “Hang on… What?”

  “That’s why my first attempt went bad. The events in the room made it very difficult to get a clean shot. There were two women in there, and they kept… getting in the way.”

  Incredulousness replaced some of his anger. “Wait. Are you telling me that you watched this guy bang two chicks through your scope?”

  “The women were doing most of the… things… with each other.” I stared down at the tabletop.

  “That’s like… a one in a million chance event, man. Just think about the twisted probability involved in that scenario.” Vassily leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands linked in the space between his thighs. “… Were they hot?”

  I threw up my hands. “Look, no. I didn’t look at them, and… if I’m to go and do anything about this tonight, I really don’t need the Technicolor motion picture of Kovacs’ sex life running through my head while I’m putting rounds through his face.”

  “Well, say there’s a moderate chance of Kovacs being at K&S. That means we need to run multiple operations across different sites.” Vassily began to patter his hands on his knees, thinking. “I’ve got an idea of how to organize this. Rodya’s at Vanya’s place down Coney Island way… so let’s pack up and go there instead of Mariya’s. I don’t want to worry her.”

  “I have to face Kovacs alone,” I said. “Confronting a mage in his place of power should only be attempted by another mage.”

  “What? Is it like some wizard code of honor? Wands at fifty paces?” Vassily got to his feet again, agitated and animated, and strode off past me out of the kitchen and down the hall.

  “No. I have to wrest the energy of the circle from him and claim it for myself.” I also got up, not half as spry as he was. “Bystanders are at risk of being exploited, and there’s not enough body armor in the world to stop this kind of magic at close range.”

  “The amulet won’t help?” He called back from his bedroom door.

  “No. I will be hard pressed enough to defend myself, let alone other people.” I rolled my shoulders back, heading in the same direction.

  “Well, I trust you. Just tell me that you’re going to do this tonight. I don’t want to risk Mariya, not now, not ever. This isn’t her life.”

  “I’ll fight with everything I have to stop her from getting involved.” And I would, but it hurt to have to think about it.

  Dry-mouthed and headache, I left the kitchen and went to my room to prepare for what was surely going to be a long, violent night. Of all the things that happened at the Fox, I could still hang onto Lev’s words. Let nature take its course. There was still hope. The wheels of politics would continue to turn in the background, and Vassily was right. This wasn’t Mariya’s life, not at all. She was as innocent as anyone could be in this business.

  Chapter 19

  “The asshole gave us until nine p.m. tonight to make the call to Maslak,” Rodion said. “And there’s no way in hell we’re going to. Vassily recommends that we send one team to the spook’s condo, one team to nab Maslak, and then we make him speak on the phone to his pet spook while we have him bent over a barrel. Even if he’s being protected by Scappeti’s crew, they ain’t shit against Nic’s team when we get the guys together.”

  We were gathered with him, Nicolai and Petro, Yuri Beretzniy – a great grizzled mountain of a man and one of Nic’s old war buddies – Semyon and Lev in the swanky den of our newest safehouse, a penthouse apartment in a highrise overlooking Luna Park. There was horilka, of course. The purple rotten smell of it challenged my tenuous hold over my stomach.

  “Alexi is going to K&S to do the Gandalf and the Balrog thing,” Vassily had a drink, though I had no idea how he could deal with it after the night before. When his remark received blank looks from around the table, he had a sip and tried again. “He’s going to go face down the spook on his own turf, in other words.”

  “Is Grisha able to go with us to get Maslak?” Nic rasped. “I’ll send men out to check his house, his office, and a couple of the Scappeti safehouses that were leaked to me, but I could use the muscle.”

  “You can go to 6th Street and ask him,” Rodion said. “But you know what he’s like. This ain’t something he can fight. He’s trying to stay calm.”

  Calm? Grigori, calm? If they meant that he was torturing someone’s Golden Retriever while drinking himself unconscious, then yes, I supposed he could be described as being in a state of calm. When my father holed himself up like that, it was a prelude to a late-night homicidal rampage. No matter how emasculated he felt by his fate, my father only had two responses to anything that happened to him: uncontrollable rage and displacement of responsibility onto the nearest convenient target.

  “If he’s bitching and moping, I’ll pull him out of it,” Yuri rumbled. “The old bear listens to me.”

  Rodion nodded. “Then you better get your ass down to his
house. We’ve got to time this right.”

  “I have preparations I must make in the time we have,” I said, almost interrupting. “To coordinate it correctly, I should reach K&S while he’s conducting the rite at around 9pm. For your bluff to be effective, you’ll need to have secured Maslak before that time.”

  “Then we better get a move on,” Nicolai said. “It’s already 1600.”

  “I’ll go to check the condo with Lev and Semyon,” Vassily said. Semyon nodded.

  “Then let’s do it. Old soldiers to the fore, intelligence to the rear, our spook to the avant garde. Let’s sweep these fuckers up.” Rodion smacked his hands on his thighs and stood. We all rose, and I turned to Vassily and Semyon.

  “I’m going to have to be at home by myself for a period of time, undisturbed,” I said. “This requires preparation.”

  “Do what you have to do, oh Jedi Master.” Vassily saluted me. “May the Force be with you.”

  Preparations consisted of painkillers and B vitamins, first of all, because I was still hungover. Once my eyes stopped throbbing, I settled into meditation and planned out my strategy. Magic written onto my skin was the first line of defense, followed by the bone amulet. A knife, soft body armor, and other basic weaponry went on over that. And then there was the mental preparation, the most important part of all.

  I knelt in front of my altar, and considered the arrangement of occult paraphernalia that surrounded the Wardbreaker, still lying in its preservative circle. My tarot card for the week, set out last Sunday, was The Sun: the card of friendship, hope, positivity. I’d been trying to stay hopeful about Vassily’s court date.

  To do this, I had to banish my petulance and disappointment, and that meant that I had to do something that Grigori was incapable of. I had to think about him and myself and come to peace with the reality of our situation. As I dwelt on the matter, I realized that for all the things I hated about Grigori, it had been him who had unwittingly guided me into piercing the veil between material reality and the metaphysical. As I’d watched him kill with the open question of a child’s wonderment, I’d come to understand the fragility of life. The first time I watched the lights fade out of a man’s eyes led to the question of: “Where did he go?” My father’s narcissism made me wonder what the alternatives were available to me, and his violence had toughened me, even as it had turned me cold. His nihilism had resulted in my interest in fate and self-determination, which resulted in my investigation of the occult and then my first moments of magical awakening. Tiny acts of telekinesis, at first, and then the creation and destruction of wards. I’d learned magic in the library at college, and practiced it while stealing cars for Nicolai. I would never love him, and the day he died would be one of the happiest and most victorious days of my life… but I could deal with it for a little while longer.

  My mind fell still, and I could lapse into a proper trance. Meditation on The Sun and myself let me open up to the reality beyond New York, beyond the small world of the Organizatsiya. There was a sense of presence that came to the fore in meditation, a presence with many names. Aleister Crowley called it the Holy Guardian Angel. Jung called it Anima or Animus. The Romans called it Genius. Some other, more powerful mages described this presence like another being, but I’d never been able to access it beyond vague glimpses of something locked away deep inside. Even so, when I opened my eyes and lit on the Wardbreaker, that silent voice of intuition nagged at me. I reached toward it, and the hairs on the nape of my neck prickled as the laughter of crows outside broke through the thick silence in the room. The crow and raven were the creatures of the Sun in Slavic lore: a trickster god, an inventor and a Promethean. Wordlessly, I understood the compulsion. It was time to take the pistol in combination with my knowledge of wards and the flow of magical energy, and bet my life on it.

  * * *

  I was not surprised to discover that the entry to K&S now had a large chain and padlock, along with a new white and red sign that read: ‘TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED'. The gate was ajar, and the padlock was blasted and melted around the keyhole, hooked over one of the chain links. Kovacs was hoping his final move would be his last, pinning his hopes on being confronted in his place of power - that, or he had planned a setup. He had good reason to be confident. Despite meditating and drinking three cups of coffee, I still had a hangover, and this was guaranteed to be a fight.

  I pulled my newly empowered talisman out of my shirt and let it hang on the outside of my body armor, then drew a deep breath and pulled the glove off my right hand. My skin crawled as I took up my little ritual knife and cut a short, deep gash in my palm. White and black spikes shot up behind my eyes and left my ears ringing as I loaded and primed the Wardbreaker. Holding onto the grip hurt – a lot – but this was a tool that needed to be blood-bound.

  With the gun in hand, I slipped in through the gap in the gate. As soon as I passed the threshold and entered the scrapyard, I knew he was here. The momentary line of sight outside his apartment and my analysis of his magic had imprinted his particular magical signature in my senses, physical and not. All energy had a smell and taste to me, as audible and tactile as the buzzing static of a TV in a quiet room or the hum of overhead wires on the street. I followed the ripples caused by Kovacs' weirding of the local area, nosing through the scrapyard like a shark tailing the overripe orange-peel and sulfur scent of the other man's magic. Here and there, I passed signs of his passing and his desperation. The new junkyard dog was as dead as the last one, its neck broken and its skull caved in with a deep, long depression. There was no sign of burning. Three days of high-powered cursing had tired my opponent out and drained his magical reserves.

  The circle was in a clearing between towering rows of baled metal, lit by the roaring glow of barrel fires. Kovacs stood in the middle of a precisely rendered circle of ground chalk, ash and salt, tall and imperious. Now that I could get a look at him, he was a leonine, proud-looking man, with a big nose and a full, dark mouth. He had his arm wrapped around a tall, thick staff engraved with Hebrew letters, but he'd skipped the dramatic robe for a dress shirt and jeans. It was a bit too hot for flowing black velvet tonight.

  "It was you that I sensed. I knew you'd come," Kovacs proclaimed. He had a notable Israeli accent.

  "Wonderful. And I knew you'd be compensating for something with a giant stick," I replied, holding my pistol down in both hands. The rough grip burned against the cut in my palm. “If I’d known this was going to be some kind of Sephardic versus Ashkenazi wizard grudge match, I’d have bought my teffillin.”

  Kovacs laughed, and I felt the power he'd built in his circle ripple around the perimeter of the design in a smooth wave. It prickled the hairs on the nape of my neck. He had drawn a traditional design, a geometric, Yahweh-centric circle as old as the Seals of Solomon, and he commanded the energy like a skilled musician.

  "What do you hope to accomplish by coming here, really?" His poise and control communicated nothing but arrogance. "You couldn't shoot me before, and you can't shoot me now."

  "You've got your job to do, and so have I."

  "Oh, I see." His smugness only intensified. "Come to try and save your blood kin? Your family? Your gang of Russian potato farmers?"

  “Ukrainian barley farmers, thank you." I stared at the circle until I could visualize and observe the pattern formed by the other mage's willpower. The longer he talked, the better. Everyone commanded the Art differently, and it took time to unweave the strands and gain mastery over the rhythm. "You really have no idea how much I don't want to stop you."

  "What?" The smarmy smirk curled into something that might have been confusion.

  "Your curse ended up hitting my father," I said, tapping my finger on the trigger. "You can kill him, raise him, and kill him again if you really want to. It's the ones after that who are problematic. So go ahead, incinerate him. I'll watch. What's Scapetti paying you for this, anyway? I might be able to match it, if you agree to walk away from the job."

 
"More than what you or your Soviet thugs could ever afford," he sneered. "My right shoe is worth more than your entire wardrobe."

  "That's probably true. I don't like to spend much on clothes," I replied. "So go on then."

  He blinked. "What? Go on what?"

  I gestured to the core of the circle with the point of the pistol. "Go on and wave your broomstick around, and do whatever you need to do to make my father self-combust."

  "Are you joking?" He seemed affronted, maybe anxious, but I couldn't really tell. Parts of his face seemed to move independently from one another, never cohering into a single, readable expression. I often had that problem with new faces.

  "No, so off you go. Yod hey vav hey! Phoomph! Pillar of fire!" I gestured with my other hand, miming a rising flame. "I have no discernable sense of humor and I am utterly and completely serious."

  "You're bluffing." His eyes narrowed. "You're making fun of me."

  I sighed. "Please kill him."

  "You're not fooling anyone. There's nothing you can offer me that Mr. Maslak’s protectors can't provide," he said brittlely, his mouth turning down at the corners. "And nothing I'd do to benefit your predatory, conniving scumbag of a Don."

  It had been worth a shot. I sighted down at him, jaws clenched, and then ran at the circle with my gun ready to fire.

  The other mage flung his hand out, stamping the staff on the ground as he yelled his Enochian word of power. "Dobrax!"

  The swimming magic in the circle accelerated under the pressure of his will and snapped out like a lightning strike, a flash with a burning sulphuric stench. I charged into it like a bull, straining physically and psychically against the wave of heat and force. Eye to eye, Kovacs' cursework was markedly more powerful than it had been when we'd been separated by time and distance. I focused my will to a fine point, clamped it down and forward, and then activated the spell on the amulet. "IAL! ALDON!"

  The amulet burned against my clothes, the bone barely holding solid form as the reflective ward reacted to the trigger, and the magic snapped back toward the caster. Kovacs' eyes widened as he swung his hand and staff around, his primary tool. His hair singed, but he caught the torrent of magic back into his circle of power and spun it around the perimeter of the design before flinging it back at me like a spear.