Instead of answering, Alexei leaned forward and continued some conversation he’d been having with Katya. “You see? What else am I supposed to do with this?”
She slapped the turn signal. “It is on the record that I think this is a bad idea.”
“Hush,” Alexei said. “Your majesty, I have some news.”
Chapter Five
Luke poured water over the embers of the bag and sucked it all up into the Shop-Vac as Camille walked Jeremy down the alley. As she returned, she and Max eyed each other like a pair of stray cats, hackles up.
She took the vacuum inside, though, and a breeze lifted the smoke away, leaving the dusty stone scents of brick and asphalt. For five perfect seconds, it just worked: Luke hooked his finger into a belt loop of Max’s jeans and pulled him closer. Max’s hips went pliant as he moved, and he lifted his face to nip Luke’s lower lip in a kiss.
Max took a step back. “You’re going to lose your headphones.”
They trailed out of Luke’s pocket. Max gathered them up and returned them, sliding his knuckles against Luke’s leg through the fabric.
“I was listening to those songs you sent me.” Luke tried to pull Max closer, but he stepped farther back and smiled—a real one, with deep dimples. He was too pretty. It was not right. Max Cooper had been created in a lab, test tubes bubbling and wires sizzling, by a scientist bent on destroying Luke’s mind.
“Yeah?” Max asked. “What did you think?”
Luke swallowed. “It was cool. Different.”
Max waited for more. Luke didn’t have it. It didn’t matter either way, because the door to the store swung open and Helene stuck her head out. “Luke, what are you—”
She saw Max and stopped, lips pressing together and nostrils flaring.
“I was just…” It was obvious what Luke was just. Way too late, he took his hand away from Max’s hip.
Helene started, “Your father—” but Max said over her, “I have to go anyway. I was on my way to a thing.”
Luke crossed his arms over his chest. “Right.”
“Right,” Max repeated. He looked nervously at Helene, but she stayed where she was in the doorway, so Max waved and skittered off down the alley instead of saying a real goodbye.
Luke waited until he was out of earshot, disappearing around the corner, and turned on his mother. “I can’t have one hour—”
“We can’t have one afternoon?” Her voice rose. “If you don’t care about this life Mr. Kovrov provides for you, you could at least respect his time.”
“I did what he asked me to.” Luke waved over the damp spot on the ground, still smudgy with ash.
Helene clenched her jaw. “Your father and I need to talk to you.”
Luke followed her, his anger spiraling slower so he was left with a hard pit of disappointment. He’d messed that up, with Max’s songs. He could text, but he didn’t know what to say.
Yuri was in the living room, sliding his armchair back into place now that the extra furniture had been put away. Luke returned from his distracted thoughts to find the room heavy, something unspoken congealing between his parents. “Is something wrong?”
At once, Helene said, “Yes,” and Yuri said, “No.” Luke drew his spine up, bracing.
“Sit.” Yuri gestured, and they settled around the table. “The Kovrovs have invited you to work for them.” Yuri stopped at the end of the sentence with a grave look, like he’d said something profound.
Luke held his face still while his mind scrambled, sure he was savvy enough to understand if Yuri left it at that, but eventually he had to ask, “Don’t we already work for the Kovrovs?”
Helene shut her eyes, pained, and Yuri smiled gently. “Of course,” he said. “A new job. For you, this summer. Day to day with Sergei and Alexei.”
“Wait—what?” Luke bolted upright in his chair. Working side by side with Alexei Kovrov? That was money and power and honor. His parents looked terrified.
“Grunt work, probably,” Yuri said. “Lay magic. I did the same thing when I was your age—well, a little older than you.” Luke was almost eighteen, but he was still in high school. “Alexei decided it was time to offer you the opportunity.”
“Offer,” Luke repeated. An offer from Alexei carried more weight than an offer from anyone else. He would have framed it as an invitation, graciously; maybe it would genuinely have not occurred to him that anyone might want to say no. Maybe he did it all the time, auditioning folks for bigger roles in the family business. Maybe it was rare, and Luke was something special.
Helene sighed. “Exactly. But I think—better you than Camille. If they try to put any spells on you, you’ll be able to break them. And who knows what they could do with a power like hers.”
There was nothing to say to that. They had somehow touched on every one of their family’s sore spots at once: Camille’s dangerous power, their debts to the Kovrovs—all this after Luke had been sneaking around with Max. The conversation was a pile of boxes stacked too high in Luke’s arms, slipping from his grasp. “I don’t understand. Why me?”
Yuri cupped his fingers and tapped them against the table, a gesture he made to collect his thoughts.
Helene stood up. She gave Yuri a heavy look: you fix this. “I’ll be in the store.”
Yuri waited for her to walk away before he spoke, and then winked at Luke. “It’s all right, Lukonya. Take a breath.”
Luke let his mind go still.
“All right. Did the Kovrov kid say anything to you?”
Luke shook his head. “Nope. He helped with the uncrossing.”
“Helped? He did magic, too?”
“The protection. He put a charm on the candle.”
Yuri frowned. “Weird. Was that weird?”
Luke’s reflex was to say yes. Of course. Spending time with the Kovrovs was an obligation, a pain, always a little dangerous. Except, Jeremy hadn’t been weird at all—nice enough, a little quiet. Luke and Camille hadn’t spent so much time alone with him since they were too young to sit through lunch with grown-ups, five or six years now, and had never seen him do magic. Whatever he had done to amplify the candle had been spectacular. If Luke didn’t know better—if he hadn’t spent his whole life learning that the Kovrovs were, at best, an unavoidable nuisance like thunderstorms or taxes—he would have said he and Jeremy had made a good team.
“Not as bad as it could have been,” he finally said.
“Good. Maybe that’s how the whole thing will go.”
“Dream big, Dad.” Maybe Luke would be great at it. Maybe he’d make a whole pile of Kovrov money and take Max to see some weird ambient noise band and they’d finally figure out how to talk to each other.
Yuri laughed. “Who was that kid who sassed his father and then fell out of the sky?”
“You mean Icarus?”
Yuri nodded with his chin. “Don’t be like that.”
Luke didn’t think he was. “Mom is scared.” Shorthand. Blaming it on Mom instead of asking, Are you scared? or Should I be?
“No,” Yuri said, slow and reassuring. “I think she hoped we had more time. I admit, I did, too. I don’t think anyone expected you and your sister to be so—” Yuri searched for his word.
Powerful.
“Talented. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing.”
“I can handle it,” Luke said. “Tell me what it means.”
“Ah, there you’re getting past your old man. I never did go full-time, got shuffled out after the Malcolm war.”
“The what?” Luke’s voice rose on the question, and he swallowed hard. It felt like trying to remember a movie he’d only seen in bits and pieces.
Yuri tapped the table. Luke shuffled his memories like a deck of cards—cleaning the apartment to its bones for family lunches, putting on stiff suits for dinners, counting out 10 percent of every dollar he saw. The Kovrovs were such a small, surreal slice of Luke’s life, it was tough to imagine what they might do when they escaped those narrow bounda
ries.
Yuri began. “I started working for Ivan Kovrov after school. That was Alexei and Sergei’s father. Hard man. Mean like Sergei, smart like Alexei.” Yuri sketched with his fingers on the table. “The Zhangs had most of Manhattan, all the businesses and the little magicians who worked for them in exchange for protection or clients or money, like we work for the Kovrovs. And the Kovrovs had all of Brooklyn, most of the boroughs, Jersey. The Damianis and the Malcolms, they were little guys, fighting for the scraps. Then one day, all the sudden, most of New Jersey stops paying. No, we don’t work for you anymore. The Malcolms have stolen them.”
Yuri spread his hands wide. “The Malcolms do big magic. Old stuff. Changing the way energy moves through the world. They’re not so powerful with the small business, but they can do some wild things. When I say they took New Jersey, I mean they took New Jersey. Ivan couldn’t cross the state line without getting sick. We’d try to go into Jersey and get confused, forget why we were there.
“Ivan Kovrov, he loses it. Clamps down on his people. By this time, I’ve met your mother, so I let myself get pushed out of that close circle. Maybe there’s not so much money in it for me, but there’s a little more freedom, you know? So I don’t know as much about what’s happened since.
“Ivan’s dead, and the old Malcolm doesn’t go out much anymore, but his son Corey is head of the family now, and he hates the Kovrovs even more. I understand there are skirmishes sometimes—little fights, families changing loyalties.”
“I wonder if that was what those bags today were about,” Luke said. “Did Alexei tell you where they were from? Jeremy didn’t know.”
“No.” Yuri gave Luke an assessing look. “The Kovrovs don’t tell anybody anything they don’t need to know. When they give you a job, you follow orders. You don’t ask questions.”
Luke nodded, eyes on the table.
“Lukonya,” Yuri said firmly.
“I heard you.”
“You have to be careful,” Yuri said. “Don’t ask questions, and never give them your blood.”
Luke jolted, stung. “I’m not going to do blood magic. You don’t have to tell me that.”
“It’s a powerful tool. When you see Alexei—”
“Come on, Dad. That’s nasty.”
Yuri thought for a long time, tapping the table in a slow, even rhythm, before he started again. “The thing about your mother was, I knew right away. She was perfect from the beginning. My parents, they hated it. Not only an American girl, but a black one?” He blew a long whistle and shook his head. “No way. I’d bring Helene to dinner, and they’d have single girls from the old country there to meet me. The last time we tried to talk to them was after you and your sister were born. My mother wouldn’t even touch you. Her own grandchildren.”
This story was their family’s origin myth, its foundation. What came next, though, was new.
“Your mother’s family is great, but they’re across the country. Ivan Kovrov was always here. He gave us work and loans when we couldn’t make rent. He adored your mother. Of course, he adored her power. And he’d tell me about how we were going to teach you kids our culture. He’d joke about how his sons spoke better Russian than he did, because there were more people here for them to talk to, and he’d tell me we’d make sure you kids could speak it, too.”
That surprised Luke—he knew about six words of Russian or Ukrainian, all for food, and no one had ever tried to teach him more.
Yuri shook his head again. “When you’re the Kovrovs’ people, they make it feel like a family. Except, you miss a payment? You make a mistake? You’ll find out real quick who their family is.”
Luke patted one of Yuri’s pale, mottled hands, resting on the table. “I’ll be careful.”
“I know you will. You’re a good kid.” Yuri squinted into Luke’s face. “That boy makes you happy?”
It felt like a hard left, though of course it wasn’t at all. His dad didn’t agree with most of his decisions, but neither of his parents was going to tell him who he could and couldn’t be with.
He didn’t want to give up the precarious thing he had with Max, but he probably wouldn’t give anything up to keep it, either. Washed hollow, Luke answered honestly.
“Sometimes he does. Sometimes he makes me pretty miserable. I can’t figure out if it’s supposed to be like that or not.”
Yuri laughed, breaking his flat face open. “If you find out, you let me know. All right, tell me what you learned today.”
“No questions.” Luke tapped the table like his father. “No blood.”
Chapter Six
Luke was early the first morning he reported for work, so he rode an extra stop and took a looping walk through a corner of Prospect Park. He was overdressed, buzzing with his parents’ warnings and admonitions, but it was a gorgeous day, and he got out of his head watching it. It was late in the morning, after commuter hours, and the park was full of nannies and children, athletic yuppies, and walkers with three or five dogs on webs of leashes.
Luke kept far to the right of the path, out of the way of the runners and cyclists, but one bumped his shoulder hard anyway. He turned, ready to be mad, and found Jeremy Kovrov’s grinning face.
Luke gathered up his formal expression quickly, spine straightening, but Jeremy started bopping along next to him without seeming to notice, pulling the white bud of his headphones from one ear. “Hi, Luke.”
“What up, Kovrov.” Luke caught a nuclear blast of orange in his peripheral vision and looked down, afraid of falling in a manhole. Jeremy wore running shoes the neon orange of a road sign. They glowed from within. Probably an enchantment. “Those are some shoes.”
“Orange makes you run faster.” Jeremy matched strides with Luke and popped out his other earbud.
“That magic?”
“Science.” All of Jeremy’s running stuff was that garish—the leather and rubber armband, the grippy earbuds, the GPS watch, the shining red technical shirt, the slippery blue shorts. Luke’s friend Short Wesley was a runner, but he didn’t make it look nearly so expensive.
“You run every day?” Luke asked.
“Every day I can. I rest once a week, but I hate it.” Jeremy wrinkled his nose.
Luke considered his bouncing steps, the wiry muscles in his calves. That sounded like more than working out to stay fit—a deeper, more intense drive. It was not something Luke would have guessed about him. He seemed much happier outside and running than he ever did during family meetings.
He took a turn Luke wouldn’t have expected, then another, and Luke was lost, and they were in an alley. He followed Jeremy into Sergei Kovrov’s backyard, another green space hidden inside the rectangle of the block’s houses. Luke thought, it’s like a courtyard, and reality tipped sideways. I’m walking into a castle, and that kid in the goofy shoes is a prince, and here we are. Inside waited a bright, spacious kitchen, shining copper pots and pale wood cabinets, and a raggedy trio of dark-haired little boys. “Jeremy!” said the middle-size one. “Who is that?”
“Who’s in my house?” Sergei’s body followed his voice into the room. “Oh, Melnyk.” His eyes flicked back and forth between Luke and Jeremy.
“Look what I found in the park,” Jeremy said.
Alexei’s younger brother, Sergei, was the family battle-ax. He was tall like Alexei but leaner, his muscle more practical than aesthetic. His nose was twisted from old breaks, and his brow jutted out in a shelf over his eyes. He wore a white muscle tank, and everything below his chin was covered in black tattoos.
“I knew all that running was bad for you,” Sergei replied. “Melnyk, heel.” He turned and walked away, and because Luke couldn’t punch him, he figured the best play was to laugh as he followed.
“Don’t be an asshole, Sergei,” Jeremy called after them. Luke could have choked on his tongue—probably would have, before swearing at Sergei.
Downstairs waited a gray basement room. “These shelves store product,” Sergei said. “These are new
boxes of product. Is the assignment clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t call me ‘sir,’” Sergei said as he left.
It looked like any warehouse, raw metal shelving in creepy wells of light cast by bare bulbs. The damp, metallic smell of the air was so strong it was almost a taste. All that drama with his father about secrets and blood, and here Luke was alone, hauling boxes. Yuri should have warned him to wear work shoes.
Jars and boxes and bricks of herbs sat on the shelves, almost alphabetical and half-labeled. He wouldn’t be able to keep much order, but nobody was going to care.
An old stereo hulked on one shelf, and Luke found something bass-heavy on the radio. He hesitated before opening the first box, thinking of Camille tossing around that knucklebone, but all it held were white candles and the narcotic floral scent of oleander.
Three boxes in, Jeremy appeared with a plate of chicken nuggets and carrot sticks and a glass of water. “For you. It’s kind of kid food ’cause I made lunch for the babies, too.”
“No problem. Thanks, Kovrov.” Luke found a sturdy box and sat himself there.
“Not that you can’t take a real break, too. I know Sergei isn’t a very helpful boss.”
Luke shrugged.
“Okay,” Jeremy said. “Do you mind if I put on my reading?”
That didn’t make much sense, but Luke wasn’t going to argue. “Sure.”
Jeremy played with his phone and the stereo until a sonorous voice with a crisp British accent started to drone.
“The Return of the Native.” Jeremy wilted with apology. “It’s in the middle, but like, you don’t care what happened so far.”
Luke nodded. He did not. “Summer reading?”
The Uncrossing Page 3
