“You’re one smartass comment away from being declared Outcaste,” Jenner’s voice was deep, and very old. “It’s bad enough that you’re working for the Order. Leave. And come back when you remember what you are.”
Ayashe’s face rippled with rage, but she was slowly being overwhelmed by the weight of Jenner’s power. She took a step back, tossing her head and shoulders before she fled, never quite breaking eye contact with the tigress. Jenner stared her down all the way as only a big cat could. The garage door slammed shut, leaving the pair of us in a weird, eerie silence.
“Fuck!” Jenner finally snarled, and slammed the edge of the pool table with her open hand. Her nails caught the worn green felt and tore it, a casual slap that left quarter-inch gouges in the hardwood. I watched her warily as she spun back toward me and stalked back to the bar. “I don’t fucking need this right now!”
I swallowed, composing myself, and retook my seat. Binah was nowhere to be seen. Sensible creature. “Are you alright?”
“Fucking fantastic.” Her eyes were blazing and bright – orange that transmuted to a vivid gold-green. She had pinpoint pupils that abruptly dilated back to regular size as she thumped bottles back onto their shelves.
“Well, now that the smell of bacon is subsiding, I have bad news.” I eyed the half-empty glass, and swallowed against the dryness in my mouth.
“Me too. Let’s take it outside. I need a break.” Jenner skittered her hand along the countertop, like a cockroach, and pointed at the ceiling before rounding the counter and heading for the door.
Good idea. I needed to get away from the bar before I made myself sick. This happened sometimes… I’d get stuck on eating or drinking one particular thing, fixate on it for a while. One month in college, I ate nothing but BLTs for three meals a day, every day, until Vassily was about ready to strangle me with my uncooked bacon. But it had never happened with alcohol before. I hated booze and always had. The couple of swallows I’d had of the orange-flavor seltzer was churning in my stomach.
While Jenner got her jacket on, I searched for Binah. She’d hidden herself inside the back of the jukebox, and showed little inclination to come out and join us in the cold. The snow in Albany had given way to icy rain in New York, and the yard was shrouded in greasy fog. We trudged over the slushy gravel toward the rearmost rank of motorcycles, the row of bikes recovered from carnage last month. Foremost among them was Mason’s old Bobber. It had been badly damaged in a tumble down a hill the night he disappeared. Jenner had been working on it by herself for the last few weeks. Along with the uptick in her drinking, it was the only visible sign of her grief.
“You think the place is bugged?” I said, once we were away from the building.
“I’m not willing to take the risk. Ayashe can mouth off in there, but I’ve been careful that we don’t talk about anything too sensitive inside for a while now, just in case.” Agitated, Jenner pulled the bright blue tarp off Mason’s bike, palming the fuel tank with a callused hand. “You go first. What’s the situation?”
“My contact has gone missing, the one who helped me find the children. Someone’s vanished him. I don’t think we’ll find the rabbis who were working for Sergei, not unless we capture someone and grill them, which is unlikely. My old tovarischi are going to be on high alert after Yegor.”
“Fuck. So this ‘MinTex’ thing is all we’ve got left.” Jenner made a sound of disgust. “I have some shitty news, too. Ayashe didn’t want to touch MinTex, so I’m handing it over to Talya in the hope that she can work some kind of nerd-magic and dig up some intel. Also, while you were out camping, I got a call from one of the Grand High Assholes of Chicago. Guy named Otto Roth. He’s what we call a Khayty, an outcast, someone who doesn’t follow the Ib-Int. He also runs an M.C., the Nightbrothers. They’re a mixed crew... mages, Weeders, and a few Feeders in the gang. They just rolled into town after they somehow learned that the Tigers are ‘only’ being managed by a woman. He wants to take over as Malek of the Tri-State Area. He’s already the Elder of Chicago.”
“Did he threaten you?”
“He wasn’t asking me to a fucking line dance. Of course he threatened me.” Jenner snorted. “He wants us to clear out and hand over our assets. Claims the club is ‘leaderless’. If he pushes me, I’m going to make sure he pisses sitting down for the rest of his life.”
“What flavor of Weeder?” I asked.
“No idea,” she said. “I’m waiting on contacts of my own to get back to me about him and his forces. The good news is that I found a buyer for the guns.”
I arched my eyebrows. “Already?”
“Yeah. A Triad down in Miami wants the lot. Doesn’t surprise me: Mexicans are trying to move in on the heroin business down there. The Cartels pack a lot of magical defense.” Jenner shrugged her thin shoulders.
“Mm.” I loathed the drug business almost as much as trafficking. It was petty, bloody, unnecessarily messy, and it was always the worst sort of people who got into the trade. Even so, it was better to let rival outfits shoot themselves up than to have one or the other side pull ahead and unbalance the ecosystem. “Speaking of dangerous men of East Asian descent, have you seen Angkor?”
“He went out pretty soon after we got back,” Jenner said. “Said he was going to stay in a hotel and be back later tonight. Why? Got something to do?”
The first flutters of a totally different sort of anxiety ruffled my gut. If I could tell anyone about asking him to dinner, it would be Jenner, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. “Nothing of concern. I was just wondering.”
“No idea where he went.” Jenner sighed, gaze roaming over the old motorcycle. “I’m taking the Big Cat Crew to our changing ground tonight. Now that Roth is waving his weenie around, it’s time the gang went hunting and spent a bit of cat time together. We haven’t been out since before we lost Mason. Think you can hold the fort?”
They were going out? My spirits lifted a little. The timing couldn’t be better. Angkor and I had often mourned the lack of privacy we had in the clubhouse… to talk about magic, of course. “I’m going out this evening, but shouldn’t be gone for too long. Angkor will be back, too.”
She glanced at me, eyes sly. They’d bled back to their usual dark brown. “Meeting up with him, are you? A rendezvous, one might say?”
I cleared my throat. “Something like that.”
“You be careful around that boy. Something’s not right with him.” She turned back to the bike. “It’s been a month, and no one knows anything more about him than we did the day we rescued him.”
I bristled a little. “He’s opened up to me a bit about his past. I understand his need for secrecy… as Ayashe just demonstrated, mages have every reason to be private.”
Jenner grunted. “Call it a hunch. There’s more to him than meets the eye.”
“You haven’t talked to him?”
“I’ve tried,” she says. “But it’s like trying to catch a wet bar of soap. You ask him a question, and twenty minutes later, you realize you’ve been talking about yourself the whole time.”
“Hmm. Well. I’ll take it under advisement.” Disquieted, I looked back toward the house. “Alright, well, I have to go and get ready. Is there anything you need?”
“No. Go have fun.” Jenner waved me off with a little shoo-shoo motion.
I turned, preparing to leave, then stopped in my tracks and looked back over my shoulder. “Thank you, by the way. For intervening. Ayashe has it out for me.”
“No skin off my back. You’ve hauled ass for the club ever since you got here.” Jenner lifted her chin. “You don’t need an excuse, Rex. Ayashe’s an Elder. She should fucking know better than to attack one of my boys. She thinks the Order have her back, and it’s making her cocky.”
“Which ‘Order’ are we talking about, exactly?”
“I knew them as the Venator Dei, but that was a long time ago. They’re the Deutsche Ordern, the Teutonic Knights. Crusaders, basically,” Jenner said. “Bu
t that’s a story for another time. Now, off you go. Wouldn’t want you to be late for your date.”
And there it was: the dreaded D-word. I doubted she knew she’d hit it on the mark, but I flushed anyway, turning fast enough that she probably didn’t notice. Probably.
Chapter 7
“What do I do, Kutkha?” I spoke to him as I trudged back to the house, leaving Jenner to brood over her lost partner’s bike. “I shouldn’t be this wound up about having dinner with someone.”
“What do you think you should do, my Ruach?”
I rolled my eyes, slipping back into the house and pushing my way through the door to the back. It was darker and quieter here; the house hadn’t seemed to ever leave the 70s. It smelled like leather and motor oil, clean laundry, pasta sauce and coffee. The shag carpet had that musty pleasant smell old houses have. “For once, could you just give me a straightforward answer? My one and only attempt at dating was a disaster. I just asked a man out to dinner. Was it a good decision? I’m trying to be… I’m pushing myself, Kutkha.”
“Indeed. Do you find him attractive?”
The flush crept back into my face, heat I felt, even if I couldn’t see it. “Of course. I… what does it mean, though?”
“That he’s attractive to you,” Kutkha replied breezily.
“It won’t… cause any problems with you? With magic?” Even after I’d asked the question, I wasn’t sure why that had occurred to me.
Kutkha guffawed by way of reply.
“I’m glad you’re amused.” Annoyed, I stomped my way to the bedroom. “I don’t know why I’m doing this. Maybe he was right, and I was in love with Vassily. But I never… I don’t think I could have ever told him. Doesn’t this mean I’m gay? If I find other men attractive?”
“Perhaps. What do you think?”
I ground my teeth as I got my shower kit from the locker, and slammed the bent metal door closed. “I think you’re my GOD-damned soul, not a fucking therapist, and you need to give me some insight instead of this psychoanalysis bullshit.”
“Am I your immortal soul, or a performing seal?”
“I’ll cram a fish right in your fucking beak, your piece of shit.” Scowling, I stomped off to the bathroom.
Dating. I didn’t date, and for good reason. My one attempt at dating had been a genuine nightmare. I’d met a girl while I was in college, the wealthy daughter of a Chinese businessman and his Anglo-WASP trophy wife. Tina Cheung had been smart, quiet, a little conservative in a repressed, pent-up kind of way. My ritualized courtesy and cold chivalry was appreciated by her parents, and for three or four months, it was good enough for her, too. She and Vassily loathed one another – he and I were sharing a dorm and fought every other week over her – and so the question of her coming to my place was never something I had to worry about. I made the mistake of agreeing to go on a skiing holiday with her one Christmas, though, where I learned three things: firstly, I was far too blue-collar for the chalet life. Secondly, I had no sexual attraction to women, and thirdly, I had an uncontrollably violent response to anyone who tried to grab my dick when I wasn’t expecting it. I ran away and never looked back.
It was stupid to be this wound up about something as banal as sharing a meal with someone I’d been sharing a room with for weeks. Angkor wasn’t going to twist my arm to do anything beyond eating dinner, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that I wasn’t attracted to the people I was supposed to be attracted to. Staring at my reflection in the mirror, I heard echoes of my father’s taunts, of the slights and slurs of my old ‘friends’. ‘Faggot’ was the least of them. There were muzhiki who went gay-bashing on a lark—or more specifically, the bashing of transvestites or transsexuals, because they were the only people they could reliably identify as ‘gay’. They believed it was a moral duty, like picking up trash or going to church. Even Mariya had thought queers were the lowest of the low. And maybe I was one of them.
The combination of knowing what those same muzhiki had been doing to kids, plus knowing Zane and Angkor—both perfectly masculine men who were not in any way like the stereotypes I’d been raised on—had brought me to this point. The slurs of my youth couldn’t stick to the grim, hard-eyed, fit man I saw in the mirror. Even if I turned out gay, it was just another thing that my father was wrong about.
I let out a deep breath, jogged my shoulders a little and stood up straight, then reached for the foam and razor. “Alright, Alexi. Everything will be just fine.”
Kutkha had no further input, other than a sense of distant, dark amusement as I went through my suits and shirts, second-guessing myself on what looked best until I realized that no matter what I wore, I still looked like a short, shark-faced bouncer at a high-end strip club. With two hours to kill, I got myself some coffee and took it to the den with the envelope Levi had given me, the dossier on Celso. Nothing to take the edge off a man’s pre-date anxiety than planning a hit. I lay a thin blanket over my lap for Binah, and did my best to push thoughts of Angkor and Ayashe from my mind as I broke the seal on the packet.
The Doctor had included a couple of manila folders and a bunch of photos clipped together. The notes were in Cyrillic longhand, and as I laid it out, I realized just how much work had been put into it. It was a full dossier, the kind you had to hire a P.I. to acquire. Addresses, vehicles, hangouts, observable routines—even photos, each one neatly annotated on the back. I pulled one out and turned it over. Celso owned a stake in a gay bar? That was a new one to me.
At the back of the pile of papers was a letter intended for me. It was short, the writing larger and more fluid than the other documents. Frowning, I unfolded it, and read it aloud under my breath.
“I heard you saved a number of children from a terrible fate—bless G-D, who in His wisdom instilled man with courage and good heart. The ways in which you used His gifts are inspiring. I hope you continue to choose in the spirit of service. Everything we could learn about Manelli is contained in this packet. Take this with my gratitude and blessing and continue to make use of your gifts, for Vassily and Mariya as well as yourself. Please take care, and when you have the time, come and see me. You are welcome to join us in reading Parashat Vayishlach on the 23rd. Y.L.”
I set the letter down and sat back, a hand resting on Binah’s back. The Doctor’s words sucked the wind out of me. He’d been… inspired? Grateful? He’d put real work into this, into helping me – more work than what I’d paid for. What if I had led someone to him? The tenuous certainty I’d built up crumbled as I thought back on what Levi had told me. He’d last been seen with a man in blue and a woman, he’d said. We only had one woman in the Organizatsiya – Vera. But no one I could think of wore enough blue for it to be notable.
“You know what… it doesn’t matter.” I looked down at my cat, brow furrowed. “I have a duty to find him, Binah. Or avenge him, if someone’s taken him out. There’s not enough people in the world like him. You know what I’m talking about, right?”
Binah squinted her white-blue eyes and rolled onto her back, paws curled in the air. I shook my head, and began reading.
The jitters set in about half an hour before I was meant to leave, and stayed with me through the final preparations and the drive to Manhattan. I took Binah, but the cat had to stay in the car while I was at the restaurant, so I locked her in with a fleece rug, some water and kibble from the corner store, and a puppy pad in her spare litter box – just in case.
I arrived at Club 21 ten minutes early. There were still more waiters than customers at this time of night on a Sunday, so I didn’t feel too odd being shown to our table by myself. Watching the staff bustling around, I had to wonder—would they know? I had no idea if men actually dated each other the way I’d dated Tina. Dinner, little gifts, that kind of thing. And if they did, who was supposed to do the rituals? Pulling out chairs, opening doors, picking up an extra copy of the newspaper or flowers were all things drummed into me by Mariya. Most of the women I’d known knew the counterpoint to tha
t social dance: Crina, for example. That was just how things were supposed to happen. I didn’t think I could stand to be catered to that way by another man. If Angkor tried, would it offend him if I refused? Would I offend him if I tried?
I passed a hand back over my head, checking over for patches of stubble I might have missed. When the waiter came around, mild and inquiring, I shook my head. “I’m waiting for someone.”
“Ahh.” He smiled knowingly. “Would you like anything to drink? An aperitif?”
I did, kind of, but I pressed down on the baseless craving and shook my head. “Just water.”
After he left, I sat back and checked my watch—it was exactly seven o’clock. New York traffic being what it was, I didn’t expect Angkor to be right on time.
The waiter brought a pitcher of water, two glasses, a little basket of bread. I ate a piece to take the edge off the dry-mouthed urge to order a glass of wine. Ten past. Eleven.
When the door to the restaurant opened and a lean, broad-shouldered silhouette shadowed the wall, I perked up, only to frown when a thin man in a cheap suit and open blazer stepped inside, closely followed by a woman in a cocktail dress. I wasn’t the sort of person to be easily bored, but I found myself fighting the urge to fiddle with napkins as people began to filter in and the clock crept toward seven thirty. My thoughts turned to my cat after a while. Binah had water and food out there, but my imagination conjured up images of opportunistic thieves poaching her out of the car. Idle anxiety, really.
Every now and then, the waiter passed by like a cruising shark, eyeing the empty seat and clearly restraining himself from speaking to me. As the minutes ticked by, tables were filling up with couples and groups of friends.
All of a sudden, I felt like everyone in the restaurant was looking at me: the lack of food, even a drink, and the guilty empty seat with the untouched glass. The pressure of the crowd of strangers weighed on the back of my neck, which was itching under the edge of the fresh white collar. On the next pass, I flagged the waiter down.
Zero Sum: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 3) Page 7
