Zero Sum: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 3)

by James Osiris Baldwin

  Once I was past the halfway point on the bridge, the dark cloud of needling, furious magic wobbled, then snapped like a broken rubber band so suddenly that I nearly swerved into the side of the bridge tunnel. When I glanced in the rear-view mirror, I saw a pale, panting ghost of a man with a broken nose, a face mottled in bruises and covered in fine tracks of blood. Thicker trails leaked from the corners of my eyes. I looked like I’d been slugged in the face.

  “How the hell did that happen, Kutkha?” I barked aloud, keeping my eyes on the road. “Why couldn’t we stop him, and how do I stop this from happening again?”

  “You ingested his blood, my Ruach. It cannot be undone.” Kutkha said. “You could not see my work, but I fought to seal the gate... He was trying to make your brain bleed. I forced it to the skin instead.”

  “Fuck.” He could have killed me from a distance, just like that. “How do we stop it? I don’t know any of the metaphysics at work here. The spell wasn’t even related to him... unless...”

  “Unless he has your doctor and has ensorcelled him as part of a trap, counting on your loyalty and your reliance on remote methods of seeking him,” Kutkha finished.

  “Suka blyad!” I struck the wheel with both hands. “That motherfucker!”

  “My knowledge of Feeders is limited,” Kutkha said. “None of your Ruachim have great experience with them... but they do have experience with the Animus at the heart of every Feeder—Wrath’ree, and by extension, the Hive.”

  “Wrath’ree. That was the thing that was used to bind my magic away from me,” I said. “I have no damn idea what a Wrath’ree actually is. And what do you mean by animus?”

  “Wrath’ree are GOD’s inflammatory immune system response,” Kutkha replied, his voice gaining clarity as we came off the bridge and into Manhattan. “Macrophages. They are the children of the Suffering GOD, the I after it was violated by the Morphorde. They function now as white blood cells do in HuMans.”

  “They attack Morphorde? Or HuMans?”

  “Morphorde. Usually. They are creatures of battle, driven by rage, hunger, and the impetus to engulf and destroy any Morphorde they encounter. They are rapacious consumers of dirty Phi.”

  My skin was sticking to my shirt, my clothes to the car seat. I pulled the car to the side of the road when I found a clear spot, just to catch my breath and assess the damage.

  Blood. A lot of it. The bleeding from my head wasn’t really as bad as it looked, but I looked like a poster child for hemorrhagic fever. ‘Alexi Sokolsky, the face of Ebola.’ The greatest saturation was on my arm and stomach, the DOG claw scars and the scar from Sergei’s seal on my connection to Kutkha. I could make out traces of the sigil he’d used on the front of my shirt.

  “So Wrath’ree are intelligent?” I reached up, felt around my nose, and pushed it back into place. The pain was breathtaking. I tried to keep it to a manly grunt.

  “Extremely, but they are all quite alike. This is because they are part of The Hive, the collective consciousness of all the Wrath’ree in all of GOD. The Hive is focused around the infected part of the Theosphere, the site where the Morphorde continues to burrow ever deeper into GOD’s tissues. This site is called The Drill.”

  The Drill. I shuddered, and turned the engine off. “What relation do they have to vampires? Feeders?”

  “The Hive relies on numbers, so it is constantly innovating ways in which to multiply. They drift around HuMans like ghosts, as they are usually incorporeal, moving through GOD’s interstitial fluids like stinging jellyfish. Now and then, a HuMan becomes subject to the right conditions where they die in a way which parts the soul from the body very suddenly or... destroys the soul. An opportunistic Wrath’ree bonds itself to the HuMan in a flash of transference, effectively becoming that HuMan’s new soul. This is how a Feeder is created. A vampire is a HuMan corpse which has retained its mind, but which is animated by the energy and hunger of a Wrath’ree.”

  “And the Wrath’ree has the impetus to breed, so it’s driven to create more Feeders,” I finished, nodding. Exhausted and bloody, I was still interested enough to be connecting the dots. “Then why is Sergei as twisted as he is?”

  “He is Morphorde,” Kutkha said mournfully. “Even Wrath’ree may be infected.”

  Mind swirling, I turned down a narrow one-way alley off Times Square and felt my heart sink a little. The Voicers’ church was contained inside a refitted hotel, a stately old Gotham building with a glass frontage and rotating door, which was currently unmoving and sealed off from the street. The building was dark.

  The rules of magical zoning could be quite technical. I didn’t have to be under the roof, surely—I could potentially squat on the roof or just inside the doorway to get the benefit of coverage. It wouldn’t protect me if Sergei figured out I was here and sent a brigada after me, but it was better than nothing.

  I parked the car in the half-empty underground garage across from the building, hiding my car between two of the black SUVs owned by the church. I cleaned up as best I could and slunk out with Binah riding on my shoulder. The cat fussily washed the blood from the side of my face as we mounted the ramp, and I was about to put my foot out on the sidewalk when something flickered in my vision and stopped me cold. I waited, and then it happened again: the swirl of dark-on-dark from inside the building.

  Security? I should have figured. But something about the place felt off. I couldn’t see the person roaming the reception area clearly from across the road: not by myself, anyway.

  “Alright, girl. Time to do some work for once.” I reached up and scruffed Binah in between licks, setting her on the ground at my feet. “Go take a look inside.”

  I really had no idea if she understood me or not most of the time. I knew she could sense magical energy, and would reliably respond to it. Sometimes she acted with what seemed like frightening intelligence, or did naturally animalistic things at just the right time, such as tripping me up in the hallway to prevent me from dancing straight into Sergei’s arms. Other times, she acted like how she did now. As soon as I let her go, she swarmed up my pants leg and stomach—with claws—and struggled her way back to my shoulder.

  “Fucking hell—did you really have to climb?” I hissed.

  Seemingly content to hang her head and front legs over one side of my shoulder and her ass off the other, Binah whapped her tail across my broken nose in irritation.

  After several minutes of creative—but quiet—cursing, I looked up through watering eyes to see the shadow inside the building moving toward the front door. On reflex, I ducked around the edge of the parking garage door into the shadows and dropped to a knee, instinctively reaching toward my armpit for the gun that wasn’t there. Grimacing, I risked a peek around the edge of the doorway, then recoiled and had to look a second time. My blood turned to ice.

  The man inside The Voice of the Lord church was carrying a full-sized military assault rifle with a long suppressor. And he was not human.

  Chapter 13

  Researching and collecting information on paranormal phenomena was part of my job as a spook. A lot of it was nothing more than modern mythology, but I’d been squaring away stories, rumors, sightings, magical events, UFO encounters and abductions from newspapers and ‘zines since I was a teenager. My memory was exceptionally good at retaining written information, and I had a massive catalog of reference points for most of the common supernatural happenings in the USA.

  Without a shadow of a doubt, I was looking at a Silencer. One of the Men in Black.

  From what I could see of him, he was tall—very tall—with milk-white skin dappled gray by the shadows inside the building. He wore the classic black suit, black overcoat, white shirt, black tie, and was absolutely hairless. When he turned, the light off the street hit the back of his head. It shone like the moon through the glass.

  Now that I was paying attention, I spotted a hole cut into one of the windows that faced the street. It was big enough to get a man’s arm through, a darker patch agai
nst a sea of duller shades and colors. Someone had used professional tools to be able to pull that job off. The window with the hole was near the revolving door. Whoever was in there now had probably opened the doors or disarmed an alarm, or both.

  I knelt back and rubbed my eyes, wondering if I was hallucinating from the ghost of the Feeder blood in my veins. Whoever had broken into the church, they didn’t belong there. But who the hell wanted in, and why? The only thing I could think of was the church’s involvement with the Vigiles’ supernatural pastoral care program. I didn’t know the details of the program, but I knew that the manager of this church, Pastor Christopher Kincade, was aware of Aaron’s work.

  Intuition and excitement—or fear—tugged at me with icy fingers. Soldier 557 was an excellent name for a Man in Black. Maybe we’d been wrong all this time. What if he wasn’t a single murderer? What if ‘Soldier 557’ was a team? And in that case... what was the Deacon’s link to them?

  The only warning I had that something was wrong was Binah. She hissed and bolted from my shoulder, too fast to follow. I stood, mouth open to call her, and turned to find two Silencers with Uzis pointed straight at my face.

  Under light, the Men in Black were even more uncanny. Bald, tall and pale, their eyes a heartless milky blue. The submachine guns aimed at my head radiated hot magic, their barrels crawling with arcane energy that glowed like embers in the engraved, flowing line of sigils writ into the metal. They looked exactly like compact versions of the guns we’d found in Vanya’s junkyard cache.

  “Sir, we’re going to have to ask you to come with us,” one of them said. “Immediately.”

  “Who the hell are you to be ordering me around? This is a public parking lot.” I put my hands up anyway.

  “This is a matter of national security,” the Man said. “It’s in your best interest to comply.”

  The other Man had split to the side, circling me. I breathed through the sudden buzzing rush, the shuddering in my chest and belly. “Hey, no need to point that thing at me. I’ll leave. My car’s over there.”

  I gestured with my head toward the vehicle, which was parked deeper in the parking lot—the direction they must have snuck up on me.

  “We just need to ask you some questions downstairs, then we’ll escort you to your vehicle and ensure your safe departure.” The other one had the exact same voice as the first: cadence, tone, texture, everything.

  I wasn’t stupid. What he’d said was code for ‘we’re going to take you somewhere no one will hear us when we shoot you in the head’. I was not in a good position. Call it an educated guess, but the magic written into those weapons was almost certainly something akin to the Wardbreaker. I wasn’t willing to bet my life on a magical barrier against them if they opened up.

  I stepped away from the wall, hands still up. “You don’t look like the cops, sorry to say. Who the hell am I dealing with?”

  “That is of no importance.” The one behind me jammed the muzzle of his Uzi into my back. “Move.”

  Call me proud if you will, but I really don’t like being forced to do anything at gunpoint. More importantly, these two had no intention of letting me go. They’d get me to the car, shoot me in the head, and let the police deal with me as a ‘gang killing’—assuming they didn’t simply dump my body somewhere.

  I nodded, and stumbled forward enough to get some space. Whatever pain I was in, I couldn’t feel it anymore. Space was all I needed.

  We were fully in the open when I spun back, smashed the Man’s arm to the side with one arm and grabbed the barrel of the Uzi with the other, wresting it out of his hand, all in the blink of an eye. The next blink had us entangled—me with the gun, him groping for my collar so he could headbutt me. He was insanely strong. I pressed the muzzle to his sternum and squeezed the trigger.

  The bullets made hardly any noise. Their bizarre, muffled rattle did nothing to stop them from turning the Man into a jerking mess of blood and limbs. His blood was white, not red: it sprayed back and forward as the other Man opened up his gun. I expected to die, to have the bullets punch through the dead man in my arms, but they didn’t. I swung the gun up under the armpit of my inhuman shield and let off a burst, forcing the other Man in Black to scramble. He hit the ground, rolled, flipped to his feet and spun around about to aim when Binah shot out like a thunderbolt of fur and threw herself into the one leg that was on the ground. He stumbled, tripped, and that was it for him—my rounds took him in the skull, and his head exploded in a spray of white liquid, like powdered milk that had been mixed too thick to drink.

  Barely fifteen seconds had passed, but my heart was hammering like I’d just run a mile at a sprint. I dropped the body in my arms, and he tumbled to the ground like a doll—a doll that was rapidly turning into an amorphous mass of white goo that rapidly oxidized to a dark gunmetal gray. I kicked him over, and saw that the Uzi spray had definitely hit him. His suit jacket had some kind of armor in it. “Fucking hell.”

  I went to investigate the second body. This Man was also decaying into slime, but his jacket was intact. I pulled it from the body and shrugged it on. It was comically large for me—the vents hung just behind my knees—but that wasn’t actually a bad thing. It was heavy: the back, front, and sleeves had a firm, gel-like layer under the silk lining. I searched the pockets, but the Man hadn’t been carrying anything except a couple of spare magazines.

  Binah limped over to me, her fur on end. I scooped her up under one arm, the Uzi braced against my other hip, and let her scramble up to my shoulder. Now that we were across the water, Sergei’s control over my body had lapsed, but I could still feel him pulling at my blood, at my mind. “Kutkha, does Sergei know where we are?”

  “I don’t know,” my Neshamah replied. “Perhaps. It will take him time if it is possible... A Wrath’ree in its pure form does not have the same limitations as the HuMan Feeder shell. If he were to send one after you...”

  “Then better to assume yes.” I had no idea if the ‘vampires hate churches thing’ was even real, but it couldn’t hurt. There were arguably better churches than this one, but I was here now. “So we get in, take out the Men in Black, and then camp out?”

  “That is the best option. The connection between you and Sergei will weaken with the dawn. If you cut it now and wait, we will have time to prepare a talisman against possession tomorrow. And you must take the cat—she is part of me, your I. If she remains outside, she may fall prey to the same blood geas by proxy.”

  That wasn’t great, but damned if I was going to end up a slave. I replaced the almost-empty clip on the Uzi and glanced over the sigils on the side. They resembled the symbols I’d engraved on the Wardbreaker, though this job was a lot more professional than my hand-engraved Commander—almost as if they’d been machined this way. “Right. Well, no running away. Come on, girl. Let’s go clean house.

  Chapter 14

  I found a way into the building from the back. There was a mechanical parking lift that took up the lot right beside the church, so I scaled the side of it up to the bottom of the fire escape on the back of the building. Binah jumped off my shoulder to land elegantly on the platform. I was far less graceful, crashing into the side of it. I pulled myself up over the railing, and limped along the wall to the window. It was locked but not alarmed—those had been shut off. I cocked an ear, listening until Binah hopped up onto the ledge and began pawing at the glass the way she did when she couldn’t get into a room she wanted in. The coast was clear.

  I broke the window with the stock of the Uzi, bashing in the glass until I could climb in without slicing myself up like a ham. The headquarters of the Church of the Voice of the Lord was once one of the ritziest hotels in Times Square, one of those old Art Deco places where flappers hung off the arms of guys in top hats and bow ties and everyone got screwed up on absinthe. It had been renovated with offices and classrooms, a couple of chapels, counseling rooms, a library, a bookstore, even a little cafe on the mezzanine level. The gaudiness had been oblit
erated under robin’s egg blue and beige paint, subdued carpet, and the clean, functional lines of glass and steel.

  The carpet muffled my footsteps as I headed for the internal stairwell. I opened the heavy door and crept down, listening intently. The magically-silenced Uzis were quiet enough that I wasn’t going to hear any fire unless I was a couple rooms over, but the stairwell carried voices well—and when I passed the entry to the second floor, I heard shouting from somewhere inside the building. Fearful shouting.

  “Shit.” I checked over the gun and kept my finger off the trigger, going to the door and cracking it open. Once the air could get in, I heard the guns. The submachine guns and the assault rifles themselves were quiet, but the bullets tore up wood and plaster as noisily as much as any other round. There was someone else in the building. I hadn’t just walked into a robbery—I’d waltzed into a small-scale raid.

  I busted out into the hall, looking around and up, and followed Binah as she broke into a loping slow run down the corridor and stopped at the far corner. She turned back to look at me. We were in sync, somehow. It wasn’t verbal communication, but Kutkha was a part of her as much as he was a part of me, working with her brain and lungs.

  There was a male scream from somewhere back in the building, then the sound of clothes rustling from around the bend. I rounded the corner low to the ground and fast, and opened up a burst on the Man in Black before he even had time to turn. He went down in a spray of milky blood. This one was different than the tall Men I’d met in the parking lot. He was smaller, lean and athletic, his skin tawny. He looked vaguely Asian, but his mouth was too small, his eyes too large. Creepy as hell. He had been guarding a pair of modest double doors, which I kicked into an auditorium.

  The Church of the Voice of the Lord was a megachurch. Their public services were held at the Manhattan Center Studios because there were usually too many worshippers to fit into their church. This chapel was for the ‘Confirmed’ members, the ones who had passed whatever standards were required for entry, and it was still big: there was room for about two hundred people. I counted five Silencers plunging down the narrow aisles between the rows of seats, chasing a dark haired, long-limbed man who threw himself from cover to cover, scrambling in and out of sight around the huge curtains that hung behind and around the stage-like pulpit. “Go away! Help! Security! Help me!”