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

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “Speak of the devil.” Talya brightened again. “I better go out. Jenner will want me to park her bike. But Rex?”

  “Uhh?” I grunted around a mouth full of salo and rye.

  Talya’s face flooded with a smile. “Thanks for the advice. It’s, I guess I’m still getting used to the way things work.”

  “Jenner and Zane know that. They won’t involve you in anything out of your depth.” I waved her off with a little shooing motion. “Off you go.”

  She smiled, and then scampered from the room. The bikes outside were revving in place, a sound that did nothing to help my headache. Grimacing, I set the last bit of sandwich down and had only just started to rise when I heard Talya’s piercing scream from outside.

  Chapter 17

  I hadn’t been stupid enough to leave myself unarmed after last night. I had the Wardbreaker holstered under my parka, and a knife, which I pulled as I barreled through the house to the outside.

  The yard was wet, a fine mist of rain floating and steaming in the headlamps of dozens of bikers, a mob of unwashed leather and diesel roaring in the yard. Talya stood between an injured man lying on the ground and the growing semicircle of bodies and machines. The man was unconscious. Both his hands had been cut off, the stumps of his wrists badly cauterized and tied off with fishing wire.

  “I don’t care who you think you are!” Talya was shouting, mantling protectively over the injured man with her fists balled up in front of her. “You’re a fucking mongrel!”

  The guy looming over her looked like a skinned bull. Seven feet tall, close to four hundred pounds, he was muscular in a way that was neither attractive or functional. Veins crawled up along his reddish, freckled arms like worms. He had a thin-lipped mouth on a crocodilian face, and tightly curled, short hair the color and texture of rusted steel wool. His eyes were flat black pits, communicating nothing but cruel indifference.

  “What the hell is going on here?” I shoved through the fringes of the pack, brandishing the knife at any upraised hands, and joined Talya to face him down.

  “About time someone with balls showed up,” Bullhead rasped. His voice was very deep, but so dry that it was always on the edge of cracking. Very few people had a voice like this, the color-texture of crumbling tar, but this man did. “Otto was just about to fuck Little Miss Piggy here and see if he could bait out Tranny with a bit of squealing.”

  Talya’s lips peeled back from her teeth with a snarl, her pupils constricting to slits. I was about to step back when the door to Strange Kitty flew open and the Twin Tigers boiled out of the club with a small army of bikers, punks and rivetheads.

  “Speak of the devil, and she shall appear!” The man to Bullhead’s left spread his arms, hands open. He was tall and skinny, with a faded dirty-blond mohawk and an unpleasant air of entropy. “Our favorite little slanty-eye whore!”

  Jenner sneered. “You forget to take Otto’s cock out of your mouth before you came here, Dogboy? You sure sound like a guy talking around a mouthful of dick. Get the fuck off my property.”

  “Came to deliver you something,” the big guy rumbled. The words coming out of his mouth, their tone, didn’t match the complete lack of life or affect in his features. It creeped me the hell out. “But then Otto ran into your puppy dog. She a new member of the Little Girls’ Club?”

  Talya smiled, her voice laced with sugary venom. “Go out into traffic and play a nice long game of hide-and-go-fuck-yourself.”

  Jenner grinned. “Hah! You heard the girl. And stop talking about yourself in the third person, for fuck’s sake.”

  While they traded barbs, I assessed Otto and his subordinates. Dogboy wasn’t a Blank- I wasn’t sure what he was, but something was off about the way he held himself. Too stiff, too… dead. The old man standing to Otto’s right looked like he’d come from a hobo camp and picked up a lot of roadkill on his way into the city. He was shirtless, skinny-fat, with a pot belly and weather-worn skin. He wore countless necklaces, his chest decorated in several pounds of beads, bones, feathers, chains and rings, most of which hummed with Phitonic charge. A mage: one of the crazy street shaman variety.

  “This everyone who’s come to back you up? Jeez. Looks like you’re a few men down,” Dogboy said. His voice had a harsh purplish crackle to it that lifted the hair on the nape of my neck. “How’s life been treating you since Mason died?”

  Jenner’s face went very still. “Pretty fucking good, actually. Now, in case you didn’t hear me, I told you to get the hell out of my yard.”

  Dogboy leered at her. “I bet it’s tough having to manage everything without a man behind you.”

  Jenner looked as grim as I’d ever seen her. “You’ve got five seconds to turn the fuck around and leave. One.”

  Dogboy laughed, flashing fangs. That solved that mystery. He was a vampire... but what was Otto? A Weeder of some sort, apparently. But Weeders were alive in a way that almost defied description, as if they carried more energy, more vitality than a normal person. I let my vision slipstream, peering at him, and recoiled at what I saw. Otto’s aura slithered over him like a caul of pulsing grubs, a deep red-violet.

  “You don’t fucking get it, you little bitch.” Dogboy abruptly sobered, hands on hips. “News travels. You don’t get to play pretend any more. Give it up. This city belongs to-.”

  "Blah blah dur hurr me big man, whatever." Jenner talked right over the top of him. She could exceed him in volume and pitch. “You wanna take it? Come and dance, little boy. I'll eat your fucking heart right here in front of your ballet troupe.”

  A storm was brewing in the ranks on both sides. Zane waited like a pillar of expressionless brown marble, arms loosely folded. Big Ron glowered at the intruders with one thumb hooked into his belt and a shotgun over his other shoulder. Neither man spoke.

  “Snow White and the fucking Seven Dwarves.” Dogboy sneered. “You don’t belong here anymore. No one cares about your stupid laws, and no one’s going to save you when Otto drags you off by your fucking hair and-”

  Jenner bristled like an angry alley cat as she advanced on him and shoved his chest. Dogboy caught her wrists inhumanly fast. Before he could do anything about it, Jenner pivoted her hands inward to break the hold and kicked him square in the crotch with strength far beyond her size. As he buckled, she caught his hand and threw him to the ground by it. She didn't let go: Jenner stepped over his arm, twisted it as he swung at the back of her knee, and broke it at the elbow.

  Dogboy hadn’t even finished his scream of agony before the Nightbrothers roared and closed in on us in a wave of unwashed leather and metal. Someone barreled toward me, a pipe raised over his head. I hit him with the glass breaker end of the knife, knocking his arm down before slamming the hilt into the side of his helmet. He was just human, and the blow sent him stumbling. Another man came in from my right, lunging straight into Zane’s foot. He took the kick to the nose, and sprawled back into the dirt.

  In the chaos, I saw Otto deliberately push into the brawl and make a beeline for Talya, who was fighting two men with the help of a couple of punks only a few years younger than she was. I shoved the reeling biker in front of me, knocking him to the ground, and struggled through the pack to join her.

  "Come at me, dogfuckers! Cái tháng chó đẻ[7]!" Jenner screeched as she kicked over the nearest Nightbrothers bike with her full strength—her real strength, the superhuman strength of an Elder shapeshifter tigress. A thousand pounds of iron, leather and chrome toppled to the ground over Dogboy’s legs as he struggled up, elbow and wrist twisted and useless.

  Every muscle in my body screamed with fatigue as I fought to get to Talya before Otto did. He had the look of a snake cruising toward a particularly juicy mouse. In theory, Talya was more than capable of defending herself: she shapeshifted into a prehistoric lion the size of a school bus. The problem was, unlike the other shifters in the Big Cat Crew, that lion was not under her control. Her ka-bah would be angry, hungry, and not capable of telling friend from foe
. The fight would turn from a brawl into a bloodbath, just like that. Even worse, Talya wasn’t looking in his direction.

  “Fucking- CHET!” My curse cut short as I spotted movement out of the corner of my eye and reflexively shielded myself. A wire-wrapped baseball bat hit the thin magical barrier and bounced back into the face of the surprised man who’d swung at me, but the exertion had already cost me. I felt like I’d pulled my remaining energy out like an unraveling thread.

  Otto grabbed two of Jenner’s human punks by the backs of their heads and cracked their skulls together. He dropped the skinny teenage boy, picked up the other girl by her neck,, and bodily threw her at Cliff. As they went down, Zane spotted the same thing I had.

  “Talya!” He bellowed over the noise, fighting his way across the yard. “Talya, head’s up!”

  “Talya!” I called in time with him.

  Talya finally turned around. She lit on to the four hundred pounds of hurt that was stalking toward her, and her eyes widened.

  Big Ron lifted the shotgun, and fired a round into the air. The sound was deafening, echoing through the compound and up and down the street beyond the fence. Abruptly, the fighting stopped. The shaman stopped doing whatever he was doing, hands poised. Even Otto froze in place, shoulders hunched.

  “All y’all want this to get heavy?” Ron bellowed. “Really? Because it’s about to git heavy!”

  “No need.” Otto sneered, and turned to Jenner. He was more than capable of looking down at her, the Goliath to her David. “You and me, Tranny. How about it? You win, Otto leaves. Otto wins, you forfeit your title in New York.”

  “You’re Khayty. Outcast. You don’t get to set terms, and you don’t get to lay a hand on OUR Malek-Kab, pigfucker!” It was Zane who stepped up, muscles pumped, skin flushed.

  “At ease, boy.” Jenner said, waving him down. She was grinning from ear to ear. “Yeah, you know what, that suits me just fine. But Zane’s right—you’re the invader, asshole. You don’t get to set the terms. I do.”

  Otto’s lip curled on one side. “Otto don’t take orders from chinks.”

  Jenner jerked her head. “Shoot him, Ron.”

  Ron didn’t hesitate. He aimed and fired.

  The street shaman threw himself in front of Otto like a trained bodyguard, gibbering something I didn’t understand. The buckshot pellets bounced and... skittered? Each pellet fell to the ground as a cockroach. They shot off through the legs of the crowd, disappearing into the gravel. Nice trick.

  “Saved by the bagman,” Jenner said, cocking her chin. “You got lucky this time, Otto.”

  The shaman began to move around his boss, chanting in an unfamiliar—possibly made up—language. The barrier he wove formed a circle that strengthened with his passing.

  Otto barked a hoarse, humorless laugh. “You can’t shoot Otto and make him go away.”

  “This gun begs to differ,” I said, opening my jacket to show the Wardbreaker.

  The shaman saw it, and his eyes went wide and wild. He pointed and shrieked. “Cursed!”

  “You’re not the only one with a spook, shit for brains,” Jenner said, crossing her arms. “Consider it a warning shot, and let’s work this out like civilized were-things.”

  “Whatever,” Otto grunted.

  “Yonkers Power Station, Halloween. Two nights from now. I set the terms, you show up for the fight,” she said, watching him through narrowed eyes. “No posse, no bullshit. And I’ll show you what it means to be an Elder.”

  Otto laughed again: an awful, forced, clicking laugh. “Fine. That’ll do.”

  “I’ll be making you say that back to me through a mouthful of smashed teeth,” Jenner said. “Now get the fuck off my land before we blow you off of it.”

  “Get out of here!” Someone from the back of the Tigers pack yelled, and then the shouting broke out in earnest. Every Tiger began to yell at them, forming an improvised riot line. Dogboy snarled, fangs bared, but he was drowned out by the sudden unified wall of sound. Zane, usually quiet and controlled, was shouting at the top of his lungs, and I added my own voice to the mix as we drove the aggressors back towards the driveway. Several Tigers mounted their own bikes and revved them to life, herding the scrambling Nightbrothers forward or to the side to avoid being run over. Dogboy hauled his motorcycle off the ground, spitting a seemingly endless torrent of sexist, racist vitriol in Jenner’s direction that was cut short when Ron fired a second warning shot.

  Jenner stood straight, impassively watching the chaos around her. I drew up beside her, not saying anything. Her eyepatch had been torn off during the fight, revealing the deep red scar and empty socket on that side. Sirens were howling in the distance, and getting closer at a rapid clip.

  After several minutes, the forward line straggled back into the yard, clapping each other on the shoulders and buzzing with excitement. Jenner drew a deep breath, and lifted her voice to be heard over the noise. “Alright, everyone! All weapons, out of sight! Cliff, Skinner, take the car and get Rob to the hospital!”

  I cocked an ear and listened to the pitch of the approaching squad cars. They were regular old red-and-blue sirens, not the warbling howl of the Vigiles’ purple and white ones. “A word?”

  Jenner grunted. “After this is sorted out. Go put your piece away—I don’t want anyone hauled in tonight.”

  I inclined my head and withdrew, joining Talya at the door. We rushed back inside to hide any contraband. The knife went into my locker, the Wardbreaker into a hidden pocket in my suitcase made for this exact circumstance. There was no hiding the blood outside on the gravel no matter how much dirt was kicked around, and everyone was still roughed up by the time five cops marched up the driveway, scowls in place, radios chirping. Zane patted Talya on the back before breaking off to join Jenner as she faced them down, hands on her hips. Talya and I stayed by the house. The less of a chance they had to see me, the better.

  “Wow,” Talya said, her voice close to a whisper. “Rex, this is so awful.”

  I nodded, watching the body language of the officers.

  “Rob Polawski. That guy they hurt?” Talya’s voice thickened a little. “He... he was driving our truck tonight. He was a hopeful, you know? Not even a member of the Club yet. I don’t know him that well, but he was always so nice to everyone. He has a daughter.”

  A chill passed through me. “What truck?”

  “The truck taking the guns we found to Miami.” Talya reached up to tug at one of her lip rings. “I wish Mason was still here. No one tried to start anything with Jenner when it was the pair of them working together. I don’t understand why this is happening.”

  “Like I said. Most people in this business play hard.” I folded my arms, frowning. “I don’t like this one bit.”

  “Why?” Talya looked over at me. “I mean, obviously, but...”

  “Otto is a Morphorde,” I said.

  “No,” she replied. “He’s still a Weeder.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “You can tell?”

  Nervously, she nodded. “But there’s something wrong with him. Something wrong with his Ka-Bah. When he was walking toward me, I looked him in the eyes and I saw… I saw…”

  “What?”

  “NO-thing,” Talya whispered, shaking her head.

  What I saw was a DOG, but we were at the stage of mincing semantics. I nodded, and when Zane returned to us, I stepped forward.

  “Zane. I need to tap you for a job,” I said. “Do you have B&E experience?”

  Zane glanced back at the police circus in the drive. “Plenty.”

  “Enough to go do some work at short notice.”

  “Maybe. Depends on the site.”

  “Commercial.”

  “Ooh, are you guys talking about breaking into that funeral home?” Talya perked. “I could go!”

  “No.” Both of us said it at the same time, then looked at each other. Zane followed it up, stepping forward to lay a hand on Talya’s shoulder. “No, Kitten, no way. You’re still too gr
een for that kind of shit.”

  “I have to learn somehow.” She scowled. Even that managed to look kind of cute.

  “Yeah, but the time to learn isn’t during a live run,” Zane replied. “Come inside, both of you. Jenner pre-approved any missions related to finding the missing kids, as long as one of the Big Cat Crew knows what’s going down. When do you want to do it?”

  “Tonight,” I replied.

  He froze. “You’re kidding me.”

  I shook my head. “If we go tonight, there’s a slim chance we’ll find what we’re looking for. Every day that passes is a day where the evidence we need could be erased.”

  “The place is crawling with cops, the Vigiles are on the way-”

  “Which means they’re distracted,” I said, staring at him. “Believe me when I say that I’m in no mood to go and do this on such short notice. But we’re pros, aren’t we? We have to do what we have to do.”

  Zane rubbed his face and grimaced. “Do we have an address? And why are we breaking into this place?”

  I looked to Talya, and the pout disappeared as she realized she was supposed to be contributing. “Yep! We have an address! That’s... uhh... that’s about all, though. I need you to get me some computer equipment.”

  “Talya and I have both got pieces of the MinTex puzzle, but we need to get records to work out the rest,” I added.

  “That’s the company that was handling the money for the kids, wasn’t it?” Zane’s brow furrowed as he thought, popping his lip under his teeth. “You sure it’s the place?”

  “Verified and triangulamated.” Talya saluted.

  “A funeral home. Fuck.” Zane shook his head. “Should be easy, at least.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t count on it.”