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

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “Then can’t Otto?”

  “If he’s an Elder and he knows they’re there, he could. But he isn’t, he doesn’t, and he won’t.” Jenner rolled over onto her side and squinted at me, as smug as any cat. “Why do you think I chose that site?”

  I rubbed my hand over my mouth. “Running water... isolated, derelict, smells like old machinery, but isn’t so polluted as to be advantageous to a Morphorde.”

  “No more than any other place in this filthy shithole of a city.” Her dark eyes glinted. “So once he does the big reveal, we blow up a mine. The whole lot of them’ll piss themselves. Even big bad bikers are scared of the dark, Rex. The shit they can’t see terrifies them.”

  “I can probably contain the sound of the concussion with the right ward,” I said. “But I can’t do it now. I need to sleep.”

  “Sure.” Jenner was looking pretty sleepy as well - and not nearly as drunk as she’d made out to be. “You’ve been pushing too hard again.”

  “Me? Never.” I snorted, and rolled my eyes as I got to my feet. My back, knees and hip cracked, and I winced.

  “Yeah. You.” She pushed herself up to recline. “What’s eating you, son?”

  “All sorts of things.” Even though she hadn’t made any move toward me, I had the sudden urge to step back and away. “The Vigiles, mostly. Tomorrow night is my deadline.”

  “Don’t worry about ‘em. If we have to squirrel you down to Texas to hide out with Cassie, we will.” Jenner waved it off. “What else?”

  “It’s not that simple,” I replied, frozen in place: half forward, half toward the door. “Have you spoken to Talya about what she’s discovered about MinTex? The link between the Russian Mafia and government?”

  “Yeah.” Jenner scowled, foot twitching like a restless tail.

  I began to pace, glancing at the walls. Was the room safe? “I have a theory as to what’s happening, and it’s not good. Do you know what a ‘Shard’ is? And what a Shardkeeper does?”

  Jenner’s face became mask-like, carefully neutral. “Maybe-yes. Depends who’s asking.”

  “Is this something in your book of laws? The Ib-Int?”

  “The Ib-Int isn’t a book. You get all the information during your first shift.” She frowned. “Why’re you asking?”

  “The Vigiles and the TVS are both looking for a Shard. They’re at war over it.” I laced my hands in my lap. They were shaking - with fatigue, with the need to go out and finish my drink, with overstimulation. “I think Angkor is working for the Vigiles, and he was captured by the TVS. He gathered the intel he needed from us and left after the blood rain signaled him to do something. He may have murdered the Vigiles agent Ayashe was upset over, Kristen Cross, and gave me to his handlers. They knew exactly where I was that night. They knew where to stage the setup. I think they want me to take the fall for Kristen’s death, because they murdered her. She was a traitor to the agency.”

  Jenner peered at me owlishly. “How’d you figure that out?”

  “I found a report Kristen had recorded for a third party,” I said. “She explicitly recounted the conflict between the TVS and the Vigiles, and mentioned their pursuit of the Shard and the people who know its location. She said one was in prison, one is on the run, and one is dead.”

  “Yeah.” Jenner grimaced. “Michael.”

  I paused for a moment. Michael had been someone I’d met only a few times. The leader of the Pathfinders and the true Elder of New York, he had been a tall, imposing, priest-like man. Bald, monastically calm, he’d died a horrific death the same night that Mason had vanished. “You think that’s why he was murdered?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. I know that’s why he was murdered.”

  “So what is a Shard, then?”

  “It goes back to the myth of our creation,” Jenner said slowly. “The short answer is that a Shard is a piece of GOD’s skin. A piece of Eden that got flung out when GOD was fucked by the Morphorde and stuck in a single cell of its body, like a splinter of glass.”

  Eden? Here? “I…”

  Jenner’s eyes burned with an orange-green halo as she fixed on me. “We know there’s a Shard here. All of us sense it, instinctively, the first time in the first life we ever shapeshifted. For me, that was back near the end of the Crusades. I knew that the Crusaders and the Muslims were fighting over the wrong chunk of land right from the start. The Shard’s not in the Middle East. I don’t know where it is, but Michael did, and he took that secret to his grave. The TVS probably wants it for their own fucking loopy reasons, but I can tell you why the Vigiles does - because they’re run by the fucking Deutsche Orden. They’re the last real Templars, and they’re still searching for the Holy Land. The REAL Holy Land.”

  “So tell me about them,” I said. “The Deutsche Orden.”

  She lay back, her hands laced behind her head. “Well. It starts all the way back in 1190, the year of the founding of the Teutonic Knights. They were a pack of fucking bastards. They started out as thugs enforcing the tolls at ports in Germany, you know.”

  “Interestingly enough, my Organizatsiya started out the same way,” I said. “Though we never received a knighthood.”

  “Hah. Well, back in those days, if you had a dick, a sword, some money and a bunch of friends, you could go to the church and turn your protection racket into a knightly ‘order’ as long as you promised to kill Muslims and Pagans. There’s a bit more to it than that - lack of roadside hospitals, mostly - but that’s the bare bones of it.”

  “Cynical, but accurate.” I shuffled up, and leaned back against the wall.

  “The Teutonic Knights raped and burned their way through Eastern Europe, killing every GOD-damned wizard, Weeder, Feeder and funny-looking animal they found, and established Prussia on the graveyard they built,” Jenner continued. “They ruled it for a long time, but lost everything when Prussia turned Lutheran. The hardcore Crusaders retreated to the Holy Roman Empire and set up as specialized supernatural critter-killers. They called themselves the Venator Dei, God’s Huntsmen. Most of the Teutonic Knights branched off into this hamstrung honorary knighthood thing that exists today, but a hardcore group kept going as the Church’s supernatural hit squad. They worked all through the Inquisitions - all of them - and split off into advisories that went around the world. The Deutsche Orden boomed under Hitler. After the Second World War, they gained a foothold in the US.”

  I rubbed my lip thoughtfully.

  “They play at being Protestant over here, but they’re whatever denomination they need to get their way. The Deutsche Orden got mixed up with politics, found their way into Government, and they backed Reagan, then Rutherford. These fuckin Nazis got Rutherford into power so they could get their tentacles into the CIA and the Army and the FBI, and then they killed him.”

  I frowned. The 1983 assassination of President Rutherford by a sorceress had been the instigating event behind the formation of the Vigiles Magicarum, as well as the event that had brought magic into the modern American consciousness. Before then, magic was the world’s worst open secret. Everyone knew it existed, in churches and cults, in dark tarot parlors and Spiritualist seances and Occult fraternities, but everyone hid it from one another, afraid of what would happen if they came out. The revelation that Presidents had a secret astrologer in the White House at all times, and always had - the ‘Special Advisor to the President’ - to inform their decision-making had scandalized the public when it had come to light. But even then, it had sort of existed as a weird, subconscious social thing. Rutherford’s death and the Vigiles’ creation had made it real in a way it hadn’t been since the fall of Alexandria.

  “So the Deutsche Orden is possibly the inheritor organization to the Thule Society,” I said. “Nazi Germany’s occult elite.”

  “The Thule Society basically is the Deutsche Orden,” Jenner said. “There’s a super-religious old guard at the core of then, the Order of Saint Peter, and the rest of them are occult-ish Nazi mystics and American Exceptionalists. They do
n’t believe anything supernatural is HuMan. Supernatural anything is exclusively the work of ‘dark forces’, and all mages, shapeshifters, and anything not a plain ol’ HuMan derive their abilities, personalities, and form from demons.”

  That explained Keen’s attitude, and the statue and paraphernalia in the Judge’s oratory. “The others don’t sound like they believe you.”

  Jenner groaned. “They don’t. They don’t get that the Order won’t be happy until every last one of us is dead. Their whole ‘Agent-Adeptus’ setup is them using fire to fight fire, and once the wildfire is put out, they’ll extinguish all their torches.”

  “She may be coming around,” I said.

  “Don’t count on it.” Jenner shook her head.

  “Well, that’s food for thought,” I said, easing up. “But if I don’t sleep, I’m going to throw up.”

  “Go.” Jenner waved airily, covering her face with her arm. “Leave me here. All alone, in the cold.”

  “I’m sure you’ll survive.” I sat up and stretched.

  “Hey, life is more than just survival.” She lifted her wrist from over her eye to glance slyly at me. “You know, you’d be great to snuggle. Big broad shoulders.”

  “No, but thank you for the compliment.” Suddenly prim, I half-turned toward the door.

  Jenner laughed. “You’ll loosen up one day, when you find the right boy.”

  I was grateful my face was turned away from her. “I... well...”

  “Angkor isn’t worth you worrying about.” She was mumbling a bit now, already falling asleep. “You should get to know Zane better. You could climb that boy like a palm tree, mm-mmm. He’d give you the time of your life.”

  I blushed so hard I thought I was going to pass out, and began sidling toward the exit. “And on that note, it is well past my bedtime.”

  “Me toooo,” Jenner replied.

  Only once she had rolled under the covers and started snoring did I begin to feel sick at the smell of stale liquor, and left as quickly as I was able so I could get into bed.

  Even though my eyes would hardly stay open, I found myself staring at the ceiling of the bunk above my head. My brain was trying to process the day, skipping from Doctor Levental to Sergei, then to Christopher, the MiB, vampires, crooked senators, Streetsweepers, bug rains, and wiretaps. The ruminating became cyclical after a while, and I was on the cusp of sleep when I finally realized something.

  Sergei. Wiretaps. The Wrathling he’d used to cut me from my magic - the Wrathling who was probably destined to take the place of my soul when Sergei cut the cord. He had summoned the creature back to himself and learned where I’d been. Which meant he knew I was staying with the Twin Tigers, and probably had a record of everyone else I’d come into contact with while I was carrying the parasite.

  Including the guy who’d kept me fed while I was homeless. Rahul Ali Wheeler.

  Chapter 23

  Jenner was right. The Universe needed to let the fuck up for a day.

  My face and fingers tingled with numbness as I hauled myself out of bed and looked over at the clock. 5:30 a.m. Just sitting upright left me feeling light-headed and nauseous with exhaustion, but if Sergei was working back through everyone I’d had contact with, then he’d either found Ali or would find him soon. He’d kill him just to prove a point. He’d leave me no solace, no friends, nothing except the certainty of my servitude to him. It was the way of the Organizatsiya, as relentless and terrible as the GULAGs that spawned it.

  Ali was my responsibility, and my body was going to do what the fuck I told it to do. I dragged myself up and out to the kitchen, forced down a plate of fried eggs and steak, and chased it with the rest of the bourbon and a B vitamin. I had a headache coming on, but the bitter smell of coffee turned my stomach. If the Yen kept screwing with my palate like this, I was going to have to start taking caffeine pills. It could make me drink, but damned if I was going to let it decide which vices I kept and which ones I didn’t.

  After my first real meal in days, I felt slightly more awake. I shaved cold and spent a while in meditation, staring fixedly at The Chariot until I felt like I had control, then went to my locker and loaded for bear. Guns, knife, my new armored suit, fresh gloves, a clean tie. By the time I was done, I looked almost human.

  Binah trailed after me as I prepared, her tail arched inquisitively over her back. When I was ready, I crouched down and stroked her head and flanks, lowering my head enough that she could stand up, her front paws on my knees, and groom my forehead and the tip of my nose.

  “Not this time, girl.” I got up and checked her food: two days’ worth, with the kibble box readily accessible on the top of the locker in case of emergency. “You keep an eye on the place. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  I left her on the bed and closed the door to the barracks. Her anxious meowing followed me through the house, echoing between my ears all the way to the car.

  It was freezing cold, dark, and sleeting. The chill drilled into my knees, and they were aching by the time I reached the alley where I’d camped like Hobo MacGyver for most of the fall. Ali lived in the shitty part of The Bronx, which was saying something, given the state of The Bronx overall. Most of the apartment buildings here were gutted hulks, while others had been torched and were now nothing but piles of rubble. Ali’s E-Zee-Pawn was an ironic bulwark against the surrounding urban decay, the second of a strip of six structures that still stood among the wreckage. The alley ran between Ali’s and the building next door, an empty bodega with smashed windows and broken, empty shelves.

  The only sounds were those of distant traffic, and plastic bags rustling in the wind. The place was dead. E-Zee-Pawn was shuttered, the windows beyond the grate broken and crazed. People had been trying to break in and steal his inventory. The sign on the door was turned to ‘CLOSED’, and my gut began to churn. Ali lived above his store in a small apartment, and he was a creature of habit. Every morning, he walked to a better part of town, got coffee and a sub from the same store, walked back and opened up at 8:45 a.m. There was no reason for it to be closed at 9:30 on a Tuesday morning.

  "Shit." A tremor passed from sternum to navel, an unpleasant nauseating thrill. I drew my knife and went down the alley, sniffing.

  The dumpster where I'd lived was still exactly where I'd left it, turned on its side against a limp chain-link fence at the other end of the alley. It was still remarkably clean. The screen door that led into the narrow two-story building was ajar, and the solid door behind it was also loose. The lock had been gouged out of the wood with a chisel. I instinctively longed for a gun, but the knife was safer. The DOGs I'd been fighting for months used firearms to reproduce and heal. I still didn't understand why or how, but I'd seen it enough times that I was willing to take it at face value.

  I pushed the door open, and walked into a wall of stench. The cloying smells of old meat and piss hung on the air, scents that twisted my stomach. Normally, I didn’t have a problem with the dead... but it was all too easy to flash back to Mariya’s apartment smelling like this.

  I recoiled from the entrance, a hand over my face, and squeezed my eyes closed. I didn’t have to go in. Realistically, there was no reason for me to go inside. I knew I should find a payphone, call the cops, and let them handle it... but this was my fault. Ali had been kind to me, and I’d led wolves to his door.

  My shoulders sagged, and I backed away to lean on the opposite side of the alley, struggling to stay with my senses. Ali and the doctor were good men, men who'd done nothing wrong by Sergei in any personal way... men who had offered me their assistance, help and resources when I had been at my most desperate. They hadn’t deserved this.

  I gulped fresh air, and forced myself to open the door and cross the threshold. The short concrete corridor inside had an interior door that led into the storefront and a flight of carpeted stairs leading up to the living quarters on the second floor. There was only the one apartment in this tiny building: he had no neighbors. I trudged up, dre
ading what I knew I'd find, hoping that he had at least been able to die quickly. That really depended on who Sergei had sent to kill him.

  The stairs led to a door in an alcove. It was dirty and old, made more homey by the protective hamsa pendant on his door and the hemp welcome mat outside. This lock had been opened more carefully: there was no damage, and the door was closed. There was no point in knocking. The smell told me there was no hope of anyone alive being at home.

  Picking locks with magic was something I could do, now. I put a hand over the lock and concentrated. A thin thrill of power lanced through my fingers, and I felt for the tumblers, lifting the pins and holding them up as I worked the doorknob with the other hand. After a couple of seconds of effort, the knob turned. I held it while I worked on the deadbolt, which was more difficult... but after a minute or so, I felt the lock turn and clunk, and the door opened.

  Wait. The deadbolt was locked? I froze before entering, ticking off the possibilities. If I were interrogating someone, I'd lock the deadbolt, too. Same if I was worried about being interrupted. That meant that the murderers had escaped through a different entry... and maybe they'd arrived through a different entry, too.

  The stench of rotten flesh was overpowering. Eyes watering, I stepped into a hallway that creaked with age. Ali's house was lined with cheap pea green carpet that went halfway up the walls to a wood-paneled edge, where it was replaced by faded wallpaper. The hallway was neat, but the walls were stained yellow.

  If Sergei had ordered the hit, I wouldn’t rule out the chance that he’d hired another spook already. There was a possibility of magical traps. If there is one thing I am not, it is incautious, so I sketched a sigil and murmured a command word in the fetid stillness of the hallway. "Chet."

  A fragile-looking web of kinetic energy spun itself ahead and around me in a sphere, Phi rippling like a sheet of tiny stars as I found the sustaining point of the spell and held it. I was tired, and the shield was thin. It wasn’t going to take more than one hit, but it would be enough. With my guard up and my knife turned back in my hand, I followed the sound of buzzing insects to the kitchen. There was no door, and the worn wooden frame had gouge marks. I rounded the edge of the doorway, knife and spell at the ready. Just in case.