The Manelli family was the biggest Mafia outfit in New York City and New Jersey. John Manelli, the Don of the family, was a ruthless cut-throat who spurned the traditions of the Cosa Nostra and dealt in drugs – lots of them. Celso was his father’s Consigliere and renowned to be one of the most dangerous non-magical Made Men in the underworld. I didn’t know much about him, and had never seen him in person. Rumor was that he’d killed more than a few Spooks – ‘hitmages’, as Vassily had once called us – and GOD knows how many norms. He was reputed to be smart, cool, and careful. All of the Murder Inc. guys could regularly be found at the club they owned and operated in Manhattan: The Gemini Lounge. It was quite likely that I could find Celso there… along with fifty other allied gangsters, street mages, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Joe could have been pulling my leg. Questioning someone who is about to die is a terrible way to get information, but something about his insistence that Celso had been there made sense. I had memorized the murder scene in a flash. The position of furniture, blood spatters, the signs of struggle and lack of it. Mariya’s body, slumped like a worn doll over the edge of the bathtub. I’d been sucking on the details like a bad tooth, recalling them over and over. There had definitely been more than one person there. That person could indeed have been Celso.
If it was true, there was no way I could leave New York. Nicolai would pay. Sergei would pay. After their performance the month before, the Organizatsiya was dead to me. I’d wring every drop of blood from their bodies for Vassily and Mariya, for Zarya, and for me.
As plans to find Celso began to coagulate, the cold shadow that had cruised with me for the entire day, from Joe’s capture to beating to execution, finally manifested himself. The cottony, dusty smell of feathers wafted through the cabin like smoke, filling the air with the subtle pressure of Phi, the substance of magic. It was Kutkha, my Neshamah: the conduit of my Art, and a sanctimonious pain in my behind.
From time immemorial, mages and mystics of all cultures have spoken of the Neshamah, the soul, as a real, conscious presence. It is the part of ourselves that all humans have, but few ever speak to. The Higher Self, the Holy Guardian Angel – call it what you will. Jung named his Thomas. Mine was Kutkha, named for the trickster deity of ancient Rus. Sort of.
"Alexi, we cannot do this." Kutkha spoke with no single voice. He sounded like the riffling wind, the air thrumming through feathers. "We will not find him in time. Tonight, we must leave."
I fixed ahead on the dark, wet road. "The Gemini Lounge isn’t too far from our route home. There’s time to cruise by before the flight. And if we miss this flight, I’ll book another. We’re not short of money."
"You will not find him. He is already gone. They know Joseph has disappeared."
My throat closed up with a sudden flash of heat so powerful that it flooded my eyes with white and gold. It caused my hands to tic, and I slowed to stop from losing control of the car. "No. You don't know that.”
“Alexi…”
“I know you don't know shit about the future. You fucking listen to me, you -"
The shadows of the cabin quickened. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the ghostly impression of a raven, blue-black, its substance boiling into filaments of vapor. When he next spoke, it was stronger, something I heard with my ears as well as my mind. “Your father used to say that to you, Alexi.”
“Don’t.” The urge to hit, to bite and grasp and tear at something, anything became overwhelming, but there was no one and nothing left to hurt. I was the only one in the car. "Don’t ever bring Grisha up again, or I swear to GOD..."
“What?” Kutkha’s tone twisted with dark amusement. “Will you drill out my knees, too?”
I exhaled thinly. It was starting to rain now, a light misty haze, and I fixated on the swirling particles to give my eyes something to chew on. "Stop being a smartass. Vassily-"
"Is still dead, my Ruach.”
“Stop.” I pulled over as the rain intensified, staring at the buildup on my screen as it began to blind me. The calm executioner’s confidence drained out of me. The engine rumbled like a cat’s purr while I clutched my head and willed Kutkha to shut up. But he wouldn’t: his thoughts, his agenda were his own, but he was part of me. Or, more accurately, I was part of him. “Just stop.”
Kutkha’s eyes burned in the gloom. “They are gone whether or not Celso Manelli lives or dies. They are gone when we are in Europe, or if we stay here. They are gone."
Gone. Gone gone gone. “Please just let me-”
“No.” The air was opaque now, blue-black and sucking. “I will not ‘just’ let you live the Lie.”
I’ll live a lie if I damn well want to, is what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t voice my petulance with any seriousness. The unspoken words rattled around my otherwise blank, exhausted mind. What I really wanted was to turn around, dig up Joe, reanimate him and kill him again. Instead, I fumbled for the windshield wipers and turned them on, sweeping the rain off the glass.
“You vowed yourself to me, Alexi. You vowed that you would grow for our sake.”
“I know.” But the resistance remained.
“It is not safe to stay near Sergei.” For a moment, Kutkha’s voice was almost soft. “We must go. You are done here.”
I didn’t feel ‘done’, though not for lack of preparation. My luggage was packed with money, clothes, my most important books and magical tools, and I’d left a go-bag out in Sheepshead Bay in case anything went wrong. I’d spent the last two weeks securing a fake passport, a two-way ticket to Spain, and a one-way train ticket to Germany. I had my photos and papers, and a fake ancestral I.D. We were set. But I was going to have to leave knowing that another man had been at that apartment: the man who had blown Mariya’s head back across her shower wall, and that he was alive and she was not.
“Do not make me regret empowering you, my Ruach.” Kutkha swiveled his head, looking across with eyes like the core of a star, smoking white and churning with constant motion. Momentarily, I met his gaze… and their gravity caught and held me. “By all rights, you should be dead… but you wanted to survive. And they would want that, too.”
Vassily and Mariya. My throat thickened. “I’m… I am abandoning them here, Kutkha.”
“They are dead, Alexi. You cannot abandon what is no longer here.”
The cold reminder did nothing to chase away the childish conviction that I was abandoning them to lie in their cold graves, while I fled the Organizatsiya and the life they had died to protect. Vassily had been a Vor v Zakone to his bones, the picture of a free-wheeling, quick-thinking thief-in-law. He had been the kind of man who could spin a million dollars out of five hundred. Once, a long time ago, he debated better than most lawyers. Sergei had picked him for his brilliant mind… brilliance that proved so fragile that five years in prison and the machinations of his comrades had crushed him like a crane fly.
And now? He was dead. Even though I knew it wasn’t my fault, it sure as hell felt like it.
I shifted gears, backed up, and pulled out onto the highway. Kutkha was right, as always. We had to follow the plan. It was a good plan, and if executed smoothly, it would work. Take the cat, leave the lights off, the car in the lot, the door locked and warded. We could get to the airport in the morning, be in England by the evening, and on our way to continental Europe the same day. We would change our money in Spain, convert the lot to Deutschmarks, and head to Bremen. In Germany, I could disappear into the Ukrainian Jewish diaspora without so much as a ripple, just as my parents had done when they’d fled Ukraine for America. But after that? No idea. I lived day to day as part of the New York Bratva, enjoying short periods of peace interspersed with episodes of hectic violence. There were days where I collapsed onto my bed in the mid-morning after working all night, sore and exhausted, patched up, amazed that I was still alive. This was the first time the future had ever existed as a concept.
Earlier in August, I’d faced down demons, DOGs, an insane sorceress, a six
teen-man shootout, and seen the I of GOD itself. My best friend had died in my arms; I’d had a gun shoved in my mouth, been tortured, kidnapped, and nearly car-bombed. I’d eaten from the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and faced death more times in that one week than I had in the last six years. But not a single one of those things were as intimidating as the prospect of freedom. I had most of a double degree in law and psychology that would get me approximately nowhere without grad school. Besides that, my only skills related to wet-work. Shoot a gun, throw a knife, sling a spell… sure thing. But hold a job? Finish grad school? Did they even have grad school in Germany?
The yawning expanse of that lifetime, all those years ahead, unseen… it felt like looking down the empty blackness of a gun barrel. A real gun would have been more comforting. At least the outcome was certain.
Something resolved in me: a deep, hot anger, the kind that burned a hole right through the gut. My jaws tensed until my teeth locked. I hauled the wheel and turned back out onto the road, wipers swiping the first rain of Fall off the windshield. “I’m checking out the club tonight.”
“Alexi-”
“No. You’ll get what you want. We’ll be on that flight come hell or high water. But just remember that you helped me out once, you got me out of one bad situation, Kutkha. Every other time, it was just me. I killed the DOGs. I freed Zarya and shook off the dope. I coped just fine without you before, and I’ll do it again if I have to.”
“As you say, proud Ruach.” Kutkha’s molten white gaze bore into me from the arc of my peripheral vision, as bright and cold as the Morning Star at dawn. “As you say.”
Chapter 2
There was no sign of Celso or his retinue when I cruised by the Gemini Lounge. He a party boy, chauffeured in a distinctly visible red Hummer everywhere around town. If it wasn’t in the parking lot, neither was he.
Half an hour later than I originally planned and seething with manic energy, I arrived at my apartment for the last time. I slammed the car door and the trunk and my briefcase, hugged my summer jacket against the rain, and stormed into the lobby. Brighton Beach was sullen tonight, the concrete wet and steaming, the air warm and oppressively humid. The Atlantic was shrouded in fog, the sky tinted orange by the light and pollution of a restless city. It was close to four am, but I could still see clearly in the weird brownish light.
Binah, my familiar, was caterwauling behind my front door, and she kept it up all the way through the muttered incantation that unwarded it. Ever since the demon-possessed corpse in my kitchen, I’d been more scrupulous with my wards. My sudden jump in ability had given me the confidence to experiment, too. I no longer only had alarms: I had an offensive ward, a design painted onto my red door with red paint that almost completely blended into the background color. People could knock. They could even touch the doorknob. But if someone tried to force my door, or if they charged it with kinetic force, the ward would react violently.
I didn’t even have my key out of the lock before the cat wormed through the gap and threw herself into my arms like a needy child. My familiar didn’t rub her face against things so much as ram herself into them. I took several blows to the head as she scrabbled onto my shoulder.
“Honestly.” I pushed Binah’s rear end up to help her gain purchase while she tried to arch against the side of my head, tail wrapping around my face. She was a lilac-point Siamese with perfect breed conformation, a lanky feline supermodel only slightly less graceful than a bulldozer. “Do you mind?”
“Mrraow. Mrrrp.” She began to lick the side of my head, sputtering and shaking when she got my hair in her mouth.
Binah purred against my neck as I took my shoe off, thought better of it, and stamped it back on. What was the point? There were maybe forty minutes until I had to leave the house again, and then I was never coming back. All I had to do was change my shirt and coat, crate the cat, and take my bags outside. That was it. I’d worn plastic rain slicker pants over my clothes when I’d killed Celso to keep the blood off them, and they’d gone in the burn pile – a trick of the trade.
And yet I stood still, frozen in place. The silence of the house boomed around me. It was small and old, so familiar that I often left the lights off when I was home and navigated by touch and smell and pattern. It smelled of books and paper and sandalwood. The apartment used to smell like Vassily, too, and it was frightening how quickly his scent had faded. It was two weeks to the day since he’d died, and his things were just as he’d left them: his shaving cream, his ties on the rack, his gold zippo case. His bedroom was a mute museum to his occupation, the sheets rumpled in the place he’d left them during his last night. Even so, his scent had vanished within days. It was easy to imagine the place dark and quiet, gathering dust as my scent also faded from the furnishings.
The fear rose in my throat again. I jerked my shoulders, pulled my gloves up along my wrists, sniffed, and forced myself towards my bedroom.
This small room had been the same, more or less, for fifteen years. Formerly crammed with books and occult paraphernalia, it was now imbued only with the empty, neat blandness of a hotel room. I was taking three suitcases, not even a tenth of what remained in the house. I was leaving my less-legal weapons, armor, munitions, tools, and most of my collection of books behind. The floor-to-ceiling shelves in the den had been custom-made for those books by one of Mariya’s friends. Not for the first time, I wondered: Why was I leaving the Beach, and not them? Why didn’t I go down to AEROMOR, shoot Sergei, shoot Vanya, and plant my flag? Even if they hadn’t bought or tipped off Celso and Snappy Joe, they deserved every bullet.
My Neshamah projected the sudden image of him staring sternly from the doorway. I swelled in place a little, fists clenched, but set the cat down on the bed and started on changing clothes.
Thunk thud thump.
The back of my neck prickled. I was halfway through pulling my undershirt off, and pulled it back down as I turned in place, ears cocked. Binah’s tail frizzed like a bottle-brush as she leaped off the bed and ran down the hall. The distinctive knock rang out again from the front door, louder this time.
Kutkha waited like a coiled spring in the back of my mind, alive and aware. He said nothing, but his thoughts and opinions curled half-formed behind my thoughts and opinions. We were in agreement. This was a poor development. Fortunately, it was a development with a simple, elegant solution.
“Ne valyai duraka, Alexi! Stop screwing around.” Nicolai Chiernenko called to me from outside, his voice muffled by the door and distance. Thunk thud thump.
Heart hammering, I glanced at my knife. The handle was protruding from the bag, but I didn’t dare move. Was there any feasible way he’d know I was home? I thought for a moment as he continued to knock. The lights were on. My car was out the front, the metal ticking to coolness. He had probably noticed, pressing his hand to the bonnet on his way from car to apartment door. He’d taught me tricks like that. Nicolai was as astute as he was traitorous.
If Nic tried to break the door down, then the ward would fry him… but they wouldn’t get whoever else he’d brought with him. If he was here to get me, he wouldn’t be alone. If he was here on business, it was fifty-fifty odds. Not good enough.
“Who is it?” I called out, reluctantly. I left the room, but I brought the knife and stuck to the doorway. I wouldn’t be the first man to get a shotgun blast through his front door in reply to a greeting.
"You know who it is. Open up."
There were few reasons why the new Avtoritet of the Beach would deign to see me, and none of them fit in with my plans. Nicolai was a snake. He’d gleefully trampled over Vassily and I to get to the top.
“Wait,” I said. “I need to get dressed.”
Nicolai couldn’t get into my apartment through the magical wards on the door, not unless he was going to blast his way in – and even then, all that would do was prime the traps in the hallway. Call me paranoid, but after the last month, I had decided not to take any more chances.
&nbs
p; I took my time. Nic looked sour by time I finally opened the door. Framed in the rectangle of light, he was a dry, thin scarecrow of a man, scarred and leathery from years spent in prison and the desert. He pinched a smoldering cigarette between colorless, thin lips. His new position of power had elicited no physical change in him: he wore his old patched army jacket, open, a blue-and-white striped t-shirt and well-worn cargo pants tucked into Doc Martens. He still did street work, often unaccompanied, the way he had always done. The only visible concessions to his new position and accompanying wealth was a solid gold crucifix on a solid gold chain, a new gold watch, and a renewed sense of entitlement to everyone else’s time. "We got a situation."
Of course we do. Kutkha's silent, persistent urging felt remarkably like rising panic. The flight was in less than four hours. We needed to find a way out of this. "Why didn’t you come earlier? We don’t have enough time tonight to finish a job and do disposal."
“Because murder isn’t convenient.” A tic of irritation rippled over his face.
“I say it only out of concern for the Organizatsiya,” I replied.
Nic tensed as if he was winding up to punch me. Then he seemed to remember that I was not just his hitman: I was a hitman who could turn away bullets with a shouted word, shatter wards with a gesture and some blood, and if I concentrated hard enough, I could probably inflate his brain until it ran out his ears. That, and we were ostensibly still brat’ya, brothers.
“We’ll find a way to get it over with.” He hunched and jerked his shoulders like a vulture shaking its wings. “Get rid of the pussy and bring sheet plastic. The scene is a fucking mess.”
He wasn’t meeting my eyes, and I realized something. Whatever this was about, he was embarrassed. It threatened him and his new station in the Organizatsiya. Nic had only been Avtoritet for just fifteen days, and something had already gone wrong on his watch – something bad enough or messy enough that he needed me to fix it. If it had been any other night, I would have gloated; as it stood, I was having to tamp down a profound sense of impending doom. To refuse a job would arouse his suspicions beyond measure. He’d finger what was going on without much difficulty, have me followed, and call his friends in East Germany. Quite unwittingly, the Organizatsiya had once again taken control of my life.
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