But before that, I had to get my tools.
The study was still mostly intact. To my surprise, the Wardbreaker was just lying there, unholstered, the silencer still screwed onto the barrel. I checked it over and then jammed it through my waistband. A deep tension I hadn’t known I’d been carrying ebbed away, replaced by determination.
My desk had been disemboweled, but someone had stuffed my papers and books back into the drawers and had left their own files on the desktop. Quickly, I went to the smallest of my bookshelves, a low deep-bellied shelf, and pulled out a photo album, a copy of the mishnayot, and half a dozen particularly rare books, including the copy of Das Rote Buch that Crina had pilfered for me before she’d vanished to parts unknown. My wastepaper basket had a trash bag in it: I shook the trash out, threw the books into it, and tied it shut.
The last thing I needed was in the glass hutch beside my desk, cradled on a folded rectangle of crushed purple velvet. My father's old prison sledge. No one had touched it, which wasn't surprising. There was something naturally unpleasant about this weapon, the hammer my father had liberated from Kolyma, the gulag where he served – and survived – for seven years. The head was fifteen pounds of cold iron, more than enough to crush a man's head in with a single solid blow. And it had crushed a lot of heads.
The sledge thrummed with a subtle siren call, and even with my magic crippled, it still made the stubble on the back of my neck stir. It had first been imbued with my father's desperate will, his fierce need to survive. Every iron spike he'd driven had symbolized a camp guard, a snitch, a pimp or a foreman. He'd carried the hammer and his hate with him through the German underground railroad, onto the ocean liner he and my mother took from Hamburg to New York, the ship where I was conceived. Grigori Sokolsky had terrorized the Beach – and me – with this hammer for fifteen years. I had ended his life with it, closing the circuit. The peculiar magic of sacrifice was etched into it as indelibly as my father's prison number was burned into the wooden haft.
Reverently, I lifted it out of its case, ran my thumb over the burnished grain, and slung it over my shoulder. As the only surviving Sokolsky man, it sung its Phitonic song for me and me alone. I had been prepared to let it go, like the photos. It was too heavy and cumbersome to travel with, but the Organizatsiya had called me Molotchik after this hammer, and the Organizatsiya was going to remember why.
With the Wardbreaker, hammer, my cat, and my key grimoires, I felt better, stronger. I passed by the desk, and lifted the cover of a dirty, finger-stained Manilla folder to glance over the contents. They were informal receipts penciled in Nicolai's rough handwriting, with a note to read the instructions for pickup and delivery. Frowning, I flipped the page.
There was a honk from outside, then another. The Tigers had spotted something.
I slapped the folder closed and shoved the entire thing into the core of the photo album inside the trash bag, grabbed the lot, and ran. As I reached the balcony exit, the front door banged open from the other end of the house. There was a burst of male laughter, and then a shout of alarm. They smelled death.
Images of my tortured cat and the red-haired girl, her wrists bleeding from the handcuffs, flashed in my mind’s eye. A tic rippled next to my mouth. I threw the glass door open on its rails, threw the books over the side, and stalked back into the house with my father’s sledgehammer in my hands.
A month ago, I’d been desperate to run from the Organizatsiya, but now I didn’t think I could – not without making them hurt first.
Chapter 15
These men were ex-soldiers, lifetime criminals, but they were in my house.
They whirled to face me as a unit as I charged out of the laundry. They had the wrong guns for a space as small as this one: before they knew what had hit them, I was already up in the first man’s face with the hammer. I used the haft end to knock his pistol aside, the head to fend off his fist, and then rammed my forehead into his nose. Cartilage gave way with a satisfying crunch. As he stumbled away into the table, I ducked and weaved the next half-seen fist, rammed the end of the hammer into his belly below where his vest ended, and swept him up in a choke with the haft just as the other two finally opened fire. His shaven head snapped back in a bloody haze; I shoved him off into the other two, frozen with horror as they realized what they had done, and followed up behind with the sledge.
I knew their names. The corpse that slumped to the floor was named Vadim; Anatoly was the one closest to me. He instinctively tried to block the swing that broke his arm and slammed it back into his face, toppling him. Marko popped off three panic rounds at us. One hit the flak vest and staggered me like a baseball bat to the gut; the other two went wide. I gestured sharply with my hand and barked an arcane-sounding word at him: he threw his hands up in brief terror of impending magic, and then I was on him. One strike to the belly, two and three to the face, and he was down with the others.
I dropped the hammer and went to my knee to pick up a gun, bracing beside the kitchen door. We were screwed anyway, so I double-tapped each man lying on the ground. Anatoly, Marko, and Vadim. One, two, three.
“Ivanko!” I called back into the hall. “Going to come out before you burn alive?”
There was no reply. I waited until a count of seven and risked a look around the corner. The hall was empty, the front door hanging open. The only sound was the shrill whine of tinnitus in my ears.
Outside, one of the Weeders laid into the horn. I dropped the gun and broke away from the door to snatch up the hammer and cross to the stove. I hefted it up, sticking to the wall, and slammed the head of the hammer into the gasline. It broke with a high whistling noise, and then the powerful sulphuric stench of methane gas began to pour into the kitchen. I was headed back to the balcony when something flickered in the corner of my eye: Ivanko, who swung around the edge of my bedroom door and opened fire.
I barely cleared the doorway, holding my breath as bullets shattered plaster and brick veneer. He wasn’t using a suppressor, and it was loud. I careened out onto the balcony, plaster chips stinging the back of my neck, and dropped the hammer down to the sidewalk. I vaulted over the railing, found my grip on the edge, and then let go.
I glimpsed the shocked face of my downstairs neighbor as I caught the edge of their balcony, jolting my arms from shoulders to wrists, and then let go a second time. I cursed with pain as I caught the last railing, let go, and tumbled to the ground. The impact against the pavement rattled my teeth and sent me sprawling to land on my ass. I looked up and saw Ivanko high above, teeth bared in a victorious grimace. He opened fire on the street as I scrambled up and dove for cover, and got a half a burst out before the top of the building exploded.
Bullets by themselves aren’t enough to trigger an explosion. Unless you’re using steel jacketed rounds, ammunition doesn’t spark – but dodgy third-hand Russian submachine guns with worn out snub noses most certainly do. The right mixture of methane and oxygen and a moment of muzzle flash was all it took.
The detonation blew Ivanko off the balcony in pieces. Broken glass and chunks of meat rained down over the street, and then a second, duller explosion tore through the rest of the house. It would burn. My house was full of books, after all.
The throaty roar of the Buick’s engine and the squeal of tires pierced the roaring of the fire. Duke – still naked – pulled up hard right in front of me. Zane flung open the door as I staggered up with my hammer and the books and lunged in over the seat. Duke tore off with the door still flapping open. Two other Organizatsiya men were running up the road, guns raised, but they were too late. Even better: there were sirens in the distance, getting closer.
“FUCK!” Duke roared, and slammed the wheel as we took off down Banner Avenue, hurtled out onto Coney Island Avenue, and sped up towards the intersection of Coney and Avenue Z. When we rounded the corner, I seized the chance to reach back and slam the door closed.
“Slow down, Duke! Come on, show some fucking sense!” Jenner, just as tweaked
as Duke, was flopping around in Vassily’s overlarge trench coat and yelling at him from the passenger’s side.
“You fucking drive!” He snarled back. But he did slow, and the back of the Buick stopped fishtailing as we headed for the empty intersection. At this time of night on a Monday, the only people out were the ones staring at the conflagration behind us. It made the oncoming sirens all the more audible.
“You need to turn left at Avenue Z, then left at Hubbard,” I said. “Turn right on the Parkway and we can lose them. Slow it down, take everything legal, and we’ll make it.”
Duke laughed, the high, hysterical laughter of someone high on adrenaline and speed, and slowed sharply at the end of Banner Avenue to merge into the traffic. "We are so fucking lucky. SO fucking lucky!”
“What the hell happened back there?” Zane was fighting his own adrenaline high with a locked jaw and deep breaths. “What caused the explosion?”
“Russian Mafia meth lab.” I bent down and reached a shaking hand out to my cat. Binah stared up from between Zane’s feet, ears flat, eyes wide. “That’s what the police report will say.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Duke replied.
“What about this fucking Russian mafia kiddy porn studio, with our damn kids?” Jenner turned in her seat, eyes flashing. “How are we going to prove anything now?”
I couldn’t answer her for a moment. The adrenaline was wearing off, and I was hurt. My arms felt like I had torn something in them from the multiple impacts on the way down. The gut shot had been a close quarters full-impact round. I felt like I’d been bludgeoned in the chest with a mallet.
“The video was worthless. We could have taped a confession and saved enough of the footage if your man hadn’t lost his cool.” I settled back and scrubbed the sweat and ash from my forehead.
“Did you know?”
“I had no idea they had kids. One of the reasons I left the Organizatsiya is because I knew that our Pakhun – the ‘Don’, so to speak – wanted to assign me to a job that involved human trafficking. He didn’t mention children. He didn’t even hint at… at movies. I assumed he meant adult women and men for labor.”
“So did you tell anyone about this?” Zane’s eyes narrowed. “That he was getting involved in this shit?”
All three of them were tense with hostility. I drew myself up, ready to fight. “What was I supposed to do? Walk into the nearest Supernatural Support Unit and say ‘Good Afternoon, I’m an illegal mage with the Yaroshenko Organizatsiya, an organized criminal outfit you’ve never heard of. I’d like to report the hypothetical activities of men who have never been arrested in America, who are discussing trading people in Thailand’. There is no evidence they intended to do this kind of work in the USA.”
“You could get them under RICO,” Zane replied.
“Prosecution under RICO still requires hard evidence,” I said. “A two-month old conversation is not evidence. Even wiretaps can fail as evidence in court.”
“I have to say, Rex,” Jenner said. “This really doesn’t look too good. Like, for you.”
“Why? Because Duke ruined a perfectly good interrogation?” I replied, coldly.
“Jesus, get the fuck over it,” Duke snarled.
“Shut your cockholster, Duke.” Jenner turned on him for a moment, and then back to me. “I didn’t say the whole fuckup was your fault, Rex. But it’s going to be real hard to convince Ayashe of that.”
Binah crawled out from her hiding place. She struggled and failed to get up on the back seat with Zane and me, so I bent down to help her up so that she could sit in my lap, staring at Jenner the whole time. The Siamese folded herself against my body and followed my line of sight to glare haughtily at her, one royal cat to another.
“We can’t convince her of anything, but I killed them,” I said. “Every one of those pedarasti motherfuckers is dead.”
Zane made a sound that was half exasperation, half unspoken curse. Jenner’s eyes narrowed. And then she snorted, a strange half-smile pulling up the corner of her mouth on one side. “You know, I like you, Rex, but I don’t trust you. Nothing personal.”
“You’re well within your rights.” I jerked my chin up, stroking Binah from neck to rump. Her remaining fur had a dry green whisper through my palm, another sign of her ill health. “But now you’ve fulfilled your part of the deal, I’ll commit to the contract.”
“There was a contract?” Duke was calming down, but his voice was still shaky. “Does it have a random explosion clause?”
“It has a ‘shut the hell up before I turn you into a leopard print man-thong’ clause,” Jenner said. She sounded a little more like her usual self. “So anyway, now that we’re not being shot at and-or blown up, did you and Ayashe have a good one-on-one?”
“Yes. And now we have multiple leads into the case, mundane and Occult.” Though I wouldn’t be able to do much unless I could remove the… thing that was cutting me from my Neshamaic link. A terrible thought occurred to me, then. What if I died with this parasite in me? Would it stop me from leaving my body? Would it turn me into an upir, like Sergei?
Suddenly, I felt very foolish for having charged into the kitchen under a hail of gunfire.
“Oh. Well, that’s good.” As if nothing had happened at all, Jenner turned and plopped down into her seat, huddling down in the trench coat. “Let’s go and get burgers!”
“No.” Zane and I said at the same time. We looked at each other, and he spoke. “No burgers.”
Duke bounced excitedly in his seat, which caused the car to jerk to the right and dip into the next lane. “Hell yeah! Burger King!”
“No!” Zane clutched onto the back of the driver’s seat as we righted again. “You don’t have any goddamn pants! Neither of you have pants!”
“C’mon man, lighten up. We’ll go through the drive-thru. The little red rocket is all shrunk up from the cold-”
“Jesus fucking Christ.” It was the first time I could remember hearing Zane swear.
“-so they aren’t gonna see anything if they aren’t looking, and if they’re looking then they’re totally into me anyway-”
“Shut up, or I swear to God…”
We managed to get on the Parkway without incident, and sure enough, we ended up passing through the Burger King drive-thru. Duke conceded by laying a t-shirt over his lap, but the exhausted woman who served us, her bouncy hair crammed under a cheap plastic visor, barely gave us a second glance as she handed over two very large paper bags of junk food and a tray of soda. Whatever we looked like we’d been up to, she’d seen it all before.
Zane and I both kept looking back behind us, expecting to see flashing lights in the distance, but finding nothing except orange-lit damp nothingness. When we realized that we weren’t being tailed, that we’d somehow gotten away with it, we both settled into our seats. The cabin was now thick with the odor of processed beef, sauce, onions and French fries. It was bad, in that it was junk food, but it covered up the lingering smells of blood and burnt powder. Takeout from the big burger chains somehow always masked every other smell in a room.
I got given a burger. Zane looked uncomfortable but stoic as he ate, gazing at the street through his window. Duke and Jenner talked about things which held no interest for me, mumbling around mouthfuls of food. I held my shivering cat with my free hand, and when I was done with ‘dinner’, I carefully and gently examined her wounds. They were filthy, but living in an alley next to Eee-Zee-Pawn for a month had basically inured me to filth. I was more concerned by the burn injuries. Several of them were infected, oozing when I squeezed.
“Why’d you do it?”
I looked up to find Zane watching me. For a moment, I thought I saw the big cat in him. The way he lounged, ankle crossed and foot twitching, reminded me of a leopard in a tree. “What?”
“Take them out,” he said. “Back there.”
“It was actually kind of an accident. I was planning to start a normal fire, but the buyki arrived back before I cou
ld and charged the kitchen.” I turned back to Binah, picking over her as I cataloged her wounds. She endured it placidly, purring all the while. “I had to search for some things.”
“Right. What’s in the bag?” He motioned to it with his head.
“My annotated Mishnayot. Agrippa’s Book Two, a very venerable Occult reference. Magician’s tables, my own studies of gematria. A rare book by Carl Jung.” I reached down, still stroking Binah’s ears with my other hand, and fumbled around in the plastic bag. I searched for the folder I had stuffed into the photo album, feeling through the pages. When I found it, I drew it up through the opening of the bag and accidentally pulled a photo of Vassily and Mariya with it. They were sitting together at a table bristling with bottles, food, and a small two-tier cake. Vassily was grinning from ear to ear. He had his degree scroll in his hand, his eyes fixed confidently on the camera. I remembered taking that photo. It was our private family graduation celebration for his MBA.
A small shock and a sharp, tight pain lanced through my gut. I slid the photo back into the album pages and cracked open the Manilla folder instead, trying to focus on the words through the sudden wave of gray fatigue that washed over me. The man beside me leaned across, peering down at the pages.
“This is a transactional record,” I said, before Zane could ask. “Pick-up and delivery instructions. I paused to grab them from the desk, and that’s why I got delayed… but they could be useful.”
“What’s it say?” Jenner turned around in the seat, looking back at me. In the dark, her bony face was deeply shadowed.
I flipped through the pages, digesting the contents. Delivery instructions, when written down, were generally coded in Russian military shorthand. It wasn’t exactly the Enigma code, but the truncated Cyrillic worked well enough in an English-speaking nation like the USA. Even native Russian speakers couldn’t make heads or tails of the abbreviations and prison slang terms that were passed on from Kommandant to soldier.
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