Before anything, I had to clear my head, and the best thing for that was exercise. A punching bag and some basic free weights were set up in the yard behind the house, so I lay into the bag for a while, did some upper body work, and then turned to magic. I’d been working on variations of the Aysh spell, magic crafted and used in desperation while on the verge of death. The fundamental basis of the spell was to pull together the normally invisible aerosol particles of dirt, metal, and water in the air into a temporary solid, a way to exploit the kinetic potential of New York’s omnipresent pollution. Aysh used that field of matter like a match on sandpaper, striking flame from the air. The main variation I was interested in was a spell I had bound to Tzain, the Sword: a punch augmented by a spike of compressed matter and force that shattered and diffused after impact.
The first couple of tries, there was a flash of light and a projection the length of a small nail. By attempt number twenty-two, I could reliably put my enhanced fist through a wooden plank and half-snap, half-explode it.
The sound drew Talya after a couple of tries. She hung back while she watched me turn another old piece of scrap wood into kindling. I moved to look at her properly, and found her picking at one of her fingernails and frowning.
“Ayashe’s here,” she said in Russian. “She, uh, says that she was sent to pick you up.”
“Pick me up?” I kicked the broken fencing out of the way and shook my hand out.
“She’s down in front of Strange Kitty, waiting. Jenner won’t let her on the property,” she replied. “Listen, when you’ve got some time, I need to talk to you. About MinTex. But not here.”
“Mm. Found much?”
She nodded enthusiastically, chewing on her lip.
I rubbed my eyes, tired and woozy. Why was I so dizzy? Oh, right. Gin, followed by cold pepperoni pizza and two hours of exercise. “Go tell her I have to get dressed. I’ll be out shortly.”
Leaving Ayashe to stew, I went to get sorted, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t seem to get the crisp look I preferred. It was the grief, plus the embarrassment of having dared open up to someone only to be promptly betrayed. Grief was making me sloppy, sentimental, and weak. It was also making me do stupid things like let my guard down at night on the street and buying into Angkor’s honeypot tactics, letting him gain kompromat on me in the process. ‘Kompromat’ was one of those Soviet words that didn’t have an easy translation to English, even if the word sounded similar to ‘compromising’. Kompromat was information that not only compromised you socially, but that actively devalued your worth as a person, dehumanizing you to some extent—and it was valuable, a form of definite currency which was wielded as a weapon and used to exterminate a person’s blat’, their reputation and ability to get help from other people. My knowledge that Nicolai and Sergei were tolerating, even encouraging, pedophilia in their ranks was kompromat if I ever had the opportunity to share the proof with another Organizatsiya, but they also held kompromat on me: I had turned traitor, and being a suka in the underworld was a crime in the same tier as child molestation and homosexuality. In the prison camp, it would get you forcibly branded with tattoos proclaiming your outcast status.
I trudged out to the front of the gate, where Ayashe waited in a trench coat and boots: black tac-boots, like the kind SWAT wore. She looked about as pleased to see me as I was her. Neither of us bothered to offer a handshake.
“About frigging time,” she said, by way of introduction. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Why? Is it time for my next drugged beating already?” I cocked my head.
She squinted at me, her lip curling on one side, and only then seemed to notice my hair. “What? No, I was told to pick you up and take you to Kristen’s house. The agent who was murdered.”
“I’m sure your good friend Agent Keen was delighted to bring you the news that I’m now helping you,” I said, brittlely.
“Who?” She frowned.
“Agent Keen and Adeptus Tomas Black?”
Ayashe mulled on that for a few moments, then shook her head. “No idea who you’re talking about. The S.A.C got in touch with me and said he’d contacted you directly and hashed things out.”
“That’s one way of putting it.” I ran my hand back over my hair, pressing it flat. “So why, exactly, am I being taken to a cold crime scene? Other than to waste your time and mine?”
Her momentary confusion turned to a scowl. “Because the S.A.C said so. We’re meeting two officers from Central Office there, so let’s get moving.”
“I’ve already ridden the Vigiles Express one time too many,” I replied. “Give me the address. I’m riding my bike.”
“Suit yourself. You can follow the car.” Ayashe tossed her head and stalked off down the driveway, her falls swishing behind her.
And follow her I did: all the way to a tidy rowhouse in Flushing, Queens, a brownstone set on one of those iconic, pretty leafy streets where no one needed fences or window bars to keep out men like me. The tiny yard had been staked and marked with yellow tape. Small white evidence flags were planted like weeds in the soft grass, and there were police cars up and down the street. A pair of tired-looking NYPD beat cops were talking to each other by the front door, but they stopped and stared as I glided to the curb and cut the throttle, leaning the bike to stand while Ayashe collected her things.
“Okay. Here’s how we do this.” She marched over to stand in front of me, holding out a lanyard. “You wear this around your neck. Don’t go anywhere you aren’t told to go. Don’t touch anything. And wear these gloves.”
I had brought my own damn latex gloves—thicker black ones, to compensate for my over-sensitive hands. I let Binah out of my jacket onto my shoulder, and once she was out of the way, dropped the lanyard over my head. “How about you don’t treat me like I’m stupid? Because I might just forget all my expertise when I’m put on the spot, you know?”
“She was raped and murdered, you piece of shit.” Ayashe looked like she was about to spit for a moment, but instead pivoted on her heel and led the way to the stairs.
The boys in blue watched us like wary dogs as we hustled from the car to the doorstep, but when Ayashe got close, one of them offered her a hand. “How you doin’, Agent? Can’t stay away from us, can you?”
“Lured here by our manly charms,” the other one chuckled.
“Only charms you got are the kind that comes in a box with cereal, Mitch.” Ayashe took the offered hand and shook, fixing a veneer of professionalism over her rage. “This here is Rex. He’s a consultant for D.C. Are they in?”
“Yeah.” The other cop—Kitchener—looked me up and down.
“The fuck’s with the cat?” Mitch asked. “You can’t go taking a cat in there.”
Binah was riding on my shoulder in her harness, her slender tail wrapped around the back of my skull. “She’s a necessary part of the job.”
“Bullshit. It’s a fucking cat.”
“Cool it, man,” Kitchener said. “But yeah, if the detective finds out we let a cat into a murder scene-”
“Then you tell him that the Government’s Magic Roadshow came through and the cat was part of our box of tricks,” Ayashe said. “This guy helped solve a similar case with me way back when. With the cat.”
The cops looked at me, then each other, and Kitchener shrugged. “Right, whatever. Just don’t let it shit on the carpet.”
“And if Waterhouse comes though, you’re the one that gets to explain the cat,” the other cop said.
When Ayashe opened the door, the cheap perfume and rust smell of decaying blood billowed out into the air. Kitchener coughed as we passed by him into the hallway. It was plain, save for the usual flotsam: coats on hooks, framed pictures of Michael Jackson and baseball players on the walls. Every light in the house was on.
“Don’t touch anything.” Ayashe walked ahead of me. “Anything.”
I followed without deigning to reply this time, looking around with growing interest. This was a fir
st. I’d never been at the scene of a crime after the police had been through it. “So. There been any other killings like this, or is it a lone incident?”
“Not off the top of my head.” Ayashe pulled a pair of latex gloves from her pants pocket, snapping them on. “Though there was another weird B&E Agency death back in July. One of our confidential informants was gunned down in his apartment. Someone smashed the ward on his door somehow, got in and murdered him and his wife. He told us he was worried about someone sending a spook after him.”
Oh, I knew who that was: Semyon Vochin. He’d been my last official hit on behalf of the Organizatsiya, and his cat was currently purring against the side of my face. “Oh? Did he name any spook in particular? I might know them.”
“Nope.” Ayashe opened a door and held it for us, waving me through into a scene straight out of Hellraiser.
It was the living room, not the bedroom as I thought it might have been, a modern den that clearly belonged to a music lover. The room was dominated by a T.V and a sound system—both of them cracked open like oyster shells—shelves that had held records and cassette tapes which were now scattered over the floor, posters of various pop stars torn and hanging like shredded skin off the walls. The furniture had been shredded, like it had been stabbed over and over with something large, round, and sharp. There were gouges in the carpet, and blood over everything. Lots of blood, dried and stiff as hair gel. There was a long smear, like the lick of a giant paintbrush, that led into the adjacent room. Voices drifted through the open doorway, getting closer. We waited until they joined us: a tall, strapping black agent with close-shaved hair and three days of stubble, and a comfortably overweight, mustachioed Indian man with buggy eyes and an incongruously neat side part.
“Richardson,” the taller guy called out in a rich blue baritone. “This our man?”
“Sure is. Can you take it from here?” Ayashe said behind me. Her voice was heavy with fatigue.
“Sure can.” He flicked dark eyes to me. “I’m Agent Robert Mattson, this is Adeptus R.C. Varma. He’ll be taking you back into the crime scene as we found it so you can look around and see where things were.”
“I see,” I replied. “Were you sent by Agent Keen, or...?”
“Who?” Mattson got the same look of confusion that Ayashe had, and so did Varma.
“Never mind,” I said. “So, what do I have to do?”
“Come with me. I will be able to take you back into the scene.” Varma waved me forward. He had a thick accent, cultured and vaguely British. “That is your familiar, yes?”
“Yes.” The kitchen had a dark pall over it. I felt the psychic depression immediately, the gaping cold wound of a place that had been the site of some kind of NO-presence, dark magic that had killed and terrified.
“She will share in the vision I will show you.” He stopped in front of a counter, where he had an array of gold and brass tools laid out on a small ceremonial cloth, a bright altar of warded silk that served the same purpose as a ceremonial circle. While he got ready, I looked around at what the police had left for us to see. The Occult part of things had been painted on the wall across from the stove. ‘Soldier 557’, his signature, written a bit over six feet off the floor. Beneath it was a seal inscribed within a circle that contained the letters: ‘AVLORI CET’. Underneath that, almost as an afterthought, he had written ‘Ground Zero’.
“Part of a symbol by Paracelsus,” Mattson said from behind me, gliding toward the island counter. His shoes were quiet on the tiles. “German magician from the late 1400s. The rest of it, we’re not sure about.”
“I know who he is. This is part of Paracelsus’s Seal of Cancer,” I finished. “He was foremost a magician, but is credited as the founding father of toxicology and the first to acknowledge the existence of mental illness as a pathology.”
Mattson grunted. “Not bad. And funny you say that. First report we got back from the labs was that Kristen had been poisoned.”
“Poisoned? With what?” I petted Binah to give my hands something to do.
“Analysis hasn’t come back yet. First impression’s apparently that it’s some kind of animal venom. Neurotoxin, the kind you find in spiders and some kinds of sea creatures.”
Now that he mentioned it, there was an odd smell in the kitchen: it reminded me of the smell of millipedes, the kind of musky smell you got when you lifted up a brick from damp soil and found creepy-crawlies and snail shit.
Varma turned to me, and waved me forward. “Come here, and close your eyes.”
I approached him. He reached out and sketched something over my brow, murmuring under his breath. His magic was a cool, effervescent thing, a rippling wave of gold-tinged orange I felt course over me. He didn’t feel like a Phitometrist, a mage in direct contact with his Neshamah. Mages like that had a gravity around them this man lacked, but his magic was effective all the same, because when I opened my eyes, the reality of the past was laid over the present like a shimmering veil. I blinked, looking around and through the flickering shadows that whispered around me in the room, a crowd of ghosts that moved around the murdered woman on the ground like a bubbling river around a large stone.
Kristen Cross had been raped—that much was immediately obvious. Her clothes had been cut down the middle, pulled off in rags, legs spread, everything below her waist torn and bruised. Her face and chest were swollen beyond human limits: her eyes and mouth almost obliterated by the distension of the surrounding tissue, which had erupted in places from the internal pressure. The ulcers, split like four-pointed stars, bled brackish brown fluid down her neck, face, and chest to the floor. A horrific way to die.
My eyes flicked from one detail to the next. Injuries on her forearms, mangled hands with deep puncture wounds, like stigmata. They were neat, deep, and not discolored. A revolver had skittered over the white ceramic tiles and hit the skirt of a kitchen cabinet, where it was being tagged and photographed by a spectral tech.
“Interesting ability you have,” I said, walking around the empty space where the memory of the body lay. “What can you tell me about this woman?”
“She was part of a taskforce that looked into paranormally active cults and societies. She specialized in ritual abuse and murder.” Ayashe answered me, speaking from the doorway. “She spent about a third of her time here, the rest travelling or at our headquarters in Virginia. A lot of her work overlapped with the Organized Crime Taskforce.”
I let Binah down to the floor, shaking my head as I looked over the assembled pieces of the puzzle. “Alright. Can you remove this effect?”
The Adept grunted, and made a slashing gesture with a small sickle. The illusion cut, leaving me in a mostly empty room with the trio of Agents.
Cautiously, I closed my eyes and let my senses drift, focusing on the color-texture synesthesia that was carried by the smells and sounds of the house. Both sound and smell have colors and textures I felt in my mouth, usually at the back of my tongue. When I utilize it in conjunction with magic, looking at the world Phitonically, the color associations suddenly make perfect sense.
I opened my eyes into a different, liquid world, a world of particles suspended in a superfine fluid reality one step above our own. Phi flowed and pulsed in time with a heart so distant it could not be heard, but so powerful that it could be felt Everywhere. I wasn’t sure about an individual Phitonic matrix, but the room itself carried echoes of the magic that had been used to it. The overriding sensation wasn’t Pravamancy, NO-magic. It was Illusion—Varma’s magic, orange and fresh on my palate—and Biomancy. The Green residue hung like a haze over the room.
“No,” I shook my head to clear the Sight, and moved to the wall. I crouched slightly, reaching up toward the writing. “No, no, no.”
“No? No what?” Mattson said behind me.
“It’s not correct.” I ignored the pair of men, pushed past Ayashe back into the den, and looked over the gutted electronics. “You’ve got it wrong, unless... Was there a chair near the
wall where the signature was written?”
Ayashe frowned at me, clearly remembering my comment back on the street. “Uhh... not that I know of. I can ask.”
“Then no,” I murmured again, looking back into the kitchen. “Soldier 557 didn’t do this. This isn’t his crime.”
Ayashe stared at me in what could only be silent, infuriated disbelief.
“He’s short,” I said. “Almost child-sized. He had to stand on the beds to write on the walls before. He doesn’t know anything about electronics, doesn’t know what computers are. He’s too proud to rape or use poison. He has always tried to communicate something meaningful, something that justifies what he’s doing. This message doesn’t mean anything significant: if he was trying to evoke Cancer, then the body should have been laid West to East. It’s a bad frame job.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “We have evidence from multiple scenes where this guy has killed. Lily and Dru’s, most notably.”
“There was Life magic used here,” I said.
“None of our Adepts picked up anything resembling ‘life magic’,” Mattson said. “And Kristen wasn’t a mage.”
It didn’t make any sense to me. I could see it around us. Had she tried defending herself with a magical item against some kind of NO-thing, or a demon or demonurge? I searched for Binah, and found her sitting at the entrance to the hallway and stairwell, waiting patiently for me. “Whoever was here, they were looking for something. I think there was more than one person. I need to look in the other rooms, alone, to try and pick out whose magic is whose.”
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