“Ahh… yes. At last.” Keen’s voice became soft and reverent. “You could have cared for her better. Look at her. She’s half dead.”
“Sorry, but gardening isn’t Otto’s specialty,” Otto replied. “Fork it over.”
If they were moved, I couldn’t tell. The Tree’s pain, her terror and confusion beat through the air of the room. Her agitation became my agitation, the same internal desperation I’d felt when I’d first found one of the kids used in Sergei’s movies, or when I’d heard Binah’s stricken wails from the cage where she’d been imprisoned. My face began to burn with smoldering anger, like a seam of coal under the skin of my cheeks.
“All in order,” Otto said after a minute or so. “So, got anything else you need done after tonight?”
“The fight is the most important thing, but I’ve brought along two new ‘challenges’ for both of your organizations to consider after you’ve completed tonight’s objective. We’re offering them at above-average market rates,” Keen replied.
Fuck. Fuck. I knew it was too good to be true.
“Another agent screw the pooch?” Otto asked, voice thick with dark humor.
“No. There was only the one.” Keen cleared his throat. “I am going to emphasize again that tonight’s events must not turn into a slaughter. We want the Twin Tigers M.C. absolutely routed, but we want them alive. You will occupy the therianthropes while we bring them to ground. Do you understand this?”
“Pretty sure I do,” Otto replied drily.
“If you can bait them to slaughter some scum, that would be beneficial. We need a case that will make the headlines.”
I listened on in growing shock. Otto had been working with the Vigiles all this time. And ‘A case that made the headlines’ would be the kind of event that would justify rounding up every damn Weeder in the city, and probably a number of spooks, too. On top of the ‘Staten Island occult sex murderer escape’ story they were running about me, Keen was setting up a GOD-damned pogrom.
“We have hashed out job already. Everything is planned. Give hit files,” Nic said.
“The first target is probably going to be more difficult to find than the second.” Tomas still had that dead, recorded-message voice. “We don’t know much about this mark. Goes by the name ‘Zealot’ or ‘Angkor’. Everything we know about them is in that file you’re holding.”
“Oh, I know him,” Nic said. “When we work for Deacon, I remember… uhh… ‘seeing’ him. He’s a freak, eh?”
“Looks like a fuckin’ princess to me,” Otto said. “No sweat.”
Nicolai laughed, a harsh croak of sound. “You do not know how true that is.”
“Do not underestimate him. The first party to take them down gets the reward,” Keen added. “But we emphatically want this one alive.”
“It is not ‘hit’ if you want person alive,” Nic replied. “It is ‘catch and carry’. More expensive. And this one is a powerful spook.”
“So be it.”
Otto was beginning to sound impatient. “Who’s the other one?”
“This man,” Keen said. “Dead or alive.”
“Chert poberi.” Nicolai grumbled in Russian. For him, it was equivalent to ‘fucking hell’. “Alexi. No, we cannot kill him. My Pakhun wants him. We been trying to find this piece of shit for months.”
“Then we can take him to Mister Y?” Dogboy said.
“Unacceptable.” Keen’s tone was very stiff. “We need him dead. If you can’t do it-”
“No, you don’t understand.” Dogboy sounded worried. “You know who the head of their outfit is, don’t you?”
“I don’t care,” Keen replied stiffly. “He’s-”
“Sergei Yaroshenko is the Master of the Fifth Choir, man. You know what that means, right?”
“His status doesn’t put him above the needs of humanity. That’s all I need to know, and as I was saying...”
“You’ll get your wish, Agents, believe me.” An unearthly voice, silent until now, spoke from somewhere behind Nicolai. A voice as dry as old grave dirt. “What Nic isn’t saying is that Lexi here is scheduled for induction into the Choir. And I assure you. It’s a one-way trip.”
... No.
Chapter 35
“I’m sorry, I don’t believe we were introduced?” Keen was using the voice rich snobs reserved for ‘the help’.
“Because I’m not why we’re here, Agent.”
No. My hands were turning cold and clammy. I thought I heard a bell going off somewhere, ringing relentlessly inside of my own skull.
“I assure you that you will gain absolutely nothing from challenging the Vigiles, Mister..?”
“Lovenko.” The thing that had been Vassily ground the word out in only a vague approximation of his voice.
My legs went out from under me, and I slid down the side of the pallet as the ringing spread to my face and hands and my mouth filled with the taste of iron. No, no, no.
“Hey... did you hear that?” I couldn’t tell who was speaking now. One of them. I put my face in my hands and stared at my palms, struggling to stay quiet, to not hyperventilate.
“Well, Mister Lovenko, we are employing your people for this task, and if your ‘Pakhun’ is not willing to abide by the terms, then we are quite capable of finding someone else to handle the job.”
“Keith Richards over here has got a point. This guy is Tran’s friend,” Otto said. “She’s on edge already. We could push her over with him as bait.”
“Guys, seriously. I swear I can hear something.”
Distantly, I knew I should have cared. But the world was cracking, falling apart, and with it my sense of reality. Self-preservation. Everything. I was used to being the tough guy, a street soldier... but I felt exactly like the eight-year-old boy watching his father come up on him with a crowbar in his hand and intent in his eyes. My intuition began to pound at me, shouting from behind a locked door: the formless voice of my Neshamah, which suddenly swelled into a warning cry as magic flushed over me in a rippling green-tinted wave.
Life magic, I realized. Tomas wasn’t a ‘forensic specialist’ after all.
“Fuck!” The sound of weapons being drawn finally galvanized me. Mind numb, body acting on training and reflexes alone, I pushed myself up and sprinted for the next row of cover as shadows rounded the line of pallets where I’d been hiding. But my heart wasn’t in it—it had been torn out before I’d even started to escape.
A round took me in the back: a small caliber bullet. The armor in the back of the suit jacket took the brunt of it, but I felt something crack and shift in my chest as I sprawled to the floor and struggled to turn on the men closing in on me. But I only had eyes for one.
Vassily was a walking corpse. Pallid, his skin flat, white, and waxy-smooth. Tattoos floated beneath the translucent, papery skin of his hands. His cheeks and eyes were sunken, hair dull. There was no blood under the skin to even pretend at an appearance of life... but he was walking, talking, and his flat blue eyes burned with predatory intelligence.
Dogboy was the first to block my view: he’d dropped all pretense of humanity, rushing at me with a barbed tongue and needle-sharp fangs extended. The need for survival finally kicked in, but too late to stop him. He leaped on me from a distance, taking us to the ground. I drove my fist up under his sternum with a shout. “TZAIN!”
The vampire’s eyes bugged, and he coughed up a gout of orange blood as he tumbled off, clutching at the huge punch-dagger hole I’d rammed up through his undead lungs and heart. I scrambled up to hands and a knee, only to find myself held at the point of two guns and two swords. Keen and Black held both expertly—longswords in their right hands, pistols in their left. Their aim was steady, flawless. The guns glowed with hot red sigils.
“Perfect timing.” Joshua Keen muttered. He sighted down the barrel at my head, and squeezed the trigger.
“No!” Vassily shoved Keen just as he fired, sending the bullet wide. When Keen brought the sword around, Vassily snarled best
ially, lips peeled back to bare top and bottom rows of razor-sharp iron teeth.
He’d... saved me? The lizard part of my brain kicked in with a surge of futile hope as I got to my feet. I rose straight into a fist that decked me across the jaw and sent me sprawling to the floor. A human punch wasn’t enough to take me down—but Vassily was no longer human.
I kept my guard up around my head, but there was no strength left in my arms. Vassily bent down and wrapped his hand around my throat. He lifted me up by the neck, squeezing hard enough that my pulse thundered behind my eyes and my vision shot through with red. As I struggled to prize his fingers off my throat and gasp a breath, his eyes glittered with something like excitement.
Dogboy coughed and rolled to hands and knees, drooling putrid Phi onto the floor. The burned wax smell was similar to Sergei’s, but not identical... and my mind fixated on that stupid little detail as I was surrounded by a circle of guns. Some pointed at me, some held back the Agents from shooting me like a dog on the street. Nicolai was one of them. He was looking at me strangely, but I couldn’t make sense of his saggy, jowly face. He looked much older than I remembered.
“This is why Otto likes dealing with the Church. Nice case of deliverance,” Otto remarked dryly. He had a Magnum in his hands, but he hardly needed it. Vera was behind him, both of her revolvers aimed squarely at the heads of the Templars. She would not miss if she fired.
“Vera shoots faster than you. Back away,” Nicolai said. “This is our Organizatsiya’s business.”
I was struggling not to pass out. In desperation, I kicked out at Vassily’s knees. I might as well have kicked the side of a boat, or the wheel of a truck. His flesh was unyielding, like cordwood.
Something in Keen snapped. He flushed scarlet with rage. “Put him down and give him to me!”
“For free?” Dogboy snickered. “You gotta be joking.”
Keen brought his pistol up to fire at me. He hadn’t completed the swing when Vera fractionally moved the muzzle of her left pistol to one side, and fired around Vassily’s shoulder. I thought I was hallucinating when I saw Keen dodge the round by moving his head to the side, but sure enough, there was only a line of black powder where the round should have clipped his cheek.
“Calm down, all of you. We need him first,” Otto said. “Like Otto says, he’s all up in Tran’s cunt. So cut him up a bit and use him as bait., See how much easier it is to draw the Tigers out.”
“Sergei is insist we take him home,” Nicolai shot back. “For his... Choir.”
Choir. I had no idea what he was talking about. Magic burned on the back of my tongue and behind my eyes, but the white lightning flashing around the edges of my eyes was creeping inward. I was on the verge of passing out when a bad smell cut through the odor of Feeder blood. Greasy, sweet... the cheap perfume stench of rotting flesh.
“Gentlemen, there’s a way we can all get what we need.” The way Vassily’s dead throat ground out the words was a mockery of his smooth voice. “It’s easy: Agent, you come with us and supervise the procedure at my boss’s warehouse. We’ll put you up, you get to relax. Lexi will be under the Maester’s control after that. He’ll go with you and help you with the shapeshifters tonight.”
Through the haze and tears, I saw Vera’s gun barrels begin to darken. The black holes at the ends bored into my temples, voids in the sparkling, spitting tunnel of my vision.
“What? So your ‘Choirmaster’ can blackmail us with his continued silence?” Keen scoffed. “The Vigiles Magicarum does not negotiate with vampires!”
The pistols were oozing. Thin runnels of oily fluid poured from them and spattered to the floor. I gurgled and struggled, fear like spikes throughout my body. Vera noticed my baffled stare, brow furrowing as she broke her aim to look at the muzzle of the revolver. Everyone else seemed to realize the same thing we did at the same time.
“Demons!” Joshua threw his pistol away as lights overhead blew, raining glass everywhere.
Everyone got the same idea. Vassily dropped me and turned, seemingly unconcerned about my being behind him. I coughed, heaved for breath and rolled back, putting as much distance as I could. My first thought was to run; my second was that I couldn’t leave Vassily.
“Semych! For GOD’s sake! Stop!” I shouted at him in our native Ukrainian, as the DOGs’ insane shrieks and giggles filled the building. “Get the hell out of here!”
He looked back, and for a moment, his expression flickered to something more familiar, the reflex double-take of spotting a friend in a crowd. Only for a moment. Magic pulsed around us, and the smell of Sergei’s blood cut through the noxious stench of DOG.
“Stay there!” Something alien spoke through him, inhumanly guttural. He bared his teeth like a barracuda, eyes gleaming with points of orange fire, and ran to face the DOGs with nothing but fangs and fists.
“Look at all these idiots!” Glory’s voice boomed through the warehouse like a cheerful claxon, punctuated by bursts of automatic fire. “You’re an idiot! Aaand you’re an idiot! You get some too!”
Tomas had taken cover, but Keen was fighting, grim-faced, pale and focused. His sword-hand blurred with inhuman speed as he dodged and weaved too fast for my eyes to follow, giving him the appearance of disappearing in pulses. There were bodies on the ground, and screams. Fuck this. I clumsily got up, stumbled back on the turn, and ran for my life, ignoring the shouts and sounds of pursuit.
No. It was crazy, I was crazy, heart thudding so loudly that even the rapport of guns firing and DOGs howling seemed distant and far off. I was so completely dissociated from everything now that I forgot my wounds, forgot the Tree, forgot everything as I raged against the unreal horror of Vassily talking, on his feet, still dead. The door was ahead of me, at the end of the warehouse, and I ran for it... only to come to a screeching halt as Glory casually strolled out in front of me.
“Soldier 557,” I said, weakly. “What a surprise.”
“That’s me!” The small man was dressed exactly the same way I’d seen him last time—dirty tank top, black sweats, no shoes. He was carrying an assault rifle that was too large for him. Covered in dust, he looked like a child soldier out of a dystopian vision. “Come with me, and we’ll clear the scum, tough guy. I’m here to rescue my Mother.”
Shock laid over shock, and I actually found myself listening as the warehouse descended into chaos. “I... what?”
“My Mother.” The craziness in his haunted features drained away. “I’m a Gift Horse, Alexi.”
Without the madness in his eyes and the rictus grin, I could see it and smell it. The Phi that made him, spoiled into that rotten fruit smell. The ruin of his beauty. “The Tree. The Tree is your Mother?”
“What? You think I’ve been working for these Morphorde because I want to?” The small man’s violet eyes were raw with pain. “They captured her. They’ve tortured us. Please... help me.”
I began to stutter out an answer, but Glory pounced on me and knocked me down before I could reply. Weapon fire burst over our heads where I’d been standing. Disoriented, I rolled over to see something out of a nightmare. The fluid DOGs had merged into three bigger creatures, one of which crashed over a biker while he screamed. Keen was fighting off a DOG like a gladiator; Tomas was casting green bolts similar to ones I’d seen Angkor use... but the true horror was thrashing around in the center of the warehouse. A centipede. A black, glistening centipede the size of a subway car. Slack-jawed, I watched it fall on the nearest DOG and scoop it into its mouth with mandibles and other disgusting, venom-dripping parts of its mouth. It ate the screeching thing without pausing. Holy fucking shit.
“There’s more where that came from, losers!” Glory cackled. He dashed past me, leaving me in front of the momentarily open door. It was about to be blocked by the cluster of abominations that were following in his wake.
I fled in the other direction this time, skidding behind a stack of pallets. As a huge shadow fell over me, I threw myself out toward the next row. A huge
, pincered tail smashed down on the stacks of potting soil I’d been cowering behind only seconds ago. The centipede thrashed around to face the largest of the DOGs with a dreadful, rattling wet hiss.
Glory skipped along the tops of the cargo with incredible agility. I tried to keep up, but the broken ribs and the tightness in my bruised throat made running difficult. When Glory threw me his rifle, barely breaking step, I nearly dropped it. He bounded out into the fray, making a beeline for a huge planter, a blue-glazed pot that was shrouded by a sack.
I took cover and braced the rifle, watching numbly as a small wave of Morphorde rolled into the building. Cockroach-like insects, the kind that had fallen during the rain, flooded the building in a torrent. They joined the DOGs, who were being torn apart by the centipede. Mutated creatures lurched in after that, spiny horrors with no legs and too many mouths. Tomas had surrounded himself and Keen with some kind of field. The pair of them fought for their lives with gun and sword. The others were surrounded, but they were still battling on—and winning.
Several years ago, I’d seen a man burn to death from the inside out. Of all the deaths I’d ever seen, it haunted me most because of the way he’d been so calm, so completely stupefied by what was happening to him that he didn’t scream, didn’t seem to feel pain. I remember him turning to face me in shock, mouth open as if to speak, and belching flames with a look of confusion on his face. He didn’t scream, didn’t seem to feel any pain… not until the very end.
That was me, now. Mesmerized, bewildered, not even able to aim. I should have been terrified… but I wasn’t. I wasn’t anything. I stared as Vassily tore through a bloated mantis-like thing with nothing more than hands and teeth, spitting ichor to the ground. But Vassily, the Vassily I’d known, didn’t fight. Not like that. He didn’t move like, like-
“Run! RUN!” Glory’s voice pierced the air behind me. I turned to see him carrying the shrouded planter. It had to have weighed three hundred pounds, at least. His muscles were straining, but he was managing it. Somehow.
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