Blood Hound

Chapter 15

Split seconds. It was Crina who dragged me to the ground as the room turned into a haze of blood mist and shattered furniture and glass. The guys at the roulette table weren’t fast enough: three of George’s men and the dealer went down like ragdolls. I heard Vassily drop with a scream of pain to my right, and my blood turned to ice.

I flung myself against the nearest baccarat table, dragging Crina behind the cover as the dealer, screaming and panicked, ran out into the room and bolted for the balcony entry. I didn’t see what happened to her: I drew my non-enchanted pistol, and Crina motioned at me with a grabby hands gesture, wide-eyed. She wanted a gun. I gave her mine and drew the silenced Wardbreaker instead.

“Keep them busy!” A horribly familiar voice called out from the entry.

“Carmine,” I grunted. “GOD dammit.”

“Who?” Crina’s hands were shaking, but she checked and took position like a soldier. East Germany. Of course.

“He’s—” Shots rang out, deafening, and then the machine guns. The guys at the door were taking turns: two guys firing, two guys reloading. “—a spook! Go to the bar, get Vassily. I’ll cover you!”

Her eyes widened even more, but this table wasn’t big enough for the pair of us. Bullets chewed up the sides, spraying wood past us in a stinging cloud. The bar was safer. I backed up in a crouch as Crina kicked her heels off and hitched the hem of her short silk dress up to her waist so she could move. She crawled around me and then dashed low to the ground as I knelt up and fired over the table, drawing the next hail of bullets over my head. I wouldn’t be far behind her: the firing squad was advancing, fanning out to start a search of the tables closest to the entry.

There was no time for fear. I pulled out my pocket mirror and looked around the edge of the table. Mikhail lay still on the ground, his swept-back hair a wet and bloody sprawl on the carpet. Worse was Carmine, bent in deep concentration around his pentacle ring. I felt something buckle and twist in the room, like my ribs were sucking in towards the inside of my chest. Carmine was the nexus of a small storm that rumbled, darkening the air around him as it began to coalesce into large, canine forms.

There was nothing we had that could stop those things once he got them started. But what did I have to head him off? I looked down at the Wardbreaker, its engraved glyphs of power. If I could defuse a ward, I could break a spell, but I needed the sacrifice. Death was everywhere, but not death spoken with the words of power I needed. Which left me.

Broken glass was scattered everywhere on the floor around me. With full intent to suffer, I seized a shard of it and stabbed it into my knee, the one that was still healing. The pain was raw and hot: I screamed, fighting to focus all my rage, all my pain, into the blood that burst out, and clapped the gun down against the fresh wound.

Blood whipped out into fine tendrils that wrapped into the grooves along the sides of the barrel, loading the charge with a ferocity and concreteness I had never felt before, a real push, like a hand behind the bullet as I reared up, took aim, and fired straight at Carmine’s smarmy fucking face.

The bullet blew out with a sucking sound I’d never heard before, a phwoomf of backed-up force, and Carmine threw his hands up with a shout as the countermagic I’d spent so many patient years cultivating, sacrificing to, broke the spell he’d been weaving and sent him stumbling back. Whatever he’d cried out, it spun a kinetic web of force in a moment. The bullet zinged off his Phitonic shield and shattered it.

Crina, George, and Lazarus came up blazing from behind the bar, picking off two guys too slow to sense the shift in the battle. In between bursts, I heard shouts and screams from out in the hall behind the Manellis. The guards were here. The Manellis fell back as one: I got up to one leg to try to blast Carmine again but dropped when I saw him throw something into the room. It hit the wall and bounced with a tinny metallic sound. A grenade? I covered the head of the man next to me, burying my face against the floor with my arm wrapped around my ear.

The air sucked in as it detonated, spraying metal and wood over our heads. A sharp pain lanced through the left side of my face, but when I rolled up and felt for blood or a wound, there was nothing. My ear was ringing, and everything on that side sounded fuzzy. I could smell smoke, and it was getting hot…The building wouldn’t burn down, but the inside of the room would, and that was enough to kill the lot of us.

Lev stumbled across to me from around the curve of the bar, milk white with shock. “Vas… Vassily’s down. Go. Go get him and the women out of here, back to New York. I’ll deal with this.”

“Avtoritet, I can’t leave you here.” Even if Lev was trying to set me up, the old loyalty resurged in the heat of the moment.

“That’s an order,” he snapped. “Vassily, out. Get him to a hospital if you have to. Out!”

Couldn’t argue with that. I hobbled up, stumbling when I put weight on my leg and it nearly crumpled. Oh right: the glass. I pulled it free without feeling anything other than a pinching pain, put it in my mouth, and sucked the blood off it. I put pressure over the wound as I went to join the others. It wasn’t too deep, but it was bleeding.

The beefy bodyguard was dead behind the bar. Crina was there, putting pressure on Vassily’s leg with a pile of blood-soaked linen napkins as he clutched at the floor in a silent rictus of agony. Vanya cowered with the blonde and Katerina, who was sobbing hysterically in his arms.

“We have to get him out. There’s stairs down to the boardwalk!” I searched for something to use to tie more napkins to my leg. The blonde girl, wooden and doll-like with shock, silently held out her scarf. I bound my wound, stuffed my gun back under my jacket, and squatted on my heels as I slung Vassily up over my shoulders. “Up, up, up!”

Crina didn’t say a word. Her face was a mask of determination as she took Vassily’s other arm and helped to bear his weight. Vanya and the girls hauled up to their feet, and the six of us ran for the balcony, stepping over a dead dealer and racing for the outside door. The emergency gate that led to the shore was easy enough to open, but our doom lay on the other side of the boardwalk: a flashing wall of blue and red sirens.

“Anya, go get the car!” Crina said. “They won’t look twice at you and Vanya if you don’t run. Katya, you can spot for them. We’ll meet you on the other side of the block.”

Katerina didn’t hesitate: she gave a nod and scrambled off. Anya was so stunned that she simply obeyed, stumbling down the stairs with Vanya’s hand clutched in hers. He was wheezing like a pug, but he managed to shove his gun into my hands on the way past and half-run, half-wobble after her. Crina gave me a nod over Vassily’s shoulder, and we dragged him swearing onto the sand, into the shadows, and waded our way up the mostly oblivious beachfront.

“Mother of FUCK!” Vassily spat aloud as soon as we were far enough away from people. He was hopping, almost exceeding us in speed. If I could give the coke credit for one thing, it was its anesthetic effect. “Fuck fuck fuck!”

“I haven’t had a gunfight that good since I left Zagreb!” Crina said brightly, her voice high and shrill with stress.

We rounded the corner of the building to find Katerina hopping from foot to foot, stockings ripped, clutching her shoes by the straps. She waved us forward, and we made our way another half a block to the waiting car. Vassily swore angrily as we stuffed him into the backseat, head-first. We scrambled in after him, and the car roared off into the night as I slammed the door behind us. Vanya was in the front: it was Vassily, me, and the three women in the back.

“My leg,” Vassily gasped. He reached down to paw at the enormous spreading bloodstain, pale and sweaty. “My motherfucking leg.”

“Hands off.” I rapped his knuckles and threw back my jacket, using it to put full-body pressure on the entry point. “You’re lucky it didn’t blow out the other side.”

“Am I… is it..?” His voice was high with fear.

“You’re not bleeding to death,” I said, firmly. If only every spook had Lev’s ability to magically calm people. “You’ll be fine.”

“Oh my god,” Katerina whispered. “Oh my god. Misha’s dead.”

Anya said nothing. She curled into the corner of the leather seat and stared out the window.

Vassily grunted, writhing. The smell of blood was thick, turning the air heavy and humid. “Motherfucking shitcocking pieces of SHIT! That HURTS!”

I breathed in, out. Calm, I told myself. You’re calm.

“We’ll be back in New York soon, Vassily. Just hold on.” Crina’s voice was full of barely concealed panic. She had kept it together while the adrenaline ran high, but now the rush was subsiding, she was feeling it. She might have seen some shit in her time, but she wasn’t a hardened muzhiki off the street.

“In two and a half fucking hours, if we don’t get pulled over.” Vassily growled, face contorting. “How many did the guidos lose? There was five of them. What happened to George?”

“Eight of them. And I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t have time to count. But you know what? If he’s alive, George will think we set this up.”

“Oh god,” Katerina said. “He will.”

Vassily looked up at me in alarm. “Jesus Christ. You’re right.”

I was trying not to focus on how my jacket was soaking through with Vassily’s blood. “Even if they realize that we did nothing, then they may use it to take the lion’s share from the Organizatsiya.”

“I’ll kill ’em. We’ll kill the fucking lot of them.” Vassily lifted his voice to a near shout, calling through the tinted glass between the back of the car and the driver’s side. “And for fuck’s sake, Vanya, turn the radio on! I don’t want die with nothing to fucking listen to except my own goddamned whining!”

After a moment, Vanya complied, switching on to a station seemingly picked at random. Johnny Cash burst from the speakers above and behind us, halfway through Ring of Fire. Crina shook her head in dismay, while our driver pulled out of Atlantic City, gunning for the parkway and the distant hope of home.