Blood Hound

Chapter 17

It took at least an hour to prepare a full circle. There was a particular setup illustrated in the grimoire where I’d found the sigil—the main circle was adjacent to another, smaller figure in which the demon would appear. The main circle featured a spiral it its center, a deceptively simple geometric figure that had to be rendered with great precision. With chalk and string and a two-foot measuring board, I laid down the ring, and then the spiral, a perfect depiction of the Golden Ratio. The shape connected through positioned candles which led to the second, smaller circle. The summoning ring was made to take a beating: the shapes were simple, the lines tight, each border and sigil inscribed firmly and with care. I’d busted enough static enchantments to know how easy it was for imperfection to be exploited by a penetrating force. The fact was, other than a certain ability to sense and work with the currents of energy, I was working mostly from textbook knowledge. My fears had to be put aside, or I would fail from the expectation of failure.

Binah sat near the edge of the room, unnaturally attentive for an animal of her kind, watching me watching her as I wielded my onyx ritual knife through the chanting the incantation at each quarter of the circle. I felt a charge in it build as I went through each invocation, merging into the space through the stately choreography of ritual magic. Every hand gesture, each spoken word, the direction of our pacing—everything had its significance.

Kutkha hung between us like a shadow, and I felt his presence overlaying mine with every step in the rote, every vowel and dripping consonant—and when the last word hung, trembling on the air like a bell, I felt him merge like a wave in the ocean, a drop in the sea… just as we were overwhelmed by a sucking rush of power that dragged my weight into the floor, the same tactile hallucination that you could sometimes experience at the seashore as the rushing tide seemed to carry your feet into the spray.

The lines of the circle thrummed, gathering strength, and then flared a deep vibrant orange. The engraved lead caster wobbled once, twice—and then the metal started to heave and boil, hissing as the entity bound to the seal began to struggle against the magic trying to control it.

“IAO!” I boomed over the sudden noise and movement, staring hard at the seal at the center of the spiral, the spiral that was gaining depth and power as we forced it to activate. I was conduit and controller, summoner and channel, and soon, something unseen began to test and challenge my will, seeking the cracks and holes it could leak in through.

“You, you, YOU… calling ME?!” Its voice crackled through the room like streaks of lightning, ringing off every surface. “You, of all magi?”

The room had gone very cold and smelled pungently of burning wax. I hadn’t expected it to respond with the eloquence and force that it did. My surprise caused the chalk line to jitter on the floorboards, slowly charring it black. I mastered myself, as the extent of the danger I was in dawned in its full weight and breadth. I drew up to my full height, unimpressive as it was, my back stock straight. Whatever had come was certainly not an angel. Invisible, it gibbered frantically in the face of my stony silence. The initial burst of sound was followed by a hush as it pried and poked at my conviction and failed to move me.

“What is this? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?” The whispering once built to a shriek and then dropped. Underlying its presence was the buzz of a hundred thousand hornets, a waveform pressure that peaked and then ebbed under my growing control. I was gaining confidence. It was the next step up from the kind of magic I’d been doing my entire adult life, but as I began to verge into cockiness, I felt the entity picking at my mind like a hangnail.

“You! Creature, you will return to your last human summoner before me, and you will deal him agony.” I spat each word with withering disdain, command bordering on but not quite falling into arrogance. “You will do it NOW.”

It hissed at me before slithering into a pile of dancing motes, vaguely resembling the shape of a person, then a wheel, then a protoplasm. “Why not do it tomorrow, to catch the element of surprise? In the meantime, I could find you a lover… the man—”

“You will do it now.” My lip curled as I hefted the hammer. “Or I will torture your seal for days before I lock it in a lead box of salt and holy resin and bury it. Do it NOW.”

The threat caused the room to fill with wailing. The creature’s form manifested in my mind’s eye, a writhing bundle of lashing electric tendrils with no main body. The thing hissed, writhing in the air before being driven from the circle, inward, imploding to fly back towards its original summoner.

I bent my will to the rest of the task at hand—to destroy the seal itself. As I thought on it, the temptation to give into its desire only grew. It knew so much, and its tempting whispers lingered in my mind like cobwebs. The supreme math of the universe was at my fingertips, if only I could stand to listen to its voice. I burned with longing, and my mind was an engine on full throttle as I forced myself past desire, past covetousness—and with unerring speed, the spirit struck true.

It hit the other unseen magus like a Molotov, splashing fire and engulfing them in a roar that reverberated through the core of my being. I saw nothing—only a furious light that filled my eyes with infernal orange fire and sucked me inwards into physical blindness. But Kutkha could see.

Giddily, I realized I couldn’t feel my body anymore. That I didn’t have a body, but that I was moving, and I had no idea where I was.

“Now we’ve done it.” Kutkha was the one speaking aloud here, slinking down a narrow corridor like an avian dinosaur shadow. He was neither bird or reptile, bipedal and sleek, his body made of clustering, freezing darkness. In this place, this space, I was the ghost in Kutkha’s machine. “You call this Yesod, the plane of dreams and visions. And I do not know why you are here.”

I could do nothing except go along for the ride. Water was rushing down the length of a progressively smaller and more constrictive corridor, flowing like blood from a wound where the demon had struck. Kutkha waded forward, and just before it narrowed into a doorway, we reached a sigil burnt into the wall, a single Hebrew letter. Chet. The letter was filled with mercury that swam and swirled as we approached. Beyond that point, the space was nebulous and indistinct, a cacophony of sound, shade, and color.

“I will not go beyond here.” My Neshamah pulled back and turned, coalescing into his raven form. On wings of shadow, he glided back down the very tangible corridors of this other reality. “Our job is done, but… that is Ocean. We are in the Drink. This is already far too dange—”

The astral matter beyond the cliff’s edge of my psyche began to resolve into points of light. I heard a dim buzz, like insects—the sound of their mandibles and legs rubbing together, and Kutkha swelled in size, his face sharpening to a bladed muzzle as he swiveled his head back to face the doorway. We watched a honeybee crawl onto the edge of the portal, and then another: ten, a hundred, a million. Their wings whined with a building shrill, and behind them came a looming figure, blazing like a torch in a cave.

“This isn’t an angel. You said they don’t exist,” I said, dragged back with Kutkha into the black stone passage. Fear hammered my intuition into overdrive. “What the hell is it?”

The bees could not get past the sigil, and they crawled out over the empty doorway as if it were a plate of glass. Each one shone like a tiny sun. The water stopped flowing along the floor as the bees covered the entire threshold, and there was a push, like a hot knife lancing through my insubstantial being.

“Fight it.” Kutkha’s body lifted up with a bristling layer of spines. “It’s attacking you. Fight it!”

I struggled for focus as the penetration deepened, fought to ward back the heat, but it was slippery, and it felt its way in through the cracks of my psyche with inexorable, incredible force. To my horror, I realized that I could not stop the invasion. “I can’t!”

“You must!”

Through the film of insects, a figure emerged: tall and thin, radiant, and remarkably, impossibly beautiful. It dragged along sheets of light as a garment, and as it emerged, a flush of heat as soft as sunlight spilled across us. My breath caught, and Kutkha stopped, eyes widening as light flooded the labyrinth hall. The pushing stopped. The angel-faced being was comforting, like a needy embrace that I had never been able to stand but somehow always craved. So close, so hot, that it might have been able to get into my skin, and I would never be alone again.

Alone. God help me, but I was sick of it.

Unwittingly, I yearned towards it, and Kutkha took a halting step forward. The tall figure reached out its hands. It sung a Solar song, pure and bittersweet, a silent bow that played the violin of my repressed emotions and coaxed me to run in, grasp it, hide my face—

“It’s a DOG!” Kutkha snarled. “Do you want to die? Do you want Vassily to die?”

As Kutkha and I struggled to gain control over the other, the being opened its eyes, rolling them down from the back of its sockets to stare down at us. They were as bright and heartless as jewels: endlessly needy, greedy green eyes. The angelic thing smiled beatifically and spread its long arms open like an old friend. An old, false friend.

I knew the look of false friendship well, and as it fixed on us, I bared my teeth. Kutkha’s hackles rippled, and he grew fangs of glass as he shrieked defiance, a thing of bright flashing claws, shadow, and ice.

The green-eyed being was fighting in its own way, wheedling its way under the skin into the channels of fatigue and pain, chipping at the hard shell that made me what I was. With a jolt of terror, I felt it trying to replace my ego with itself. It was everything I could need or want, a sympathetic virus. The creature didn’t judge me for my longings, for all the people I’d killed or the lies I’d told. It only wanted me. To possess me—to consume me.

United in desperation with Kutkha, we became a bestial thing. Lips peeled back from double rows of razor-sharp teeth, and we snarled, filling the corridor with a freezing, boiling presence. This time, the command to leave was wordless, a spear of pure will and intent. Like a caul, shadow encapsulated the penetrating radiance and pushed it back. For a moment, the pressure wavered, the siren call replaced by a quarterback rush of energies as the other magus rallied behind their countermagic, pushing against my fierce and sudden will.

And then I realized something. This thing, this viral, deceptive thing—it wasn’t a demon. It was someone else’s Neshamah.

With a roar of defiance, we charged in a surge of spines and shade and salt mist towards it. The other Neshamah’s smile split its face in two to bear rows of long, needle-sharp fangs, and it screeched at us as the dark coldness shoved it away. Screaming, spitting, it was inexorably pushed back from where it had come, and when we battled it past the threshold, the gaping energetic wound it had left sealed up and threw us back into earthly reality.

I came to with the point of my onyx knife pressed up under my breastbone, the blade grasped in shaking hands. Gasping for air, bathed in crystallizing sweat, I was bent backwards over my own heels in grand mal, my hair brushing the ground. My knees ached viciously where they had hit the floor.

“Not… not Carmine.” I gasped. I threw the knife aside and then carefully, slowly collapsed my body to the side. “That was not Carmine.”

“No,” Kutkha replied softly, a ruffled presence of shadowy plumage and bright, nervous eyes. “It was not Carmine.”

I groaned and managed to slowly bend forward into a normal human shape. The muscles of my back were so tight they threatened to snap. Lying on my side and wracked with spasms, I felt like a honeybee after it had stung something, half-dead, its entrails embedded in its target as it slowly suffocated under the cold creep of death.

When I was able to pick myself up, I wearily surveyed the contents of the circle, wiping at a thin trail of blood oozing down from my sternum. The tin cup had splattered, liquefied, forming a spindly arc into the air where it had frozen solid. It had taken the dim shape of a tormented figure straining for release, clawing at itself in a contortion of agony.

It wasn’t Carmine. I had looked into his eyes and known that his Neshamah was canine. The Hellhounds were his soul. When I thought back to Vincent’s mansion, man and hounds had had the exact same colored eyes, just like me and Kutkha. At least it meant I knew who I had to kill, because I knew only one green-eyed mage. Lev Moskalysk.

As I recovered in the circle, exhausted, confused, and vaguely triumphant, I heard the tinny shrill of the phone from my office. My jaw worked, clenching tightly enough I felt the muscles of my face all the way up to my temples. After that bit of arcana, whoever was calling was not going to be anyone I wanted to talk to.

A sense of simmering dread deepened on the way from the bedroom to my office. When the phone stopped ringing, the answering machine clicked, but didn’t record anything else. The phone hesitated only a second before the ringing started again. I switched on the light and watched the handset vibrate in its cradle before reaching out.

I heard no sound from the other end when I picked up the receiver, save for soft, raspy breathing.

“Lev,” I said.

“I’m appalled, Alexi. All that effort, and you didn’t even get my name.” A polished mezzo-soprano, thick with dark, cruel amusement, spoke after several moments’ pause.

For the second time that night, and the umpteenth time that week, I had been wrong. It wasn’t Carmine. And it wasn’t Lev.

“You just couldn’t listen to me, take my advice to leave well alone, could you, sweetheart?” Jana was excited, but I could hear barely concealed strain in her voice. Whatever I had done, it had hurt her. She wasn’t the only one hurt, though. The horrifying sensation of my mind leaking out from between my ears had ceased, but every one of my limbs trembled with exhaustion. “Alexi, you have half an hour to bring yourself to my house, or Vincent dies.”

“I don’t give a damn if he dies.” My eyes narrowed. She thought she could ransom me, of all people? “He’s a drug dealer. A leech.”

“Don’t be dumb. No one wants Vincent for the drugs.” I heard her press and wet her lips, rubbing them against each other. Over the phone, the sound turned my stomach. “Maybe the mundanes in your two-bit protection racket, but there’s more at stake than yuppie-dust. No, if he dies, you’ll care a lot, Alexi, because that will leave you, and you alone, as the most precious resource in the city. You will never know peace again.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” My hand turned into a fist on the desk.

“Why would I tell you that?” Her voice lightened and smoothed. She was clearly enjoying the game. “You and Vincent share some… peculiar circumstances. But no one really knows, other than me. Yet. Carmine Mercurio, for example, doesn’t know you’re just what he’s looking for… but I’m sure he’d like to.”

I said nothing, nostrils flaring. “What are you talking about?”

“I told you. He said ‘yes’.”

My chest tightened.

“Carmine knows of you, zolotka, yes. When I told him that someone was using his uncle’s family name for business, and was helping the Russian Mafia, he was keen to find out who that was. I gave him an address.”

“Did you rig my car, too? Because that didn’t work.”

“Yuri set that up for me. He was a good host, better than Robert Nacari. Before we knew what you were, I was supposed to remove your piece from the board.” Jana sighed. “So now, you have a choice. You come to me, or I dispatch Vincent, use his sacrifice to kill your butt-buddy while he’s at your sister’s place, and then tell Carmine where he can find you.”

“Go fuck yourself.” My face flushed hot.

“16 Brown Street, Sheepshead Bay. Half an hour.” She laughed and hung up on me.

I closed my eyes for several long moments and then looked down at the desk. If I only had thirty minutes, I needed to make them count.