Blood Hound

Chapter 8

“Wakey wakey, princess.” A cold voice rang out from overhead.

I was naked. That was the first thing I realized, as my bare skin stuck and squeaked against a cold, rounded metal surface. I was in agony, and I couldn’t feel my hands. My arms were pulled back strangely, and every motion brought a lance of bright pain from elbows, wrists, and shoulders. Every sound was too loud: the rustle of cloth, the sharp jangle of change in a pocket. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Get yourself together.

I had to focus. Had to. My pulse beat a bright tattoo against the backs of my eyes. Past the dancing lights and stabbing pain, I made out a shrewd, hawkish face with a mouth full of big white teeth. Early thirties, with short dark hair and three days of stubble. He reached over my head, and seconds later, my head and shoulders were hit with a spray of cold water that struck my nerves with a slap.

“We can do this the nice way or the way that gets you fucked up the ass with a baton.” My tormentor caught my hair in his fist and pulled, and I realized my hands were cuffed to a sturdy assistance rail behind my back. “What the fuck did you guys do to Frank? Why?”

I wheezed with pain, unable to speak. The man held his other hand up threateningly when I couldn’t find the words to reply. He wore a thick gold ring embossed with an eye within a pentacle, and I fixed on it in confusion. That earned me a hard slap across the face, and then a much more solid backhand in the other direction.

Black lightning crackled around the edges of my vision. Oh look, I thought blurrily. He has no idea what the fuck he’s doing.

He leaned in, fixing me with wolfish intensity. “You think I’m joking, you son of a bitch?”

“No,” I slurred, my voice thick with blood. “Didn’t do it.”

“The fuck’s that supposed to mean?” His eyes narrowed. They were amber, more orange than brown, like the dog’s eyes. The dogs. Hell, what the… where the fuck were those dogs?

The water was turned on again, and I jerked back to cold reality, gasping shower spray and harsh, clinical air. “Didn’t do it! I didn’t do the hit on your guy.”

“Bullshit,” my interrogator said. “Fucking bullshit.”

“Didn’t.”

Do something, or he’s going to kill you. He cocked his fist. I swallowed a mouthful of water and blood and mucus and pressed my tongue behind my teeth to protect them in the split second before he punched me again.

“Like fuck you didn’t. I know what happened to him, you piece of shit. Someone set a fetch on him. Your side, punk, not ours! None of us did it. Who? Laguetta?”

It took a moment for the word he’d used to sink in. Fetch. The pause earned me another slap across the face and then another dose of water. The spray left me shivering. It hurt. Pain was all I had to center on. “Fetch… fetch what?”

The man snarled in my face. “Come on! You fuckin’ stink of magic! What was it? Demon? Elemental?”

Magic. He was talking about magic. I struggled against the inertia, tried to gather my wits. He was acting like a Hollywood action movie villain. You can’t beat the shit out of people you want information from, because baby can’t talk with a broken jaw—but even if he was a shitty interrogator, Jersey-Shore here was as powerful a mage as any of the old masters. Merlin. Dee. Crowley.

“Wait,” I gasped out. “Wait. Can’t speak.”

He trembled in rage but held off for a moment, chest heaving. It was enough to give me space to see just how hyped up and unsure he really was.

I rolled my eyes up to look at him, flinching at the light. It stabbed all the way to the back of my skull. “You are so much… more powerful. Than him.”

He clearly hadn’t expected me to say that. Jersey-Shore obviously didn’t play poker, either. “More powerful? More powerful than who?”

“Guy that… did the job.” I forced myself to think past the teeth-drilling agony of my hands. “Gave me… a thing. Ball… caster. He engraved it… with the cross, some other things. Said it would keep me safe. He wanted…” What? I groped for something, anything. “The diary. Diary in V-Vincent’s bedroom.”

“Why the fuck would he want…” Jersey trailed off, scowling, and then some kind of realization seemed to dawn and he bounced back in agitation. Somehow, I’d nailed it. He hadn’t even looked at the diary, he’d been so worked up over finding me. “Shit. That lying sorca, cazzo! Piece of shit!”

Get him talking, Alexi. “You…” I tried to speak and ended up mumbling as a tooth wobbled. It shifted around every time my tongue moved. “How’d you… do that? Your dogs?”

“None of your fucking business. You don’t get to ask questions. What’s in the diary?”

“Don’t know.” I leaned towards him, as far as the handcuffs allowed, and licked at the blood running over my lips. “Italian. Couldn’t read it.”

“Was it a grimoire? Big book of magic?”

I stared at him blankly.

The man jerked his face to one side, looking down at me imperiously, and jogged a little on his feet. He was evaluating me with a touch of uncertainty, and I realized something. He’d been expecting the Russian spook, sure, but he’d been expecting a mage like himself. Someone powerful, someone brassy. He maybe had a secondhand description of what I looked like, but it must have been tentative. He didn’t recognize me. Was he from out of town?

Finally, he scowled. “Fuck. You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do ya?”

“Pick-up job,” I mumbled, sinking down. “That’s it. Pick-up job. Collection.”

“Jesus Christ. Okay, fine.” He ran his fingers back through his hair. Hyperaware, I read a hundred tiny signs of stress. He thought he’d picked up the errand boy, and that suited me just fine. “What’s the spook’s name? The one you talkin’ ’bout?”

This time, I looked away and said nothing. My interrogator’s mouth turned down as the seconds ticked on, and then he struck again. And again. A fist connected with my ribs, with my stomach, my neck. My vision blacked. When the light reappeared, it was hazy, fizzing at the edges with a black halo.

“Give me his fucking name!”

“Dunno,” I managed to say. “They call him… call him Molotchik.”

“Molotchik. Jesus, was that so fucking hard?” He stalked back, pacing an anxious circle.

I watched him blearily. If he bent down that close to my face again, I was going to go for his throat.

“Fine. So you don’t know anything about the spook. Well, this is your last chance to be useful, Russkie. If you don’t know who did Frankie in, who’s this Vincent? You know, Vincent ‘Manelli’?”

Hang on… what?

My reward for my real confusion was another punch to the gut.

“Don’t… know.” I spat and tasted blood, lots of blood. “A-aren’t you…”

“Carmine.” He pronounced it the proper Italian way, Carr-mi-nay, and sneered. “I work for John, shithead, and I want to know who is going around using his Family name on the street without his knowing.”

I remembered Vassily talking in the car. John Manelli only had three sons? It was getting harder to focus over the hot pain. It felt like I had a belly full of broken glass. “Isn’t he… isn’t he a M-Manelli?”

Something invisible wrapped around my throat and squeezed. I could smell ozone. My skin crawled as the air bent, gathering around me, and lifted me back up to my knees on the hard, wet metal. It was the same force that had torn my gun from my hand. This guy was incredible. He was also out of control. He threw his magic around like a toddler with his toys.

“Let me make this as clear as possible, shithead. Uncle Jo hears some punk off the street has been chuckin’ his family name around like fuckin’ confetti, so he calls in me. Mr. Fixit. Now I’ve got my means and ways of finding out who’s who, where they are, and then dealing with them.” As he spoke, he gestured with his fingers, and the choke intensified. My face was turning numb. “And a little bird called me up, told me that the Russkies are working with Vincent Manelli, who doesn’t fucking exist, and that they axed Frankie. Frank Nacari. So I go to Vincent’s house, thinking I’ll go ask him some questions, and find you. And now you’re sayin’ you don’t know who he is?”

Someone was playing us. Someone had summoned the demon of feuds, Aamon, and they were playing us off against each other. “No… no, you don’t—”

He let me loose as suddenly as he’d seized me. I fell heavily, coughing. The relentless pain, the fading adrenaline were dulling my thoughts.

“You’re sayin’ that you don’t know who he is?”

The quaver in Carmine’s voice spoke of underlying desperation. I was bubbling at the corners of my mouth, but I could hear it. He was mining for something. It was a weakness and exploitable. All I had to do was make it up.

“Frankie… was a part of a deal.” The strain in my voice was genuine and cracked with every other word. “With Vincent. He’s… faking. Not really a Manelli.”

“Yeah, that’s more like it. Go on.”

“Frankie… he came over… to deal with us. Sell John out to us.”

Carmine’s wolfish eyes were gleaming. “Keep going.”

“We knew… we knew Vincent wasn’t real Manelli.” The words boiled together, rising blithely of their own accord. I was lying, and for once, I didn’t care. “But we never told anyone.”

“What was Frankie trying to sell you guys?” Carmine crouched down now, leaning in excitedly. “What deal did he set up?”

I wanted to spit on him. Five inches closer, and I’d tear his stupid larynx from his stupid chicken neck. Instead, I swayed, feigning a lapse of consciousness. Sure enough, the splash of cold water followed, and under the searing, sense-clearing spray, I put two and two together. This was where I had to guess. It felt insane. Sounded insane.

“Some kind of… relic.” I managed to keep the simultaneous question and disbelief out of my voice. “A book or something. That’s… what I heard. He was dealing with Molotchik. I don’t know his real name, I swear.”

“Is that so?” Carmine was very intent. “What’s he look like?”

I was reaching out on a limb. “Dark. Big. Kind of fat. Weird eyes. Bulgarian, maybe.”

Carmine’s eyebrow arched. He held up the Wardbreaker. “So you don’t know his name, but you let him juice you up with this? Cause I swear, you have the taint on you. The mark.”

“Y-yes.” I fought the urge to lick at my split lip, staring at the gun. “Pakhun[19] ordered it.”

“Huh.” He looked down on me. “So you got something else you want to tell me? Because that’s not enough to save your ass.”

I shivered, rattling from the base of my spine to the back of my neck. The next words came to me unbidden, almost as if I hadn’t even spoken them. They were from the images and the snatches of English in the dream diary, still lying on Vincent’s bedroom floor. “What is… The Fruit?”

Carmine rubbed the ring on his finger with his other thumb, staring down in silence for several long, thick seconds. His hand dropped away, slowly. Watching him watching me, I hung from the rail and waited.

“That ain’t any of your business.” Carmine stepped back and turned, his shoes tacking gummily against the tiles. “Too bad you don’t know anything useful. Go kiss God’s eternal ass for me in heaven.”

I watched Carmine’s back as he walked to the door. It opened into a fathomless black rectangle; he disappeared, and I heard him quip something in Italian to someone outside. I couldn’t understand him, but made out the tone well enough. Words to the effect of “All yours.”

This was not how I’d planned to die, but I was slipping and couldn’t stop it. This was not going to be a quick death, or an easy death, or a good death. I’d beaten enough men in basement interrogation rooms to know what happened from this point on. If I was lucky, they’d just shoot me. And if I wasn’t? Nothing is more depraved than a man hopped up on a cocktail of testosterone and righteousness. I felt for something, anything I could do, but I didn’t have my gun. There was blood, but no energy. The only sacrifice available was me. This wasn’t a ward I could break or a threat I could contain.

My nose was full of the smell of water. It smelled like glass. I licked my lips and settled into place, grounding in the pain, in the cold, in the wet. I’m not religious, but I’ve seen and done enough to know that magic comes from somewhere. The best hymn to the Higher Self was written by old Aleister Crowley, and it was that long-memorized verse I started to mumble. “You who art I… beyond… all I am. Who has no nature… and no… name…”

Staccato bursts of tense laughter from outside the bathroom punctuated the words. That didn’t bode well. Professional executioners didn’t chitchat and laugh just before the dirty work started. Bullies did. Old jailbirds, the type of guys who liked to rough up and torture.

“Who art, when all but thou are gone… the s-secret and center of… the Sun.”

The invocation continued to pull itself from my lips. It seemed to catch fire and fuel itself. “You hidden spring, of all things known and… unknown, thou aloof alone…”

Thou the true fire within the reed, brooding and breeding, source and seed… Of life, love, liberty and light? You are no Thelemite, my Ruach.

I heard a flutter and the tic-tac of claws as a raven with white eyes landed on the edge of the bathtub. His irises steamed into the humid air, spitting like burning magnesium. “Why quote Crowley’s daemon when you can talk to your own?”

Over the bird’s head, I saw the executioners enter, moving like shadows behind plate glass: two men, a combined four hundred pounds of hurt. Left was bald and Right was bearded and wore a baseball cap, but they both had the same shark-eyed, dog-jawed look I saw every morning in the mirror. These were hardened men, killers.

“Keeps me calm.” I don’t think I managed to speak aloud.

“These men are about to bleed you like a calf in this bathtub,” the raven said. The feathers of its plumage boiled in the air like a black liquid. “You will undergo Shevirah here, or you will die.”

Shevirah. Now there was a magical term I hadn’t heard in a long time. That was straight-up Kabbalah: Shevirah, the breaking of the vessels. Supposedly, YHWH created through a series of emanations. Shevirah referred to the point when the divine light of self-awareness within God grew so intense that it burst outwards into nothingness like a harpoon. As it grew farther away from God, it became more solid, more tangible, cooling and creating the myriad layers of reality.

I felt a rough hand haul my face up by the hair and refocused on the arm stretching down towards me. It was the bearded guy. He laughed, lewd and derisive, but the sound seemed to come from far away. The raven was still there, and I fixated on it. It looked back at me, through me, with eyes the color of blazed winter skies. My gaze was drawn into a swirling vortex of pure white that took my breath away, a spiral galaxy contained within a single point.

The tub vibrated under and around me as one of the men climbed in, standing over me. He hauled me up until my jaw was level with his fly. I could smell diesel oil, male musk, the faint odor of unwashed skin through his jeans. For a moment, I was reminded of Moni, the way he’d talked about Semyon Vochin’s wife. With distant disgust, I realized the man was hard, but he didn’t unzip; instead, he pulled a gun and pressed it between my lips as he jeered back at his friend.

“What do I have to do?” I knew I was speaking in my mind now, as the oily point of the gun waggled in past my teeth. “I don’t want to die like this.”

“I can’t lie, Alexi.” The bird had sidestepped around so I could still see it on the rim of the tub, flicking its glossy blue-black wings. “The road to understanding is long and bitter. You will bleed. Your dead flesh will come back to life. You must take holes to be whole. Are you ready to say YES?”

My mouth was full of metal. I felt the shuffling boot soles through the tub, but my whole body, my whole mind, felt like a gas. A floating web, hovering between the black sky overhead and the green sea beneath. The nothing overhead, the no-sky, sucked at me hungrily. The sea was deep and fathomless, patient, and full. I felt like something tiny looking into a well of impossible size.

“Yes,” I replied. The word felt like an incantation, as if it had power all of its own.

“Hang on a sec, Robbie. Don’t shoot him,” said a voice from far away. “I want some target practice. Haul him up.”

“I ain’t taking the cuffs off,” Beard said, laughing.

“You don’t have to, man. Just get him up so I can get his knees.”

The barrel slid out, and my head snapped to the side as I was struck. The light was creeping into my vision. Through filmy eyes, I watched the blond thug heft a baseball bat and start across to the bathtub.

“Yes. I accept.” The raven opened its beak, revealing a blue forked tongue. “You will know me as Kutkha. I am the eye of your I… the one you only half-opened in the time before.”

My vision seared white as Kutkha threw itself forward in a heavy downbeat. It funneled into light so blue it was almost black, and pierced me through the front of my chest. I felt the impact, shaking as coils and loops of it braided itself through my mind, through my spine, through my heart and tongue and fingers. The freezing indigo of its substance meshed through me in a tenth of a second, and suddenly, I understood something I had never known. Some part of me had been caged, all this time. But now, the vessel had broken.

I was lifted higher as the other guy came up on me. I saw his face, a mask of rictus pleasure, and a pair of black, lightless eyes. He swung around, hefting the baseball bat, and then brought it down and around at my left knee.

The contact was like a detonator. As dead wood caved through bone, it tore apart the shredding virgin film over my mind. My will consolidated with an involuntary scream of naked agony, a force that pushed up from under my sternum and out of my mouth—a return thrust that wracked the air of the room in waves. Baldy’s face blanked into a mask of shock. Then, he exploded.

Escape.

The backlash of life force returned to me like iron filings to a magnet, sucked in and transmuted. My veins were hot, thrumming, every part of my body drawn in sharp relief. The handcuffs turned to liquid around my wrists as the air twisted and weirded, distending. Energy boiled white-hot in my mouth, in every bone and muscle, but I wasn’t in control as my hands reached down, grabbed my knee, and wrenched. The bones shifted together with a wet crunch I barely felt. One word hammered through the delirium. Escape.

I got one step forward before the world came back into awful focus and my knee collapsed underneath me. I tumbled over the slippery porcelain, striking the edge of the tub with a heavy crash as silenced gunshots clicked over my head and sprayed the wall where I’d been chained. Whatever heavy magic I’d just done, that was it. It was all I had. My knee seared, and I screamed rawly a second time as I lunged for the bat, the only weapon within reach, and managed to grasp the handle.

Beard was stumbling up, terrified, covered in minced meat and sprayed blood. The muzzle of the gun was a black hole, a point in space trying to track my head as we slipped uselessly on the wet floor. I got up first and charged him, limping. He got an arm up; I knocked the gun free, and we went to ground, grunting and struggling. His mouth was in my face, gaping; I headbutted him, sending him sprawling to one side, and my oversensitive hand clapped down on the fallen pistol. I pulled the trigger and it clicked, empty. Before he could recover, I rolled over on top of him and hit him in the face with the butt of it. Eyes, temples, skull, until his arms dropped and he stopped moving.

Fuck. Fucking hell. I threw the gun away from me, retching with pain, and fought to breathe. I tried to stand up and limp away, but the fragile healing job the burst of power had given me didn’t hold up. I fell back on my ass. The room was suddenly very quiet, very still, save for the etheric hum of the light overhead.

Jesus Christ. My goddamned knee. My hands hovered over it, not touching. I was terrified of what I’d find. Before I could look down, a filamentary shadow reappeared in my vision, translucent and fluid through the tears.

“There’s no time. Get up.”

“I can’t.” Every movement felt like too much effort. My eyes ran; I heaved, even though there was nothing in my stomach. I was still naked, covered in drying dead flesh.

“You have no choice. Get up, or die.”

Die? No. I didn’t want to die here. I wasn’t meant to die here. He was right. I needed to break each one of Carmine’s stubby manicured fingers and feed them to him. I fixed on this, on the fuel of revenge, while I grasped the bloody baseball bat and used it to lever myself up to my feet so I could shuffle-hop out into the hallway.

Outside, I found my things crammed into a calico shopping bag. With shaking hands, I fumbled with boxers and slacks and then dropped the bat to get my gloves on. The gloves gave instant relief, shutting down the worst of the pain in my torn fingers. The Wardbreaker was there, but the clip was gone. My knife was here. I opened the blade, and a strange, immediate sense of impending safety washed over me. No matter how disgusting I felt, I knew this. The dance of violence and survival, the feel of a knife in my hand and the power of the Art in my blood, however tenuous.

Carmine had taken me to a warehouse. The hall had concrete floors, and the ceiling was cobwebbed and unkempt. The bathroom was part of an open corridor, one of several doors set into the wall to my right, and faceless wood paneling to the left. A bolted door was at the end of the hall behind me. Ahead was the warehouse proper. I could try to unlock the back door and get out that way, but I had no idea where it led. The storage part of the warehouse was a crapshoot. Maybe there was enough cover to make a run for it, maybe there wasn’t. It depended on how many people were out there.

Then I heard the snap and rattle of a large roller door outside, and the lights came on ahead. Decision made. Male laughter followed me as I limped quickly for the farthest door, the sound growing stronger as I pulled the bolt out and flung the door open into the surprised face of a jowly, dark-eyed thug. His hand was cupped around the end of a cigarette, and he reared back like a deer in the headlights as I threw the bat at him as hard as I could. It hit and bounced; there was an expletive and then a short gargling scream as I leaped on him, blade first, and drove the knife through his neck. We spun in a lazy circle and tumbled to the ground, me on top. He was a goner, even if he was still flopping around. I dragged him off, shut the door, and rustled his pockets for keys, money, and weapons. No weapons, no money, but he had keys. The bundle was heavy, and amongst them, I found a white numbered tag and a blue-and-gold burnished keyring with a long, thick key, the squared-off kind that fits a truck or bus. The keyring had a logo on it, a crown with seven points and seven dots. Elite Meats.

The Manelli family front? I snorted blood, looking up ahead. Across the lot was a row of trucks. They were refrigerated cargo trucks, not quite big enough to be semis. I grabbed my crutch and stumbled sideways into a wall. God help me, I was tired.

“No.” Kutkha’s voice hissed through my mind. “Get to the truck.”

Pushing away from the wall cost me energy. Hopping towards the trucks cost more. “I’ve never driven a truck.”

“There’s always a first time.” It sounded like something Nic would say, but I was in too much pain to do anything but fixate and stagger. I had no idea where Carmine was, no idea if there were other men. But that wasn’t exactly correct. As I thought about it, sluggishly, I had a dim sense of their presence on the other side of the warehouse. Carmine’s aura was the largest, a red-and-orange haze in my mouth and nose that lingered like a bad smell. They were hanging around in the storage area, waiting for their buddies to finish with me. They probably had a truck of their own in there, waiting to receive my body so they could dump me out in the bay.

Which raised a good point. Where the hell was I?

We reached the first truck and had a brief battle with gravity and inertia to reach up and try to unlock it. Not that one. The next truck in the row was the one: the key fit. At first, I wasn’t sure I could use the step to pull my weight up to the door, but I felt another wave of subtle pressure from within. My Neshamah, burning the energy of blood sacrifice to save our goddamned lives. Every muscle screamed as I grappled my way up, hauling with my arms and pushing with the good leg until we collapsed across the worn driver’s seat.

“Lev,” I muttered. “We need to get to Lev.”

I didn’t know why I needed Lev. Common sense told me that Lev could have put me here in the first place. He was the one who’d known where I was. In the moment, though, I had genuine, immediate, fully rational problems. The truck had a manual transmission, and I had only one functioning leg.

“Use the bat.”

“You fucking use the goddamn bat!” I growled aloud, finally losing my temper. My body was wracked with pain, nothing but pain, as I pushed and pulled and found my way upright in the seat. I jarred the ruined knee. “Mother of fuck!”

Kutkha fell silent, but I could feel it hovering in the fringes of my awareness. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched a shadow cluster on the passenger’s seat, swirling anxiously as I heaved for air. As the pain settled back to berating my nerves instead of screaming at them, I reached up to stab at the key slot with the key. Once, twice, and then it slid home.

Across the lot, three men burst out of the door, shouting at me, at the dead body, and at each other. One of them was Carmine. They were briefly transfixed by the dead man on the ground, pausing to stare.

Panic surged through my gut like a shock of cold water. Use the bat. Right.

I braced the bat against my leg and down onto the clutch, holding it as I somehow used all limbs to turn the engine and put the stick shift in gear all at the same time. The truck roared to life, stuttering as I fumbled with the controls. Thanks to Nicolai, I’m an excellent driver. Thanks to genetics or memetics or whatever it is that causes me to be so neophobic, I am not excellent at dealing with unfamiliar arrays of buttons and dials. I got the headlights on as the first of the men ran out towards me, gun raised.

That’s right, rabbit. Come on.

I shoved my foot down on the pedal and accelerated at full speed towards him. The Italians scattered in terror; I hauled the steering wheel one-handed as I let off the clutch. Stalling meant death, but now that the machine was working, I knew what I was doing. The truck was more responsive than I expected, and as I spun it, it nearly tipped on its side. My skin flinched as bullets spranged off the hood and struck the windshield, but we had speed and, most importantly, momentum. The vehicle roared straight through a chain-link fence that we mowed down and flung aside, charging across some slippery dead grass and then out onto the road.

“Magic,” I gasped. “Carmine. Can we—”

“He has to be low on Phi,” Kutkha replied, coiling around the cabin like an agitated mist. “He can’t risk much now.”

Phi. I had no idea what that was. I gritted my teeth so hard they felt like they were going to crack as we turned out from the warehouse street onto a main road. In the distance, I could see the George Washington Bridge, and my heart sped. We were across the water and over the state line, in Jersey. This was nuts. Talking to my imaginary raven friend was nuts. I was buzzing and fought to not be conscious of anything but the dance of clutch, shift, and the wheel in my hands while I floored the truck with the help of the baseball bat. My knee felt three times its usual size, too large and swollen to be real. I hadn’t looked at it and wouldn’t. Not until we stopped.

An engine roared behind me, revving hard. I swerved to one side on raw instinct as bullets whizzed and pinged off the side of the cab. They were chasing, and they were faster than the truck. One bullet struck the mirror, and it shattered just as I swung back and rammed broadside into the pursuing car. It spun away, screeching, and smashed into a telephone pole behind us. I fought to right the truck before we followed it over onto the side of the road.

“I can’t believe this.” My face flushed. I was furious and shaking. It was finally dawning on me, through the fog of adrenaline, that I was talking aloud to… what? My soul? A hallucination? “I just… can’t fucking believe this. And if you’re my Neshamah, you better explain how the hell I did that and how the hell I do it again.”

“Then listen, and learn. Five parts has the human soul, like a small cell within the greatness of the Cauldron. Your being is a tree. Under and around the roots is GOD itself, and then come the roots, called Chiah. From those grow branches, your Neshamah. Then there is you, the Alexi of this world, who is Ruach. You are the mind, the breath which animates the fifth part, your Nephesh, which is your body.”

That was pure Kabbalah, for the most part. “What do you mean by God?” I replied. We took the next left and merged the bullet-riddled truck into the traffic of Interstate 95. “And Phi?”

“The Greater Optimistic Direction. The Giant Organism of Dimension,” Kutkha replied. “The YESbeast. It is the Great I.”

“It?” This sounded mad. “That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t believe in God.”

“You don’t have to.” Kutkha chortled. “The YESbeast doesn’t care. You are one atom in a single cell of its body. You could destroy everyone on this world but yourself, and it would not notice.”

I scowled but had no answer. The whole exchange was so fluid and strange—semi-telepathic, hyper-real—that I couldn’t piece the information together. “Great. My Neshamah is some kind of Mormon.”

Kutkha guffawed. “Was I not being mystical enough? Pardon me, your humble soul. I am the gate and the key. I am the watcher, your guardian.”

“And a smartass.” Fantastic. The road ahead was swimming in front of my eyes, wobbling like a black ribbon. I checked the rearview mirror, but I didn’t see any especially suspicious cars. I certainly didn’t see Carmine’s flaming black dogs. “Guardian? If you’re my guardian, why weren’t you there when my dad was thrashing the shit out of me and my mother?”

“I was waiting,” Kutkha replied, wistfully. “Waiting for you to see me. But you were afraid… you only saw me briefly, Alexi.”

“Well I—shit!” As I spoke, the engine stuttered, and I worked the clutch, hissing through my teeth. Few people have ever heard me curse, but the words boiled up from a dark and angry place deep in my chest before I could stop them. “Don’t you fucking fuck up now, you no good piece of shit!”

The traffic slowed as we rolled up to the toll gates, and it took every shred of concentration to keep the truck moving. We rolled up to the window, and I set my jaw, resolving to breeze on through. When no one asked for my toll, I looked out and down. The woman in the booth stared back mutely, her eyes bulging slightly in the bright lights. That’s when I remembered I was covered in shredded meat and dried blood, gunpowder, and sweat. And I was half-naked. In a bullet-hole riddled truck.

“Same old New Jersey, huh?” I peered at her dark face, trying to open both my eyes. One of them was swollen shut tightly enough that it was going to need a crowbar to get it open. “How much?”

“Four dollars. And, uh, sir… do you—”

“No.” I glared at her with all the dignity I could muster and fumbled for my wallet—or maybe the dead guy’s—one-handed as the truck shuddered and lurched a little. I fought to keep the balance on the accelerator and clutch and ended up pulling out a twenty. “Just… you just take that, ma’am. Tip.”

Her eyes tracked me as we rumbled off, the engine coughing. The cabin was warm now and brighter than I remembered. The pain was getting worse, not better. The magical outburst had probably saved me from permanent brain damage from Carmine’s beating, but I wasn’t sure if it was the lights of the bridge blurring into one another or the aura preceding the worst headache I’d ever have.

“We are deplete,” Kutkha said, picking up on my silent query. “The sacrifice was our fuel.”

“You mean every time I want to cast big magic, I need to kill somebody?” I hoped not. I had done a good job of staying out of the hands of the law, but that was only because I killed infrequently and well. And, of course, I guessed that killing people just to cast spells probably raised some ethical concerns.

“No,” Kutkha replied. “But you’re so blocked up that you have next to no Flow. The magic worked because you were close to death.”

Oh, right. So I had to die, or nearly die, to be a proper wizard. Do zla boga.[20]

We got the truck most of the way to Central Park before I passed out at the wheel. One moment, I was intent on the lines and whirring tarmac, and the next, I was hanging from my seatbelt and the hood of the truck was folded around a lamp post. I was pleasantly, distantly surprised to find that my legs weren’t crushed as I hauled myself out of the smoking cab and tumbled bonelessly to the pavement, the bat still in my hands.

My heart shlupped in my chest. It sounded as squishy as I felt, and I was glad that it, at least, was able to move. The rest of my body refused to respond. My brain was a sheen of white noise. Carmine and friends could drive up beside us right now, step out and put a bullet in my head, and there was nothing I would be able to do. Whoever killed Frank Nacari could take me off the street. At least I had made it back to New York.

“Get up,” Kutkha hissed in my mind.

“I can’t.” Its urgings were like prickling claws. I struggled to rise, but my wrists buckled from my weight.

“Get up or shut up. You’re almost there.”

My vision swam, but I still didn’t want to die. Sleep, yes; die, no. I tried again and managed to clumsily roll up to my ass and get a look around where we’d crashed. It was a clean, broad boulevard, full of high-rises. It smelled green. Cast-off newspapers rustled down the nearly empty road. Someone was running away towards the park, away from the scene of the accident, and some apartment lights had turned on overhead. Of course, I’d crashed the truck in one of the few neighborhoods in this city where the people cared what was going on outside. The cops would be there soon, and if they found me, I was worse than dead.

I choked a curse, set the butt of the bat on the ground, and used it to push myself up to the better knee. They were both screwed up by this point. With some shuffling and a lot of growling, I got to my feet. Took a step forward. Again. I lost awareness of my surroundings as I fixed my eyes on the pavement and walked towards the payphone at the end of the street.

I careened into the door before getting inside, dropped my change when I tried to feed it in the slot, and settled on digging the wallet out to find another quarter instead of contorting myself to find the first one on the ground. I tried the house first, but no one picked up. Vassily was out, of course. Next I tried the other number that came first to mind: Nic’s office number. I had to think about it, stabbing out with clumsy fingers, trying to moisten my lips as I summoned the words.

“Sirens Office.” Lev’s fluted voice crackled over the line.

“Lev. ’S Lexi.” My tongue felt too big for my mouth. I slumped against the side of the booth. “Ambushed. Manellis.”

“Alexi? The Manellis?” Lev’s shock was mild, almost affected, but that was Lev for you. “Where are you? I’ll send someone right away.”

“No idea.” I heard the slur in my voice and swallowed, glancing around. Park. Green. It had started to rain, heavy pattering drops that formed a mist around the tall buildings. I looked up at the skyline, orienting myself. “No… wait. Central Park. South.”

“Tell me the number on the payphone.”

I peered at it, but it took a while to make it out. My eyes were refusing to focus. “Two… four, five… nine, seven…nine… zero.”

“Okay, I’ll look it up. Stay down, stay safe.”

Was that it? I held onto the phone for several seconds after it clicked, not certain I’d heard my Avtoritet correctly. Then I dropped the receiver, staring at it numbly until the wail of sirens pierced the night air, getting closer. Shit. My fuzzy-headedness was abruptly cleansed by fear. Fear of arrest tapped reserves of energy I never knew I had, and I hobbled desperately out of the booth, across the street, and into the park, like a wounded cat. I huddled down in a cluster of bushes, burning and freezing under the metallic summer rain, peering out through the green wire netting at the road as it began to flash red and blue. My gut tensed to something the size of a walnut as the siren hooted and then went silent. Voices called out, cops getting out of the car. God help me.

“Kutkha?” My mental voice was very small. “Please tell me that I didn’t just go through all that to get pulled up.”

The response was a subtle fluttering of pressure around my shoulders, like someone’s consoling touch, the kind of touch I had never been able to stand. Kutkha felt weak and distant now, but even the smallest sense of his presence somehow balmed my mind and took my attention, however briefly, off the relentless and otherwise all-consuming pain. I thought back to Vassily in the car, the long stretch of his throat and the words of the Tao Te Ching. The man who walks without fear. I wasn’t dead. Not by rhinoceros or tiger, or Guido hellhound, or NYPD.

It was an age until the street outside my green sanctuary descended into silence. The doors slammed, the sirens flashed and then withdrew. The cops had likely called a tower in to get the truck, but with no one around, there was no reason for them to linger. My heart beat rapidly and shallowly in my chest, and lurched when a car door slammed outside the park fence not too far from the ruined truck. I heard a pair of old army boots hit the pavement. The change roused me from my damp fugue.

“Marco.” Nic lifted his voice a little higher than usual, gravelly and tired.

“P-polo.” I choked on the word. It wasn’t loud enough. “Polo.”

The boot step swaggered over in my direction. A few minutes later, the foliage over my head rustled, and Nic’s dry, wiry fingers snapped around my forearms. I was too exhausted to protest as he hauled me out, except to snarl and chomp my teeth as I put weight down on my foot and felt an invisible knife wrench from sole to knee.

He clicked his tongue. “Shit, Lexi. They fucked you up.”

“Lev.” I turned my head to the side and spat blood. “Need Lev. I have to… have information… the operation. Vincent.”

Nic paused for a moment, looking at me with narrowed eyes, and then hmmph’d and shrugged, offering his arm. I accepted, and he helped me hobble to the car. I let him load me face-first onto the backseat and lay there watching the world spin in an elegant loop ahead of my nose.

“Lev,” I croaked.

“You’re real beat.” Sympathy never really touched Nic’s voice, but his tone held a certain urgency I’d never heard before. He’d mentored Vassily and me in our teens. Maybe he cared. “Keep talking. What happened?”

I couldn’t talk. Instead, I rolled over, struggled up to my elbows, and finally looked down at my leg. I immediately regretted it. It was stuck out to the side, the kneecap pushed up strangely from underneath my pants. Legs weren’t meant to look like that, so I lay back and stared at the lines of leather on the ceiling overhead. “Had to kill a couple of guys. Lev.”

“We’re on the way to Lev. Don’t sweat it. You’re tough.” Nic revved the engine and backed out of his space too fast for anyone’s comfort, least of all mine. “We got your car fixed.”

You’re tough. He’d given that same piece of encouragement since he started teaching me how to box and shoot and boost cars. “Okay.”

Dizzy, dry-mouthed, I covered my eyes and tried to relax on the backseat, bumped forward and back by Nic’s flippant one-handed steering. We turned a corner, and I had to bury my teeth in my own arm as my leg jerked, bracing the other hand against the seat in front. The longer I lay there, the greater the shock. It flushed like a wave of hot anger but without the accompanying energy. I had been naked. My mouth was still oily and sour from the gun. It wasn’t anger. It was disgust. My body was full of holes, my flesh weak and bloodied, invaded. And yet… past the slow and continual shattering of my remaining dignity, past the stench of blood on my wet clothes, I could feel the crooning, cold presence of Kutkha. He enfolded my consciousness with wings as breathtaking as the clouds passing over a wild steppe. Every touch, every brief synaptic moment, carried a litany that slowly overwhelmed my thoughts.

…LoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYou…

I could smell night-blooming flowers. Jasmine, maybe, or honeysuckle. Was I dying? Drifting, distant, I was surprised to find my vision fading to green.

With no other recourse, I surrendered. Maybe death wasn’t so black after all.