Burn Artist

Chapter 10

The drive home from Sirens was tense. Vassily and I were silent, unable to converse while the memory of Slava – burning, screaming – loomed large in our memories. Back at home, my friend radiated displeasure as he watched me dress and arm before the drive out to Long Island. Shoulder holster, gun, knife, and other less standard tools. Salt and chalk, of course; a fire extinguisher, which I had rigged to a military-surplus bandoleer with Velcro and duct tape. I took the bone amulet, too. Scrubbed of Slava’s blood, I was able to quickly tune it back in to my own energy and apply my own to seal the enchantment. His death had charged it more quickly than the moon ever would have.

There was one other magical tool I considered taking with me. My Colt Commander, one of the first guns I’d ever bought, lay on my altar in a three-layer ring of steel wire, oxidized iron dust, and crushed hematite. Sigils were carved into the barrel on both sides, concentrated words of power which were currently still not doing what I wanted them to do.

A hitmage does a lot of wardbreaking. People inevitably seek magical protection as well as physical protection if they suspect their lives are threatened. Maslak, for one, but any man with enough money and common sense would hire a spook to ward him up when word got out that there was a contract out on his head. Wardbreakers like me were less common than you’d expect. The average spook could create and unmake their own wards, but not other people’s. My gift was to be able to find the cracks in the veneer, the tiny errors that were inevitably made by the human hand and mind in the creation of magical objects.

The problem with wardbreaking was how much time it took. Most times, I didn’t have fifteen minutes to screw around under someone’s car with planetary metals and colored chalk. My solution to that was to create a chargeable gun that could shoot bullets that could bust magical shields. In theory, it was an elegant and efficient solution to a common problem. In practice… the results had been less than satisfactory. I could engrave individual full-metal jackets, and they worked fairly well against simple wards – very simple wards – but once they were spent, they were gone. I didn’t want to just plug a small amount of energy into someone’s magical shield with a single shot. I wanted the Wardbreaker to work like a taser: the power came from the gun itself, with the round being an anchor for a powerful stream of energy. I was sure you could break wards by overcharging them, inflating the magic until it ripped itself apart, but I hadn’t been able to make it work.

I frowned down at it. No… for the moment, it wasn’t worth the risk or the extra weight. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be able to get it to work unless I used the gun more, but using the gun more meant taking it on jobs like this one. A misfire was the difference between coming home in the morning, or being delivered to the hospital under a sheet. I took a disposable piece instead, a neatly drilled and filed virgin S&W Model 645, and packed two full magazines: an eight round clip of FMJs marked up in painstakingly etched arcane designs, and eight plain.

“You’re an idiot, Alexi,” Vassily said. “At least let me drive. Did you see what this freak did to Slava?”

“That is exactly why you’re not coming with me.” I said. “I’m not too worried. You heard the guy’s voice. Over-dramatic, arrogant, and so very dire. This guy is probably some kind of stage wizard who’s good at magic and not much else. He won’t know what to do with someone who can kick his ass in person.”

“That’s a lot to assume from one phone call.”

I turned to look back at him. “Do I tell you how to do your job?”

Vassily huffed, leaning back on his hands. “I really don’t want to have to come and collect your ashes from K&S, okay? What am I gonna say to Mariya if something happens to you and I wasn't there?”

“You tell her I died doing what I love,” I replied, checking the bolt action on my pistol a second time.

“What? Perishing in a pyre of your own body fat while some pimply fat kid dances around your burning corpse?”

“Hunting my fellow man,” I said, holstering the pistol. “If you find my ashes, assume I had a mysterious, knowing smile on my face.”

“Oh,” Vassily said. “How very wizardly.”

“Absolutely sorcerous.” I zipped my vest up to the neck. “So, before I’m burned at the stake… Have you gotten something for Rodion yet?”

“I’ve got my eye on something,” Vassily replied. “I managed to find this painting called ‘The Road to Happiness’ by James Dean. Has his signature and everything. He’ll like that, won’t he?”

“I have no doubt of it.” It was better than anything I was going to be able to get him in such a short window of time, short of Maslak’s head. “The question is, are you going to be able to get it before tomorrow night?”

Vassily wagged a finger. “Hey now, Mister ‘I don’t tell you how to do your job’. Of course I can get it. That’s what credit cards are for.”

“They must be quite a hefty credit card if you can buy a… what? Ten-thousand-dollar painting, plus express air freight?”

Vassily sniffed, affronted. “Twenty-five, thank you very much. And they’re not MY credit cards.”

I sighed, turning to face him. “I can’t believe you’re doing this while you’re on remand. You know the Fed is watching you, don’t you?”

“The Fed can kiss my ass,” Vassily said. “With tongue.”

“You’re being reckless.”

“And you aren’t?”

“Perhaps a little. But we both know that this kind of work involves risk.”

“It sure does. So you’re gonna let me drive, right?”

“No!” I threw my hands up and stalked out of the bedroom. “You’re not equipped to fight another mage if it comes down to a confrontation. Stay here and just… don’t end up in jail again, you idiot.”

“Your mom’s an idiot!” He called after me in English. “And so is your face!”

How gratifying to know my sworn-brother’s sense of humor hadn’t changed since he was twelve.

There weren’t quite a million scrapyards in the greater New York City-New Jersey metropolis, but there were still a lot of them. Some in Brooklyn, some in Long Island, some in Trenton or Newark. My instincts said East. Way east. The sounds I’d heard in the background, the glimpses of rusted metal towers and mountains of metal shred pointed me straight at one of the largest scrapyards in the state: Kozlowski and Sons.

K&S was a sprawling complex in Babylon, Long Island, a cancerous dustbowl the size of a baseball stadium. There was an abrupt transition from clapboard houses set among gardens and trees to this yellow-dirt industrial wasteland, with its broken roads, factories, and warehouses.

I parked off-road at the factory across the road from the main scrapyard, leaving my car behind a stand of chokecherry shrubs. The clouds were low and the roads still had patches of damp, but there was no rain tonight – only a wind that tickled the hairs on the back of my neck and forearms with ghostly, humid fingers.

The size of K&S was a problem. The complex spanned five acres across two sites. Number One had nearly everything: an office, warehouse, a weigh-in center for cars, then the shredder and the huge piles of scrap waiting to be churned through it into tiny shards of recyclable metal. Then there was the autowrecking site, a junkyard with all that entailed. Sheds and a processing line, a crusher, cranes, and tons and tons of buses and cars in various states of operation. The third site was at the railyard, where the shredded metal was loaded into train cars… cars which inevitably ended up at AEROMOR and other similar companies to be shipped overseas.

I turned into the wind and tuned into the great radio silence that hung in the air, filtering the taste and smell of the air. I didn’t really know what I sensed, exactly… something like a tug out from my tongue and my eyes. As I immersed in the invisible flow of energy, the raucous call of ravens from the north-west and swiveled toward the sound, eyes still closed. When I opened them, I saw birds lift from the roof of the shredder, wheeling around in agitation. Lot number one it was then.

The gate was open. When Big K and his kids closed for the day, they took all the cash and locked up all the non-ferrous metal, the really valuable stuff. I kept an eye out for junkyard dogs and security as I jogged into the dusty yard, pistol drawn. I found the dog around the first towering pile of scrap. It was burned black, skin split from heat, its lips pulled back over its half-bare skull. The smell of cooked meat was fresh, and when I crouched to hold a hand over it, warmth radiated through the leather of my glove.

As I stood, something occurred to me… a vague, unformed theory on how the other mage had worked such an energetically intense spell from a distance. Animal sacrifice. Death was a potent fuel for magic. Revelation, birth and death… three of the most powerful events in existence, when it came to curses and wards.

I set off for the shredder, warier and quieter now that I was on the approach. The huge machine was an awkward tower with several jutting conveyor belts and a central crane-like ‘office’ where the overseer could monitor the procession of hulks that were pulled up the largest belt, fed into the shredder, and then sorted along different belts that ran out from underneath the tower. There was a huge engine shed underneath. The door was ajar, the padlock and chain hanging loose from the rusted iron handle.

My sense of unease only grew. The first thing I did was look up: when you were dealing with animals or the supernatural, ‘up’ was always a potential site of ambush. When I was satisfied that there were no pyromaniac demons hanging from the rafters, I drew up to the side of the door, the pistol cupped and ready to fire, and tuned into my full range of senses. The shredder was turned off, and would have been turned off since four thirty in the afternoon, but the air billowing from the entry to the engine room complex was distinctly warmer than the outside. There was no sound. I drew a deep breath, then spun around the doorway gun-first, staring down the sight.

My boot crunched down on something gritty and hot.

I paused, breaking the trance of trigger discipline to look down. A triangle-within-a-circle of iron filings twisted apart under my sole. I frowned for a moment before the shock of adrenaline hit me, and rapidly backpedaled out of the engine room, turning quickly as the nearest pile of shredded steel ignited with a loud phwoompf, the sound of a gas pilot lighting a heating element, but larger. Much larger.

Fire caught the thin flakes of steel alight with weird, eerie blue flames. As I watched, the scrap flashed orange and white as it rapidly ignited, liquefied, and flowed together into a vaguely humanoid shape. It was lean and angular, the metal cracking and setting into brittle blades in the places where it wasn’t under pressure from the intense, hot magic. Its joints spurted flame, flowing with molten metal.

As I fumbled to bring the extinguisher around – a tool that suddenly felt a lot less useful than I’d imagined – the fire elemental rushed me in a cloud of boiling heat.