Burn Artist

Chapter 11

I blasted a cloud of frosty white gas into the face of the thing before it got within ten feet. It screeched like broken metal rubbing against itself as its charge slowed, but then a gout of flame lashed past me like a whip. It took the sleeve of my t-shirt off in a cloud of fibers and ash, scalding the skin beneath.

I didn’t bother to check what had happened to it: I turned tail and ran, dodging broken strollers and aluminum siding and car doors, fleeing heedlessly toward open ground and away from the combustible piles of shred.

Who the hell had Maslak hired that was capable of summoning an elemental? No names came to mind as fire tore over my head and splashed to the ground, roaring across the dirt gravel before extinguishing. I dodged from side to side, ducking and covering as we careened toward a dark complex of open sheds. Crushed cars were stacked up in huge piles, while others waited on suspension platforms waiting to be drained and compacted. I pelted into the darkness of the nearest shed and turned a corner, heaving for breath, and used the moment of reprieve to furiously sketch a ward against spirits on the blank sketchpad I’d bought. I got the design down, but not the charge. I heard a deep-bodied rumble from somewhere outside, and the elemental roared on the other side of the wall, too close for comfort. I needed to start running again.

My hope was on the other side of the junkyard. There was a canal next to the rail line, and if I could get there and over the fence, I could probably lose it at the stream. Spirits didn’t like moving water, and the canal – while sluggish – would be moving.

I kept my pistol in one hand, the extinguisher cable and pump in the other, got down low, and began to crab crawl through the shadows behind the suspended cars. The elemental was in the main open area of the shed, and I could hear its joints screeching as it twisted one way, then the other, searching for me with what passed for its eyes. My personal wards were confusing the spirit: it knew I was in here, but it apparently needed line of sight to find me. I slunk between a row of cars, keeping the under the height of the windows and away from the beating hot light that radiated out from the elemental’s mass. When I was at the end of the line, I broke for it, expecting it to pursue as it had before. Instead, it whirled in place and threw its next fireball straight at the car at the end of the row. That wasn’t fair. It was smart.

The car exploded in a shower of unsiphoned gas, glass and metal, a huge smoking conflagration that threw me off my feet and set off every fire alarm in the building. Regularly, the sound would have deafened me. Fortunately-unfortunately, only one ear drum ruptured as I hit the ground and tumbled inelegantly across the dirt, coming to a stop on my side. Scraped up and bleeding, I pushed myself to hands and knees. My head was ringing, and my back hurt more than was normal. Worse, I’d lost the gun: it lay in the spreading cloud of dust that billowed out of the now-burning building.

“Dammit!” I scrambled up to my feet as the elemental, glutted on its native substance, walked out of the conflagration a foot taller than it had been before. I still had the extinguisher, and blasted it full in the face as it wound up to fling another fireball.

The cloud of halon and CO2 engulfed the figure as it bore down on me, causing its body to slow and screech. I grit my teeth against the pain and kept the hose trained on it. The extinguisher didn’t stop it, but it was slowing it down. Not enough. The nozzle began to sputter, and the elemental was still on its feet.

There was a massive, throaty roar from the siphoning shed, which was now beginning to billow with flame. I stumbled back as the fire elemental surged forward. A poorly aimed fireball careened and splattered at my feet, showering me in a rain of red burning sparks, as a bulldozer burst through the smoke and dumped a metal trough full of water over the elemental’s head.

Coughing, I scraped flecks of hot metal and rock from my arms and cheeks. The elemental’s high whistling scream rang through the scrapyard. I pulled out the paper I’d written the seal on, slapped it against my bleeding arm, and barreled straight at the trapped spirit. Even with the steam still billowing from its skin, it was fighting against its brittle metal prison, gouting jets of flame through the open joints. I slapped the paper on it and barked the incantation aloud. “SATOR! Omeliel! Anachiel! Araochiah! Anazachia!”

With each name, the steam kettle shriek intensified, but the seal – powered by blood and terror – burned into the metal as the paper ashed, crackling with strange, lurid black fire for a moment before it settled into a crude engraving on the surface.

Peevishly, I looked up to the bulldozer as Vassily hopped out, brushing white dust off his tracksuit and t-shirt, then taking his peaked cap off and dusting it against his thigh.

“Hang back,” I said, unhappily. I pulled the bag of salt, and chewed a corner off of it so that it began to pour out in a thin stream. The elemental wailed, rattling against its charred metal shell.

“Just as well they left the keys in this thing,” Vassily said. “And that I don’t listen to you.”

I began to walk a circle around the struggling elemental. It was trying to find leverage against the Third Seal of Saturn, but old King Solomon knew his stuff. “Coming here was stupid, Vassily.”

“Your face is stupid. And what the hell is this thing?” He did, at least, hang back while I closed the circle and went to my knees in front of it, holding my hands out in a gesture of invocation. “I saw it on fire and you on fire, and everything on fire, and there was water, so—”

“Probably the smartest thing you could have done. Be quiet.” I closed my eyes and concentrated.

Quite suddenly, I felt something rush up from deep inside of me: a hidden leviathan, a formless shadow coasting beneath the surface of my mind, unseen. A ripple of energy, stronger than anything I’d ever felt before, thrilled up and down my spine and out through my fingers. I shuddered; my jaws snapped together, teeth clacking. It felt like a release, like a catch coming undone. Suddenly, I felt the circle seize and hold.

When I looked up, Vassily was watching me strangely. He’d lit a cigarette, smoking with it pinched between thumb and forefinger, and his consternation was visible through the smoke. “What was that?”

“Sealing the circle and the ward on this thing,” I said. “It’s a fire elemental.”

“Huh.” Vassily frowned. “Well… alrighty then.”

The creature was weakening inside its cocoon. There was no fuel for it, and only the will of the spirit was keeping it kindled. I sighed, slumping on my knees. “I need to work with this alone, Vassily… I…”

“This is the point you say: ‘Thanks for saving my ass, Vivi.’”

I looked up at him. “Thank you. For not listening to me, this one time.”

“Good enough.” He flashed a broad, sly grin.

“But it was still stupid. I can’t defend two people from this kind of magical firepower.” I motioned him off irritably, two-thirds focused on magic and the push of the elemental as it struggled itself to extinction.

Vassily held his hands up in a posture of surrender as he wheeled around and swaggered off, leaving me to my work. I reached out to the spirit, and narrowed my eyes.

“Who bound you here, salamander?” I said, protecting command into my voice. “Who cursed you to remain in this place?”

Elementals were, by their nature, neutral entities. As I understood it, they were essentially thoughtforms, imbued by the collective imagination of the billions of humans who had lived, died and worshiped since prehistoric times. It had no allegiance to the man who summoned it, or specific enmity toward me: this creature of fire was as much a victim of the spook as Slava was.

“Kovacssss.” The voice was not spoken aloud. I heard its crackling, hissing whisper in my mind, as clear as a radio picking up a signal. “Eric Kovacsss.”

It was using my own patterns of speech. I kept my focus on it, and watched the flames briefly flare in response to my own energy. “Where is Eric Kovacs in the present moment?”

Images flashed through my mind: the back of a limousine, a nightclub, a meeting room, then a modern block of condos. The building squatted like a glass cube between a line of old Brooklyn factories on one side, and a triad of distinctive, flower-shaped projects on the other. I could smell dirty water, and – most tellingly – see the shadows cast by the Brooklyn bridge over the building. The vision flickered into the interior of his apartment… it faced the street, with big windows and a big porch behind glazed glass doors.

“DUMBO,” I said. “He is in the district of New York City known as DUMBO?”

Its reply was a feeling of desperate affirmation.

“Are you still under his compulsion?”

“No compulsion,” the elemental hissed. “We failed our imperative. The geas is spent.”

“Then I release you on two conditions, salamander: that you withdraw to your realm of habitation without delay, and that you never harm me or my sworn or blood kin, including every member of the Yaroschenko Organizatsiya.” I had to be as careful as a lawyer with my wording. Any gap in the conditions could or would be exploited by a clever magician. “You will accept no geas or offer which would result in harm to the Yaroshenko Organizatsiya. Am I understood?”

The spirit was in no way chastened by my demands. It was emotionless and efficient. “We abide by your terms, magus.”

I broke the circle of salt with my toe, and then reached out with the marker to cross out the seal. The impure steel cracked like an egg, shattering and pattering to the ground in a shower of sparks and red-hot shards, and then the elemental – now a ball of fire the size of a basketball – shrunk in on itself and vanished.