Burn Artist

Chapter 12

On a Friday night, Sirens was bustling. The main room of the security office was busy, with most of the bouncers clustered around the table with Nicolai for muster. Vassily and I both stalked inside and found ourselves walled off by a row of broad backs and black t-shirts. Nic was at the front of the room in what passed for his uniform – a blue and white striped tank and black cargoes instead of the usual camo print. My father lounged indolently on a chair beside him, and looked up at us with flat, white eyes.

“Alright. Any questions? No? Good. Get out there and report any weird shit straight back here,” Nic said. He waved his hand, and the small black t-shirt-and-slacks army rose and filtered out past us, some of them glancing at my seared and ragged clothing. We smelled like sulphur and rusted iron.

“How’d you go?” Nic asked, once everyone had left.

“We have reduced the threat at least. Where’s Rodya?” I focused on Nic, refusing to look at Grigori.

“Out,” Nic grunted by way of reply. He took out a pouch and filters, and began to deftly assemble a cigarette. “What happened?

“There was a trap set for us at K&S.” I wanted to sit, but didn’t dare to. Adrenaline was all that was keeping me on my feet. “A fire elemental. It was probably what was used to cause Vyacheslav to self-combust… it’s dead now.”

“So that’s it? All clear?”

“Maybe,” I replied. “We still have to find the spook who summoned it, but—”

“So you’ve come back after doing half the fucking job?” Grisha spoke up from the back. “What do you want? A pat on the head?”

Finally, I settled on him. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

“You’re fucking talking to me now, you little shit. I’m a starred Commander in this organization, and you’ll talk to me if I fucking tell you to.” Grisha sat forward, resting his hands on his knees. “So the spook is still running around. You killed the puppet, not the puppeteer.”

“The elemental gave me his address,” I said acidly. “If you’d shut up for five minutes and let me finish my report to Nicolai.”

Grigori got to his feet. He could still tower over me. “Nic is part of MY crew. MINE. Don’t you ever speak to your Kommandant like that again.”

“I’ll show my Kommandant – and my father – respect when he gives it.”

His eyes paled, pupils contracting into tiny black points in a sea of gray-white. I knew that expression well. My eyes did the same thing when I was furious. I felt a thrill of… fear? shoot through me as my father balled his fists and advanced a step toward us. But it wasn’t the kind of cowering, nauseous fear I usually felt when I faced him. I had a knife, loose in its sheath on my hip. If he got on top of me, I could stab him. I WOULD stab him.

“Grisha, come on…” Nicolai reached out to steady him the way he had the other day, but my father brushed him off and threw his chair aside as he bulldozed his way across the room. A took a single step back, but before I even thought it through, the knife was in my hand.

Grigori’s forward charge halted for a moment, breaking stride as his face flickered with some emotion I couldn’t read. And then he continued, snorting like a bull. I braced to weave for the punch, but he didn’t strike – instead, he feinted, and then his other hand shot out and grabbed my knife hand wrist. He squeezed and pulled me forward, putting the point of the blade against the side of his throat.

“So that’s how it’s going to be?” He said, grinning. “You want to kill me?”

My eyes narrowed. This close, I could smell the sour ghosts of alcohol and cheap tobacco on his breath.

He laughed in my face. “Go on then, pussy. Go on, stick it in.”

Strong as I was, I still had nothing on my father. I bared my teeth, clamping my tingling fingers down to keep my hold on the hilt, and stared him in the eye as I pushed forward against his grip. His fingers tightened, but not enough to stop me.

“Do it,” he hissed. I saw his skin dimple beneath the point of the blade; his eyes were wild and thrilled.

“Alexi! Jesus Christ, man!” Vassily’s hands were on my shoulders, pulling me away. Nicolai was doing the same thing on the other side, hauling Grisha back. I’d never drawn a weapon on him before. Nicolai was pale, spooked. Vassily tried to put himself in front of me, and he was similarly shaken. My father wasn’t shaken: he was laughing, his face flushed dark. A thin line of blood tracked down the front of his throat.

“Jesus, Alexi, relax. I was just messing with you,” he said. “I’m gonna have words about this with Rodya tonight, kid. We can’t have you messing up the chain of command.”

“Tell him whatever the fuck you want, and tell him I said that I’ll kill your fat fucking ass, too!” My temper, already frayed, broke down completely. I tried to lunge around Vassily, hand white-knuckled around the knife, while Grigori laughed loud enough to almost drown me out. “I’ll kill you, you disgusting piece of shit!”

“I could break your neck in three seconds, kid. Get the fuck out of here.” My father gestured to the door. His voice was deep, low and dark. “Don’t come back.”

“You don’t have the authority to eject me from the Organizatsiya. So I will be back.” I stared at him over Vassily’s arm. “I have as much right to be here as you do.”

“You really think so? You think Nic will just stand here and let my limp-dick faggot son just fuck me up in front of him?”

Nic’s expression was graven. At mention of his name, he grimaced.

“Alexi.” Vassily put his hand on my shoulder. “Come on, man. We have better shit to do.”

“Yeah. You do.” Nicolai’s thin face was drawn, mask-like and unreadable. “Both of you.”

My father’s expression was unreadable. He said nothing, but I knew that his estimate of me had changed. I had moved from being a weak object to torment to a threat… and Grigori only knew one response to physical threats.

I shook Vassily off, and left the room ahead of him, straight-backed and buzzing with adrenaline. The nerves only hit me when we were out in the corridor, and even then, I felt giddy. Elated. I would have done it. For the first time in my life, I could imagine myself killing him. Really killing him, and I smiled a small, frosty smile, the knife still in hand.

“Put that thing away, Lexi,” Vassily said. His voice was hushed, like we were in church. “That was not okay. He could have broken your wrist, he could have—”

“I’m going to kill him.” I kept walking. I didn’t even bother to keep my voice down.

“You can’t. He’s your dad, for one thing, and he’s Kommandant, for another…”

As Vassily continued justifying the many reasons that I couldn’t murder my own father, I found myself tuning out. Something had changed in that split second moment where I’d drawn the knife. I’d seen it in his eyes, felt it in the way he’d pushed the point of the blade against his neck. My father hated himself as much as he hated me and the rest of the human race. He wanted release, but he was too cowardly to do it himself.

We reached the crossroads of the back-of-house. The exit to the car park was in one direction, the entry to the club on the other. Vassily jerked his head toward the club. “You want to go out and like… go watch the girls or something? Bet you could talk that goth chick into the best lapdance of your life.”

“No,” The thought of touching a stranger – having a stranger touch me in ways I had never been touched, ways which were bound to be painful – made my skin crawl. “I need a shower. After that, I need to go for Kovacs.”

“Oh, come on,” Vassily said. “You literally nearly just got fried by that fire thing. You’re not the Terminator. You need to sleep.”

“I need to stop any more of our men from dying by conflagration.”

“A what in the who now?”

I sighed. “Dying in a fire, Vassily.”

“When you stop speaking real words, it’s time to go home.”

“I’m not tired,” I replied. “I’m hopped up. I need to find Kovacs tonight, before the party tomorrow. You know Rodion won’t buy it if I’m out in the field and skip his birthday. He’ll think I’m avoiding him, now that Grigori is going to go and bitch me out.”

“Yeah, well, unlike Grisha, you actually do your job. Rodya won’t care if I tell him where you’re at.”

“That’s not the point.” I turned and started for the door to the parking lot. “The point is that I’ve left a job half done.”

“Alexi… don’t listen to your dad. He was trying to get a rise out of you.”

“I got a rise out of him.” The high was fading. Now, I was irritable and hungry, hopped up and in need of something to punch, preferably more than once. “Shower. Change of clothes, then Kovacs. It’s a Friday night, and at the very least, I can find out where he lives.”