Burn Artist

Chapter 15

We closed in with the others as 57th Street dissolved into a warzone. Women screaming, men fighting, women fighting, men trying to drag their girlfriends away from the collective thousand pounds of angry Slav who all too happily engaged with the lot of them. Vassily and I joined the fray without any uncertainty, setting on one of the guys who had managed to get Ovar in a headlock. We pulled him off and beat him from both sides, then threw him to the ground. No matter who started the fight, your people had to be the ones to finish it.

The guy who had flipped off Grisha was now on the ground getting the shit kicked out of him by three men. In front of me, Mo lurched and dropped with a punch to the jaw. The man he was fighting came at me next, fist pulled back. I wove and ducked the haymaker, slammed him in the sternum and then up under his chin. He went forward instead of down, yelling furiously as he bore me to the ground. We kicked and punched all the way to the pavement. Vassily hauled him off by his cornrows and gave me enough room to knee him square in the balls and scrabble out and up to continue on.

The fight was over as soon as Nicolai got out with our allies: close to twenty drunk, excited Eastern Bloc muzhiki who descended on the fight in a wave of peaked caps, Adidas tracksuits and leather. The clubbers did the sensible thing and hauled ass, pulling their fallen friends up off the ground and running as a hail of empty vodka bottles, screams and obscenities followed them down the road. As soon as it was obvious they weren’t coming back, the laughter and cheering resumed.

“Nothing like a fight to finish a good party, eh?” Ovar offered me a hand up from where I’d been sitting. Sitting?

“Oh, absolutely.” Nothing like watching your father hassle random passersby on a public road, more like it.

Laughing, he hauled me up to my feet as though I weighed nothing. Ovar was a Georgian and was approximately the size and shape of a door, with the build and mustache of a circus strongman. “You almost fight better than your old man, son.”

“Give me another year, and I’ll be better.” I was bleeding from some part of my face, and shook my head just before Vassily pressed a handkerchief into my hand and then pushed my hand against my nose. Punchy must have clipped me, but I hadn’t even felt it. “There’s no way we’re getting back in the restaurant.”

“Fuck the restaurant! There’s stripclubs down on 8th.” Ovar flung an arm around Vassily, and cheerfully manhandled him off into the crowd. My friend gave me a mournful little wave on the way past, and I knew I was never going to hear what it was he’d been about to confess to me. All because of one man.

Grigori was easy enough to find: he was throwing up noisily in the gutter. When he rose back up to one knee, he found me glaring down at him.

“The fuck do you want?” He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. The vinegar reek clung to his tracksuit.

“You’re a disgrace,” I said. “Take a goddamn look at yourself, Grigori. Just for one night.”

“You’re asking to get hit in the head with a hammer while you’re in bed, kid.” His eyes paled, draining of life and light, and he lumbered up to his feet. “You come here like… like you’re somethin’. I made you. I made you.”

I rolled my eyes. “Of course you won’t. You can’t reflect on yourself. You’re a narcissist. When you look in the mirror, you see some… some goddamn hero, but you’re an alcoholic, racist, slobby has-been.”

“Big talk coming from a little man.” Grisha sneered. “You finished playing with your boyfriend over in the alley over there? Think I wouldn’t notice? If I told you once, I told you a million times that I was gonna wring your neck if you ever turned out this way.”

“How creative.” I stood back, readying myself for his longer reach. “But you made me. If I’m gay, I must have inherited it from you. Something happen in prison you never told me about, father?”

Grigori’s face purpled in the split second before he swung at me. I dodged the punch, and he roared with wordless fury, aiming at my face. I dodged that, too, and backed up into the thin crowd of people who had turned to face the noise. They split around me like water, freeing up space.

“You useless fucking piece of shit! I should have kicked your whore of a mother in the stomach before you were born!” Grigori fumbled at his jacket zipper, yanking it down. He was going for his pistol.

I pulled my little obsidian knife and fell into stance, my other palm held up in a vaguely arcane gesture. “You want to try me? You might be my ‘Kommandant’, but I’m your Volkhv, and I swear I will gut you here and go to prison with a smile if you pull that gun on me.”

He sneered on both sides of his mouth. “Yeah, right. What are you gonna do? Curse me? I was cursed the moment you shot out of Nikla’s cunt, you little fuck!”

It wasn’t the first time my father had threatened me with a gun, but it was the first time I’d ever threatened him with magic. The presence of the weapon only steeled something inside as I started toward him. “To Chernobog I will offer your breath—”

Grigori had the gun out in his hand, but he faltered before pointing it at me. His pupils contracted. “Hey, what are you-?”

“Your head. Your limbs. Your heart. Your liver, your seed.” I spat out each part of the incantation in Ukrainian, advancing on him. My father – already pale and jowly – turned the color of milk. He raised the pistol, and I shot out with a hand and grabbed it, turning it upwards and back toward his own face. “I offer all of you to the only God you’ve ever worshipped, father. Nothing. You’re a shell, shambling through every day to avoid your self-inflicted suffering.”

“Grisha! Alexi!” Rodion called from somewhere further back.

“I am your curse. I am your curse from today and forever.” I fixed my eyes on Grigori’s, possessed of a singular, crazed manic strength. He was sweating, and his arm trembled as I forced the gun up under his chin, his own finger still on the trigger. “You’re a hole. A NO-thing. You’ve been waiting for me to kill you your whole god-forsaken life.”

At that exact moment, a wave of magic struck at me like a snake: a wave of fiery heat that roared against my magical shield, then over and around me like the plume of a comet. I pushed away from Grigori in shock, teeth gritted as I fought against the wave of invisible pressure and felt back through it, groping for the mage trying to curse me. This was my chance, my only chance to find him. I could smell sulphur, and once again heard the scrape and clang of metal, the sound of ravens laughing on top of the shredder at K&S. He was there again.

Alarmed and angry shouts rose up around us as I refocused on the moment. I looked up through watering eyes to see my father’s pistol pointed at my face, until the energy of curse recoiled from my amulet and tunneled into Grigori Sokolsky’s heart.