Stained Glass

Chapter 10

That night, I had my first shower in close to a month.

The showerhead was old, sputtering out the sides, but I stood under the streaming hot water and shook until my bones rattled. I had been washing in the rain, in the sinks of corner store bathrooms and public toilets, but it had not been enough. I scrubbed the built-up calluses from the backs of my heels until they turned pink, and gave my head a fresh shave. The water turned gray with dead skin and the detritus of the street, and I was wracked with spasms of relief so intense that they bought sounds from my throat. Short, huffing moans, tics and shivers… not only of pleasure, but of painful release.

The mirror over the sink revealed the damage done. I had always been short, burly and pale, but now my eyes were sunken, my cheeks hollow. My skin was bad: dry on the brow and chin, oily everywhere else. I looked hard and feral and disused. The comfortable polish of suburbia had been worn away, layer by layer, until only the animal remained.

When I was ready, I decided to finally try to get a proper look at my stomach. This was the first time I’d really dared to look at or think about the seal that Sergei had placed on me. I hadn’t been willing to try to operate in the conditions I’d been surviving in – an open wound and no antibiotics was not my idea of a good time.

The blood used to draw the sigil was long gone, as were the stitches. What remained was a strange symbol that looked like a fanged mouth with a connected crown. It was slightly raised, a shape formed by black-violet ropy cords of something that was eerily visible under the fluorescent tube light. They were only just under the skin.

It had to come out. I was no stranger to self-surgery: everything from digging out splinters to setting bones and removing bullets. There was sterile equipment here, but for a shallow incision like this, I could make do with the straight razor, tweezers, and soap.

I washed the tools in the sink and then sat on the edge of the bathtub, pressing around the lines to feel the contour and depth. As if sensing my intent, they creeped and wriggled against my fingers.

“Shut up.” With steady hands, I brought the edge of the razor to my belly, got the tweezers ready, and pressed in to make the first cut.

The lines jerked, and my abdomen spasmed. I doubled over with the sudden flash of cold stinging pain. The urge to claw at my stomach was nearly overwhelming, but the more I pawed at it, the more it hurt. I gulped for air and forced myself to stretch it out the way you would any other muscle cramp. When I took the blade away, the pain stopped.

“You want a fight? I’ll give you a fight.” Flushed with adrenaline, I tried it again with much the same result. This time, the parasite – good GOD, it really was a parasite – thrashed until I retched with pain.

I stretched out through the cramping again, clutching the towel around my waist. In the mirror over the sink, the legs of the corona moved like tentacles as they settled back into place. It wasn’t coming out.

I scowled at my reflection. “Wait until I get Lidocaine and a scalpel, you little son of a bitch.”

Now that I was clean, my clothes looked faded and worn, and they smelled bad – like metal and old sweat. They were still all I had to wear. Grimacing, I pulled on the t-shirt, jeans and sweater, rolling the sleeves to my elbows before I pulled on the gloves. The cable-knit sweater had fit me once. Between wear and weight loss, it was baggy in the body and sleeves. I hadn’t looked this poor since I was a boy.

From deeper within the house, I heard voices and smelled cooking. There were probably more boarders here besides me and Zane. I waited in the darkened hallway outside the bathroom for a little while, uncertain if I should join them or not. After so much solitude, my social navigation was at an all-time low. It wasn’t going to get better without practice, though. With a deep sigh, I headed for the kitchen.

Zane was alone. He was prowling restlessly around the kitchen, a cordless handset jammed between neck and shoulder while he listened and ‘mm’hmm’d to whoever was on the other end of the line. He had stripped down to a black wifebeater, revealing arms that were covered in greenish-black tattoos. A mandala disappeared around his shoulder. Tiny, intricate, beautifully executed calligraphy wound around his upper arms and forearms in a solid sheet of lettering. It almost looked like magical scripture of some sort.

Belatedly, I noticed there was a pan of bacon and eggs on the rusty gas stovetop. I pointed at it enquiringly, and he gave me the thumbs up. Grateful for the reprieve, I slid some onto a plate and took them to the other side of the table.

“Yeah, alright. Next Saturday. I’ll let you know if anything comes up, alright? Okay, thanks.” Zane held on for another couple of seconds while the handset yammered, then clicked. With a sigh, he hung up.

“Must be urgent if they’re calling you this late,” I said. “It’s after four.”

“That was work,” he replied. “Got a fight booked next weekend. About time, too – I haven’t had a gig in a couple of weeks.”

“You aren’t on a roster?” I doused my eggs in Tabasco, pepper and salt. They smelled so greasy that I wasn’t sure I could hold them down, not after weeks of monotonous sandwiches.

“I’m still building a rep in New York,” he said. “A lot of these fights aren’t really formalized until the week before. If I’m lucky, I’ll land an agent. Kickboxing isn’t exactly mainstream, though.”

“Using your feet in boxing is generally frowned on.”

“Nah, kickboxing isn’t English boxing. Kickboxing is a whole other thing… its proper name is Muay Thai. Comes from Thailand, as you might have guessed.” He smiled. “Jenner got me into it.”

“She’s Thai?”

“No. Vietnamese. But her family relocated to Thailand after the war. She ran her first gang in Chiang Mai, then she came over here. Funny thing is, the first time I met her was when I was in Thailand on holiday. It’s funny how that kind of thing happens… she says that Weeders always find a way to meet each other.”

“Shapeshifters subscribe to fate?” I arched an eyebrow, and tried my first forkful of eggs.

“I think it’s the reincarnation thing.” He glanced at my plate. “Is that okay? I probably should have asked if you ate bacon.”

I held up a hand for a moment’s pause, savoring the taste and the glide of yolk on my tongue. “You have no earthly idea how much I’ve missed real food.”

Zane sat back, watching me eat with his arms loosely folded across his broad chest. He was as muscular as I’d suspected, gym-cut and sculptural. “So… how does a guy like you end up on the street?”

“Any number of ways,” I said. “The current Avtoritet of Brighton Beach is ex-Spetznaz, and far too intelligent for my continued health. Hotels were the first place he’d look, and half the hotels in New York are mafia-operated. Sleeping rough is something he’d never expect me to do. Secondly, I was kidnapped from my home before I could get any of my belongings, money included. Someone found my go-bag. I spent so much of my life paying off my father’s debts that I never really invested in property.”

“I have to agree with Mason, though. I figured a guy like you would just kill someone and take their stuff.”

“There’s security cameras and cops everywhere since the Central Park Jogger incident.” I chewed thoughtfully for a space. “Besides that, killing people you don’t know is murder. It is not something you undertake lightly.”

“What? And killing people you know isn’t murder?”

I paused for a moment. “Not the kind of people I knew.”

Zane snorted, and shook his head.

“It’s irrelevant now.” I shrugged. “More relevant are you and your people. I don’t know the first thing about shapeshifters.”

“We’re secretive as all hell, even among ourselves,” Zane replied. “Privacy is a big deal, and for good reason. Witch hunters, Inquisition types. Some crazy pred shapeshifters seek out prey shifters to hunt, specifically because they think eating them will make them stronger. The Covenant of Ib-Int is meant to protect us from each other as much as from norms.”

“Huh. That makes a certain sick sort of sense.”

“I guess. The government used to hunt us down, poison bullets and everything. Now they corral us into programs like the one Ayashe was talking about. It’s pretty classified stuff, too… that’s why she’s always so strung out. She’s trying to balance two secret worlds that are still in conflict.”

“I never knew.” Shapeshifters were common lore in the study of magic, but the lore conflicted across different books and different time periods. “Would you say shifting is a form of magic?”

“Not really,” Zane said. “But I can’t say any more. That’s part of the Ib-Int, the ancestral laws. They’ve been passed on from Elder to young for like six thousand years, at least. Only Elders are allowed to talk about this stuff, and I’m not an Elder.”

“What defines an Elder?” I folded the bacon and took a mouthful. Whatever cultural guilt I might have felt passed as soon as the flavor hit.

“Like Michael said, the human changes, but the animal stays the same. You reincarnate over and over again. Each time, the Ka gets a bit smarter. Enough times around the wheel, and it starts to remember things from lifetime to lifetime. Someone like John or Jenner can have memories reaching back eight hundred years or more.”

I tried to imagine it. Maintaining a single set of memories was difficult enough. Everything I’d learned growing up, all of the mistakes I’d made, the people I’d known, the things I did. I had an excellent memory – practically photographic – but too much thinking on the past was tiring and difficult. What would it be like to have a second set of memories overlaid over the top of all of that? A third? Five? Twenty? Entire human beings, their experiences linked only by the animal soul that ran, unchanged, through each cycle. It was a wonder they weren’t all as mad as hatters.

“That is remarkable,” I said. “What about Lily and Dru Ross?”

Zane’s wry expression crumpled into a frown. “They were first generation Elders. This was the first life where their Ka passed the initiation tests. Michael screened them for the Pathfinders, and John made them honorary Elders in his. They were very good people, you know? Really churchy, but they were never pushy about it. They just lived their lives… all the kids they raised never say a bad thing about them. A lot of them stay on at this boarding school in Texas.”

More big words. This huge tattooed biker across from me had the vocabulary of an academic, soft-spoken and precise. “Did they have any enemies?”

“Not that we know of,” Zane said. “That’s part of the problem.”

I considered him while I ate, reluctant to let the food get cold. Every bite was ambrosia: fat and protein had been in short supply. “Lily could transform into a hyena. Female hyenas are powerful animals, perfectly capable of defending themselves if need be. I assume you can’t just… change on command?”

The other man glanced to the side, discomforted. He was struggling between duty and necessity, an expression I could read on any face. I usually had difficulty with new faces, but his broad, bony features were surprisingly easy to watch. Zane’s features were very symmetrical and his voice was very deep, characteristics that helped my eyes to focus and bring the moving parts together with less difficulty.

“Don’t tell Jenner I said anything about this, not until she gives the all clear,” he said, haltingly. “Okay?”

“Men in my line of work don’t stay out of prison by being yentes.”

Zane gave me the kind of odd look that meant he didn’t know what I’d just said, but he seemed to take it as a reassurance anyway. “Alright. Yeah, they could have changed any time they wanted. But like I said, they were only just initiated, and not that long ago. They’re sentient when they’re in Ka-Har, but a new Elder still isn’t able to control themselves the way Spotted Elk or Jenner can.”

“I see.” Frowning, I motioned for him to continue. “So they would just become regular animals?”

“We prefer to say ‘Ka-Har’ – ‘Soulform’ – but yeah.” Zane grimaced. “She turned into this barely sentient, huge, super-strong predator that eats antelope alive. They were probably worried about the kids.”

“Well, yes… but even in dire circumstances?”

“Shifting burns a lot of calories. Not that any scientist has ever studied it or anything, but I know that if you shift too many times too fast, you can starve to death… so I figure that must be what it is. The first thing you want to do is kill monsters. If there are no monsters or you were too hungry to begin with, the first thing you do is eat. If it’s bad enough, even an Elder can’t control it. You eat anything.”

Even other human beings. I finished the unspoken part of the sentence. “I see. And this is universal to all shapeshifters?”

“That I know of.” Zane shrugged his broad shoulders.

I sat back, thinking it over, but the gnawing in my belly and the ache in my body was making analysis difficult. “Alright. I’ll sleep on all of this. Ayashe will be here GOD knows when, and we have a big job tomorrow. Today.”

“I’m sure we’ll ace it.” He smiled, reserved and almost a little shy, and rose. “Come on… I’ll show you to the bunks.”

I followed him through the house, closer to the ‘front’, where it faced out onto 5th Street. A wall had been knocked down between two rooms to turn it into one large room, and they had set it up like a post-apocalyptic barracks. Bunk beds were lined up along one wall end to end. There were lockers, a TV, and a row of glass museum cases. They held old uniforms, militaria, folded flags and banners, collections of Vietnam and Gulf War patches. There was a book with photos. It had been left open down the center to a grainy colored photo of four soldiers, standing in a line with their arms looped over the shoulders of the fellow next to them. They were all young, smiling, but already haunted with the entropic shadow common to Vietnam Vets. Mason was on one end, handsome but brittle. The man in the middle of the group was much younger and much lighter, but I recognized him as Big Ron.

I moved to the next case while Zane got the bed ready. Another case held photos of a Vietnamese girl I assumed was Jenny. These photos were much poorer quality. She was wearing a hat that was too big for her, carrying a rifle that was far too heavy for her slender hands, standing between two American soldiers. She looked as square-jawed and proud in that image as she did now.

“Jenner was a child soldier?” I turned back to find Zane stripping his shirt up over his head, and immediately turned back, red-faced.

“Yeah. She’s had a pretty wild life.” His voice drifted back to me, while clothes continued to rustle and fall. I could smell him now, the sharp cologne I’d caught at the door to the club. “You should talk to her over a drink sometime. She loves to talk about all the things she got up to. Over and over and over.”

“I don’t drink.” She was almost certainly the King of Swords I had identified in Talya’s tarot reading.

“What? A Russian who doesn’t drink?”

“Ukrainian.” I forced my hand flat on the glass to stop it from fisting up. Like I’d never heard that before.

“What’s the difference between a Russian and a Ukrainian?”

I looked back sharply, expecting a punchline, but Zane’s face was open, expressive. He was genuinely curious, and fortunately, he had redressed in pajama pants and a loose shirt.

“Ukraine was annexed by Russia in a genocidal invasion soon after the 1918 Revolution,” I said, clearing my throat. “They tried to destroy our language and culture, installed a puppet government, and claimed parts of the country because the people were already Russian speakers. My blood relatives fought against both Russia and the Nazis from the time they entered to the time they left, even while we were part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine is now independent.”

“Damn.” Zane blinked. “When did the occupation leave?”

My mouth sloped to one side. “Earlier this year.”

“Right. Well, I get it now.” Zane sat on the edge of his bed. It creaked under his weight. “Must have been a rough place to grow up.”

“I didn’t grow up in Ukraine.” I shrugged. It was a land which I had never seen, but which had defined my life and Vassily’s – socially, linguistically, culturally, gastronomically – from a great and shadowy distance. “But every man I know from there swears it is the most beautiful land in the world.”

“My dad said the same thing about South Africa.” Zane regarded me with the quiet curiosity of someone who knew they shouldn’t ask a question, but who wanted to regardless.

I looked away first. “Are there any clean clothes I can borrow? What things I have are still in the Bronx.”

“Sure. Check the locker. We can pick them up tomorrow, if you need.”

Grateful he didn’t try to continue the conversation – and grateful that I didn’t have to say something curt – I went to investigate. There were some clean shorts in the locker, and a Metallica t-shirt which smelled like strange men. I could hardly bear to touch them, but they were still cleaner than my clothes.

“You know, I always figured hitmen did lines of coke off their favorite strippers for kicks.” I heard Zane roll over onto the bed. “Go gay-bashing or something.”

“Men with that kind of temperament don’t last long,” I said. “There’re plenty of them – the city chews them up and buries them. Hardly any wet workers make it past their twenties.”

“You look a bit older than that. You’re some kind of professional, then? Mafia James Bond?”

I got a towel, wrapped it around my hips, and skillfully changed while staying mostly covered. It was a skill I’d learned going to the gym, the ability to strip and dress without showing skin. “As General James Mattis once said, ‘be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.’”

“Lord help me, Alexi.” Zane groaned, and slung his arm over his face. “Turn out the damn light.”

I was already on my way there, and eagerly returned to my new bed. This was a moment to savor: the smoothness of relatively clean sheets, the spring and give of a real mattress, my first soft sleep in months. As I lay down, an ache spread through my lower back, my knees, my feet. Why my feet? Everything felt cold, stiff, in a way that made me wonder if my body was now irreparably damaged.

Zane did not say a word once the lights dimmed. His breathing was audible in the sudden heavy silence, slowing with remarkable speed. Rain drummed on the roof, distant white noise wholly unlike the continual banging, rolling cacophony of droplets thundering on the thin metal shell of the dumpster.

The weight of the last several weeks lay over me like a shroud. Vassily, Celso, Sergei, the escape. Huffing, I closed my eyes and tried to drift off… efforts that became more difficult as a muffled moan vibrated through the walls from the next room across. Mason and Jenner, by the sound of it.

I pulled the covers up around my ears, jammed my head down on the pillow, and stared into the well of warm darkness ahead. Not long ago, I would have been able to see Kutkha in my mind when I relaxed enough, and as I thought about him, the sense of loss, of failure, threatened to drown me. Overlying that aging pain was the knowledge that I was lying to these people who were offering me charity. I wasn’t really a mage anymore, and I couldn’t really help them in the capacity they expected. Not without my magic. I could only hope we got it back before they noticed.