Stained Glass

Chapter 2

There was no sign of Celso or his retinue when I cruised by the Gemini Lounge. He a party boy, chauffeured in a distinctly visible red Hummer everywhere around town. If it wasn’t in the parking lot, neither was he.

Half an hour later than I originally planned and seething with manic energy, I arrived at my apartment for the last time. I slammed the car door and the trunk and my briefcase, hugged my summer jacket against the rain, and stormed into the lobby. Brighton Beach was sullen tonight, the concrete wet and steaming, the air warm and oppressively humid. The Atlantic was shrouded in fog, the sky tinted orange by the light and pollution of a restless city. It was close to four am, but I could still see clearly in the weird brownish light.

Binah, my familiar, was caterwauling behind my front door, and she kept it up all the way through the muttered incantation that unwarded it. Ever since the demon-possessed corpse in my kitchen, I’d been more scrupulous with my wards. My sudden jump in ability had given me the confidence to experiment, too. I no longer only had alarms: I had an offensive ward, a design painted onto my red door with red paint that almost completely blended into the background color. People could knock. They could even touch the doorknob. But if someone tried to force my door, or if they charged it with kinetic force, the ward would react violently.

I didn’t even have my key out of the lock before the cat wormed through the gap and threw herself into my arms like a needy child. My familiar didn’t rub her face against things so much as ram herself into them. I took several blows to the head as she scrabbled onto my shoulder.

“Honestly.” I pushed Binah’s rear end up to help her gain purchase while she tried to arch against the side of my head, tail wrapping around my face. She was a lilac-point Siamese with perfect breed conformation, a lanky feline supermodel only slightly less graceful than a bulldozer. “Do you mind?”

“Mrraow. Mrrrp.” She began to lick the side of my head, sputtering and shaking when she got my hair in her mouth.

Binah purred against my neck as I took my shoe off, thought better of it, and stamped it back on. What was the point? There were maybe forty minutes until I had to leave the house again, and then I was never coming back. All I had to do was change my shirt and coat, crate the cat, and take my bags outside. That was it. I’d worn plastic rain slicker pants over my clothes when I’d killed Celso to keep the blood off them, and they’d gone in the burn pile – a trick of the trade.

And yet I stood still, frozen in place. The silence of the house boomed around me. It was small and old, so familiar that I often left the lights off when I was home and navigated by touch and smell and pattern. It smelled of books and paper and sandalwood. The apartment used to smell like Vassily, too, and it was frightening how quickly his scent had faded. It was two weeks to the day since he’d died, and his things were just as he’d left them: his shaving cream, his ties on the rack, his gold zippo case. His bedroom was a mute museum to his occupation, the sheets rumpled in the place he’d left them during his last night. Even so, his scent had vanished within days. It was easy to imagine the place dark and quiet, gathering dust as my scent also faded from the furnishings.

The fear rose in my throat again. I jerked my shoulders, pulled my gloves up along my wrists, sniffed, and forced myself towards my bedroom.

This small room had been the same, more or less, for fifteen years. Formerly crammed with books and occult paraphernalia, it was now imbued only with the empty, neat blandness of a hotel room. I was taking three suitcases, not even a tenth of what remained in the house. I was leaving my less-legal weapons, armor, munitions, tools, and most of my collection of books behind. The floor-to-ceiling shelves in the den had been custom-made for those books by one of Mariya’s friends. Not for the first time, I wondered: Why was I leaving the Beach, and not them? Why didn’t I go down to AEROMOR, shoot Sergei, shoot Vanya, and plant my flag? Even if they hadn’t bought or tipped off Celso and Snappy Joe, they deserved every bullet.

My Neshamah projected the sudden image of him staring sternly from the doorway. I swelled in place a little, fists clenched, but set the cat down on the bed and started on changing clothes.

Thunk thud thump.

The back of my neck prickled. I was halfway through pulling my undershirt off, and pulled it back down as I turned in place, ears cocked. Binah’s tail frizzed like a bottle-brush as she leaped off the bed and ran down the hall. The distinctive knock rang out again from the front door, louder this time.

Kutkha waited like a coiled spring in the back of my mind, alive and aware. He said nothing, but his thoughts and opinions curled half-formed behind my thoughts and opinions. We were in agreement. This was a poor development. Fortunately, it was a development with a simple, elegant solution.

“Ne valyai duraka, Alexi! Stop screwing around.” Nicolai Chiernenko called to me from outside, his voice muffled by the door and distance. Thunk thud thump.

Heart hammering, I glanced at my knife. The handle was protruding from the bag, but I didn’t dare move. Was there any feasible way he’d know I was home? I thought for a moment as he continued to knock. The lights were on. My car was out the front, the metal ticking to coolness. He had probably noticed, pressing his hand to the bonnet on his way from car to apartment door. He’d taught me tricks like that. Nicolai was as astute as he was traitorous.

If Nic tried to break the door down, then the ward would fry him… but they wouldn’t get whoever else he’d brought with him. If he was here to get me, he wouldn’t be alone. If he was here on business, it was fifty-fifty odds. Not good enough.

“Who is it?” I called out, reluctantly. I left the room, but I brought the knife and stuck to the doorway. I wouldn’t be the first man to get a shotgun blast through his front door in reply to a greeting.

“You know who it is. Open up.”

There were few reasons why the new Avtoritet of the Beach would deign to see me, and none of them fit in with my plans. Nicolai was a snake. He’d gleefully trampled over Vassily and I to get to the top.

“Wait,” I said. “I need to get dressed.”

Nicolai couldn’t get into my apartment through the magical wards on the door, not unless he was going to blast his way in – and even then, all that would do was prime the traps in the hallway. Call me paranoid, but after the last month, I had decided not to take any more chances.

I took my time. Nic looked sour by time I finally opened the door. Framed in the rectangle of light, he was a dry, thin scarecrow of a man, scarred and leathery from years spent in prison and the desert. He pinched a smoldering cigarette between colorless, thin lips. His new position of power had elicited no physical change in him: he wore his old patched army jacket, open, a blue-and-white striped t-shirt and well-worn cargo pants tucked into Doc Martens. He still did street work, often unaccompanied, the way he had always done. The only visible concessions to his new position and accompanying wealth was a solid gold crucifix on a solid gold chain, a new gold watch, and a renewed sense of entitlement to everyone else’s time. “We got a situation.”

Of course we do. Kutkha’s silent, persistent urging felt remarkably like rising panic. The flight was in less than four hours. We needed to find a way out of this. “Why didn’t you come earlier? We don’t have enough time tonight to finish a job and do disposal.”

“Because murder isn’t convenient.” A tic of irritation rippled over his face.

“I say it only out of concern for the Organizatsiya,” I replied.

Nic tensed as if he was winding up to punch me. Then he seemed to remember that I was not just his hitman: I was a hitman who could turn away bullets with a shouted word, shatter wards with a gesture and some blood, and if I concentrated hard enough, I could probably inflate his brain until it ran out his ears. That, and we were ostensibly still brat’ya, brothers.

“We’ll find a way to get it over with.” He hunched and jerked his shoulders like a vulture shaking its wings. “Get rid of the pussy and bring sheet plastic. The scene is a fucking mess.”

He wasn’t meeting my eyes, and I realized something. Whatever this was about, he was embarrassed. It threatened him and his new station in the Organizatsiya. Nic had only been Avtoritet for just fifteen days, and something had already gone wrong on his watch – something bad enough or messy enough that he needed me to fix it. If it had been any other night, I would have gloated; as it stood, I was having to tamp down a profound sense of impending doom. To refuse a job would arouse his suspicions beyond measure. He’d finger what was going on without much difficulty, have me followed, and call his friends in East Germany. Quite unwittingly, the Organizatsiya had once again taken control of my life.

“What?” His eyes narrowed at my hesitation.

“Nothing, Avtoritet, just refreshing some incantations appropriate for sticky situations,” I said. “Tell me what’s happened while I go get my tools.”

For a fleeting moment, Nic was taken aback. His shoulders jerked as he stuffed his hands in his pockets. Binah tried to stick her head outside the apartment, and Nic pushed her back with the flat of his boot. “One of our couriers was gacked tonight… went out to pick up a regular delivery.”

“And?”

“And the guys he was picking up from turned on him and tore him apart. Literally. They left some symbols drawn in blood on the ground. None of the other guys will go near it.”

This was literally the last job I wanted to have sprung on me on the morning of my departure. As I flew around my room and packed enough gear to look passable, I hastily cobbled together the only plan I could think of – shoot Nic in the back of the head, hide him in his car, get my disguise on and my things out of the house, and then fly out of New York as fast as possible.

My Neshamah’s agitation was a continual rustling in the back of my mind. My stomach tightened, sour and tense, but I forced a nod and a grimace. “Fine. Wait downstairs. I’ll be ten minutes.”

To my surprise, he turned and swaggered off down the corridor without a backward glance. Nice to know he still had some kind of respect for me.

I closed the door and cruised back to my room in the dark. I hauled the bags to the door and went to my closet. It was still full of things I didn’t plan to take to Germany, including my shoulder rig, my Wardbreaker Colt Commander, ammo, and a suppressor. The Wardbreaker was an unnaturally silent weapon when charged and silenced, perfect for the job I needed to do. Most suppressed guns were still too noisy in close urban spaces, but the Wardbreaker’s purpose was to scatter and dissolve energy. When activated, the pistol sounded like an air gun or a Hollywood assassin’s pistol: nothing more than a flat ‘blip’ of sound. The magic reduced the Commander’s range, but not its torque. It still had plenty of that, enough to turn Nic’s head into a mashed tomato.

“Something is wrong,” Kutkha said. “I cannot see ahead.”

“In what sense?”

“I strive to perceive the near future,” my Neshamah replied. “Filaments of time lashing back and forth across our path. From these fractional glimpses, I may infer much of what is to come… but the Waters have become muddied.”

I fit a clip and screwed on the silencer, motions so rote that I didn’t have to look down at either one. My synesthesia translated the smell of oil and metal into a violet color-texture, a sensation I felt somewhere between my soft palate and tongue. I strapped it in to the shoulder harness, and pulled down a rarely used tool: a kukri. The heavy curved knife was over a foot long, oiled, the edge honed to perfect sharpness. It nicked the leather of my glove when I pressed my finger to the edge, no pressure required. “So be it.”

That was all I took with me downstairs. I emerged into the misty night, jacket open, and glanced across the street to place Nic. He was leaning against the driver’s side door of a white Cadillac Seville, smoke trailing off into the air. The back of his head faced me. I drew the Wardbreaker, and held it low against my thigh as the ghosts of the last month flickered through my memory. Nicolai smirking as he revealed masterstroke after masterstroke: Hooking Vassily on coke, keeping me indebted while he talked shit about me to the other men in the Organizatsiya. He’d been our mentor growing up, a friend to Mariya. She’d given Nicolai the keys to her car. He taught Vassily and I how to drive… raising us like wheat to harvest when the time was right. I had liked him, respected him. Now, I was going to cut him down. My hands weren’t even shaking.

I was about two thirds of the way across the street when time rippled… and stopped.

My foot did not fall on the ground ahead. Suddenly, I could hear everything in my body, feel things I couldn’t normally feel. My heart, contracting. My stomach, squeezing. My throat working, muscles bunching as I instinctively exerted with all my strength against the sudden inertia. My head, thrown up in alarm, moved in fractions of an inch through a single soupy drawn out second, and for that moment, I wondered if I had accidentally manifested magic I didn’t know I had.

Through the haze, I saw a tall, dark shadow move out from around the trunk of my car, standing and turning. His outline blurred and shifted, too fast for my slowed-down eyes to follow, but I glimpsed the shadowed plane of a featureless, flat mask through the fog. Nicolai was turning, his words made incomprehensible by slowness, as the half-seen stranger raised a pistol and pointed it at my face.

Nic lunged at the mage’s arm, shoving it across. My hand wouldn’t lift, and my mouth wouldn’t move fast enough around the word of power as the bullet flew from the barrel and pulsed through a cloud of smoke towards me.

My mind was not slowed. I forced the word forward through my will alone. “Chet!”

A thin blue cornea-like membrane, half-seen and fragile, spun itself ahead of me. With time slowed, I had the chance to see what it was that my intention created. The bullet hit the flimsy shield, shattering it like glass, and as it shattered, the projectile rebounded from it, flying straight back at the gunman. Right as Nic finally grabbed his sleeve.

The temporal vortex snapped with the mage’s concentration. I stumbled forwards at high speed, tripping over my own mass and smashing nose-first onto the road. White light flashed up behind my eyes. Blind with pain, I scrabbled up to hands and feet, only to be knocked down again by something heavy falling across my back. The blow sent me straight back to the ground and took the wind out of my lungs. I rolled over, drawing the kukri and lashing out with it. The thick blade barely turned the pipe Nic swung down at my face. It jarred my wrist: he knocked the knife away on the backstroke, and then he was on top of me.

Nic was strong and wiry, but he was old. As his fist came down, I turned my head, and he drove his knuckles into the bitumen instead of my nose. I bought my knee up between his legs and flailed with the hilt of the kukri, snarling with the effort. He guarded his face; it took him in the wrist, then the neck as his arm failed under the blows. I shoved him off and stumbled up to face the charging spook bringing the butt of his pistol down where my neck had been. I couldn’t see him clearly for his speed – unnatural speed disguising him in a tumble of dark clothes and bright red blood.

Blood. The bullet had cut him. I threw a hand up and tried to cast a spell, but the spook was supernaturally fast. Twice, I managed to dodge the corner of the pistol, but it finally took me in the temple and sent me staggering away.

My vision looped. Retching with sudden nausea, I wasn’t fast enough to evade the arm that wrapped around my throat from behind and cut off my voice.

“Blyat! You didn’t hear Sergei, damn idiot suka!?” Nicolai spat from behind me as I struggled to keep my air and prize his arm from my neck. “Alive! He wants him alive!”

“Don’t speak to me like that. I advised your superior that he needs to be put down,” was the cool reply. “You saw what he did when—”

I got my jaws between Nic’s arm and my body, and bit as hard as I could. His flesh split under my teeth, and he howled. Blows landed against my back and head, and the world narrowed to that central point as both men closed on me. I ripped flesh from Nicolai’s wrist and turned, bestial, on the stranger. His hand got too close to my mouth. I snapped at it, biting down until something crunched.

But I was going down. The gravel on the road pierced my skin through my slacks as I fought up against their combined weight – the man who’d taught me everything, and the one who had no name. My teeth went numb, and the world turned black as they brought me to ground.