Stained Glass

Chapter 29

The assembled TVS members were clustered around a makeshift altar that had been mounted in front of the gaping remains of the corner window. The priest’s back was to me. The others in the room – six or seven people – were standing in a rough circle, staring up towards a ring of black lights hung from the old trolley rails on the ceiling. Those were running off a small kerosene generator which made enough noise that my footfall was unlikely to be heard.

I left the door ajar, searching for cover in the semi-darkness. There were old machines left here, and short stairwells that led up to the next floor of the grain elevator, but nothing that was going to offer real protection. I took what I could on my way across until I was crouched behind a narrow steel pillar and able to see and hear what was going on.

The black lights distorted all color that might have been present, but I recognized at least two faces. Vanya was staring up at the light overhead, his jowly face smeared with black from eyes to sagging jawline in a parody of tears – or blood. At the far end of the altar was Mason.

Jenner’s partner stood with his back to the shattered window. He was not robed like the others. He was stripped down to a bloodied wifebeater and jeans, his clothes torn, his skin striped with gore. If not for that, he looked like he’d been in a bar room brawl and come out barely on his feet. There was a huge, spreading dark stain across his shirt, radiating from his heart on the left. Mason was the only one looking down at something. He was staring at the featureless, motionless black bodybag that was lain on the table, feet pointing at the setting moon.

“—to celebrate a new brother entering the fold,” the priest intoned, mid-sentence. The speaker was masked and hooded, and I couldn’t make out any details from my position. “The price of your admission to the Anointed is to cleanse the world of an affront to the Father, Ivan Kazopov. Will you purify this abomination with your body and strength, and swear your fealty to the Eternal Light?”

“I will,” Vanya replied.

I frowned, utterly at a loss. There was something not right about Mason. He swayed in place, and as far as I could tell, he wasn’t blinking.

“The windows of Heaven are opening for you, Vanya.” The priest turned to face me, hands lifted. The mask was white, flat and featureless, save for three thin, grim slashes where the eyes and mouth should have been. Despite that, I know that it was the Spook, the one I had glimpsed on Ribbon Street through the distortion of his weird magic. His power was over the cold, inexorable twin pressures of time and gravity. “Praise the Father, blessed be his many names…”

As the praying and affirmations continued, echoed by the others in the room, I shifted the PP-90 around to hold it at the ready and tried to cobble together a plan of action. There was no obvious warding around the circle, but I couldn’t discount it. The magic on the door had been very real, and the effect of the milk very noticeable. If I was lucky, the gun would be safe to use on the humans. If I wasn’t, I was probably going to get gunned down while I tried to stop something infernal from eating me and my cat.

“Are you ready to be baptized in blood, to become a true follower of the All Father, to speak with fire and serve Him for all your days?”

Vanya nodded. “I am.”

As I watched, The Deacon – he was really the only one who could claim a title like that – took up a featureless silver box at the end of the altar and opened it. The inside was lined in black velvet. It held a knife like no other I had ever seen. The blade was glass, or crystal. As he lifted it, I saw it catch and gleam in the blacklights. The UV lighting revealed a matrix of flaws in the glass. It was hazed, like it had been broken and the pieces glued together.

“You all know me, brothers in the spirit. You know me, your brother.” The masked priest held the knife to Vanya. “You have seen his miracles wrought through me. You know that I can see past, future and present, because though the Father in his wisdom caused me to be blind, I can see. I am wise because I am following him, and following his voice.”

The proclamation was echoed by muttered ‘amens’ from around the circle, and as he spoke, Binah flattened her body against the floor. I glanced at her. My familiar was a barometer of magic, and whatever that thing was, she didn’t like it.

While the blind priest continued his dark sermon, Vanya moved around the table, holding the knife like it was going to bite him. He began to undo his belt and his fly, while the rest of the men joined hands. I was watching some bizarre mockery of a prayer circle, where the faithful touched, swayed, exclaimed and threw themselves into the holy spirit… or in this case, the unholy demiurge that apparently demanded rape and sacrifice, not necessarily in that order. If I was guessing right, it was Angkor in that bag.

As the others moved to give Vanya room, I noticed something. What I hadn’t seen, and that I could see now, was that Mason had no eyes. His sockets leaked a black, viscous fluid down his hollowed cheeks. The man on Vanya’s other side also had no eyes. His face was deeply scarred – one could even say mutilated. Even under black lights, the scars looked fresh. He was a big guy, too… six feet of lean compact muscle. He was currently singing in gibberish, and if his lack of eyes bothered him at all, I couldn’t tell.

Mason looked like a wolfish parody of the man I’d seen laughing and talking with Jenner in the clubhouse. He stood in paralyzed silence as Vanya dragged the body-bag closer and zipped it open from the feet up. The cultist next to him took the knife and held it in a ritual posture while the Kommandant heaved his bulk up onto the table and got into position over the prone man on the altar. The crazed glass blade glowed black and purple under the black lights.

My eyes narrowed. Time to end this.

With the lips of the carton clenched in my teeth, I came up around the pillar and unloaded the clip in three short bursts from right to left and back to center before ducking, rolling, and coming up behind the grain shuttle hanging from the ceiling. There were screams, piercing through the haze of propellant and smoke. I slammed the spare clip into the gun and came around again, glanced a flash of purple light reflecting off a muzzle, and ducked down as three deafening shots sucked my eardrums in and blew the chute off the shuttle. Head pounding, I dropped to my belly on the floor, braced, and fired off a second spray at knee-height.

Three men went down. Two cowered behind the altar, but the blind priest stood tall amidst the chaos. He had his hand raised, the bullets trapped in ageless suspension in front of him, and I had an awful feeling as to what was coming after that.

The bullets vaporized, bursting into inky liquid that splashed and hissed across the floor. As the fluid whipped up from the floor in ropey strands, called by the mage’s conducting hands, Mason fixed on me and snarled. His teeth glowed in the black lights. Vanya was down and scrabbling away from the gunfire behind the altar. The big blind guy was getting back up at a run. I threw the empty PP-90 at him as he barreled towards me, and ran for new cover as the black tendrils suddenly focused on me like hydra’s heads and lashed out from across the room, tearing the grain shuttle apart on their way across. I dove and rolled: a piece of metal caught me across the calf on the way down, slashing open my pants leg and the flesh beneath. Then something cold caught around my ankle and took me to the floor. The bottom of the milk carton hit the concrete and splashed up into my nose.

“Get him! Get him!” Someone was screaming from the back of the room as I was dragged kicking and struggling from behind a metal pillar and into the open. A wild glance showed me that G.I No-Eyes could still somehow ‘see’ well enough to train me with his pistol. Fighting not to cough from my milk bath, I fumbled for my knife and threw myself forward, rolling underneath the shots. The first went over me; the second was so close to my head that powder burned my face as I rolled to my feet and charged.

I was not afraid. I was angry and sick after what we’d found on the computer. And I still had half a carton of milk.

The Deacon slashed with a hand, and I let the black mass of tendrils rush around me in a slithering wave… a wave that screeched and fled as I dumped the rest of the milk on it and myself and pushed to close in, the knife in hand. The priest dodged away from the blade as I swiped for him, better than anyone wearing a mask like that had a right to, put his guard up, and slammed me in the side of the head. Wonderful. A fellow boxer.

Years of training kept me on my feet as I bit my tongue and came right back at him, knife in hand. The blade unzippered his guarding arm from wrist to elbow and sent him stumbling away with a shout, clutching at the wound. I stumbled back, briefly disorientated, and put my foot right into one of the empty black pits that peppered the floor. I tripped to one knee, and got a ringside view of Mason’s festering heart wound as he rushed me. It was all I could do to pull my leg free and scoot back on my ass as the tackle connected.

Mason’s dead weight carried us in a slide against the cold concrete, enough of a ride that I was able to get a hand between him and me and ram the knife straight into his ribs. The blade went in like I’d punched it through a side of beef. He snarled in agony, then roared. Roared, like a lion or a tiger might. His body pinned me from the hips down, hands on my neck even as I stabbed and struggled, driving the blade into his shoulder, lung and neck. Mason faltered on the sixth stab, collapsing onto me as his boots kicked out between my legs in a position far too intimate for sanity.

Still clutching onto my throat, his eyeless face only inches from mine, he threw up. He threw up blood and shards of broken glass onto my face with a garbling howl of agony, and then, he transformed.