Stained Glass

Chapter 4

Vampire blood is a powerful hallucinogen that does two things to those who consume it. It puts you under the power of the upir who fed it to you, and it heals wounds. Even terrible wounds.

I roused into wet, cold darkness, stirring from a dream where a red star broke through a white mirrored sky. A stream of black figures descended from the hole, dripping and dropping to the land and sea. I was naked. My mouth was bitter with the taste of burned wax.

The cell walls crawled in every direction, seething with what I first thought was a mass of prismatic spiders. Everything writhed and hissed, lashed and scuttled. It took me a few groggy minutes to realize that none of the ‘spiders’ ever reached their destinations. The churning wet sounds were from my body as it healed in quick-time: the snap and pop of my ribs and broken ankles resetting, the sub-audible squeak of tissues as my bruises swelled, blooming like stopmotion flowers before dwindling away. I was painfully aware of all of my bodily functions, the sensation of a billion tiny organic engines wriggling on and through my bones. My guts, crawling with peristalsis. My heart, squeezing. I felt like a discordant orchestra, and over everything was awful, skin-wracking pain.

The spiders turned to lizards as I stared at the walls, wrists clamped between my thighs, then looked up through the filtered light coming down from overhead. They’d taken me to the basement hole. This was the hole where we kept guys lined up for execution. It was a converted sewer drain in the lower level of the AEROMOR warehouse, a nine-foot vertical shaft bricked off from a large sewer tunnel, part of the complex that shunted effluence into the ocean. There was a barred steel grate overhead, the only way in or out. The pit was bottle-shaped, with a narrow neck spreading out into a five-by-five foot square of space. If I had magic, I’d be out in five minutes. Cut off from Kutkha, I had nothing.

Nothing. Nothing wasn’t good enough. I had to make something. Sergei could take my magic from me, but there were some things that no one could take. My will. My pride.

There was a patch of wall in front of my face that was different from the rest. While every other part of the shaft was covered in wrigglers, there was a round cutout where they passed around the bricks and mortar, deviating like a river channel. This cutout part looked soggy, like moldy bread. As I stared, the patch of wall grew orange tentacles that yearned towards my face. Boils studded the limbs like flowers. They burst open with steaming pus that dripped down to the floor, and the wounds turned to little babbling mouths.

Hit me, they whispered.

The grout looked mossy, fuzzy… soft enough to push through. Curious, I inched towards it. The weird, furry electrical warmth of static passed over the skin of my face, causing my hair to bristle. The illusion wavered. I took a deep breath, and slung a weak fist into the writhing mass. I misjudged the distance, smacked my fingers awkwardly against hard stone and rolled back, clutching and cursing as everything whited out. I roared, and kicked out in temper. The wall ahead of me shuddered. Dirt rained down from somewhere up high.

I discovered that upir blood has a third property. It makes you monstrously strong.

As I watched, my skinned knuckles sealed over to pink shiny scabs, then smooth skin. It was not the clean, swift healing I’d once gotten from Gift Horse blood. My flesh itched, tingled and crawled as my cells chewed at themselves.

Shuddering, I rolled up to hands and knees, flinching as my uncovered palms scraped against concrete. I snorted a clotted mess of dirt and dried blood onto the wet ground. My limbs were taut with a weird, feral energy.

“—you helped me out once, you got me out of one bad situation, Kutkha. Every other time, it was just me. I coped just fine without you before, and I’ll do it again—” My own voice echoed back to me, interspersed with the same two words, repeated over and over again.

Hit me.

“Shut up!” The writhing mass of tentacles split apart for my fist as I slammed it into the mortar. The blow rattled something loose in the wall, but the pain was sublime. Awful, awful pain… the sensation of my hand being eaten by something with sharp teeth. I recoiled, snapping my jaws to vent the tension without screaming.

There was a sound from somewhere outside, a soft ‘crack’, like something dropping to the floor. I was out of time.

I roared, and slammed the soft spot on the wall again and again. Pain retreated, overwhelmed by fear. My knuckles wore out and reformed. Bones snapped and popped back into place with wet gristle sounds I felt in my mouth. Everything was black, dancing with white spots, as I tore myself apart against the wall with primitive fury. And yet… I healed. I healed as fast as I could mangle myself, fist and foot and tooth and shoulder. After an eternity of agony, my twisted fingers found a small empty space behind the facade.

Fresh heat shot through my face, blood pounding in my temples. I locked my jaws, and began to kick at the damaged mortar with everything I had. The first pebbles came away, then small chunks of sandstone.

“YES.” I hissed under my breath, scrabbling, clawing, stabbing and shoving. “Come on… Come on!”

The first brick rasped in its slot. I wiggled it back. It fell with a dull, heavy clink into what sounded like at least an inch of water. Even though the source of the sound was right in front of me, it made me freeze, ears buzzing with strain. I broke off the next brick beside it, reached through the hole into the sewer pipe and dragged a chunk of rock up with my fingertips until I could pull it through. A few hard bangs with the makeshift chisel, and the whole thing came apart. The tunnel ahead was darker than Schrodinger’s asshole.

Sweating, streaked with filth, I crawled into the new space. My hands felt twice their normal size, singing with pain as the soft palms, bleeding, pressed into the rubble. I roughly reconstructed the wall behind me. Haphazard, yes, but in the gloomy light of the basement, the appearance of an empty pit and no immediate route of escape could buy precious time.

I was only six feet in, blind in the darkness and pressed on all sides by hanging slime, when I heard the basement door clang open from somewhere above. I dropped to my belly and pulled myself forwards, arm over arm. It was completely black down here, and it smelled like thirty years of dead bodies and decomposing blood. Fish blood, human blood, some of it waste I’d hosed from the floor of the interrogation room myself. Ropes of the same stringy stuff in the narrow shaft hung loose here, gelatinous and fetid. Synesthesia was not my friend. The slimy texture of the tunnel on my bare skin made my tongue throb and my eyes flash violet and olive green, colors I saw and felt in my mouth.

Someone shouted from somewhere behind, a bark of sound that bounced weirdly off the walls. They’d found the empty pit.

I turned into the direction of the wind and half-crawled, half-scrambled towards it. Fetid rotten flesh and sewerage gave way to the comparatively fresh smell of the Upper New York Bay. There was light ahead, the prismatic swirl of the night sky, the sound of rain and thunder. From behind, there were more shouts, and then a distant crumpling sound, the sound of a boot being put through a flimsy brick facade.

At the end of the tunnel was the ocean, the same murky iron-red color as the clouds. Slick with oil from the ships trawling up and down the bay between New York and Jersey, it rushed up against the embankment. I had come out underneath the AEROMOR docks. A ship was moored to my right; to the left, the container cranes looked out over the loading area. There was nothing to do but swim.

I tensed and threw myself out, jumping higher and faster than normal human strength allowed for. The water was surprisingly warm, but the current was strong. After flailing to the surface, I paddled and limped towards the shore, trying to hide among the waves. Every moment that passed was a potential bullet to the head. Being unafraid of dying and desiring to die are two very different things: the need, the driving need, was to live. My lungs labored, striving in time with heart and eyes and arms and legs. I fought the water, ducked beneath the layer of rubbish to swim as far and as fast as I could.

Along the embankments in the docklands, you could find old metal ladders bolted straight into the concrete. Covered in oil, I splashed along until I found one and hauled myself up to peer over the side. The yard had a scattered crowd of people milling around. Most of them were gawking at the fuss going on in the AEROMOR yard, Yard #3, where all the searchlights were turned onto the water. I had come out near Yard #5, the one used by the big Chinese carrier, Ying Shao. Their loading stage was stacked up with shipping containers and pallets. There were forklifts moving on and off the boat moored at the end of the pier where I’d surfaced. It was good cover, busy, but not necessarily neutral.

In the shadow of the barnacle-covered wall, I waited until the pier was clear before pulling myself up and over. A short run brought me behind the first stack of pallets, where I tried to crouch and promptly collapsed in a pile of jellied, shivering limbs. Flat on my rump, I looked down at my hands and recoiled in panic. They were ripped down to bone and tendon, black and bloodied, and they were still healing. As I watched, shuddering with the effort to keep my eyes on them, the sinew knit together, the muscle pulsed and squeezed pus and dirt out of my flesh, the ragged tendon sheaths stretched and snapped back into place over bone. The process was slower than it had been back in the cell, which made the recovery all the more sensuous, all the more disturbing. Distantly, I realized what the problem was. I was hungry. Starving. Everything was beginning to smell like meat.

I slunk out into the scintillating air like a rat, navigating through boxes that swam with insectoid shapes. I didn’t dare look up at the sky again, not while my senses were stricken with crawlers. I chose my route with an instinct I didn’t understand, wending unsteadily towards the a red-brick warehouse behind the shipping crates. I came around the back. There was a row of dumpsters out here, reeking with a damp sour milk and rotten vegetable smell that carried to my nose. Stupidly, my mouth began to water as I forced the dumpster back from the wall, set myself in the space behind it, and fell very still.

It wasn’t too long until a man came up from the stacking yard, and then another. They trailed by in twos and threes, chattering and smoking, throwing shadows across the ground, throwing cardboard into the trash above my head. Concealed by the dumpster lid and the darkness of the warehouse, no one thought to notice the filthy naked man cowering at ankle-height.

Eventually, the traffic slowed. As the excitement at Dock #3 trailed off, the Ying Shao workers got back to loading their ship while I waited, cold, hungry, and patient. After a long humid silence, my skin prickled with sudden sound: boots scuffling on the pavement, marching closer and closer to the warehouse door. One pair of boots, punctured by melodic whistling. My prey was swinging a chain with keys. I could hear the links click, the keys rattle. Like a spider, I stirred only to refocus my attention, waiting for the fly’s legs to pluck the right strands at the right time.

He was a fast walker, striding by so fast I nearly missed my chance. I lunged out, and struck him in the back of the knees with a fist and the blade of my hand. He went down with a short cry of surprise, quickly silenced with a smack to the back of the head. I seized him by the ankles and dragged him away into the shadows to strip his clothes. I left his underwear, but took everything else. Taking another man’s underwear was against the Code.

His coveralls were tight over my chest, bagged at the waist, and strained over my thighs. His boots pinched, but I was no longer unclothed. Even better, I had gloves: They were fingerless, but they were leather. I pulled them on with a shudder of relief. My eyes and tongue stopped throbbing, and the hallucinations, while still vivid, reduced in intensity.

I pulled my new wool cap down as far as I could, left the unconscious man behind some pallets for his workmates to find, and slouched away with my hands in his pockets. There was a pack of cigarettes in there. A lighter. A ten-dollar bill in a clip, no wallet. A piece of thin red rope braided with jade beads and a bronze Chinese coin, some kind of talisman… and car keys, with an electronic tag. Never had I felt anything as beautiful as these keys, and the means by which to find his car. I could go and get my cat, my passport, a gun… all of which were at my apartment. The apartment that was almost certainly being watched.

My momentary elation vanished. Nicolai would be in charge of recovering me: Sergei would not trust such an important job to anyone else. Nic would be organizing his men quickly and efficiently. I knew Nic, had trained under him. He’d taught Vassily and I how to fire guns, boost cars, make tools. The skills I had used to escape, he had taught us. One of the things he’d taught me? If you ever try to kill someone and the guy manages to run, check his house. Nearly every fugitive makes a last stop at home to grab those vital, necessary things before they flee for good. Nine times out of ten, you catch your mark coming back out of his front door.

I would not be able to get on my flight. The Laguetta Family owned the airport, and the security union was headed up by one of the Don’s captains. Nic could and would reach out to him for a favor. The Avtoritet of Brighton Beach would be calling everyone he could think of, including the people who generally regarded me favorably. No one I knew was trustworthy enough to stand up to Nic for me. My passport, my papers, Binah, everything… Nic would make them tempting and unreachable. GOD damn him, but he was good at his job.

Move. The inner voice was not Kutkha, but it was compelling all the same. Find the car.

They had my fucking cat. My tools. The Wardbreaker. Everything. A tremble started in my fingers. Angrily, I clenched around the bundle of keys until the points bit into my fingers, hissing through my teeth as a jolt of hot pain lanced through my hand. It freed me up to move on, one foot in front of the other.

Ten bucks, one tank of gas, a pack of cigs, and one go-bag hidden in Gravesend. If they weren’t going to let me run, I was going to have to fight.

And once I could see straight? I’d fight them to the death. Sergei didn’t know who the fuck he was dealing with.