Oh GOD.
The pieces of me sucked back in and reformed, drawn by the inevitable pull of gravity. I came to on my bathroom floor, guts roiling with remembered pain. My mouth was open, throat wheezing as I screamed without sound. My body was bathed in sweet-smelling sweat that evaporated without a trace, just like the Phi.
“It’s her.” My voice cracked like a boy’s. “She’s the Fruit. The woman. That Phi was blood.”
“I told you that it was too soon. Yes… she is a Gift Horse.” Kutkha loomed at the corner of my eye. He was projecting again, perched on the rim of my bathtub. Just like the first time.
“Which means what, exactly?” I rolled over, surprised to find that I wasn’t in pain, that I wasn’t bleeding or fucked up. My knee no longer hurt. My cheek no longer burned. My bruises were gone.
“Will you accept an explanation once you are centered and calm?”
I was fascinated by my knee. The crooked joint was straight again, almost as perfect as it had been when I’d first broken into Vincent’s house. “I suppose.”
“Then get a bathrobe. Get in the shower.” Kutkha sounded as though he were standing right beside me.
I shivered my way through the shower, scrubbing Jana out of my skin. When I came out of the bathroom, I nearly ran headlong into Vincent in the hallway. The small man had his blanket clutched around his shoulders like a cape, framed by the doorway of the kitchen, eyes huge with surprise. They were sunken and bruised in his deer-like face.
He made a small, cracked sound. “Hi.”
“Get back inside,” I said. My voice came out like a whip. I hesitated, checking my tone before I spoke again. “Look… you can’t even speak yet. I’ll get you some water.”
He turned and lurched back towards the den without a word. I double-knotted the belt of my robe and followed.
“Never seen a guy in bathrobe and gloves before.” Vincent sounded like he’d been gargling glass. He collapsed back onto the sofa, pulling his blanket in around him. “Heard ya screamin’.”
“You were hearing things. I’ll get you some water.” I didn’t sit. “Stay here.”
“Hey, before you run off… Who the fuck are you?”
I looked back from the doorway. “I was paid to find you.”
“That kinda answers the question. I guess.” He glared sulkily at the radio.
I left and got two glasses of warm water. When I brought them back, Vincent reached out urgently.
“Slowly, now, or you’ll make yourself sick.” I took my own chair, setting my glass aside on the reading table.
He had the look of a guzzler, but he had enough compos mentis to listen to the order and sip.
“You’re one of the Russians.” His voice was clearer after a drink, but vaguely accusative. Vincent was smiling, though, which confused me. His voice was higher than I was used to in men, a bright buzzing yellow. “Never thought I’d be glad to be in the clutches of the Russian Mafia.”
‘Clutches’. How dramatic. “I’ve been through a lot to find you, and seeing as you can speak, you’re going to answer some questions.” I rested my fingertips on the rim of my glass. “So let’s start with Carmine.”
“Oh, shit.” Vincent grimaced as he sipped at his water. “Carmine’s a total dick. I’m real sorry.”
“Who is he?”
“You gonna at least tell me your name? Because I ain’t answering nothing to someone whose name I don’t know.”
I sighed. I was too tired for the intimidation act. “Alexi.”
“It was either gonna be Aleksey or Boris, wasn’t it?” Vincent exaggerated the pronunciation of my name and offered me another hopeful, uncomfortable smile. “Do they make you great white shark motherfuckers in a factory out in Siberia or something?”
“I was born here.”
“No shit? Okay, Alexi… you uh…” Vincent shuffled back against the sofa. “You deal in woo-woo, don’t you? Big woo. Like Carmine.”
Did I? I’d worked half-assed uncontrolled magic in desperation, botched one summoning, and managed to turn a bullet while I was naked and in fear of my life and virtue. Only the last one counted. “You could say that.”
“I thought so. That blonde bitch had more woo on her than I’ve ever seen. I mean, that was some crazy, fucked-up shit she was doing in there. Torturing guys, cutting their fucking dicks off—”
“Wait.” I lifted my hand. “No tangents. Start from the beginning. I want to know about Carmine, what happened to you, and whatever you know about the Fruit. In that order.”
Vincent’s face drew into set lines. He glanced at me, eyes flashing, before he curled back against the cushions. “Well… that’s a real long story.”
“We have all the time in the world.”
“See, that’s the problem. We don’t, really. Not if the White Lady’s got a thing to say about it.”
I frowned. “The girl in your dream diary.”
“You read my diary?” Vincent scowled, but he was too nervous to do anything about it. “Okay, look… I left my old man’s place a few years back, for some real personal reasons. Things he couldn’t deal with, you know what I mean? Meant I was out on the street. He’s disowned me now. I lived pretty hard for a while, but I did what I had to do. I was having surgery for something when this voice in my head starts talking to me.”
“Go on.”
“Now, I remember Nonna, see. She was a Seer, full-blown Strega. My family’s real superstitious. So I’m like, okay… I have this voice in my head now, and it’s keepin’ me from getting too down. Problem is, I start dreaming about weird shit. Probability. The future.”
“Right.” I sat back, steepling my fingers against my jaw. “You inherited her gift.”
“Yeah. The Sight’s a family thing. Goes right back to Roman times.” Vincent sounded unaccountably tense. “So anyway, one of the things Spook-voice says to do is go see old man Laguetta. So I do that. It tells me: ‘go to Cali.’ Turned out two of my old street buddies were making it good in Colombia, so I hook Laguetta up with the two biggest coke suppliers in South America. Not just coke, either. Scopolamine, M.J.… So that’s part of this, the drugs. But that’s not the same as the Fruit.”
“Where does that come into this?”
“Hang on. So there’s two brothers in Dad’s Family, right? Frank and Rob. Rob owns a fishing boat. Both of them love their coke, but my old man doesn’t let his wiseguys ride the line. I could supply ’em, so they were my last link back to the Family, you know? I dealt to ’em after setting up with Laguetta, and they kept me in the gossip. So last time I sees Rob, he’s all excited. Tells me that he and Frank were out dumping a body in the bay, and they found something weird. Super-weird.”
I raised an eyebrow.
Vincent giggled. Not chuckled. Giggled. “Yeah. We’re talking, like… a giant chestnut. James and the Giant Peach shit. Seven feet around. They find this thing out in the middle of the Atlantic, and they fish it out. No idea what it is, but they’re opportunists, you know? Figger they can make money off it somehow.”
“Naturally.”
“After that, the weird shit starts happening. They put it somewhere, and nearly everyone that sees it forgets it exists. The few guys that do remember—because they keep seeing it in its hiding spot—they tried to crack it open, right? Some kinda goop shoots out of it and burns them alive. As soon as that happened, Dad calls in Carmine from my uncle’s office in Vegas. He got real serious real fast, and Rob tells me that he put him under some kind of protection. We take magic pretty seriously. Rob shows me this pendant Carmine was making him wear, and he tells me that Carmine is looking for me.”