“Ah–ah–lexi,” Zarya whispered. “P-please…”
I couldn’t look at her. Couldn’t speak. I moaned, breathing in Vassily’s smell through his shirt, and then screamed, a harsh sound of pure agony and rage.
“Ah–lexi. Take… the knife,” she gasped, louder. Her lips were flecked with bright silver. “Kill me. Try… feed him… heart’s blood.”
Her last words broke through my fugue. I hunched in a ball around Vassily’s body, tear-streaked and shaking, unable to form any reply.
“Yes.” She breathed the word as a fluted sigh. “Ah–lexi. Kill me. You must… fulfill the Pact. You must.”
“I…” In all the times I’d killed, I’d never done that. I’d never eaten them or fed them to anyone else. “I don’t—”
“Fruit.” She looked up at me, shuddering with the effort. Her veins were visible, shot through with ugly violet streaks, which were spreading like poison as I watched. Her flesh was depressed and soft-looking, bruising under her own weight. Just like a rotting peach, she dimpled when pressed. “I’m… fruit. Made for it. Please.”
I swallowed and lowered Vassily to the ground, touching his face, his unseeing eyes, his mouth. I turned to the Gift Horse, this strange familiar woman, and thumbed the box cutter blade to its full length. Her eyes were flickering, and as I watched, she heaved and brought up a gout of clotted silver streaked with black. The air was full of sweet perfume, but Zarya gagged, a horrible sound that wracked the air of the room. It was beginning to smell like Nacari on the docks… and I realized what the rotten sugar smell really was.
“Feed… him.” She reached up, clawing weakly at my thigh. “My… heart’s… blood. And eat. We will… see you again.”
Beside her, I fell to my knees. “Zarya—”
“Trust… me.” She smiled, and it was ghastly: her teeth were covered in tarnished chrome. “I’m… here, now. On this Cell. Trust… me.”
I brought the knife up like a sacrificial priest. Zarya relaxed and fell back, lifting her chest up towards the blade, as if she’d done this a hundred million times. I brought it down without hesitation. Her flesh was so soft that I punched it through her ribcage without resistance, deep into her heart.
Zarya’s eyes flew open, and she choked, staring up at my face with an expression of blissful relief. Unable to look away, I felt my Neshamah take my hand and draw the blade through her ribs and then pulled it free. She cried out, and her pupils expanded completely until they filled her irises. They unfolded into a spiral that led my gaze down, down… drawing me into a vortex of energy that took my breath away.
“The Hunt will go on,” her voice ruffled through my mind. “Until we meet again.”
The blood that ran down her torso was mercurial, a thick spill of silver. I could see my reflection in it as it spilled over her chest and pooled on the floor, evaporating upwards in thin runnels that disappeared as they decayed. My face loomed larger and larger as I bent down over Zarya’s body. She was gasping in agony now, chest rising towards me as I bowed towards her and, with a trembling tongue, lapped at the shivering pool that welled up from her heart.
Time slowed… and then wound in to a single point in space.
I was gathered up in a rush of wings that carried me down a long tunnel, and they broke me into pieces, into dust that was carried, rushing, down a river of light; a water chute flung me out into a sea of endless GREEN.
A throbbing, booming sound rolled through my being, through every bone, every muscle, every cell as the scope of the ocean expanded exponentially. There was the seething Green cauldron, burning like the heart of an enormous star, and there were its innumerable, uncountable filaments—branches of GREEN bigger than my entire universe. At first, I thought they were veins, until I registered the minute twinkling flashes along their lengths and realized they were ropes of neural tissue. Each nerve strand was roped with pearls, and I knew without knowing that they were universes, entire universes, and there were BILLIONS of them. Billions and billions of flashing specks, in all directions, as far as my eyes could see. They expanded through a rippling aqueous structure that went from white to green to yellow to orange then red—but it was the core of this enormous thing which drew me to face it as the pounding, the booming, began to resolve into a chorus of genderless voice.
loveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyou
It was looking back at me. The voice intensified and deepened. I was not even one cell within its mass. I was perforated, penetrated, a membrane full of holes that writhed and sobbed and screamed as my head was filled, full of it.
loveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyou
Images flashed in a whirlpool of sensation. I saw myself split and brachiated along many of its nerves, living many lives on many worlds. I was a blond youth, laying my head down on a hexagonal stone in the seconds before a sacrificial hammer fell. I was on horseback, straight-backed and proud… I was riding in a car, I was sitting on a bench in the drop bay of a spacecraft. I saw Zarya and others like her. I saw Crina: female, male, arching back against a sofa, a stripper pole, braced with a gun in the door of a helicopter. And I saw Vassily, shadowed by the streetlights beyond a window as he came to me in bed…
loveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyou
I woke over Zarya’s body, sobbing. Seconds had passed, but I was no longer in pain. I scrambled upright, remembering her last words. Feed him. Give him my heart’s blood.
The Gift Horse’s flesh was turning translucent, trembling as it began to fade and peel away into the air. I cracked her chest and pulled her heart free. It was an enormous organ, half again as large as a human heart and with arteries like the spokes of a wagon wheel, blue and sweet smelling. Shaking, I shuffled on my knees to Vassily’s cooling corpse and wrung it over his face and into his mouth. It felt stupid, and once more, the dry retching of grief began as I looked down into my sworn brother’s wide black eyes and saw nothing there.
The silver fluid soaked into his skin, ran into his mouth, over his cheeks, disappearing into his pores as I watched with wide, frightened eyes, and set the organ down on the middle of his chest. The structure of it clarified, turning as clear as glass, and then dissolved into his body.
I saw and felt some kind of energy ripple outwards from him, and his darkened eyes turned numinous, an incredible, fathomless blue shot through with stars. For a moment, I thought I saw him in there… but then the color left, and so did Vassily. Whatever I had seen in that moment—his Neshamah, my own desperation—left as quickly as it had come. I was too late.
He was gone.
Epilogue
Sunrise dawned hot over St. Vladimir’s, raising fog from the hard pavement outside. The church was holding funerals early to avoid the worst of the heat because—even with the air conditioners on—the mortuary wax used to restore Mariya’s body wouldn’t hold its shape right come midday.
Ukrainian funerals were not private affairs. St. Vladimir’s was packed with mourners for both brother and sister: Mariya’s customers and friends, her tear-streaked ex-husband, his family, his friends, Vassily’s friends, his released prison buddies, nearly every member of the Organizatsiya who cared to attend, and curious members of the local public streamed from the doors and down the aisle. The Orthodox church was not made for so many people, and they mingled and bickered and chattered out the door and onto the street, where Vanya’s hand-picked bouncers patrolled and guarded the gates.
Outside the church grounds, the street was full of gawkers. Police pretended to have a real reason to be there, while civilians clamored like crows at the fence, trying to get a glimpse of a rumored Mafia funeral.