I found my place by Vassily’s side from the moment the doors opened. Both he and Mariya had open caskets, their bodies buried under piles of flowers. Mourners came to touch, kiss and lay more flowers and flags down over them. Jewish flags, Ukrainian flags, white banners, even dollar bills. They came and left around us in a blur. Their words, their faces and scents bubbled formlessly around me. I only had eyes for my family.
Vassily was milk pale and sunken, his expression serene, eyes closed. His hands were folded over his chest, and I drank in every detail of his tattoos: the cat and dagger on the left, the snake and skull on the right. Each one commemorated his cunning and loyalty and determination, and for all his flaws, he had earned them. The blue ink seemed to float just under the surface of his skin, as if it had turned to glass. He had taken these images for his father, and Vassily had embodied them with the kind of passion that he’d be proud of, had he been alive to watch his youngest son grow to adulthood.
The Scopolamine fog made it impossible for me to tell which memories of that awful night were true and which were not. I was sure Zarya was real, and the DOG. I know I worked magic that took my breath away to think about. The rest? I couldn’t say. All I do know is that this place, these people, and these sick men I grew up following are wrong. The Organizatsiya is a disease. Now, I realized why the smell of the DOG was so familiar: Because it smelled like home.
I only broke from my vigil once, to use the bathroom and check my arm. Two days had passed. My wounds were gone, but something had cut deeper than the DOG’s talons. Zarya had healed me, and the flesh the DOG had chewed out of me was filled in, but the scars still ached. They wound up my forearm like twin serpents. Looking at them made me dizzy, and when I went back out, I lingered in the threshold of the bathroom, paralyzed until I caught a sweet draft of honeysuckle air from the open church door. It was as raw and pure as incense. The scent freed me of my freeze, but my hands remained heavy and hot.
Nervously, I put my gloves in my pocket and moved bare-handed back into the chapel hall. I wanted to go back to Vassily, but an impulse I could not name drew me outside. I stepped out onto the garden path, breathing deeply of the humid air, and scanned the crowd.
There was a line of men smoking near the door, killing themselves slowly while they paid their respects to the dead. Sergei’s distinctive raucous laughter boomed from around the corner of the main building. I went around the corner of the chapel to see what he was laughing about, only to see him lift a screaming baby up high over his head, clasping it in huge meaty hands as he cooed and chuckled. Even at this distance, I could see the appraisal on the old man’s face, the calculation.
He handed the baby back to his mother perfunctorily, praising her, and she blushed. Not thirty feet away, Vanya’s three boys were playing around the only tree behind the church, a sickly looking maple that was shedding its leaves prematurely from the summer heat. The two older boys were bullying the youngest. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I watched them push him to the ground with sticks and feet. The young boy didn’t cry; he got angry, face burning, and picked up a stick of his own to charge them and continue the cycle of violence.
“Take them in as men and horses, and churn them out as numbered corpses.” Kutkha said, whispering deep within my imagination. It was something I felt like I’d once read, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember the source.
Even as I tried to remember, something prickled at my skin. I refocused to my left. Sergei was watching me. He was overdressed, as always. The huge man wore a gaudy black velvet suit dressed with a heavy gold medallion that rested over his tie. He caught my eye and smiled knowingly with far too many teeth, then turned and went on to continue entertaining his guests, the couple breeding the next generation of cogs in his machine. Beside him, Vera stood with her hands folded behind her back, feet shoulder width apart, and stared at nothing with dead doll eyes.
A chill passed through my gut, a lance of unnatural cold that made my mouth itch. I bowed my head and peeled away from the wall, reentering the church with a churning stomach.
Kutkha fluttered in my awareness with the pressure of protective wings. As I mounted the dais a second time, I felt the gentle indigo-black throb and pulse of his substance as he meshed quietly through my being, silent and supportive. I had my Neshamah. I had Binah, waiting for me at home. I had Zarya’s final words. “We will see you again.”
For the last time, I looked down at Vassily’s face.
“Until we meet again.” I leaned in to commit his smell to memory. Without really meaning to, I pressed my lips to the waxy skin of his forehead, lingering just long enough that I would always remember how it felt. Then I turned and walked away.
I didn’t want to. A part of me wanted to join them down there, in the deep Green sea. I didn’t want to live, alone, in a world where people like Sergei and Nic survived and Mariya and Vassily did not. I didn’t want the loneliness that would come with my decision. But I am a Magus, a Phitometrist, a catalyst. Whatever it is I must do, I would not find it here.
It was time to go.
Stained Glass: Chapter 1
Vengeance, like most fantasies, is better in the imagining than it is in the execution.
Snappy Joe Grassia—Manelli hitman, renowned sadist, and murdering piece of human waste—was hog-tied in my trunk. We were headed north along the Interstate, gunning for a place that a long-dead gangster had nicknamed Bozya Akra, God’s Acre. The Yaroshenko Organizatsiya had been planting bodies there since my grandfather’s day, and if the Feds ever found it, they’d have enough bones to keep the world in human ivory for the next decade.
It had been a long two weeks, and now that we were nearly there, I felt hollow, sour, even bored. This was the last kill I’d make in the USA, maybe for the rest of my life. I’d expected to feel satisfaction, some kind of relief. All I felt was nothing. When I glanced in the mirror at my face, it was stiff and cold, skin tight and grayish. I couldn’t see anything through that shell of self-containment, the autistic armor I’d grown over the course of a short, violent life. There was only a mask: passionless, hard and proud.
The trip to Bozya Akra was nearly the reverse of the one Vassily and I had made earlier in August when we’d driven back from Fishkill Correctional. The wind blowing over us from the windows during that ride had been warm, the scents blue and bittersweet with the dog days of summer. He’d come out of prison thinned and brittle. He hadn’t been strong enough to survive the odds arrayed against him when everything had gone to shit. The icing on the cake had been when he was kidnapped and his sister killed…and now, Snappy Joe and I were fated to share this moment.
The outer fence had rotted to stumps, and the frontage to Bozya Akra was so overgrown that it resembled the rest of the forest. We drove up along that long driveway very slowly, bumping and rumbling over the soft earth, and eventually came to a gentle stop in a clearing not too far from a deep, pre-dug pit. I collected the weapon I’d brought for the job, cut the engine and got out, the pulse in my tongue tap-tapping with the tick of cooling metal. The hissing trees filled the silence as I went around and popped the trunk.