Joe squealed when he saw me, eyes bugging over the top of his gag. He was a burly dog of a man, tough and bony as dry chicken. My hands itched in my gloves as I reached in and hauled him out like so much meat, rolling him to the ground with a wet thud. He was beaten to within an inch of his life, his body a coagulated mess of broken bones and livid bruises, and he swooned in a fresh faint as I—three inches shorter and a hand broader through the shoulders—grasped the top of his head by the hair and dragged him behind me through the mud.
In the dark of my mind, I felt something stir… the awareness of my Neshamah. Kutkha roused with dispassionate interest as I set Joe on his knees by the edge of the pit. There was just enough sun left in the day to us to see by. While he swayed and moaned, clawing his way back to consciousness, I cut his gag free, set a piece of razor-sharp broken window glass taken from Mariya’s house against his twitching throat, and waited.
The sun was wavering red on the horizon by the time he gurked and lurched a little, catching himself before he toppled forward into the hole. The damp earth sighed under his weight. When he finally righted, he drew a sharp, frightened breath.
“Joseph Grassia,” I spoke his name slowly, rolling out the ‘ra’ a little to taste the ‘s’ that followed. “Do you know why we’re here?”
Joe’s throat worked a little under the blade as he swallowed, mouth working. We were in a clearing behind a thick stand of hemlock and trembling aspen, the trees shivering in the sweet evening breeze. Far from the New York city limit, fifteen miles from the nearest truck stop, we were utterly alone.
“R… Russian? The Russians?” He croaked. “No way. Come on, man… You—”
“Ukrainian.” The blade was rocking, rocking, and beginning to draw a little red. “Three weeks ago, you raided an apartment to kidnap my sworn brother. You killed his sister and took him—”
“Please man, plEEE—!”
With a small shudder, I yanked the shiv in, and he cried out in a surprisingly high, wavering voice. “Be quiet while I am speaking, Joseph.”
With the click of clenching teeth, he fell silent.
“You took him and you doped him up, and now he’s dead, Joseph. Their names were Mariya and Vassily Lovenko.” I smelled urine, and shuffled my feet apart so it wouldn’t get on my shoes. “They took me in when I was a kid, when I had nowhere else to go. Do you know what that’s like? The desolation of losing your only family?”
“Oh god. Oh god, stop.” Joe rasped now, flesh quivering around the uneven edge of the knife. “Stop. Stop.”
“Did you stop? Have you ever stopped to think about anything in your life? Do you think I had the choice to stop, when your Spook forced me to defile Zarya? The Gift Horse?”
“Oh god. You’re the Spook. You’re the f-fucking Spook.” Joe’s voice stayed high and girlish, squeaky. “Don’t… please, I didn’t fucking do it! I d-d- it was fucking Celso, man! He—”
My eyes narrowed. “Celso Manelli?”
“Yes… YES-S…” he stammered, unable to find his words for several seconds. “It was Celso, Celso called me in. It was you freakin’ Russkies that started the war, I didn’t have nothin’ to do with it, they just wanted me to drive, all I was doin’ was driving, I was just—!”
His voice slowly turned to a dim buzzing drone, and the filthiness of him, the un-reality of his being, suddenly became too much. I am not a telepath, but I didn’t need any form of magic to see into Joe’s mind. The thing in front of me was a man-shaped hole in place of a human being, a sucking void. A NOthing, greedy and craven. The NO was an infection in the world that ran so deep and so virulent that there was no hope of a cure. This was what the Gift Horse had taught me. And in the bittering weeks since Vassily’s death, I saw the influence of the NO in everything.
I pulled Joe up higher on his knees with the shard. He screamed, and kept screaming as I spoke against the nothingness I felt.
“‘I have done it again. One year in every ten, I manage it. A sort of walking miracle, my skin as bright as a Nazi lampshade, my face a featureless, fine Jew linen.’”
“What the FUCK!?” Joe was nearly screaming now. He sounded like a frightened hen. “The fuck is this? The fuck—!”
Sylvia Plath’s words continued to roll off my tongue in soft measured cadence, as natural as any wizard’s spell. “Peel off the napkin, O my enemy. Do I terrify?”
“No, no no no, no NO NO—!”
I punched the shard, a remnant of Mariya’s broken bathroom window, through the front of his throat just beside his Adam’s Apple. Gristle bent and ground under the force of the improvised blade. Joe’s lamb-like screams turned to garbles as his blood slopped over the back of my glove. I put the hard sole of my shoe against his thin back and pushed him into the pit, face-first, to suffocate his life out on the loose dirt. This was not a kind kill, a mercy stroke through the carotid artery. He would remain conscious until the end.
“Dying, is an art.” I looked down at him from overhead, pulling the latex gloves off one at a time and throwing them to the ground. “And like everything else, I do it exceptionally well.”
Joe had not known Mariya. The way she picked sour cherries out of the jar with us while we did homework after school, her patience with our grandmother as Lenina’s mind dissolved in the grip of Alzheimer’s Disease. He hadn’t known Vassily: his broad shoulders, his long, tattooed hands, the wicked glint in his eyes or the flash of his smile across a room when he turned to face me. Joe would never know the dryness of my mouth when Vassily stripped off his shirt or laughed at my jokes; his effortless intensity when handling a new gadget, a deck of cards, a cigarette. Snappy Joe Grassia was sick, like everything and everyone in the underworld. And so was I.
A month to the day ago, I tasted the Gift Horse’s blood and received a revelation. GOD, the Greater Optimistic Direction—was very real. Through Zarya, I’d felt its heartbeat, saw its capillary action, its respiration. I’d glimpsed the way that its body channeled highways of Phi, the stuff of magic, like lymphatic fluid. It was an organism, a flesh-and-blood living thing with tissues so massive that its cells spanned universes. The EveryThing, an all-consuming, and all-encompassing entity of which I was one tiny, tiny organelle.
But I knew now that GOD was in pain. When I looked into that massive eye, I hadn’t felt chosen. I’d felt dirty. Twisted up. In my visions, I knew instinctively that I was not part of the cure; I was still part of the disease.
The grave was filled and meticulously camouflaged, every shred of dirty evidence bagged and burned by the time I drove back down the bumpy winding road to the highway. I spent the trip back in a numb fugue: part dissociation, part adrenaline, part realization that no matter how many fingers I broke or how fast I did it, the job would be left unfinished. In perfect accord with Murphy’s Law, Snappy Joe Grassia had named the one man who I could not possibly kill in the short window of time I had left. Celso GODdamned Manelli.
The Manelli family was the biggest Mafia outfit in New York City and New Jersey. John Manelli, the Don of the family, was a ruthless cut-throat who spurned the traditions of the Cosa Nostra and dealt in drugs—lots of them. Celso was his father’s Consigliere and renowned to be one of the most dangerous non-magical Made Men in the underworld. I didn’t know much about him, and had never seen him in person. Rumor was that he’d killed more than a few Spooks—‘hitmages’, as Vassily had once called us—and GOD knows how many norms. He was reputed to be smart, cool, and careful. All of the Murder Inc. guys could regularly be found at the club they owned and operated in Manhattan: The Gemini Lounge. It was quite likely that I could find Celso there… along with fifty other allied gangsters, street mages, and a partridge in a pear tree.