Joe could have been pulling my leg. Questioning someone who is about to die is a terrible way to get information, but something about his insistence that Celso had been there made sense. I had memorized the murder scene in a flash. The position of furniture, blood spatters, the signs of struggle and lack of it. Mariya’s body, slumped like a worn doll over the edge of the bathtub. I’d been sucking on the details like a bad tooth, recalling them over and over. There had definitely been more than one person there. That person could indeed have been Celso.
If it was true, there was no way I could leave New York. Nicolai would pay. Sergei would pay. After their performance the month before, the Organizatsiya was dead to me. I’d wring every drop of blood from their bodies for Vassily and Mariya, for Zarya, and for me.
As plans to find Celso began to coagulate, the cold shadow that had cruised with me for the entire day, from Joe’s capture to beating to execution, finally manifested himself. The cottony, dusty smell of feathers wafted through the cabin like smoke, filling the air with the subtle pressure of Phi, the substance of magic. It was Kutkha, my Neshamah: the conduit of my Art, and a sanctimonious pain in my behind.
From time immemorial, mages and mystics of all cultures have spoken of the Neshamah, the soul, as a real, conscious presence. It is the part of ourselves that all humans have, but few ever speak to. The Higher Self, the Holy Guardian Angel—call it what you will. Jung named his Thomas. Mine was Kutkha, named for the trickster deity of ancient Rus. Sort of.
“Alexi, we cannot do this.” Kutkha spoke with no single voice. He sounded like the riffling wind, the air thrumming through feathers. “We will not find him in time. Tonight, we must leave.”
I fixed ahead on the dark, wet road. “The Gemini Lounge isn’t too far from our route home. There’s time to cruise by before the flight. And if we miss this flight, I’ll book another. We’re not short of money.”
“You will not find him. He is already gone. They know Joseph has disappeared.”
My throat closed up with a sudden flash of heat so powerful that it flooded my eyes with white and gold. It caused my hands to tic, and I slowed to stop from losing control of the car. “No. You don’t know that.”
“Alexi…”
“I know you don’t know shit about the future. You fucking listen to me, you —”
The shadows of the cabin quickened. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the ghostly impression of a raven, blue-black, its substance boiling into filaments of vapor. When he next spoke, it was stronger, something I heard with my ears as well as my mind. “Your father used to say that to you, Alexi.”
“Don’t.” The urge to hit, to bite and grasp and tear at something, anything became overwhelming, but there was no one and nothing left to hurt. I was the only one in the car. “Don’t ever bring Grisha up again, or I swear to GOD…”
“What?” Kutkha’s tone twisted with dark amusement. “Will you drill out my knees, too?”
I exhaled thinly. It was starting to rain now, a light misty haze, and I fixated on the swirling particles to give my eyes something to chew on. “Stop being a smartass. Vassily—”
“Is still dead, my Ruach.”
“Stop.” I pulled over as the rain intensified, staring at the buildup on my screen as it began to blind me. The calm executioner’s confidence drained out of me. The engine rumbled like a cat’s purr while I clutched my head and willed Kutkha to shut up. But he wouldn’t: his thoughts, his agenda were his own, but he was part of me. Or, more accurately, I was part of him. “Just stop.”
Kutkha’s eyes burned in the gloom. “They are gone whether or not Celso Manelli lives or dies. They are gone when we are in Europe, or if we stay here. They are gone.”
Gone. Gone gone gone. “Please just let me—”
“No.” The air was opaque now, blue-black and sucking. “I will not ‘just’ let you live the Lie.”
I’ll live a lie if I damn well want to, is what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t voice my petulance with any seriousness. The unspoken words rattled around my otherwise blank, exhausted mind. What I really wanted was to turn around, dig up Joe, reanimate him and kill him again. Instead, I fumbled for the windshield wipers and turned them on, sweeping the rain off the glass.
“You vowed yourself to me, Alexi. You vowed that you would grow for our sake.”
“I know.” But the resistance remained.
“It is not safe to stay near Sergei.” For a moment, Kutkha’s voice was almost soft. “We must go. You are done here.”
I didn’t feel ‘done’, though not for lack of preparation. My luggage was packed with money, clothes, my most important books and magical tools, and I’d left a go-bag out in Sheepshead Bay in case anything went wrong. I’d spent the last two weeks securing a fake passport, a two-way ticket to Spain, and a one-way train ticket to Germany. I had my photos and papers, and a fake ancestral I.D. We were set. But I was going to have to leave knowing that another man had been at that apartment: the man who had blown Mariya’s head back across her shower wall, and that he was alive and she was not.
“Do not make me regret empowering you, my Ruach.” Kutkha swiveled his head, looking across with eyes like the core of a star, smoking white and churning with constant motion. Momentarily, I met his gaze… and their gravity caught and held me. “By all rights, you should be dead… but you wanted to survive. And they would want that, too.”
Vassily and Mariya. My throat thickened. “I’m… I am abandoning them here, Kutkha.”
“They are dead, Alexi. You cannot abandon what is no longer here.”
The cold reminder did nothing to chase away the childish conviction that I was abandoning them to lie in their cold graves, while I fled the Organizatsiya and the life they had died to protect. Vassily had been a Vor v Zakone to his bones, the picture of a free-wheeling, quick-thinking thief-in-law. He had been the kind of man who could spin a million dollars out of five hundred. Once, a long time ago, he debated better than most lawyers. Sergei had picked him for his brilliant mind… brilliance that proved so fragile that five years in prison and the machinations of his comrades had crushed him like a crane fly.
And now? He was dead. Even though I knew it wasn’t my fault, it sure as hell felt like it.
I shifted gears, backed up, and pulled out onto the highway. Kutkha was right, as always. We had to follow the plan. It was a good plan, and if executed smoothly, it would work. Take the cat, leave the lights off, the car in the lot, the door locked and warded. We could get to the airport in the morning, be in England by the evening, and on our way to continental Europe the same day. We would change our money in Spain, convert the lot to Deutschmarks, and head to Bremen. In Germany, I could disappear into the Ukrainian Jewish diaspora without so much as a ripple, just as my parents had done when they’d fled Ukraine for America. But after that? No idea. I lived day to day as part of the New York Bratva, enjoying short periods of peace interspersed with episodes of hectic violence. There were days where I collapsed onto my bed in the mid-morning after working all night, sore and exhausted, patched up, amazed that I was still alive. This was the first time the future had ever existed as a concept.