My Neshamah projected the sudden image of him staring sternly from the doorway. I swelled in place a little, fists clenched, but set the cat down on the bed and started on changing clothes.
Thunk thud thump.
The back of my neck prickled. I was halfway through pulling my undershirt off, and pulled it back down as I turned in place, ears cocked. Binah’s tail frizzed like a bottle-brush as she leaped off the bed and ran down the hall. The distinctive knock rang out again from the front door, louder this time.
Kutkha waited like a coiled spring in the back of my mind, alive and aware. He said nothing, but his thoughts and opinions curled half-formed behind my thoughts and opinions. We were in agreement. This was a poor development. Fortunately, it was a development with a simple, elegant solution.
“Ne valyai duraka, Alexi! Stop screwing around.” Nicolai Chiernenko called to me from outside, his voice muffled by the door and distance. Thunk thud thump.
Heart hammering, I glanced at my knife. The handle was protruding from the bag, but I didn’t dare move. Was there any feasible way he’d know I was home? I thought for a moment as he continued to knock. The lights were on. My car was out the front, the metal ticking to coolness. He had probably noticed, pressing his hand to the bonnet on his way from car to apartment door. He’d taught me tricks like that. Nicolai was as astute as he was traitorous.
If Nic tried to break the door down, then the ward would fry him… but they wouldn’t get whoever else he’d brought with him. If he was here to get me, he wouldn’t be alone. If he was here on business, it was fifty-fifty odds. Not good enough.
“Who is it?” I called out, reluctantly. I left the room, but I brought the knife and stuck to the doorway. I wouldn’t be the first man to get a shotgun blast through his front door in reply to a greeting.
“You know who it is. Open up.”
There were few reasons why the new Avtoritet of the Beach would deign to see me, and none of them fit in with my plans. Nicolai was a snake. He’d gleefully trampled over Vassily and I to get to the top.
“Wait,” I said. “I need to get dressed.”
Nicolai couldn’t get into my apartment through the magical wards on the door, not unless he was going to blast his way in – and even then, all that would do was prime the traps in the hallway. Call me paranoid, but after the last month, I had decided not to take any more chances.
I took my time. Nic looked sour by time I finally opened the door. Framed in the rectangle of light, he was a dry, thin scarecrow of a man, scarred and leathery from years spent in prison and the desert. He pinched a smoldering cigarette between colorless, thin lips. His new position of power had elicited no physical change in him: he wore his old patched army jacket, open, a blue-and-white striped t-shirt and well-worn cargo pants tucked into Doc Martens. He still did street work, often unaccompanied, the way he had always done. The only visible concessions to his new position and accompanying wealth was a solid gold crucifix on a solid gold chain, a new gold watch, and a renewed sense of entitlement to everyone else’s time. “We got a situation.”
Of course we do. Kutkha’s silent, persistent urging felt remarkably like rising panic. The flight was in less than four hours. We needed to find a way out of this. “Why didn’t you come earlier? We don’t have enough time tonight to finish a job and do disposal.”
“Because murder isn’t convenient.” A tic of irritation rippled over his face.
“I say it only out of concern for the Organizatsiya,” I replied.
Nic tensed as if he was winding up to punch me. Then he seemed to remember that I was not just his hitman: I was a hitman who could turn away bullets with a shouted word, shatter wards with a gesture and some blood, and if I concentrated hard enough, I could probably inflate his brain until it ran out his ears. That, and we were ostensibly still brat’ya, brothers.
“We’ll find a way to get it over with.” He hunched and jerked his shoulders like a vulture shaking its wings. “Get rid of the pussy and bring sheet plastic. The scene is a fucking mess.”
He wasn’t meeting my eyes, and I realized something. Whatever this was about, he was embarrassed. It threatened him and his new station in the Organizatsiya. Nic had only been Avtoritet for just fifteen days, and something had already gone wrong on his watch – something bad enough or messy enough that he needed me to fix it. If it had been any other night, I would have gloated; as it stood, I was having to tamp down a profound sense of impending doom. To refuse a job would arouse his suspicions beyond measure. He’d finger what was going on without much difficulty, have me followed, and call his friends in East Germany. Quite unwittingly, the Organizatsiya had once again taken control of my life.
“What?” His eyes narrowed at my hesitation.
“Nothing, Avtoritet, just refreshing some incantations appropriate for sticky situations,” I said. “Tell me what’s happened while I go get my tools.”
For a fleeting moment, Nic was taken aback. His shoulders jerked as he stuffed his hands in his pockets. Binah tried to stick her head outside the apartment, and Nic pushed her back with the flat of his boot. “One of our couriers was gacked tonight… went out to pick up a regular delivery.”
“And?”
“And the guys he was picking up from turned on him and tore him apart. Literally. They left some symbols drawn in blood on the ground. None of the other guys will go near it.”
This was literally the last job I wanted to have sprung on me on the morning of my departure. As I flew around my room and packed enough gear to look passable, I hastily cobbled together the only plan I could think of – shoot Nic in the back of the head, hide him in his car, get my disguise on and my things out of the house, and then fly out of New York as fast as possible.
My Neshamah’s agitation was a continual rustling in the back of my mind. My stomach tightened, sour and tense, but I forced a nod and a grimace. “Fine. Wait downstairs. I’ll be ten minutes.”
To my surprise, he turned and swaggered off down the corridor without a backward glance. Nice to know he still had some kind of respect for me.
I closed the door and cruised back to my room in the dark. I hauled the bags to the door and went to my closet. It was still full of things I didn’t plan to take to Germany, including my shoulder rig, my Wardbreaker Colt Commander, ammo, and a suppressor. The Wardbreaker was an unnaturally silent weapon when charged and silenced, perfect for the job I needed to do. Most suppressed guns were still too noisy in close urban spaces, but the Wardbreaker’s purpose was to scatter and dissolve energy. When activated, the pistol sounded like an air gun or a Hollywood assassin’s pistoclass="underline" nothing more than a flat ‘blip’ of sound. The magic reduced the Commander’s range, but not its torque. It still had plenty of that, enough to turn Nic’s head into a mashed tomato.
“Something is wrong,” Kutkha said. “I cannot see ahead.”
“In what sense?”
“I strive to perceive the near future,” my Neshamah replied. “Filaments of time lashing back and forth across our path. From these fractional glimpses, I may infer much of what is to come… but the Waters have become muddied.”