I lunged at him a little, snorting like a bull, and reached back for the core of me, for my magic… and failed. It was like trying to catch fish with my hands, and the slippery inability to turn inward sent a spike of panic straight through my chest. Adrenaline woke me up. “What… what have you done?”
Sergei blinked, once. “You went against your orders earlier this month. The men you nearly killed didn’t remember that you broke into the safehouse, but that doesn’t mean the memories weren’t there. I examined them. I know you tried to take Vincent to the Manellis in exchange for Vassily.”
Mealy-mouthed, I stared back at him in sullen, furious silence.
Sergei leaned forwards. “And then… what happened, Alexi? What was in that factory worth dying for?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
Sergei cracked a grin. His teeth were sharp… unnaturally sharp. Sharper than any human’s teeth had a right to be. “Come now, Alexi. No need to be sarcastic with me. Not when you’re here like this.”
Kutkha was not there. He was still linked to me – he had to be. I was alive, but I couldn’t feel or hear him. I lowered my face, nostrils flaring.
“There wasn’t anything in that damn warehouse,” I growled. “Just a DOG.”
The word stirred him to his feet. Sergei sighed. He put his hands to his thighs and stood, creakily, looming over me. “I wanted to make princes out of you and Vassily. Lev warned me that having you grow up here, in America, would make you selfish and untrustworthy. Disobedient. He was right. You’re worse than a stray dog, Alexi. An ungrateful, worthless little bitch. Let’s try once more. What was in the warehouse?”
“The DOG that ate Lev.” I glared from under my brow. “So it seems like he wasn’t much of anything, either.”
Sergei chuffed, clapping his hands. “Did you hear that, Vera? Listen to this cockerel’s smart mouth, eh?”
Vera hadn’t looked away from me, her thumbs hooked on her gun belt. At mention of her name, she straightened from her slouch like a puppet on its strings. I was still staring at her when Sergei swooped into my vision, caught my jaw in his calloused paw, and squeezed.
“Look at me.” His tone was guttural, and utterly compelling. My skin crawled, and pain lanced through my skull as my eyes were unwillingly forced to focus in on his own. They were a deep blue-violet, cornflower blue. The whites were yellow. The veins… the veins were black.
Sergei licked his bottom lip, and then bit it, pushing the point of a tooth through the thin skin. It cracked like glaze, and as the seconds passed, blood began to well up from his flesh. It was very, very dark brown. Orange-black, not red. It smelled… strange. Powerful. And despite myself, my mouth began to water even as my nose stung with the sudden, acrid odor, like ammonia and burned wax.
“What you don’t understand…” Sergei said, reaching up to dab his lip with his finger. “Is that I won’t just kill you, Alexi. I know you’re brave. Plucky, but weak. So no, I won’t kill you. I will erase you. One by one, you and your little incarnations across time and space will start to die, while you suck from my mouth like a crack-baby. You will do anything for my blood, and you won’t be able to stop yourself. You’ll do it until you, your soul, and your mind are nothing but dry, hollow puppets.”
Zarya had told me, her face bloody silver, that there were many Alexis. She had known one of them, but it beggared belief that Sergei knew this, not unless he’d ripped something out of my mind. I tried to twist away, but I might as well have fought the sky. Sergei smiled like Santa Claus as he shoved his fingers in my mouth and swiped his blood across my tongue. It was as sweet as opium, burning a hole into the nerves of my mouth. A rush flooded through my head and chest like ice water. The veil of glamour was pulled away from my eyes, and for the first time, I saw.
His face was the pallid cream of old parchment, and the violet color of Sergei’s eyes was lurid, his pupils drawn to thin vertical slits under the light. Trembling with chills, I forced myself to across to look at Vera. I saw her – really saw her – for the first time. She wasn’t just thin and weathered. She was taxidermied, her tanned skin pulled taut over her bones.
“She’s dead.” My voice cracked. Sergei’s lip was still bleeding, and I was drawn back to it, iron to the magnet. The dark orange trickle ran down to mix with the ginger curls of his beard. The smell was chemical and toxic and sweet, like someone lighting a crack pipe with a burning crayon. “And so are you.”
Sergei roared with sudden laughter. He had iron teeth set like bullets in his jaws, top and bottom. “It only took you thirty years to work that out, boy!” He slapped his thigh. “Human after all, aren’t you? Vera, show him your scars.”
She complied without question, hooking her thin hands under the edge of her tank top and lifting it up to her chin. Her torso was peppered with old scars and bullet holes, the latter stuffed with yellowing wool caulk. She had a single enormous tear from sternum to flank, on the heart side. It was dark and knotted, pulled together with rusted metal stitches, and sealed with a sigil burned into her flesh. Her dusky skin was puckered, like old leather. And no one had known. Not even me.
“It’s good work, isn’t it?” Sergei leered at me. “My lovely Vera. You are looking at one of Mother Russia’s unsung revolutionary heroes, Alexi. She was shooting Tsarists with a one-shot rifle when your grandfather was an infant. I recruited her just before the first World War.”
“Recruited.” All my life, I’d known Sergei was a monster of a kind. I’d known that the Organizatsiya laid machination atop machination, a constantly scheming, writhing morass of men trying to one-up each other while they one-upped the world. I knew that Brighton Beach was a tiny backwater, established in the USA like a military base, or a sleeper cell. But this… this was not what I’d expected. “How… old… are you?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” He mimicked my voice.
In shocked silence, Sergei returned to his chair. He shucked his jacket off before he sat, and thumped his arm down on the armrest, staring at me haughtily as he turned it, palm up, to bear the inside of his elbow. Vera broke her place and went to him, mechanically rolling his sleeve up to expose the skin. He was tattooed from fingertips to bicep… cats, daggers, skulls, crowns, spades. The marks of kingship in the GULAG.
“What was in the warehouse, Alexi?” Sergei sounded calm, now. Reasonable, save for the audible clack of his metal fangs.
Vera was unwrapping a needle and syringe. My shoulders crawled with tension. “I told you.”
“Try again.” Sergei looked up, fixing me with a shark’s blank stare. As his eyes met mine, something clicked in my throat. My tongue twitched.
“Ah… Rr… Rrrr…” I couldn’t stop. The words came up like contractions, like waves of nausea. I fought it, but was like struggling against the urge to vomit. “A… Rind. A Gift… Horse Rind.”
“Hrrrn.” Sergei made a sound low in his throat, and did not flinch as Vera slid the needle into his flesh. Now that I could see him for what he really was, Sergei’s skin was pallid, his muscles the texture of clay. There was no twitch of the skin as the needle slid in – only the tiny squeak of the syringe as Vera drew a full barrel of thick brown fluid. “Finally. And what was in this Rind?”
I fought for my Art, for a word or a gesture or something, anything, to spit in Sergei’s face. As his eyes blazed from across the room, the Hebrew letters would not resolve in my mind’s eye. There was no resisting him, not after he had made me taste his blood. “A… woman,” I said. “Not… human.”