Vera stood by Sergei, stock still, as he leaned forwards on his too-small chair. “Dark skin? White hair? Blue eyes?”
“Pale skin. White hair. Blue eyes.” The description ground out of my throat like gravel.
“Tall?”
“Yes.” I was grateful that her face was a blur. I could remember Zarya, the things she said. I’d know her scent if it blew to my nose from a mile downwind. But there was nothing for me to describe. “Yes.”
Sergei smiled, and a flicker of some half-hidden emotion flashed over his face, too elusive and too subtle for me to understand. “And was she… healthy? Young and innocent?”
His questions stopped my tongue. “Healthy, yes…”
He waited.
I swallowed again, and the words came up without my being able to stop them. It was everything I could do to steer the course of what I blurted. “Not especially young. She… was articulate. Knew how to fight. She… cursed a few times.”
“What was her name?” His pupils pinned.
“Z… Ts… Tss…” Ticcing, struggling, I couldn’t look away from his eyes, and I couldn’t stop my tongue from forming the word. “Zar…ya.”
“Ohhh.” His eyes narrowed. “Zarya. What a lovely name for a Mare.”
The syllables tripped off his tongue like a caress, like was lingering over a candy. GOD help me, he knew what she was. They had a history. My hands shook, clenching on the armrests of the interrogation seat. “No.”
“No what?” His lips cracked with a gun-metal smile.
“You stay away from her,” I choked the words out. “Pizdha. Don’t you—”
“Pfff, look at you. Moonstruck, aren’t you?” Sergei bared his teeth. “I knew you must have eaten her, Alexi. I smelled it on you. People who eat those soaking cunts always turn out the same way. This is why I decided that you weren’t coming with me to Thailand. Not like this, not after listening to her lies. Not after eating her heart, and you did, didn’t you? They like that. They beg for it.”
It X’d me. It wants to X you too. Zarya’s voice, fluted and soft, rang from some half-forgotten niche of memory.
“No. I didn’t eat her heart. I killed her to free her from the DOG that killed Lev.” I wasn’t sure why that was important. Maybe it was because I knew, somehow, that the DOG had taken his soul as well as his body. Like Sergei wanted to do to me.
“Changing the subject, are we?” Sergei chuckled, and stood. “So it did. So it did. What a shame it didn’t take you instead.”
His change of position broke our eye contact, and my guts churned with sudden, renewed terror. I jerked my restraints, shook them, and when I glanced down in my fear, I saw what had been itching on my belly all this time. My stomach was streaked red and black. A seal the size of a dinner plate had been burned into my skin, touching my waist on either side. There was a crudely sewn incision just under my navel, a deep incision. There was something underneath the skin there… and the stuff that crusted the edges and ran down my belly was black.
“What did you do to me?” I flinched back against the chair as he stepped forwards. “WHAT DID YOU DO!?”
“Okh, stop it.” Sergei motioned back to Vera. “In all my years, boy, I’ve only met four starets’ with your kind of ability. Lev Pavlovich was a good man, very good… but he was a sixer, eh? Not very powerful for a sorcerer of his type. I’m not going to kill you, Alexi, now that I know you’re not strong enough to hold out on me. Two more infusions of blood from me, and you’ll do anything I say. You’ll bend over when I tell you to bend over. You can still be useful.”
“Fuck you.”
“Funny you should say, eh?” Sergei grinned. “You know how an upir is made?”
I dropped my chin, sighting down at him. “An upir is created when an evil sorcerer dies an unclean death.”
“Indeed. And you have been murdering men all your life, haven’t you? You’re already in the transit lane to Hell.” Sergei clapped his hands, and reached out. Vera handed him the needle and syringe. “It’s a little more complicated than that, but yes… an unclean death, and then the abuse of the corpse afterward before a ritual burial at the crossroads. So fucking is part of the equation, boy. I will be sure to get you a Jack of Hearts tattoo so that everyone knows your place with me.”
“Don’t.” I shrunk back, as far as the back of the chair allowed for.
“I was dragged by horses down a road when I died, Alexi. Dragged naked down the streets in front of my entire kingdom, like rotten meat.” Sergei sighed, and stepped in close. He lay the point of the needle against my throat. “Just imagine what I will do to you.”
Chapter 4
Vampire blood is a powerful hallucinogen that does two things to those who consume it. It puts you under the power of the upir who fed it to you, and it heals wounds. Even terrible wounds.
I roused into wet, cold darkness, stirring from a dream where a red star broke through a white mirrored sky. A stream of black figures descended from the hole, dripping and dropping to the land and sea. I was naked. My mouth was bitter with the taste of burned wax.
The cell walls crawled in every direction, seething with what I first thought was a mass of prismatic spiders. Everything writhed and hissed, lashed and scuttled. It took me a few groggy minutes to realize that none of the ‘spiders’ ever reached their destinations. The churning wet sounds were from my body as it healed in quick-time: the snap and pop of my ribs and broken ankles resetting, the sub-audible squeak of tissues as my bruises swelled, blooming like stopmotion flowers before dwindling away. I was painfully aware of all of my bodily functions, the sensation of a billion tiny organic engines wriggling on and through my bones. My guts, crawling with peristalsis. My heart, squeezing. I felt like a discordant orchestra, and over everything was awful, skin-wracking pain.
The spiders turned to lizards as I stared at the walls, wrists clamped between my thighs, then looked up through the filtered light coming down from overhead. They’d taken me to the basement hole. This was the hole where we kept guys lined up for execution. It was a converted sewer drain in the lower level of the AEROMOR warehouse, a nine-foot vertical shaft bricked off from a large sewer tunnel, part of the complex that shunted effluence into the ocean. There was a barred steel grate overhead, the only way in or out. The pit was bottle-shaped, with a narrow neck spreading out into a five-by-five foot square of space. If I had magic, I’d be out in five minutes. Cut off from Kutkha, I had nothing.
Nothing. Nothing wasn’t good enough. I had to make something. Sergei could take my magic from me, but there were some things that no one could take. My will. My pride.
There was a patch of wall in front of my face that was different from the rest. While every other part of the shaft was covered in wrigglers, there was a round cutout where they passed around the bricks and mortar, deviating like a river channel. This cutout part looked soggy, like moldy bread. As I stared, the patch of wall grew orange tentacles that yearned towards my face. Boils studded the limbs like flowers. They burst open with steaming pus that dripped down to the floor, and the wounds turned to little babbling mouths.
Hit me, they whispered.
The grout looked mossy, fuzzy… soft enough to push through. Curious, I inched towards it. The weird, furry electrical warmth of static passed over the skin of my face, causing my hair to bristle. The illusion wavered. I took a deep breath, and slung a weak fist into the writhing mass. I misjudged the distance, smacked my fingers awkwardly against hard stone and rolled back, clutching and cursing as everything whited out. I roared, and kicked out in temper. The wall ahead of me shuddered. Dirt rained down from somewhere up high.