James Baldwin - Stained Glass

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.

Earlier in August, I’d faced down demons, DOGs, an insane sorceress, a sixteen-man shootout, and seen the I of GOD itself. My best friend had died in my arms; I’d had a gun shoved in my mouth, been tortured, kidnapped, and nearly car-bombed. I’d eaten from the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and faced death more times in that one week than I had in the last six years. But not a single one of those things were as intimidating as the prospect of freedom. I had most of a double degree in law and psychology that would get me approximately nowhere without grad school. Besides that, my only skills related to wet-work. Shoot a gun, throw a knife, sling a spell… sure thing. But hold a job? Finish grad school? Did they even have grad school in Germany?

The yawning expanse of that lifetime, all those years ahead, unseen… it felt like looking down the empty blackness of a gun barrel. A real gun would have been more comforting. At least the outcome was certain.

Something resolved in me: a deep, hot anger, the kind that burned a hole right through the gut. My jaws tensed until my teeth locked. I hauled the wheel and turned back out onto the road, wipers swiping the first rain of Fall off the windshield. “I’m checking out the club tonight.”

“Alexi—”

“No. You’ll get what you want. We’ll be on that flight come hell or high water. But just remember that you helped me out once , you got me out of one bad situation, Kutkha. Every other time, it was just me. I killed the DOGs. I freed Zarya and shook off the dope. I coped just fine without you before, and I’ll do it again if I have to.”

“As you say, proud Ruach.” Kutkha’s molten white gaze bore into me from the arc of my peripheral vision, as bright and cold as the Morning Star at dawn . “As you say.”

There was no sign of Celso or his retinue when I cruised by the Gemini Lounge. He a party boy, chauffeured in a distinctly visible red Hummer everywhere around town. If it wasn’t in the parking lot, neither was he.

Half an hour later than I originally planned and seething with manic energy, I arrived at my apartment for the last time. I slammed the car door and the trunk and my briefcase, hugged my summer jacket against the rain, and stormed into the lobby. Brighton Beach was sullen tonight, the concrete wet and steaming, the air warm and oppressively humid. The Atlantic was shrouded in fog, the sky tinted orange by the light and pollution of a restless city. It was close to four am, but I could still see clearly in the weird brownish light.

Binah, my familiar, was caterwauling behind my front door, and she kept it up all the way through the muttered incantation that unwarded it. Ever since the demon-possessed corpse in my kitchen, I’d been more scrupulous with my wards. My sudden jump in ability had given me the confidence to experiment, too. I no longer only had alarms: I had an offensive ward, a design painted onto my red door with red paint that almost completely blended into the background color. People could knock. They could even touch the doorknob. But if someone tried to force my door, or if they charged it with kinetic force, the ward would react violently.

I didn’t even have my key out of the lock before the cat wormed through the gap and threw herself into my arms like a needy child. My familiar didn’t rub her face against things so much as ram herself into them. I took several blows to the head as she scrabbled onto my shoulder.

“Honestly.” I pushed Binah’s rear end up to help her gain purchase while she tried to arch against the side of my head, tail wrapping around my face. She was a lilac-point Siamese with perfect breed conformation, a lanky feline supermodel only slightly less graceful than a bulldozer. “Do you mind? ”

“Mrraow. Mrrrp.” She began to lick the side of my head, sputtering and shaking when she got my hair in her mouth.

Binah purred against my neck as I took my shoe off, thought better of it, and stamped it back on. What was the point? There were maybe forty minutes until I had to leave the house again, and then I was never coming back. All I had to do was change my shirt and coat, crate the cat, and take my bags outside. That was it. I’d worn plastic rain slicker pants over my clothes when I’d killed Celso to keep the blood off them, and they’d gone in the burn pile – a trick of the trade.

And yet I stood still, frozen in place. The silence of the house boomed around me. It was small and old, so familiar that I often left the lights off when I was home and navigated by touch and smell and pattern. It smelled of books and paper and sandalwood. The apartment used to smell like Vassily, too, and it was frightening how quickly his scent had faded. It was two weeks to the day since he’d died, and his things were just as he’d left them: his shaving cream, his ties on the rack, his gold zippo case. His bedroom was a mute museum to his occupation, the sheets rumpled in the place he’d left them during his last night. Even so, his scent had vanished within days. It was easy to imagine the place dark and quiet, gathering dust as my scent also faded from the furnishings.

The fear rose in my throat again. I jerked my shoulders, pulled my gloves up along my wrists, sniffed, and forced myself towards my bedroom.

This small room had been the same, more or less, for fifteen years. Formerly crammed with books and occult paraphernalia, it was now imbued only with the empty, neat blandness of a hotel room. I was taking three suitcases, not even a tenth of what remained in the house. I was leaving my less-legal weapons, armor, munitions, tools, and most of my collection of books behind. The floor-to-ceiling shelves in the den had been custom-made for those books by one of Mariya’s friends. Not for the first time, I wondered: Why was I leaving the Beach, and not them? Why didn’t I go down to AEROMOR, shoot Sergei, shoot Vanya, and plant my flag? Even if they hadn’t bought or tipped off Celso and Snappy Joe, they deserved every bullet.