James Baldwin - Stained Glass

“That’s Ivanko’s car,” I whispered. “But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why not? Who’s Ivanko?” Zane lounged in the back seat of the car alongside me, tapping the flat of his machete on his palm. He, Jenner and Duke hadn’t bothered with armor – and they had hardly bothered with clothes. They were dressed in undershirts and track pants and flip-flops, things they could get off in a hurry.

“Ivanko is the senior boyevik, one of the…” I struggled for a word that wasn’t in another language than English, and briefly failed. “The captains? He serves the Kommandant of our Red Hook operation, Vanya. But Vanya has no jurisdiction over this area… the Kommandant of Brighton Beach is Petro Kravets. Our Avtoritet would only station Ivanko here if Vanya asked to have my apartment for something.”

“Does Ivanko have a face?” Jenner called back. “Because as long as he has a face, I can smash it in, okay?”

“It’s not that easy,” I replied. “They might have a new spook.”

“I ain’t scared of no wizards,” Duke said. “Magic ain’t shit against Weeders.”

That was information to file away in the event I ever needed it. “So the superstitions surrounding shapeshifters are true. Resistance to magic, allergy to silver, and such-like?”

Duke laughed, a high-pitched hyena bray. “Nah, man. The silver thing is all bullshit. It’s like vampires and crosses. Seriously like, the only thing I’m allergic to is the Bee Gees.”

The familiar smell of the Beach hit me when I got out, accompanied by a dull pain I hadn’t expected. The wind was cold, and whipped along the damp pavement with the familiar smells of salt and metal and food and people. I’d lived here my entire life, and would never live here again. “Let’s go.”

We had a plan: all three of the bikers were veteran soldiers who had seen combat before returning to the States. I’d drawn the apartment for them back at the clubhouse. We’d figured out the likely locations for the guard to come around. If I was lucky, Vanya’s men had thrown my suitcases into my wardrobe and left them packed. If I was luckier, my familiar was still alive and my first aid kit would still have clean surgical tools that I could use to operate on myself before anyone realized I had no magic to sling.

The entry hall was dirtier than I remembered, as was the stairwell. The air was thick with the stench of urine. Behind me, I heard someone snort, and turned to briefly see Zane filtering the scent through nose and mouth, just like a cat would. He wasn’t even aware he was doing it: when his eyes focused on me, his jaw snapped shut and his face reddened beneath its coat of light stubble.

My front door had been shot full of holes. Someone had used the Wardbreaker pistol to force their way into my house. The spook who’d helped capture me had probably done it, confirming they had magical skill that equaled or exceeded my own. I was counting on the latter, given how our first run-in had gone.

Zane pulled around to the front while everyone else took position next to the door. He rolled his shoulders back, signed three, two, one… and then charged the door, planting a boot against it and snapping the weakened wood back into the interior of the house with a sharp bang that echoed through my skull.

Jenner was in first, too small and too fast for human eyes to follow. “Here comes the battering ram!”

A man’s shout of surprise rang out, then cut short with a gurgle and a clatter as the rest of us ran in behind her: Duke with his sword, Zane with his machete, me with the knife. Ivanko’s man was down in the hallway, liftchik open, machine pistol on the ground. Jenner was perched on his chest like a pixie: she had struck him in the head enough for it to bleed, but not enough for him to be dead. As I drew up, I recognized his jowly face and spiny hair. It was Kir, one of Vanya’s favorite Union bruisers.

A sense of creeping inertia swept up through my fingers, through to my shoulders, and tightened the muscles of my face until they began to ring. It was no longer my house. My shoes were in disarray, and some of them were missing. There were dirty coats on the wall hooks, and a bag of trash near the door. The air smelled like cigarettes, liquor, strange men, and vomit. The cool sandalwood and lemon smell which had been mine, MINE, was gone. A decade of settlement, erased. And worse, there was no caterwaul. No meowing. No Binah.

I couldn’t call out for her until we’d cleared the house. Grim-jawed, knife held low, I turned into each room. My bedroom was disheveled, my things thrown everywhere and left to gather dust. The den was empty of people. Shelves of books were overturned. MY books. My radio was gone, and a TV had been set on the coffee table.

The kitchen was cluttered with cheap plastic chairs that formed a circle around the small table. A Bunsen burner, still warm, sat beside a stack of charred glass saucers, blackened teaspoons, and abandoned syringes. Burned pages from books were scattered around it. My first-edition copy of The Hobbit had been pulled apart, set alight, and used to heat heroin.

“Smells like someone was cooking junk in here.” Duke came in behind, sniffing.

“They used Tolkien.” My ears were ringing. Someone had broken the carafe of my coffee maker. The sink was full of dirty dishes, the counter cluttered with beer bottles and deli takeout containers. Ashtrays were everywhere, even in the laundry. “They’ve gone and turned my house into a goddamn crack den.”

Each word ground harder and tighter, until a choked sound of wordless fury forced itself out and I had to, HAD to lash out. My foot hit one of the cheap fold-out chairs and kicked it across the room to smash into the far wall. It wasn’t enough. “FUCK!”

I swept the table and turned it, kicked it. Only when it was broken, the glassware destroyed, did I return and remember that Zane was watching in silence from the doorway. Duke was back further down, rattling the door to Vassily’s room. It was locked.

“We need to get in and out of here, Rex.” Zane’s voice was low and solemn. “These guys aren’t the kind of men we want to have to shoot out with. Not in a—”

My ears twitched, and I held a hand up, trying to see if I was hallucinating in my fury. But then I heard it again, the sound of a distressed cat meowing from a distance. “Wait. Can you hear that?”

“I hear it,” Jenner said. She passed me, turning her head. If she’d had a tail, it would be flicking. “Is it outside?”

“The balcony.” I drove past her back into the laundry, and pushed the curtain away from the glass doors that led outside, heart hammering. I cracked the door, and the muffled wailing sharpened in volume and pitch: the frantic, deep-bodied ‘waow, waow, waow’ ambulance siren call of a Siamese cat.

Binah’s intelligent white eyes gleamed at me through the narrow mesh of a cramped hutch strewn with splintered chicken bones, dried and fresh feces, and bits of rubbish. She looked like an anorexic rat: skinny, covered in sores, and – as I closed in and got a good look at her – mostly bald. Her fur had been shaved off in uneven patches. The sores were from where she had been burned with cigarettes. The lock was just a simple slide bolt, but not anything a cat could open.

“Binah…” With shaking hands, I pulled my gloves off and opened the cage. The pain of the cold metal against my fingers was inconsequential. “Come here, Binah.”

I extended a hand in towards her, but not too far. Binah’s nostrils worked as she meowed, but for several long seconds, she didn’t approach. When she finally did reach her head forward to sniff properly, her flanks began to vibrate with shivers. As awareness filtered in through her pain, she tentatively butted my hand with her head and began to purr.