James Baldwin - Stained Glass

That was all I took with me downstairs. I emerged into the misty night, jacket open, and glanced across the street to place Nic. He was leaning against the driver’s side door of a white Cadillac Seville, smoke trailing off into the air. The back of his head faced me. I drew the Wardbreaker, and held it low against my thigh as the ghosts of the last month flickered through my memory. Nicolai smirking as he revealed masterstroke after masterstroke: Hooking Vassily on coke, keeping me indebted while he talked shit about me to the other men in the Organizatsiya. He’d been our mentor growing up, a friend to Mariya. She’d given Nicolai the keys to her car. He taught Vassily and I how to drive… raising us like wheat to harvest when the time was right. I had liked him, respected him. Now, I was going to cut him down. My hands weren’t even shaking.

I was about two thirds of the way across the street when time rippled… and stopped.

My foot did not fall on the ground ahead. Suddenly, I could hear everything in my body, feel things I couldn’t normally feel. My heart, contracting. My stomach, squeezing. My throat working, muscles bunching as I instinctively exerted with all my strength against the sudden inertia. My head, thrown up in alarm, moved in fractions of an inch through a single soupy drawn out second, and for that moment, I wondered if I had accidentally manifested magic I didn’t know I had.

Through the haze, I saw a tall, dark shadow move out from around the trunk of my car, standing and turning. His outline blurred and shifted, too fast for my slowed-down eyes to follow, but I glimpsed the shadowed plane of a featureless, flat mask through the fog. Nicolai was turning, his words made incomprehensible by slowness, as the half-seen stranger raised a pistol and pointed it at my face.

Nic lunged at the mage’s arm, shoving it across. My hand wouldn’t lift, and my mouth wouldn’t move fast enough around the word of power as the bullet flew from the barrel and pulsed through a cloud of smoke towards me.

My mind was not slowed. I forced the word forward through my will alone. “Chet!”

A thin blue cornea-like membrane, half-seen and fragile, spun itself ahead of me. With time slowed, I had the chance to see what it was that my intention created. The bullet hit the flimsy shield, shattering it like glass, and as it shattered, the projectile rebounded from it, flying straight back at the gunman. Right as Nic finally grabbed his sleeve.

The temporal vortex snapped with the mage’s concentration. I stumbled forwards at high speed, tripping over my own mass and smashing nose-first onto the road. White light flashed up behind my eyes. Blind with pain, I scrabbled up to hands and feet, only to be knocked down again by something heavy falling across my back. The blow sent me straight back to the ground and took the wind out of my lungs. I rolled over, drawing the kukri and lashing out with it. The thick blade barely turned the pipe Nic swung down at my face. It jarred my wrist: he knocked the knife away on the backstroke, and then he was on top of me.

Nic was strong and wiry, but he was old. As his fist came down, I turned my head, and he drove his knuckles into the bitumen instead of my nose. I bought my knee up between his legs and flailed with the hilt of the kukri, snarling with the effort. He guarded his face; it took him in the wrist, then the neck as his arm failed under the blows. I shoved him off and stumbled up to face the charging spook bringing the butt of his pistol down where my neck had been. I couldn’t see him clearly for his speed – unnatural speed disguising him in a tumble of dark clothes and bright red blood.

Blood. The bullet had cut him. I threw a hand up and tried to cast a spell, but the spook was supernaturally fast. Twice, I managed to dodge the corner of the pistol, but it finally took me in the temple and sent me staggering away.

My vision looped. Retching with sudden nausea, I wasn’t fast enough to evade the arm that wrapped around my throat from behind and cut off my voice.

“ Blyat! You didn’t hear Sergei, damn idiot suka!? ” Nicolai spat from behind me as I struggled to keep my air and prize his arm from my neck. “Alive! He wants him alive! ”

“Don’t speak to me like that. I advised your superior that he needs to be put down,” was the cool reply. “You saw what he did when—”

I got my jaws between Nic’s arm and my body, and bit as hard as I could. His flesh split under my teeth, and he howled. Blows landed against my back and head, and the world narrowed to that central point as both men closed on me. I ripped flesh from Nicolai’s wrist and turned, bestial, on the stranger. His hand got too close to my mouth. I snapped at it, biting down until something crunched.

But I was going down. The gravel on the road pierced my skin through my slacks as I fought up against their combined weight – the man who’d taught me everything, and the one who had no name. My teeth went numb, and the world turned black as they brought me to ground.

Cold. Everything was cold, and stiff, and aching. The world returned in pieces, brittle moments of sensation. My hands and throat hurting. My head bumping rhythmically against something hard. My cheek was pressed against crunchy carpet, damp and prickly, vibrating with every dip in the road. Then Nic turned a corner, hard, and my head rammed into the side of the trunk. Damp darkness overtook all.

The next sensation was shivers, cold metal, and then blinding hot light. The lamp burst through my eyelids like a punch to the face. As the world swayed into focus, recognition filtered in past the pain and incessant itching. I knew this room. The AEROMOR warehouse interrogation room was small, square, tiled white on the floor and all four walls. There was a drain set in the center. I was stripped to the waist, chained to a bar mounted near the rear corner of the room, on a hard seat that was bolted to the floor. The man and woman in front of me, they were also familiar. Terribly so.

Sergei reclined on a rickety office chair from the upstairs warehouse, hands folded on his belly. He had one leg crossed over the other, leaning back on his too-small seat with the presence and nonchalance of a king. And a king he was. He was pushing seventy and was still usually the largest man in the room, with a thick red beard and oiled red hair pulled back into a short ponytail. The Pakhun of the mafiya that bore his surname looked more Viking than Slav – a Viking in a gaudy red velvet suit that clashed violently with his hair.

Vera Akhatova stood at parade rest beside him, straight as a rail and just as hard. She was sinewy and strong, with taut freckled arms, a short bob of brown straw hair, and no obvious humanity. She carried two revolvers on her belt, one on each side. They were both loaded and primed.

“Well,” Sergei finally said. “Alexi Grigoriovich Sokolsky. We have come full circle.”

My head was clearing, slowly. Too slowly. I tried to call anger, energy, a word of power. Nothing formed in my mind, an empty echoing cavern. I felt empty, small, weak. Alone. Alone?

Where was Kutkha?

“We are presented with temptations in life, Alexi. Tests.” Sergei laced his hands on his knee as he leaned forward. “Tests by which we judge a character of a man. Men in this business have to have mettle, hmm? The kind that lets them permit someone else to take charge without shame or suspicion. Someone who plays the long game, Alexi. Who knows what they are doing.”

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 ?”