James Baldwin - Blood Hound

“ Bat’ko , there’s going to be a DOG here any minute.” She spoke in accented English, educated, neither American or European. My accent. “Please, we have to go!”

“Dog? What dog?” Carmine blurted.

He took a step towards us, and Zarya shied back, as if warding him away. Without a second thought, I put myself in front of her and shoved him back. “Back it up, pizdha .”

The bigger man’s lips curled, and he snarled wordlessly as he took a step forward. “Back it… hey! You aren’t calling the shots here, you little f—”

Before I could stop myself, I swung at Carmine’s face. He wasn’t expecting it, and my fist took him square in the jaw. He raised his ring hand, but before he got the word of power off, I kicked him in the jaw and he bit his own tongue with a bubbling squawk.

“No. You fucking shut your whore mouth,” I said. “She’s not ‘yours.’ Her name is Zarya.”

“She knows!” Carmine spat, blood pouring down his chin, and pointed at her. I didn’t dare turn to see what Zarya was doing. “She knows Everything!”

“ Blyat! ” Zarya said from behind me. “I can’t use any of these guns! They’re all… oh, GOD dammit…”

“So ask her from over there.” I reached over to the tool bench and picked up another, larger knife. I was pretty sure I could land it in Carmine’s face before he could get his hands up to work magic.

Carmine looked past me, shivering. His reddish eyes were full of the kind of desperation I’d ever only seen in junkies. “Fine, okay. Fine. Listen to me, lady. You listen. I need to know the answer to something.”

“You g-g-got about a minute before we’re all dead.” She was chattering with cold or fear.

“I fuckin’ died on that mountain.” Carmine picked himself up and lurched a step forward. I tensed, but he stopped and turned away to pace sidelong to us both. “I know I did. I remember dying. Lady, you gotta tell me. What the fuck did I see? What the fuck was looking at me?”

“Ah.” Zarya nearly made a sound but, instead, turned away to skim her hands over the array of tools on the table. “No, we don’t have time. And you don’t want to know.”

“I have to know!” He had gone red in the face and whirled back to face us. “It’s driven me nuts! Every night! Every dream! I see it staring at me. What the fuck is it!?”

“I…” She froze, trembling. “It’s… it’s the I. The I of GOD.”

“God?” Carmine’s expression fell. “And the voice?”

She made a small, needy sound, like a sound of hunger. “That’s GOD, too. Look, we need to get—”

“It’s freaking me the fuck out, is what it’s doing!” Carmine was expressive in his agitation, waving his hands. “How do I stop it? Jana told me you could stop it.”

“You… you can’t.” I felt her swallow.

“The only way you can stop GOD looking at you is by removing yourself from your enslavement to it,” added a third voice from across the room. “Listen to the lady, Carmine Mercurio, and while you’re at it, back it up.”

Carmine whipped around on his feet, looking straight at what I also saw and couldn’t believe I was seeing. The small, doughy face of Lev.

Lev held a slender silver pistol outstretched in one hand. He was flanked by three of Carmine’s own enforcers. They had the stupefied, fixed expression of men under thrall. There was no visible turbulence around Lev: no light, no shadow, no flame. Lev’s gaze was keen, and the skin was drawn tight across his jaw with effort. I felt the energy around him, the magic.

“Leave her, Alexi.” Lev’s voice carried through the warehouse. The four men stepped around Vassily. He was crumpled beside a stack of crates, his legs folded awkwardly under his weight. He was pale, a blue-white color that sent a chill through my chest. “Step aside, before I kill you both.”

I looked back at him. “Lev! The hell’s the matter with you?”

“Me? Why, nothing at all.” The small man’s smile was a tight-lipped mask. “I feel bad for you, Alexi. You’ve always been too earnest. Too hard-working. No one appreciates you in the Organizatsiya… but I have a lot to thank you for. Unlocking Jana’s oratory, for one, and leaving it with all of its useful information intact, for another. I paid a visit, I broke her codes. Modified courtroom shorthand. I know everything she knew, about the Fruit, about this… retarded child consciousness that governs our reality. I had no idea she knew so much.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I couldn’t quite mask the fear in my voice. Zarya broke away from my back, and my gut flashed uncomfortably.

“I always figured magic was just a useful skill, you know. Like being good at math or speed-reading. But it’s so much more. I’ve really just begun to grasp the magnitude of what we are dealing with.” Lev blinked rapidly. “Take the Gift Horse. Do you know what she is?”

“Please, Lev. Vassily—”

“I don’t care about Vassily.” Lev’s eyes darkened. Foam was gathering at the corners of his mouth. “She is magic . Literally. Raw power. If I eat her, I’ll be more powerful than both of you put together. Sergei can’t strip me of my position. That scumbag, Nicolai, will be mine. I won’t be playing second fiddle to anyone ever again. EVER.”

“You and what fucking army?” Carmine said.

I wanted to kick him again.

“Anyone I please. I could rule the world with my kind of magic.” Lev’s gaze flicked to a point past his shoulder and stayed there. “If only I had a little more of it.”

It was Carmine who pushed forward, hands raised. “You want magic? You want the girl? You can have her, motherfucker, over my dead body.”

Lev’s reply was to open fire. Carmine threw up a word of power and a gesture with a harsh shout, and then a scream of pain came out as the bullets punched his magical shield with just enough delay that they didn’t burst out of his body. He fell to the ground with an agonized shriek, rolling on the floor. The pain wasn’t normal. I saw the wounds smoking, and his breath came shallower and more quickly as he looked back to Lev.

“You got that gun from Jana’s, didn’t you?” I began to back away. The knife might as well have been a toy. “Lev, you’ll destroy her. She has to be handled by a virgin.”

“No. The Gift Horse has to be birthed and fed by a virgin. It doesn’t need to live for that long afterward.” Lev’s voice was still eerily calm. He was struggling to keep focused on me as Carmine screamed, eyes flicking down and then back again. “I mean… it’s a fruit, isn’t it? You eat it.”

At first, I thought I was still hallucinating when the tip of Lev’s gun began to ooze. The barrel was slowly leaking a familiar greasy oil that dripped from the muzzle and ran down along it, trembling before it broke off and hit the floor. It beaded like black mercury, wobbling—and then the drops began to move towards one another.

“Lev, your gun…” I took a big step back.

Zarya cried out. A knife flew past my face, flung with force from behind me. Lev’s expression contorted: he fired and took the blade just under his collarbone at the same time. His finger convulsed with a wet click. I had seen that before.

“Run!” I backpedaled. A blast of violet-black emulsion spewed from the gun in a torrent: Lev turned ash-white and staggered, throwing the gun away with a yell. The weapon struck the coagulating mass of liquid, hissed on contact, and was absorbed into its mass.

The three Manelli soldiers broke their spell and started shouting, running into each other in their confusion. I started for Vassily as the fluid arched up into a gelatinous mass. It formed a roughly canine shape, but it had too many limbs and far too many teeth.