James Baldwin - Blood Hound

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 wetwork. 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.”

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Set five years before Blood Hound, BURN ARTIST documents the last major events before Vassily’s incarceration.

Burn Artist| Book 0

Blood Hound| Book 1

Stained Glass| Book 2

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Guilty By Association : Supernatural murders in a modern Wild West. Get it here: http://amzn.to/2dstVQk

Charm School : A young mage must fight his demon master and find his own purpose and freedom. Get it here: http://amzn.to/2dsuZn1

Grave Beginnings : Vincent Graves is a body-hopping detective. Incarnated into the bodies of the slain, he must solve their murders in a race against the clock. Get it here: http://amzn.to/2dhoxPc

Vincent Graves wakes up in the body of a man who died in an asylum and has to find his unearthly murderer. Get it here: http://amzn.to/2dyLbRd

The Yaroschenko Organizatsiya is actually two gangs: the largely autonomous Brighton Beach/USA faction who identify with Sergei’s surname, plus a larger Organizatsiya in Kiev, Ukraine who call themselves the Sviatoshyn Gang. As of 1991, the hierarchy is as follows:

Pakhun

Sergei Yaroshenko

Avtoritet

Lev Moskalysk

Brighton Beach Advokat

Alexi Sokolsky (in training)

Volkhv/Spook

Alexi Sokolsky

Brighton Beach Kommandant

Nicolai Chiernenko

Brighton Beach Street Captain/Head of Security

Petro Kravets

Red Hook/East Village Kommandant

Vanya Kazupov

Red Hook Advokat

Yegor Gavrilyuk

Red Hook Street Captain

Ivan ‘Ivanko’ Andreichenko

The first prototype for Alexi, Dante, started out as a character in an old IRC D&D group that I played with while I was in university. We were running a campaign in the Forgotten Realms setting—a protracted PVP murder-mystery style plot, where one of the characters was the murderer and had to pick off the other characters while they tried to figure out what was going on. The Dungeon Master asked me if I’d like to play the murderer. I made a Lawful Evil cleric with the ability to disguise his alignment, and deployed him as the healer for the party. He was so effective that they only worked out who it was when it was far too late. In a single session of absolute carnage, he strangled the paladin, poisoned the fortress well so that all our NPCs were sick, then let the forces of darkness in to overwhelm our weakened garrison. He then kidnapped the cute (male) rogue, who became his loyal brainwashed boy-toy, and took the artifact the garrison was supposed to be protecting. Everyone had a great time, but they were floored by this motherfucker: a fussy, thoughtful, outwardly compassionate but deeply bitter and merciless man capable of great foresight. Dante was compelling, confusing, and contradictory. I knew I’d found a winning archetype.

Alexi began to take more shape when I deployed his essential characteristics for a WOTC d20 Modern game, this time, as a mundane-but-talented crooked cop. As time went by, I gradually began to conceive of the character as being an organized criminal rather than a corrupt policeman, and the rest of his backstory followed. But it wasn’t until I entered the Dermal Highway setting that I fully realized Alexi for what he was… a character who exists in multiple places and multiple times. Part James Bond, part Dr. Who, part Constantine. The first draft of the book was written in 2009.

While working as a bouncer in 2010, I got a telecommute job for a small magazine in Australia. Seeing the opportunity for what it was, I gave up all of my personal possessions and traveled the world for three years, moving from country to country and keeping up a long-distance relationship with my soon-to-be wife. But I knew, as soon as I left Australia, that all roads led to Brighton Beach. I got there at one in the morning on a very hot night in 2012. The train carriage had one sleeping, coked-out office worker, two Russian women, and me—a very nervous Australian backpacker. Expecting to be mugged at every turn, I eventually found Brighton 8th Street, where I walked in on a fight between a cat and a raccoon. The fight was being cheered on by a group of cheerful Slavic men in sleeveless undershirts and gold chains, bottles in their hands, cigarettes in the corners of their mouths. They welcomed me like I’d come home, as did everyone else I met there. In other words, the place was pretty much as I’d always imagined it.