James Baldwin - Burn Artist

“No,” The thought of touching a stranger – having a stranger touch me in ways I had never been touched, ways which were bound to be painful – made my skin crawl. “I need a shower. After that, I need to go for Kovacs.”

“Oh, come on,” Vassily said. “You literally nearly just got fried by that fire thing. You’re not the Terminator. You need to sleep.”

“I need to stop any more of our men from dying by conflagration.”

“A what in the who now?”

I sighed. “Dying in a fire, Vassily.”

“When you stop speaking real words, it’s time to go home.”

“I’m not tired,” I replied. “I’m hopped up. I need to find Kovacs tonight, before the party tomorrow. You know Rodion won’t buy it if I’m out in the field and skip his birthday. He’ll think I’m avoiding him, now that Grigori is going to go and bitch me out.”

“Yeah, well, unlike Grisha, you actually do your job. Rodya won’t care if I tell him where you’re at.”

“That’s not the point.” I turned and started for the door to the parking lot. “The point is that I’ve left a job half done.”

“Alexi… don’t listen to your dad. He was trying to get a rise out of you.”

“I got a rise out of him .” The high was fading. Now, I was irritable and hungry, hopped up and in need of something to punch, preferably more than once. “Shower. Change of clothes, then Kovacs. It’s a Friday night, and at the very least, I can find out where he lives.”

I found the apartments that the elemental had shown me without much trouble. Gold Street Apartments were new, renovated warehouse condos, fancy modern apartments bankrolled by the Mob. They were entirely out of place between the drab public housing towers on one side of the block, and old waterfront factories on the other. Fifteen minutes of note-taking and some surveying was enough for me to decide what to do about him. It involved a pair of binoculars and a sniper rifle.

If I’d marked Kovacs correctly, he was an Arrogant Douchewizard, T.M. Spooks generally come in three varieties: The Crazy Street Shaman, the Secretive Professional, and the Arrogant Douchewizard. They’re the guys – and they’re nearly all men – who wear robes to restaurants, carry carved staves or amulets out on the street, and generally make a scene of themselves at every opportunity. They can be overt, with the robes and Staff of Power thing, or subtle. The subtle kind are those annoying Freemason types who have a nudge and a wink for every bit of ‘hidden’ esoterica, no matter how mundane.

The condos were on Gold Street. I found them by orientating with the three public housing towers and then driving around the nearby blocks until the elemental’s image overlay reality. The setting was almost too good to be true. There was an old disused building right across from the balcony that I’d seen, a gutted factory with no security to speak of. There was no guard patrolling the condos themselves, and I was quite sure that the extent of Kovacs mundane security was a passworded entry into his fancy new apartment building. If he was counting on magical defenses sunk into the foundations, he was kidding himself. The consecration of buildings hadn’t been a standard practice since the 1880s.

I found and disarmed a single ward on the warehouse across the street. There were the usual locks and physical security measures on it – a padlock, which was easily removed with bump keys – and only one bump-proof lock on the door that I had to pick. Once I was in, I took the stairs to the roof and set up, the wind blowing my hair across my eyebrows. It was warm and breezy, and while the wind wasn't expressly in my favor, it was soft enough to not be a huge handicap for a high-powered rifle.

The sniper rifle wasn't a gun I got to use often, but it had several advantages. For one thing, it had completely interchangeable, replaceable parts. I'd never used the same barrel twice on this gun, which was important for not getting done for murder. For another, I had no doubt that Kovacs had festooned himself with magic designed to protect against magical and physical attack – at close range. Wards designed to turn a bullet could only take so much kinetic energy and were nearly all designed with pistols in mind. In addition, the gun was quiet despite its size, and the single, precise crack was rarely interpreted as a threat even within an urban jungle like this one.

The biggest impediment I faced was myself. As I assembled the piece and fixed the stand, I found that my heart just really wasn't in it. I was tired and burned out. Vassily had been right about my fatigue and the need to rest, but time was not on our side. Besides, killing Kovacs would solve the problem of my Avtoritet’s birthday present. Nothing says ‘happy birthday’ like giving someone the severed hands of their enemy in a fancy box.

I set the muzzle of the rifle as far back from the edge of the warehouse as I could. When I had a good, steady position, I lay on my belly with the binoculars, braced the weapon in against my shoulder, and settled down to wait for life to stir behind the curtains of Kovacs’ bedroom window. And wait I did… two hours of nothing, in fact, before a light turned on further back in the apartment and shadows began to move across the walls inside.

“Finally.” I shuffled around on the ground, stiff and uncomfortable, and swapped out the binoculars for the scope of the rifle. After several tense minutes of inactivity, I began to hum a half-remembered song under my breath to pass the time, waiting for the first physical glimpse of this warlock who could curse a man to burn to death.

I was just getting into the refrain when the light turned on and a person stumbled into the room, spinning around to face the door where they had just come from. My heart sped, and my finger tensed on the trigger, freezing in place when I saw the hair – long, blonde, teased and curled. A woman, not a man. Frowning, I forced my finger light and resuming squinting down the scope, redoubling my concentration.

The woman was tall, leggy and laughing with a model's white smile as she spoke to someone out of my sight. Quite abruptly, she reached down and pulled her tank top off over her head and took her bra with it, spilling her breasts from underneath. My face flooded with heat; my head jerked up and back, and I cursed as I nearly took my own eye out on the edge of the scope.

Fantastic. With my eye itching and smarting, I refocused on the other side. There was another woman in there now – dark haired, small and buxom. She was kissing the blonde passionately and, I thought, drunkenly. I found myself feeling increasingly lost as I watched the pair of them tumble onto the bed in a heaving wave of long hair and limbs. Neither of these women looked like anyone named Eric.

My cheeks were burning as I forced myself to stay at the scope, and on the scene in the bedroom. If the women cared that the blind was open and their privates were on public display to all and sundry, it didn’t show. Clothes went flying, and the blonde reared up on her knees – fully nude, by this point – and laughed as she turned to face back toward the entry to the bedroom.

And then, finally, a man appeared in my narrow round frame. He was further back in the room and out of focus, lurking in the shadows on the far side of the bed. Just enough of him was visible that I could tell he was male. I screwed the eyepiece around to zoom in on him, chewing a flake of skin off my lip as I looked back down and recoiled. Yes. Definitely male. Definitely naked, and judging by what he was doing with his hand, apparently impressed by the cavorting taking place on top of his bed. He was hairy, trim but fleshy, with a sullen, heavy face and curly black hair. Not unattractive, under other circumstances… but my god. I should have listened to Vassily and just gone to bed.