James Baldwin - Burn Artist

We were gathered with him, Nicolai and Petro, Yuri Beretzniy – a great grizzled mountain of a man and one of Nic’s old war buddies – Semyon and Lev in the swanky den of our newest safehouse, a penthouse apartment in a highrise overlooking Luna Park. There was horilka , [26] Ukrainian style vodka, typically flavored with spicy peppers, fruit, or herbs. of course. The purple rotten smell of it challenged my tenuous hold over my stomach.

“Alexi is going to K&S to do the Gandalf and the Balrog thing,” Vassily had a drink, though I had no idea how he could deal with it after the night before. When his remark received blank looks from around the table, he had a sip and tried again. “He’s going to go face down the spook on his own turf, in other words.”

“Is Grisha able to go with us to get Maslak?” Nic rasped. “I’ll send men out to check his house, his office, and a couple of the Scappeti safehouses that were leaked to me, but I could use the muscle.”

“You can go to 6th Street and ask him,” Rodion said. “But you know what he’s like. This ain’t something he can fight. He’s trying to stay calm.”

Calm? Grigori, calm? If they meant that he was torturing someone’s Golden Retriever while drinking himself unconscious, then yes, I supposed he could be described as being in a state of calm. When my father holed himself up like that, it was a prelude to a late-night homicidal rampage. No matter how emasculated he felt by his fate, my father only had two responses to anything that happened to him: uncontrollable rage and displacement of responsibility onto the nearest convenient target.

“If he’s bitching and moping, I’ll pull him out of it,” Yuri rumbled. “The old bear listens to me.”

Rodion nodded. “Then you better get your ass down to his house. We’ve got to time this right.”

“I have preparations I must make in the time we have,” I said, almost interrupting. “To coordinate it correctly, I should reach K&S while he’s conducting the rite at around 9pm. For your bluff to be effective, you’ll need to have secured Maslak before that time.”

“Then we better get a move on,” Nicolai said. “It’s already 1600.”

“I’ll go to check the condo with Lev and Semyon,” Vassily said. Semyon nodded.

“Then let’s do it. Old soldiers to the fore, intelligence to the rear, our spook to the avant garde . Let’s sweep these fuckers up.” Rodion smacked his hands on his thighs and stood. We all rose, and I turned to Vassily and Semyon.

“I’m going to have to be at home by myself for a period of time, undisturbed,” I said. “This requires preparation.”

“Do what you have to do, oh Jedi Master.” Vassily saluted me. “May the Force be with you.”

Preparations consisted of painkillers and B vitamins, first of all, because I was still hungover. Once my eyes stopped throbbing, I settled into meditation and planned out my strategy. Magic written onto my skin was the first line of defense, followed by the bone amulet. A knife, soft body armor, and other basic weaponry went on over that. And then there was the mental preparation, the most important part of all.

I knelt in front of my altar, and considered the arrangement of occult paraphernalia that surrounded the Wardbreaker, still lying in its preservative circle. My tarot card for the week, set out last Sunday, was The Sun : the card of friendship, hope, positivity. I’d been trying to stay hopeful about Vassily’s court date.

To do this, I had to banish my petulance and disappointment, and that meant that I had to do something that Grigori was incapable of. I had to think about him and myself and come to peace with the reality of our situation. As I dwelt on the matter, I realized that for all the things I hated about Grigori, it had been him who had unwittingly guided me into piercing the veil between material reality and the metaphysical. As I’d watched him kill with the open question of a child’s wonderment, I’d come to understand the fragility of life. The first time I watched the lights fade out of a man’s eyes led to the question of: “Where did he go?” My father’s narcissism made me wonder what the alternatives were available to me, and his violence had toughened me, even as it had turned me cold. His nihilism had resulted in my interest in fate and self-determination, which resulted in my investigation of the occult and then my first moments of magical awakening. Tiny acts of telekinesis, at first, and then the creation and destruction of wards. I’d learned magic in the library at college, and practiced it while stealing cars for Nicolai. I would never love him, and the day he died would be one of the happiest and most victorious days of my life… but I could deal with it for a little while longer.

My mind fell still, and I could lapse into a proper trance. Meditation on The Sun and myself let me open up to the reality beyond New York, beyond the small world of the Organizatsiya. There was a sense of presence that came to the fore in meditation, a presence with many names. Aleister Crowley called it the Holy Guardian Angel. Jung called it Anima or Animus. The Romans called it Genius. Some other, more powerful mages described this presence like another being, but I’d never been able to access it beyond vague glimpses of something locked away deep inside. Even so, when I opened my eyes and lit on the Wardbreaker, that silent voice of intuition nagged at me. I reached toward it, and the hairs on the nape of my neck prickled as the laughter of crows outside broke through the thick silence in the room. The crow and raven were the creatures of the Sun in Slavic lore: a trickster god, an inventor and a Promethean. Wordlessly, I understood the compulsion. It was time to take the pistol in combination with my knowledge of wards and the flow of magical energy, and bet my life on it.

I was not surprised to discover that the entry to K&S now had a large chain and padlock, along with a new white and red sign that read: ‘TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED'. The gate was ajar, and the padlock was blasted and melted around the keyhole, hooked over one of the chain links. Kovacs was hoping his final move would be his last, pinning his hopes on being confronted in his place of power – that, or he had planned a setup. He had good reason to be confident. Despite meditating and drinking three cups of coffee, I still had a hangover, and this was guaranteed to be a fight.

I pulled my newly empowered talisman out of my shirt and let it hang on the outside of my body armor, then drew a deep breath and pulled the glove off my right hand. My skin crawled as I took up my little ritual knife and cut a short, deep gash in my palm. White and black spikes shot up behind my eyes and left my ears ringing as I loaded and primed the Wardbreaker. Holding onto the grip hurt – a lot – but this was a tool that needed to be blood-bound.

With the gun in hand, I slipped in through the gap in the gate. As soon as I passed the threshold and entered the scrapyard, I knew he was here. The momentary line of sight outside his apartment and my analysis of his magic had imprinted his particular magical signature in my senses, physical and not. All energy had a smell and taste to me, as audible and tactile as the buzzing static of a TV in a quiet room or the hum of overhead wires on the street. I followed the ripples caused by Kovacs' weirding of the local area, nosing through the scrapyard like a shark tailing the overripe orange-peel and sulfur scent of the other man's magic. Here and there, I passed signs of his passing and his desperation. The new junkyard dog was as dead as the last one, its neck broken and its skull caved in with a deep, long depression. There was no sign of burning. Three days of high-powered cursing had tired my opponent out and drained his magical reserves.