James Baldwin - Burn Artist

The shot was nearly soundless: an anticlimactic ‘blip', the sound that hitmen's guns make in Hollywood movies, but the blastwave that followed the little 9mm round ruffled my smoking hair and blew the dust up off the ground below, white-hot and propelled by the full weight of Kovacs' curse. I glimpsed his expression drop with shock as the round struck the circle and shattered it like a glass house around him. He shouted with mingled confusion and rage in the split second before the next round struck him in the center mass and blew out through his back. He dropped his staff and staggered away, falling to his knees on the dirt.

Shivering and sweating, I stalked through the damaged circle, stepping over the charred chalk line with the pistol extended. Kovacs' chest wound was smoking, cauterized all the way through. He tried to crawl backwards, his face a red so dark that I knew he was boiling from the inside out. “I curse you! I curse you with—”

His guttural snarl and his last flickers of power were lost as he coughed fire from nose and mouth. His eyes widened as the curse, unable to find a foothold on me, turned back and consumed the caster. Like Slava, Kovacs went strangely quiet and still as the fire roiled up out of his flesh. I watched in mystified, disgusted silence as his clothing ashed and his skin ruptured, belching gouts of flame so hot that they began to melt the ground underneath him. There was no screaming, because no one was trying to put him out. He died in roaring silence.

I looked at the gun in my hand. The Wardbreaker was still unnaturally warm, flickers of red flashing and glancing through the sigils. They were feeding greedily on the blood oozing from my palm, pulling it out of my body and channeling it up through the grooves that led to the first symbolic invocation to Mercury in Mars, the opener of locks and all things sealed and secret.

“Geburah to Gedula,” I murmured. I reached with my mind and found the gateway between the weapon and my life's blood. It took a moment of intent to shut it down. The connection severed easily enough, and the weapon stopped feeding, and went still. The same small extension of will was enough to activate it again, and I smiled despite myself. The Wardbreaker now work on time, every time, but perhaps not for me alone. It hummed with hot, seething power, but the power itself felt… impersonal. It was not the distinct color-scent of my own magical energy, which was dark, cold, blue-black and smelled like fresh rain. That was why I had not been able to create it myself, perhaps. The pistol's only function was to harm, much like a curse, and its fundamental purpose was not energetically compatible with anything still living.

I holstered the Wardbreaker, and watched as Kovacs' body turned to scattered chunks of charcoal. Only his hands and shoes and staff were left. Fussy as ever, I used the gravel and rubble around us to cover up all physical traces of the circle, and then picked up the charcoal, still seamed with embers, and threw it in the burning barrels. I wasn’t sure what to do with the rest. The mage had a chunky gold and star sapphire ring on his middle finger that I hadn’t noticed before. The fire – which only consumed the core of the body and left peripheral limbs intact – had not destroyed it.

I broke the finger off, brittle from the heat, and after several moments of deliberation, stripped down to my undershirt and wrapped the rest of the waste in my vest. I could take it to Bozya Akra, the Organizatsiya’s unofficial graveyard, or even just throw them out to sea. I was so hot and so exhausted that rational planning was almost out of the question. Dried blood had crusted on my upper lip. I’d gotten a nosebleed from the effort of battling Kovacs’ impressive will, and I felt like my brain was leaking out my ears.

A deep bodied caw broke me out of my momentary fugue: a raven's cry. It was too resonant to have been a crow. Wearily, I squinted up at it.

The animal was perched up on the edge of one of the bales, looking down at me from high above. Its eyes glowed white in the light of the fire, as it cocked its head from side to side.

“What do you want?” I frowned, wiping my face with my shirt. My eyes throbbed and twitched whenever I accidentally looked into the light.

The bird wiped its beak against the edge of the compressed metal, and then resumed staring at me. A vague haunting sense of recognition caused my stomach, already weak, to lurch with nausea.

I frowned and pointed the gun at it. “Go on. I’m not dead yet, you stupid thing.”

“Roorck!” The raven bounded back, and launched itself into the air.

“Same to you. Asshole.” Now that I was recovering, the site of Kovacs’ death was beginning to creep along my skin. The site of a mage’s death – especially when the death was by magic – was weirded in a way that made it uncomfortable for the living. There would be a cold spot here tomorrow, and forever after that. Or maybe a hot spot, given the mage’s predilection for fire.

Slowly, I rose to my feet, and wended my way back toward the gate leading to the road. I usually felt something like satisfaction after a victory of this magnitude. Kovacs was easily the toughest spook I’d faced in a duel, but I felt like I had heatstroke; I was tired, and heavy with the knowledge that even though Mariya and Vassily were safe – for now – I was not. If my father was now free of the curse, I knew better than to expect gratitude for saving his life.

I called Sirens and then AEROMOR from a payphone, and learned that Nicolai and his team had taken Maslak to our Red Hook interrogation and execution room. There was a sub-basement underneath one of the old brownstone dockside warehouses, a floor practically level with the waterline. It was cold, industrial, and intimidating, and had everything you needed in a prison: small cells, discreet entry points, great insulation and soundproofing, and a drain that washed out into the ocean.

Unsurprisingly, Maslak was screaming and cursing up a storm when I got there. They had him locked in the hole, a blocked-off vertical sewer access drain with an iron grate, and he was in full freakout mode. The room that contained the hole had a door that faced a wide concrete corridor with a low ceiling and two small rooms. One of them was also used as a cell. The other was the interrogation room, which was white-tiled on all surfaces. A chair was bolted to the floor, and shower rails were bolted to the walls. A lot of people had died in that room.

Nicolai, Ovar, Yuri and Rodion were gathered in the corridor, loitering around the entrance to the cellroom, and they turned as a unit as I came clumping slowly down the metal stairs. Nic’s eyebrows nearly reached his hairline when he saw me.

“You got fried,” he said.

“Kovacs is dead.” I limped to join them, reeking of burned hair, and held out the ring to Rodion. It was still attached to the mage’s finger. “I took this from him. Happy birthday.”

“Aww, you shouldn’t have.” My Avtoritet grinned wolfishly, taking the finger and yanking the ring off it. “He give you much trouble?”

“He gave me thirty thousand dollars’ worth of trouble,” I said sourly. “Not twenty-one.”

“Fair enough. Call it a nine-thousand-dollar tip for a hard night’s work.” Rodion chuckled, turning the ring over to look at the inside of the band. “Huh, not bad. Real gold, real… wait a second.”

“Ey?” Ovar leaned in, as if he could possibly see whatever it was that Rodion had noted.

Rodion’s jaw dropped. “Lexi… oh man. Do you… you can’t have…”

“What?” I was curious now, as were the others.

“This ring,” Rodion said. “It belonged to Elvis fucking Presley.”