“What do I have to do?” I knew I was speaking in my mind now, as the oily point of the gun waggled in past my teeth. “I don’t want to die like this.”
“I can’t lie, Alexi.” The bird had sidestepped around so I could still see it on the rim of the tub, flicking its glossy blue-black wings. “The road to understanding is long and bitter. You will bleed. Your dead flesh will come back to life. You must take holes to be whole. Are you ready to say YES?”
My mouth was full of metal. I felt the shuffling boot soles through the tub, but my whole body, my whole mind, felt like a gas. A floating web, hovering between the black sky overhead and the green sea beneath. The nothing overhead, the no-sky, sucked at me hungrily. The sea was deep and fathomless, patient, and full. I felt like something tiny looking into a well of impossible size.
“Yes,” I replied. The word felt like an incantation, as if it had power all of its own.
“Hang on a sec, Robbie. Don’t shoot him,” said a voice from far away. “I want some target practice. Haul him up.”
“I ain’t taking the cuffs off,” Beard said, laughing.
“You don’t have to, man. Just get him up so I can get his knees.”
The barrel slid out, and my head snapped to the side as I was struck. The light was creeping into my vision. Through filmy eyes, I watched the blond thug heft a baseball bat and start across to the bathtub.
“Yes. I accept.” The raven opened its beak, revealing a blue forked tongue. “You will know me as Kutkha. I am the eye of your I… the one you only half-opened in the time before.”
My vision seared white as Kutkha threw itself forward in a heavy downbeat. It funneled into light so blue it was almost black, and pierced me through the front of my chest. I felt the impact, shaking as coils and loops of it braided itself through my mind, through my spine, through my heart and tongue and fingers. The freezing indigo of its substance meshed through me in a tenth of a second, and suddenly, I understood something I had never known. Some part of me had been caged, all this time. But now, the vessel had broken.
I was lifted higher as the other guy came up on me. I saw his face, a mask of rictus pleasure, and a pair of black, lightless eyes. He swung around, hefting the baseball bat, and then brought it down and around at my left knee.
The contact was like a detonator. As dead wood caved through bone, it tore apart the shredding virgin film over my mind. My will consolidated with an involuntary scream of naked agony, a force that pushed up from under my sternum and out of my mouth—a return thrust that wracked the air of the room in waves. Baldy’s face blanked into a mask of shock. Then, he exploded.
Escape.
The backlash of life force returned to me like iron filings to a magnet, sucked in and transmuted. My veins were hot, thrumming, every part of my body drawn in sharp relief. The handcuffs turned to liquid around my wrists as the air twisted and weirded, distending. Energy boiled white-hot in my mouth, in every bone and muscle, but I wasn’t in control as my hands reached down, grabbed my knee, and wrenched. The bones shifted together with a wet crunch I barely felt. One word hammered through the delirium. Escape.
I got one step forward before the world came back into awful focus and my knee collapsed underneath me. I tumbled over the slippery porcelain, striking the edge of the tub with a heavy crash as silenced gunshots clicked over my head and sprayed the wall where I’d been chained. Whatever heavy magic I’d just done, that was it. It was all I had. My knee seared, and I screamed rawly a second time as I lunged for the bat, the only weapon within reach, and managed to grasp the handle.
Beard was stumbling up, terrified, covered in minced meat and sprayed blood. The muzzle of the gun was a black hole, a point in space trying to track my head as we slipped uselessly on the wet floor. I got up first and charged him, limping. He got an arm up; I knocked the gun free, and we went to ground, grunting and struggling. His mouth was in my face, gaping; I headbutted him, sending him sprawling to one side, and my oversensitive hand clapped down on the fallen pistol. I pulled the trigger and it clicked, empty. Before he could recover, I rolled over on top of him and hit him in the face with the butt of it. Eyes, temples, skull, until his arms dropped and he stopped moving.
Fuck. Fucking hell. I threw the gun away from me, retching with pain, and fought to breathe. I tried to stand up and limp away, but the fragile healing job the burst of power had given me didn’t hold up. I fell back on my ass. The room was suddenly very quiet, very still, save for the etheric hum of the light overhead.
Jesus Christ. My goddamned knee. My hands hovered over it, not touching. I was terrified of what I’d find. Before I could look down, a filamentary shadow reappeared in my vision, translucent and fluid through the tears.
“There’s no time. Get up.”
“I can’t.” Every movement felt like too much effort. My eyes ran; I heaved, even though there was nothing in my stomach. I was still naked, covered in drying dead flesh.
“You have no choice. Get up, or die.”
Die? No. I didn’t want to die here. I wasn’t meant to die here. He was right. I needed to break each one of Carmine’s stubby manicured fingers and feed them to him. I fixed on this, on the fuel of revenge, while I grasped the bloody baseball bat and used it to lever myself up to my feet so I could shuffle-hop out into the hallway.
Outside, I found my things crammed into a calico shopping bag. With shaking hands, I fumbled with boxers and slacks and then dropped the bat to get my gloves on. The gloves gave instant relief, shutting down the worst of the pain in my torn fingers. The Wardbreaker was there, but the clip was gone. My knife was here. I opened the blade, and a strange, immediate sense of impending safety washed over me. No matter how disgusting I felt, I knew this. The dance of violence and survival, the feel of a knife in my hand and the power of the Art in my blood, however tenuous.
Carmine had taken me to a warehouse. The hall had concrete floors, and the ceiling was cobwebbed and unkempt. The bathroom was part of an open corridor, one of several doors set into the wall to my right, and faceless wood paneling to the left. A bolted door was at the end of the hall behind me. Ahead was the warehouse proper. I could try to unlock the back door and get out that way, but I had no idea where it led. The storage part of the warehouse was a crapshoot. Maybe there was enough cover to make a run for it, maybe there wasn’t. It depended on how many people were out there.
Then I heard the snap and rattle of a large roller door outside, and the lights came on ahead. Decision made. Male laughter followed me as I limped quickly for the farthest door, the sound growing stronger as I pulled the bolt out and flung the door open into the surprised face of a jowly, dark-eyed thug. His hand was cupped around the end of a cigarette, and he reared back like a deer in the headlights as I threw the bat at him as hard as I could. It hit and bounced; there was an expletive and then a short gargling scream as I leaped on him, blade first, and drove the knife through his neck. We spun in a lazy circle and tumbled to the ground, me on top. He was a goner, even if he was still flopping around. I dragged him off, shut the door, and rustled his pockets for keys, money, and weapons. No weapons, no money, but he had keys. The bundle was heavy, and amongst them, I found a white numbered tag and a blue-and-gold burnished keyring with a long, thick key, the squared-off kind that fits a truck or bus. The keyring had a logo on it, a crown with seven points and seven dots. Elite Meats.