The Manelli family front? I snorted blood, looking up ahead. Across the lot was a row of trucks. They were refrigerated cargo trucks, not quite big enough to be semis. I grabbed my crutch and stumbled sideways into a wall. God help me, I was tired.
“No.” Kutkha’s voice hissed through my mind. “Get to the truck.”
Pushing away from the wall cost me energy. Hopping towards the trucks cost more. “I’ve never driven a truck.”
“There’s always a first time.” It sounded like something Nic would say, but I was in too much pain to do anything but fixate and stagger. I had no idea where Carmine was, no idea if there were other men. But that wasn’t exactly correct. As I thought about it, sluggishly, I had a dim sense of their presence on the other side of the warehouse. Carmine’s aura was the largest, a red-and-orange haze in my mouth and nose that lingered like a bad smell. They were hanging around in the storage area, waiting for their buddies to finish with me. They probably had a truck of their own in there, waiting to receive my body so they could dump me out in the bay.
Which raised a good point. Where the hell was I?
We reached the first truck and had a brief battle with gravity and inertia to reach up and try to unlock it. Not that one. The next truck in the row was the one: the key fit. At first, I wasn’t sure I could use the step to pull my weight up to the door, but I felt another wave of subtle pressure from within. My Neshamah, burning the energy of blood sacrifice to save our goddamned lives. Every muscle screamed as I grappled my way up, hauling with my arms and pushing with the good leg until we collapsed across the worn driver’s seat.
“Lev,” I muttered. “We need to get to Lev.”
I didn’t know why I needed Lev. Common sense told me that Lev could have put me here in the first place. He was the one who’d known where I was. In the moment, though, I had genuine, immediate, fully rational problems. The truck had a manual transmission, and I had only one functioning leg.
“Use the bat.”
“You fucking use the goddamn bat!” I growled aloud, finally losing my temper. My body was wracked with pain, nothing but pain, as I pushed and pulled and found my way upright in the seat. I jarred the ruined knee. “Mother of fuck!”
Kutkha fell silent, but I could feel it hovering in the fringes of my awareness. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched a shadow cluster on the passenger’s seat, swirling anxiously as I heaved for air. As the pain settled back to berating my nerves instead of screaming at them, I reached up to stab at the key slot with the key. Once, twice, and then it slid home.
Across the lot, three men burst out of the door, shouting at me, at the dead body, and at each other. One of them was Carmine. They were briefly transfixed by the dead man on the ground, pausing to stare.
Panic surged through my gut like a shock of cold water. Use the bat. Right.
I braced the bat against my leg and down onto the clutch, holding it as I somehow used all limbs to turn the engine and put the stick shift in gear all at the same time. The truck roared to life, stuttering as I fumbled with the controls. Thanks to Nicolai, I’m an excellent driver. Thanks to genetics or memetics or whatever it is that causes me to be so neophobic, I am not excellent at dealing with unfamiliar arrays of buttons and dials. I got the headlights on as the first of the men ran out towards me, gun raised.
That’s right, rabbit. Come on.
I shoved my foot down on the pedal and accelerated at full speed towards him. The Italians scattered in terror; I hauled the steering wheel one-handed as I let off the clutch. Stalling meant death, but now that the machine was working, I knew what I was doing. The truck was more responsive than I expected, and as I spun it, it nearly tipped on its side. My skin flinched as bullets spranged off the hood and struck the windshield, but we had speed and, most importantly, momentum. The vehicle roared straight through a chain-link fence that we mowed down and flung aside, charging across some slippery dead grass and then out onto the road.
“Magic,” I gasped. “Carmine. Can we—”
“He has to be low on Phi,” Kutkha replied, coiling around the cabin like an agitated mist. “He can’t risk much now.”
Phi. I had no idea what that was. I gritted my teeth so hard they felt like they were going to crack as we turned out from the warehouse street onto a main road. In the distance, I could see the George Washington Bridge, and my heart sped. We were across the water and over the state line, in Jersey. This was nuts. Talking to my imaginary raven friend was nuts. I was buzzing and fought to not be conscious of anything but the dance of clutch, shift, and the wheel in my hands while I floored the truck with the help of the baseball bat. My knee felt three times its usual size, too large and swollen to be real. I hadn’t looked at it and wouldn’t. Not until we stopped.
An engine roared behind me, revving hard. I swerved to one side on raw instinct as bullets whizzed and pinged off the side of the cab. They were chasing, and they were faster than the truck. One bullet struck the mirror, and it shattered just as I swung back and rammed broadside into the pursuing car. It spun away, screeching, and smashed into a telephone pole behind us. I fought to right the truck before we followed it over onto the side of the road.
“I can’t believe this.” My face flushed. I was furious and shaking. It was finally dawning on me, through the fog of adrenaline, that I was talking aloud to… what? My soul? A hallucination? “I just… can’t fucking believe this. And if you’re my Neshamah, you better explain how the hell I did that and how the hell I do it again.”
“Then listen, and learn. Five parts has the human soul, like a small cell within the greatness of the Cauldron. Your being is a tree. Under and around the roots is GOD itself, and then come the roots, called Chiah. From those grow branches, your Neshamah. Then there is you, the Alexi of this world, who is Ruach. You are the mind, the breath which animates the fifth part, your Nephesh, which is your body.”
That was pure Kabbalah, for the most part. “What do you mean by God?” I replied. We took the next left and merged the bullet-riddled truck into the traffic of Interstate 95. “And Phi?”
“The Greater Optimistic Direction. The Giant Organism of Dimension,” Kutkha replied. “The YESbeast. It is the Great I.”
“It?” This sounded mad. “That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t believe in God.”
“You don’t have to.” Kutkha chortled. “The YESbeast doesn’t care. You are one atom in a single cell of its body. You could destroy everyone on this world but yourself, and it would not notice.”
I scowled but had no answer. The whole exchange was so fluid and strange—semi-telepathic, hyper-real—that I couldn’t piece the information together. “Great. My Neshamah is some kind of Mormon.”
Kutkha guffawed. “Was I not being mystical enough? Pardon me, your humble soul. I am the gate and the key. I am the watcher, your guardian.”
“And a smartass.” Fantastic. The road ahead was swimming in front of my eyes, wobbling like a black ribbon. I checked the rearview mirror, but I didn’t see any especially suspicious cars. I certainly didn’t see Carmine’s flaming black dogs. “Guardian? If you’re my guardian, why weren’t you there when my dad was thrashing the shit out of me and my mother?”