“I was waiting,” Kutkha replied, wistfully. “Waiting for you to see me. But you were afraid… you only saw me briefly, Alexi.”
“Well I—shit!” As I spoke, the engine stuttered, and I worked the clutch, hissing through my teeth. Few people have ever heard me curse, but the words boiled up from a dark and angry place deep in my chest before I could stop them. “Don’t you fucking fuck up now, you no good piece of shit!”
The traffic slowed as we rolled up to the toll gates, and it took every shred of concentration to keep the truck moving. We rolled up to the window, and I set my jaw, resolving to breeze on through. When no one asked for my toll, I looked out and down. The woman in the booth stared back mutely, her eyes bulging slightly in the bright lights. That’s when I remembered I was covered in shredded meat and dried blood, gunpowder, and sweat. And I was half-naked. In a bullet-hole riddled truck.
“Same old New Jersey, huh?” I peered at her dark face, trying to open both my eyes. One of them was swollen shut tightly enough that it was going to need a crowbar to get it open. “How much?”
“Four dollars. And, uh, sir… do you—”
“No.” I glared at her with all the dignity I could muster and fumbled for my wallet—or maybe the dead guy’s—one-handed as the truck shuddered and lurched a little. I fought to keep the balance on the accelerator and clutch and ended up pulling out a twenty. “Just… you just take that, ma’am. Tip.”
Her eyes tracked me as we rumbled off, the engine coughing. The cabin was warm now and brighter than I remembered. The pain was getting worse, not better. The magical outburst had probably saved me from permanent brain damage from Carmine’s beating, but I wasn’t sure if it was the lights of the bridge blurring into one another or the aura preceding the worst headache I’d ever have.
“We are deplete,” Kutkha said, picking up on my silent query. “The sacrifice was our fuel.”
“You mean every time I want to cast big magic, I need to kill somebody?” I hoped not. I had done a good job of staying out of the hands of the law, but that was only because I killed infrequently and well. And, of course, I guessed that killing people just to cast spells probably raised some ethical concerns.
“No,” Kutkha replied. “But you’re so blocked up that you have next to no Flow. The magic worked because you were close to death.”
Oh, right. So I had to die, or nearly die, to be a proper wizard. Do zla boga.[20]
We got the truck most of the way to Central Park before I passed out at the wheel. One moment, I was intent on the lines and whirring tarmac, and the next, I was hanging from my seatbelt and the hood of the truck was folded around a lamp post. I was pleasantly, distantly surprised to find that my legs weren’t crushed as I hauled myself out of the smoking cab and tumbled bonelessly to the pavement, the bat still in my hands.
My heart shlupped in my chest. It sounded as squishy as I felt, and I was glad that it, at least, was able to move. The rest of my body refused to respond. My brain was a sheen of white noise. Carmine and friends could drive up beside us right now, step out and put a bullet in my head, and there was nothing I would be able to do. Whoever killed Frank Nacari could take me off the street. At least I had made it back to New York.
“Get up,” Kutkha hissed in my mind.
“I can’t.” Its urgings were like prickling claws. I struggled to rise, but my wrists buckled from my weight.
“Get up or shut up. You’re almost there.”
My vision swam, but I still didn’t want to die. Sleep, yes; die, no. I tried again and managed to clumsily roll up to my ass and get a look around where we’d crashed. It was a clean, broad boulevard, full of high-rises. It smelled green. Cast-off newspapers rustled down the nearly empty road. Someone was running away towards the park, away from the scene of the accident, and some apartment lights had turned on overhead. Of course, I’d crashed the truck in one of the few neighborhoods in this city where the people cared what was going on outside. The cops would be there soon, and if they found me, I was worse than dead.
I choked a curse, set the butt of the bat on the ground, and used it to push myself up to the better knee. They were both screwed up by this point. With some shuffling and a lot of growling, I got to my feet. Took a step forward. Again. I lost awareness of my surroundings as I fixed my eyes on the pavement and walked towards the payphone at the end of the street.
I careened into the door before getting inside, dropped my change when I tried to feed it in the slot, and settled on digging the wallet out to find another quarter instead of contorting myself to find the first one on the ground. I tried the house first, but no one picked up. Vassily was out, of course. Next I tried the other number that came first to mind: Nic’s office number. I had to think about it, stabbing out with clumsy fingers, trying to moisten my lips as I summoned the words.
“Sirens Office.” Lev’s fluted voice crackled over the line.
“Lev. ’S Lexi.” My tongue felt too big for my mouth. I slumped against the side of the booth. “Ambushed. Manellis.”
“Alexi? The Manellis?” Lev’s shock was mild, almost affected, but that was Lev for you. “Where are you? I’ll send someone right away.”
“No idea.” I heard the slur in my voice and swallowed, glancing around. Park. Green. It had started to rain, heavy pattering drops that formed a mist around the tall buildings. I looked up at the skyline, orienting myself. “No… wait. Central Park. South.”
“Tell me the number on the payphone.”
I peered at it, but it took a while to make it out. My eyes were refusing to focus. “Two… four, five… nine, seven…nine… zero.”
“Okay, I’ll look it up. Stay down, stay safe.”
Was that it? I held onto the phone for several seconds after it clicked, not certain I’d heard my Avtoritet correctly. Then I dropped the receiver, staring at it numbly until the wail of sirens pierced the night air, getting closer. Shit. My fuzzy-headedness was abruptly cleansed by fear. Fear of arrest tapped reserves of energy I never knew I had, and I hobbled desperately out of the booth, across the street, and into the park, like a wounded cat. I huddled down in a cluster of bushes, burning and freezing under the metallic summer rain, peering out through the green wire netting at the road as it began to flash red and blue. My gut tensed to something the size of a walnut as the siren hooted and then went silent. Voices called out, cops getting out of the car. God help me.
“Kutkha?” My mental voice was very small. “Please tell me that I didn’t just go through all that to get pulled up.”
The response was a subtle fluttering of pressure around my shoulders, like someone’s consoling touch, the kind of touch I had never been able to stand. Kutkha felt weak and distant now, but even the smallest sense of his presence somehow balmed my mind and took my attention, however briefly, off the relentless and otherwise all-consuming pain. I thought back to Vassily in the car, the long stretch of his throat and the words of the Tao Te Ching. The man who walks without fear. I wasn’t dead. Not by rhinoceros or tiger, or Guido hellhound, or NYPD.
It was an age until the street outside my green sanctuary descended into silence. The doors slammed, the sirens flashed and then withdrew. The cops had likely called a tower in to get the truck, but with no one around, there was no reason for them to linger. My heart beat rapidly and shallowly in my chest, and lurched when a car door slammed outside the park fence not too far from the ruined truck. I heard a pair of old army boots hit the pavement. The change roused me from my damp fugue.
20
‘Give it to the Black God’. A common Ukrainian curse, fairly mild, which is used like ‘Oh for God’s sake’ in English.