“Lexi? Hey, Lexi?”
My breathing sped. The sensory flood was merciless, the sensations as real as the day I’d last been home. I heard the cat howling inconsolably at the peeling window, saw the broken table and the long, cold shadow of the crooked ceiling fan. I was fourteen again, unable to move, unable to think… unable to do anything except look up at…
My vision cut. My eyes simply shut down as I barreled blindly past Vassily to the sink, struggling with the faucet. I plunged my hands underneath the cold water as the other parts of the flashback kept resolving, kept clarifying. The buzz of a single fly. The sound of my father throwing up in the bathroom down the hallway. The meowing hadn’t stopped, but it wasn’t the high-pitched mewing of mother’s tabby calico. It was the deeper, resonant howl of a Siamese.
The flow of clean water shocked through my nerves, and my head jerked as colors and textures flooded my tongue and fingers, stabbing and hot. My vision beat back in, a kaleidoscope of unresolved colors throbbing in time with my heart.
“Hey.” Vassily’s head was a worried specter, light-rimmed, hovering in the mirror. “Alexi?”
The pour of water was an anesthetic, reinstating equilibrium, and it drew me back towards the present with its flow. I stared at the pair of faces in the mirror. Vassily was tall, lean, movie-star handsome. I was short and disappointing. I had my father’s white eyes and burly build and my mother’s height and pinched features.
“Hey uh… you want something to eat?” Vassily said. “I got some potato chips.”
Potato chips. It was so inane that it hauled me back into the present moment. My mouth was so dry that chips would turn my tongue into jerky. “No. Can’t.”
Vassily’s mouth drew to one side. I noticed his pupils were fully dilated under the bathroom light. He had bedroom eyes, junkie eyes. “Trust me, man. You might not be feeling shit-hot right now, but you gotta eat something. Not unless the Manellis were stuffing you with foie gras while they beat the shit out of you, you know? Getting bashed takes it out of a guy.”
He was right. I knew he was right, but I wanted to resist. His blue fur voice made me twitch all over. It was so tactile that every word made my skin feel like it was being rubbed by sound. I flexed my nails against the porcelain sink and drew a deep breath.
“You okay?”
“Just…” The adrenaline had worn off, energy extinguished. Words blurred in my mouth, came out all wrong. Instead of trying to speak, I reached back, hand dripping wet, and awkwardly half-groped, half-clapped Vassily on the arm. I felt like a clumsy assembly robot, unable to coordinate my limbs properly. “Over… stimulated. Dark. Need dark.”
“All right. You get to bed, then.” Vassily knew what “overstimulation” meant. Knew it meant I couldn’t deal with too many words, too many sounds. He shortened his sentences automatically. “But food, soon.”
“Soon,” I echoed. I focused on my breathing, staring at my soggy hands under the water. They looked drowned, dead, too white. There was still blood under my nails. Goosebumps crawled over my arms, and I reached for the scrubbing brush. “Wash. Shower first.”
Vassily sighed and moved aside, and I lost track of him while I scrubbed at my hands, back and forth, back and forth. It hurt, but it felt good.
“You got real close to the Reaper this time, didn’t you?”
The sudden sound broke my momentary trance. I dropped the brush convulsively, and it clattered into the sink. It was several seconds more before I could speak. “Yes.”
“Turn the water off. You’re bleeding.”
Numbly, I complied. The mirror showed me my own heavy-boned face, shadowed and pitted under the white light. I looked exhausted and dirty.
“I’m gonna talk to Lev. Get you off the hook.” Vassily’s voice was very low and unusually serious. “I can tell by looking at you, Lexi. You got the death-mark. You looked down the barrel of a gun.”
My hands hurt. I gently shook my head and opened the mirror cabinet to look inside. The tumbler where I usually kept my spare pair was empty.
“Did you hear me? I’m gonna get you off this contract.”
“No.” Dry-mouthed, I gingerly patted my palms over with a clean towel. He was right: they were bleeding. They were clean, at least. “Don’t you dare.”
“No, you gotta understand me. I just got out of the fucking slammer, Lexi, and I didn’t spend five years rotting in the boonies to get out just in time for your funeral. All right?”
The depth of anger in my friend’s voice shocked me. I turned to face him, hands wrapped in terry cloth. Vassily was sweating like he had a fever, beads shining on his forehead. “Vassily, the men already disrespect me. Someone tried to bomb my car. I can’t lose any more face. They’ll kill me just for that.”
“Right. So I’m gonna talk to Lev, and I’m gonna look at setting you up with something better. Something we can work on together. Fuck the three hundred G’s. We’ll make a million by the end of the year if we get back into credit cards. You remember the serial generator I was working on? That’s the way of the future, man. Not this neighborhood racketeering shit.”
“This is my duty,” I said. “This is my responsibility.”
“No!” Vassily threw his hands up. “You’re two days into this gig, and look at you! Two days, Alexi! Look at you!”
“They weed out the weak. You want me to look weak in front of everyone?” I asked, incredulous.
“No one believes you’re weak. They think you’re a fucking psycho, but they don’t think you’re weak.” Vassily’s face was stormy.
“You do,” I said. “You interrupted me when Petro was giving me shit. You think I’m weak.”
“Petro was stomping all over you. What was I supposed to do? Stand by? Is that what you’d do if someone was doing that to me?”
“Of course not.” The very idea was an affront. “I’d never abandon you. But I need to find Vincent.”
“No, you don’t. You need to survive. That’s what we do.” Vassily advanced on me, stabbing his finger against my chest. If I’d been stronger, I’d have caught his wrist. But I was tired, and this was too much already. “The graveyard is full of cowboys who tried to rush off into the sunset, Alexi. You think you’re any better than them?”
My eyes narrowed. “I’ll finish what I started. What kind of Vor v Zakone talks this way?”
“One who’s had to bury his mother, his father, and the rest of his whole fucking family!” Vassily shoved back from me and stalked out the open door, slamming it behind him.
In the sudden silence, Binah jumped onto the sink and arched against my arm. I stroked her as I listened to Vassily curse his way down the hallway. The cat jumped when his bedroom door slammed, and then resumed purring.
The outburst left me windless. Not angry. Anger made me stronger, not tired. I picked up Binah, draping her over my shoulder, and cast one sidelong look back at my haggard face and slumped shoulders before I limped away to the cold solace of my room.
The empty room seemed to hold the ghosts of every voice, every interaction I’d had in the past twenty-four hours. I set Binah on the bed while I found a spare set of gloves and looked down at her. She looked up at me with the same quiet wisdom I’d seen in Semyon’s apartment. That was what her name meant. Wisdom.
I saw the same depth in her eyes that I’d seen in Kutkha’s… and that reminded me of him. As my attention shifted back, I could see him in my mind’s eye.
“So,” I said aloud. “Kutkha. You have some explaining to do.”
The faded awareness of my Neshamah sharpened in the moment before his voice returned to me in the stillness of the room. “Do I, now? Do you think your own immortal soul is some fetch to be ordered about the place, Alexi?”