I heard no sound from the other end when I picked up the receiver, save for soft, raspy breathing.
“Lev,” I said.
“I’m appalled, Alexi. All that effort, and you didn’t even get my name.” A polished mezzo-soprano, thick with dark, cruel amusement, spoke after several moments’ pause.
For the second time that night, and the umpteenth time that week, I had been wrong. It wasn’t Carmine. And it wasn’t Lev.
“You just couldn’t listen to me, take my advice to leave well alone, could you, sweetheart?” Jana was excited, but I could hear barely concealed strain in her voice. Whatever I had done, it had hurt her. She wasn’t the only one hurt, though. The horrifying sensation of my mind leaking out from between my ears had ceased, but every one of my limbs trembled with exhaustion. “Alexi, you have half an hour to bring yourself to my house, or Vincent dies.”
“I don’t give a damn if he dies.” My eyes narrowed. She thought she could ransom me, of all people? “He’s a drug dealer. A leech.”
“Don’t be dumb. No one wants Vincent for the drugs.” I heard her press and wet her lips, rubbing them against each other. Over the phone, the sound turned my stomach. “Maybe the mundanes in your two-bit protection racket, but there’s more at stake than yuppie-dust. No, if he dies, you’ll care a lot, Alexi, because that will leave you, and you alone, as the most precious resource in the city. You will never know peace again.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” My hand turned into a fist on the desk.
“Why would I tell you that?” Her voice lightened and smoothed. She was clearly enjoying the game. “You and Vincent share some… peculiar circumstances. But no one really knows, other than me. Yet. Carmine Mercurio, for example, doesn’t know you’re just what he’s looking for… but I’m sure he’d like to.”
I said nothing, nostrils flaring. “What are you talking about?”
“I told you. He said ‘yes’.”
My chest tightened.
“Carmine knows of you, zolotka, yes. When I told him that someone was using his uncle’s family name for business, and was helping the Russian Mafia, he was keen to find out who that was. I gave him an address.”
“Did you rig my car, too? Because that didn’t work.”
“Yuri set that up for me. He was a good host, better than Robert Nacari. Before we knew what you were, I was supposed to remove your piece from the board.” Jana sighed. “So now, you have a choice. You come to me, or I dispatch Vincent, use his sacrifice to kill your butt-buddy while he’s at your sister’s place, and then tell Carmine where he can find you.”
“Go fuck yourself.” My face flushed hot.
“16 Brown Street, Sheepshead Bay. Half an hour.” She laughed and hung up on me.
I closed my eyes for several long moments and then looked down at the desk. If I only had thirty minutes, I needed to make them count.
Chapter 18
I spent fifteen minutes studying a single letter, the same one I had been studying and meditating on the way to Atlantic City. Chet, the barrier. I armed myself, pistol and knife, but doubted I’d get to keep them. Jana was right—I didn’t really have much of a choice but to play her game. If I called for help, it was as good as telling Lev and Sergei I couldn’t be relied on. One “aw-shit” was worth more than a hundred “attaboys.” If I was going to do this, I’d have to do it myself.
The address she gave me looked like a perfectly normal Brooklyn row house, white clapboard with a chain-link fence, and unremarkable save for the exceptionally healthy red petunias she grew along her windowsill and over her stoop. They were a brilliant color, a red darker than blood. I didn’t knock and didn’t have to. As soon as I set a foot on the third step, the door opened of its own accord.
Jana’s house was very well furnished, tasteful and decorated entirely in shades of white and cream with careful, small contrasts. Splashes of red in places, ambers and tawny browns. Her smell led me to her sitting room: it was all open-plan and white. Pure white. Everything was immaculately clean, white as polished bone. The woman herself was reclining on a white leather armchair in full view of the front door, seated with the stiff imperiousness of a nervous queen. She held a semiautomatic pistol in a loose, confident grip, the only black thing in the room.
“Come in.” Her mouth curled at the corners. “But if I see you reach for anything, I’ll blow your head off.”
I edged inside, keeping my hands loose and my eyes slow. There was nothing at all to indicate that she was a magus. There had to be a room with tools and paraphernalia somewhere, an altar or a circle. My gaze fell on the sculptural lamp by her elbow. The base of the fitting was an inhumanly beautiful gazelle-like figure who arched like a gymnast, holding the spherical lamp on her shoulders. She was neither animal nor human and had long curving horns, like an antelope’s.
The air ruffled strangely, warping from the power of an invisible, powerful will. Behind me, the door slammed shut.
“Coffee?” She arched a brow.
“No.” I looked back at her. “Thank you.”
“Don’t feel like buying time?” She rose, neat in her prim dress and low heels, and moved around me in a slow circle.
“Would there be any point?”
She disappeared out of my peripheral vision, and I tensed. When she was behind me, she stopped. The cold muzzle of the pistol pressed in against my kidney.
“Not really,” she said. “Walk ahead.”
She pressed the gun in, and I moved off slowly, waiting for an opportunity. Waiting for inspiration. It was like my father always said: you could be the hardest sonovabitch in the neighborhood, but it didn’t mean nothing at the business end of a piece.
Jana pressed me towards her bedroom. I looked over it with numb consternation as the door shut behind us. The bedroom, even more so than the living room, was white. Her bed, walls, carpets, everything. The blond wooden dressers had white sheets over them, with only the ankles showing. The only break in the monotony was dead things: Jana collected antlers, insects, bones, and pieces of amber mounted in wooden cases on her walls. White wooden cases.
“You like them?” she asked, girlishly. “I pictured you as a bit of a collector, you know.”
“Oh, yes.” What the hell was I supposed to say? Basically, the room had no cover, save for the bed. Nowhere to duck and shoot. “Just… lovely.”
“Aren’t they? Turn around.”
Jana had a weird half-smile fixed on her lips, her eyes wide. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement, her lips moist. I regarded her sullenly, running over the word of power in my mind. Chet, the Gate. The letter of the shield. Chet.
“You know, I tried to ask nicely. I had Yuri visit and everything.” She flashed a sympathetic, wholly insane grimace, wide-eyed and plaintive. “And that was before I knew what you are. But you didn’t listen to me. They usually listen, you know, other mages. We love the magic for its own sake.”
I thought back to the boardwalk. “So you killed Yuri and Frank. And what about the other guy?”
“Frank’s brother? He was the one who found the Fruit.” She said the word like it had a capital, like a title. “But he forgot where it was by the time I finally spoke to him. They do that, the norms—they forget. It’s a defense, you see? If the unworthy behold the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they forget where it is.”
“I really have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I was going to have him kill you,” she said. “But then I finally got to touch you. Skin to skin. And I realized, Alexi—you’re the real deal, better than Vincent. A true Wise Virgin. Do you have any idea how rare that is? A fully fledged mage with a clean cock?”