And as I wondered, I had to ask myself: was I any better than he? A year ago—hell, a week ago—I probably wouldn’t have wanted this sort of power for my own ends. But my first thought had been to attack the men who threatened and insulted me, to bring magic to bear on them. If there had been anything left in me—anything at all—I’d have set the VIP suite alight and burned myself with them out of spite. What would happen if someone like me harnessed the kind of magical power that Jana and Yuri had hinted at?
My eyes burned with fatigue. There was no way I was going to make it to Mariya’s. I fed Binah and went to bed. I slept a deep, dreamless sleep, and when I rose in the evening, I drove straight to my adopted sister’s place. Her car was in the lot next to Vassily’s. I took the steel steps up the back of the building to her door, fist lifted to knock—except the door was already open and, where there had been a lock, there was only a blasted, gaping hole.
The world contracted into a small square of focus. My eyes throbbed. No. No one knew where Mariya lived… no one knew Vassily was there. Surely not. Acid rose in my throat. I reached back and drew my gun. “Mariya!? Vassily!”
No one answered me. I pressed the door in, the gun raised, and was greeted only by the smell of rotting meat.
I stepped inside, numb with disbelief, and looked around. The living room was trashed. A small cloud of flies had gathered in a lazy procession near the unmoving ceiling fan. Other than their hum, there was no sound. The kitchen was laid out for snacks: crackers, cream cheese, a pitcher of blended juice that had separated in the heat of the day. I sniffed it. Apples, carrots, and beets, with the fizzy tang of early fermentation. That meant it had been sitting here all day… while I was sleeping.
I turned from the living room. My face tingled as I half-ran, half-stumbled to Mariya’s room. Neither she nor Vassily were there, but the place was torn up, littered with broken glass and bloodstained sheets. The next door I threw open was the bathroom.
She had been in the shower. The vase she kept on the windowsill was smashed across the floor, blue plastic poppies and daisies flung in a spray over the wet tiles. Mariya had fallen against the back wall. Someone had turned the water off: the tiles were painted with dried gore. Her eyes were wide, fixed and empty. Even in death, she looked surprised.
“Mariya.” Fingers hovering, mouth dry, I was paralyzed in front of her. The tall, commonsense woman who’d raised us, the closest thing we’d had to a mother. Dead.
It took every ounce of restraint I had not to touch her. Instead, I clutched at myself, struggling with waves of agony that wracked my body and twisted my hands into painful claws. The color seemed to drain from the room, while denial beat at me, and then, grief. Horror. Rage. I didn’t want to search the rest of the house, look into the other two bedrooms. I didn’t want to find Vassily there.
Heaving, shuddering, I wrenched myself from the doorway into a forced march. Fear doesn’t change reality, I silently chanted to myself. Fear doesn’t change reality, and it never would. If Vassily was in there, he’d be dead whether I saw him or not.
My feet were heavy, but I was becoming numb to the smell of death. Rage was overwhelming despair. I didn’t want a gun in my hands: I wanted a drill, a saw. Weapons of horror and torture. Revenge was something I could fixate on, and it was the certainty of cold, bloody revenge that drove me on to throw open the next door, and the next.
Every room was empty and clean. It was almost worse than just finding the body.
Vassily hadn’t called. Hadn’t raised an alarm, nothing, and the scene was cold. I went back to Mariya’s bedroom and scanned it a second time, this time for the small details I might have missed. The bed was a mess: there was blood on the carpet, but not enough for a death. The dresser had been tipped over, a lamp thrown… and a white envelope had been set down, almost invisible against the tumbled pillows at the head of the bed.
I ripped the top off the envelope and unfolded the note inside. It was rough, a small slip torn off from a piece of plain copy paper. “We know who this guy is. Bring Vincent. Crows Mill Rd Woodbridge T.Ship TransCorp parking lot 3am 8/16 or we kill him and send the tape.”
The hand was blocky, rough and practical, flat-bottomed, the handwriting of a killer. I stared at the paper, turned it over, and then held it up to the light. No fingerprints, and I’d bet no hairs or trace evidence would be found. The gun that had been used to kill Mariya was long gone.
In the pictures, the world’s gas men—whether they be Mafia or Organizatsiya or Cartel—are always sparing the women and kids. That was another Hollywood fantasy. As far as the average killer was concerned, women and children were just collateral. The guy who did this didn’t know what kind of person my adopted sister had been. He didn’t care. She was in the way.
Horror dawned as the involuntary memory of myself, staring down at Semyon, filtered back into my memory. “We always have choice,” I said. What choice did Mariya have? What decision had she made, that lead her to die like this? The decision to take care of me, all those years ago? To take her coke-addled baby brother, and nurse him back to health?
Good GOD. What the hell had I done?
What the hell had we done, all of us?
My hands were shaking as I folded the note and put it in my pocket. Then, I holstered my gun and straightened my shirt, making my way out of the house, down to my car. The gray humid sky beat down on the back of my neck. It was going to storm, and the whole parking lot smelled dead. I turned on the air conditioner and found myself unable to move.
I had no one I could call for help. Not a single one of those fuckers in the Organizatsiya. Even if Nic hadn’t set this up—and I wasn’t sure if he had or not—he’d still be happy to know that Vassily was gone. I didn’t want to try Lev—he’d been there, listening to Sergei chew me out. He hadn’t joined in, and had even tried to help in his own way, but he hadn’t disagreed. Maybe it’s just because Sergei was right. I was weak, at least compared to him and Carmine. But if there’s one standout in all the things that piss me off… it’s betrayal.
“I don’t want to do this,” I said aloud. “I don’t want to be like them. I don’t.”
But Kutkha didn’t have to descend from on high and tell me what I already knew. Vassily’s mother and father died for the Organizatsiya. Syoma Lovenko had stolen a transport plane from Vladivostok and flown it to Japan to escape the Soviet Union and used the proceeds to buy his wife, eldest son, and widowed mother through the Iron Curtain, like some kind of fucking superhero. We lost them both to a plane crash, and Sergei didn’t shed a damn tear at their funeral. Syoma Junior had died soon after arriving here, suicide by cop. Antoni, the second eldest and first born in America, died in prison after being arrested for his work in the protection racket. Lyosha died in a firefight. Then, there was my own family. My mother, the gentle pianist, a Jewish girl completely unprepared for life with my father, was a distant mystery even to me. When I tried to remember the circumstances of her death, there was nothing but the deep black. No one had ever told me her story. No one had ever bothered to find her out.
Just because Sergei and the Organizatsiya had furnished my cage didn’t make it any less of a cage. Even if I let Vassily die, consigned him to his fate and the Fruit with him, what the hell was I going to do? Go to Thailand and train locals to deal drugs, protect gambling rackets, and raid villages for their children? The cold certainty of the action I needed to take fell across my mind like a shroud. Without a word spoken between my Neshamah and me, we were in instant agreement. I turned the engine, backed out of the lot, and drove the short distance home.