“My dad said the same thing about South Africa.” Zane regarded me with the quiet curiosity of someone who knew they shouldn’t ask a question, but who wanted to regardless.
I looked away first. “Are there any clean clothes I can borrow? What things I have are still in the Bronx.”
“Sure. Check the locker. We can pick them up tomorrow, if you need.”
Grateful he didn’t try to continue the conversation – and grateful that I didn’t have to say something curt – I went to investigate. There were some clean shorts in the locker, and a Metallica t-shirt which smelled like strange men. I could hardly bear to touch them, but they were still cleaner than my clothes.
“You know, I always figured hitmen did lines of coke off their favorite strippers for kicks.” I heard Zane roll over onto the bed. “Go gay-bashing or something.”
“Men with that kind of temperament don’t last long,” I said. “There’re plenty of them – the city chews them up and buries them. Hardly any wet workers make it past their twenties.”
“You look a bit older than that. You’re some kind of professional, then? Mafia James Bond?”
I got a towel, wrapped it around my hips, and skillfully changed while staying mostly covered. It was a skill I’d learned going to the gym, the ability to strip and dress without showing skin. “As General James Mattis once said, ‘be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.’”
“Lord help me, Alexi.” Zane groaned, and slung his arm over his face. “Turn out the damn light.”
I was already on my way there, and eagerly returned to my new bed. This was a moment to savor: the smoothness of relatively clean sheets, the spring and give of a real mattress, my first soft sleep in months. As I lay down, an ache spread through my lower back, my knees, my feet. Why my feet? Everything felt cold, stiff, in a way that made me wonder if my body was now irreparably damaged.
Zane did not say a word once the lights dimmed. His breathing was audible in the sudden heavy silence, slowing with remarkable speed. Rain drummed on the roof, distant white noise wholly unlike the continual banging, rolling cacophony of droplets thundering on the thin metal shell of the dumpster.
The weight of the last several weeks lay over me like a shroud. Vassily, Celso, Sergei, the escape. Huffing, I closed my eyes and tried to drift off… efforts that became more difficult as a muffled moan vibrated through the walls from the next room across. Mason and Jenner, by the sound of it.
I pulled the covers up around my ears, jammed my head down on the pillow, and stared into the well of warm darkness ahead. Not long ago, I would have been able to see Kutkha in my mind when I relaxed enough, and as I thought about him, the sense of loss, of failure, threatened to drown me. Overlying that aging pain was the knowledge that I was lying to these people who were offering me charity. I wasn’t really a mage anymore, and I couldn’t really help them in the capacity they expected. Not without my magic. I could only hope we got it back before they noticed.
Chapter 11
I didn’t remember falling asleep, and couldn’t remember what I dreamed. There was nothing but the dark and a terrible, roaring loneliness. When I roused, my eyes were gummy, mouth thick. The light coming in through the windows was reddish, an eerie and lurid New York City sunrise.
“Morning, sunshine,” Zane called to me from further back in the room. “I just got off the phone with Ayashe. She’s on her way with the file.”
Everything hurt. Everything. Arms, legs, spine. Very slowly, I peeled myself from the bed and sat on the edge of the bunk, staring at my toes. Survival had clearly come at a price. It is all very well to entertain ideals of self-sufficiency, to be resourceful… but it had cost me. “Already? What time is it?”
“Six,” he said. “P.M.”
I squinted at the window again. Sunset, not sunrise. Right. “When will she be here?”
“About forty minutes. She had to pick up her kids and still has to cross the bridge to get here.”
That gave me enough time to shower – again – and eat breakfast, exquisite luxuries after so much time spent scavenging. Zane had bought chicken and eggs and tomatoes, and by the time I was finished, I was ready to go back to bed. It wasn’t possible. First there was a Vigiles to deal with. Then, a firefight that would probably destroy whatever remained of my home and my health. Even with backup, it was going to be a long night.
Ayashe arrived in a dark, sleek, expensive car that she parked right outside the garage window. Zane had left to go and do something, leaving me at the bar to nurse a cup of coffee in my now-relatively clean clothes. The Agent walked in jaw-first, short heels tapping across the floor. Her badge was still pinned to the front of her crisp black suit, and her collar was high and clean. My brief notion of having regained my dignity evaporated in its entirety before she’d finished crossing the room.
“I’m not happy with this,” she said by way of greeting. She slapped a fat manilla file on the counter, and then a second sealed plastic case on top of that. “You have to read it here. I’ve got to take it back before ten.”
The folder was blank, but the opaque plastic case was stamped with the symbol of the Vigiles: a stylized lion with a mane of sun-rays contained within a circle. “That won’t be a problem. Please open the case.”
“What?” She squinted at me, nose wrinkling. “It ain’t warded.”
“Call it a matter of habit, but mere street magi like myself don’t often feel the need to break the enchanted seal of a major arcane organization.”
Ayashe huffed impatiently, but cracked it open for me regardless, laying out a collection of photographs in zip-sealed paper baggies. “Read the summary report first, then look at the photos. It’s better to have the background before you try to draw any new conclusions.”
She was trying to teach her grandfather to suck eggs, but I said nothing and simply obeyed. While I read and digested the contents of the summary report – still a good forty pages of forensic legalese – Ayashe restlessly roamed the clubhouse. It was empty save for the two of us, and only she made noise, rooting through the room like a ferret hunting snakes. Every now and then, she went to peer out the window at her car.
The shifters had summed it up fairly well the night before: The Vigiles had found a whole lot of nothing. It was a rare opportunity to look at their investigation process, and I was at least as interested in their methodology as I was in their report. They still relied heavily on physical forensic techniques, using acronyms that were familiar to me through my studies, with a shorter roster of non-standard protocols. They had bought a ‘verified occult expert’ onto the scene – and who knew what background they had – as well as a ‘transitional witness communicator’. All personal details of the experts and the victims had been whited out of the report – by Ayashe, no doubt. “Am I correct to assume that a ‘transitional witness communicator’ is a spirit medium?”
“Yeah,” Ayashe grunted the word as she roamed around the pool table, fiddling with the triangle.
The medium had not been able to contact the murdered victims or anything else in the house, though numerous ‘cold spots’ were located. The expert had identified the symbols drawn on the wall as a reference to Beelzebub and had left it at that. The organs I had listed off had been harvested from the bodies, and in addition to that, their eyes were also missing. The bed and bodies had been full of broken glass, and a second symbol had been found in the ensuite.
I noted that Ayashe wasn’t on the investigation team – she was listed as a ‘Supernatural Community Liaison’, not as an active agent involved in the case. No wonder she was nervous and shifty about bringing the file here.