I wanted to kill him, but I’m five foot five in shoes and he was far too big for me to stab. Gunning him down would alert every person inside and outside the building. I clamped my jaws together until my teeth creaked, then turned and threw the egg down the aisle. It sailed out, and broke against something with a wet ‘splotch’.
“Eh?” Ovar turned, eyes scanning the room. “Bors? That you?”
For several long moments, I said nothing. Every sound in here was amplified, and any motion I made would crack out into the air. As Ovar waited, looking for anything out of the ordinary, another push of magic rippled over us. I was running out of time.
“Fuck, this place is creepy.” He muttered, and turned back.
I hissed. And tried to throw my voice. Ovar whipped around again, advancing to the door this time.
“Hey,” he said. His voice echoed, the word ringing out multiple times against the walls. “Cut it the fuck out!”
As quietly as I could, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the first thing I found: a quarter and the dime that Christopher had given me. The coin didn’t mean that much to me, so I flung them both, close to the ground. They rolled and skittered, and Ovar started forward. Sweat was rolling down his face now. He had his finger on the trigger, gun braced against his shoulder as he advanced into the room in the direction of the noise. If he heard or saw me, I was deader than the canal outside.
As he left, I half-scrambled, half-crawled into the stairwell, waiting a moment until Binah caught up. What remaining fur she had was standing on end. The magic was only getting stronger, whipping down the channel of the stairs. I ran up them, trying to be quiet on the rusted steel treads. At the top of the stairwell was a door.
My eyes were still adjusting as I got to the landing. I reached for the handle, and stopped at the last moment as a hot buzz, like static electricity, crawled up my arm from my fingertips. In the gloom, a figure loomed out at me from the wood. It was an eye. The iris was blank, and struck through with a cross.
Swallowing, I lowered my hand and stepped back. I couldn’t break this sigil, not if it was really charged. There was a bated darkness about it, and the eeriness I felt from it – and the room beyond – made me wonder if someone had already spotted me. If it had alerted someone on the other side, I had a machine gun capable of putting a few rounds into their skull… assuming that’s not what they wanted me to do.
From downstairs, I heard Ovar call out to the other guards that he’d heard something in the building, followed by quick, heavy footsteps that grew closer every second. He was heading for his post, and he was going to see and hear me.
Anxiously, I reached out towards the handle. As I did, a creeping, prickling chill passed through the leather of my gloves, through my fingertips. I jerked my hand back, frowning. Lips pursed, I slung my bag around and pulled the carton of milk. It was a long shot, but I had gotten the milk on a hunch. Close to fifteen years of sorcerous wet work had taught me that the symbolic properties of things were as important as the materials. Eggs were symbols of fertility, birth, nourishment, perhaps femininity – and the effect on DOGs probably also extended to other egg-like materials. Seeds were at the top of my list, though the only seeds at the bodega had been toasted sunflower seeds and I doubted they would have any effect. Milk was something I decided to try on a whim: the full-cream, unhomogenized stuff that was as close to the substance used to feed calves as was possible.
Feeling somewhat awkward, I opened the carton and splashed it over the door. The sigil sizzled. Sizzled. I watched a complex tracery of violet light rush through the crude black paint and then fade. When I doused it the second time, there was no response, though the ‘paint’ was sloughing off in a very un-paintlike fashion. I depressed the handle and waited for a few breathless seconds before entering, carton in one hand, my other hand bracing the machine gun against my less-injured ribs. As quietly as I could, I slunk out into the top floor: another huge single room with bottomless, circular black holes spaced across the floor. At the other end of the room, at the far western corner of the building, a human sacrifice was in full swing.
Chapter 29
The assembled TVS members were clustered around a makeshift altar that had been mounted in front of the gaping remains of the corner window. The priest’s back was to me. The others in the room – six or seven people – were standing in a rough circle, staring up towards a ring of black lights hung from the old trolley rails on the ceiling. Those were running off a small kerosene generator which made enough noise that my footfall was unlikely to be heard.
I left the door ajar, searching for cover in the semi-darkness. There were old machines left here, and short stairwells that led up to the next floor of the grain elevator, but nothing that was going to offer real protection. I took what I could on my way across until I was crouched behind a narrow steel pillar and able to see and hear what was going on.
The black lights distorted all color that might have been present, but I recognized at least two faces. Vanya was staring up at the light overhead, his jowly face smeared with black from eyes to sagging jawline in a parody of tears – or blood. At the far end of the altar was Mason.
Jenner’s partner stood with his back to the shattered window. He was not robed like the others. He was stripped down to a bloodied wifebeater and jeans, his clothes torn, his skin striped with gore. If not for that, he looked like he’d been in a bar room brawl and come out barely on his feet. There was a huge, spreading dark stain across his shirt, radiating from his heart on the left. Mason was the only one looking down at something. He was staring at the featureless, motionless black bodybag that was lain on the table, feet pointing at the setting moon.
“—to celebrate a new brother entering the fold,” the priest intoned, mid-sentence. The speaker was masked and hooded, and I couldn’t make out any details from my position. “The price of your admission to the Anointed is to cleanse the world of an affront to the Father, Ivan Kazopov. Will you purify this abomination with your body and strength, and swear your fealty to the Eternal Light?”
“I will,” Vanya replied.
I frowned, utterly at a loss. There was something not right about Mason. He swayed in place, and as far as I could tell, he wasn’t blinking.
“The windows of Heaven are opening for you, Vanya.” The priest turned to face me, hands lifted. The mask was white, flat and featureless, save for three thin, grim slashes where the eyes and mouth should have been. Despite that, I know that it was the Spook, the one I had glimpsed on Ribbon Street through the distortion of his weird magic. His power was over the cold, inexorable twin pressures of time and gravity. “Praise the Father, blessed be his many names…”
As the praying and affirmations continued, echoed by the others in the room, I shifted the PP-90 around to hold it at the ready and tried to cobble together a plan of action. There was no obvious warding around the circle, but I couldn’t discount it. The magic on the door had been very real, and the effect of the milk very noticeable. If I was lucky, the gun would be safe to use on the humans. If I wasn’t, I was probably going to get gunned down while I tried to stop something infernal from eating me and my cat.
“Are you ready to be baptized in blood, to become a true follower of the All Father, to speak with fire and serve Him for all your days?”
Vanya nodded. “I am.”
As I watched, The Deacon – he was really the only one who could claim a title like that – took up a featureless silver box at the end of the altar and opened it. The inside was lined in black velvet. It held a knife like no other I had ever seen. The blade was glass, or crystal. As he lifted it, I saw it catch and gleam in the blacklights. The UV lighting revealed a matrix of flaws in the glass. It was hazed, like it had been broken and the pieces glued together.