Burn Artist

Chapter 17

The dream continued in fits and starts: dreams of hands turning into birds that drilled into my temples and the back of my neck, attacking me as I fled down a black stone corridor away from some nameless terror at the other end. Pain and dehydration roused me from an unquiet sleep.

I woke on my back, half-on, half-off the bed. My shirt was still buttoned up, contrary to my memory, and I was hard: an uncomfortable congested erection that showed little sign of abating. My head was pounding in time with my hot, throbbing stomach. It felt like the worst food poisoning I’d ever had, except that food poisoning generally didn’t involve embarrassing hallucinations and priapism.

“Good God.” I moaned aloud. My voice was still slurred. I rolled onto my side, and then slowly pushed myself up on my hands. The movement only reminded me of the discomfort downstairs, made worse when I sat up the wrong way and accidentally pulled something the wrong way with a sharp, tearing pain. That woke me up. Wincing, I reached down and tried to adjust to a more comfortable position. It was partly successful, in that I no longer felt like I was going to punch through the end of my foreskin like the Kool Aid Man, but it only reminded me of other kinds of discomfort as my dream faded back in in fits and starts. I closed my eyes, confused and ill.

I could still feel Vassily’s mouth against mine. It had felt so real that I could hardly believe I’d dreamed it. It was humiliating… I wouldn’t do that. HE wouldn’t do that, not in a million years. Vassily never stopped talking about women, and he’d had girlfriends all the way through college… why would he do that? My conclusion was that he hadn’t. Most of my memories after leaving the Tea Room were simply gone. My dreams had been very surreal in other ways… that kind of fantasy wasn’t a stretch to imagine.

Despite that, my cock throbbed insistently. It crossed my mind to find some way to get it to settle down and clear the pipes, so to speak, but then the first wave of nausea hit and all I could think of was getting to the bathroom before I threw up on my bed. I stumbled down the hall and fell to my knees on the cold tiles in front of the toilet, puking until I was blind and semiconscious. I heard the door open, and felt Vassily’s hands on my shoulders and hair before I awoke a second time. I was on my knees in front of the toilet, kneecaps grinding uncomfortably against the floor. The bowl was clean, and Vassily was moving around behind me. How had I gotten here?

“Easy, Lexi. Can you hear me?”

“Why do people do this to themselves?” That was what I tried to say, but it came out as a garble around the next wave of sick.

“Don’t worry, just do what you’re doing. You’ll perk up after some tea and toast. I got toast in the kitchen, okay?”

I managed a thick moan. THIS is what I’d been missing out on for the last twenty-five years?

“Nothing makes you feel more alive than your first hangover,” Vassily said cheerfully. “Hang tight. I’ll get you some water, okay?”

“Metoclopramide… Maxolon,” I gasped. “White bottle, green lid. In First Aid kit.”

I might have blacked out again. At some indeterminable time later, Vassily returned with three pills and a glass of water that was the temperature of fresh blood. I sat down against the wall to take them and sip at the glass, the question I wanted to ask burning on the tip of my tongue. Had I been dreaming? But how could I ask when it was a blur, and when everything else had felt just as real?

“Come on, man. You got this.” Vassily squatted in front of me, his face a mask of sympathy. “Need a hand up?”

“Did… did…?” I tried, but the words wouldn’t come out. “Did Rodya call? About the spook, the curse?”

“Yeah. But you need to be functional before we talk about it.”

Tongue-tied, I reached out and let him help me to my feet. He led me out to the kitchen and sat me down at the table. The light was too bright. The meowing cat outside the window was too noisy. I rested my face in my hands, and tried not to retch up the pills.

“You went pretty hard for your first time,” Vassily remarked. I could hear him working the kettle and the toaster. “The guys were real excited to see you partying for a change. You have no idea. Rodya was talking about it on the phone to me.”

“Oh. Wonderful.” The smell of food cleared my head and set my stomach to rumbling, but not in the usual expectant-hungry food way. It was more like the warning tremors at Mt. St Helens. I didn’t look up until I felt him set a plate and a mug in front of me. Plain buttered toast and strong tea with strawberry jam, no milk.

“We should go over to Mariya’s today.” Vassily sat down across from me, a piece of toast in his hand. “This isn’t the stuff we should be talking about with Rodya on a private line. He was calling from Vanya’s new safehouse, I think.”

Carefully, I had a single sip of tea. It was too sweet, but I needed the sugar after throwing up as much as I had. “What did he say before?”

“That Kovacs guy left another message. He said that Grisha burns tonight unless we back off, and the next time, he’s going to lay the curse on the whole Organizatsiya.”

“They’re really not giving us any time to pull out, are they?” I tried a bit of the toast next, and discovered that I was surprisingly hungry underneath the nausea. “It’s a Sunday. What does he expect us to do?”

“Fucked if I know.” Vassily grimaced. He looked pale and pinched, stubbly, the skin of his forearms a clammy blueish-white. Maybe he’d done his puking before me. “So… you planning to wait, until he like…?”

I rose my eyebrows at him, chewing my dry toast in silence.

“You know. Grigori.” Vassily rubbed a hand through his messy hair. It was puffy with old mousse. “I dunno, man. Do you really think anyone deserves to die like that?”

“Yes,” I said. “Without question.”

He looked at me, disquieted. “I know he beat you and shit, but he’s your blood. A bullet through the head is one thing. Death ala flambé is seriously kind of screwed.”

“He didn’t just beat me.” I had another sip of tea. “I didn’t run away from home because of the beatings. I ran because he tried to kill me multiple times, in multiple ways, and that’s all he’s ever done. If he can’t kill someone physically, he kills their soul and tries to grind them into the dirt. That’s what he did to my mother, and that’s what he’s been trying to do to me.”

“I… Uh…” Vassily frowned. “You’ve… kind of hinted that he tried to whack you, but to be honest, you never told anyone anything about what happened.”

“I told Lenina and Mariya. That’s why they adopted me into the house.”

“Why DIDN’T you ever tell me?”

I shrugged, glancing down at the table. “I don’t know.”

Silence hung between us for a short time before Vassily spoke again. “What’d he do?”

“I used to go out a lot at night to get away from the house,” I said, chewing thoughtfully. “I’d go down to the beach and hide under the boardwalk, do my homework under there. Neither of them wanted to feed me, so I’d usually come back around midnight and fix something myself before bed. Both parents were generally unconscious by then.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I came back through my window that night, and found my dad sitting on my bed with a crowbar. He went on one of his drunken rants… something about me being a parasite, about ruining his life and making my mother cheat on him, and all this other nonsense. He… projects. Whatever he believes about something is the absolute truth, as far as his concern. Somehow, it turned into Nikla and I being responsible for him ending up in the GULAG, and then he chased me around the room trying to kill me. Smashed up all my things.” I motioned with the mug of tea. Now that I had some fluids and the Maxolon with me, my appetite was coming back. “He was going to kill me, then my mother, then himself. I knew what he was trying to do, and I knew he was serious. He’d been taking me on his hits for years.”

“You’re joking?” Vassily stared at me, eyes wide, lips parted. “What were you? Seven?”

“Mm. You remember Jay Brewski? That Polak who ran the bakery uptown?”

“Yeah. Vaguely.”

“Grisha took me with him when I was five. That’s how he got Brewski to go out the back with him… he figured that because he’d come with a little kid holding his hand, he was safe.” I shook my head. “My father brained him with a tire iron right in front of me. Got me to hold it while he went and got his sledgehammer to finish the job. That was the first time I ever saw anyone die. I think that’s why I ended up doing that thing to Jan Murphy’s hand with the scissors… Grisha used his hits to make an example of it to me. He did other stuff, too… tortured animals, fucked people in front of me, that sort of thing.”

“Jesus.” Vassily let out a taut breath. “Fuck. I had no idea. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

I shrugged. “Maybe because I don’t remember very much of it. The memories have been coming back in fits and starts since we really started working for the Organization, and when was that? Eighty-two?”

“Yeah. No wonder you’re so steady during work, though.” Vassily didn’t quite seem to know what to make of the confession. “Most of the guys who started around the same time as us are gone already. They shit their pants or didn’t clean up after themselves, and bam. Dead or locked up.”

“Yes.” I was already feeling better – better being relative to how I’d felt before. If there was one good thing my father had given me, it was his iron constitution. “But you see why I have no desire to stop Kovacs. Father’s made it so that it was either him or me, and I intend to see it through.”

Vassily exhaled thinly through his nose, cupping his mug and looking down at it. After a while, he nodded.

I stretched, grimacing as my back clicked. “I’ll shower and get dressed. Then we should go to Mariya’s and call Rodion. I can fill him in with how I expect to deal with the crisis in a reasonable timeframe, which will be some point between the point Grigori combusts and three a.m. tomorrow night.”

“What do you think caused the curse to turn on him?” Vassily pushed back from the table, collected our plates, and took them to the sink.

“Well… I’d assume that this spook has built a set of failsafes into his magic,” I said. “That’s normal procedure, when you’re enacting things like curses. It’s obvious that a mage will expect opposition and plan accordingly for things like counter-curses and protective wards, so that the spell will find some way to get around them, destroy them, or…”

I trailed off as an ugly realization struck me cold.

“What?” Vassily turned. The Hand of Fatima was framed by the collar of his bathrobe, the lapis and pearl eye staring out from his chest.

“Or he’s keyed it so that if the curse is turned by a ward, it defaults to the next closest blood kin of the intended target,” I said. “The guy works for the mafia. It makes total sense… if you can’t twist the target’s wrist with his own life, twist his wrist with his family’s.”

Vassily froze, the tap still running over the plate in his hands. “Your only relative is your dad. Which means—”

“Mariya.” I finished. “Your only living relative is Mariya.”