Stained Glass

Chapter 14

I stumbled out of the way of the oncoming leopard, swiping with the machete. He wasn’t interested in me: he landed on Kir. The trapped man screamed a blood-curdling, high-pitched pig squeal that cut when Duke slapped his lower jaw with his forepaw and almost casually tore it off his face. It hit the opposite wall in an arc of gore and bounced, sending Binah scattering from her nest of clothes.

A tiger – fully twice the side of the cat who had quite literally ripped this man’s face off – charged past me as I backed as far as the floor allowed for. The tiger leapt onto Duke’s back, pulling him off to the floor to roll, snarl and tumble over the ground. The camera was taken to the floor, smashing open.

Duke was no match for the bigger cat, but fought anyway. They hit the window and burst through it in a shower of glass and plaster, screeching out on the fire escape. The leopard, bloody and panting, tried to clamber back into the room as the tiger caught it around the torso with paws the size of dinner plates and lay on top of it, pinning its comparatively small body to the floor. Comparatively. One was the size of a very large mastiff; the other, the size of a pony.

“Fucking hell, Duke!” Zane’s shouting finally cut through the racket. He surged forward, trying to help Jenner restrain the hissing, spitting leopard. The Twin Tigers moniker made sense now.

I rushed to Kir’s side. He was convulsing, fingers opening and closing spasmodically as his body flopped on the bed. His lower face was simply gone, his throat open, his guts torn out from his belly like so much offal. He was going to die, and I wasn’t much inclined to try and help him.

Duke was helpless under Jenner’s bulk. He yowled and clawed at the floor, but the club president, in her animal form, was far larger and far stronger. When he finally calmed down, she let go of the scruff of his neck and looked at me with an alien intelligence. It was Jenner and not-Jenner at the same time. It was like looking at someone’s Neshamah.

“How the hell are we going to clean this up?” Zane’s voice had a note of hysteria. He pushed both hands over his shaven head. “Jenner, Duke just fucking killed someone!”

“Forget about him. We have to get out of here,” I said. “The cops will be here any minute. Don’t touch anything, for GOD’s sake. The more we touch, the longer we stay, the more evidence we leave.” If we were lucky, the Mafiya itself would be blamed. I wasn’t stupid enough to have bought an apartment under my own name, but the police had any number of ways they could identify me. I’d lived here for most of my life. They’d find something I had missed. “I have to get some things.”

“I got your suitcases and the medical kit. They’re in the car. Give me the cat.” Zane held his arms out.

I bundled Binah up in Vassily’s old suit jacket and handed her to him. She was too tired to resist or care, and her frailty was evident in his huge hands. “Don’t waste too much time.”

Lights had turned on in the house across the street. Shit.

Duke shuddered, and went limp under Jenner’s weight. When she was satisfied, the Siberian tiger stood upright on her hind-paws. Limbs and fur folded back into her center mass as bones popped and changed shape, expelling clear, sweet smelling gel that splattered to the ground. It was both grotesque and oddly elegant, every part moving smoothly into place. The clear gel fell to the floor in clumps, vanishing almost as soon it touched the bloody carpet and taking the blood and dirt with it. I recognized the high, mouthwatering floral smell of the stuff over the stench of viscera. It was Phi. Weak Phi, compared to Zarya’s blood, but it was Phi nonetheless.

Duke followed soon after. The leopard crawled on his belly towards Jenner, shifting back in the same oddly mechanical way. When he was back in human shape, the naked woman kicked him in the jaw and sent him sprawling.

“You fucking idiot!” Jenner shouted at him. She bent down and hauled him up by the arm. Duke didn’t have cat ears anymore, but if he had, they would have been laid back flat along his skull. “What the fuck? WHY the fuck?”

“I’m s-sorry, Prez, I—”

“You fucking lost your shit, is what you did. Get up and get out! Into the car!” Jenner shoved the much larger, much taller man like he weighed nothing. Without a word, he picked up his sword – still nude – and stumbled out the door.

“There are coats in the wardrobe,” I said. I was sweeping up anything that the cops could use to identify me or Vassily. Photos, his zippo, but there were just too many things that could be used to incriminate us. A dull radiating pain ached through my hands with the knowledge of what I was going to have to do.

Jenner sniffed. “You think I’m worried about being naked? I was born this way.”

“No, but the NYPD may be less than impressed by your assets if we’re pulled over.” I didn’t turn around to look at her, but I wasn’t able to put any force in my voice. “Get out.”

“What about the tape?”

“The tape that now ends with Duke turning into an animal and murdering someone?” I pointed at the floor. The cassette was shattered amidst the ruins of the camera, the tape pulled out in a mockery of Kir’s corpse.

“Fucking hell.” I heard the wardrobe bang open as Jenner went to search for something to cover herself. “They’re just going to have to take our word for it, then.”

My eyes were hot as I pulled open the dresser and rifled through Vassily’s underwear, clean and untouched since he’d died. There was a money clip in there, monogrammed but empty. I added it to the collection of his tokens in my pocket. “Get out. I’ll finish up in here.”

“Whatever.” I heard a rustle, and then Jenner strode out past me into the hall, slinging a trench coat around her shoulders. I pocketed what I could, took what photos I could carry, and picked up the ruined cassette. Brown celluloid tape was flammable, and I had a gas stove.

But before that, I had to get my tools.

The study was still mostly intact. To my surprise, the Wardbreaker was just lying there, unholstered, the silencer still screwed onto the barrel. I checked it over and then jammed it through my waistband. A deep tension I hadn’t known I’d been carrying ebbed away, replaced by determination.

My desk had been disemboweled, but someone had stuffed my papers and books back into the drawers and had left their own files on the desktop. Quickly, I went to the smallest of my bookshelves, a low deep-bellied shelf, and pulled out a photo album, a copy of the mishnayot, and half a dozen particularly rare books, including the copy of Das Rote Buch that Crina had pilfered for me before she’d vanished to parts unknown. My wastepaper basket had a trash bag in it: I shook the trash out, threw the books into it, and tied it shut.

The last thing I needed was in the glass hutch beside my desk, cradled on a folded rectangle of crushed purple velvet. My father’s old prison sledge. No one had touched it, which wasn’t surprising. There was something naturally unpleasant about this weapon, the hammer my father had liberated from Kolyma, the gulag where he served – and survived – for seven years. The head was fifteen pounds of cold iron, more than enough to crush a man’s head in with a single solid blow. And it had crushed a lot of heads.

The sledge thrummed with a subtle siren call, and even with my magic crippled, it still made the stubble on the back of my neck stir. It had first been imbued with my father’s desperate will, his fierce need to survive. Every iron spike he’d driven had symbolized a camp guard, a snitch, a pimp or a foreman. He’d carried the hammer and his hate with him through the German underground railroad, onto the ocean liner he and my mother took from Hamburg to New York, the ship where I was conceived. Grigori Sokolsky had terrorized the Beach – and me – with this hammer for fifteen years. I had ended his life with it, closing the circuit. The peculiar magic of sacrifice was etched into it as indelibly as my father’s prison number was burned into the wooden haft.

Reverently, I lifted it out of its case, ran my thumb over the burnished grain, and slung it over my shoulder. As the only surviving Sokolsky man, it sung its Phitonic song for me and me alone. I had been prepared to let it go, like the photos. It was too heavy and cumbersome to travel with, but the Organizatsiya had called me Molotchik after this hammer, and the Organizatsiya was going to remember why.

With the Wardbreaker, hammer, my cat, and my key grimoires, I felt better, stronger. I passed by the desk, and lifted the cover of a dirty, finger-stained Manilla folder to glance over the contents. They were informal receipts penciled in Nicolai’s rough handwriting, with a note to read the instructions for pickup and delivery. Frowning, I flipped the page.

There was a honk from outside, then another. The Tigers had spotted something.

I slapped the folder closed and shoved the entire thing into the core of the photo album inside the trash bag, grabbed the lot, and ran. As I reached the balcony exit, the front door banged open from the other end of the house. There was a burst of male laughter, and then a shout of alarm. They smelled death.

Images of my tortured cat and the red-haired girl, her wrists bleeding from the handcuffs, flashed in my mind’s eye. A tic rippled next to my mouth. I threw the glass door open on its rails, threw the books over the side, and stalked back into the house with my father’s sledgehammer in my hands.

A month ago, I’d been desperate to run from the Organizatsiya, but now I didn’t think I could – not without making them hurt first.