Dark Sun: Ch 1

In my dream, I smell the ocean.

I'm on a balcony, looking over a different sea. Not the Atlantic. Not Brighton Beach. It's a flashing, brilliant blue, the color of a kingfisher's wings. Behind me, a clinic. Leather and paper. Jung, Freud and Adler line the shelves. A place of peace and healing.

Then I hear him. Elegant knuckles rapping sharply on my desk. Tattoos and scars long faded, an old map of the life we've left behind. Pastries in a brown paper bag, because he knows I always forget to eat when I'm working. Taking care of us, just like his sister.

In my dream, I take his hand in mine, kiss the long fingers, brush my lips over his palm. I look up, and I see him. I see him. Eyes a drowning cornflower blue, darker than the water outside. By the light in them, I know. We no longer war for scraps of the American dream. Violence a distant memory. And between us, no shame. No shame at all.

But this is not for me. No... None of it for me.

We were raised amongst wolves. Amongst thieves. I am their weapon.

The dream turned to ash as we hit a pothole on 7th St, startling me from sleep. It was a hot night in Manhattan, dreary and leaden, and my driver, Nicolai, was as grim as a pallbearer at the wheel. He was a Dedushka, a grandfather, one of the old guard from the Soviet Union. So was the man I had been ordered to kill. His name: Semyon Vochin. A jeweler, money launderer... and traitor. My boss had ordered the hit in a rage, ranting with the spiteful, trembling fury of the broken-hearted. Semyon had been his best friend. He thought he’d known him well.

"Hey," the man across from me grunted. "The fuck you looking at?"

My partner for the dance was nervous. Mani, Manny, something like that: fresh off the boat from Bulgaria, seething with the need to prove himself. Younger than me by about five years, which put him at around twenty-four, twenty-five. He had the look of a man that killed easily, but I could tell I was the first Spook he'd ever met. Every nervous shift of his back against the seat prickled my ears with the sound of wool on leather. He had a pug-like face. Nasty black eyes, the whites already yellowed from smoke and liquor. I'd been sure to stare into them, unblinking, while he tried to crush my hand in his at the start of the night. All I'd seen was a flat, dull nothingness, a void of old anger and spiteful self-entitlement. Unfortunately for him, he reminded me strongly of my father.

"Hey. Faggot. I asked you a question."

"So you did." Slowly, I turned to gaze out the window. We were nearly at the Diamond District.

Naturally, Mani-Moni took my silence as a challenge. I saw the tells from the corner of my eye: the energy of his aura jangled, darkening to the ugly dark red of violent intent just before he started to lean forward. Before he got within a foot, I idly raised my hand. Telekinesis caught him by his little finger.

"Do. Not." I made a gesture of my fingers in the air, squeezed and torqued his wrist into a lock. The man regarded me with an expression of stunned bovine confusion.

"Knock it off, Moni," Nicolai grunted from the front seat.

Moni - that was his name - jerked his finger out of the unseen grip and huddled to the back of the SUV. I flicked my eyes to him.

"The fuck do we need a Spook for, Nic?” Moni protested, turning to try and look at Nic from the side. “This guy, this Semyon: he some sort of wizard too?"

"No," I replied before Nic had to. "But he hired one."

My partner spat a curse in Bulgarian. He was rubbing something on his wrist: a faded red cord, with a small eye-shaped trinket. "Shut up, freak. I wasn't talking to you."

"You sought my attention three times. Now you have it."

"Alexi," Nic said flatly.

With one long, cold, meaningful look at Moni, I resumed my meditation. Tried to recapture the scraps of the dream. Like Vassily himself, it was just out of reach. But not for long. He'd be back soon. All I had to do was survive the night.

Despite his limitations, Moni was exactly what I needed for this job. Repulsive, impulsive, superstitious, with an IQ less a hundred and a bad case of terminal manliness. Before arriving in the USA, he’d been involved in the trafficking of young European girls, fourteen to sixteen years old. To my great relief, he ceased trying to get me to turn my head and settled for grumbling and cuddling into his new jacket. The jacket and the suit beneath it were finer than anything he could have afforded in Sophia, a welcome gift from our Avtoritet. He was superbly ungrateful, already trying to figure out how to overthrow Lev and conquer this soft American bratva.

We turned the corner onto the silent road and came to a gentle stop in front of the apartments sheltering our target. Nic cut the engine and lounged back, fingering a cigarette. Moni dropped the seatbelt clip he hadn't fastened and sniffed, fussing with the pistol jammed down the front of his slacks. The safety was off. I gave it an even fifty-fifty chance he shot his own dick off when we exited the jeep.

"Moni, wait. Hold your whiskers." Nic's terse, staccaco Russian punctured the air of the cabin. "Briefing."

"Oh." The other man dropped back into his seat.

I hadn't moved, save to look sidelong so I could watch Nic's face in the rearview mirror. Nick was our Commander, the man who oversaw the street teams of Brighton Beach and Sheepshead, Red Hook, and Queens. He was a dry, thin man with sun-weathered skin, heavily tattooed, missing the tip of his left ring finger. His blue eyes were slightly cloudy with premature age, but even in his fifties, he was still lean and sharp as a razor.

"Okay. Vochin hired his own spook to do him up with some heavy magic. If you know what's good for you, Moni, you'll shut the fuck up and do what Alexi says. Anything he says. Whatever Sem's packing ashed the last two guys who tried to pay him a call. Hit Vochin and don't take anything. No money, nothing. Make a scene, but stay quiet. Alexi can make it so the neighbors don't hear nothing, but that's only for a room or two, right?"

"Correct," I replied.

Moni's dead black eyes flicked to me. He furtively licked his teeth. "And if he's got a woman?"

"Don't leave a mess." Nic's flat voice turned stiff with distaste.

I finally stirred from my seat and left the car before Moni could, masking my disgust behind a pleasant nothing-face. The air outside was metal-tinged, heavy and humid after the last summer rain. I could taste pennies on my tongue, and as I tuned into the street, I felt magic creeping and crawling in a thousand places. Some of the energy was old and ghostly, arcane architecture coded into the city by its Masonic planners. Some of the magic was newer, glinting like a matrix of spiderwebs. Burglar alarms, benedictions, curses, minor wards of all kinds.

Ever since the Breach, wards were the most common form of magic to be found in cities: static enchantments written into the energetic structure of a place or object. Most wards were simple alarms: they alerted someone when the ward was disturbed. Evocation wards - complex, dynamic spells with encoded effects- were far rarer, but they could do all manner of wonderful things. Two hours before, my Avtoritet had sent two men to kill Semyon Vochin in his car. Surzi and Boris pulled up alongside him at the red light, where Surzi had stuck his pistol in through the window and promptly exploded. Boris hadn't been any luckier. Semyon's personal evocation wards turned them both into cat food and caused a six-car pileup on Water Street. Then, like a frightened rodent, he'd scampered back to his burrow.

The average man was intelligent enough to realize that if someone as dangerous and powerful as Lev Moskalysk was trying to pull a hit on you, you didn't return to your own house. No. You drove your car to the airport and bought a ticket to somewhere he couldn't reach, your possessions be damned. The fact that Semyon had gone back to his house implied that he felt his house was sufficiently warded to protect him, and sure enough, his apartment lights were on. The drapes were pulled over, and as I focused on the windows, a blurred sheen of energy turned them opaque.

My brow creased slightly. Whoever he had hired to rig his house, they were good.

Moni trailed behind me as we headed for the foyer, hats pulled down. Even with the heat, this was an occasion for formalwear. Hats to hide our faces from overhead cameras, overcoats to conceal our weapons, and gloves to hide our fingerprints. We had ski hats on underneath the brimmed hats so we didn't lose any hair for the cops to find later on. The Vigiles Magicarum would be crawling all over this scene by the end of the night anyway - the last thing we needed was to leave biotraces their Seers could use to track me.

"So uh... what'cha gonna do up there?" Moni spoke in roughly accented Russian as we passed the abandoned reception desk. "Sacrifice a goat or something?"

"If there happens to be a goat conveniently staked out on the penthouse floor." My voice stayed deep and dry, no trace of a laugh.

He scowled. "Are all wizards stuck up like this? Or is it just you?"

"I have on good authority that I occupy the extreme end of the bell curve." God, he was nervous. I could smell his sweat through his heavy clothes, the sour red tang of spent adrenaline. The Bulgarian was nearly a foot taller than me, big and brawny, but he was sweating like a new side of lamb. "But in all seriousness, I will analyze the wards, examine them for flaws, and either leverage those flaws to destroy them or find another workaround."

"The hell does that even mean?"

And here was why I discouraged questions about magic. I sighed. "Blood magic. Now, please. I must concentrate."

The foyer was stripped clean of spells, but like so many of these old buildings, it was constructed to facilitate them. The Freemasons and their even-more mystical cousins, the Rosicrucians, once had and still do have a significant hand in the building of America. Sure enough, we passed across a checkered floor and between two columns on the way to the elevators, one black and one white. Beneath the glass dome overhead lay the compass rose within a square, a powerful magical construct in its own right. A great chandelier hung down from the center of the dome over the rose, like a knife poised over a beating heart. It channeled magical energy like a lightning rod. If I concentrated, I could sense the graceful flow of power coming down through the crystals, streaming into the floor, and dispersing through the tiles. With more concentration, I could feel that some of that power had been diverted. Semyon's mage had trapped the elevators.

"We take the stairs," I said, already heading for them. The security desk was unmanned, too. Lev had called and arranged bribes in advance.

"Why? I'm hot in this stupid getup." Moni made a thick, stupid sound in his throat, but he trotted after me. Thank G-d I only had to work with him for one night. I clamped my jaws together and locked them until I felt my teeth creak.

The stair climb was a good way to relieve some tension, and by the time we hit the fifth floor, I felt better. Sweating, my heart thumping with every step, I felt properly alive. My intuition was thrumming like violin chords, rising higher and higher as we approached the sixth-floor landing. I came to a hard stop just before I stepped onto the platform, waving Moni back.

"What?" Moni drew his pistol from his coat. Sweat dripped down his face. "Where?"

"Put your piece away. And don't move."