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  I found Sir Purrs-A-Lot’s old litter box and food bowls and set them up for Binah in the bathroom, then shed my gloves and threw them and my keys into the tub to wash up. Exposed, my hands rang like a tuning fork: I pressed my teeth together and forced myself to touch the tap and turn it. The chilly metal sent a shock of bright sensation through my fingers. The sound of the screeching faucet and rushing water obliterated my vision with white haze while I washed the keys, my gloves, and then myself under the shower—twice with soap, once with lanolin cream. Too much heavy magic and not enough sleep turned up the dial on my nerves, overstimulating my senses to the point of disability. The sound of the water had color and shape I felt in my mouth.

  The whole time, I was haunted by a strange, nebulous discontent. I couldn’t say if I was disturbed by the course of the night or not. Death has never particularly disturbed me. It is nicely certain, one of two events—the other being birth—which are guaranteed and irrevocable. The only variable is how you go about it, when the time comes. Do you die well, or do you die badly?

  For different reasons, two men had died badly tonight, and bad deaths bothered me in a way I could not even articulate to myself.

  Once I was clean, I felt around over the sink and opened the mirrored cupboard with the point of my wrist. Inside was a glass tumbler and a new pair of gloves. Even after all that, I still felt dirty, as if I were covered in a faint sheen of blood and filth. It had been a very long night, and it was going to be an equally long, hot, difficult day. I had to pick up Vassily, and then maybe—if I was lucky—I’d get six hours sleep before we drove in to report to Lev.

  God, Vassily. The thought of having him back made my mouth turn dry. I still had surfaces to clean, books to sort. The place needed to breathe: it needed to be everything that prison wasn’t for those precious first minutes when Vassily stepped in and found everything the way it should be. He'd been gone for five years. I guess it wasn’t that long, not really. Not on the scale of, say, the time between the present—1991—and the day I’d run away from my parents’ house, but five years is a long time to be missing your right hand. We’d practically lived together from the day I’d been adopted into his family to the day he’d been convicted, and for five years, I’d come home to this heavy silence after every job, hanging my coat and setting down my gun in the buzzing nothingness of an empty apartment.

  Before I left, I spent some time in front of the mirror practicing. Nic told me soon after Vassily had gone in that sometimes, the prison wouldn’t admit you if you looked wrong. I’d never been refused a visit, but this was a release, and I wasn’t completely certain it was the same sort of occasion. I tried to appear more pleasant and less severe for several minutes, but no mirror in the world could bring a warm light to my eyes or soften the thinness of my mouth. No matter what I did, I looked like a short, sharky man-eater. It was Vassily who taught me how to socialize outside the confines of a hit. Thanks to his patience, certain kinds of interactions were manageable. Hellos, goodbyes. Business. Intimidation. Dealing with people like Moni is easy: I have those men down to a science. But being likeable, attractive, relaxed? They were Vassily's skills.

  I fiddled with my face and clothes until my cheeks ached. Frustrated, restless, I stood back, gut tight, and breathed deeply of the clean vacuum smell of the house. Overriding it was the faint perfume of frankincense and myrrh. My altar took up one wall of my bedroom, a plain table laid out with a well-organized, eclectic clutter of Judaica and Occult paraphernalia from no particular country or point in history: a knife and chalice, a statuette of Santa Muerte, the Mexican cartel saint who protected those who worked by night, and an effigy of Veles, ancient god of magic, in honor of my Slavic heritage. A tarot deck wrapped in a scarf sat in front, the card for the week propped up against the rest, and a hundred other items of curiosity, awe, and personal significance were arranged in concentric rings from the central point. The Wardbreaker lived there, resting next to a gold ankh I’d given to Vassily on his twentieth birthday. He’d pressed it into my hand just before he was led out of the courtroom after his sentence was handed down, his fingers shaking and hot against my palm.

  I took up the ankh, folded my fingers around it, and squeezed. It was time to go and see what remained of my best friend.

  ***

  Fishkill Correctional was located just off Route 84, an old New York State Psychiatric Center converted into a prison. My gut was sour with tension by the time I cleared security. Dry-mouthed, I waited in reception with my hands twisted on my lap, staring down at them in stony silence while I tried to think of things other than the dangers and vices of cellblock life. Jaundice. Drugs. Alcohol. Especially alcohol.

  A buzz preceded the opening of the inmate release doors, and each time, the sound jerked me from my reverie. Three ex-convicts went by, one after the other. One of them, a black man with the hollow eyes of a serial jailbird, was picked up by a stoic woman with big hair and big teeth. Next out was a bald, fit hardcase with an underbite and piercing blue eyes. He marched out the door alone without a backward glance. The third was a bewildered little rabbit who lingered around the reception desk. I watched him with slow eyes. He had the wire-strung build of a junkie and the quick, jerky manner of prey.

  The buzzer blared a fourth time, and my gaze shifted from Rabbit to the door. My eyes lit on a familiar pair of hands—long, fine-boned philosopher’s hands, lettered and tattooed over the knuckles: the tattoos of a Vor v Zakone. Vassily and I were both too young to actually be considered Vor v Zakone, the oath-taking sworn thieves of Nic and Lev’s generation. Vassily’s tattoos were well deserved in many other ways, but they were a memorial to the father he’d never known.

  I stood up in alarm as my sworn brother—thinner, harder, and more wolfish than I remembered—let his mouth stretch in a chagrined smile as he was led to the desk for processing. His black hair was shorter, and his old suit strained visibly across his shoulders and hung loose around his waist, but he was just as lean and tall and handsome as I remembered. I stared at his back in shock as he signed the release, pulse hammering under my tongue. Finally, I heard the final stab of the pen from across the room, and Vassily threw it down as he broke apart from his escort in a rush. We collided as I stepped into his long-limbed embrace, wrapping my arms around his chest as he swore and laughed and squeezed his whole upper body around my head. Under the weird clinical smell of institutional air, without cologne or aftershave, he still smelled the way he always had. He smelled right, like fur and blue and spice on my palate. For a long moment, I found my mouth full and cottony, unable to speak from a place of perfect stillness.

  “Jesus,” Vassily said hoarsely. “Alexi. Jesus.”

  “You’re back where you belong,” I replied in Ukrainian, clapping Vassily’s back. “Here.”

  Vassily did not let go. I felt his fingers clench the skin of my shoulders through my shirt. When he spoke again, it was quiet, lips beside my ear. “Get me the fuck out of this place. Food. Sun. Coffee. Please.”

  I peeled back enough to look up at him, gripping his arms. Intensity hummed like a weight in the back of my throat, and white heat burned behind my eyes as I leaned forward, my gaze locked with Vassily’s. “We will go to Gletchik’s. I’m certain they’ll be glad to see you again.”

  Hesitantly, he nodded. Behind him, the guards were waiting impatiently by the door, their lips drawn into disapproving lines. I fought the urge to stare back and pulled him away, and neither of us said another word on our way outside. I was light-headed. The fears tumbling around in my imagination during the drive were lost to the wind.

  We listened to the radio on and off, but after a while, our need for music petered out and we spent the rest of the drive in comfortable silence. I watched Vassily out of the corner of my eye and sometimes caught the glance of the hot summer sun over his cheekbones or the shadows of his throat. Vassily let his elbow rest outside the threshold of the car window, drinking in the sight of the sky. He couldn’t keep his ey
es from it, and as the clouds rolled in, a massive front from over the mountains, he grinned broadly with delight. It made me smile, too.

  “Space, man,” Vassily finally said. “Nothing but wide open space.”

  I relished the pleasant mouthfeel of his voice for a moment, then spoke. “These years must have been hard.”

  “Meh. No different to how it was out of prison really. You eat your peas, you roll some jackass every other day, you shave and shit. Nothing to it.” Vassily snorted, rolled his eyes, and tipped his head back against the seat. “The only thing... man. No girls. THAT sucked.”

  Being a virgin, I had no idea what to say by way of reply. We drove in silence for nearly five minutes, and this time, it was slightly awkward.

  “So, uh... tell me what’s happening. I heard what I could from you or Nic, but he said a lot of shit’s changed.”

  “It has.” Goodness, where to begin? “Sergei still has not returned from the continent, and as you know, Lev is now Avtoritet.”

  “Feh,” Vassily chuffed.

  “Nicolai is now Kommandant of Brighton Beach. He absorbed Rodion’s old team when Rod was gunned down last year. No one knows if it was Lev who had him killed, but my theory is that he did. We also lost Mo, and my father, of course.” I recited the changes and deaths perfunctorily. They were little more than statistics: movements on the grand chessboard where Vassily and I had been making moves since we were teens. I mulled my next words, considering what Lev had said. We weren’t to talk about Nacari, and I wasn’t to divulge the intimate details of Semyon’s death... but everything else was kosher. “I dealt with Sem Vochin last night.”

  “Sem? Sem the Jeweler?” Vassily’s surprise was audible. “Lev’s—”

  “He went to the Manelli family and sold out all of the details of Lev’s new cocaine operation. Naturally, the Manellis took his information and fed it to one of their pet cops.” My lips thinned. “As you can imagine, Lev was not pleased.”

  “I’m not pleased. The little rat was probably the one that landed me out here.” Vassily scowled, drumming his fingers on the dash. “But that was Lev’s mistake. He should have kept his cards close and his mouth shut. This is the problem with the old guys, Lexi. They can’t keep their metaphorical dicks in their metaphorical pants. Sergei was the only one with any real wit, you know?”

  Sergei Yaroshenko, that grand old patriarch, was our Pakhun:[2] the man who’d established the Yaroshenko Organizatsiya in the 1950s. He ruled Brighton Beach for thirty years and put Vassily and me through school, priming Vassily for the leadership and me to be his Advokat, his advisor. That goal was why I’d done the Organizatsiya’s dirty work for most of my life. But it was a goal that was looking more remote with every passing year.

  When we’d turned twenty, Sergei left America to take care of business in Ukraine, vanishing into whatever bureaucratic spiderweb he’d spun in Kiev. The leadership had passed to Rodion Brukov, an old-school captain with a pompadour, a vodka and gin habit, and the uncanny ability to make good decisions while drunk. He’d been about to make Vassily Kommandant just before he went to jail on trumped up credit card fraud charges, which we now knew was Semyon’s fault, as was Rod’s death. Rodion's passing left a power vacuum, and Lev was the man who conveniently stepped in to fill the void. He was an attorney and trust fund guy, a real white-collar intellectual, and even though he’d averted an internal war and built the Organizatsiya into an immensely profitable force, he was not popular with the rough-and-tumble men who had willingly worked for Sergei and Rodion.

  I made a noncommittal motion of head and shoulders. “Sergei is apparently securing our place in the new system, now that the USSR is collapsing around our ears. The continent is in chaos.”

  “Perestroika.[3]” Vassily made a face.

  “Indeed. The system is crumbling, jobs are disappearing, and every louse with more muscles than brains is looking to get rich. Mikhail has been hiring rogue players from Bulgaria, Georgia... Nic’s been feeding them to the dragon, so to speak, to keep the numbers in check. I dealt with another one just last night.”

  “I heard it was getting rainy out there. Lots of guys dying.” Vassily sat back, hands restless in his lap. “I just hope I can hit the ground running.”

  “You will.” The USSR might have been changing, but things in Brighton Beach rarely did. We worked the same trades our fathers had done before us: fake fuel and guns, contraband, and policing the krysha, the protection racket. Before cocaine, the krysha had been a big part of my life. I collected the rent, pressured the guys who didn’t pay, and protected the ones who did. “Lev, to his credit, has been a good leader, but he is not well loved. They think he is changing too much too fast.”

  “Well, yeah. Because Rodion was a great Avtoritet. Lev’s nothing but a bureaucratic jerk-off.”

  “You shouldn’t challenge him yet, Vassily. Lev is still Sergei’s Advokat. You shouldn’t even look at him askance until Sergei has returned and confirms you.”

  “If he ever does. It’s been nearly ten years. He’s just about forfeited his claim to the Beach, and I don’t care how many million fucktons of money he has. This is where you and I grew up. It’s our turf, Lexi, and Lev and Sergei treat us like serfs on their land. We’re the ones who collect the cash and do all the work. My brothers all died for this place, and for him. And for what?”

  His words had some truth. I ran my tongue over my teeth as we turned off the highway, barely slowing for the exit. Most traffic was moving in the other direction, away from New York. Cars full of families and fishermen, heading for the Hudson and its promise of slow days and cleanish air.

  As suddenly as it had come over us, the grim mood began to ebb in the lull of conversation. Vassily made a thoughtful sound and drummed his long fingers on his thigh. “Anyway... I was wondering if—”

  “Your room is as you left it.” I cut him off, anticipating what he was about to ask, and merged onto the busier lane that would take us into the city. “I sorted your washing and vacuum-sealed it. It’s as good as new.”

  “Of course you did.” Vassily rested his head against the back of the seat and snorted. “That wasn't what I was gonna ask, though. You still into the woo-woo?”

  Magic was the one part of my life he had never understood and I never shared. "Of course. Why?"

  “Maybe you can explain something for me, Mister Wizard. I thought about the sea a lot while I was in.” Vassily’s brow furrowed. “Dreamed about it. What do you make of that?”

  “Emotion. The sea is symbolic of ocean and the mystery.”

  “The mystery, huh? What mystery?”

  “The Mystery. Ocean is a powerful symbol for the subconscious mind, for the things we don’t know and can never know about ourselves,” I replied, gesturing to the road ahead. “We know it is the origin of life, but we cannot survive in it. It is full of oxygen we cannot breathe, animals we have never seen, forests we cannot walk through. It’s the mystery which represents the greater mystery of our existence.”

  “I don’t really know what you’re talking about, but I’ll think about it. ‘Mystery’ wasn’t ever much of a big deal for me, except for like... you know, ‘what’s in the fridge that I can still eat for breakfast?’ But I had a lot of time to learn how to think.”

  “That is probably the most profound thing I have ever heard emerge from the sphincter you pass off as your mouth,” I said.

  “Fuck you. I was the token Russkie in prison. I got along by keeping my mouth shut.” Vassily jerked his shoulders back, rolling them, but there was laughter in his eyes. “So, did you ever get around to the Tao Te Ching?”

  “I did.” Books had kept our friendship alive while he was in prison, a point of connection when everything else had been taken away, and I smiled. “He who knows how to live can walk abroad without fear of rhinoceros or tiger. He will not be wounded in battle. Why is this so? Because he has no place for death to enter.”

  “Yeah, I knew you’d love it. Verse forty-four
’s my fave. It helped a lot with these weird nightmares I had. I was always dreaming about falling up into a black hole. Black holes, or the sea, but it was always up. I felt like I was coming apart sometimes, you know?”

  Yes, I did know. You couldn’t work in my profession and not encounter it, that void of no-future. My father had fallen into it, and had tried to drag everyone around down with him. “Indeed. Though bear in mind that black holes are often associated with feelings of guilt.”

  “Guilt? Yeah, right. Anyway, off topic. I held off asking for as long as I could, but are you still single? Do I have to keep worrying about you never getting laid?”

  He switched topics so quickly I almost lost track of his voice. Fortunately, I had been preparing for this question for years. What I needed to say was technically a lie, albeit one with a kernel of truth. “Not entirely.”

  “I mean, I know you’re basically a monk, but I... wait.” Vassily paused mid-thought, hand raised. His mouth worked as he struggled to process what I’d just said. “Hold on. ‘Not entirely’? As in, ‘No, Vassily, I’m no longer a sad and lonely virgin’?”

  “I know a woman.” Not knowing how to elaborate, I shrugged a second time.

  “Is she... uh... is she real?” Vassily’s brow furrowed in concern. “Like, alive, and not a magazine cutout with a hole for your dick?”

  I tch’d and rolled my eyes. “Don’t be a putz. Her name is Crina Juranovic. You met her once, at Sirens.”

  “I don’t remember her. And Juranovic? She Serbian? Croatian?”

  “Possibly. She speaks Ukrainian, but she grew up in Germany.”

  “Well, I... huh. Right.” Vassily trailed off and began to twitch, drumming his fingers on his thighs. He hesitated for a moment before speaking again, voice catching. “That’s good, because guys like you end up in the Weird Obituaries section of the papers, Lexi. I worry I’ll come in and find you’ve choked yourself out from the doorknob with a pair of dirty stockings someday, and—”