Broken Souls (19 page)

The magic in my tats
does what it can to protect me and there’s a blinding flash of light and heat as the spells bleed off the energy of the round before it hits me. But a big fucking bullet’s a big fucking bullet and it blows a hole right through my abdomen. It’s so fast and so intense it takes me a second to register what’s happened. My legs drop out from under me, the phone falls from my hand.

Sergei’s sister steps through the wall behind him. Her steps tentative, eyes wide, like she’s not sure what’s happening. She peeks around his shoulder like a spooked pet and it occurs to me that maybe she doesn’t really know what’s happening. Compared to him, she’s tiny. Maybe five foot six, but folded in on herself, dwarfed not only by Sergei’s size, but by his personality, too. On the train she came across as crazed. Living in the shadow of a brother like that, I can see why.

“Bro,” Sergei says, leaning down and getting into my face. It’s hard to hear him past the ringing in my ears. It occurs to me that this is the first time I’ve actually heard him speak. Where Kettleman’s voice is clear and crisp, Sergei speaks English as a second language, his Russian accent thick like cold molasses. A smile splits his face like a crack in the earth, showing three gold teeth on the left side. He’s wearing a baggy t-shirt and sweatpants. Probably got tired of his body shrinking and growing and his clothes not keeping up. I press a hand against my belly to keep my guts in place. The initial shock is starting to wear off and the pain is kicking in.

“Sergei, buddy,” I say through gritted teeth. “Been looking for ya.”

“And here I am,” he says. “Glad you didn’t die, bro. Still want your skin.”

“You probably shouldn’t have put a hole in it, then.”

He laughs. “I fix that as soon as I take it.”

“You take it? I thought your little sister was gonna get it. She almost got me on the train.”

His brow furrows, face twisting into a frown that looks like a rockslide. He turns to her. “This true?”

“What, you didn’t know?” I say. “Oh, man, it was epic. She killed, what, twenty, thirty people on that train? More? How’d you get away, anyway?”

“What is this?” he says. “What is this about a train?”

She shrinks away from him like he’s on fire. “I saw him. When I was by the bar. Just as you described him. And the knife was in the car. So I followed him. He took the train and I followed him.” She lifts herself to her full height and it’s like watching an angry flower defying the sun.

He slaps her with the back of his hand, a bone-jarring crack that echoes in the hallway. She shrinks back into herself, but it only lasts a moment before she’s back in his face again, an angry bruise blooming on her face.

“You promised me,” Katya screams. “You promised me a skin.”

“When I am done. Not before. I told you this.”

“When you’re done. Always when you’re done. When will that be? You have had weeks and only now you move.”

“Soon I will have the cage and I will finish this. So shut up and let me do that.” They start screaming at each other in Russian. I have no idea what they’re saying, but it can’t be good.

I’m losing a lot of blood, feeling kind of woozy and goddamn this hurts. And that’s probably why it’s taken me this long to realize Sergei’s Sergei. He’s not wearing Kettleman.

He can’t cast spells.

I don’t have a lot of power left, but I have enough. I push past the pain, focus my will and send out a blast of lightning that fills the hallway. The blast hits them both, but Sergei’s fast. The moment my spell goes off he’s Kettleman again, throwing up a shield that protects him from the worst of it. It shoves him hard against the wall, but it doesn’t take him down. Katya, on the other hand, gets the brunt of it. She hits the floor, spasms with the voltage.

Sergei throws out a spell of his own and my throat squeezes closed as the air tightens around my neck. He lifts me up, my feet dangling inches off the floor. I can’t breathe, I’m bleeding out and my head feels like it’s about to pop off my neck. My vision is starting to go dark around the edges. I’m not sure what’s going to kill me faster, blood loss or asphyxiation.

“That was very foolish, Mister Carter,” Sergei says in the crisp, clipped tones of Kettleman’s scholarly voice. He looks over at his sister lying on the ground. She’s stopped convulsing, but I doubt she’s dead. The pressure around my throat loosens and I can breathe again. I suck in air with a loud wheeze.

“I was hoping I could just take your skin without a fuss,” he says. “Not that I need it, anymore. Maybe I should just kill you. What do you think?”

“How are you gonna get into Mictlan without it? That is your plan, right? Use my connection to Santa Muerte to get there? She been whispering in your ear, telling you what to do, and you just got sick of it? That about the size of things?”

“Nicely done,” he says. “Her, or someone like her. I don’t like being made a puppet.”

“More the puppet master type?”

“Quite. That was the plan, yes. But if I take your skin, it’s not really my power, is it? It’s like wearing a suit of clothes. That’s all these are. Costumes. They’re not really me. But imagine if I can kill a god. I could take all of Mictlan.”

“You’re an idiot. You ever wonder why Kettleman didn’t try something like that already?”

“Because he was weak,” he says.

“Because he wasn’t stupid. Yeah, you might know what he knew, but it hasn’t made you any smarter. It’s just made you more confused. You’re like a monkey with an education.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand,” he says. “You’ve already thrown away the gifts Santa Muerte’s given you. I don’t think I want your tainted point of view in my head. And once I have the Ebony Cage I’ll have more than enough power to punch through to Mictlan. I don’t need you at all.”

“Gotta keep me around a little longer, at least,” I say.

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“Storage unit’s locked.” I’m starting to slur. “Warded. You might be able to break in, but you’ll destroy the cage if you do.”

“I see. I suppose you have the key, then?”

“Right here in my pock—Goddammit. Can we go back to before I told you where the key is?”

“Blood loss is not your friend, Mister Carter. Kindly hand me the key.” He steps close, puts his hand out. I reach into my pocket. Of course I don’t have a key. But I do have this exploding marble that Gabriela gave me at her hotel.

I pull it out and shove it into his eye.

He screams as his eyeball pops with a squelch, my thumb digging into the socket and cramming the marble in as hard as I can. Gabriela said it would only effect the space of whatever it was used in, from a suitcase to a whole room. I wonder what it’ll do to the inside of his skull.

I pull my thumb out of his eye and he falls back, the spell holding me up dissipating as he claws at his face. I drop to the floor. He flails, tries to dig out the marble. I trigger it with a thought.

Sergei’s face lights up from the inside. His screams are drowned by the jet engine sound of the fire and smoke flaring out of his eyeballs, nose, ears and mouth, charring and blistering his skin. He convulses, falls to his knees. The light dies and then, a beat later, the implosion hits. Air pulls in through every hole in his head, the skull cracking under the pressure. He falls face-first to the floor. His head disintegrates into powder.

That little bauble might have killed the Kettleman skin, but I doubt it took out Sergei. I don’t have much time before he comes back. I crawl over to him, grab his gun. Rifle through his pockets until I find the obsidian knife, slip it into my coat pocket. Then I plant myself a few feet away against the wall, the gun heavy in my hand and wait for him to come back.

I don’t know if he could have broken through to Mictlan or not. With Kettleman’s skill and the Ebony Cage, I’d say that’s a definite maybe. But now he’s just a Russian mobster and the second he moves he’ll be a dead Russian mobster. And if he throws another skin at me, well, this gun holds a lot of bullets.

“You killed him,” Katya says, her voice barely above a whisper. She lifts her head, smoke curling up from her hair.

“Nah, he ain’t dead,” I say. “Gonna be. But he isn’t, yet. And don’t you get any ideas.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

Good question. “Probably. I mean you did kill a lot of people.”

“I didn’t know what would happen to those people on the train,” she says. “It’s not my fault.”

“I’m sure Mrs. O’Leary’s cow felt the same way.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. You know what? Go. You don’t deserve to get away, but I’m feeling kind of woozy and I’m tired of dealing with you. I see you again and I will kill you.”

“Don’t I get a vote?” Gabriela rounds the corner, machete held loose in her hand. Face is covered in soot, cut on her cheek that’ll need stitches, left eye going black from a nasty hit. “Jesus, Carter you look like shit.”

“Blame him,” I say. The pain in my stomach is like somebody punched me with a burning coal. Vision’s getting worse. It occurs to me that I might actually die here. Huh.

“Sergei?”

“Yeah. Might not want to get too close. He was Kettleman when I burned him. He’s gonna get all goopy in a second and then I’m gonna shoot him.”

“The hell did you do to him?”

“Those little marble bombs of yours work a treat.” Sergei’s body shudders, the skin rippling like a pool after a stone’s been thrown in. It turns waxy, translucent and then gushes off of him like a popped water balloon. And there’s Sergei, lying in a puddle of thick, pink sludge, a bewildered look on his face.

Blood loss will really screw with your reflexes. It takes a moment before I register that Sergei’s back and for my brain to tell my finger to pull the trigger. And in that brief second Katya tosses out another of those goddamn paper charms her brother made for her.

The rolled up wad of paper hits the floor between Sergei and I and flares like flash paper. Cracks split the concrete floor, the drywall, the acoustic tile ceiling. Massive branches of ice explode out of the cracks, a razor sharp lattice that blocks my view as I pull the trigger. The Desert Eagle bucks with so much force that it flies out of my hand and carves a divot in the drywall behind me. The bullet hits the translucent wall of ice, cascading a web of cracks through its surface, but stops dead.

Gabriela grabs me and yanks me hard out of the way as more shards extend through the floor. One of them slices my leg, but I barely feel it. I’m pretty much numb from the stomach down. By the time the ice is done it’s a solid wall of interlocking spears five feet deep blocking the entire hallway. Maybe three seconds have gone by.

Gabriela is yelling at me, but I can’t hear her over the ringing in my ears. She gets under my arm and hauls me to my feet and I think I’m screaming and everything goes black for a second and then I’m being dragged down the other end of the hall. The ringing starts to fade and I can kind of make out her asking me where the Ebony Cage is.

“Hang on,” I say, and I know I’m yelling and I’m starting to notice the pain in my right hand. I think I broke it when I fired that goddamn gun. Who the hell invents a gun that can break your fucking hand just by shooting it? I scan the numbers on the storage units, blinking a couple times before they get right in my vision.

“Next right and one down.” She nods and we get back to dragging my sorry ass down the hall.

She asks me something and I yell “What?”

“You gonna make it?” she says. I think.

“I don’t know,” I say, though I have to admit to myself that it’s really more “probably not.” I shift my left hand a little because I can feel something thick and slimy squirm around the hole in my gut and I think it might be my intestines.

“I thought you had protection. Your tats.”

“You make it sound like I forgot condoms. Cut me some slack. I should be a smear on the fucking wall.”

“Police and fire’s gonna be here soon if they’re not already,” she says.

“Then we’d better hurry. If Sergei gets the cage it could get ugly.” Gabriela helps me stand. My left leg is limp and dragging behind me and every move is agony, but at least I’m upright.

“Not like he could do anything with it. You killed Kettleman, right?”

“I don’t know how much he’s going to remember now that he doesn’t have Kettleman to fall back on, but if he knows enough to remember what it is I wouldn’t put it past him to try. It’s not easy, but it’s like a toddler with a hand grenade.”

“I don’t care if he blows up the whole goddamn block. I just want to get the knife back.”

“Yeah. We’ll get it back.” I should probably tell her I’ve got it in my pocket, but if I manage to live through this I’m going to need it. And if I don’t, well, I won’t care then, will I?

“And kill him,” she says.

“Figured that was a given.”

We round the corner. I see Sergei down the hall sitting on the floor, head in his hands. Weeping. Seriously, he’s crying like somebody just shot his dog. Big, wracking sobs.

“I’ve heard of this,” Gabriela says. “After a while the skins become a part of you. Pretty traumatic when they go. Lose a big part of yourself. Kinda tragic when you think about it.”