15 
EAST SIDE STORY
I tried to call Sig, but phones didn’t work in the Inn of Weirdness. Of course they didn’t. The place was using gas lamps.
“You smell like you are going to kill someone,” Kasia observed as I put my phone away.
I gave her a stare with some varnish on it.
Kasia seemed amused for the first time since coming to the inn. “I did not say I minded. But are you certain that you should tell anyone else about this Book of Am? Simon has his reasons for not talking about it. If it becomes common knowledge that something that powerful is real and out there …” She didn’t have to finish the thought. All kinds of major supernatural players and predators would come out of the woodwork and add to the chaos of the situation, whether messing with the book was a good idea or not. Dealing with nuclear bombs and bioweapons is insane too, and that hasn’t stopped anybody.
“If Simon wants to keep the book a secret that badly, I wouldn’t put it past him to eliminate us or contain us for real. And that includes you, Kasia,” I said. “The knights aren’t kresniks. They don’t like working with dhampirs.”
“Really?” she said dryly. “I never noticed. But has it occurred to you that Simon did not tell you everything because he was afraid that you would do exactly what you are trying to do now? Or that you feel justified in doing what you are doing now because he did not tell you everything?”
“Are you trying to be my and Simon’s couple’s counselor?”
“Hardly.”
“Whatever. This is why Ben Lafontaine wanted me involved. Spreading the secret out a bit more will make us less vulnerable,” I said. “And keeping this kind of thing from allies can be as big a risk as being open with them. Every terrorist incident and every school shooting, you always find out that there were warning signs, but the different people holding the pieces never communicated and put them together.”
Again, Kasia ignored the subject of trust altogether. “We are looking for the person behind these incidents, anyhow,” she argued. “Does mentioning this book specifically change anything?”
“It changes everything,” I said.
“How?” Kasia demanded.
“Let’s start looking up some of those people on Simon’s list,” I said. “And I’ll show you. Do you want to come along, Sarah?”
“I don’t think so.” She didn’t sound all that regretful. “If the book is tapping into a place where all minds connect, I should contact some people who are very sensitive to that sort of thing.”
“Just admit that you want to call the Psychic Hotline,” I said. “I won’t judge.”
I should really start categorizing looks to save time. The one Sarah gave me was look #43, the Remind-me-why-I-never-turned-you-into-a-frog special.
“If you’re going to do your own thing, can we borrow Kevin?” I asked.
“I’m not a cup of sugar,” he said irritably.
Kasia puckered her lips at him. “Are you sure about that?” Her mood really had lightened up. For all her naysaying, Simon’s spiel had probably left Kasia with a lot of little unanswered questions and contradictions nagging at her, too.
Sarah seemed to regard Kevin and Kasia’s interaction with both amusement and mild alarm. “Do you promise to keep Kevin safe, John?”
“Absolutely not,” I said.
Even outside the inn, I couldn’t get in touch with Sig or Molly.
“Simon has not done anything to them,” Kasia scolded when she smelled my frustration and worry. “They are probably just communicating with dead spirits.”
It’s odd, the things you can find comforting in my line of work.
I almost called Simon, but that conversation was going to take a little more thought and a lot more cool. Every time I pictured him, my fingertips itched and all I could see was Simon’s throat. I’m pretty sure that was the wolf stalking. I mean, talking. I did get in touch with Choo and Ben Lafontaine, though, and I gave them the Reader’s Digest Condensed Version of what I’d learned. My pack leader was pretty pissed at being kept out of the loop too, but mostly he focused on what he should tell the wolves he’d been sending to New York and whether or not he should keep sending them. I asked him to give me a little more time so I could give him a bit more perspective on that decision, and he agreed.
As far as getting perspective went, despite my promise to show Kasia how knowing about the Book of Am changed everything, the house belonging to Randy Prutko’s ex-wife was surrounded by reporters. I suppose it had been naïve to expect otherwise. As far as anyone knew, Randy was still on the loose after killing a bunch of his coworkers and setting his grocery store on fire.
So we got back in Kevin’s car and made our way to the fringes of the Lower East Side. I don’t know if that put us in the lower Lower East Side or the upper Lower East Side and don’t really give a damn. Randy Prutko’s grandfather lived there, and that was good enough for me. The area was borderline middle-class, maybe a little over half Caucasian and a little bit of everything else, full of working-class immigrants, retirees, and some artistic types who were slowly being driven out by encroaching gentrification. The last time I had been through there, the gentrification had been slowed down by abandoned construction projects, but it looked like the economic heart attack had been a seizure rather than a full-blown stroke. Things seemed to be picking up a bit, at least to my outsider’s eyes.
After we parked, we decided that if anyone asked, Kevin would pretend to be a young hotshot representing a Japanese corporation that had recently bought out my bounty-hunting agency. Kasia and I would be bounty hunters, and Kevin would pretend to be monitoring us in the field to see how we operated. Whether anyone believed that the three of us were representing a legal enterprise or not really wasn’t the point. The story worked just as well if people believed we were hiding something more threatening.
“Sure,” Kevin said. “Play to the American fear of Japanese investors or Yakuza.”
“You’re too young to be a Fed and too well dressed to be a cop,” I said. “You’re the one who decided to put on a thousand-dollar suit and carry a black beechwood cane around.”
“Sarah’s teaching me to cast fire with it.”
I had to admit, that was a hell of a selling point.
“How about I be the mysterious badass martial arts specialist brought in to be intimidating?” Kevin asked.
“Wouldn’t that be a stereotype too?”
“Yes,” Kevin admitted. “But it would be a cool one.”
I think Kevin wanted to impress Kasia. He might have been an Obi-Wan Kenobi in training, but he was also young and male.
Kasia didn’t try to hold her amusement in. “I think John and I can be intimidating more believably.” Which was probably true. Kevin’s parents had made him start training in aikido and kenjutsu early and intensely because he grew up under the shadow of a powerful and homicidal grandfather, and Kevin had later killed the man, but deep down, Kevin still didn’t want to hurt anyone unless he absolutely had to. I’m not saying that like it’s a bad thing. Kevin is an empath who spent most of his short life being home-schooled by a mother who loved him, and his attitude is a natural reflection of that. His personality only comes out in glints and whiffs, but his distaste for violence shows in his too-earnest eyes and body language. That didn’t keep Kevin from looking at Kasia and the way she was dressed in a doubtful way that could only spell trouble, though. We were making our way through a large parking garage, and there weren’t a lot of people around us, but I could hear some on different levels, and cars passed by every few minutes.
“You think—” Kevin started.
“Don’t say—” I began.
“—that you can lo—” Kevin paused because Kasia’s palm had suddenly appeared right in front of his face. At first, I just thought that she was showing restraint because she didn’t want to get his outfit bloody, but then Kasia held the pose longer than was dignified. Her muscles were taut, straining as if something inside of her might snap.
Kevin carefully stepped backward, away from her palm.
“I was just going to dump him on his ass, not hurt him.” Kasia kept trying to push forward. She looked like a mime struggling in a windstorm. “Why can’t I touch him?”
“Probably because Sarah put some kind of spell on you,” I said. Kevin was still in shock. “Or that inn did.”
Sweat was beading down Kasia’s face, and dhampirs run cool. “Did you know this would happen?”
I saw where that was going. If she’d been playing around a moment before, Kasia really wanted to hit somebody now, and I was the next-closest target. “No, but I wouldn’t have taken you to see Sarah if she couldn’t protect herself. You probably can’t tell the knights about her either.”
“You set me up.” When I didn’t respond, Kasia’s fangs came out. “You told your friend I was a dhampir, not a kresnik, over the phone. That part where you assured her I was not a psychic. Did you do that so she would know I was not protected by a geas?”
“I did that so that she’d—” Ever stare out from a moving amusement-park ride and watch things blur past? Kasia came at me like that. I barely shifted to the right in time to push her punch away at the wrist, letting her arm drive her fist past me. She was stronger than me. Maybe stronger than Sig. Kasia tried to continue forward with the motion and stomp on my ankle, but I dropped into a swivel that whirled one foot away and brought the other behind her shoe while it was off the ground.
Kasia was tilted backward, but she arched her back and caught her fall with her hands and cartwheeled heels over head to her feet again. It was like something out of a martial arts movie, and very few actual fights are. I would have shown her why, but I wasn’t really trying to hurt her. Yet. So instead of pursuing her, I put the knife that had appeared in my hand away and tried again. “I w—”
She charged. I would have knocked her off her feet if she’d kept at it, but Kasia was sneakier than that; she caught my lunge punch at the wrist and used her greater strength to pull my body sideways, exposing my ribs and limiting my attacks. Shit! I kept turning with the motion and brought all of my body weight down on her thumb. She wasn’t that much stronger than me; I broke free and deflected the blow she sent toward me with an elbow strike. Her fist slid up my arm and glanced off my shoulder.
It felt like that shoulder had been shot by an elephant gun.
I began an open left-handed slap while she was partially turned by her own attack, just to swish some air around, knowing her enhanced hearing would pick up on it. Kasia moved to block, but instead of following through, I pivoted into a right hook. I was aiming for her temple, but Kasia yanked her head back and I broke three fingers on her forehead. Strong or not, though, Kasia only weighed so much, and I knocked that weight around. She still somehow snapped off a short side kick while she was falling back.
The kick shouldn’t have had much power—her body weight was going in the opposite direction—but when I turned slightly to catch it on my right thigh, raising my leg like I was marching in place, I slipped. I didn’t slip much, but my pivot foot was on concrete that was smooth and slightly slanted and slick with grease where car emissions had gone to die, and I was slightly off-balance at just the wrong moment in just the wrong way. I reeled backward into the hood of some kind of family sedan, and its car alarm went off.
We stood there, Kasia and me, staring at each other while the alarm brought the rest of the world back into focus, and then we reached some kind of silent accord. Our shoulders and spines relaxed.
“This discussion isn’t over,” she told me.
“Sure,” I said. “Good start, though. Way to use your feeling words.”
Kevin, who hadn’t moved the entire time, spoke up. “You’re not enslaved or anything, Kasia. That kind of binding works both ways. It means Sarah and I can’t hurt you without a good reason either.”
“I do not want to live in a world where someone cannot hurt me for no reason.” Kasia studied Kevin as if memorizing his acne scars. “Where is the fun in that?” Then she turned and stalked off in the direction we’d been walking.
“She’s the muscle,” I told Kevin.
This time, he didn’t argue.
We wound up in a place that smelled like strong coffee, good borscht, and potato pancakes. Stewed and jellied fruit was on sale in brown glass jars that lined the windows, and I’m pretty sure the owner was selling some kind of cheap, homemade, pungent alcohol that smelled like leftover potatoes and fruit from behind the counter, at least to his trusted customers. Said owner was Alek Prutko, Randy Prutko’s grandfather.
Alek was sitting at a table, talking to some other men who didn’t fall into the eighteen-to-forty-nine demographic valued by advertisers, wearing an apron that declared he was just taking a break. First, our entrance raised a thick white eyebrow, and then it raised Alek himself. He was a big man, and he got up with a grunt like the seventy-something-year-old he was and shuffled toward us. “You’re here about Randy. You’re not reporters or police, though.”
“So, what are we?” Kevin asked softly while he really should have been shutting the hell up and watching. The irony was, Kevin didn’t want to get rough, and he was making it more likely that we’d have to. Giving up the initiative and encouraging the old man to think was no way to avoid escalating to threats or force.
Alek jerked his head at Kasia. “She’s a killer dressed up like a hootchie girl. He’s an ex-soldier. You’re an I-don’t-know-what.”
This sharp old buzzard had grown up somewhere a lot harsher than the East Side. Some place where assessing people was an absolutely crucial survival skill. He’d killed people too, in his day. It’s a myth that you can always tell, but sometimes you can’t miss it. I stepped in. “We have some questions about Randy.”
“What if I told you I don’t care?” he countered.
Kasia said something in an Eastern European language that I didn’t know. Whatever it was, it sounded very matter-of-fact and took some of the starch out of one Alek Prutko. For a moment, he looked queasy, and his big shoulders sagged. But the old man was made of stern stuff. He rallied, shrugged, and said, “Let’s sit down. I’ll answer your questions. You won’t tell me any lies or things I don’t really want to know. And then you can get the hell out.”
“Sounds good,” I said agreeably. We sat at a square table that was old but clean, and a slender young blond girl came and brought us glasses and water. It was really just an excuse for her to eavesdrop and glance at Alek questioningly. He ignored her. He didn’t want Kasia to see how much he cared about the girl, or guess that she was some kind of family. It was a pointless gesture—both the old man and the girl were saturated in the same smells from living under the same roof, none of them sexual—but I liked him more for making it.
We talked for a time. I focused on asking Alek about Randy Prutko’s social life, and it turned out that Randy had never had much of one. Alek said that Randy had stopped coming by or calling after Alek stopped giving his grandson money, and that had been a long time before. I believed him. I believed Alek when he said that Randy had always been a mean little shit too, that Alek had tried to love Randy but never liked him. I was beginning to think I was wasting my time when Alek said, “The only thing Randy was ever really proud of was being a Knight.”
My pulse did a drumroll. “A knight?”
“That’s what they called his high school football team.” Alek sounded dismissive, another sign that he hadn’t grown up in America. The United States is the only country in the world that thinks American football is interesting.
I had to make absolutely sure. “The team was called the Knights?”
“Yeah. Randy was only on the team for two years, but one of those was the year they won a state championship. He was still wearing that team jacket the last time I saw him, and that was ten years after he graduated.”
I went along like I was just making idle conversation. “I think I know the team you’re talking about. The Knights’ uniforms were …” I squinted like I was having a hard time remembering.
“Black,” Alek said.