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1
Once upon a time, this guy stumbled into something big, something way bigger than he could handle, and though he won, he got his ass handed to him in multiple pieces. And while he was recovering from that, this huge white-haired dude with a foreign accent and a black trench coat showed up and said, “Follow the yellow brick road!”
And that’s how I wound up here. Wherever the hell “here” was. It sure as hell wasn’t Kansas anymore, Toto.
Okay, I knew I was somewhere in Eastern Europe, one of those countries that changes its name every other week. Somewhere that seemed uniformly gritty, until I was sure I could feel tiny granules grinding between my teeth, strained out of the air I breathed. Given that my guide was Ukrainian, we’ll say I was in Ukraine. ’Cause I honestly had no idea. You would think for my first trip out of the United States, I would have chosen somewhere less…frozen.
I hitched the collar of my coat up higher around my chin, but despite the occasional brutality of Midwestern winters, the leather bomber jacket just wasn’t living up to the Ukrainian temperatures. I jammed my hands in my pockets and did my best to keep up with the long strides of the man in front of me.
His name was Ivan Zelenko. I got that much a few days ago when he showed up on my front porch. Dude had to be at least six four, and his shoulders were broad enough to be two of me. His white hair was cropped in a short military buzz cut, and the lines of many years made his eyes crinkle at the corners.
Most of the time, I’d have told him to stuff whatever he was selling and get off my lawn, but when I opened the door, he was thoughtfully examining the doorjambs, running a finger down the wood like he was testing for dust.
Finally, with an approving nod, he said, “This is to being good work. Excellent wardings. You are to being Jesse James Dawson?”
That one statement brought me up short. Not the knowing my name part, even as creepy as that was. No, it was the recognizing the wards part. Up until that moment, I’d known only one person besides myself capable of sensing the protection spells on my doors, and that was the woman who’d put them there. My wife, Mira. And to tell the truth, up until that point I wasn’t sure she and I weren’t both some level of insane. I mean really. Magic? Demons? If I’d have told anyone else, they’d have put me in a nice white coat with extra-long sleeves and given me a padded room to take my rest in. No sane person believes in demons.
Except that I’d seen two of them now, and the second one was nearly the end of me. The muscles down my left side were still knitting, the scars that marred me from armpit to hip angry red and throbbing when I overexerted. I’d gone from wiry to emaciated in the ICU, and even a month after my liberation from the hospital, I was struggling to put the weight back on. The huge man on my front step served only to make me feel as wasted and frail as I was afraid I looked.
So, this Ivan Zelenko knew magic. After proving that he could walk through my doorway unimpeded, I invited him to sit on my couch. He met my wife. He met my daughter. Despite the fact that he nearly filled the room with his sheer size, and booming gravelly voice, he managed to put both the women in my life at ease almost immediately. And then he did a lot of talking in badly fractured English.
Most of it boiled down to the fact that he knew all about demons, and contracts, and fighting. A champion, he called me. He was one too, or had been in his youth. Unabashedly, he unbuttoned his shirt to show me the scars, some of which looked like the ones I was now carrying, and some of which looked like an alien creature had tried to gnaw out a few vital organs. Nothing natural made marks like that.
“I watch for men like you. To be letting them know that they are not alone in this fighting. The more we are to be knowing, the better chance we are to be having.”
“That’s great, man, really, but I don’t intend to be doing this again. This isn’t a lifestyle choice.” The white- haired man smirked before I could even finish my sentence.
