the many ages, now balled up like sewage debris jammed in a dam’s drain. But it really did not matter. What mattered was getting to the kitchen. What mattered was Elga’s answer.
“Fine,” the old woman grunted, warily watching Zoya for a trick, but still confident, like a knowing spider eyeing the struggling fly stuck in her web, “you can have some water.”
“Thank you, Elga.” She got up and walked over to the kitchenette. The rat was her only option. Elga and the girl were steeled with charms, ready to withstand her attacks. But if she could find a way to break their concentration and distract them from the spell … “You know, on the metro tonight I was thinking about those saltpeter collectors back in Kiev, the two who came to dig out the cellar.” Her eyes desperately scanned the counter and the shelves. There it was, an answer to her prayers: the cleaver was lying on the drying rack, right next to the glasses. It could not have been better placed. “Do you remember them? They were a funny pair: one was a dwarf, the other was so tall he had to duck to get in the doorway…”
In one complete and dexterous motion, she spun, releasing her left hand full of nothing toward the girl on the chair and, following that feint in perfect succession, she grabbed the cleaver, spun, and released a whirl of steel across the room, splitting Max’s skull right between the eyes, spattering the rat’s blood and brains against the wall.
At the sight of the rodent’s sudden explosion, the young girl screamed. Zoya hissed and held out her hand, sending a concussion of air toward the child that knocked her into the doorframe. Elga was hissing now too, with the loud sound of a fat steam pipe bursting, and Zoya ducked to escape the condensed balls of electricity coming at her. Two windowpanes shattered, spraying glass everywhere. She saw Elga pinching her fingers together. Zoya grabbed the cutting board off the counter, holding it up to block the shocks. The lightning blasted the board to smoking splinters. Knowing what was coming next, Zoya quickly looked for another shield. If she rolled she could duck behind the girl, now curled up in a screaming ball of panic with her hands over her ears. But Zoya had no doubt that Elga would take them both out, the little girl was a small price to pay. There was no defense in sight. The old woman’s face was drained of all color, her eyes bloodshot and bulging, her hair shot out frazzled and wild from her skull, the final spell forming on her lips, when, for a fraction of a second, she paused, looking over as the front door creaked and a curious Will poked his head in.
“Hello? What the—?”
His entrance had distracted Elga long enough for Zoya to leap across the floor, landing hard on the old woman’s body. Without the slightest pause she immediately began striking the old woman’s face with her fists. After less than a minute of this, Will pulled her off.
“We have to go!” said Zoya, stumbling to her feet.
Will looked around, taking in the bloodied rat with a meat cleaver solidly wedged in its skull, the small child balled up and crying in the corner, the unconscious, battered old woman sprawled out, nearly dead, before them, and the chicken pecking at smoky wood scraps that covered the floor. “There is a reasonable explanation for all this, right?” he said.
“No,” a nearly unconscious and reeling Zoya said, grabbing his hand with the last of her strength and pulling him out of the apartment.
X
As soon as they were in a taxi Zoya grabbed him and held him close. She was whispering some indecipherable words into his ear and, kissing his cheek, then whispered some more. Eventually, she stopped and lay down on his lap. She rubbed his cock through his pants and gave him a sleepy smile and then shut her eyes. He let her rest. It had been a crazy night. Already her whispered spells were making the memory of the fight and the old woman and the little girl fade from his mind, the spectacular becoming clouded out by the ordinary. What did they do tonight? Had they seen a movie?
The taxi sped along rue de Rome. Will looked down at his lover’s face. Even with the deep, sunken circles under her eyes she was unimaginably beautiful to him. He took her hand in his; it was ice cold. He remembered how his mother would complain about her cold hands throughout Detroit’s long, mean winters and how she would soak them in a sink filled with hot water at the end of each day. For some reason, that memory reminded him of the time when he was first living in Chicago, right out of college. He had a client who worked in the fashion industry selling chiffon ladies’ gloves to department stores, and one day, over a long lunch, they arrived at a discussion about how women were always complaining about the coldness of their extremities. Will remembered arguing that evolution must have centered the blood in the middle of a woman’s body, there where the warm womb and waiting eggs lay, nature’s primary interest being in protecting whatever came next as opposed to ensuring the comfort and happiness of what existed now. The client, a flat-nosed former pugilist from the South Side who only worked in fashion because his mother had founded the company, insisted that nature had designed women’s hands with poor circulation to keep them weak and unable to fight off the men who wanted to seize them, assault them, and, as the client bluntly put it, “pump them full of their dark demon seed.” They were both cynical theories, the second one especially brutal. Looking out the taxi window, Will wondered how many human truths were that horrible.
As the shuttered Parisian storefronts sped by, his thoughts returned to the day, such a carnival of unexpected scenes, the course of events skidding beyond the realm of his reasoning, and in the end it was pretty hard to recall all the details (what movie had they seen?). The one thing he did remember was that he had begun that morning waking up next to Zoya for the very first time. He clearly remembered kissing her sleeping cheek as he had departed for work. He thought about the feeling that had hummed about in his bones as he had walked to the office that morning, as if the arrangement of spinning molecules that defined his body had momentarily unbonded and, in some harmonious anatomic Busby Berkeley choreography, magnetically rearranged themselves into some new, minutely heavier, more substantial element, literally harmonizing him with the universe. Perhaps that was what love really was. Maybe that was why it felt so real, because, like the ultraviolet light or the mysterious, invisible radiation waves vibrating in the air, love actually existed. But only in small and undetectable quantities, impossible to synthetically mimic, composed of only the most thin, fragile actuality that would absolutely vanish if you tried to contain, catch, or even observe it, like those awkward and inscrutable physics conundrums he had never been able to comprehend in his
His thoughts suddenly stopped meandering as the car turned the corner and he saw, down his block, a dark figure step into the light for a moment before disappearing back into the shadows.
Will thought quickly, racking his brains about what he could do. He had no leverage, no answers, and he didn’t have any connections to call who could get Brandon and his goons off his back. He realized there was only one person he knew who could manage his way past Brandon. Reluctantly, he gave the cabdriver Oliver’s address.
Ten minutes later Will was holding up a sagging Zoya and ringing the doorbell.
“Hullo?” said a sleepy voice.
“Sorry to disturb you, Oliver. It’s me, Will. I’m afraid I need a little help. I have a—”
The buzzer cut him off midsentence and he took Zoya inside. Fortunately the elevator was working, so he dragged her in, pulled the metal gate across tight, and pushed the button for the third floor. When they arrived, Oliver was standing at the open door, wearing a blue bathrobe. When he saw Zoya, his face dropped. “My lord, what happened to her?”
