I dug in my duffel bag and pulled out the small flask of alcohol. The chair yielded a leg, the medkit gave me the gauze, and once I soaked it in alcohol, I had myself a torch. I set it on fire and carried the torch up to the wall. The flame licked the slime. The web bit at the torch, jerking it, and I let go a fraction of a second before the slime touched my fingers.
The torch stuck to the wall, cocooned in webbing. Fire didn’t work. Fire pretty much always worked.
I looked around. Throwing something heavy at it wouldn’t do either—there was too much web and the walls were solid enough that I’d have trouble breaking through.
Think, think, think…
My gaze snagged on the staff.
I walked up to the desk and grabbed the phone. Phones were strange. Sometimes they worked during magic and sometimes they didn’t. The phone clicked, once, twice, and I got a dial tone. I fished a card out of my wallet and dialed the number.
“Ullo,” a familiar Russian voice said, dripping fatigue. “Yesli ehto ne catastropha…”
Well, it looked like a catastrophe from my end. “Hi,” I said. “This is Andrea.”
“Oh, hello.” A new life came into the voice. “How are you?”
“I’m great. Never better. Hey, listen, I have a staff here I thought you might be interested in. It’s about six and a half feet tall, part wood and part bone. There is writing on the shaft and a face with a mustache. Interested?”
Roman fell silent for a second. When he came back on the line his voice was calm. “Can you read the writing?”
“Some of it looks like runes and some of it is Cyrillic. Let’s see, the top one under the face looks like backward number four, then e, then p, then something that looks like capital H except it’s lower case…”
“Are you holding the staff now?” Roman’s voice was still very calm.
“No, it’s in a case.”
“Do not touch the staff. It’s a very bad staff.”
“Noted.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in the back of a warehouse. I broke into it illegally, and I’m now trapped by some strange ward. Looks like spiderwebs made out of slime. If you were to come and help me with the web, the staff is yours.”
“Give me the address.”
I recited the address.
“I’ll be right there. Don’t touch the staff. Don’t touch the web. Don’t touch anything until I get there.”
I hung up. The dark scary servant of all evil was on his way to rescue me. Somehow that thought failed to make me warm and fuzzy.
I had just finished going through the last box of documents, when the door across the warehouse opened, and Roman called out, “Andrea?”
“In here,” I yelled. “Don’t touch the webs!”
I got up and walked to the office doorway. The large warehouse space with the shelves stretched before me, shrouded in the curtains of the web. I could barely see him. From where I stood, he was merely a gray silhouette in the opposite doorway.
“Okay, okay, I got this.” The silhouette muttered something in Russian. A dull roar issued from Roman’s direction.
Roman’s voice rose, chanting, mixing with the roar.
The webs shuddered. The curtains bent toward Roman, turning concave, as if pulled backward.
Roman’s chant gained power, preternaturally loud, words pouring out, whipping and twisting through the roar like a live current of power.
The curtain of webs snapped taut and broke. Roman stood in the gap, arms spread wide, his black robe flaring as if caught by a ghostly wind. He grasped a wooden staff topped with the head of a monster bird in his right hand. The bird’s beak gaped wide open, filled with darkness and grotesque, so big a watermelon could have fit through it. The pearl-colored web twisted into a knot, sucked into that cavernous mouth.
The floor of the warehouse shuddered. Roman stared straight up, the chant bubbling from his mouth, each word vibrating with power. Splashes of pure darkness swirled around his black boots. Something peered at me through that darkness. Something ancient, malevolent, and cold.
The temperature in the room dropped. I shivered and watched a cloud of vapor escape my mouth.
A choir of deep male voices sang in tune to Roman’s chant. The web kept hurtling into the staff’s mouth.
My hands itched, wanting to release claws. Every hair on my body stood on end.
The warehouse shook.
An enormous bell tolled, a menacing bass note to the choir and the chant. Despair rolled over me like a thick viscous wave. Images fluttered before my eyes: a hill of corpses against the dusk, bright red blood painted over by feathery frost, and a primal dark figure atop the corpse mound…
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the web on the wall flutter behind me, stretching toward Roman.
I dropped down and hugged the floor.The web tore off the wall and flew over my head. For a second it stuck to the doorway of the office, billowing like a sail in a strong wind, and then it was pulled toward the staff.
The last of the web vanished into the dark beak. Roman’s chant changed, receding from overpowering to soothing. The darkness melted, taking with it the somber choir and the bell. The top of Roman’s staff closed its beak and shrank.
I sat up slowly.
Roman raised his arms, as if accepting an ovation, and grinned at me, flashing white teeth. “Huh? Am I good or what?”
I clapped. Roman bowed.
I got up off the floor and walked to the dark wizard.
“Do I get a hug for being a hero?” He wagged his black eyebrows at me. “Maybe a kiss?”
For being an evil priest of an evil dark god, Roman seemed surprisingly normal. Either he was hiding his evilness really well, or it really was just a job for him. Priest of darkness, nine to five. It’s just the family business.
“No kiss?” Roman looked sad.
Why not? It’s not like Raphael owned me or we were together. It could be much simpler with someone like Roman. We could start fresh and clean. I looked at the dark wizard. Really looked at him. He had the most wicked eyes, dark and full of a strange fire. Here goes.
I leaned over and kissed him. His lips covered mine. He was good at kissing, not really claiming or demanding, but enticing, almost charming. And I felt nothing. Zip, zilch, nada. No heat, no spark. Nothing.
Stupid Raphael. I wished so badly I could be rid of him, but when he kissed me, I wanted to throw him on the bed and make him nuts. When Roman kissed me on the mouth, it felt like a peck on the cheek.
We broke apart. Roman grinned. Well, one of us had enjoyed it.
Roman’s gaze fixed on something over my shoulder. I glanced back and saw the fishing net hanging off the hook.
“That can kill you,” he said. “You better stand closer to me.”
“Any closer and we’ll be rubbing against each other.”
“Now that’s an idea…This can kill you, too.” He pointed at the monkey bust. “Also that.” The sandglass. “And those”— he pointed at the stone spheres—“those can kill everyone if used properly. This is like an armory for a mage.”
Roman pushed himself from the shelf, one arm protectively around my shoulder. “I think I need to see that staff now.”
I led him down to the office. “It’s in a glass case here. I didn’t touch it.” I realized he wasn’t next to me and turned. Roman stood in the doorway, his gaze fixed on the staff, his mouth slack.
“Kostyanoi posokh,” he whispered.
“What?”
“The Bone Staff. Here, hold this!” Roman thrust his stick at me.
I shook my head. “No. It bites things. I’ve seen it do it.”
“He will behave,” Roman promised.
I gripped the staff. It turned and stared at me with its vicious raptor eyes. Its beak opened a fraction of an inch. I bared my teeth and pantomimed breaking it. The beak snapped shut.
Roman dug in the pouch at his waist, pulled out a handful of moist black soil, and tossed it at the floor in front of the case. He knelt on the dirt, said something in Russian, and squeezed his eyes shut.
Nothing happened.
Roman cautiously opened one eye, then the other.
“No big kaboom,” I assured him.
The black volhv rose. “You got any more of those gloves?”
I pulled a pair out of my duffel and passed them to him. He slipped the gloves on, opened the case, and carefully took the staff out. The top of the staff flowed like molten wax forming an outline of a serpent mouth with two glistening fangs. The Bone Staff hissed. The bird staff in my hand screeched.
“Shhh,” Roman murmured. “Tiho, tiho, easy.”
The serpent melted back into the bone. A moment later the bird realized it was screaming by itself and shut its beak.
“We’ve been looking for this for eight hundred years.” Roman shook his head. “How did it even get here? When you described it, I thought it might have been a duplicate someone made to show off, but this? This is the real thing. I can feel the power through the gloves even.”
“So this is some sort of artifact?” I asked. I felt so tired all of a sudden. I had to make sure not to get bitten again. The snake venom was turning me into an old decrepit woman.
“The Bone Staff belonged to the Black Volhv, the head priest of our god,” he said. “It’s been missing for centuries, since the Mongols invaded Russia. Eventually the Horde came to the town of Kitezh on Lake Svetloyar. It was the last of the great pagan strongholds. But the magic was already weak, and the Mongols were too many, so the volhvi decided to work one last spell to keep the holy relics from the Horde. They sank the city.”
“What do you mean, sank?” I asked.
“Buried it in the lake. The whole thing. The Bone Staff was supposed to have been lost with the city, but then years later a respected old volhv, who was just a boy when Kitezh sank, claimed on his deathbed that the staff and other relics had been smuggled out of the city by him and two others before the place went under.”
“So this is a holy relic?”