Alchemystic (10 page)

“And they just let us go!” Rory added.

“You sure you’re not some sort of Mafia princess?” Marshall asked.

I shook my head. “Not Italian, remember?”

“You going to be okay?” Rory asked when we stopped in front of my home. “We can wait with you if you want.”

I shook my head. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’m just creeped out. Did you see the mark on his hand?”

Rory and Marshall both shook their heads.

“I’m pretty sure that was the guy who attacked me earlier tonight,” I said. “He disappeared in that alley…and now he turns up here. Dead.”

“A shocking coincidence, I’m sure,” Marshall said.

“That’s an understatement.”

“On the plus side, guy’s dead,” Rory reminded me.

“Rory,” I said, tweaked. “Show some respect.”

“Respect?” Rory laughed. “Lexi, the guy pulled a knife on you.”

“I know, but—”

“But nothing,” she continued, her voice getting serious. “Maybe you need to get out of your family’s building a bit more, but this city is jacked up, Lexi.” She pointed off to the park. “Case in point. You might not see it every day, but it’s out there. So when someone who tried to take a swipe at my best friend turns up dead, I’m sorry, but I really don’t mourn their loss.”

“That’s cold,” Marshall added.

“It’s
not
,” Rory insisted. “I just think if it’s us or them, I prefer that we’re the survivors.”

“Go,” I said, feeling my nerves get all jangled up again. “Now. This is all getting to be a bit too much and I already need to steel myself for a talk with my father when he’s done…bribing them, or whatever the hell it is he’s doing in there.”

Rory nodded and grabbed Marshall by the arm, dragging him down the block with her as she left. “Good luck with all that,” she said. “Come on, Marsh. Let me give you pointers on how not to impress the ladies by bringing up your ‘Dungeon Master.’”

“I wouldn’t
want
to be with a woman who didn’t appreciate it, you know,” he countered.

“You may never be with a woman
ever
at this rate,” she said, continuing on, but her voice fell out of earshot as they rounded the corner, heading west. I hated to see them go. They may have been annoying the way they picked on each other, but at least they were a welcome distraction compared to whatever stern dressing-down my father had in store for me later.

On the plus side, I was still better off than the dead man in the park, rest his unfortunate soul.

Alexandra

W
hen my father caught up with me later that evening, I was sketching at one of the old drafting tables my great-great-grandfather had once used.

“Alexandra,”
he said, sounding just as pissed off as he had in the park, only now I was ready for it, having had some time for the shock of seeing the dead body to wear off and to regain my composure.

“This is not my fault, so please don’t take that tone,” I said, hearing it reflected in my own words. “Before you say anything else, I need to know something.
Have
to know.”

He paused, his face a mask of frustration, and gave a reluctant nod. “Yes?”

I let out a long breath, the shaking of my nerves returning from earlier. “I may regret even asking this, but here it goes. Are you…connected?”

His eyebrows creased, his vast expanse of forehead wrinkling as his eyes narrowed in puzzlement. “Connected…?” he repeated, his voice unsure.

My stomach tightened. “You know,” I said. “Like to the mob? Like in
The Godfather
. Only a more Slavic version, I guess.”

My father’s eyes widened with dawning comprehension. A smile rose up on his lips and he did something he rarely did. He laughed. I couldn’t remember the last time I had heard that sound out of him. Certainly not since before Devon’s death, at least.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Tell me, Alexandra, where did you come up with such an idea?”

I wasn’t about to tell him the whole truth on the matter, that Marshall had put the thought in my brain. It would probably get him—and Rory by association—banned for life from my home. “You’re a well-respected man of business, but I don’t know many businessmen who can talk the police out of pursuing a case. You just told them you’d deal with them and they let me and my friends go without further question. Plus there was an actual body left outside our building…”

My father shrugged. “It is true that I am a powerful man,” he conceded, “but such is true of anyone who owns real estate in Manhattan.”

I wasn’t convinced. “And the body out in the park? That’s not some kind of horse-head-in-the-bed kind of warning?”

He gave me a dark smile. “Do you forget we live in Manhattan?” he asked. “There is crime. New York is an amazing city, but let us be honest here—people are murdered every day.”

“Since we are being honest,” I said, “I just thought you should know…that person in the park…wasn’t some random person. That was the man who attacked me earlier this evening.”

His face went stone serious. “I see,” he said, and walked over to one of the couches in the library section of the floor, groaning a little as he sat. He patted the seat next to him for me to join.

I got up from my desk, walked over, and sat down. My father looked me in the eyes.

“You have been through much tonight, my darling daughter,” he said. “But trust me when I tell you that God is watching over you.”

“I’d be lying if I said I understood your unquestionable faith in God or the universe or whatever,” I said. “But I’m sorry, Father. I have a hard time buying into it. After all, God didn’t seem too keen on watching out for Devon.”

I waited for him to react—sadness, anger, something—but he stayed calm and fixed me with a peaceful smile. “Even the blessed must suffer to know at times how truly blessed they are. The same applies to our family.”

“How can you be so sure, so…full of faith?”

“I have lost one child,” he said. “I have faith my family will not lose another.”

“‘The family,’” I repeated. “You sure we aren’t mobbed up?”

He smiled and patted my leg. “We are not, but I think perhaps that would make more sense to your way of thinking than what I’m about to tell you, oh, daughter of little faith.”

I settled back on the couch, turning to him.

“Our family has been very fortunate over the years,” he said. “Lady Luck, she has smiled on us, for several generations.”

“Maybe our luck is running out,” I said. “It didn’t help Devon.”

A pained smile crossed my father’s face. “No,” he said, “but nothing—not even our luck—is perfect, rest his soul. Besides, who is to say Devon is not in a better place? All of God’s plans are not meant for us to know.”

I could have argued with him. The odds didn’t really seem in the favor of Devon ever reaching the pearly gates, unless being cruel had been added to the terms of admission there. Then there was the deeper philosophical argument of whether there even
was
an afterlife, but that was something I
definitely
wasn’t ready to get into with him, so instead I nodded and waited. The pain slowly faded from his face as he began talking once more.

“It started with your namesake, Alexander, whose first luck came when fleeing to this country from Kobryn, along what was then the Lithuanian side of the border with Poland. He was fortunate as a stonemason to escape a life of servitude under the quite mad reign of the local lord Kejetan Ruthenia. Kejetan
the Accursed
, he was called.”

I pointed at one of the statues on the far side of the studio space, one depicting a Slavic-looking man with an enormous jaw and heavy brow. “That’s him,” I said. “Although my great-great-grandfather labeled the base of the statue ‘The Bloody Lord.’”

“My own father, your grandfather, talked about that when I was growing up,” my father said, a faraway look in his eyes, lost in his own memories. “He said Alexander never spoke of why he fled the old country, only that he came to the Americas to start a new life with your great-great-grandmother and his two surviving children. My guess is that, yes, the lord of the land earned the name on that statue, but Alexander escaping tyranny under his rule was the first bit of blessed Belarus luck. He came to America and settled in New York City, helping to build it as it rose higher and higher into the sky. Your great-great-grandfather’s dealings in the construction of this city only grew, making a name for him that ensured the well-being of his family for generations. We have benefited greatly from that, living well.”

Enrapt as I was in this bit of family history I had heard only in bits and pieces, I still fought the urge to contradict the “living well” comment. After all, Devon certainly wasn’t.

“But there have been times of misfortune, too,” he said, a little of the sparkle slipping from his eyes. “When I was a young boy, no more than fifteen, my friends and I used to sneak out and hang where we weren’t supposed to. We loved to go out on the ice up at the reservoir in Central Park. Only one night, I go to meet my friends, and, stickler for time that I am, I was early, but that also meant I was alone when some men in the park came after me. Hoping to escape them, I was forced to run out onto the ice, something I would never do alone. My friends and I knew the dangers of not having someone with you, but what choice did I have?”

“No offense,” I said, “but I’d like to state for the record Rory and I have never done anything half that dangerous.”

My father eyed me as if he didn’t believe me, but continued on. “I fell through the ice. I pray you never know such a horrid
feeling as this in your lifetime, Alexandra. The chill, the shock, the confusion of it all. I fought to get back to the surface, following what little light I could make out above me, but every time I came up, I was under the full sheet of ice. I could not find the spot where I had fallen through, and, panicked as I was, I could not break through. That night, I was going to die and, what was worse, I knew it and could do nothing.”

His breathing was rapid now, as if he were somehow reliving the moment. He paused to catch his breath, and when he spoke again, he was calmer, quieter.

“That was when I saw it—the angel. Long wings extended, coming down hard on the ice, sending a ripple of cracks all throughout the space right above me. He drove back the men, smiting them with the power of the Lord, sending them flying across the ice. Its fist came down through the ice and I felt it lifting me. Cold, barely breathing, I felt it carrying me off through the sky, and I gave myself over to the sensation, expecting to wake in Heaven. When I instead woke in my own room, I knew I had witnessed a miracle.” He crossed himself. “We are blessed. We are watched over. That must have been a good forty years ago.”

“Dad, you had a traumatic childhood experience,” I said. “That’s all. You probably fell through the ice, got rescued by someone, and blocked the rest out. You were in shock.”

Then the worst thing in the world happened: My father looked hurt. For just a moment his face was filled with a look of sadness and pain; then he simply shook his head and looked into my eyes.

“I know what I saw,” he said. “I know what I believe.”

This conversation was going a little too into the deep end of the baptismal font for my liking, so I checked the time on my phone. It was nearly two a.m. “I should probably get to bed,” I said, standing up.

He grabbed my wrist with considerable force, startling me. The second I jumped, however, he loosened his grip and sat me back down on the couch with him.

“This isn’t about my faith,” he said. “This isn’t even about how blessed we are. This is about something I noticed in the park on that man’s hand.”

“You saw the mark?” I asked, my eyes flying wide. “That demon-looking thing?”

My father nodded. “That’s the real reason I tried to ‘ground’ you. You see, Alexandra, I have seen that before, back when I was a boy. My attackers on the ice, they bore the same mark.”

“What does it mean?” I asked.

My father took my hands in his and squeezed them tight, something I still found reassuring even as a grown-up. “I do not know,” he said, “but please believe me, whatever your own beliefs are, my daughter, I need you to exercise caution. God is watching over us, but he helps those who help themselves.”

I tried to laugh. His words bordered on ridiculous, melodramatic, but the sheer sincerity in his eyes drove any humor out of me. I didn’t have to be a believer in much of any kind of religion to understand the concern my father had for me. I hoped he was right about our family’s luck.

But I was afraid it was running out.