MudMan (The Golem Chronicles Book 1) (11 page)

“It’s okay,” he said, closing the door. “You did good back there. Most people couldn’t have done that.”

She nodded her head and set her makeshift dagger on the console, but didn’t speak as Levi started the van.

Levi kept an eye on Ryder as they drove. She stared out the window with vacant eyes, clearly shaken. With that said, Levi felt a peculiar pride for the girl blooming in his chest. He didn’t
like
her, not precisely, but in some sense, they were partners now. He’d never really had a partner before. It was sort of nice in a way.

“What are you?” she asked after a long handful of minutes, gaze sweeping to Levi’s arm and staying there.

“It’s complicated,” he replied. “Let’s get back to my place. Get safe, cleaned up. Then, if you still
really
want to know, I’ll explain what I can.”

She turned away and pressed her eyes shut, but nodded her acceptance.

NINE:

Home Sweet Home

They pulled up outside of a little ranch style home. Red brick with white siding streaking across the top. Levi’s place, and meticulously cared for: the driveway clean, the front yard green as a forest—short trimmed grass, a pair of high oak trees, flowers dotting the landscape. Just north of Colfax, Levi’s home sat in a neighborhood mostly home to illegal immigrants, the working poor, gangs, and the occasional meth lab. Burglary, violent crime, and even sporadic shootings were par for the course. Not that these things concerned Levi.

He’d picked the community, in part,
because
of those reasons.
Help the poor, care for the foreigner, protect the weak
,
love thy neighbor.
These were at the heart of the Good Book. He worked hard to keep the neighborhood clean, and dealt with the bad apples that hung around too long.

“We’re here,” he said, pushing the gearshift into park and unlocking the van doors.

“Where’s here?” she asked, her eyes glazed and far away. Lost.

“My home. Come on.” He grabbed his amputated arm from the floor, locked up the car, and then let them in through the front door.

Ryder followed quietly, movements jerky and forced. She was in shock, Levi knew. It was all over her face, in the set of her shoulders, in the way she kept her arms curled around her torso. Regular mortal folks—those in the preternatural community called them
Rubes
—weren’t wired to handle all the strangeness lying underneath the world, hidden from the eyes of men. Kobocks, trolls, the Hub … Levi. They were used to mocha lattes, prime-time television, and reasonable, scientific explanations—sometimes, when confronted with the truth, their minds just snapped.

She was a tough cookie, though, that much the Mudman could already tell—she’d done that Kobock, after all. He hoped, prayed even, she wouldn’t break under the strain. Aside from being innocent, she had information Levi needed.

He closed the door behind her and flicked the deadbolt shut with a metallic
click
, the sound ominous and final.

“Alright,” he said. “I need to go out back and take care of some business.” He held up the arm to illustrate the nature of said business. “Leave me be. This is the den. The bathroom’s the first door on the left—you can use any towel you’d like. They’re all new, never been used. Go shower. After that, go get something to eat. Maybe lie down.” He shrugged. “Do whatever, I guess. The guest bedroom is across the hall from the bathroom. Door at the end of the hall is my bedroom. Stay out. The basement is my workshop, no reason to go down there. Stay out.” He paused, frowning, rubbing at his chin.
Was that everything?

“You can help yourself to anything in the kitchen,” he added after a moment’s thought. “Should be plenty of stuff in there.”

She nodded, but didn’t budge. Her eyes flitted around the living room, gaze touching here and there before moving on, as though cataloguing every detail: wide green sofa with a matching love seat, dark wood coffee table, a great old antique clock, a comfy carpet over hardwood floors, and cases and cases full of books.

He sighed. “Look, I know this is … tough,” he said, trying to console her. Except he’d never properly consoled someone before. Since starting church, he’d attended several funerals—the congregation was an older bunch—but he always ended up idling in the back, too timid to offer a word of comfort or encouragement. He had none to give, and he couldn’t seem to fake it. Was he supposed to pretend to be sad—face drawn, eyes downcast? Or should he aim for positive and optimistic, the it’s-all-in-God’s-will approach? Or, perhaps, he was supposed to feign indignant anger over the injustice of it all? Brow furrowed, lips pulled back in a scowl? He didn’t know. It didn’t come naturally.

In the end, he placed a hand on her shoulder—missing arm shoved up in his armpit—and patted her like a dog. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll figure this out together. I’ll help you.”

She nodded again, but said nothing.

“Right. Okay then,” he said. “I need to deal with my injuries. You’re going to be on your own for a bit. It’s important you remember you can’t go anywhere. The police? They can’t help you. No place’s safe. No one will even believe you. I’m your hope. Understand?”

“Oh yeah.” She shivered involuntarily. “Trust me, the message is coming through crystal clear. I won’t leave … but … do you have a phone I could use? I’ve got an important call to make.”

“Best if you don’t call anyone.”

“It’s my sister.” She faltered. “Look, don’t make me explain. I don’t wanna tell you and you don’t wanna hear it. It’s important, though. I’m all she’s got—she’ll be worried. Probably already filed a police report. Just let me call her. Don’t be a dick about it.”

Dumb idea
, Levi thought. Letting anyone know anything was an unnecessary risk. But then, a memory was in his head, filling him up:

“Where have you taken her?” I demand, anger sprinting along my limbs while fear claws at the back of my neck. Father, mother, brother. Dead. Lost. All of them. Killed, murdered during the invasion, gunned down by the Wehrmacht. Bloody bullet wounds marred their bodies like a pox. She was everything left in the world, and they’d taken her somewhere. After taking everything else, they took her too.

“Where!” I shriek, not caring about the consequences of my outburst. I’ve seen the Schutzstaffel kill for lesser infractions, but none of it matters. Not without Ruth. The guards just stare at me with flat, cold eyes. She’s sick, she needs me, and they’ve taken her…

“Calm down,” one says, boredom and impatience coating his chubby face. He doesn’t seem to take any pleasure in his job, not like some of the others, but neither does he show any particular kindness. “She’s only going to Red House,” he says. “It’s standard procedure. She’s sick, that much must surely be obvious even to you. She’ll be bathed and disinfected, then returned. Unless you try my patience further. Then? Well, who can say. So, if you truly desire to see her again, Miststück, I’d hold your tongue. Yes?”

The insult is spoken with a lazy formality, as if it were his standard response. Still, it’s a contemptuous slap to my face and my hand itches to repay him in kind. But that would never do, not if I want to see Ruth again. So, I clamp my mouth shut, doing as he instructs. Ruth’s everything, now. The only thing. Will they really let me see her again? I want to believe yes, but I’ve seen far too many cruelties to be optimistic. Krakow was bad, but I suspect this Birkenau will be worse.

Levi shook the memory free before it could carry further—he’d seen it many times before and had no desire to watch the end of that particular story. Ruth and Edith Rublach. Sisters. The first gassed in the chamber known as Red House in Birkenau, the second experimented on and sacrificed in front of a terrible altar with ruby eyes—like Jacob Fackenheim.

“Fine,” he mumbled. “One call. Only her. And don’t give any details. Nothing. Not where you are, who you’re with, or what you’ve seen. Nothing. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He grunted, nodded. “Sit tight.” He carefully set his arm down on the coffee table before marching off through the kitchen and down the stairs into the basement. A series of metal racks hugged the far wall, burdened with tools and various house supplies. A washer and dryer occupied a space next to the racks.

The majority of the basement was blank, cold concrete. It held a couple of tables, a manual potter’s wheel, a pugmill—for making clay—a modeling stand, and a bench with his modeling instruments: calipers, scrapers, sponges, rasps, armature wire, and study casts. His kiln, a hulking thing of brick and steel, with a heavy door and a vent shaft, sat in one corner. Next to that stood a cooling rack filled with various projects he’d been working on, all in different states of completion: a drying bust, a wildly abstract vase—all gentle curves and soft flowers—waiting to be finished, and a small army of circular pots he’d been testing different glazes on.

His gaze lingered on the kiln for a long beat. He used it for firing his pieces, turning soft clay into hard and brittle artwork, ready to ship for the market, but he also used it for purging. Levi hated fire, but unlike water, he didn’t fear it. Rather, he used it to inflict punishment. Self-castigation.

When he relapsed, like with the Kobocks in the Deep Downs, he’d heat the kiln up and shove his hands into its belly, letting the flames dance over his murdering fingers and bite at the exposed skin on his arms and chest. Levi was no stranger to pain, but even the raw wound in his shoulder was nothing compared to the cleansing torture of fire.

It burned and charred without leaving a mark; instead it fed on the ichor in his clay-skin like gasoline. God was a consuming fire, and Levi’s purging was an act of communion and contrition with that holy flame, a display of his desire to change. He’d need to purge for today’s bloody deeds, to pay for the deaths of the Thursr and the Kobocks from the Cadillac. But later since he suspected there would be more bloodshed to come.

So, instead of making for the kiln, he headed over to his workbench and grabbed a bulky sealed Tupperware container filled with slip: thick, mucky clay goo. He stared at his stump. He’d need the slip to make it whole—

A ball of orange fur seemed to materialize from nowhere, thudded into his shin, then twirled and twisted around his ankle.

His cat, Jacob-Francis.

The Mudman bent over and scratched the animal behind one ear with his index finger, which earned him an approving
chirp
followed by a purr that sounded like a jet engine. The cat loitered only for a moment before shooting off toward his food bowl in the corner. Of course. Levi headed over to the bowl—still full, but not full
enough
for Jacob—and topped it off. The tabby offered Levi one more chirp, then buried his face in the dry kibble, dismissing Levi with a flick of his tail.

Ungrateful little beasts, cats. Still, Levi felt some infinitesimally miniscule affection for the creature. He even smiled, but only for the briefest instant.

Next, he headed over to the only proper room in the basement, an office—his lair—little more than a large storage closet, with a heavy lock on the door.

The lock was a specialty item, a warded trinket he’d picked up in the Hub, which helped conceal the room from prying eyes. Moreover, the lock was coded to him and would only open in his presence. The interior was a plain affair, especially compared to the lock guarding the door: concrete floor, a few more bookcases holding arcane texts and ancient history tomes, a squat brown desk with a desk lamp and an old computer. The computer he used for taxes, a pain even supernatural monsters couldn’t avoid.

It was the bulky metal chest in the corner of the room, hidden under a blanket and guarded by a secondary specialty lock, that he wanted. It took only a moment to get the thing open. Inside: papers and phony documents—birth certificates, passports, credit cards, driver’s licenses—everything he would need to start a new life ten times over. Fat stacks of emergency currency, a hundred thousand dollars total. Prepaid cell phones—cheap, plastic, untraceable things. And, under that, stacked along the bottom, gold.

Ten bars of gold, each 400 troy ounces in weight. At two thousand dollars an ounce, the total came in at eight hundred thousand per bar. Eight million for ten bars. He also had a Tupperware container filled to the brim with gold bullion in smaller increments: 20-gram bars, worth seven hundred a piece, and 100-gram bars, which went for three thousand five hundred a pop. A not so small fortune, and going up every day as the price of gold soared. He was an artist, true, but that was only a front. The real source of his wealth was the gold. And the gold came from his ichor: bars of transmuted lead.

He ignored the fraudulent papers and gold bullion, grabbing a new, prepaid Track-phone and a stack of bills, which he slipped into a pocket. With that done he carefully locked up, rearmed the special wards, and stomped his way upstairs.

The goopy slip he deposited on the coffee table next to his severed arm, then proffered the phone to the girl on the couch. “Make your call,” he said. “Just the one, mind you—then shut the phone off and leave it on the table. After that, go shower, eat, sleep, whatever. I’ll be indisposed for a couple of hours.”

He picked up his Tupperware container and limb, turned away, and went out to the backyard—the girl, for the time being, out of mind.

The back, like the front, showed signs of meticulous care, though it featured even more greenery and artful landscaping than the front. Wild flowers speckled the lawn in every shape and hue, while raspberry and blackberry bushes vied for dominance near the manicured lilac hedge. Around it all towered an extra high wooden fence—one which he’d had to procure a special permit to construct—shielding him from the curious eyes of nosey neighbors.

Levi ignored all these, trotting over to the gnarled oak squatting in the middle of the yard with a smooth boulder perched in its shade.

Gently, he set both the slip and his arm on the boulder, then eased himself onto the stone’s surface, warm from the sun’s falling rays. A moan escaped Levi’s lips as the boulder accepted his weight and began to sap away the weariness and pain taking up residence inside his body like unwelcome squatters. The rock, like Levi, was unique in the world. Originally a chunk of rough granite nearly two tons in weight, it was now the world’s largest bloodstone—a martyr’s stone—of dark-green jasper, almost black, with a spattering of bright red circles strewn about its surface. Granite to bloodstone, courtesy of powerful alchemic magic.