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“You lead, I follow,” I say. “Since you know where we’re going.”
Zacharov laughs. “Someone is cautious.”
He starts toward the stairs, and Stanley follows him, then skull tattoo guy, leaving me last. I’ve managed to work off my glove. I cradle it in my palm.
The hallway we come to is lit by flickering overhead fluorescents. They look yellowed and, in a few cases, burned. I follow the skull tattoo guy’s suit-jacketed back until we all come to a large steel door.
“Put this on,” Zacharov says, reaching into his coat and taking out a black ski mask.
I pull it over my head somewhat haphazardly with my one gloved hand. Zacharov and his guys must notice I keep the other hand in my pocket, but no one says anything about it.
Stanley knocks three times.
I don’t recognize the man who swings the door open. He’s tall, maybe forty, wearing stained jeans and no shirt. He’s so skinny that his chest looks concave. He’s covered in tattoos. Naked women being beheaded by skeletons, demons with curling tongues, blocky words in Cyrillic. No color, just black ink and an unsteady hand. It’s amateur work. Jailhouse, I’m guessing. The guy’s hair hangs over his cheekbones in greasy strings. One of his ears is as blackened as Grandad’s fingers. He’s obviously been living for a while in the room that he ushers us into. There’s a cot covered in a filthy blanket. A table made from sawhorses and a single sheet of plywood rests in the center of the room, piled with cardboard pizza boxes, a mostly empty bottle of vodka, and a take-out foil container of half-eaten pelmeni.
His gaze darts hungrily from me to Zacharov, then back again.
“Him?” the guy says, and spits on the floor.
“Hey,” Stanley says, stepping between us. The other bodyguard was leaning against the wall near the door. He stands up a little straighter, like he’s expecting trouble.
I look over at Zacharov, waiting for his reaction.
“You are going to change his face,” he tells me calmly, as if he was discussing the weather. “For old times’ sake. For the debt you still owe me.”
“Make me pretty,” the man says, coming as close to me as he can with Stanley between us. He smells like stale sweat and vomit. “I want to look like a movie star.”
“Yeah, okay,” I say, taking my hand out of my pocket. Bare. The air feels cool on my skin. I rub my thumb against my fingers in an unfamiliar gesture.
The man dances away. Stanley turns to see what freaked the guy out, and backs off too. Ungloved hands get attention.
“You sure he’s what you say he is?” the guy asks Zacharov. “This isn’t your way of getting rid of a problem, right? Or making me forget my own name?”
“No need to bring a boy to do either of those things,” Zacharov says.
That doesn’t seem to reassure the guy. He looks at me and gestures to his neck. “Show me your marks.”
“I don’t have any,” I say, pulling at the front of my sweater.
“We don’t have time for these pointless questions,” Zacharov says. “Emil, sit down now. I am a busy man and I do not oversee murders. I also do not take pointless risks.”
That seems to settle him. He pulls up a folding metal chair and sits in it. Rust has eaten away at the joints, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He’s too busy watching my hand.
“What’s this for?” I ask.
“I will answer all of your questions later,” Zacharov says. “But for now, do as I ask.”
Stanley eyes me coldly. Zacharov’s not asking. There never were any good choices.
Emil’s eyes go wide when I touch the pads of my fingers to his filthy cheek. I bet my heart is beating just as fast as his.
I’ve never done anything like this transformation, something requiring fine detail and finesse. I close my eyes and let myself see with that odd second sense, let every part of Emil become infinitely malleable. But then I panic. I can’t think of a single movie star whose features I recall in detail. Not a guy, anyway. They’re all blurs of eyes and noses and some vague sense of familiarity. The only actor that comes to mind at all is Steve Brodie as Dr. Vance in The Giant Spider Invasion.
I change Emil. I’m getting the hang of this. When I open my eyes, he looks like a passably hot dude from the 1970s. No more tattoos. No more scars. I fixed his ear, too.
Stanley sucks in his breath. Emil reaches up to touch his face, his eyes wide.
Zacharov is staring at me, one corner of his thin mouth lifted in a hungry smile.
