Page 83 of One For my Enemy

Sasha glanced at her reflection. Maybe now her eyes were too wide for having seen too much, but maybe she was wrong to think them vulnerable. Maybe now they were wide enough to miss nothing.

“We should get started then, Masha,” Sasha said, turning to smile grimly at her sister. “We have quite a lot of work to do.”

IV. 4

(For Every Myth, a Villain.)

Eric Taylor was not a villain; he was merely a man playing the cards he was dealt. Did those cards mostly consist of access to narcotics and pharmaceuticals in lieu of something more useful, like a trust fund? Yes. But better that than to play empty-handed, he’d always thought.

Eric was Caucasian, upper middle class, conventionally attractive, something of a late bloomer; a cautionary tale for the modern era. Smart, sure, but never smart enough. Inattentive father, drunken WASP of a mother. A familiar story, though it’s out of fashion to waste sympathy on those sorts of foundational moral vacancies anymore. Unrequited love? Oh, absolutely, for a lifetime. Always coming second to someone, usually his elder brother, who went to Harvard and then Columbia Law and was currently on the fast track to becoming… whatever. A Supreme Court justice. He was clerking for a judge in Chicago, and honestly, what difference did it make? Andrew Taylor was probably going to be a Senator someday, and when he was, Andrew would likely thank his humble roots and pretend he hadn’t once shoved Eric in a locker while he was football captain in prep school.

Maybe it was small of Eric to feel sorry for himself, but in fairness, nobody else was doing it for him. Sure, his mother was too drunk most of the time to notice Eric was alive, and yes, his father had called him a disappointment more times than he’d said ‘I love you’ (the latter occurring enough to be counted on one hand, and one of those times had been during a magazine interview for their hometown farce of a newspaper), but nobody really seemed to care whether that had affected Eric’s development. His own shrink cared from time to time, having been assigned to him after he had a fucking nervous breakdown in the tenth grade and threw himself down the stairs of his high school, but mostly the affection Eric received was in the form of a prescription pad and the kind of free rein that only comes from apathy. (Not to demean the profession, of course. Eric imagined there were psychiatrists out there who did good work. He just also knew he didn’t have one of them.)

So yeah, Eric sold Adderall. And Lexapro. And Ritalin. And some other drugs construction workers took to stay awake on cranes, which he received after he complained to his shrink that all the antidepressants were starting to make him drowsy. And yes, he’d given pills to his classmates—givenbeing, of course, not at all accurate, but they could afford it. (He wasn’t unreasonable.)

Was it a secret? No. Did it eventually become something of an enterprise? Yes. Eric almost got in trouble once, actually, stepping on the toes of a pharmaceutical ring that had already been in operation on NYU’s campus. Of course, once that doctor’s license got taken away (anonymous tips; so strange how those calls were so rarely traced), Eric found himself with an entire network of people who badly needed drugs. And wasn’t the American medical system fucked up anyway? Who was he really harming? Drug companies? He figured they could take the hit.

Then he met Baba Yaga. Well, not Baba Yaga, exactly—her eldest daughter, who simply went by Marya.

“Like the fairytale?” Eric asked, because he wasn’t stupid. He read books.

“Sure,” said Marya. “Like the fairytale.”

In the stories, a princess named Marya Morevna defeated Koschei the Deathless. Sort of. Then her husband ruins things, but Marya wins again in the end.

“Marya doesn’t work for Baba Yaga,” Eric pointed out, but Marya wasn’t interested in the details.

“Do you want money or not?” she asked.

Eric liked people who got straight to the point.

“How’d you find me?” he asked.

She smiled. She had an unnerving smile.

“Magic,” slipped from her berry-colored lips, and he liked her anyway, even if she didn’t get to the point that time. He liked directness, but he could play coy, too. Or thought he could.

He found himself slipping into little daydreams about Marya. Not her specifically, of course (she wore a gold wedding band around her finger and seemed less than convinced by the appeal of his presence), but… theconceptof her. The powerful woman, named for a myth, who controlled the helm of a vast narcotics enterprise. He liked it, liked the taste of it; of power succumbing tohim,who’d always been second-best, a disappointment, a let-down.

Thus, finding that Sasha was part of what was clearly a major crime family was both disappointing and exhilarating.

“Eric,” she said, as he opened the door.

“Sasha,” he said, surprised. The last time he’d seen her he’d been face-first in a candy-colored hallucination; one that involved pink-flavored clouds, with the curves of her thighs wrapped tightly around his head. “Missed class again.”

“I’m starting to think school’s not really for me,” she replied, and added, “I actually came to see you about something else.”

He arched a brow, threw out a little, “Oh?”, because again, he could play coy.

She rolled her eyes. “You’re disgusting.”

“Am I?” he asked. One of these days she was bound to give in.

As if she could read his mind, she gave a dainty sigh; stepped forward to rest a single finger on the hollow of his throat, eyeing his mouth.

“Eric,” she murmured.

He leaned forward.

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