by C. S. Poe
Gunner pulled back enough to meet my eyes. The corner of his mouth tugged upward, like an invisible puppeteer was controlling his smile.
“You’re incredible,” I reiterated.
Gunner eased himself off my lap and stood from the bed. He said, while walking to the door, “Yank on my tie again and I’ll let you brand my backside.”
I sat up to watch him vanish down the hall, and a moment later, heard the door to the water closet open. I’d experienced a tidal wave of passion so intense that the lower portion of my body was borderline numb, but what Gunner had just said—confirmation that he liked the distribution of power between us, and that he was clearly relieved in knowing he wouldn’t have to lead every time—it made my prick twitch. Doing that with him was… well, incredible had been a hell of an understatement.
I drew my knees up to rest my elbows on them. I sat there, ignoring the tackiness on my stomach and dampness of the mattress, while staring out the window to my right. Perhaps New Year’s Eve had turned around, if only a bit.
“Everything all right?”
I startled at Gunner’s silent return. “Yes. Fine.”
He held out a washcloth.
“Thank you.” I wiped my stomach and prick clean. Gunner lay down beside me, naked as the day he’d been born and none too modest either. I looked at him, watched his jaw work, and picked up the sweet and herbal notes of his licorice gum a second later.
“Virginia Brights,” he stated, crossing his arms behind his head.
“Pardon?”
Gunner tilted his head toward me. “I used to smoke.”
I raised both eyebrows. “Cigarettes?”
“Hm-hm.” Gunner held one hand up, motioning with his thumb and index finger. “I liked the trading cards. Parasol Drill was my favorite collection.” He glanced at me a second time and clarified with “Women holding parasols.”
“Oh.”
“Black Jack is the lesser of vices,” Gunner concluded before he reached and stroked my bare thigh. “Although I still have the desire to smoke after sex, even now.”
I fiddled with the wet cloth but didn’t break eye contact. “It’s always listed on your wanted posters—known to have a fondness for Black Jack.”
“It is,” he agreed, his voice dropping low. It occurred to me then that perhaps that former habit was the source of Gunner’s huskiness when he spoke.
“I’d always wondered why.”
“Now you know.” Gunner shifted onto his side, propped his head up with one hand, and pulled me down to kiss chastely. “My apologies. It’s nothing of interest.”
“I think it is.”
He arched one brow.
“If you’ve not noticed, you’re a bit of an enigma to people.”
“Am I?”
“I feel rather like a corvid around you—collecting details like they’re shiny pebbles or pretty buttons.”
“And what have you hoarded so far?”
“You’re wicked.”
Gunner smiled suddenly, and it was always a bit of a shock to see the change on his face—the impassive marble to something like a work of art in the blink of an eye.
“Charming,” I continued. “Kind. Brave. Can discern Crown perfumes by a passing scent, once had a fondness for trading cards—”
“The parasol women were very beautiful,” he insisted.
“You haven’t heard my favorite detail learned.”
“What’s that?”
“Constantine.”
Gunner reached up and stroked the closely cropped hair on the side of my head. “And what about you, Gillian Hamilton?”
“What about me?”
“Tell me something I haven’t ascertained yet.”
“You’ve already picked up the highlights.”
“No. I know your age, your history with the Bureau, your perfume and hair oil. I know your shoe preferences and how you sound in bed.”
I flushed. “I’m not sure that’s a detail others would fight you for.”
Gunner was still stroking my head. “I know you’re far more powerful than what the Bureau believes.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but Gunner lowered his hand back to my thigh.
“But I haven’t figured out why.”
“Why what?”
“Why you keep it a secret.” Gunner was staring at me again in that manner in which he stripped a person down to their bones. “They assign levels to their magic agents, do they not?”
I nodded curtly.
“And what have they given you? Four? Five?”
Before I could speak, the PDD on the bureau across from the bed began to emit a series of tones—Director Loren Moore.
VI
December 31, 1881
“This is madness.”
“Yet there is method in it.”
The field office was only a handful of blocks from The Buchanan—a ten-minute walk at a leisurely pace. When I’d answered the PDD, Moore curtly requested my presence, paused a fraction of a second, then said I was to bring that man along, as he might be able to provide us with a unique perspective on the Fishback situation. Moore ended the call before I could utter a response.
Gunner and I had dressed, and while I made certain in the mirror that I looked entirely like myself, I couldn’t shake the notion that what we’d done—what I’d done—was smeared across my forehead in a woman’s rouge lip salve. Would something about the way I walked or talked denote a change in me? Would Moore be able to take one look at me and piece the clues together?
“A method in walking you, of all men, into a Magic and Steam field office?” I retorted.
Gunner glanced down at me, and a plume of air escaped his lips as he answered, “Shakespeare. Hamlet, act two.”
“Right.” Of course. “I only meant, this isn’t wise.”
“Moore won’t arrest me.”
I looked up. “He has the right. The obligation, even.”
“The problem with viewing the world in absolutes,” Gunner began, “is that sooner or later, you find yourself in a situation where the mind and heart disagree. Of course Moore has an obligation to arrest me. But in doing so, he’d be required to arrest you too.” Gunner stopped at the end of the sidewalk. “Which he won’t.”
“You sound awfully certain.”
“He won’t.”
I snorted.
“He’d sooner not acknowledge the situation. For now, at least.” Gunner inclined his head for me to follow as he crossed the street. “Tell me about this Fishback fellow.”
I let out a heavy breath and crossed the cobblestone street, snow crunching loudly underfoot. “Frank Fishback,” I stated. “Murderer-for-hire.”
“Target?”
“Beat coppers—the honest sort. Downtown gangsters have been hiring him for the last two years, until he recently changed vocations.”
Gunner had no comment, so I continued.
“He picked up a job as a middle-man for a new gangster.”
“Tick Tock. Was that what the mechanical intruder said?”
I nodded. “Correct. And as far as intelligence goes, we have very little. What was gleaned from Fishback earlier this evening was that Tick Tock is moving unknown quantities of elemental ammunition—fire, specifically—packages that came in from the West, which Fishback picked up and delivered to ‘a mechanical man.’”
“The mechanical man being one and the same?” Gunner asked.
“We’ll never know.”
“Why’s that?”
“Fishback is dead.”
Gunner grabbed my coat sleeve and pulled me to a stop. “You implied he was in custody.”
“That’s why Moore came to The Buchanan. Roughly the same time Mechanical Man was falling off my balcony, Fishback was murdered while under lock and key.”
Gunner removed his hand from my arm. He took a breath. “Gillian—”
“Hamilton.”
We both turned toward the third voice and watched a shadow detach from the
wall of the looming FBMS field office. A red ember briefly illuminated Moore’s face as he lit the tobacco in his pipe.
“Sir,” I called back. The distance between us, while no less than half a dozen feet, felt akin to jumping straight down Dead Man’s Canyon without any magic to govern the landing.
Splat.
Somewhere overhead, a window opened and drunken delight and laughter spilled out into the night. A gust of wind escaped the narrow alley between the office and neighboring business, kicking up the freshly fallen snow and screaming like a banshee lamenting the death of an O’Neill or O’Connor. A touring automobile plodded along the street, the holiday bells attached to the grille ringing obnoxiously with every bump in the road.
Chiiing, chiiing, chiiing.
The cloud of cherry smoke from Moore’s pipe held suspended around his head, and only when he removed the bit from his mouth did it dissipate like fog on a spring morning. “Come with me.” He disappeared into the alley.
“Sir,” I tried once more, running forward. I skidded to a stop in the entranceway as Moore stepped into a pool of orange light cast from a security lamp over the rarely used side door. “What—that is—your intention—”
Moore slid a large skeleton key into the lock, and I heard the tumblers click into place. He looked sideways at me as he opened the door. “Are you a federal agent, Hamilton?”
“I am.”
“And did you receive an order from your director?”
“I did.”
“Then move your backside,” Moore concluded before disappearing inside.
I spared Gunner a quick glance before stepping into the alley. I heard his steps mirror my own—heels snapping the thin skin of ice on the uneven walkway. I moved into the dim hallway of the office, and Gunner pulled the door shut as he took up the rear. The side entrance led onto a series of congested, maze-like corridors hardly wider than the shoulders of one man. The halls acted as a method for skirting the lobby and booking rooms and not being seen by the general population, as well as providing agents with a secondary entrance and escape route, in the event our building was ever overtaken by an opposing force. The overhead piping clanked quietly with steam, and the glass globes of light were turned down so low, it was easier finding my way by simply following the lingering trail of Moore’s tobacco.
At an intersection—right leading to the bullpens and private offices upstairs, and left down to the basement of the building—we took the left. The temperature dipped as the three of us walked single file down the stairs and into a large workspace, sparsely furnished, with unfinished brick walls. A bruiser, the fellow’s name momentarily lost to me, stood at the head of two tables with his arms crossed and a deep scowl on his face. On the right were the remains of Mechanical Man carefully laid out, on the left, the charred body of, I believed, Frank Fishback.
It wasn’t the sight of dead bodies that caused a cold and tacky sweat to break out across my chest—not exactly. I’d experienced plenty of death in my twenty-nine years and had hardened to it. It was more the way the bodies had been presented. Two slabs of meat atop a doctor’s operating tables, broken and left behind for disposal.
Bleeding and screaming and choking and gagging on a miasma of fetid death.
I shook myself, hoping it appeared to be nothing but a reaction to the chill in the air. There was no time for the past, and certainly not in my current company. I took a deep breath and entered the basement room. That same dying magic snapped in the air around both bodies—crackles of disturbed energy at odds with the raw current flowing through the room. The unsettled magic was visible without a conscious need to shift my perception, and it reacted like a startled animal as Moore walked across the room—the way the energy spiked and distorted at the presence of a caster, it was like a cat arching its back and hissing. I watched Moore, but there was still no indication that he sensed the manufactured magic on the level I did.
I tugged my gloves off, stuck them into my coat pockets, and with my arm at my side so as to go unnoticed, I positioned my palm out toward the magic. Then I grabbed the jagged tendrils, made a fist around the energy, and gave it a tug. The heat of a fire spell immediately burrowed into the palm of my hand, like a beetle digging into flesh. The tangled web of broken magic in the atmosphere carried me upstairs—the jail cell where Fishback had been taken out—farther, past The Buchanan, then it got lost on its way back to the Five Points.
I winced, let go of the magic, and dug my thumb into my palm to try to alleviate that disgusting burrowing sensation. I unbuttoned my coats as Moore dismissed the bruiser from the room, and I watched the gentleman pass Gunner on his way out the door. I shrugged the winter attire off, hung it on a nearby rack, and added my bowler as well. I turned while adjusting my cufflinks to see that Moore and Gunner were staring at each other from opposite ends of the room, the tension palpable despite the distance. Without some quick intervention, there was likely to be four dead bodies in this room instead of two.
“So,” I prompted suddenly, my voice far too loud.
Gunner didn’t tear his gaze from Moore as he pushed the door shut, turned the lock, then leaned back against it. He crossed his arms, and the butt of his Waterbury was visible in its holster. Gunner planted the heel of his shoe against the door, and with the rakish angle he wore his bowler, he looked every bit the dangerous outlaw. But his attitude wasn’t cockiness or smug assurance—it was simply well-placed confidence. Gunner had a coolness about himself that even being in New York City, behind a locked door with my director, in a building full of federal agents, couldn’t be shaken.
It should be worth mentioning that Moore, while not appearing visibly distraught—because he was, in his own right, quite the formidable force as well—was not making an effort to meet Gunner’s fearlessness. Moore hadn’t been introduced to the Gunner I had while in Arizona—a silent and stoic man who minded his manners and had an odd propensity for meretriciously aligning items. He certainly didn’t know the Gunner I had from thirty minutes ago—a man who I knew as Constantine, naked in bed, stroking my thigh.
Moore only knew Gunner the Deadly.
And Gunner the Deadly had a reputation worth respecting.
I walked around the far side of Fishback’s table and created a sort of triangle with Moore standing near the head of Mechanical Man and Gunner at the door. I put my hands on the table’s edge and stared at Fishback’s charred body—his mouth agape and hands twisted into blackened claws, screaming in agony even in death. The poor bastard.
“What happened?” I asked.
“A commotion was heard from the cells at a quarter after seven,” Moore stated.
I carefully peeled back the burned folds of Fishback’s suit coat. “Then what?”
“Special Agents Bligh and Plunket rushed in. Fishback was on fire. Screaming. Dying. No intruder—just a broken window.”
I tugged at what remained of his shirt collar, but it snapped off in my hand. I set it on the tabletop. “Someone got in via a fourth-floor window?”
“That’s what I said, Hamilton.”
I glanced up. “Yes, sir. I only meant… there’s no fire escape on the east side of the building. How did they get up there?”
Moore slowly and purposefully directed his attention toward Gunner. “I thought Mr. Gunner might have some insight on that.”
“My expertise lies in raiding airships, Director,” Gunner said coolly.
“Any criminal worth a dime knows how to make an escape.”
“I suppose I’d have to be caught first.”
“I need forceps,” I interrupted.
They both looked at me.
I pointed at Fishback. “I see a few wound tracks. If those fire bullets are anything like their aether counterparts, then there should be a bullet to extract. It might be of value to study.”
Moore stuck his pipe between his teeth. He turned around and began opening and closing a number of cabinets mounted to the wall. They held a variety of odds and ends the
field office had accumulated over the years: handyman tools, oversized evidence that couldn’t be properly stored on the second floor with the rest of the open and cold cases—at one point Moore pulled out a box of what appeared, from a distance, to be broken inkwells and handcuffs. He puzzled over the contents a moment, shook his head, and shoved the box back onto a shelf. Moore finally unearthed what he seemed to have in mind from my initial request—a black physician’s bag.
He walked to Fishback’s table, and standing on the opposite side, set the case down and opened the latch. Moore dug around, puffing on his pipe before saying, “Our first medical kit when the office opened.” He produced a rusted pair of forceps and looked at me. “Hand-me-downs from the war.”
I accepted the handle of the tool, mindful of how Moore held the tip of the forceps instead of flirting his fingertips close to my own. Like how he used to. I said with forced nonchalance, “I don’t think Fishback will notice.” I leaned over Fishback, tugged open the blackened flesh of his throat with my thumb, and held my breath as I dug into the hole. For a moment, the only sound in the room was the squish of human innards.
“I suppose,” Moore started, “if Mechanical Man ran to your residence immediately after shooting Fishback and utilized the Fourth Avenue fire escape—”
“No.”
“My patience is understandably limited tonight, Hamilton. This is going to be the one time I ask you ignore my earlier request and pull those punches.”
“He wouldn’t have had the time,” I corrected.
“Why.”
I looked toward the door. “Gunner, when did we arrive at The Buchanan?”
Gunner removed his pocket watch and studied the face. “Couldn’t have been more than a minute or two after Fishback swallowed that bullet,” he said, looking up and then nodding his chin at the crispy flesh and blood I was digging through.
“Perhaps you’re incorrect,” Moore said to Gunner.
“Doubtful.”
“Ah-ha.” I yanked a flattened, bloodied bullet from the back of Fishback’s throat. I offered it to Moore when he pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and held his covered palm out. “There was an atmospheric disturbance at the same time we reached The Buchanan,” I explained.