by C. S. Poe
Addison turned his attention on me again. “True enough. It was a week ago—Patrick Tuffey came ’round Pilly’s spittin’ mad. He’s telling the lads he found Fishback in some shithole tenement, meeting with some kind of mechanical man. Patrick ain’t never seen anything like it before—said his entire face was silver, had some kind of gun attached to his shoulder. So Patrick keeps watch, right? Fishback leaves empty-handed, and this abomination comes out with a big case that’s been traded off. And then, fuck Patrick sideways, guess who’s been keepin’ watch and meets the mechanical man?”
“Whyos,” Gunner answered.
Addison looked surprised but nodded. “Right.”
“So some members are double-dealing?” I asked. “Working for Driscoll and Tick Tock?”
“Aye, sure looks to be the case.”
“Has Driscoll dealt with them?”
“They ain’t been seen since that night. Patrick, he didn’t go after them. Figured they’d resurface in a day, pretendin’ nothing’s amiss. He told Driscoll instead. Says Driscoll nearly shot him for not handlin’ the situation then and there.”
“That’s why Patrick showed up angry,” I concluded.
“Aye. I tended to his needs, if you understand me, but he weren’t much more pleasant after.”
“Addison,” I began, digging out my wallet and passing him several folded bills. “I have evidence that this package is likely a combination of illegal ammunition and custom-built weapons from the scraps of Jordans and Waterburys.”
“Magic?” he asked, tucking the money into his trouser pocket.
I nodded and said, “I need to know where the parts are coming from, so I can trace Tick Tock’s entire enterprise before it grows too large to contain.”
Addison puffed his cheeks as he expelled a long breath. “This is dangerous, Hamilton.”
“Then this should be right up your alley,” Gunner remarked.
Addison reluctantly grinned at that. “It won’t be coming from the Whyos. Dig deeper than the surface violence—look to the architects.”
“Who?” I pressed. “Every year we arrest unregistered architects dabbling in illegal magic. There can’t be many left in the city.”
A whistle screeched overhead, and the three of us looked to the heavens as the sky erupted in fiery blossoms that could have shamed the summer flowers of Madison Square Park. Strontium red and barium green and sodium yellow illuminated the sky. Hours before the clock struck midnight and already city pyrotechnicians were giving Independence Day something to be jealous of—and over the slums and Bowery, no less.
“I heard a name worth remembering,” Addison said over the boom and crackle. He looked down at me briefly, his face highlighted in a kaleidoscope of colors. “He ain’t local, though. Out in San Francisco is what they say. Goes by Weaver. I’d be looking at shipments coming into Pier 17, Hamilton.”
Then, an explosion like nothing I’d experienced since cannon fire during the war shook the ground beneath our feet.
IX
December 31, 1881
The fireworks were still erupting overhead, but their celebratory detonations were completely silenced by this unrelated blast. Another shrill whistle cut through the crash—not that of a firework soaring into the sky; this was metallic—a patrolman in distress.
“What the fuck was that?” Addison shouted, his hands over his ears. He looked toward the street corner where several pedestrians were watching something out of our line of sight to the south.
The whistle kept shrieking.
My arms and chest pimpled with painful gooseflesh before a sudden, sickening heat broke out across my entire body. The world was reduced to a low static hum deep in my ears, and my hands cramped and my fingers curled into unintentional fists as an excessive sum of manufactured magic in the atmosphere attacked my already-damaged nerves. My vision tunneled, but I managed to stumble backward and was sick into a pile of rubbish heaped against the brick façade of Pilly’s. My body was sweaty and clammy, and my arm shook as I wiped my mouth on the sleeve of my coat.
“Hamilton?”
Addison’s voice was barely audible at first. But one at a time, each sense came back to me, like convalescing after a bout of influenza. The heat dissipated from my skin, my vision cleared, and the roar of fire filled my ears.
“Hamilton?” Addison called again, and this time his hand landed heavily on my shoulder.
I shook his touch off, turned, and ordered, “Get back inside.”
He hesitated, glanced at Gunner, then nodded and yanked the door open. He kicked the bottle that’d left it ajar as he entered, and the glass skittered across the frozen cobblestones in his wake.
I turned to see that Gunner had already unholstered his Waterbury and had his body angled to the street, but was staring at me. “I’m fine,” I said before rushing past him and returning to the corner of Bowery and Broome. Two blocks south on Hester Street, a mushroom cloud of black smoke swelled from what I suspected was a warehouse. The yellow and orange of a raging inferno illuminated the skyline.
“Firework gone astray?” Gunner suggested over the growing commotion.
“Whatever the cause, I think we just found where Tick Tock’s been storing his ammunition packages.”
I broke into a run before another minute was wasted on talk and no action. I raced down the Bowery, working against the crowds moving away from the fire, shouting for onlookers to clear a path, and identifying myself as law enforcement. The heat of the fire could be felt even on the northern end of Hester—in fact, it pulled me up short, and I heard Gunner come up behind me as I studied a four-story building burning like Hell on Earth. The flames were huge, leaping from broken windows and the rooftop, licking at the El tracks that ran down the Bowery, and putting the system’s structural integrity into immediate danger. The crank sirens of fire department water tankers wailed from the east, but even with a dozen leather hoses, those boys were about to learn the hard lesson of how ineffective plain old water was against magic-induced fire.
I raised both hands to cast just as a figure came tumbling out the front door. I hadn’t recognized him at first, what with the copious blood and bruises, but I’d been studying rogues’ gallery photos for years. Recognition was inevitable.
“Tuffey?” I called over the thunder of destruction.
Patrick Tuffey stumbled toward me. I don’t think he knew who I was, knew I was a federal agent. I don’t think he cared. He reached his arms toward me and shouted, “What he done to those lads—it’s like playin’ God. It’s all magic in there. I only wanted to bankrupt Tick—” A shot rang out from the warehouse, and then there was a hole in the middle of Tuffey’s chest.
“Tuffey!” I lunged forward and grabbed under his arms as his eyes rolled back and he dropped to his knees. “Hang on—what’s happened? Is it about the Whyos double-dealing? Tuffey? Tuffey. Goddamn it.” I eased into a crouch and laid the lifeless body on the ground.
“Gillian,” Gunner prompted.
There was something in his voice—nothing overtly obvious of course, and not any one emotion either. But it was a curious combination of something like doubt and wariness in Gunner’s tone, and it was different enough from everything I knew about him that I quickly directed my attention to the warehouse as I stood.
Standing just outside the entrance, flames ripping and tearing at the threshold behind him, was a beast of a man. He was easily Gunner’s six feet, but built far wider and stockier than my favorite outlaw, with the ten barrels of a Gatling gun resting on his left shoulder. I belatedly realized the glinting orange glow on his face wasn’t merely illumination from the fire, but a reflection on a smooth, polished surface.
Silver.
His entire face was made out of silver.
“Special Agent Gillian Hamilton,” I announced as he approached. “Federal Bureau of Magic and Steam.”
Gatling Man took another heavy step.
“I’m placing you under arrest for the murder of Patrick
Tuffey and for transporting with intent to distribute illegal magic firearms and ammunition.”
Another step.
“Stop where you are,” I demanded.
Gunner cocked his Waterbury.
I held one palm toward the sky, and electricity zapped and crackled in the air around us.
Gatling Man kept lumbering forward. He raised his left arm up, a motion that mimicked having to reach for the rung of a ladder, but instead, the Gatling gun activated with the movement and the barrels swiveled to point directly at us.
“Christ Almighty,” I whispered.
Then Gunner and I dodged in opposite directions as the man brought his arm down and the gun opened fire. The heat of fire ammunition scorched the air at chest-level just as I threw myself to the road. The bullet hit the streetlamp to my right, sent it up in immediate flames, and the glass globe burst from the heat, raining shards down over me.
I raised my head and looked toward the cross streets in time to see Gunner roll to one knee, take aim, and fire. The round from the Waterbury hit Gatling Man square in the chest and he stumbled back a step, but unlike before with Mechanical Man, there was no blood. Gunner fired a second round, then ran for the cover of a parked automobile when the gunfire was returned.
I got to my feet and pulled my goggles on. That monstrosity was clearly reinforced with silver underneath his clothing, otherwise two aether rounds would have sent him to his knees. Silver as an element held up inherently well against aether magic, which had been why Milo Ferguson’s locomotive was built with it. Silver had a high melting point, which kept the machine intact, but most importantly, it put Gunner at a distinct disadvantage. I’d been able to melt through the silver and iron hull of the locomotive with time and concentrated spell-casting, but this situation was different. Because silver on its own—and looking no thicker than an extra layer of skin—was an extremely conductive element. This man was built to withstand the intense heat of the magic ammunition he was volleying at us, but not lightning.
I raised one arm up, hand extended toward the sky. Clouds rolled in over the Lower East Side, and thunder rattled my bones. I tempered the million volts of lightning, because I wanted this bastard alive, and when the crash of energy came down from the storm, I hurled the blinding lightning at Gatling Man. The electricity ballooned around our assailant as it came into contact with his fire ammunition. I pumped a bit more magic into the spell, just enough that it overtook the manufactured elements, cocooned him in a brilliant yellow glow, then threw him right off his feet, skidding along the road. The Gatling gun bumped and banged against the cobblestones, shooting wildly into the sky before his body came to an abrupt stop.
A beat copper ran into the cross streets from the east, still blowing his whistle.
I let the spell go and reached into my coat to hold up the badge I’d removed earlier. “Magic and Steam!”
“The fire department is on the way,” he called back, red in the face from both the cold and incessant whistling. “One of the tankers got stuck in the snow.”
Steel screeched overhead—the El tracks were now completely enveloped in flames.
I pointed north toward Grand Street and said, “Get to the platform—stop the trains.”
“But the fire department—”
“They can see the flames from goddamn Tammany Hall,” I retorted. “Go—now.”
The copper nodded as if his head were bobbing from a string, and raced toward the staircases on Grand. He was blowing his whistle the entire way.
Gunner was shooting again, and I spun in time to watch a gangster, pistol in his outstretched hand pointed at my back, drop the weapon, blood trickle from triple shot in the middle of his forehead, then collapse face-first in the road. More shooting rang out from south of us, and Gunner ducked behind the automobile and returned fire. A second gangster with heavily bandaged hands was stooped beside Gatling Man, helping the abomination to his feet. I recognized him from my earlier jaunt in the neighborhood when I’d been chasing Fishback. That felt like so long ago and not a mere few hours.
“McCarthy!” I raised both hands, palms out, and they began to glow and snap with electricity. “Stop right now, or you won’t have any hands left to bandage when I’m done with you.”
McCarthy got his shoulder under Gatling Man’s arm, whose face was cracked and caked in black soot from the lightning, then looked toward me. “This means war, magic pig.”
Thousands of pounds of steel groaned overhead, then the split and wrench of tracks and steam pneumatics came crashing down. The destruction of the El was practically on top of me in the time it took to acknowledge my inevitable fate. There wasn’t a chance to slow the moment down and react logically. No. There was only the animalistic drive to survive—a very rabid thing I kept deep inside, tucked away in that blackness I carried, a shroud of shame around my soul. Gunner had taken a candlestick to that darkness, shined a light on everything gross about my person. He had seen, without understanding, some of my worst disgrace. I needed to trust he would be sympathetic when I explained it all, but that violence scared me.
And now—it was awake within me again.
I snapped my left hand in a quick, circular motion, whipping a squall of wind upward while bringing my right up as if to hold a tangible item over my head. The wind and gravity magic wove together, caught the plummeting framework midair, and was held suspended overhead. The cobblestones beneath my feet cracked and broke as the weight of the tracks competed with the gravity spell. I screamed—a sort of incoherent, wordless rage—and sent the debris flying. It landed a dozen feet away in the middle of the road.
I spun toward the warehouse, the wind still thrashing around me like a standstill tornado. McCarthy and Gatling Man were gone. I snapped again, and a heavy blackness rolled over the night sky that could send shadows scurrying for safety. Thunder boomed and rumbled, and then a torrent of rain fell over Hester Street. The wind was still spinning, churning the flames, spiraling them up and up, out of the warehouse and into the clouds. The clash of this manufactured magic—wild and unregulated, without the custom weapons or curious mechanical men to maintain the levels—was like being kicked through a wall by cannon fire.
My hands glowed blue with the water spell. I dipped more aggressively into the stream of raw magic, tearing fistfuls of energy from the atmosphere and pouring my own lifeforce back into it as the rain pelted the cyclone of fire harder—harder—the last of the flames finally pulled from the blackened husk of the warehouse and overtaken by the storm raging in the sky. The scars that crisscrossed my palms pulsated with the beat of my heart while the rest of my body began to tingle as if I’d fallen asleep in a horribly convoluted position.
It’s happening again.
I reached a final time for the current of magic around me, gathered those glittering tendrils, wove them together, built them bigger, until I had an aether spell over three feet in diameter. The blinding-white energy washed over the neighborhood, illuminating nooks and cervices that’d maybe not seen light for the last decade, and then I hurled it into the sky. The aether tore through the wind, the rain, the clouds, swallowed the fire, and then everything ceased.
Stillness.
Silence.
And then I passed out.
X
January 1, 1882
The first time I awoke, it was to a foreign space. Not that I had actually opened my eyes, but everything felt off. The ceiling was too low, the walls too close, the cold air leaching in through the window was on the left instead of right. I asked where I was—at least, that was my intention, but the words felt garbled and slurred in my mouth. I wasn’t even certain they were understood, so I tried again.
An ice-cold cloth was pressed to my forehead and cheekbones, and the shock of it made me wonder if I’d come down with a sudden fever. Even this touch was alien. Gentle in the sense of… feminine delicacy. Not the sort of gentle roughness of a man that I’d recently become acquainted with. And the scent. Lavender and citrus,
but not Sandringham. Too lemony. Too clean. Too bright a base.
I wasn’t at The Buchanan and this wasn’t Gunner. But before I could ask again where I was, before I could open my eyes and see who this was, I sank deeper into the bedding and a galaxy of a million stars swallowed me whole.
Like counting knots in the beams overhead.
Good night, Special Agent Hamilton.
“Jesus goddamn Christ.”
There was a low chuckle to my right. Warm and husky and familiar. “Mind your manners, Hamilton.”
I opened my eyes and struggled to sit up in a bed not my own. My head was pounding, and the pulse behind my left eye felt as if the thing were about to rupture. I rubbed hard enough to create black spots in my vision, then belatedly took in the state of my partial undress. No suit coat, waistcoat, tie—cuffs and collar were gone too. The first few buttons of my shirt had been undone.
I peered to my right to see Gunner in a wooden chair, his posture relaxed despite what looked to be a terribly uncomfortable seat. He’d also ditched his suit coat and had rolled back the sleeves of his shirt to advertise the cords of muscle in his forearms. Beside him stood a woman, perhaps my age. She wore a dress decidedly middle class—a pretty thing of mauve, with a bit of ruffle around the middle and buttons all the way up to her lace collar, but it was, despite its festive color, a practical piece of wardrobe. Her hair was coiled and pinned in place atop her head, bringing focus to her brown eyes and the dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
I hastily pulled the front of my shirt closed, then remembered the bite mark Gunner had left on my neck and plastered a hand over it. “Where am I?”