by C. S. Poe
But most importantly, Moore was my colleague, my boss, and the closest thing I’d ever had to a friend. I cared deeply for him, even if it was not in the manner Moore wished.
Rachel Plunket, Bligh’s bruiser partner, was coming down the stairs with a stack of files in both hands. She looked at me, blushed a furious shade of crimson, and tried to avert her gaze while slinking by.
“Plunket.” I sidestepped and cut her off. “Where’s your partner?”
She huffed a little, but the attitude toward me had always seemed… forced, as if it were a performance for Bligh’s sake. Plunket looked at me, the paperwork, me, Gunner, me again, then shot Gunner a second once-over. A crease settled between her brows, like he was a familiar face she just couldn’t quite place at the given moment.
“Plunket,” I said again, more firmly. “Where is Agent Bligh?”
Plunket redirected her attention and then shook her head. “Still with Moore, I suppose. We’ve been regulated to paper-pushing duties after last night and—”
I held up a hand to stop her. “What do you mean, still with Moore?”
“Moore called him into a meeting, maybe fifteen minutes ago.”
“Without you.” It was not a question.
Plunket colored again, and it made her strong features pop. “Um, I don’t believe the impromptu oversight review had anything to do with our partnership.”
“That’s a very polite way of admitting your partner stepped in it,” Gunner said to her.
I moved around Plunket and continued up the stairs.
“Hamilton,” she called after me. “What’s going on?”
“If you see Bligh, you detain him,” I answered over my shoulder. “That’s an order.”
Gunner kept on me until we reached the fourth-floor landing, where I hastily led the way down the hall toward Moore’s private office, luckily in the opposite direction of an open-floor bullpen of scholar agents. His door was closed. I knocked and called loud enough to be heard through the heavy wood, “Sir? It’s Agent Hamilton. I need to speak with you at once.”
No response.
“It’s an emergency,” I continued, grabbing the knob and trying it, only to find it locked. I looked at Gunner. “He never locks the door.”
Gunner put a hand on my chest, gently pushed me aside, then raised his foot and slammed his heel into the door. The wood audibly cracked but seemed to hold, so Gunner smashed it again. On the second try, the entire lock plate snapped, the door crashed against the inner wall, and broken bits of wood flew every which way.
The sounds of alarm from the bullpen were immediate, but I didn’t wait around to explain myself. I rushed inside and took in the particulars of the office—flashes of detail that registered like a piano student’s first attempt at staccato.
Curtain drawn across the window.
Tumbler overturned on the desktop.
Amber liquid and a shattered decanter.
An arm on the floor, just visible behind the desk.
“Moore!” I moved around the furniture, shoved his chair aside, and got down on my knees. Moore was unresponsive and bleeding from the side of his head. I grabbed his waistcoat in both hands, smoke and sparks already materializing between us, and shook him hard. “Moore. Please… Loren, wake up.”
A stampede thundered down the hallway and then voices were filling the doorway, agents from the bullpen demanding I identify myself at once.
I sat up so they could see me over the desktop. “Fetch Dr. Lillingston at once.” The half dozen of them hesitated a second too long, and I snapped, “Now!” As they scrambled from the office, Gunner hooked his hands under my arms and hoisted me out of the way. I flailed wildly against him, saying, “Stop it—stop—let me cast aether.”
“Calm down,” Gunner ordered. He shoved me against the window and took up the space beside Moore. He pressed his fingers to Moore’s neck, and his eyes narrowed.
“No pulse?”
“I don’t think so.”
I put a hand to my chest as if my own heart were about to give out. “Aether won’t work without a goddamn pulse from the recipient.”
Gunner yanked off his bowler, threw it across the room, leaned over Moore, pinched his nose, and blew a deep breath into his mouth.
“Gunner,” I protested. “What’re you—expired air won’t do him any good.”
But Gunner ignored me. He blew a second lungful of air, a third, and after the fourth, Moore coughed and inhaled on a ragged breath. Gunner sat back and looked at me. “Come cast your aether.”
I moved forward without conscious thought, staring at Gunner with what I suspected was a wild and disbelieving expression, but then I was on my knees beside Moore’s head, his temple still bleeding, and I righted my focus to the matter at hand. I put my goggles on, cast aether in one hand, and pressed the bright magic to the wound. Even though I wasn’t physically touching Moore this time, my magic bridged the inches between us, and I could feel his heat warming the underbelly of my wrist. A bit of smoke coiled in the air between us, and Moore grunted in discomfort.
“No, don’t move. Don’t open your eyes,” I told him.
I poured more magic into the aether spell, already feeling the exhaustive side effects of such a complex magic being used in its most potent method possible—healing. Destruction with aether was an incredible force, but it was always easier to break the world than it was to mend it. As I’d done to Addison’s face, I stopped the bleeding and sutured the skin some, but the major complaints of any wound would still need to be addressed by medicine, not magic. Aether couldn’t repair broken bones, torn muscle, or God forbid, raise the dead. The caster simply didn’t have the energy required for that level of healing—even a caster such as me.
Cautiously, I curled my fingers into a fist, cutting off the aether’s energy stream and managing to keep my nerves from having a caustic reaction again. I slowly unfurled my hand, tugged the goggles down, and dared to lightly press my fingers against the semihealed wound. Moore winced as electricity jumped from me and nipped his skin.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m trying—”
“Gillian?” Moore asked, his usual smooth tenor rough around the edges.
“Yes.”
He cracked a smile and asked, his eyes still closed, “Are we alone?”
“Gunner is with me.”
“Ah….” A pause, and then he said anyway, “When I imagined having my head in your lap, it wasn’t quite like this.”
“Your head in my lap would result in spontaneous combustion and electrocution, Loren.”
“What a way to go out.”
I laughed a little, removed my hand from the still-red skin, and said, “I was scared for a moment.”
Moore hummed under his breath.
“What happened, sir?”
Moore opened his eyes and stared at me, looming upside down over his face. “Bligh had interrupted my interview… with Higgins. Yes. He was adamant about joining me.”
“Did you allow it?”
“I forbade it. He was infuriated.”
“Bligh is never happy,” I pointed out.
Moore was frowning. “Not like this. I must have sent him into the hall—I heard him answer a PDD call… wasn’t his Bureau-issued device.”
“I called him,” I explained. “I took apart McCarthy’s and traced the most pinged code. Bligh answered it, expecting McCarthy.”
“That’s right.” Moore closed his eyes and massaged his temples. “I remember thinking, does Bligh know Carl Higgins? Why, when this has never been his case, is he so insistent to be part of this interview? And when I heard McCarthy’s name….” He weakly snapped his fingers.
I glanced at Gunner and said, “Triangulating Bligh’s location is a waste now. He was here.”
“Call him again. He doesn’t have much of a lead on us.”
“I said he was a self-centered man-child, not stupid. He won’t pick up.” I looked to Moore once again. “How’d you end up in your offic
e?”
“It’s a blur. I wanted to speak with Bligh—about what I’d overheard him say. I think… I must have poured a drink. I left the decanter on the desk.” He looked at me again. “One of my agents is a gangster.”
“It would appear as such, sir.”
“I needed a drink,” Moore muttered. “That’s the last thing I recall.”
Gunner rose to his feet and moved around us, broken glass crunching underfoot. “Bligh entered your office, grabbed the bottle, and smashed it over your head. He locked the door as he left and intended for you to bleed out.”
“Speculation,” Moore replied.
“Hardly. You’re covered in blood, whiskey, and glass.”
Moore’s expression grew quizzical as he looked down at himself. “Almost done in by my Dublin, twelve years.”
“Agent Hamilton,” a woman called from the doorway, slightly out of breath. “Dr. Lillingston has arrived. She’s on her way upstairs now.”
“Thank you,” I answered. And to Moore I said, “I have to find Bligh.”
“Dead or alive, Hamilton. And given the recent turn of events….”
“Understood, sir.”
XVII
January 1, 1882
“What’s the plan?” Gunner asked, following me down the hall that led away from Moore’s office. The stairs came up on our right, and the half-sized bullpen that overlooked the cells where Fishback had met his end was on the left. Just beyond either was the doorway that led to the open floor of scholar agents, several of whom were now hovering in the archway, watching me.
Watching Gunner.
It only took one of them to connect the dots: blue eyes, black hair, lean build, six feet.
“I’m going to kill Henry Bligh,” I answered, my tone mere window dressing for the blackness raging inside me.
I didn’t need a view to confirm a storm was rolling in across midtown—I could feel it. Undoubtedly, the wary scholars at the end of the hall could sense it as well. Perhaps my magic, a whirlwind of violence building by the minute that I felt no desire to temper, was all that kept them from proclaiming Gunner’s arrest in my presence. I had been an enigma to them before, but now I was dangerous and they knew it.
Gunner grabbed my arm, pulled me to a stop, and spun me to look up at him. If he was at all troubled by the agents surrounding us—him—he in no way showed it. “We still don’t know where Tick Tock—Bligh—holes up. That family isn’t hurting for country estates. Why would he willingly use Mulberry Bend as a refuge?”
“He’s been successfully maintaining two distinct lives—for months, at minimum,” I answered. “He’s built Tick Tock up, by name alone, as a new terror to this city. If a face is put to it now, he’ll lose that ever-present threat of death he holds over the other gangsters. He’s not some sort of high collar criminal. If Bligh is found out, his esteemed position with the Bureau, as well as his family inheritance, will be gone. No, he’d absolutely keep away from Millionaire’s Row or any other location that could be linked back to his name.”
“There’s still far too many possibilities around the Bend,” Gunner countered. “Warehouses, tenements, storefronts. These are not the sort of citizens who welcome a badge into their neighborhood, my dear.”
I smiled at that—one of self-mockery, but a smile nonetheless. “I thrive where I’m not wanted.”
“Gray looks good on you.”
“My director gave me explicit orders.”
“I know.”
“This isn’t vigilantism.”
The corners of Gunner’s eyes crinkled. “I know. What do you need from me?”
I gave the room over my shoulder a glance, then said, “I’m going to speak with Higgins. I think the connection between him and Bligh is a critical one—he might know the specifics of Tick Tock’s hideout on the Bend.” I looked at Gunner again. “Be ready outside.”
“It’s a shame,” he replied, his tone casual, if not this side of bored, “airships being prohibited south of Grand Central.”
“What’re you planning?”
Gunner merely smiled in response. He turned to go down the stairs, but I took his coat sleeve, pulled him toward me, and kissed him. I kissed him and made certain that everyone watching couldn’t mistake it for anything but what it was.
Love.
“If I’m going to war with gangsters and untold illegal magic, I don’t want to have any regrets,” I whispered after pulling away.
“You’ve made a scene,” Gunner said, just as quiet, although he hadn’t broken eye contact with me.
“This is who I am. I’m sick to death of being afraid. All these lies, survival or not, they’ve built a life that has no room for you—and that’s not worth it to me. If I cannot be both an agent and happy, to hell with them.”
Gunner smiled once again, so warmly that it could have thawed the winter night entirely and brought about an early spring. “I do believe this breath will matter tomorrow, Gillian Hamilton.”
I exhaled a choked-up laugh. “I’ll be downstairs in a moment.” I watched him descend the stairs before turning to the group with their mouths agape. “I want five agents on Director Moore’s office at once. And if the doctor decides to move him out-of-building, I want a dozen more at his side. A combination of caster and bruiser partners—Agent Boggs, please see to assignments at once.”
Boggs, a middle-aged scholar who’d been with the Bureau for a number of years, albeit at a desk, seemed to waffle between taking a direct order from a senior agent and pointing out the obvious—a sodomite was among them. “Ah….”
“Was I not clear?” I countered.
“No—I mean, yes, sir. Of course.” And with that, Boggs turned and began barking orders, calling agents out by name, and taking control of Moore’s immediate safety.
I stormed into the half bullpen and called over my shoulder, “And someone arrest Agent Plunket! I have no idea what team she’s playing for….” Despite a boarded-up window and scorched cell on the other side of the two stone-cold sober agents standing guard at the jail door, this was still one of the most secure rooms in the building for housing suspects in the interim. “Out,” I ordered.
The team looked at each other, the bruiser declining to speak while the caster said, “Director Moore ordered—”
“Agent Henry Bligh just tried to kill Director Moore,” I interjected. “I’m in charge. Out.”
Thunder rumbled from outside the windows, and flashes of lightning were visible at the edges of the curtains. Magic-induced static shot through the air, raising the hairs on my arms. But even as my emotions threw the raw elements into chaos, I could feel the energy bumping against the tangible threshold the illegal magic had been creating and building with every fire bullet shot.
Luckily, the two agents scurried from the room without further argument.
I held a hand out and threw the jail room door open with a well-timed blast of wind magic. As I entered the narrow hallway, Higgins made an audible squeak.
“Don’t you come any closer,” he exclaimed, pressing himself against the far wall of the cell. “I’ll scream. I swear it.”
The air rustled around me as I approached. “I hope you do.”
Higgins’s face blanched, his eyes bugging out, and I swore his waxed mustache drooped. Standing behind bars, sans suit coat, shirt caked and hardened with dried blood, his arm in a sling… he looked pathetic. “Wh-what do you want?” he all but whimpered.
“Tell me about the aether syrup.”
Higgins sniffed. Then sniffed again. “The—syrup?”
“Is there an echo?” I asked.
“It’s a sugar concoction,” he protested. “With a dash of liquid aether. It works wonders for the complications of women—uterine and ovarian pain, for example—”
“You’re not a doctor,” I shouted. “‘It works wonders….’ Christ Almighty. Next you’ll tell me it’s a miracle drug like laudanum.”
“Aether isn’t addictive.”
“N
o, it only has a curious side effect of sudden death if cast incorrectly. Did you, even once, consider the possibility that you were transporting and selling a magic-induced medicine cast by someone without the essential training? Or hell, someone with wicked intentions?”
Higgins’s mustache quivered as he sniffed and sobbed.
“I want a list of customers.”
“A list?” he repeated, and when the air kicked up around me, Higgins held out his good arm in protest. “I only mean, I can’t possibly! Half of the ladies in society come to me on the regular. There’s a demand and I’ve got the means in which to fill it.”
“Explain.”
“A little warehouse downtown for bottling and labeling. Warner’s Elixir is my side business.”
“How has this gone completely undetected by the Bureau?”
Higgins tried to shrug both shoulders and then hissed in pain. “My enterprise is small, sir. Nothing on the scale of what Tick Tock was doing. And women—women are cunning. They know how to keep a good thing secret. Aqua Tofana killed some 600 unwanted husbands in Italy before the Queen of Poison was finally found out.”
No doubt Gunner would have understood that reference more than I did.
I shook my head. “You must have a principal customer. The one who is referring others to you?”
“Oh… uh… yes.”
“And she must have a name,” I ground out.
Higgins swallowed hard and said, “Martha Olin. You’re familiar? Her daughter, Emma, is about to marry into Old Money.”
I pushed Higgins out the front door of the field office, holding on to his cuffed hands from behind as we walked down the steps. The sky was alight with bolts of lightning, the city echoing with the symphonic booms of thunder, and a wind had kicked up the top layer of snow, swirling it around us like miniature whirlwinds.