by Lee Kelly
“Gunn’s calling a mandatory meeting, a practice,” I say. “Be downstairs before three. And wear something nice, but plain, if you can.”
Everyone mumbles annoyances but turns back to their rooms. As I’m about to do the same, Grace steps out of her doorway and grabs my arm.
“Joan, come on. It’s me you’re talking to here—enough dodging. Is this related to what you’ve been doing, during all your time with Gunn?”
“Grace, I seriously can’t talk about it, all right? You’ll see soon enough.”
“It’s not something dangerous, is it?” She tightens her grip. Her eyes flick down the hall, then back to me. “I’m worried about you. You barely come up for air anymore.”
Grace’s forehead is creased, her hand still wrapped around my forearm. I know she’s trying to help. I know she wants to make sure I’m not in over my head. But the questions are too much, feel more like persistent jabs than a helping hand. Even more, I feel the pressure of her trying to mine inside again, pluck my thoughts right out of my head. And right now, I’m too tired to keep my walls high enough to block her out.
“Grace.” I take her hand and gently pry it off my arm. I step back, making sure I break our connection. “If you really are concerned about me, please stop trying to worm your way inside.”
I don’t mean it to sound harsh, but it must, ’cause she takes a few steps back too, as if I’ve slapped her. “Hell, Joan. I’ll stop worrying about you, if that’s what you want.”
“I swear, I’m not trying to keep things from you. Trust me, you’ll understand—”
“Oh, I understand. You’re doing what you need to do,” she says flatly. A pause as we stare each other down. “You’ve always done what you needed to do, though, right? That’s been crystal clear from the beginning.”
“Grace, come on.”
“By the way, for the record? You’re now as hard to mine as he is.” And then she turns around and slams her door.
* * *
My morning passes by in a flurry of strategy sessions with Gunn and underboss Win Matthews. Some of the conversations I can weigh in on (Which finale is the troupe’s strongest and most impressive? Should I spellbind all the sorcerers’ shines, or just my own? Where should the celebratory toast take place after our performance?). And of course, a lot I can’t (Where should the dividing line between gang territories fall? Will it really be profitable if D Street gets a monopoly on distributing our product?). But still, I stay behind closed doors with them for hours. They manage to iron everything out around two thirty, and then Gunn and I leave Win and wait for the troupe in the show space.
Grace, Billy and Ral, Tommy and Rose all file in from the hall. Alex comes through the double doors a couple minutes later. My heart starts fluttering on seeing him, and so I look away, focus on Gunn. He’s studying our troupe one by one, giving us each a little approving nod. The staff of stagehands has already filtered in too and begins to prep trays of shot glasses for our shine demonstration. A few of them start to rearrange the room into a seating area of benches in front of our stage.
The troupe shifts around me uncomfortably. I can almost feel their panic, over the not knowing, over being part of a performance they’ve never rehearsed.
“I apologize for the subterfuge to get you here,” Gunn finally addresses our troupe when the room is set, “but when you realize what today is all about, I believe you’ll appreciate my decision to be cautious.” He pauses. “In a few moments’ time, a man named Anthony Colletto will come through that door with some of his men, and he’ll be looking for an unparalleled performance, and an even wilder shine.”
There’s a tiny gasp from Grace, mumblings between Ral and Billy. Of course they all know the name Anthony Colletto. Of course they realize Gunn’s saying that we’re performing for the Shaws’ sworn enemy tonight. The troupe’s faces are pinched with concern, and confusion, but either Gunn doesn’t see them, or doesn’t care.
“And we’re going to show Colletto a shine that’s not only the highest-grade, strongest magic contraband available . . . we’re going to seal it, use magic to work around the limitations of sorcery, and let him ship it around the country for us. And together, we’re going to take over the goddamned world.” Again gasps, sideways looks. I close my eyes as I feel Grace trying to meet my gaze—
“This is possible, in part, because of all of you,” Gunn persists over their reactions. “I knew, back in that clearing in the middle of nowhere, that through the magic of seven—the magic of you—we were going to achieve extraordinary things.”
And like always, despite the fear and confusion that has taken hold of the crowd, with Gunn’s words, something else starts to churn within the troupe. An undercurrent of pride. Despite having been left in the dark, Gunn’s assured them they matter.
He always knows just what to say. Gunn’s good, far too good, at getting what he wants.
As Gunn walks toward the back stage, he says, “I want you to perform the finale that you ran last night, the Magical Dawn, for Colletto and his men. And then I want you to stand up here”—he points to the back-stage altar—“and brew your heart into your shine. Joan will take it from there.”
My cheeks flush, just a bit, as all eyes glance to me, wondering, judging.
“Everything is riding on this deal—your future, my future, the future of the Shaws. So give me everything you have.” Gunn lets his gaze fall on each of us again, those ice-blue eyes never wavering, blinking, or doubting that we—that he—could fail. “Take your places.”
Without another word, the troupe whispers and divides. The energy pulsing through the show space is anxious, electric.
Alex comes up to me without a word. I feel his tension, his desire to speak, to compare notes with me.
But there’s no time. Because as soon as we’re settled, like a stage cue, the double doors to the show space open.
PERFORMANCE
ALEX
And there he is. The man who brought my father to his knees with his constant threats and promises. The man who took my future into his hands and gutted it. The man who, in another time, another place, I’d take my magic to and break apart.
I’ll never forget his face. I wonder if he recognizes mine.
“Mr. Colletto!” Gunn booms across the hall, with more warmth in his voice than all the times I’ve heard him speak put together. He crosses the performance space and takes the hand of the man who haunted my father’s nightmares, who served as a compass for why I first agreed to help bring the underworld down. Why D Street? Why on earth would Gunn go after D Street, especially considering what they did to Gunn’s father, and the ensuing decade of bad blood?
The only silver lining in all this: if we’re taking the Shaws down, we’re taking D Street down with them.
“Big place you’ve got here,” Colletto muses as he looks around. “Would never know it from the outside.”
“That’s the point, of course.” Gunn smiles as Colletto’s small army—gangsters, young and old, a crowd of about ten—filters into the performance space from the double doors. I recognize several of the faces from my days working by my father’s side. Moments later more Shaw men arrive—faces I can’t all necessarily connect with names, but they’re important, familiar faces. Powerful faces.
“You know my underbosses, Val Appicello and Chris Moretti.” Colletto nods to two middle-aged goons on his left side.
Gunn nods. “My colleagues, Win Matthews, Sam Sullivan, George Kerrigan, Calvin O’Donnell.” Underbosses, all of them. McEvoy’s right hands, now pledged to Gunn.
The handshaking and name swapping continue as the seven of us watch and stare, like the hired hands we are, around the perimeter of the performance space.
“I want to show you everything we can give you, everything you’ll be a part of if we decide to move forward.” Gunn ushers his audience forward, toward the
benches that the stagehands have arranged in front of the back stage like a makeshift theater. “Based on years of study, a dedication to finding and culling the best talent, and a strict regimen of training, I’ve taken seven sorcerers and elevated them into something extraordinary. There’s no one across either of our organizations who knows what I know. There’s no one in this city—hell, this country—who’s managed to do what I’ve done,” Gunn says, as Colletto’s men make their way to seats. “And I can do it again, and again.”
Again and again . . . so is this demonstration about Gunn opening up more magic havens . . . or transforming some of the other half-rate shining rooms in the city, like he did with the Red Den?
Is Gunn going to ask for a monopoly on the city’s performance business, in exchange for flipping some of the profits to D Street?
What’s Gunn’s play here? What’s the angle? And what does shine have to do with it?
Colletto sits, unbuttons his vest, and takes out a cigarette. “I’m looking forward to every aspect of this demonstration.” And then, it might be my imagination, but I swear his eyes find and rest on me. It churns something thick and poisonous around inside.
“Without further delay.” Gunn gestures to the aisles around the audience, to us, his troupe of sorcerers.
My heart starts hammering inside my chest, the nerves and expectation pounding like a pulse. Whatever lies on the other side of this performance is what I’ve been trying to uncover for the Feds, what all the lying and sneaking around and sleepless nights have been for. In our pocket off the right-side aisle, I watch Joan, studying her. How much does she know about what’s happening today? What’s her real role in all of this? Does she have any clue that her mob bosses are going to be taken down?
I take a deep breath.
Just get through this performance.
One step at a time.
BREW
JOAN
Grace begins by turning off the lights, one by one, and then Billy and Ral step in, fade the dark of the show space into a textured gray. Then it’s Tommy and Rose’s turn: the pair paints a burst of color onto the canvas above Colletto’s crowd and sends thick clouds, gray and purple, lined and scaly like floating fish, over the heads of the mobsters, teasing the space from early dawn into sunrise.
And that’s my cue. I conjure my sun manipulation, the glowing globe, breathe life into it, make it fuller, until Alex takes over and breaks my sun open, letting the sunrise fall like a sideways waterfall over the crowd.
I can’t help but steal a glance at Boss Colletto, to see what he’s thinking. His head is angled up, his eyes are wide and childlike. He’s enchanted. They all are—just like any audience on any night—looking up as a sorcerer-made sky sizzles, cracks, and breaks open just for them. Rendered children by our magic, our magic that wraps around and hugs them tight.
When the immersion’s over, Grace turns only a few of the space’s lights back on, keeps the mood sexy, seductive, and we step up, one by one, onto the back stage. But unlike other nights, I’m going to have the final word. I’m going to be the finale.
Thanks to the stagehands, seven bottles of water already rest on the altar in the center of the stage. We line up behind them, left to right: Ral, Billy, Grace, me, Alex, Tommy, and Rose. By this point, we have our rhythm down—there are no pauses. Together we reach for our bottles, and the water inside each jumps in response. Whirls of cherry-red tendrils swirl inside each bottle, the water surrendering quickly to the magic, the hisses and pops of the shine echoing through an otherwise silent show space.
On a normal night, in a normal show, this would be the cue for the stagehands to head up the stairs with trays of shot glasses, pour our shine into them, and pass them out to the crowd. But tonight is different.
Almost like he’s finishing my thoughts, Gunn interrupts the nearly hour-long silence. “On a regular night, it’s at this point in the performance that our stagehands pass around my sorcerers’ shine. The sorcerers brew the shine live every night, of course, and just enough, because up until now, shine, like all pure magic, doesn’t last more than a day.”
Colletto grunts in assertion and shifts in his seat below us.
Gunn ascends the stairs to the stage, angles himself next to me and picks up my bottle of shine. “Shine’s the highest trip on the black market. Euphoric. Transcendent. Lets you see the magic in the world. Some say that it lets you see God. Rendered even more rare and coveted because it’s impermanent, and fleeting.” Gunn looks up. “Until now.”
He nods to the three sorcerers on my left, and then the three on my right. “Please step away from the altar,” he tells them. But I don’t look at my troupe, especially not at Alex. I’ll just get more nervous. So I stare straight ahead and wait for my cue.
“Now, the full extent of the magic I can give you, if we find a way to put the past behind us and join forces. A shine that can be stored, and shipped, and transported all over the world. Joan, if you please.”
ETERNAL SHINE
ALEX
The rest of the troupe takes a step back, completely in the dark about what Joan’s going to do, as she holds the spotlight. And the dread I’ve managed to dam, as I’ve played the dutiful cop playing the dutiful troupe member during the performance, starts flooding in. There’s a shine that defies the laws of magic, a shine being sold by a gangster who wants to take over the underworld—
And the girl I’m falling in love with is taking the stage to somehow bring it home.
The room falls completely, deathly quiet, as Joan places both of her hands back on her bottle of shine. She mumbles words of power, words I can’t quite hear, even this close to her, but in seconds, a glass stopper appears and lodges itself right into the mouth of her bottle. Colletto and his men shift below us, mumble speculation.
Then Joan takes one of her hands off the glass, digs around the shelf under the altar, and pulls a switchblade out from it. As she pushes up the right sleeve of her dress, I have to stop myself from reaching out and grabbing her hand, telling her that whatever she’s about to do, it’s not worth it, not for them. Grace gasps on Joan’s other side, and her hand flies to her mouth, while a strange, deep regret floods through me and settles into my skin. On Joan’s forearm is a patchwork of scars, some fresh and red, some pink, older. She leans her arm over the bottle, and with a calm precision, presses the blade right into her arm.
After a trickle of blood wraps around her skin and drips into the stoppered bottle, she caps the bottle and begins another spell. Again I can’t hear the words, but this time I strain to: “Less of me . . . offering . . . eternity . . .”
Her bottle begins to tremble, quake, then settle, just like it’s alive. What did she just do? Some dark sorcery, a spell of blood? Devil’s magic?
As Joan backs away from her new creation, again Gunn goes to her side. He takes Joan’s bottle into his hands, lifts it up for the crowd to assess: a bottle of glistening shine, stoppered with a cork of bloodstained glass.
“An eternal shine,” Gunn says to the audience. “A bottle of pure, liquid magic, caged by magic. An old and secret magic that we have perfected, that would not have seen the light of day without the power of this magic haven.” Gunn hands the bottle back to Joan. “Or of course, without a powerful, resourceful sorcerer.”
Colletto stands up slowly and walks to the front of the stage. “May I see the bottle?” he asks Joan.
“Go on,” Gunn tells her.
Joan heads down the stairs to hand the bottle to Colletto, while I get a strong, overwhelming urge to gut Gunn, right here and now. He’s standing so close, I could wrap my fingers around his neck. I could conjure a thousand knives, incise him with cuts just like Joan’s, let him bleed out slowly.
“That’s yours to keep,” Gunn tells Colletto, once Joan takes her place back among us. “I knew you wanted to make sure there was no tampering with the sample I showed y
ou last time. You saw this one brewed and bottled yourself—so take it back with you, confirm its shelf life, and open it in a few days. When you see it’s real, I expect we’ll have a deal.”
As Colletto studies the glass bottle, the room buzzes around him. The air is tense, expectant, excited—and my mind is buzzing right along with it. Because everything I’ve been shelving . . . Joan’s relationship with Gunn, her caginess, her secrets, her unparalleled power . . . there’s no ignoring it anymore. It’s impossible not to bring this deal down without bringing Joan down with it. Because Joan is the magic behind the largest score in Unit history. Joan is the eternal shine.
Colletto says, “Tell me exactly how it’s done.”
Gunn shakes his head. “If we’re going to embark on this road together, there needs to be a foundation of trust, of partnership. I assured you that I can make this product, again and again. Now leave the magic to me,” he says. “Our history of hate has lasted far too long. It’s time to put the past behind us.”
Gunn is a cold, ruthless bastard, but even still, I can’t wrap my head around his decision to team up with Colletto. He’s shaking hands with the gangster who gunned down his father, Danny the Gun. He’s delivering the death blow to his mentor McEvoy, to align with the enemy. This bastard deserves everything that’s coming to him.
Colletto looks up at Gunn on his stage, nods. “How much?”
“You give me two hundred and fifty dollars for every gallon. You charge double on the street, and the difference of course will fall to you. We shake hands, and you’ll have our word that you’ll be our sole distributor, on the only shippable shine known to man,” Gunn says slowly. “And in exchange, you give up the shining room business—my Shaws get a complete monopoly on performance magic in the city.”
Colletto keeps his eyes on the glistening red bottle. “And the rest of our operations? Gambling, racketeering, loans?”