Into The Crooked Place

by Alexandra Christo

  Ironic that she was now going to use that very thing to break into a cell.

  Tavia rubbed her hands together, letting the charm warm in her palms, and when she felt air beneath her feet, she winced. She tried her best not to look down.

  “Just stare straight,” she told herself, counting each of the windows that passed.

  The wind swiped against her feet and Tavia jolted forward, hands slamming into the brick.

  “Damn.”

  She dug her nails into the wall. Her feet dangled perilously.

  Five. She had floated five floors up and the ledge of the sixth window, where Saxony was sure to be, hung above her like a tease. That was where they put all the magic junkies on a comedown and so it was scarcely guarded.

  Tavia hitched in a breath and she could feel the hover charm faltering from under her—it was all she could feel under her. Any second now she was going to fall and break her neck. Or get caught by the amityguards, who’d no doubt tattle to Wesley before they told their captain.

  Tavia reached for the window.

  Her fingers skimmed the ledge and she gritted her teeth, digging the steel knives of her boots into the wall. Then, summoning a rarely used strength, she hoisted herself up, hands quickly curling around cell bars of the window in a vice grip.

  Now she looked down.

  “Oh, skeht,” Tavia said, eyeing the black cobblestone below.

  It was a lot higher looking down than it had been looking up.

  Tavia shuffled closer to the bars so that she could see inside.

  The holding cell was significantly larger than her bedroom, but that wasn’t saying much. It was made from patchwork concrete, with large drips hanging from the ceiling like spears. To the left was a metal toilet barely off the ground, with a tap screwed to the wall beside it. Three mattresses were lined up on the floor, their sheets weathered and damp. On the one closest to the cell door was a man who was definitely not Saxony.

  He was wearing the purple jumpsuit most buskers found themselves in at one point or another. Even Tavia had spent a day in the holding cells, dressed in her prison worst, while she waited for Wesley to get out of his meeting and lend her some pull. In Creije, you were guilty until someone faked enough evidence to prove otherwise.

  “Hey,” Tavia said.

  She didn’t bother whispering. She knew the guards’ schedules and they wouldn’t do their rounds for another eleven minutes.

  The man flinched, but kept his hunched back to Tavia.

  She sighed, inching closer, keeping her hold on the bars and not daring to look down again. Any minute now she was going to lose her nerve.

  “Hey,” she said again. “Has anyone else been brought into the cells tonight?”

  The man’s head angled in her direction. The light was steady but dim, a single bulb hanging from string that brushed the floor. When he turned, Tavia had to squint to make out his face, and it wasn’t until he rose from the mattress and walked toward the window that she finally recognized him.

  The man she had sold the elixir to earlier that night, before Saxony downed a vial for herself. The man with arrogant eyes and a haughty top hat and a mustache that was now thick with blood.

  And what made things worse, was that Tavia somehow knew that blood wasn’t his.

  “Are you here to save me?” he asked, and then, far graver, “Everyone keeps screaming.” He looked down at his hands. “They say I killed someone. I’ve never killed someone before.”

  Tavia opened her mouth, but no words came.

  Whatever had happened to him, the amityguards didn’t even bother to clean him up before throwing him into the holding cell. They’d stripped him down, thrown on the Creijen colors, and let him stew.

  “I’m looking for my friend,” Tavia said, trying to pull herself together. “The amityguards picked her up outside the old temple. Have you seen them bring anyone else in?”

  The man shook his head.

  “What’s your name?” Tavia asked.

  “Deniel,” he said. “Deniel Emilsson.”

  “What happened to you?”

  Part of her hoped he wouldn’t say.

  The elixir. The elixir. The elixir.

  “I met you earlier,” Deniel said, frowning as though that was the most bizarre thing. “I wanted … There was magic and you said it was a dream.”

  He swallowed, took another step forward, so the light hit his face like a beam.

  Tavia caught sight of his neck and when she did she felt like crying.

  He had it too, the very thing her nightmares were made of.

  The mark of the magic sickness.

  The mark of her mother’s doom.

  It was barely the size of a finger, shaped almost like a doorway, with a line across the center that broke left and then right at the singed edges. It was a sign of the dead and the damned.

  “There was a voice,” Deniel said.

  His hands closed over Tavia’s, pinning her to the steel bars. Then his nose began to bleed and all she could do was stare.

  “It whispered for me to do awful things,” he said. “But when I tried not to, it stopped whispering and started screaming.” He squeezed his hands tighter over Tavia’s and she hissed in pain. “It told me to kill that amityguard.”

  Tavia pulled against his grip. “Let go,” she said.

  “Tell me you believe me.” Deniel was crying, the blood on his cheeks rolling down with the tears. “I couldn’t control myself. It was like someone was there telling me what to do and I couldn’t think of anything past it. I just had to. You—”

  Deniel stopped, hands going slack over Tavia’s. For a moment, she thought maybe he was going to pass out. There was a dead look in his eyes and the corners were inked black just like Saxony’s had been.

  “What did you give me?” he asked, quiet and broken.

  Tavia paled. She wanted to know the answer to that too, because if what this man said was true, then it damn sure wasn’t happiness.

  “Busker.”

  Tavia looked up at the man, at Deniel Emilsson, his face pale and his bloodied lips drawn to a thin line. He knew he was destined for death, or things far worse.

  “What was in that magic?” he asked.

  Honestly, Tavia said, “I don’t know.”

  A tear slipped down the side of Deniel’s face. His eyes searched the floor, as though written somewhere on the uneven cement there would be a spell to undo it all. Take back the day and whatever horrors he’d committed in the name of a magic Tavia conned him into taking.

  Deniel’s hands curled back over hers. His head shook slowly from side to side.

  “You did this to me,” he said. “This is all your fault.”

  And then he ripped Tavia’s hands from the bars and pushed her from the ledge.

  WESLEY HAD A SECRET.

  Actually, he had hundreds, but there was one in particular that nobody could ever know, and it was that Wesley was not entirely in his right mind.

  People threw the word crazy around a lot, and Many Gods knew they all thought Wesley was criminally insane. They just didn’t know how right they were. Because for years now, Wesley had voices in his head.

  Specifically, one voice.

  An impossible voice.

  The voice of a girl he knew long ago, who even after she was dead and gone had left her voice to get stuck behind. Perhaps to remind Wesley that he didn’t have a conscience and should never try to find one.

  She functioned as white noise most days. Images and a sense, a knowing, that she was there, listening to his every move and he had to be on guard, constantly, to shield himself from her. But every so often, when Wesley wasn’t concentrating hard enough, her voice broke through and took on a life of its own.

  She scolded him when he was too good and cheered when he was very, very bad, and Wesley didn’t know how to stop it. He didn’t know how to stop her.

  All he could do was push her down into the back of his mind, adjust his tie, fix his cuff li
nks, and focus. Bury her deep until she decided to rise to the surface again.

  His very own ghost.

  Wesley looked at the clock and watched the seconds tick away.

  The headquarters for the Kingpin’s consort was a grandiose building that wisped out on one side. The sole purpose of a consort was to act as a go-between for Ashwood and the other Kingpins, shaking hands on their deals and ferrying their secrets. She was a cross between a spy and a diplomat, and rumor had it that she kept stashes of the realm’s darkest magic in a host of safes. It was a busking legend all of the kids told, though Wesley had never put much stock in it.

  Still, the building was grand because the consort liked to think she was. It sat brazenly on the wrong side of the bridge, each of the windows a ruffle of feathers, and to the right it bowed and dipped like the arc of a broad chest.

  It was great and mighty, in an obvious way Wesley had never been fond of, but it was also sly and sneaky in a way he quite liked: to the rest of Creije and, especially to the Realm Doyen, this was nothing more than a magic factory where legal elixirs were extracted and repackaged.

  The good guys just didn’t know about a few hidden floors.

  Across the room, a doorway bubbled and Wesley glanced up to see a thin man step out from it. Reynholt Leifsson, the secretary of the building.

  He was dressed all in black, hair slicked to one side, his skin so chalky that from a distance he looked a little bit like a floating head making his way toward Wesley.

  “Mr. Thornton Walcott,” Leifsson said in a smooth Creijen rendition. He extended a gloved hand, which Wesley did not take, and dipped his head.

  Wesley glanced down at his gloves and raised an eyebrow. “You’re always wearing those.”

  “One finds it’s always best not to leave fingerprints when dealing with dark magic.”

  “That’s easily taken care of.” Wesley closed the button of his blazer and stood. “If someone doesn’t have the skill not to leave a print, you can always cut off their fingers.”

  The ghost in his mind applauded, as she always did when Wesley was awful.

  Leifsson blinked. “Yes,” he said, “that would be quite effective.” He extended a hand over to the doorway he’d emerged from—“Right this way”—and turned on his polished heel, leading Wesley toward the mirror.

  Wesley took in the cold gray rendition of himself—the bow tie that signaled this was going to be an odd day indeed—and reached out a hand. The mirror erupted around his touch, ripples curling from his fingertips until his face was obscured.

  This was the part he could never get used to. The doorway to his office at the Crook was similar, in that it read palms like any system worth its salt, but this did more than that. It read the person, their intentions and, most importantly, their loyalties. As far as Wesley knew, Ashwood was the only one in the realms to have developed something so sophisticated.

  Wesley kept his fingers to the mirror and though it took a few moments, once the magic confirmed his allegiance, the glass stilled.

  Wesley slid his hands into his pockets and stepped into his reflection.

  The hall on the other side was long enough that it seemed to narrow to a point, and the walls were a solid line of mirrors, marked by silver handles at odd junctions, with no clear lines separating one doorway from the next.

  Leifsson inclined his head toward the right and placed a firm grip around the first handle. “After you,” he said, and the doorway dissolved before them.

  The room was as much red as it was black, with walls made from the same glass Wesley had come through. The carpet was a midnight ruby and what little light there was came from charcoal-colored candles that hung from glass chains, and the subsequent reflections their dim flames cast.

  In the center of the room, a dark figure reclined and the shadows around him cooed.

  Leifsson backed slowly from the room.

  “Wesley,” the Kingpin said.

  His name repeated in an echo.

  Dante Ashwood was there and he was not.

  He was a man and he was not.

  Wesley could see the outlines of his top hat and the streamlined jacket that pinched across his body. But his face—Wesley had never seen the Kingpin’s face. Nobody had. In place of skin and eyes there was darkness and smoke, only the faintest smudge of his lips was visible, and the orb of his black cane shone under his transparently pale palm.

  Around him, the air flickered like flames.

  Though each of the four realms had a Doyen to lead, three also had a Kingpin with a capital K that stood for criminal. While the Realm Doyens ran things aboveground, the Kingpins ran the black magic trade, with underbosses to manage their many cities and buskers recruited to sell their dirty magic and consorts to be their messengers. But though the other Kingpins were powerful and evil, possibly soulless, they were still undoubtedly human.

  All except for Ashwood.

  Not a human, but a god, his ghost said.

  Wesley ignored her, as he always tried to, and bowed to the Kingpin.

  Ashwood laughed at the formality. “So serious, my boy. Pour yourself something expensive and sit down.”

  “I’m fine, tek.”

  “Wesley.” The Kingpin tapped the orb of his cane. It blinked under the touch of his long, blanched fingers. “Pour yourself a drink.”

  Wesley cleared his throat and headed to the bar.

  The air was dense with the layers of protection they each wrapped around themselves, because you couldn’t trust yourself in Creije, let alone anyone else. Though Wesley didn’t kid himself, if the Kingpin wanted his magic to be silenced, then it would be.

  He only liked to offer Wesley the illusion of power, never really giving him full control over anything, least of all his own life.

  Wesley picked up a bottle of Cloverye, the drink of choice in Creije, and filled his glass.

  “It’s not often we get to see each other,” Ashwood said. “You’re so busy making Creije into your kingdom. Gone are the days when you relied on me for guidance.”

  Wesley took a swig of his drink, back still to the Kingpin.

  There was a hint of nostalgia in his voice that Wesley didn’t care for.

  It wasn’t like Ashwood had taken him on as an apprentice and they were some happy little family.

  He’d found Wesley on the eve of his seventh birthday, wandering the alleys with his hands in other people’s pockets, and Ashwood had been as much a shadow then as he was now, with gloved hands and a face made from chimney smoke. He’d supposed that Wesley was an orphan, surely, with no family and nowhere to go, and wouldn’t he very much like both of those things?

  Only Wesley did have a family and he did have somewhere to go.

  The only difference was that he wished he didn’t.

  Wesley knew what taking the Kingpin’s hand meant, but he wanted to return to the streets only after he’d grown big and strong and could prove his worth to a family that had never wanted him to begin with. But then months became years and magic became life and by the time Wesley was enough of something to show them, it was too late. Magic sickness broke out and the worst batch was in the small street on the outskirts of Creije that he’d grown up on.

  His family was probably dead and even if they weren’t, the boy who wanted to prove something to them was.

  Wesley knew better.

  He had discovered Creije now, unlocked its secrets, and he delighted in its delicate twists and rough edges. The glow of lights and stars and magic. He’d fallen under its spell and all he wanted was to keep it safe.

  To protect it, the way he knew nobody else could.

  “How are my other underbosses?” Ashwood asked.

  Wesley took another sip of Cloverye and made his way to the sofa that sprawled parallel to the Kingpin.

  “Still necessary,” he said. “For now.”

  Ashwood laughed. “And my elixir?”

  Wesley paused, unsure how to answer that.

  “You look c
oncerned,” Ashwood said.

  Wesley stared through his mirrored glasses, reflecting the magic of the Kingpin right back into the chasm of his face, because Dante Ashwood could see from a person’s eyes and into their soul, wading through their secrets, and Wesley very much liked keeping his secrets.

  Besides, he had enough people in his head.

  “We haven’t made much progress,” Wesley admitted. “It’s tough to sell something when you don’t know that much about it.” He tried to choose his next words carefully. “A detailed rundown of the magic could help. If you have plans, I thought I’d be the first person to know.”

  The Kingpin let a small crack of silence pass between them, and then he said, “You are my right hand, Wesley, more dear to me than any other underboss. But I need a left hand too.”

  Wesley let the irritation simmer inside him, careful that not even a morsel slipped onto the outside.

  “Is the elixir really happiness?” he asked.

  “It is,” Ashwood said. “And it isn’t. This magic is a way to ensure I win my war.”

  “We’re not at war.”

  “We will be soon.”

  Though Wesley couldn’t see the Kingpin’s face, he was sure he felt the smile crawl along it. Wesley may have liked chaos, but he had no desire for war and especially no desire for his city to be a part of it.

  “I’ve always thought that you would make a fine second in command,” Ashwood said. “You know you’re like family to me, Wesley.”

  Which was true, Wesley supposed, because the Kingpin had raised him from the streets, crafting him into the man he was today. He’d made him special and turned him into the leader of an entire city.

  Wesley owed him everything.

  And he hated it.

  He hated that Ashwood was family, in a way. Not the one Wesley was born with, or even the one he chose, but one that was made for him. One he was cut from. Besides, Wesley really didn’t like the idea of being anyone’s son. He already had a father and that man was awful enough for him to never consider having another one.

  “Who do you want to go to war with?” Wesley asked. “I thought you and the other Kingpins had an understanding.”