“Sleep well?” Brother One asked, smirking as he adjusted the belt holding his service weapon.
“He’s up,” Brother Two called to someone behind them.
I had been puzzling over who had ordered Lady Bastet’s murder. Now I had a gut-wringing feeling I was about to find out.
“What’s this?” a man’s voice demanded. Between the brothers’ shoulders, I caught a flash of lenses. A moment later, a pudgy figure shoved his way past the wolves. “Is he alive?”
It was Mayor Lowder.
Sorry to break it to you, sweetie, I thought to an imagined Caroline. But contrary to your assurances, I’m not only a target of the mayor’s eradication program, but part of phase one testing.
“He didn’t cooperate,” Brother One said.
“Did he attack you?” Budge asked.
“He pointed a Smith and Wesson at him,” the wolf replied, nodding at his brother, “packed with silver.”
“We confiscated it,” Brother Two said with a grin. “Then ran it over.”
The revolver had cost me a small fortune, but its condition was the least of my worries at the moment.
Budge stopped in front of me, hands on the hips of his baggy trousers. He studied the right side of my face, the side that had absorbed the brunt of my fall. It felt stiff with blood. Budge sighed and looked over the rest of me. “Well, untie him, for God’s sake. He looks like an Italian sausage.”
Not the next words I’d been expecting.
The wolves looked at one another before stalking forward, fierce yellow nails emerging from the ends of their fingers. The same nails that had sliced Lady Bastet’s throat?
They wedged their nails under the restraints and ripped away the plastic ties. Within seconds, I was free—but not free from danger. The wolves loomed over me, hatred shining in their flaming irises. I was the killer of their brethren, after all, maimer of their leader.
I leaned back as Brother One reached for my face. With a flick, he snagged a corner of the tape and tore the whole thing from my mouth. I licked lips that felt raw and swollen.
“Don’t just stand there, Flint,” Budge snapped. “Go get him a drink.”
“A drink?” Flint asked.
“There’s an old vending machine around back,” Budge said. “See if there’s anything left inside. You too, Evan.”
The two wolves growled down at me before pacing away.
“You’ll have to forgive them.” Budge dragged another office chair from the side of the room and sat on the front edge of the seat. “Big dummies. I just wanted them to pick you up so we could chat.”
“In a warehouse?” I asked skeptically.
“Yeah, well, this is sort of off the record. I couldn’t have you coming to City Hall. Not without upsetting the rest of the pack.” He dipped his head so he could see my downcast face better. “Hey, I really am sorry about the rough treatment. You gonna be all right?”
Though the mayor was playing Mr. Nice Guy, I knew his game. He wanted to extract some sort of information before giving the kill order. Like he’d no doubt done with Lady Bastet.
“What do you want to talk about?”
Budge leaned to one side as though taking his measure of me. “Look, I’m not gonna bullshit you, Everson. I’ve got a list of reasons to want you gone, the top one being that you damned near killed my wife.”
“Well, you damned near killed me. Makes us even, right?”
Budge smiled. “I have a private firing range I go to every Saturday, ten a.m. Over two hundred rounds a visit. Been doing that for at least twenty years now. I’m a damned good shot from fifty. You were about, what, twenty feet away when I pulled the trigger that morning? What I’m saying is that if I’d been shooting to kill, you’d be worm food right now.”
A ghost pain throbbed in my right chest where the bullet had entered. I touched a hand to the spot and gauged Budge’s distance. Even if he was packing, he was close enough that I could reach him before he drew. Pound him to the floor. The problem would be the wolves. With their preternatural senses, they would hear the commotion. I was in no condition to outrace them—and without my sword, gun, or magic, in even less condition to fight them.
“The truth is, Everson, I like you,” the mayor went on. “No, I’m serious. You helped my stepdaughter, and you seem like a genuinely decent person. Plus, you’ve got some good people out there vouching for you.”
Caroline, I thought with mixed emotions.
“I also happen to know you do a lot of good work for the city.” He tipped me a conspiratorial wink. I stiffened when I realized he was referring to my duties with the Order: banishing nether creatures, closing their portals to our world. But who in the hell could have told him about that? Not even Caroline knew the extent of my work. We hadn’t gotten that far.
“It’s all right,” he said, showing a hand. “Your secret’s safe.”
The wolves returned, Flint holding a green can. He was slightly bigger than his brother, and I pegged him as the older one. “There was only one drink left in the machine,” Flint said, “diet ginger ale.”
“Fine, fine.” Budge took the soda and shooed the wolves back out of the office. “Here.” He cracked the tab and handed the can to me.
The aluminum was hot in my grip, and the ginger ale went down warm, but I was too thirsty to care. Who knew how long I’d been conked out and pouring sweat before the mayor showed up? I drank down half the ginger ale, then lowered the can to my knee and burped.
“Better?” Budge asked, in a concerned voice.
“I would be if I knew what the hell you wanted.”
“I’m getting to that.”
I couldn’t stand the dancing around anymore. “Did you know Lady Bastet was killed earlier today?” I said.
“The mystic in the Village?” The mayor’s face scrunched up as he loosened his tie and used his collar to fan his neck. “She was the one who changed my stepdaughter back, right?”
I nodded slowly. I was usually good at reading false emotions on a person’s face, but the mayor appeared surprised by the news, saddened even. Maybe a group of Penny’s wolves had gone rogue.
“Any suspects?” Budge asked.
“None that I know of,” I answered carefully.
“Damned shame.” Sullenly, Budge wiped his brow with a forearm. “Too much of that sort of thing happening in the city. I’m not sure if you caught my press conference earlier today.”
“I did,” I replied. “Round up the supernaturals, throw them in an oven, save the city.”
The mayor gave an embarrassed chuckle. “Well, those kinds of announcements are always one part policy, two parts theater.” His mouth straightened as he rested his forearms on his knees. “The truth is, the problem is much more complex than that. Not only because my wife is, well, a supernatural, but because there are genuinely good supernaturals in this city. The diviner I consult in Chinatown, for example. Lady Bastet. The fae. You. Don’t worry, Everson. I know that about my city. For the eradication program I’m proposing, I want to target the bad ones. The worst of the worst. The goddamned ghouls in the subway lines. The creatures making a bone yard of Central Park. Those are the ones I want gone.”
I squinted at Budge, trying to figure out his angle. He was in a mayoral race that, by all rights, his opponent should have been running away with. That Budge was even close was owed to his wife’s condition. But sympathy was only going to carry him so far. Enter the eradication program—or at least an expedited operation or two that would show dramatic results.
“All so you can announce ‘mission accomplished’ in October,” I said, “sweeping you to victory in November?”
Budge grimaced before breaking into a you-got-me smile. “I have to keep reminding myself that you’re a college professor, not one of my typical voters. Yeah,” he conceded, “you’re more or less in the ballpark. Which means I have three months to do what I announced. Not much time at all.”
I studied his imploring gaze.
> “Look,” he said, “the federal government spotted me an advance, so the team I’m putting together is ace. But most of them are new to this supernatural thing. You know the ins and outs. Hell, I’ve seen you in action. You’re good. Damned good. Plus, you’ve advised the NYPD before. It’s just a matter of renewing your contract.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The man didn’t want me dead. He wanted my help. I thought about Caroline’s warning before answering. “What would your wife say?” I asked.
Budged looked toward the door and lowered his voice. “What can she say? By the time she awakens, the program will have wrapped up. I’ll be in my second term, and I’ll have you in part to thank. We both will.”
“You sure about that?”
He nodded, his eyes moving back and forth over mine. In exchange for helping him, he was offering a kind of amnesty. No more looking over my shoulder to see whether Penny’s pack was stalking me.
“Are any wolves going to be involved?”
“God, no,” Budge replied, keeping his voice low. “Just NYPD officers and specialists.”
“Detective Vega,” I said.
Budge’s brow furrowed in question. “What about her?”
I was considering what Caroline had said about how the information Vega and I wielded over the mayor and his wife would no longer be a deterrent. “I want the same deal for her.”
Budge’s face smoothed. “Already done.”
“And there has to be discretion. I don’t want every New Yorker and their grandmother knowing what I can do.”
“Hey, mum’s the word.” His eyebrows rose above his glasses. “So?”
Even with my throbbing headache, the calculation was a simple one. Whether or not Budge could control his wife were she to awaken, I would be safer inside the eradication program than outside of it.
“I’ll have to clear it with my higher ups,” I said. “But as far as I’m concerned, yeah, I’m on board.”
Budge’s face lit up as he slapped my knee.
“Attaboy!”
8
I plodded up the final steps of my apartment building, cane and necklace back in my possession, casting prism restored, and reviewed the deal I’d made with Budge. If nothing else, it offered Vega and me another layer of protection. The only question was how robust that protection would be. I didn’t know how much control Budge wielded over Penny’s pack.
I unlocked the three door bolts and prioritized my next moves. First, heal up. Second, contact the Order about my participating in the eradication program. And third, start figuring out why the wolves had murdered Lady Bastet. That would tell me what kind of danger Vega and I might be in.
The apartment was dark when I entered. I was reaching for the light switch when, from the direction of Tabitha’s divan, came a strangled moan. I stopped and yanked my sword from my cane, the bloody image of the decapitated cats searing through my mind’s eye.
“Tabitha?” I called.
A pair of eyes flashed from the divan—but not the ochre-green of my cat’s. These were yellow.
“Protezione!” I called.
Sparks burst from my orb as it manifested a shield of white light. In the sudden glow, the being on Tabitha’s divan took shape. Not a wolf, though. A squat man in a corduroy sports jacket with elbow patches was sitting there, the pointed toes of his green leather shoes just touching the floor. Beneath a mop of gray hair, the man’s eyes squinted back at me.
“Chicory?” I said.
The last time I’d seen my mentor had been ten months earlier, when he’d rescued me from the druids in Central Park and then forbade me from pursuing the demon cases. I dissolved my shield with another Word and hit the flood lights. Chicory lowered his hand from his brow.
“At ease,” he said in his Irish brogue.
Tabitha was on his far side, purring and moaning as Chicory scratched the hair around her ears. They had always gotten along well, despite my mentor’s disapproval of her succubus nature.
I sheathed my sword. “You scared all hell out of me.”
“Ah, yes, I let myself in,” Chicory said. “I hope you don’t mind. I’d almost forgotten about your companion. She’s quite a beautiful thing, isn’t she? Though a little starved for attention, I should say.”
I watched Tabitha moan and twist her neck as Chicory scratched around it.
“Not anymore,” I muttered, walking toward them.
I searched my mentor’s face, with its bushy brows, squash-shaped nose, and curmudgeon’s lips, for some indication of why he’d come. His visits rarely heralded good things.
“So, what’s up?” I asked.
Chicory gave Tabitha’s head a final pat. “There you are, love.” He wiped his hands together and stood to face me. Behind him, Tabitha curled onto her cat bed and passed out.
“Did you summon a gatekeeper from the In Between?” he asked pointedly.
Crap. “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say summon. I had a brief chat with one, if that’s what you’re getting at. Emphasis on brief.”
“And what did he say?” Chicory asked.
“Not much, to be honest.”
“They rarely do, unless it’s in the act of claiming your soul.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not careless enough to let that happen,” I said, recalling the sensation of dangling into the frigid void, my fingers clenching the mirror frame.
Chicory let out a humpf as he lowered himself to my reading chair. “You know the Order’s policy on summonings.”
“I told you, it wasn’t a summoning. It was more of a … leaving the back door open. I didn’t force the gatekeeper to come through.”
Chicory’s eyebrows crowded his dark eyes. He wasn’t buying it.
“Look,” I said, “I was just trying to find out some information on my mother. I went to the Order first, I’ll have you know.”
“Then you should have awaited their response.”
“Oh, yeah? And when would that have been? The next fossil age?”
“Everson,” he said sternly, “I needn’t remind you that there are penalties for wayward wizards.”
“No, you needn’t.” I sat on the couch with a hard sigh. “I just find it funny that whenever I ask for a hand, the Order seems to fall off the face of the Earth, but when I commit a minor infraction—bam!—you’re suddenly up in my face.”
“You shouldn’t expect your priorities and the Elders’ to align. But preventing wizards from turning to the dark arts is a priority we all share. There’s a reason there’s only been one rebellion against the Order in its centuries of existence.”
“Rebellion?” I said, sitting upright. “I’ve never heard anything about a rebellion.”
Chicory, who had been pulling a smoking pipe from his jacket, paused to frown, as though he’d let something slip. He regarded the bowl of packed leaves for a moment before nodding. “That’s not a story we tell our novice practitioners, but perhaps it’s time you heard it.”
I bristled at the word novice before reminding myself that, though I’d been wizarding for more than a decade, I remained an infant in the eyes of those who’d been practicing for hundreds, even thousands, of years.
Chicory drew his wand from another pocket, touched it to the pipe, and puffed until the leaves began to crackle. When he moved the stem from his lips, a sweet fragrance of tobacco drifted over the room. “The First Saint from whom we’re all descended had nine children,” he began.
“I already know that part of the history.”
“Are your own students this impertinent?” Chicory asked with a frown. “If you want me to tell you the story of the rebellion, I need to start at the beginning.”
I showed a hand to say fair enough and nodded for him to continue.
He took two quick puffs. “Now, the Order began informally, as you know. A way for Michael’s nine children to train their own children in the art of magic, battling dark creatures, so on and so forth.”
“Sort of like commun
ity homeschooling,” I said.
“Very much so,” Chicory decided after a moment’s pause. “But like with any growing organization, as the practitioners multiplied and spread around the ancient world, the training became more formalized. Michael’s children called themselves the First Order. They appointed regional heads, whom they called the Second Order. Later Third and Fourth Orders were added. Decisions made by the First Order were disseminated down the ranks. Over time, the Diaspora came to be known as the Order of Magi and Magical Beings.”
This was still a review from my training under Lazlo, but I didn’t say anything.
“Now,” Chicory continued, “around the time of the late Roman Empire, the First Order attained a level of magic that transformed them. Some would say they became gods or at least god-like. Though they continued to exist on the physical plane, they inhabited more ethereal planes as well.”
“The Elders,” I said, scooting forward. Though I had heard all of this before, the thought of attaining that state—as indeed I might one day (if I managed to stay alive)—fascinated me.
“Precisely,” Chicory said, the smoke that rose from his pipe seeming to bend reality. He aimed the stem at me. “Now here’s what you weren’t told. Of the original members of the First Order, only eight attained that godlike state. No one can say why the youngest did not.”
“Runt of the litter?”
Chicory shrugged. “Perhaps he didn’t inherit as much power from his father as the others. But it wasn’t for lack of practice. This ninth sibling was intent on perfecting his magic, of transforming that art into science. Indeed, Lich—for that was his name—Lich devised the regimen for fledgling magic-users, penned many of the world’s first spell books. You might imagine his disappointment, then, when his siblings ascended and he was left behind.”
I caught myself nodding.
“But Lich was determined to join them,” Chicory continued. “The legend goes that he practiced more than he ever had before, the effort nearly killing him, until one day, after hundreds of years, his efforts opened a deep, deep fissure in the fabric of our world. Through it, he heard the whisperings of a being more ancient than the First Saints and Demons.”
Purge City (Prof Croft Book 3) Page 5