“It is a French piqué. My seamstress is a miracle worker, isn’t she?” Mrs. Fitzsimmons’s voice burned with acid. “I know that poor Molly doesn’t want me to mourn her, wherever she has gone off to. She would be so happy for Herbert. Perhaps she has access to the society pages and has read of their engagement. As the saying goes, Miss Emerson, life marches on.”
“No matter what the tragedy, it is true,” Jane replied.
The lady’s eyes hardened. “We all make our bargain with the devil, one way or another. And one must do one’s best. Poor awkward, jealous Molly. Perhaps it is for the best that she isn’t here for the engagement ball. She is all elbows, a skinny, gangly little thing. Happy for Herbert, I’m sure she is, and happy to miss the ball as well.”
Jane swallowed hard and bit her tongue to stay quiet.
“Did you know Police Commissioner Alistair himself will be attending this evening?” Mrs. Fitzsimmons continued. “How thrilling for Herbert.”
How thrilling for Mrs. Fitzsimmons, the mother of the impending groom. Commissioner Alistair was a tool of the Tammany machine, a corrupt, venal man whom Jane had met in the course of her work.
Jane made some vague murmur of congratulation, and before the butler could show her the door, Jane had already moved to open it herself.
She saw that Mrs. Fitzsimmons had nothing to give her. As the saying went, out of sight, out of mind.
• • •
The thud of heavy leather boots against storm-beaten wood shook the little boat in which Jane had been hidden. She smelled rather than saw the knot of rough men enter the hold, and half a dozen hard, cruel hands grabbed at her arms and hauled her to her feet.
“Come on, ye Friday-faced moll,” one said close to Jane’s ear. His breath, fetid and swampy, filled her nostrils. “Once the Rooster’s done with ye, I’ll have a turn with what’s left.”
The other men laughed, an ugly, disquieting sound. Jane took the fear and rage balled in her stomach and sent it out in a sharp spike of Fire off her skin.
The men leaped back in surprise, and the leader cried out in pain. He punched Jane in the shoulder, so hard that she staggered and almost fell.
“Don’t mark her, you hackum Sam,” another man said in the darkness. “Rooster will eat yer liver for it.”
The man with the swampy breath growled and grabbed her again. “If you try any more parlor tricks like that, you little cow, I’ll throw you in the East River, be damned what the Rooster wants.”
The Rooster. Jane had heard much of this man’s exploits along the East River, for he was the man who led the River Rats, the most terrifying band of river pirates in New York. But more than likely he had heard of her also, or at least knew that she was a reporter for the Daily Clarion. Why would the Rooster take the extraordinary step of taking her captive?
She was a defenseless woman in his eyes, true, but surely he knew there would be consequences to what he had done to her. Jane summoned her power and kept it within her as the men hauled her up the narrow, swaying stepladder leading to the deck.
The moon was gone now, obscured behind a thick veil of gray clouds. The docks glowed purple in the shifting shadows of deep night. Jane sent her awareness high into the brooding, unsettled clouds, and found Fire there, energy also held in reserve and waiting for release.
“Storm’s coming, a real Nickey,” one of her captors noted. She could see them dimly, now, and they looked like a pack of wolves guarding their prize. They pulled her, more gently, onto the wharf and past the other boats tied there.
An enormous warehouse loomed between them and the shore, and when Jane probed it with her inner sight, she reeled back, overwhelmed by the malevolent evil dwelling within. Physically sickened, she swayed on her feet, and the thug who had punched her grabbed her by the arm again.
“Don’t go swoonin’ on me, you bleak mort! Rooster’ll chew me gigg off.”
He shook her like a rag doll, and his roughness brought Jane’s consciousness back into her body once again. She knew, now, where the girls had ended up. Though given what lurked within the structure, she sadly doubted that they still lived.
She squinted at the hulking monstrosity of the thing. “You do all of this only for money?”
Somehow her question shocked this rough pack of men into silence. “Well, let the Rooster tell,” the first man with the rotten teeth finally said. But he sounded sick and hesitant now, as if Jane had punched him back in the gut.
He led her another few yards toward the warehouse, the horrible miasma of evil getting thicker with every step. But to Jane’s surprise, instead of completing their journey to the bolted door, her captor led her to a narrow stairway leading off the wharf by the shore.
Instead of stepping foot on Water Street, the pack of men and Jane descended the stairway all the way down, past the street level, to a dark, yawning cave under the wharf itself. Underneath, it smelled like garbage, wood rot, and algae. The broken stones shifted underneath Jane’s feet, and bound as she was, she feared falling here even more than she had on the narrow stairs.
This place was no haven against the evil contained in the warehouse. Indeed, the very ground oozed with a malevolent magic. Jane gathered her own reserves around her, muttered under her breath the first protective ward her guardian Polly March had taught her long ago, when her magic had first begun to manifest.
The man sat on a throne, radiating a luminescent glow. Jane was so surprised to see him sitting there, she forgot her fear.
She whispered to the black lodestone hidden in her skirts, where she had tucked it as a precaution. The stone was magnetized by a lightning strike eons ago, and it still retained the traces of the fire that had touched it. Jane used it to focus her own latent Fire.
She squinted to make out the man more clearly. He sat cross-legged on what looked like a settee made of bones, a silk top hat tilted rakishly on his head. His face looked painted on, and his fingers clutched the ends of the armrests as if he was restraining himself from leaping.
“It’s her,” he said, his voice barely containing a trill of excitement.
A terrible unease settled in like an ache at the base of Jane’s stomach. This man had been waiting for her.
“You seem to know me,” she said, her voice quiet, still, steady. “But I don’t believe that we have met.”
“Pity. But now the moment is here. I’m Tommy Rooster, Janie girl, and I been waiting for you.”
Jane frowned at his over-familiarity, but she refused to give him any more clues to her mind than that. “It must be kismet, then, sir. I have been searching for you—and the girls you have taken.”
He glowed brighter, a terrible greenish cast shadowing his face, and she squinted against the sickly light he emanated. “I am going to tell you some things, and you are going to listen,” he said.
“And then you are going to die.”
His voice echoed inside her mind louder than his spoken words. That violation, the invasion of her innermost sanctum, made Jane so sick she thought she was going to vomit. She knew that voice. It had whispered to her in the witching hour in the years after her mother died, when despair and loneliness gathered close.
She refused to answer him, either in her mind or out loud before his minions. This creature was Tommy Rooster, or what the world knew as Tommy Rooster. But crawling within him like maggots was a deeper, more ancient power.
“I’m a right friendly gent,” he said aloud, his voice booming and pleasant, and his men, gathered around behind Jane, affirmed his words with a gale of fearful-sounding guffaws. “I likes the girls, the girls like me.”
“They are all dead.”
Alas, she did not need the chthonic voice to confirm what she already knew in her bones. She said nothing, remained absolutely silent. And with the force of her concentration, the hidden lodestone began to grow hot.
A low
rumble of thunder far in the distance, beyond Brooklyn, echoed after Rooster’s words. He hesitated for a moment, then continued.
“Those girls, lost girls all. They came to me with broken hearts. You came, too.”
Jane could not restrain a shudder.
“They came willingly!”
The men behind her murmured under their breath, and she caught a whispered “not hardly,” but nothing more than that.
A low rumble of thunder, again, and the sharp smell of a storm. The sudden patter of rain on the wooden wharf above their heads. Jane strained against the rope at her wrists, but it was hopeless. “You preyed upon those girls,” she whispered, her voice hoarse.
“To the contrary. They were unwanted, and their fathers wanted them gone. Don’t believe me? Look at their names, ask for gossip if you like. Look at the truth hidden behind the pretty society lies. They were girls instead of boys. They were ugly. They were too racy and naughty, and made their papas angry.”
Jane was too horrified to respond. A vision in green, a French piqué and a darling little white hat, flashed before her. Mrs. Fitzsimmons’ words echoed in Jane’s mind . . . “We all make our bargain with the devil . . .”
“I do an important job,” Rooster went on. “I call those pretty little things to me, a Pied Piper of broken hearts, and they come to me because they know nobody else really wants them. I take ’em in. I’d take you in.”
“You sell them,” Jane blurted out. As horrible as the white slavery trade in New York was, Jane took refuge in the idea now. Because the alternative . . .
“I sell them, sure. To people who know what to do with them. To people who want what I can get out of them.”
“They want power. And power requires sacrifice. These girls weren’t worth keeping. I keep their secrets I give them what they want. I am hungry I am hungry I am hungry.”
Jane could stomach no more. A flash of lightning clawed out of the sky, and Jane called its power into her. The lodestone grounded the electricity before it could destroy her, and she took hold of the energy for her own purposes.
The human wolves behind her staggered backward, yelling with shock. “DANIEL!” Jane called through the chaos, desperately, in her mind. “ROSE! ROSE! HELP ME!”
The thing that had been Rooster, now animated by some deep, malignant Elemental of the Earth, rose from its throne of bones. Rat bones, she guessed, creatures that had served their Master before it fed upon them.
Such a Moloch required a constant influx of sacrifice. And the men and ladies of society who consented to the trade received at least a fleeting increase in their own power. This was the underside of the Gilded Age, this evil lurking under the desires of men had led to Daniel’s fears for her and for himself.
She could not vanquish such a thing . . . it had lived in New York before any human inhabitant, it propagated itself in the mud and stone of the land itself. The magic that had bubbled out of the ground and devoured Tommy Rooster was utterly alien to Jane and her own Mastery.
Like attracts like in the world of magic. Such opposites as Jane and the Rooster, designed to repel each other. This immutable law of the physics of magic was the only opportunity Jane could find in her desperate situation, and she made the most of it.
She didn’t bother with weaving a spell of protection, or binding, or heaven forfend, healing. None of that would save her from this demon of mud. Instead Jane gathered up every ounce of the clean Fire she had gathered from the sky and blasted the Rooster from his throne. Her Mastery called down the lightning, and Fire rained down upon the creature of Earth and blood.
The first strike blasted through the wooden wharf, kindling the rotten wood above their heads. Wet from rain, huge billows of brownish-gray smoke unfolded from the burning wood into the night sky.
The looped ropes binding her wrists incinerated in the blast, and the lodestone burned against her thigh. But it wasn’t enough.
The Rooster rose, his skin peeling off in ribbons. The mortal man was surely dead, yet his frame remained animated by something ancient and unkillable. The fire burned away the human, and the Earth element so alien to hers remained.
Another blue-white claw of lightning cracked down, missing Jane by inches. And her Rose, her beloved, true Rose, struck out of the storm. Like called to like, and her phoenix came to her cry.
Swooping out of the sky, brilliant blue, orange, crimson, in her Elemental form Rose rode the storm. And behind her, Jane sensed not only Daniel’s power, but the circle of the great mages of New York. The Western White Lodge, gathered to battle the tremendous evil in their midst.
They could not kill this thing. But with their collective magic, they drove it back underground, into the stone under the city. With a final despairing shriek, the Earth Elemental sank deep into the ground, pressed there by the power of the mages’ circle.
Jane whirled to face her human captors, but they had fled. She forced herself forward to see what had become of her tormentor, the river pirate Tommy Rooster.
She sank to her knees by the pirate’s side, utterly exhausted. Nothing was left but shreds of fabric, and a scorched and waterlogged silk top hat.
• • •
Even as the world turned to gray, Rose gathered Jane into her talons. Nestled safely within the phoenix’s claws, Jane rested her head against Rose’s flank as she leaped into the air and away from the cursed place.
“Take me to Daniel,” she managed to say.
In what seemed to Jane like a blink, Rose and she alighted into the circle of mages, who had gathered to work their magic in the heart of Central Park. Inside the circle, Rose became a human girl again, gasping for air and trembling after the effort of her flight from the pirate lair.
Daniel stepped forward and gathered them both into the protective circle of his arms, and Jane felt the warmth of his breath through her hair. For an eternal moment they wrapped together, and despite the danger Jane felt more loved than since her mother had died.
“I thought I had lost you,” Daniel finally said.
Until this moment, Jane had secretly counted herself among the legions of lost girls, in danger of following a Pied Piper into oblivion. The malevolence lurking in the city remained, a dark velvet against which the Gilded Age shone.
But now, safe in Daniel’s arms, she realized that despite the evils that could never be vanquished, she possessed all the magic she would ever need, beating right there inside her vulnerable human heart.
Air of Deception
Jody Lynn Nye
The life of an apprentice parfumeuse is a delight, Mlle. Aurelia Degard thought, though one of solid work and hard thought. The unforeseen revelation that she was an untrained Elemental Magician added further responsibilities and dangers which Aurelia accepted in good part.
One does, after all, complement the other most auspiciously, she thought. She gestured to Hyr, the Air Elemental who lived in La Parfumerie Rupier’s workroom, to tip into her mixing bowl a drop of a precious oil so small it would scarcely wet the point of a pin. The scent bloomed in the globelike bowl, enriching the airs already there.
The workroom was a garden of delights to one such as Aurelia. Where better to be able to indulge herself in beautiful fragrances while making a good living doing what one dearly loved? Her parents were proud of her new career and demanded to know every detail. Yet, she reflected, as she peered up at the boy-shaped blue cloud that was the spirit of Air, there were things that she would never be able to tell them. It was possible that if she had known the truth about this shop, she might not have taken the position. But then, she would never have learned the truth about herself, either.
The recent return of her employer, M. Rupier, from his months-long journey to the Levant for rare oils, resins, and other fragrant—and not so fragrant—ingredients for his famed scents, precipitated a very refined and restrained but thorough scolding from
Aurelia for not informing her of the dual nature of his shop, nor of her own skills that he had detected. How could he not tell her he was a Master Magician? Or she? What was she? It was a matter she could not trust to letters or other correspondence, and so had to wait several months in peril of her soul to find out. She was a good Catholic and did not wish to be burned as a witch.
M. Rupier had immediately apologized to her. He truly had not meant to deceive Aurelia. Time had simply run out for him to have acquainted her with her hidden skills and begun her education in their use before he had had to depart on a long-awaited and necessary journey, let alone to describe his own abilities and responsibilities. How could he know that she had the native talent to discover his hidden workroom and the magical being that lived therein?
But she had done well, very well, in handling the situation, and prevented harm. She had done the House of Rupier proud, and he was glad. A financial reward, a gift of ten francs, had done much to ease the discomfort, but the information she craved was more valuable yet. M. Rupier had promised to answer any and all questions Aurelia had at any time that they were alone, except for the presence of the Air sprite and the door warden, Alfonse, who was a young Earth Magician himself. M. Rupier had also reassured her that her soul was in no danger.
Their first session of questions and answers began the very evening of his return, and went on so long that dawn was creeping over the threshold before Aurelia’s voice had gone raspy.
“Is there anything that you have left unsaid?” Aurelia had asked, with the last vestiges of sound she could muster, as the sound of the street sweepers passed by the front door of the elegant shop.
“I am sure there is,” her master had said with a twinkle in his catlike eyes, not looking at all tired in spite of their sleepless night. “But this time I promise you, it is neither intentional, nor will remain unsaid, should I realize I had forgotten.”
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