by Anton Strout
Her last word came out with such disgust in it, I wanted nothing more than to offer her comfort.
“You did what needed to be done,” I said.
“That’s what I’ve been telling her,” Aurora said, “but she won’t hear it coming from me.”
“What would you have me do?” Alexandra said, slamming her book down. “Someone else died because of what I set into action. And not just someone . . . a spirit of some kind that was trying to help us.”
“Lexi, calm down,” Aurora said, turning to Marshall. “Tell her to be reasonable, Marsh.”
“I’d like to,” he said, “but I can’t.”
“Excuse me?” Aurora asked him as she walked over to him.
Marshall laid down the materials in his hands and leaned across the table to look at Alexandra. “How can I tell her to be reasonable when none of what is happening to us is reasonable?” he asked. “I’m not going to invalidate how miserable she feels about it when I can’t think of a better way to process it. If she wants to get down and be obsessive in her research, then let her. There’s no playbook for any of this.”
Marshall’s words silenced all of them and actually brought a smile to Alexandra’s face, which I found myself thrilled to see.
“Thank you, Marshall,” she said.
“For the record, though,” he said, going back to his work, “I don’t think any of us blame you for what happened to Fletcher.”
Alexandra nodded with pursed lips, and without arguing went back to her notes and books. I stepped around the table to her and rested my hand on her shoulder. “These are unusual times,” I said. “Therefore to not react with frustration would be unusual.”
Alexandra leaned her head against my chest, and for a brief moment I allowed myself to wonder what it would feel like if we found the medallion and it could be my skin against hers. There was also frustration in the thought for me, but I did not wish to add to Alexandra’s burdens.
“What is it you hope to find in these books?” I asked, stepping back from her.
Alexandra composed herself and went to one of her open notebooks.
“Laurien had said that the Convocation had turned my great-great-grandfather away after one of his first students with them went missing,” she said. “I won’t believe he had anything to do with that, but Laurien was insistent he was up to no good. She practically laughed when I tried to defend his nobility.”
“How would she know?” Marshall asked.
“They have their history,” Alexandra said, holding up the current book in her hands, “and we have ours.”
Marshall shrugged and went back to working on whatever the project was in front of him, tinkering with the bits and pieces of metal as he consulted a notebook of his own. I stepped around the table to him.
“And how does this relate to your search?” I asked, gesturing to his handiwork.
Marshall held up a gleaming cylindrical pipe that was slightly longer than the length of his hand to his elbow. He swung it through the air like he was casting a spell.
“This doesn’t relate to her search,” he said. “But I think it may prove of some help . . . at least to Rory.”
“What is it?”
“Just something I’ve been experimenting with,” he said, gesturing to the empty fixture at one end of the shaft. “I’m making a set of Horseman’s picks. There’s going to be a hammerhead on one side and a sharp point on the other.”
“It is like a maul,” I said, nodding with some understanding. “My father’s men used them in defense of his lands back in Europe.”
“Like a maul, yes,” Marshall said. “Only smaller. Rory should be able to use two at once.”
“If you can get them light enough,” she said, joining us. “Marshall made me try wielding a couple of miniature sledgehammers at Home Depot. I thought I was going to pull my arms out of my shoulder sockets.”
“I’ll work out the enchantments when they’re done,” he said, a bit short with her. “I wish you had half the faith in me that my store clients do.”
Aurora mussed his hair. He tried to duck away, but she was quicker. “That’s because they don’t live with you, roomie,” she said. “Hard to expect attention to detail from the guy who can’t seem to put the toilet seat back down.”
Marshall had nothing to say to that, letting Aurora muss his hair until Alexandra cleared her throat loudly behind them. They turned to her.
“We’re never going to find out if my great-great-grandfather was an apprentice-murdering madman if you two keep screwing around,” she said.
Aurora looked as if she could have argued with her friend, but instead silently went back to the pile of books she had been working on before.
I turned to Alexandra. “You mentioned this apprentice to me the other night,” I said. “If Alexander had an apprentice, do you not think I would know about it?”
“No offense,” Marshall said, going back to his notes and bits of metal, “but you’ve never been the most reliable one as far as memory is concerned.”
“That was before, Marshall Blackmoore,” I said, doing my best to hide a bit of exasperation. “My past was locked away from me until Alexandra recovered it for me. And she gave all of it back to me.”
Marshall put down the shaft of metal in his hands and looked up at me with complete sincerity in his eyes. “Riddle me this, Stanis,” he said. “If you don’t know something, how can you tell that you don’t know that something?”
I thought for a moment, my wings fluttering with agitation when I realized I was having trouble following his question. “What do you mean by that?” I finally asked.
“Let’s say several centuries ago you did know about an apprentice,” he said, “but Alexander blocked it from you. If that information suddenly isn’t in your brain anymore, how can you be certain that it was being blocked, or was it simply something you just never knew anything of in the first place?”
“Stop it,” Aurora said. “You’re giving me a headache.”
“Does it matter?” I asked him. “Either way, I do not recall or think Alexander took an apprentice.”
Alexandra walked over to me, holding open one of her notebooks. “But according to some of his writing, he did,” she said. “Scattered in all his books, there’s a record—a very short record, mind you—of his taking an apprentice, but there isn’t all that much to go on. He’s spread the notes in that secret code of his over several books, but the trail goes dead pretty quickly.”
Aurora shut the book she was reading, rubbed her eyes, and sat herself up on the edge of the table. She looked up at the ceiling. “Why build all this, then, if you’re not going to train people?” she asked.
“I did not even know of this guildhall until Alexandra’s brother’s death,” I said. “When the original building collapsed, we dug, discovering this place and thinking Devon dead.”
“Could you at least get back to helping, please?” Alexandra asked. “These books aren’t going to read themselves.”
“I’m sorry,” Aurora said, not moving, “but when I read words like capitulary and catechumen, my brain starts to hurt.”
Alexandra looked up from her book. “That’s what you were reading? It actually said catechumen?”
Aurora nodded. “Why?”
Alexandra moved down the table and snatched up the book.
“In the ecclesiastical sense, it’s a person being instructed in the rudiments of Christianity,” she said, flipping through the pages. “But another, more laymen term for it is neophyte, which is anyone being taught the elementary facts or principles of any subject. Like Spellmasonry.”
Like a creature possessed, Alexandra tore through her notes and went through the book before her, and several minutes passed in silence before she slammed her main notebook shut.
“Well?” Aurora asked.
; “The book talks about a hidden catechumen, a lost apprentice,” she said. “Marked by the Belarus family seal among the sconces of the wall here.”
Alexandra stepped away from the table and went to the edge of the circular room. She looked up at the protruding stones, but there was nothing carved on them.
Marshall and Aurora ran to others, but they, too, were blank.
I circled around the room looking closely at all the sconces that jutted out of the wall, stopping at a section thirty feet away from Alexandra.
“Only these two are marked,” I said, indicating the ones in front of me. There was no mistaking the stylized B set over the batlike wings carved there.
Marshall came over to me, pulling out a small flashlight from his pocket. He shone it across the stone that stuck out from the wall, moving from one to the next.
“He’s right,” he said. “All the rest were definitely blank.”
Alexandra readied herself with a spell, falling into a stance and moving through the motions of it, but unlike the rest of the guildhall, this section of stone would not react to her command.
“There’s resistance,” she said, lowering her arms. “Like it’s locked.”
“So what do we do?” Aurora asked.
The humans fell silent for several moments as they contemplated their next move, but knowing the puzzle-building nature of Alexander so well over the centuries, I had a thought.
“Your great-great-grandfather marked the location on the sconces along this section of the wall,” I said, looking to Alexandra. “I believe you should light them.”
Alexandra’s eyes sparkled with delight. She turned to Marshall. “Can you make some kind of arcane fire?” she asked.
“Can I!” Marshall said with excitement. “Wait . . . Can I?” He went to his coat lying on the table, pulled out a notebook of his own, and began looking through it.
“I think I can,” he continued, and ran to the glassed-in shelves and started pulling down different alchemical mixes.
Aurora hopped down off the table and moved closer to the door. “I’ll be over here,” she said. “In the non-exploding section . . .”
I doubted any mistake Marshall might make would harm my form and stayed where I was.
Marshall ignored Aurora and continued working, changing the contents of several vials, flasks, and tubes over and over until he decided on two and held them up. He walked to the area between the two sconces and looked up at them before looking over to me.
“A little help here . . . ?”
I walked over and lifted the man with ease, using care not to exert too much strength for fear of crushing him. He poured half of the two vials together in one sconce and then the other, blue flames flashing to immediate life within them.
“Try now,” Marshall called out to Alexandra.
I set him back down as Alexandra took up her pose once more, foreign words springing from her lips. The section of wall between the two fires began to shift. Stones moved around one another, sinking into the wall, disappearing and reappearing in stacks just inside the room itself, revealing a dark opening behind it.
The grind of stone against stone continued in the wall as the space continued to shift, carrying something forward out of the darkness.
“What the hell . . . ?” Marshall asked, shining his flashlight into the space.
A long wrap of off-white cloth moved to the edge of the hole in the wall until it passed through and upended onto the floor of the guildhall.
The bundle shifted, unraveling. The taut skin-over-bones of a human hand and forearm tumbled free of it, the metal rings on it clacking against the stone floor—the kind a witch or warlock might wear.
Alexandra dropped her spell and ran forward as the stones ground to a halt. Kneeling next to the bundle, she grabbed the edge of the cloth and pulled it away using just the tips of two fingers.
“Congratulations,” Marshall said, although his voice was quiet and did not hold the tone usually associated with the word, “the Belarus family has an actual skeleton in their closet.”
Aurora joined us by the body. “But whose?”
“Apparently, my bloodline is more murder-y than I thought,” Alexandra said, standing up, the color gone out of her face as she turned away. “My great-great-grandfather did murder his apprentice.”
Twenty-five
Alexandra
I awoke to a low, steady thud against the door to my building, only to find Bricksley slamming himself over and over against it out on Saint Mark’s. I was relieved to see that my little golem looked unharmed from the mission I had set him to the other night. How long he had been throwing himself at the door, I had no idea, but the scattered chips of wood from the door itself indicated it couldn’t have been all that long.
Curious what his findings would be, I risked waking everyone as I phoned around to my crew and gathered them in my living room in just under an hour as I filled and checked over my backpack in prep for wherever Bricksley’s expedition would lead us.
“You look like Luke Skywalker with Yoda when they’re training on Dagobah,” Marshall said from his place on my couch. “You know, from The Empire Strikes Back.”
“I know what it’s from,” I said as I adjusted the zipper so that Bricksley was securely fastened in but also protruding from my backpack. “I’m not a total cultural illiterate.”
“We ready?” Rory said, dropping her dancer’s bag in my living room. Her hood hung around her neck like an infinity scarf, her art tube poking up over her shoulder.
“If you’re packing Mr. Hack and Slash in that thing, sure.”
The four of us headed out of my building onto Saint Mark’s Place.
“Just keep it out of sight for now,” Caleb said. “This is strictly recon. We don’t want to draw any attention. We simply check out whatever Bricksley discovered; then, once we have evidence, we bring it before Warren, Laurien . . . the whole Convocation if we have to.”
“Lead on, Bricksley,” I said. My golem’s tiny clay hand came up and pointed uptown, so we headed over to Second Avenue and then began walking uptown.
Rory fell in step next to me as we went.
“You sure this is going to work?” she asked. “I mean, I love Bricksley probably more than is healthy, but he’s not the most complex golem out there.”
“I was explicit in instructing him,” I reassured her. “Follow the Butcher, and come back to us when you know where he is. He might not be the sharpest brick in the pile, but I trusted him with the task. It’s bad enough I felt guilty sending him out all on his own, alone.”
We walked along in silence for a few more moments until I felt a tear at the corner of my eye and wiped it away, drawing Rory’s attention. “When they lock me away,” I said, “make sure you tell them how emotionally wrapped up with a living brick I was, okay?”
“Tell them yourself,” she said. “Chances are we’ll be cell mates.”
“That is some comfort.”
We continued up Second Avenue until Bricksley indicated we should head west on Fourteenth Street, and our journey turned crosstown. Just past Irving Place, the little golem guided us to the intersection where Park Avenue South split into Broadway and Fourth Avenue.
“Union Square,” I said, and although Bricksley was prompting us to enter, I hesitated.
“The park is packed,” Marshall said, “and from the looks of it with an extra heaping spoonful of crazy.”
Much of Union Square had become a shantytown since the other night. The green grass of it was set up with makeshift tents, lean-tos, and people just sleeping out under the night sky. With some reluctance we crossed the street and headed into the park. Up close there was a creepy, cultish vibe to everyone there. Some wore shirts with the words “Show Me the Eternal LIFE!” on them while others had signs lying against their makeshift homes with hand-drawn gargoy
les on them, their messages swearing allegiance.
Rory drew in close, whispering, “May I remind you that some of these people were probably part of the mob that wanted to kill us the other night.”
“I’m trying not to think about it,” I said, concentrating instead on where Bricksley was indicating we should go. “Marshall, Caleb, walk in front of us.”
The two men moved into place, Marshall leaning back over his shoulder.
“And we’re doing this why?”
“None of this crowd will know either you or Caleb,” I said. “Rory and I, on the other hand, might get torn limb from limb.”
His face went pale, and with no further questions he turned forward and kept moving as I steered the four of us through the crowd.
“I would have thought the mob would have dispersed by now,” Rory said.
“Me, too,” I agreed.
“Are you kidding?” Caleb asked. “Remember Occupy Wall Street? It doesn’t take much in this city to get people to drop what they’re doing and jump on a bandwagon.” Standing taller than the rest of us, his eyes scanned the crowd. “Although there is an abnormal amount of police on duty here.”
“At least Maron and Rowland got them to take some of this seriously,” I said. “Although, I bet they had to sell them on the simple premise of crowd control. I’m not sure how they would have fared if they said they needed more patrolmen to take on any gargoyles that might show.”
As we approached Union Square West around Seventeenth Street, I could see the efforts of my handiwork from the other night. Much of the pavement wall still blocked off Eighteenth Street going west, although even now construction crews were working on its removal.
Its sheer enormity had me hiding in the back of my hood, as if it somehow absolved me of the chaos and destruction I was responsible for. Luckily, the gargoyles were nowhere to be seen and no one seemed to be paying any attention to us.