The dead bat came to life and fluttered into the air. With each wingbeat it grew—first as big as a pigeon, then a hawk, then man sized, until finally a midnight-black bat the size of a small plane skimmed low over Taika’s head and soared up to the battle going on. It caught one of the snake-women in its bloody fangs and dispatched her with a single bite.
It circled around and dove at the bull, which gave a bellow of rage and took to the air itself, charging with horns forward and legs tucked up neatly for streamlining. But the bat continued to grow, so that the winged bull simply vanished into an open maw like a tunnel entrance. The bat then wheeled and scattered the remaining snake-women with a gust of wind from its mighty wings.
And then a little dried dead bat fell to the grass.
“Okay, what’s going on?” Moreno shouted. He and Sam got out of the car and walked across the graveyard toward the rock outcropping. Sam spotted Isabella perched atop a tombstone a few yards off to one side, eating a very drippy ice cream cone and watching the battle with glee.
“That disgusting man killed my husband!” Taika called back, setting down her bucket, which smelled of seawater.
“She’s mad!” Stone put in. “I was just looking for new ghosts to collect when she attacked me!”
“Both of you cut it out. Mrs. Feng, the Count killed your husband, and he’s dead now.”
“I got a message that he”—Taika pointed one thumb over her shoulder at Stone—“had been working with the Count. And when I confronted him he admitted it!”
“I said I wasn’t sorry Feng died, which is simply the truth, and I said the Count was my friend and I regretted his death. Which is also true. But I had nothing to do with what happened to your husband. If you ask me, she’s making a bid to succeed him as Master of the Circle by eliminating any rivals.”
“I didn’t ask you,” said Moreno. “Now listen up, both of you. This stops, now and for good. Taika, your husband’s death has already been avenged. The Sage agrees. Stone, don’t make accusations unless you can back them up. Right now it’s no harm, no foul. Let’s keep it that way—because if anything happens to either of you, I know who’s at the top of the list of suspects. Understand?”
Taika glared for a moment, then kicked over the bucket of seawater and began walking toward the cemetery gate. As she passed close to Sam and Moreno she stage-whispered, “Don’t trust him!” Isabella slid off the tombstone and trotted after her as she left.
Stone, with some effort, scrambled down off the rock and tried to salvage some dignity. Once Taika was out of earshot he approached Sam and Moreno and extended a hand. “Thank you for showing up when you did. As I said, I think she—”
“Never mind about that,” said Moreno. “Can you get back to your home safely?”
“Of course,” said Stone. “I have other protections in place. She caught me by surprise. I’ll be all right.” He strolled off, looking deliberately casual—but Sam noticed he walked in the opposite direction from the one Taika had taken.
After a minute Sam looked at Moreno. “What was that all about?”
“No idea. I guess people are more scared than I realized.”
The two of them went back to Moreno’s car and drove out of the cemetery more sedately. At the corner of Riverside they passed Taika and Isabella getting into an old Škoda limousine.
“That’s not good,” said Moreno.
“How come?”
“That’s Miss Elizabeth’s car. If those three are working together they could be a problem.”
“Taika, Miss Elizabeth, and…Isabella?”
“Bingo. They can do a classic triple. Maiden-Mother-Crone. Big juju. Draw down the Moon, crap like that. I hope they don’t try anything stupid.” Moreno steered north on Riverside as he talked.
“So…what’s up with her? Isabella, I mean.”
“She’s a big pain in the ass for me. Her family were Apkallu. Both old lineages—second cousins, I think. Wizards are like European royalty; everybody’s related, and a lot of them are kind of funny. Anyway, her parents died exactly a year after she was born—Halloween, no less. A working went wrong. Called up something neither of them could handle. Tore them to bits, knocked down the house. Nothing grows on the property any more. It’s out in Montauk. Getting her away from the subs was quite a job. I finally had to control a judge and get a court order.”
Moreno got onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, still going north. “Feng lined up another Apkal family to take care of her—remember that kid Shimon? His parents, the Zobris. They had Isabella for a couple of years. Cute kid, very smart. Started walking and talking early. Then she started running off. It got harder and harder to find her. They called me in to help, but even I had trouble. She’d go off for a day, a week, then two, then a month. And finally…we all just kind of gave up. I know it sounds cold, but even when she was just five or six she could take care of herself. Kid’s got serious magical juice, more than most grown Apkallu I know. Now she lives wherever she wants. Sylvia tries to keep tabs on her—and I’ve heard she’s taken a liking to you, too.”
“I worry about her. I know she’s got spirit protection, but is that really enough? New York’s got some bad people in it.” Sam remembered his own little boy, not much younger than Isabella. Just the thought of Tommy alone in the city gave Sam a panicky feeling even two years after his son was dead and gone.
Moreno actually laughed at that. “Don’t be a dope. No sub can do anything to Isabella. It’s cleaning up after her that gives me problems. She’s always doing magical shit in public—showing off for kids on the playground, taking stuff she wants, sometimes just messing with people for the hell of it. That’s one reason I pushed to get her initiated early. Now she’s oath-bound. If she harms another Apkal I’m gonna crack down on her as hard as I can manage.”
Chapter 13
As the city sweltered through August Sam found himself busier than he had ever been in his life. He was getting instruction from Sylvia, Moreno, and Lucas—and, of course, he had to keep his contact with Lucas secret from the others.
During those weeks he recruited more spirits to his service. On Lammas Eve he climbed to the roof of Columbia’s Butler Library where he bound a sylph into a tin pinky ring and then secured a year’s service from a song-spirit, making his words more persuasive.
As the equinox ticked closer Sam made preparations. At the beginning of September he took the late-morning train to Bridgeport and picked up a rental car, then drove ten miles north along the Housatonic River to White Hills, where he had once lived. He took his time and stuck to back roads, and stopped for lunch at a fast-food place where nobody would recognize him.
No point in stopping by the house, he thought. Any traces of the attack would be long gone. No point to it at all, he thought—but he allowed sheer muscle memory to direct the car and wound up at the foot of the long driveway up the wooded hillside. The new owners had put in a new mailbox; not the kind he would have chosen. The little patch of flowers around the base was nice, though.
Did they have kids, these new people? Was some new child marking up the walls as Tommy had done? Had they painted over the growth marks on the kitchen door frame?
No, he decided. No point in trying to find out. It wasn’t his house anymore. He gunned the car motor unnecessarily and drove off.
The storage unit was a few miles away, and he could get through the gate with a number code. No need to see anyone at all, which was good. In his current mood he didn’t want to talk to anyone.
All the things it had smashed were long gone…but he had kept the hall rug his mother had bought in Bogota. It had walked on that rug; there might be traces. Sam had watched Moreno call up the div which had slain Feng, by using a chunk of wood it had marked. A rug the anzu had marked with its claws would be almost as good.
He found the hall rug—and then looked at the boxes labeled A for Alice and T for Tommy.
Sam knew their full names. He had things which were theirs. Probably even trac
es of them—hair, blood, whatever. They were linked to him, closer than anyone else.
He could summon their spirits. Her family’s burial plot near New London wasn’t far. He could do it tonight.
The moment it occurred to him he felt two overwhelming emotions. He wanted more than anything to do it, to speak to them both again. And yet the very idea horrified him—for a moment he struggled to keep from throwing up. It felt like a desecration. They would despise him for it.
No. Let them rest. Focus on punishing the guilty.
He unrolled the rug and examined it. Should’ve gotten it cleaned, he thought, looking at the mud and sawdust ground into the pattern. Lucky he hadn’t, though: that meant a better chance of finding some trace of the anzu. Had it made those little tears? Possibly. Yes, there were places where the fabric was torn, in parallel groups of three. Unless the cops and paramedics had been wearing golf shoes, that wasn’t the work of human feet. He had a connection to the killer. Sam rolled the rug up again and tossed it into the back seat of his rental car.
On the way back to Bridgeport he passed the house again, and couldn’t avoid slowing down once more. Not for the first time he thought about just chucking it all. Burn the William Hunter documents and credit cards, smash the phones, delete the email accounts, and stay plain old Samuel Arquero for the rest of his life. No more lying.
Except…he wouldn’t be plain old Samuel Arquero. He’d still be a wizard—and a murderer. There was no path back to his old life. Time to admit that. He was William Hunter now, and he had a job to do.
* * *
The night before the autumn equinox Sam and Lucas met at Trinity Church, sitting through the end of a “folk-music coffeehouse” which proved to be more of a political rally with guitar interruptions. Sam fidgeted while Lucas nodded patiently along with the music and chuckled softly at the slogans. When the event finally ended the two of them went back out to the street and walked up Broadway.
“Why do we always meet in churches?” Sam asked.
“It’s a good place to shake spiritual surveillance,” said Lucas.
“Would a synagogue or a mosque do just as well?”
“There are theological subtleties at work. It must be hallowed ground. This church is Episcopalian, which means it was consecrated by a priest in the line of apostolic succession. Catholic and Orthodox churches qualify as well. Quaker meetinghouses and Christian Science reading rooms don’t. A synagogue is more complicated: It’s not the building per se but the Ark holding the Torah that is sacred, so for our purposes they’re only useful when services are going on and the Ark is open. Mosques are usually safe, although there are a great many ways they can be profaned.”
“But how can all that be true? Those religions all say the others are false. Who’s right?”
Lucas chuckled. “All of them, and none. But to us, they only matter as tools to manipulate the world, both magically and politically. We Apkallu are free. But enough of all that. Here we are.”
Sam looked up. They were standing on the corner of Warren Street and Broadway, across the street from City Hall. Lucas led the way into the building on the corner. A security guard was on duty inside, and looked up alertly.
“I’m here to see Mr. Beach,” said Lucas. The guard’s eyes unfocused for a moment, and he nodded at them and looked away, as if losing interest completely.
“The password is just a convenience. I use this place fairly often and have all the security people conditioned.”
The two of them went downstairs into the basement, passed the pipes and valves of the water system, and eventually reached the eastern wall. Lucas worked his way along the old brickwork of the foundation until he found an ancient-looking cast-iron door, just four feet high. The old iron latch was locked with a shiny new combination lock. Lucas unlocked it and gestured to Sam. “If you would do the honors? It’s often a bit stiff.”
Sam had to hit the latch lever with the heel of his hand to move it, and then swung the door open. The hinges squealed loudly, but Lucas didn’t seem to worry about the noise. Beyond was blackness.
Lucas clicked on a pocket flashlight and went through the little door, stepping cautiously. “Mind the step,” he said.
Sam followed him down a set of three wobbly wooden steps onto a floor of…mosaics? Yes, marble mosaics. He looked up as Lucas played the flashlight over the arched ceiling. Gilt patterns twinkled back at him.
“What is this?”
“This is the first and only station on the Beach Pneumatic Subway line. Constructed 1869, but the inventor didn’t bribe the right people and so never got to complete the project.” He pointed off to the east, where a concrete wall cut off the end of the room. “The BMT is on the other side of that retaining wall. Now, tell me why I brought you here.”
Sam looked around and then laughed. “We’re going on a journey.”
“Precisely. Doing this in an active subway station would be awkward, but this one is perfect. We can send our perceptions into the Otherworld without having to worry about the bodies we leave behind. It’s especially useful for us today, given that the Sun is in the wrong decan and the Moon is in an awkward phase. The fact that tomorrow is Wednesday is auspicious, though.”
Lucas spread out a picnic blanket and sat cross-legged. Sam poured out cornmeal to make a pentangle around the blanket, then stepped carefully over the lines and took his own place facing Lucas. The two of them chanted an invocation to Nabu and thrice-great Hermes…
…And then Sam was startled by a wind and the noise of squealing brakes as a cylindrical subway car pulled into the station. He and Lucas stood, picked their way over the cornmeal, and got into the car. It was very luxurious inside, with leather seats and polished brass fittings. Sam risked a glance out the window as the car pulled away, and saw himself and Lucas still sitting on the picnic blanket.
It was one thing to know, intellectually, that this was a “spiritual journey.” It was quite another to actually see that he was no longer inhabiting his body.
“Have you got something that it touched?” Lucas asked him.
Sam fished out the four-inch square of carpet bearing slashes from the monster’s claws. Lucas had him hold it in a certain way, then invoked Umibael, Larunda, and Ariadne. Sam felt the carpet swatch tugging gently in his grip, as if drawn by a magnet.
They rode for a time Sam found hard to measure; it passed quickly enough but somehow he knew (as one knows things in dreams) that it was a long journey. Outside the windows the subway car passed through darkness, but occasionally he got glimpses of vast caverns and distant flows of glowing magma.
Suddenly the tugging sensation grew much stronger, and pulled off to the right rather than straight ahead. “It’s here!” Sam called out, and felt the subway begin to slow. When the car squealed to a stop and the doors opened, the carpet swatch in Sam’s hands almost pulled him out onto the platform beyond. Lucas hurried to keep up with him.
The sky overhead was charcoal gray, and a few distant red lights glowed feebly, so that Sam could barely make out his surroundings. The ground underfoot was soggy, with lank weeds growing knee-high. The air reeked of sulfur and decay. Here and there he could make out vast ugly structures rising from the swamp, along with skeletal towers of rusty metal and piles of slag and garbage. It looked…familiar.
“We’re in New Jersey?” he asked Lucas.
“The Otherworld is highly subjective. Your mind needed a template for the dreary land of the dead, and this is what popped out. When I come to the Otherworld by myself it tends to look more like Annwn.”
The two of them splashed across the swamp, and once again Sam couldn’t tell if it was a long journey or a short one. They climbed up embankments and pushed through torn chain-link fences, and eventually walked along cracked and potholed streets lined with decaying buildings. They began encountering people—the passersby were thin, pale, almost translucent looking. Most of them were preoccupied with what looked to be overwhelming private grief, ignoring S
am and Lucas completely.
It was a good thing Sam had to hang on to the tugging carpet square, because it prevented him from utterly freaking out as he realized that these unhappy, wispy “people” were spirits of the dead. When he looked at them they seemed unreal, like badly done animations. Some had more detail and individuality than others—some of the most distinctive-looking ones even met his own glance briefly. The rest ignored their surroundings entirely.
As they penetrated deeper into the nightmare version of Secaucus, New Jersey, Sam saw a different sort of figure on the sidewalk ahead. It was big and solid looking, nearly as tall as Sam even though it was sitting on the curb facing the street. When it saw the two of them it stood: a ten-foot-tall man, broad and strong, with a frowning bull’s head and gleaming black horns.
“Let me handle this,” said Lucas, hurrying to get in front of Sam. He bowed low to the bull-man and spread his arms wide. Sam did likewise.
“Go back,” the bull-man said.
“We must go ahead,” said Lucas. “Our errand here is brief and then we will leave.”
“You are not dead, nor are you guardians of the dead. Go back.”
“We are initiates. We have passed seven gates and returned. Let us pass.”
“Go back,” the bull-man said.
Third time, Sam thought. Now it’s going to happen.
It did. The bull-man lowered its head and charged at Lucas, but as it did a tall four-winged figure appeared in the way, dazzlingly bright and armed with a mace wreathed in fire. The bull-man gave an angry bellow and crashed into the shedu, trying to knock it aside. The shedu ignored the impact, and swung its fiery mace almost as an afterthought. The blow knocked the bull-man across the street.
“Come on!” said Lucas. Sam hurried after him.
As the shedu swatted the bull-man again it called to Lucas. “My service to you is done for all time, mortal man.”
“You owe me a replacement,” said Lucas to Sam. “Binding that shedu took me weeks of work.”
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