by Dan Willis
“Listen, friend,” he said. “The guy took their kid. It’s part of some messy divorce that you don’t want any part of, so either you answer my questions, or I call the cops and tell them the kid might be here.”
The man’s angry look faded to one of irritation. The kind of people who parked their boats in private marinas tended to like their privacy. Ever since the last mayor dumped all the slot machines into the east river, a lot of Manhattan’s wealthy had moved their poker games to places like this to avoid the law. Alex was betting the caretaker didn’t want the cops crawling around looking for a missing kid.
“Fine,” he said after a long moment. “What’s this feller’s name?”
Alex shrugged.
“He wouldn’t be hiding under his own name,” he said. “Is there anyone here living on their boat?”
“Sure,” he said. “Lots of folks do that. Prob’ly five or six here right now.”
“Anyone acting cagey, you know, nervous? Staying out of sight, only coming and going at night, that sort of thing?”
The old man shook his head.
“Nothin’ like that,” he said. “But folks round here like to keep to themselves.”
Alex resisted the urge to swear and thanked the old man instead.
“Mind if I have a look around anyway?” he asked, heading for the door.
“Help yourself,” the caretaker said, picking his paper up off the floor and going back to it.
Alex made his way slowly down the dock. The sun shone brightly on the water and he had to squint to see clearly. He pulled the compass from the pocket of his jacket and consulted it.
This time he did swear.
The needle of the compass was pointing north.
There were plenty of boats on the north side of the marina, but the needle was pointing right down between a row of berths, right at the open water. He took a few steps back, but the needle didn’t even waver. The magical link was gone.
It wasn’t pointing at Leroy Cunningham anymore.
Alex took a deep breath and reined in his anger. Lots of things could cause magic to fail. Sometimes spells simply ran out of energy and expired, or the subject could have moved too far out of range. In the case of water, if Leroy had been on a boat out in the ocean, the presence of that much water could block the spell, even if he were relatively close by.
Looking around and finding himself alone, Alex knelt down on the dock and pulled the last finding rune from his rune book. He folded it quickly and put it atop the compass, adding Hannah’s silver wedding band from his pocket. The paper matchbook in his pocket only had three matches left and he lit one and touched it to the rune.
This time the silver ring went rolling right for the edge of the dock and Alex had to throw himself at it to keep it from being lost. When he turned back to the rune, he found it spinning aimlessly over the compass. The needle in the compass wasn’t moving at all.
He sat there, staring at it in stunned silence. The rune had failed to lock on to Leroy, yet Alex was certain the previous spell had traced him right to the marina.
Standing, he scanned the horizon out to sea. If Leroy had been on a boat that was already underway when Alex got here, it was possible he was now too far out for the spell to find him. As he looked, however, there were no boats to be seen. He didn’t think it was likely that he would have missed a boat leaving the marina when he arrived.
He resolved to go boat by boat and search, but realized the caretaker would call the cops on him if he hadn’t already. Plus, if Leroy was here somewhere, searching could end up getting him killed. Alex knew he couldn’t go to the police; they’d never take the word of his seemingly unrepeatable spell as cause to search a marina full of rich people’s boats. He was going to have to figure out another way to find Hannah’s husband.
“Hold on, Leroy,” he whispered to himself. “I’m still coming.”
Alex decided to save his money and took a crawler back to his office. The trip took him almost an hour and by the time he arrived, he had no better idea what had happened then he had standing on the dock at the Sunrise Marina. He’d never had a finding rune fail once it had made a connection with its target, and that bothered him.
“Did you find the husband?” Leslie asked when he walked into his office.
Alex shook his head in disgust and explained.
“Well, the wife called twice while you were out,” she said. “What are you going to tell her?”
Alex hadn’t thought about Hannah. He owed her an explanation and he wished he had one.
“I’ll call her,” he said. “But first I’m going to try another finding rune, just to be sure. Hold my calls,” he said, heading for his office.
An hour later, Alex sat at the drafting table in his vault. A half dozen discarded sheets of flash paper littered the ground around him and he tore the one he’d been working on from the clip that kept in in place and threw it after the rest.
“Damn it!” he should, throwing the pen he’d been using after the rune.
Finding runes weren’t that hard. He’d written over a hundred of them in his career. Now he’d just wasted an enormous amount of expensive, ruby-infused ink to make seven pieces of avant garde art on rectangles of flash paper.
The trembling in his hands was getting worse.
He’d thought that last one was good, but as he finished it, he couldn’t feel any magic flowing into it. That was how runes worked. When a runewright drew one, he served as a channel for the magic of the universe, infusing it through the pen and into the ink and the symbol it formed. Alex didn’t know what was wrong, but he could tell that last rune had no magic at all.
He forced himself not to think about it. If he thought about it, it would scare him to death.
“Is something wrong?” Leslie’s concerned voice came from behind him.
He turned to find her standing at the open door of his vault.
“I don’t know,” he said. He hadn’t told anyone about his hands, but the weight of the knowledge overwhelmed him and he explained it to her.
“I think…” he said, his mind going down the dark alley he desperately wanted to avoid. “I think I might be losing my magic.”
“Let me see,” she said, crossing the floor of the vault to his table.
Alex held out his hands and she took them in hers. Leslie’s hands were smooth and warm as they glided over his fingers and palm. She took him by the right wrist and held his hand up, noting the tremors in his fingers.
“It doesn’t look too bad,” she said.
“Yesterday I drew one good cleaning rune out of five,” he said. “Today I couldn’t manage a finding rune, and they’re ten times easier than a cleaning rune.”
“Have you told Iggy?” Leslie asked. “He is a doctor, you know.”
Alex shook his head, kneading his hands together.
“I think it’s because…” he began.
“Because of the life rune,” Leslie finished. She always could see right through him. “You think it’s another side effect of all that life energy you lost. Like your hair.”
He nodded again, his hands trembling now from the fear of having that thought said out loud.
“If that’s the case, I doubt Iggy will be able to do anything about it,” he said. “Doctor or not.”
Leslie fixed him with a hard stare.
“You won’t know until you ask,” she said. “It might be nothing.”
“Or it might be something,” Alex said. “What if I am losing my magic?”
“Is that even possible?” she asked.
“Think about it,” he said. “That would explain why my finding rune lost its connection to Leroy, and why the next one failed.”
“Or he could have been on a boat, like you said,” she reminded him. Leslie crossed her arms and fixed him with a hard stare. “You’re good at what you do, Alex. One of the best. I refuse to believe this is how you go out.”
Alex just shrugged.
“We both know I
don’t have much life-force left,” he said. “What if this is it?”
Leslie’s jaw tightened. Alex could tell she was fighting the urge to be scared. She was too tough for that, and a moment later her hard look came back.
“Is your brain trembling?” she asked, crossing her arms. “Or is it just your hands?”
“What’s that supposed—”
“You’re still a detective,” she cut him off. “And a damn good one, so if you don’t use magic, get your sorry ass out there and find Leroy Cunningham the old-fashioned way.”
He looked her in the eyes and found her blue eyes hard, but earnest.
“You’re right,” he admitted at last, smiling at her. The tension in his chest began to ebb away, leaving just a tiny mote of doubt behind. “I’m done feeling sorry for myself. I’ll go home and have Iggy look at my hands and make me some new finding runes, then I’ll track down Leroy.”
“You might want to look at this before you make any plans,” Leslie said. She reached under her arm and pulled out a folded-up newspaper, depositing it on his drafting table.
Alex opened it, revealing the masthead of today’s issue of The Midnight Star. The large headline read, Ghost Killer Claims Fourth Victim. A subheading declared that the police were baffled and had called in a P.I. runewright to help solve the case. When Alex read that, he groaned.
“Oh, it gets better,” Leslie said with a sardonic smile. “Read the article.”
Alex did and he began to feel sick in the pit of his stomach with every word.
“This makes the police sound like bumbling incompetents.”
“Uh-huh,” Leslie said. “And it makes you sound like you’ve come in to show them how to do their jobs.” She pointed to one particular paragraph. “He calls you the Runewright Detective.”
Alex rubbed the bridge of his nose, pinching hard. This was not good.
“Detweiler is going to assume I talked to this rag,” Alex said. “He’s going to blow a gasket.”
Leslie picked up the paper and turned to leave.
“I suggest you get over there before someone shows him a copy,” she said.
Alex followed her out, shutting the door to his vault.
“Did you find where Anne Watson is staying?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Leslie said. “I’m going for lunch then I’ll get back on that.”
“If you find her, tell her I’ll call her when I can. I’m going by the Central Office to try to smooth things over with Detweiler, then I’m going home.”
The New York City Central Office of Police was a ten-story building in Manhattan’s inner ring a few blocks south and west of the park. It was early afternoon when Alex walked through the front doors and headed for the elevators in the back. All six of the detective divisions were on the fifth floor and he had no desire to take the stairs after the day he was having.
“You!” Detweiler’s voice assaulted him as soon as he exited the elevator on the fifth floor. Before Alex knew what was happening, the portly lieutenant was right in his face. “You’ve got a lot of nerve showing your face here!” he yelled.
“Me,” Alex yelled right back. He’d decided on the way over that the only chance he had to convince the lieutenant that he had nothing to do with the story was to be offended himself. “Somebody on your team has a mighty big mouth!” Alex yelled, shoving Leslie’s copy of the tabloid at Detweiler.
“My team?” he yelled back as detectives from all over the floor began to drift out into the hall to see what the commotion was about. “It was you who talked to this rag, why else would they make you sound like some master detective come to save us keystone cops?”
“You think that’s good for me?” Alex rejoined, lowering his voice a bit. “This hack makes me sound like some all-powerful sorcerer. What happens when clients come to see me expecting miracles I can’t deliver? Word will get around I don’t have the juice. It’ll ruin my reputation and my business.”
“Don’t try to make yourself out to be the victim,” Detweiler said. “No cop would say these things about a fellow cop, it has to be you.”
“Yeah?” Alex spat back. “And what about those details in the paper from yesterday? What about the stab wounds? Someone leaked that before I was even on the case.”
“That’s no big thing. That doctor you live with is chummy with the coroner. You could have learned that from him.”
“And then what?” Alex said, addressing the assembled crowd for the first time. “I got myself involved? How? Anyone think I put Callahan up to it? He brought me in, remember?”
Apparently Detweiler had forgotten that point because he opened his mouth to answer and abruptly shut it again. A murmur of agreement rumbled through the onlookers. Most of them wouldn’t have peed on Alex if he’d been on fire, but no one believed that Callahan could be bullied into anything.
Alex had guessed that if it came down to a choice between believing Detweiler or believing Callahan, the detectives would go with the latter. Everyone who knew the big Lieutenant knew he was a tough, honest, son-of-a-bitch. Not the kind of guy someone like Alex would be able to leverage.
Alex may not have though much of Detweiler, but the man wasn’t stupid. He sensed the shift in the audience instantly and his face screwed up into a look of fury. He understood the corner into which Alex had backed him.
He rushed Alex, grabbing him by the front of his waistcoat and slamming him into the wall of the hallway.
“All right, scribbler,” he said in a low voice only Alex could hear. “That was pretty smart of you, but don’t think I’ve changed my mind. You’ve been talking to that hack from the Sun and if anything you’ve told him ruins my case, I’ll have you brought up on an obstruction charge.”
Alex looked him right in the eyes without blinking.
“Wasn’t me.”
“I don’t believe you,” Detweiler growled. “Now get out of my building and stay out of my case. If I catch you anywhere near this, I’ll have you arrested.”
“For what?” Alex asked, a smile creeping across his lips.
Detweiler smiled too.
“Obstruction,” he said. “Interfering with a police investigation, jaywalking, and anything else I can think of.”
“That won’t stick and you know it.”
Detweiler shrugged.
“Maybe not,” he said, “but I can hold you for forty-eight hours without charging you with anything. Now get out.”
He let go of Alex and stepped back, smoothing out his jacket.
“Get back to work, you mugs,” he said to the hallway, and he and the other detectives disappeared, leaving Alex alone by the elevator.
Alex straightened his own jacket and turned to the call button. His gamble had paid off, so he wasn’t in jail, but he was off the case. The more stubborn part of his mind wanted to tell Anne Watson that he’d keep working just to spite Detweiler, but that was asking for trouble, and he really didn’t have any meaningful way to help her anyway.
He sighed as the elevator doors slid open.
“That went well,” he said to the empty hallway.
6
The Doctor’s Vault
“Let me see your hands,” Iggy commanded once Alex got back to the brownstone and explained his day.
Alex held out his hands and Iggy took them, each in turn, squeezing them and feeling the bones and tendons in the fingers.
“How long has this been going on?” he asked, feeling the trembling in Alex’s fingers.
“A few weeks now,” Alex said.
Iggy gave him a sour look.
“You should have told me,” he said.
“Why?” Alex said. “It’s because of the life rune. The only thing you can do about that is worry, and we both know it.” Iggy glared at him, but Alex didn’t relent. “Right now I’m doing enough worrying for the both of us,” he went on.
“Firstly,” Iggy said, fishing his green-backed rune book from his jacket pocket. “This tremor might not be related to th
e Incident.”
The Incident was Iggy’s nickname for Alex’s teleporting Sorsha Kincaid’s floating castle out over the Atlantic.
“Secondly,” Iggy went on, “you don’t need to spare my feelings. I’m not some frail old man.” He tore a vault rune from his book and pasted it into a barely visible door frame painted on the wall of the kitchen.
“I’m sorry,” Alex said as Iggy touched the lit end of his cigar to the rune and it vanished, leaving a heavy steel door in its place. “But I’m not dead yet either. We agreed we’d just keep going as usual for as long as I’ve got left.”
Iggy looked at him somberly before he pulled open the heavy door to his vault. Alex knew that look; he’d seen it in the mirror plenty of times. It haunted him on the nights when he couldn’t sleep, which was more and more often these days. That look had only one meaning.
Your days are numbered and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it.
Seeing that look on Iggy’s face, a man he owed almost everything, pained Alex in a way he didn’t want to dwell on. The sorceress had known that look was coming and removed herself from Alex’s life before it became a reality. He didn’t blame her for that. If he was honest with himself, he would have hated seeing that look on her perfect features almost as much as he hated it on Iggy’s craggy face.
Iggy sighed.
“We’ll soldier on,” he said. “It’s all we can do. Now come inside.”
Alex stopped, flat-footed for a moment. He’d never been allowed inside Iggy’s vault before. Stepping around the door, he entered a vast space, much bigger than his own large vault. The central area was a round room, laid out as doctor’s surgery. It had an examination table under a cluster of magelights in the center, and cabinets, cases of medical supplies, and racks of alchemical solutions along the curved edges.
To the right an arched doorway led into what looked like a runewright’s workshop, with a large, well-lit writing desk, and shelves and shelves of inks and components.
On the left, another archway ran into what looked like a study, complete with a comfy chair, shelves of books, and a perpetual fire in a grate.
