by C. S. Poe
“No one makes me do anything,” Gunner interrupted. “Even you.”
“Right. Of course. I meant to say, I’m grateful you’ve come to New York. But that sort of expression of romance isn’t—we can’t. There are certain establishments on the Bowery where we could touch and be around others, but—”
“Gillian.”
“Yes?”
“Stop staring at your shoes.”
I swallowed hard and raised my head.
Gunner’s face had softened around the edges. I’m not certain I’d have even noticed the change before that all-too-brief tumble in the sheets together, but after having witnessed Gunner’s unguarded expressions during the throes of passion and sated bliss afterward… well, I’d memorized that look. Carried it with me. I’d been the one to do that to him, and it was incredible.
“Do you remember what I told you in Arizona?” Gunner asked.
“I remember everything.”
He smiled. Just a little. Just enough. “Some men like us, they find happiness. You’ll be one of them, so long as you stop apologizing for your existence in this world.” Gunner put his free hand briefly to his own chest and patted. “This doesn’t change, but attitudes do. Starting with your own.”
Twenty seconds ago, I had been Atlas, bearing the sky on my shoulders, a burden that was to be mine for all eternity. And then it was like someone had found me on the most western edge of the world and lifted enough weight that I was able to raise my head and see the stars for the first time.
“Gunner—”
With no warning, the atmosphere prickled around me, raised painful gooseflesh across my body, and then a faraway searing heat burrowed itself under my skin.
Fire.
I turned sharply to face east, studying the distant stairs to the El platform from where we’d disembarked at Third Avenue. I shifted my focus to study the thread-like appendages of magic as they flowed around a few pedestrians, but the energy didn’t linger, didn’t light them up like a lighthouse on the ocean’s edge. Where had that artificial spark come from?
I quickly tugged my gloves off, shoved them into my coat pocket, and held one out, palm up. I allowed the tendrils of raw and unused magic to coil around my scarred fingers, then closed my fist over it and gave a tug. Like a bullet shot, the magic carried my own energy along two separate pathways in a dizzying rush before each fractured and splintered into a tangle of—something that made no sense. I could feel the whisks of a spell originating somewhere in the chaotic fray of the Five Points downtown. But the detonation was significantly closer. And manufactured for sure. There was a gaping wound in the atmosphere where the spell hadn’t replaced the borrowed magic with the lifeforce of the caster.
“Gillian?”
I startled, lost the visual hold on the magic around me, and turned to see Gunner had reached into his coat, hand resting on the butt of his Waterbury. “I’m okay.” But even as I heard myself speak, I distantly registered how automatic the answer had been. How disingenuous I sounded. I was quite adept at lying, but this injury to the atmosphere was so sudden, so toxic, and so perplexing that I was too distracted to attempt sincerity.
What was I to do? I couldn’t inform Moore. Not exactly, anyway. And I couldn’t leave Gunner in order to ferret out the cause on my own—not when this evening had been so anticipated and he’d traveled so far.
“Gillian,” Gunner said again, a bit more insistent.
I hesitated to shake the event off but flexed my hands a few times and did my best to ignore an after-current that rippled through me as if the heartbeat of the city had shuddered. “Come with me,” I told Gunner before hastening across the street, snow crunching underfoot as I approached the front doors to the hotel.
“What was that?” Gunner questioned, his long legs and sure stride keeping an easy pace with me.
“Never mind it,” I answered.
“Good evening, Mr. Hamilton,” the doorman called as we approached.
“Dawson,” I greeted the doorman, who wore a long coat and hat. We stopped before the door he held open, and I motioned to Gunner. “This is—John Gaylord. A friend of my family’s.” I glanced at Gunner in time to watch him tip the bowler he wore at a rakish angle toward Dawson. “He’ll be a guest of mine for a few days.”
Dawson didn’t appear to find the story suspicious. He said to Gunner, “Welcome to The Buchanan, Mr. Gaylord.”
“Thank you,” Gunner answered.
“Happy New Year, Dawson,” I said.
“And to you, sir.”
I stepped into the lobby, shook my coat, and then walked down a short hallway. The lower portion of the walls were paneled with polished mahogany. Above that were living motifs built into the walls—an amalgamation of switches and screws and cogs, all moving in an unhurried harmony to depict murals of the New York skyline. The wall art transitioned from day to night in time with the gentle ticktock produced by the gleaming mechanisms. Rounding the corner, I took the stairs on the left. The handrail was cut from the same dark wood as the walls, and the iron-wrought balusters shone from a recent buffing.
“John Gaylord,” Gunner murmured to my back.
“Quiet.”
“If that name was any less inconspicuous, it’d be suspect.”
He had a point, I supposed. With his six feet of perfectly sculpted masculinity, eyes like sapphire brooches seen on Millionaire’s Row, and that husky commanding voice, Gunner stood out. Anyone with lingering appreciation for his uncommon aesthetic would have surely expected him to have an uncommon name to match.
But that name belonged to me.
The city could have John Gaylord.
Only I could have Constantine Gunner.
Upon reaching the fourth floor, I walked to the door closest to the stairs, removed a ring with a few skeleton keys from my coat pocket, and inserted one into the lock. I tapped a button on the key bow to activate the wards, and the tumblers audibly clicked into place. I pocketed the ring once more and pushed open the door. The first room was a small parlor, but seeing as I was an unattached man who was hardly home, that didn’t much matter. A water closet was behind a closed door to the left, and the adjoining room to my right was the bedroom that overlooked Twenty-Seventh Street. The steam radiators hissed and sputtered in the dark parlor. I flicked a wall switch and the overhead glass globe bathed the apartment in a warm tungsten glow.
Gunner stepped inside behind me, set his carpetbag on the floor, and I turned as he shut the door. He took the lapel of my winter coat in one hand and tugged me forward while he backed himself up against the door. Gunner raised his hand and knocked the bowler from my head.
“I had to buy a new hat because of you,” I warned.
A smile tugged the corner of Gunner’s mouth, and he guided my bare hands into the folds of his coats to rest on his slender hips. “You’ll have to teach me a lesson.”
“To never touch another man’s hat.”
Gunner rested his gloved hands on my shoulders. “Kiss me.”
I rose up on my toes to meet Gunner as he leaned down, but his gaze flicked from me to the floor and he froze. Curious, I looked down as well. The snow that’d collected on both our shoes had melted and left a small puddle on the hardwood floor, but just to my right was an unaccounted for droplet.
Another.
And another.
I let go of Gunner’s hips, took a step backward, and tilted my head to study the water. At the right angle, the overhead light caught the surface and the glimmering trail led all the way to one of the parlor windows. I spun toward Gunner again, who unholstered his Waterbury and cocked the pistol. I looked to my bedroom. The door had been partially closed, which was my intruder’s mistake, because I never shut that door in winter.
I moved toward the room, stood to one side of the threshold, and pushed the door open the rest of the way. The bedroom was dark—curtains pulled taut across the windows to keep out the relentless glow of red and green streetlamps—so it took half a second t
oo long to make out the shape of furniture and the out-of-place mass at the foot of my bed.
The shadow charged forward without warning, grabbed my shoulder, hauled me forward and then back against the door. I heard the knob bust through the wall and my head knocked against the solid wood. A massive hand wrapped around my neck and squeezed. I grabbed the man’s wrist with both hands and released an explosive fire spell. The stench of burned hair and seared flesh filled my nostrils as he screeched in pain and released me. I dodged to one side, and when the man doubled over, cradling his smoking wrist to his chest, I slammed my elbow down on the back of his neck.
The intruder grunted and fell to an unceremonious heap.
I took a deep breath, shoved my two-toned hair away from my face, and demanded, “Who are you?”
The man cocked his head up, and illumination from the parlor cut a harsh line of light across his face. His left eye was gone, replaced with the housing of a compass. The needle bobbed with his movements as if always trying to direct him north. His lower jaw was all brass and silver, cogs spinning and steam releasing from sockets as he bared sharpened silver teeth like those of a wild animal.
A mechanical man.
He climbed to his feet and raised a gun—no. The gun was his arm. His arm was a gleaming four-barreled piece of deadly weaponry. “Tick Tock kindly requests you look the other way in this matter regarding Fishback.” His jaw snapped and the words had a metallic ring. “Enjoy the holiday, Mr. Hamilton.”
I bristled. “It’s Agent. And I will do no such thing.”
He sneered, cocked his weapon, and manufactured magic was activated. It was a fire spell, but with a makeup so very different from my own. And once again, raw magic was ripped from the atmosphere, and the lifeforce around me felt battered and broken without a caster replacing the energy. The man’s four-barreled pistol began to glow red.
A magical mechanical man.
I took a mental step back from the moment and let everything slow. The mechanical man bared his teeth again and roared. He pulled the trigger, and a sensation, much like that of an unwelcomed touch, clawed its way up my spine. Only one barrel released a magic bullet, and I shot a hand out in time to raise a shield of bright, shimmering water. The fire slammed into my magic and sounded a crash so loud that I was certain it shook the walls, before it was put out and only a haze of smoke remained. I’d begun to lower my hand when the man fired again—all three remaining bullets releasing at the same time.
Gunner grabbed the back of my collar and yanked hard. I was slammed into the floor and time jerked, lurching forward in a jumble of misplaced seconds as my senses recalibrated. I rolled onto my side, propped up on an arm, and looked behind me. The fire shots had missed me, gone through the open doorway, and set the wall beside the water closet on fire. Gunner had flattened himself against the front door, narrowly missing the explosion after pulling me out of its path. He raised his Waterbury and fired.
The mechanical man jerked as he was hit in the chest with a round of aether. He staggered a step, stumbled back against the foot of the bed, then managed to turn and trip toward the window. He yanked the curtains back, pulling the rod clean from the wall. Mechanical Man hoisted the windowpane up one-handed and began to climb out.
Gunner cocked the Waterbury for a second shot.
I looked back toward the water closet a second time, raised my hand, and cast another water spell, hammering the wall with it until the flames and smoke had dissipated and my apartment resembled a very disappointing aquarium.
Gunner fired again.
I rolled onto my backside as Mechanical Man climbed out of the window and onto the fire escape before taking another round to the back. He spun like a prima ballerina performing her final show, dipped against the railing—then fell.
There was a loud silence for one, two, three seconds, and then my PDD, still sitting atop the bureau where I’d forgotten it that morning, began emitting a series of tones. Two high pulses followed by three, short low beeps. 33678 was Director Moore. Except why would Moore be trying to reach me on a holiday he knew I had plans for—possibly the first in my adult life? It would have to be an absolute emergency.
But Moore would need to wait a moment.
I scrambled to my feet and ran into the bedroom. The tones on the PDD began for a second time as I climbed through the open window. Dark blood and broken gears painted the walkway. The sting of icy snow on my cheeks felt like a dull razor pulling at facial hair. I leaned over the railing and studied the scene below. Mechanical Man lay in the middle of the road, a tangle of broken bones and weaponry.
Gunner maneuvered his body through the window behind me before stepping close enough to put a hand on my shoulder.
“I’m fine,” I answered before looking up. “Are you?”
But of course he was. He was Gunner the Deadly, not Gunner the Dead.
The PDD was emitting its third series of tones, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say the device was becoming exasperated.
“What’s going on, Gillian?”
I shook my head and looked to the road once more. “Something terrible.”
IV
December 31, 1881
“Seems a might suspicious,” the copper said for a second time from where we stood in the middle of the street.
Dawson had heard the whomp and crack of flesh and metal slamming into the cobblestone from his post inside the lobby, and thinking the body was that of a resident, had rushed to render aid. I’d left Gunner upstairs, raced to the ground floor, and gone outside to find the poor man looking terrified and grief-stricken.
“Mr. Hamilton,” he exclaimed, running toward me. “There’s—he must have—”
“I need you to find a police officer right away.”
The request brought Dawson partially back to his senses. “On New Year’s Eve? I can’t imagine I’d find one who isn’t warming his belly with a beer or three.”
“I don’t need them sober,” I said, managing not to snap at him. “Anyone with a badge and a pulse will do.”
In truth, I didn’t actually need a metropolitan officer for anything important. This stranger had broken into the private residence of a federal agent, so it was clearly my jurisdiction. (Never mind that he possessed and employed illegal magic.) But one of the agreements that kept the peace between agencies was that the Bureau needed to have the police formally offer the reins—so to speak.
And that’s how I found myself in the company of Officer Kelly, who was already a sheet or two in the wind and likely wouldn’t have remembered the words to “Auld Lang Syne” come midnight, if Dawson hadn’t dragged him out of whatever watering hole he’d been hiding in.
I pushed my open coat lapels back, tugged up my trousers, and crouched down beside Mechanical Man. I put a thumb on his broken jaw and pulled his mouth open to study those hideous teeth.
“Mm-hmm… might suspicious.”
I tipped my bowler back and looked up at Kelly. “Where in my account did I lose you?”
Kelly jabbed a finger downward, indicating Mechanical Man’s chest. “Only aether tears a man apart like that.” He gave me a wide, malicious smile. “A shame you federal sort think you’re above your own laws.”
“I’m a caster, you thickheaded brute.”
Kelly crossed his massive arms, and his ill-fitting blue uniform pulled tight across his chest. “Sure looks like ammunition damage, not a spell.”
I stood, hands on my hips. “Care to find out?”
“Hamilton,” called a stern voice from the cross streets.
I recognized the speaker immediately, and my stomach felt as if it’d just plummeted off the edge of the fire escape like Mechanical Man. I lingered on Kelly a second longer, was successful in getting him to shift uncomfortably and be the first to look away, then turned to my left. “Sir,” I answered as Moore stomped down the snow-covered street.
“I’ve been calling you, goddamn it,” Moore barked. “What’s the point of assigning you a
PDD if you never carry it?”
I held both hands up. “Sir—”
“We’ve got a situation—” Moore cut himself short and seemed to finally acknowledge the mangled body at my side.
A plume of cold air escaped my lips as I said, “So have I.”
Moore slowed but kept moving toward me. He studied Mechanical Man and then looked at me with a raised brow. He must have recalled Fishback’s words just as I had.
A magical mechanical man.
I nodded once.
Moore directed his attention to Officer Kelly. “Director Loren Moore of the New York branch of the Federal Bureau of Magic and Steam. This death falls within our jurisdiction under directive S. 134.5: Unlawful retention and employment of illegal magic.”
“S. 240 and S. 120 as well,” I murmured before crouching beside the body again.
“S. 240: Unlawful ownership of an illegal magic firearm, and—120?”
“Yes, sir.”
“S. 120: Trespassing on federal property, which includes an agent’s place of residence,” Moore concluded.
Kelly took off his helmet and scratched his forehead. “Aye, but those wounds—”
“Thank you for your attention, officer,” Moore said. “You’ll, of course, file an official report with your captain?” Moore removed his bowler and pulled his PDD headset up and over his ears. He flicked his arm and the handheld transducer slipped out from his sleeve. “Did you need me to repeat the jurisdiction codes?”
Kelly put his helmet back on and said gruffly, “No, sir. I got it. Good night.” He hoisted his belt up his belly, turned, and began west on Twenty-Seventh.
I shifted weight to my right side and stared up at Moore from my position as he put in a request to the office for a prisoner transport at my cross streets—no dillydallying. “He must have scaled the secondary fire escape overlooking Fourth Avenue so as not to be seen by the doorman.”
