Into The Crooked Place

by Alexandra Christo

  But Saxony wasn’t listening. She brought the charm to her temple, hands shaking.

  “I’m too loud,” Saxony said, and then, as if correcting herself, “She’s too loud.”

  She swallowed and the light from a nearby streetlamp flickered with her breath, casting a sequential torch onto the lines that made up her face. In the night, Saxony’s freckles almost looked like blood splatters.

  “There’s someone in my head,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut.

  It was only when they opened again that Tavia saw the stillness. That ghost of a smile.

  Her chest tugged.

  There was something familiar about it—about that damned look—and her heart thundered.

  “We need to find Wesley,” Tavia said. “Whatever this is, he can fix it.”

  Saxony didn’t answer.

  There was blood curling from her nose and when she lifted a hand to wipe it away, her eyes widened.

  “Tavia,” she said. “Run.”

  But before she could even process the words, let alone think about reacting to them, Saxony thrust her arm out and Tavia flew across the ground.

  She barely had time to register the pain before a beam of light shot from Saxony’s palm.

  Tavia rolled across the ground to avoid being hit again.

  “Djnfj,” she swore.

  She hadn’t even noticed the charm up Saxony’s sleeve until it was too late.

  Saxony wasn’t a busker and she wasn’t trained in magic, so how was she suddenly so quick?

  Tavia scrambled to her feet and ran behind a nearby pillar, dodging another skewer of light.

  It shattered into the temple wall beside her.

  Sooner or later, people were going to hear the scuffle, or see the blinding lights of magic. If the crowds swarmed, then the amityguards wouldn’t be far behind.

  And the last thing anyone with black magic wanted was to be caught by the amityguards.

  “Many Gods damn this day,” Tavia seethed, ripping her hand from her pocket and pulling out a trick bag.

  Half magic, half firecracker.

  Tavia threw her shoulder back and sent the explosive hurtling toward her friend. It burst at Saxony’s feet with enough sparks to set her shoes on fire.

  Saxony let out a furious cry, jumping backward.

  “Get a grip!” Tavia yelled.

  “I’m trying,” Saxony said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I …”

  She trailed off and Tavia wished she could remember the name of at least one of the gods this side of the Onnela Sea, so that she could insult them personally.

  With her backpack thrown across the temple steps, Tavia fumbled in her pockets once more, searching for the few pieces of magic she had on standby for if somebody tried to kill her. Though usually those people weren’t her friends.

  Probably because she didn’t have any other friends.

  The moment Tavia’s hand touched the invisibility charm, she felt cold. The bead was dewy between her fingers and then completely fluid as it ran up her arm, soaking her skin. It itched a little, but Tavia held back from scratching it away. Instead, she closed her eyes and let the prickling embed into her bones.

  There was a rhythm to it, each sting timed to a pulse. Tavia counted in her head.

  Math. She always liked the math.

  Tavia squeezed her hands into fists and then dissolved before Saxony’s eyes.

  It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  Tavia had done it a dozen times and it never ceased to make her queasy. The first to go was her skin, paling to reveal the pink of her muscles, then her organs and vessels, shriveling like tree roots until all that was left was polished bone.

  Saxony blinked and, in that moment, Tavia disappeared completely.

  “Are you still there?” Saxony asked. “Tavia, you need to help me.”

  I will if you give me a damn minute, she thought.

  Tavia stepped toward Saxony and reached into her pocket for the last dregs of her magic.

  The trick bag wasn’t elegant, but desperate times called for desperate magic. Tavia poured the contents of the drawstring into her palm and blew. The moment the sand-grain crystals whirled through the air Saxony stilled, the breeze washing each particle over her skin until there wasn’t a part of her left that didn’t carry a spark of starlight.

  Saxony opened her mouth to speak.

  And then collapsed onto the ground, her head hitting the concrete.

  Tavia closed the gap between them, the temporary invisibility shattering around her. She nudged Saxony’s leg with the edge of her boot to be sure the paralyzer took, and when Saxony didn’t move, Tavia sucked in a grateful breath.

  “What was that?” she asked, though her friend had lost consciousness.

  Tavia knelt down beside her.

  And then she saw it.

  So small and almost hidden under the fold of Saxony’s jaw, a vivid pink against the deep brown of her skin, a mark that had been seared into Tavia’s mind for years.

  The clearest and most awful memory she had of her muma.

  Don’t cry, ciolo. It’ll all be okay.

  “How did you—?”

  Tavia broke off as warning buzzers shrieked through the streets.

  The amityguards were coming for them.

  “Skeht,” Tavia swore.

  If she and Saxony got hauled to the precinct, then Wesley was going to have to haul them back out, and with Doyen Schulze monitoring them all so closely, he wouldn’t be happy to do it.

  Tavia looked down at Saxony.

  The paralyzer would still take another hour to wear off and it wasn’t like Tavia could carry her.

  The warning buzzers grew louder.

  She swallowed and took in the mark on Saxony’s neck once more.

  And then, bleeding and cursing in equal amounts, Tavia ran, leaving her friend behind.

  WESLEY THORNTON WALCOTT HAD killed eleven men.

  Most of them were not good men. A few of them were not altogether bad men. But all of them were men who stood in the Kingpin’s way.

  Of course, eleven was not a particularly large number compared to how many people everyone seemed to think Wesley had killed, and since it also included the old underboss—who was quite possibly more of a bastard than he was—Wesley thought only ten should count.

  “Skeht,” Stelios said. “Take it out.”

  It had been ten minutes since the knife went in and though Stelios had given up trying to pull it out, he hadn’t given up on pleading for someone else to.

  He was on his knees and sweating, the tongue of his tie licking up the blood that drained from his hand. Wesley was hoping it wouldn’t stain. He quite liked the knife and the table and the carpet, and right now his fellow underboss was dripping blood all over them.

  “I wasn’t planning to make you a permanent fixture in my club,” Wesley told him. He watched his carpet continue to smudge. “But we might as well finish our conversation while I’ve got you here.”

  Stelios squeezed his eyes shut and bared his teeth in a gold-rimmed sneer.

  “It’s only a matter of time,” Ilaria said. “The Kingpin’s new elixir will get to us eventually. You’re just cutting the wait short by passing it on.”

  Wesley placed a clover on his tongue, considering.

  “So you want me to do you a favor,” he said.

  “It’s professional courtesy,” Ilaria said. “We may all enjoy taking a stab at each other every now and again”—she looked at Stelios’s hand, a little smug—“but when it comes down to it, we’re one and the same. We’re all underbosses in this realm. We’re a team.”

  Her words made for a nice sentiment, but they were a sentiment all the same. Loyalty or betrayal. Allies or enemies. Wesley didn’t think anything could be that black and white. Even this meeting, which happened each month like clockwork, had turned so quickly from touching base in the regular fashion, to a near-ambush, with Wesley’s fellow underbosses clambering in a tag team, trying relentless
ly to sway him into giving them magic they hadn’t earned.

  The elixir the Kingpin had handed exclusively, personally, to him.

  “You’re like hungry animals, begging for scraps,” Wesley said. “Why not just wait until Ashwood feeds you himself if you’re so sure he will?”

  Ilaria all but snarled. “You forget who you’re dealing with.”

  But that wasn’t true and Wesley smiled to show it.

  “If there’s one thing I never do,” he said, “it’s forget.”

  Because he remembered just fine how all three of these underbosses—Uskhanya’s most deadly, before Wesley had arrived—thought him unworthy of their inner circle. It was almost funny to think of it now, how they’d looked down on him, as they did underbosses of the far less grand central cities, thinking he was too young, not ravaged enough by sin.

  Now they grew nervous whenever he paused.

  Now they saw what he could do with a city under his command.

  Of course, just because the underbosses were wary, that didn’t mean they weren’t still dangerous. Nobody was entrusted to run the magic trade for an entire city because they were good and reasonable. Wesley knew that better than anyone.

  In fact, he was acutely aware of how awful the people in front of him were.

  Crooks and killers, who’d stop at nothing to rise to the top.

  And Wesley was the worst of them.

  Casim smirked. “Maybe we don’t have your oh-so-special elixir because it’s just not good enough for the rest of us.”

  “Or maybe,” Wesley said, “I’m the Kingpin’s favorite.”

  Ilaria sucked on her teeth and the look she gave him was tired and unflattering. “Just tell us what the magic does and what the Kingpin is planning. We outnumber you, after all.”

  Wesley sighed.

  He really didn’t like it when people implied threats instead of making them. It seemed like a waste of good conversation.

  Better to kill them all and just be done with it, the voice inside him whispered.

  Wesley adjusted his cuff links, and the air around him grew cold, his magic humming with the possibility of such destruction.

  “It’s a little rude to come into someone’s house and make demands like that,” he said.

  Wesley slid a hand into his pocket and thumbed the tiny piece of metal he always carried with him.

  Casim shifted uncomfortably.

  “Someone back down,” Stelios said, wincing. “I’m not having this blade in my hand all night because you lot want to prove your power.”

  “I don’t need to prove anything,” Wesley said.

  Though part of him always thought he did.

  Wesley leaned forward and stood the small silver bullet in the center of the table.

  He inclined his head upward and it rose obediently.

  “You’re going to shoot us with a magic bullet?” Ilaria asked.

  She stared at him, ripe with disbelief, as though she had only just remembered what a bastard Wesley was.

  It wasn’t her fault, of course. Wesley had two faces and he was wearing a far nicer one when the underbosses first arrived. Now the face that belonged alongside his reputation appeared, smug and a little dead around the eyes.

  Tavia would have hated it.

  “Do it.” Stelios laughed and banged his uninjured hand against the table. “It’s about time my blood had some company.”

  “That’s a little much, even for you,” Ilaria said, eyeing Wesley. “Think carefully about what you’re doing.”

  Wesley ran a thumb over his lip and slid as far back as his chair would allow. The bullet teetered. “I am thinking,” he said. “About how much of you guys I’m willing to have scrubbed off my floor.”

  Ilaria’s laugh was brittle. “Just like Ashwood’s lapdog to try to bite off more than he can chew.”

  Wesley exhaled and without warning, without him really meaning for it to, the bullet shot through the air, spitting through the narrow gap between Ilaria’s arm and her ribs. She jumped up as it tore into the sofa behind her and continued its blazing path until the mirror at the far end of the room shattered.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Ilaria roared.

  It was a fair question.

  “You could have killed me!”

  “I’m aware of that,” Wesley said. “I just wanted to make sure you were.”

  Ilaria only glared, which meant that Wesley had made his point.

  Perhaps the underbosses were resentful that the Kingpin gave him his pick of the magic and that this new elixir, this thing Ashwood was so excited about, shrouded in awful mystery, was only Wesley’s to sell. Perhaps he should have made nice and fed their egos. But the truth was, they weren’t allies and they weren’t on the same side.

  Wesley had earned every advantage he had over them.

  Creije was thriving because of him. The city was Uskhanya’s magical mecca because of him. Wesley may not have been in the position for as long as the other underbosses, he may not have killed and tortured as many people as they had, ruined as many lives and burned as many bridges, but he’d done more in those short years to help his city than they could in their entire lives.

  Wesley loved Creije, and these people were too awful to love anything.

  He picked up the half-empty decanter of Cloverye and refilled his glass. The wind called in through the open window, mingling with every trick Wesley had in his pocket, telling him it was time to go.

  “If that’s all,” he said, “then you’ll have to excuse me. I have places to be and a city to run. I’m sure at least one of you knows what that’s like.”

  Ilaria slammed her fists on the table.

  “What happens on the day you don’t have any more of the Kingpin’s fancy magic to throw around?” she asked. “Because that’s the day when we’ll come for your city, Walcott. What are you going to do then?”

  Wesley stood, straightening out his suit sleeves. “I suppose I’ll just have to kill you the old-fashioned way.”

  “There’s only one of you and three of us.”

  Wesley looked over to Stelios, still bleeding onto his carpet. “Two and a half,” he said, and headed for the door.

  The moment Wesley turned from the other underbosses, the shroud of magic he kept around himself began to hum, like it always did when his back was turned, ready to protect him in case someone decided to stick a knife in it.

  Wesley crossed the Crook with its song in his ears and pushed open the door to his office.

  Of all the ways for a night to end, that wasn’t the worst. Nobody had tried to kill him and he’d managed to walk away making everyone think he might just kill them.

  All in all, he’d call it a success.

  The underbosses needed to know that he wouldn’t cower to their demands, because if Wesley gave them the smallest bit of slack, they would use the rope to hang him.

  They were envious and Wesley knew it, not just because Ashwood favored him, but because the other Uskhanyan cities were such a stark juxtaposition to his. Places like Ilaria’s Eltriea to the east, packed with concrete buildings hidden amongst the clouds, sandwiched too close to look like anything other than a jigsaw, broken only by flashing signs that advertised food or pleasure. The southern city of Kythnu that Stelios watched over was older and brimming with a very boring kind of culture that made for pretty architecture and not much else. It was warm, always, but the glow of the sun was the only color in its stark expanse of white buildings. And then there was Rishiya, Casim’s territory to the west, the most war-devastated of the realm, where farmers worked the land and buildings were covered in greenery.

  They were nothing compared to Creije, where buildings were a mix of colors spread lavishly across the city, so when the sun hit them just right the windows cast paintings on the ground.

  Wesley sat on the edge of his desk and reached into his pocket for another clover.

  Behind him, the painting he inherited from the old underboss began to shake and
Wesley eyed it with a curious smile. It depicted the four elements of the Many Gods, their symbols like watchful eyes that forever despaired over Wesley’s secrets and, nestled above them, a shadow moon in the drawn sky.

  In the old days, it was called the Crafter Moon and was part of some sacred ritual Wesley had read about, though he couldn’t remember in which book. He did remember that the text said whenever a shadow moon appeared, magic increased tenfold. It was only a story, he supposed, and since Crafters were no longer around to ask, he couldn’t be sure whether it was true. Still, Wesley always liked the idea of a magical moon imbuing people with power.

  It was why he kept the painting, long after he disposed of its owner.

  Wesley watched, patiently, as the image continued to shake until it finally creaked open. From the darkness behind, a face slipped through.

  “Sir,” Falk said, quiet and cautious. “I think I’ve had a breakthrough.”

  Though Falk was older than Wesley, it was not by much, and yet still his face was worn with magic. Stretched and then scrunched, making everything about him pointed, from his lips to his small nose.

  “A breakthrough,” Wesley repeated.

  Falk nodded and Wesley’s lips drew to a smile.

  The other underbosses were so concerned with the Kingpin’s elixir, with the things that Ashwood gave to Wesley, that they never thought to worry about the things Wesley would make for himself.

  The weapons and the magic, and the infinite possibility they held when paired together.

  “Show me,” Wesley said.

  Falk pushed the door of the painting back wider, erasing the shadow moon from view.

  Wesley pillowed his hands into his pockets, and with a whistle to match his magic, he stepped through.

  TAVIA HITCHED A HAND on her waist and looked up.

  Saxony’s cell was most likely on the sixth floor and Tavia hated heights. She also hated climbing and any task that required athleticism beyond street performing. She had no rope or wall-scaling materials and she certainly didn’t have any acrobatic skill.

  But she could fly.

  Tavia had stolen the hover charms from the old underboss on her fourteenth birthday, as a present to herself because though she didn’t like heights she did like the idea of being able to escape at a moment’s notice.