She picked up a pen and dipped the nib in the inkpot, ready to close her journal’s entry.
“One way or another, I shall make an end to this.”
The King of the River Rats
Michele Lang
The East River Waterfront, New York City
Spring, 1886
• • •
When Fire Master Jane Emerson opened her eyes, inky darkness surrounded her. Deep as the blackness engulfing her thoughts of pirates, of treachery, of death.
She tried to move and found her hands securely bound behind her. Heart pounding, she wriggled on the splintery floor, trying to get free, but it was no use. Somehow, despite her power, Jane had become a prisoner.
With great difficulty, she forced herself to stay still and to think about what to do. She breathed as deeply as she could, smelled the musk of the wooden floor beneath her, pocked with a faint whiff of mold. She heard water slapping against the wood below her cheek. The floor beneath her rolled, and far away she heard the mournful cry of a foghorn.
She was on a boat. And now she remembered how she had gotten there.
• • •
“I’m taking you off the white slavery story,” Daniel Tappen had said only two days earlier. “In fact, you must come off the Five Points beat altogether. From now on, you’ll cover the society balls uptown.”
He sat behind his enormous mahogany desk in his publisher’s office of the Daily Clarion, in the heart of her beat, the Tenth Ward, the tenement district. His protégée, reporter Jane Emerson, took the news of her demotion like a bullet. His voice sounded apologetic, his face was masked with embarrassment. But nothing could remove the import of his words.
The numbness began to yield to a sharp pain, mortification coupled with grief, but she refused to crumple under the force of his pronouncement.
Ever since the New Year, girls from respectable homes had begun to vanish. One or two a week, snatched from their uptown homes . . . or tempted away somehow. Jane suspected the white slavery trade, which raged in the Tenth Ward, almost completely out in the open. But so far, despite her investigations into the depraved pimps’ markets in places like the old Bull’s Head Tavern and the Silver Dollar Saloon, Jane had found no trace of the girls.
Jane could not allow herself to accede to her employer’s words and abandon her hunt. She paced back and forth on Tappan’s gorgeous Persian silk carpet, her arms crossed in front of her so she could hide the trembling of her fingers. Sparks of rage shot out in a nimbus around her head, a corona of heat, and because Tappen was an Air Master, she knew he could see it. She didn’t care. Perhaps it would help her in her cause if Daniel could only realize how deeply his pronouncement had affected her.
For he was not only her employer, but her mentor in magic. Daniel Tappen, scion of Old New York, had taught her all that she knew of the arcane arts of the Elemental Masters. A Mage of Air, he had taught the hot-tempered Jane to blend her Fire affinities with the cool azure of Air Magic, and her mastery had benefited from the marriage of such unlike Magics.
She had come from Boston all but untrained, chafing at her ignorance, and Daniel had not only schooled her in magic, but opened the world of Gotham, indeed all the burgeoning Gilded Age, to Jane’s reach.
Because of all this, the demotion meant far more than the loss of a job, her livelihood, or her station in the world. Despite the fact that Jane knew she had done nothing wrong, the terrible thought besieged her that somehow she had disappointed Daniel in some fundamental way.
As usual, her temper fought to claim her, and as usual she fought to tame it. So she paced, silk skirts sweeping her ankles as she turned, the hems twitching like a lioness’s tail on the hunt. The brass-and-cherrywood grandfather clock leaning against the back wall tick-tocked in tandem with her steps.
Finally, she steadied herself sufficiently to speak. “What is the reason for my dismissal?” To Jane’s dismay, she could not keep the trembling out of her voice.
“We both know the reason.” Tappen leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Do you really need me to spell it out for you?”
An omnibus clattered by below, rattling the windowpanes behind Tappen’s desk. Jane looked at the window and saw a black bird swoop by in the brilliant blue sky, and she thought of her beloved Rose. Her little bird of fire.
The thought of Rose, Elemental phoenix and her dearest friend, put steel into Jane’s spine. The trembling stopped.
“Yes,” she replied. “I think it would benefit both of us if you explain your reasoning here. I know that I am not an incompetent, and that my stories have enhanced the reputation of the Daily Clarion.”
Jane knew she had done more than merely enhance the newspaper’s reputation. Her exposé of the tenement arsonist, the lady robber baron Imogen Stewart, had not just caused a sensation in New York society at large, but it had cemented her reputation as a rising young star of the mages of the great city. No place as powerful as New York could avoid attracting the cruel and wrong aspects of magic, and it was up to the mages of the world to police their own and to make sure that magic did not spill over into the lives of ordinary folk.
Tappen clasped his hands on the surface of his desk blotter and cleared his throat. “Your work is nothing short of extraordinary. But I have no choice but to remove you from the Tenth Ward, Miss Emerson. Not to dim your brilliance, but to ensure your own safety.”
Safety. Jane smelled fire, and the back of her throat burned. She stopped pacing in front of her editor’s desk and looked him directly in the eyes.
He didn’t flinch or look away. Instead, those all-knowing sky-blue eyes took in the sight of her, her righteous fury, and absorbed all of her teeming emotion without a blink. Ah, Daniel and his blasted serenity! Sometimes his even-temperedness and calm rationality drove Jane halfway to madness.
“Ah, for my own good,” Jane finally said. Daniel arched an eyebrow but said nothing. “You are my teacher, and my mentor, and my guardian as well. I suppose hiding me away will make your thankless job of watching over me a bit easier, at least.”
The grandfather clock counted time in the silence.
“Not at all,” Daniel finally replied, his voice still easy and calm, at odds with his tense features. “But you don’t realize the peril in which you have put yourself. There are powers that do not want you to discover the fate of those missing girls. And I have received word from a lofty source indeed, warning me that if you don’t stop your investigation into this latest story, your very life is in danger.”
Daniel meant Tammany Hall, the corrupt political machine that controlled New York politics. A fearful enemy, indeed.
“Ah,” Jane said. “But what about the safety of the missing girls? What will become of them?”
Daniel’s eyes darkened to midnight, and for the first time Jane realized how frightened he himself had become. The power within her balled into an almost painful core of energy, begging for release.
Daniel leaned forward as if that would drive home his intent more effectively. “In your official capacity as the tenements reporter for the Daily Clarion, yes, you must stop. You are drawing a tremendous amount of attention to yourself.”
He stared deeply into her eyes, piercing her, and she understood in a blinding flash what he really was saying to her. As her employer, the publisher of a daily newspaper subject to political and economic forces, Tappen had no choice but to pull her off the story.
Magic was not the only power rising in New York. The politics here were rotten to the core. For whatever reason, the Tammany machine cared to obscure the fates of these unfortunate girls. But Jane could not bear to forget them.
She drew a step closer and leaned over the massive old mahogany desk. “Imogen Stewart is dead,” she reminded him—herself—for courage. “She will never burn a child again.”
The robber baroness had met her end at the hands
of Jane’s sleuthing and her magic, the cold winter before this new, fresh spring of 1886 in the mighty city of New York, the epicenter of a new world age. But such a new age of power did not come without attendant danger, either corporeal or magical.
Both of them knew that these young girls, most of them from respectable homes, were disappearing from all over the city, and they could sense the strange, malevolent magic at work beneath the surface. Jane, emboldened by her victory against the malignant robber baroness who had succumbed to the power of a dragon Elemental, thought that the light of truth could act to kill the magic that now stalked the innocent of New York.
The cold blue of Daniel’s eyes put the lie to her rather naïve supposition.
“And you are afraid for me,” Jane whispered.
“Yes, I am afraid for you. There is political danger, yes. But it is worse than that. The thing snatching the girls away is of a magic much more ominous than Imogen Stewart’s. And Jane . . .”
He rarely called her Jane, and her name on his lips betrayed his fear for her. Daniel broke their gaze and turned to look out the window behind his desk. His narrow shoulders tensed, and he muttered under his breath, clearly miserable, though he would rather die than admit it to her.
She took a half-step forward. “Surely you know best, but . . . do you think I can simply stay in my gilded cage while these poor girls disappear? My heart is not so hard as that, Daniel. Perhaps I am a silly girl, and too innocent to comprehend the danger. But surely it would be an evil to refuse to use the powers I’ve been granted?”
Daniel swiveled back to face her. Tears shone in her mentor’s eyes. She had never seen him visibly shaken so, not ever. Jane’s mouth went dry as cotton.
“My dear Jane, I, too, possess powers. I, too, have taken it upon myself to protect ordinary folk from magic gone awry. But this . . . this magic is most foul. It comes from somewhere the mages of New York have been unable to trace. You are newly come into your powers; you think merely telling the story is enough to change the ending.”
“But surely you haven’t given up?”
For the first time since Jane had entered the lair of Daniel Tappen’s office, he smiled. A small and dangerous smile. “No. You know better than that. Together, in good time, we must find this sickness hidden in the roots of the city, and we will bring it out. But we must do it with discretion. There is no way to report this story without making it worse. Please trust me.”
Something hiding in his voice made her heart beat harder, almost painfully. She knew that Daniel meant to protect her from a danger that even he could not yet fight. But if she acquiesced to his protection, the girls who had disappeared would never come to light again. And she could not bear the thought.
She sighed. “Because it is you who ask me, Daniel, I will refrain from investigating the white slavery case in my capacity as a reporter for the Daily Clarion. I will write no stories. I will contact no sources.”
They both knew she was lying.
• • •
The boat creaked in the darkness, and the rolling waves under Jane’s head became stronger. She bit her lips to keep back a groan.
After speaking with Daniel, she knew the gambling houses and saloons had too close a relationship to Tammany to risk further investigation there. So Jane followed her hunch and began to ask questions along the East River waterfront, where all manner of wickedness unfolded by night.
The worst of the thugs operated on the water, not on shore. The River Rats and their leader, Tommy Rooster, were renowned as the most notorious of the river pirates operating along both sides of the waterfront, in New York City and across the river in Brooklyn.
They looted the foreign fruit trade in the neighborhood of the Wall Street ferry, and robbed the captains of the canal boats carrying freight from the great California clippers to shore. The canal boatmen and the stevedores on the docks had no love lost for the pirates, and Jane hoped her contacts among the policemen and the sailors near Water Street could give her more information than her Tenth Ward sources had done.
She did not go alone into these dangerous precincts. Walking next to her, in the guise of a penniless tenement girl, was her dearest friend and familiar Rose. This magnificent Elemental, an elusive and rare phoenix, had been drawn to Jane’s Fire Magic, and Jane had saved her from a brutal death by ice the winter before.
Jane had provided for the phoenix in her mortal manifestation, and Rose repaid her with a profound and unsettling magic. Each believed they had gotten the better of the bargain, and Jane often reflected that her faith in this cruel, cold world was strengthened simply by the knowledge that a creature like Rose existed in it.
Now they walked hand in hand along Water Street, the power flowing out of Rose’s fingers and augmenting Jane’s energies. With Rose by her side, Jane felt like she could fight a dozen dragons and triumph.
The full moon glowered down on them like a lone, accusing eye. As they walked along the wharf, Jane heard more than saw the enormous river rats running along the splintery docks and the enormous ropes that tethered the ships to the shore.
A thick black cloud covered the moon and shrouded them in darkness. And the spring night suddenly was plunged into an icy cold.
Rose’s fingers tightened inside Jane’s. “Danger,” she whispered in her low, husky voice.
Jane could hardly speak through the cold, thick magic. “I sense it, too.”
A group of men emerged from the boat tethered to the end of the dock, shaking the rotten gray planks with their thick leather boots.
Jane gathered her energy and prepared to do magical battle with these men, who walked within a terrible darkness, a clot of emptiness, a hole in the ordinary night.
She wove her Fire Magic into a braid of energy, planning to bind the men so that they could not harm her—
“Fly away, Rose,” Jane whispered with a sudden urgency. She knew to the roots of her hair that she was going to lose this battle to these unknown assailants, and furthermore that they were not the ones generating the superior magic, but merely the minions of that alien power.
If nothing else, Rose could escape, must be safe. All at once, Jane understood how Daniel had felt, helpless to protect her. Rose’s safety meant more than her own.
Rose said nothing, only rose into the inky gloom with a shrill cry that split the night. Her brilliant plumage stood out against the darkness like a brilliant jewel set against velvet. The men hesitated as Rose shot through the sky like an arrow and away.
Thank goodness, away.
Godspeed, Rose, Jane thought. And then they were upon her . . .
There was a great outcry . . .
And now, alone, bound and tossed into the hull of the boat, Jane suspected she would soon discover the fates of the missing girls she had tried so hard to find.
• • •
The day after her meeting with Daniel, Jane determined to seek information from her new beat uptown, since she was officially barred from the old. Instead of the tenements and workshops of the Five Points, she alighted from a cab to the front door of a fashionable brownstone on Madison Avenue, where Mrs. Fitzsimmons had agreed to meet with her.
Mrs. Fitzsimmons’ daughter Molly had disappeared back in February, and the police and the other reporters had already come and gone. Now, in April, Jane hoped Mrs. Fitzsimmons could shed some light on what had happened.
Jane presented her card to a liveried butler, who disappeared down a long hallway, his footsteps echoing away into nothingness. She was surprised when the butler returned with the lady of the house herself, sweeping to the front door to meet Jane.
Every inch the French fashion plate, Mrs. Fitzsimmons was a vision in a green walking dress, with a perfect little white hat and matching gloves. Jane felt quite dowdy in her own best muslin dress.
“Pleasure, I’m sure,” the Madame of the house drawled a
s she held out a silk-soft hand for Jane to shake. “Your reputation precedes you, Miss Emerson. I expected a dirty-faced hellion of the streets.”
She looked as far from the image of a grieving mother as could be imagined. A whited sepulcher, a voice whispered in Jane’s mind, and then she swallowed the bitter thought away.
After a moment of complete shock, Jane managed to laugh. “I clean up quite nicely, don’t I? Thank you ever so much for meeting me. You must be terribly busy, all dressed up in your finery.”
“Oh, this is my working dress . . . we are to have a ball tonight, and I am all in a tizzy over it.”
A restless breeze disturbed the lace curtains at the window next to the front door. “Oh, dear, looks like rain, doesn’t it?” the lady said, a little too quickly.
“A ball! How lovely,” Jane said, her voice affecting Mrs. Fitzsimmons’s careless cheer, her mind churning furiously underneath. “I hope it doesn’t rain tonight and spoil it. May I ask the occasion?”
For the first time, the lady looked a bit discomfited. “It is the engagement party for my son, Herbert. He is marrying one of the daughters of the Old Knickerbockers, Emily Van Heusen. We are thrilled to pieces, and as the saying goes, rain will not wash you away . . . they are a grand old family.”
Mrs. Fitzsimmons seemed to sense the question hidden in Jane’s silence. “Oh. You’re thinking of Molly, aren’t you?”
Jane nodded. “I am here, as you know, because of her, to see if you have learned anything more of her fate.”
Mrs. Fitzsimmons glanced down the hall, her cheeks blushing demurely. Her butler took a step forward, as if expecting to toss Jane out on her ear for her impertinence.
But no. Evidently the lady had decided to speak her peace before bidding Jane farewell. “I know that’s why you have come. You want to see me in mourning, secluded, my family destroyed. That is what you expected, what you hoped to put in the newspaper, I’m sure. Read the stories from February, and that is what you will find.”
Jane struggled to put her subject at ease, but she saw that she had already lost Mrs. Fitzsimmons, indeed that she had lost her before she had ever knocked upon her front door. “I’m sorry,” she finally said. “That is a beautiful dress. Such a green.”
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