by James Hunter
“You’re a sixty-six-year-old, blues-playing magic-man who lives in a car,” she said before picking up her drink and taking another sip. “We’ve been in more than one firefight together. I’ve stitched up wounds that a shape shifter carved into your stomach. We just traveled through a parallel future and met Fate. In my book, we’re past the awkward first-date jitters. Besides, you could’ve chosen to have Lady Fate send us anywhere and you chose here. A dumpy bar in Southend. So I can’t image this,” she motioned to her pants, “will bother you much.”
“Fair enough … though, as a side note, this bar is not ‘dumpy.’ It just has character, nothing wrong with a little character.”
“If this place gets any more ‘character,’” she said, “the health inspector is likely to close it down for uncleanliness—which, I admit, would be unfortunate.” She pointed at the chunk of burger remaining. “This is phenomenal.”
The tinkle of a brass bell mounted over the entrance sent out a shrill call as the front door swung in and a man shuffled his way in amidst a flutter of snow. He stomped his two-tone wingtips—yes wingtips, feel free to laugh—on the entry mat, shaking the snow free, and hastily unwrapped the scarf draped around his throat and face before peeling off his black pea coat. Wingtips aside, Boston winters were chilly.
He was taller than me by more than half a foot—six-four sans the fancy shoes, which added an inch or two—with thick muscles across his chest and shoulders that made him look like a professional athlete or a movie star. Definitely the type of guy women noticed. It was more than his looks though, he carried himself a certain way—like he was a man who knew things you didn’t, a guy who maybe should’ve been hobnobbing with influential politicians or drinking cocktails with the rich and famous instead of gabbing with you. Hoity-toity, better-than-you, uber prick. But for all of that he was still a good guy.
He wore dark tweed slacks, creased down the middle, which rode a little too high to be fashionable, a matching dinner jacket with a waistcoat underneath, and a crisp white button-up with a fat striped tie disappearing below his vest. His hair was short and wavy brown, styled up in a neat little 1920s hairdo that most people would probably consider retro. Hell, the guy looked like he should’ve been on set for The Great Gatsby.
Except for him it wasn’t retro. James had spent his late teens during the roaring twenties, and had never really left them behind. At least not the fashion. Though over a hundred years old, he looked maybe forty—he aged even better than me, which I attributed to his healthy eating habits, regular exercise routine, and generally clean living. Blech. No thanks.
I shot up an arm and waved it back and forth. He spotted me and threaded across the room, a shit-eating grin spreading across his face. It’d been a couple of years since the last time we spoke and even longer since I’d actually seen him.
We were on speaking terms, though things were a little uneasy between us. Shitty situation—James was a member of the Fist of the Staff, one of the most badass battle magi on the planet, and he’d been a mentor to me, a brother. Taught me most of what I know. But he’d also sided with the Guild about Ailia. Well, maybe not sided—he’d backed me up and argued vehemently that the Guild had a responsibility to kick the shit out of the Morrigan. When the Guild ruled, however, he toed the company line. Maybe Ailia had been my gal, but she’d been his friend, and friends don’t let shit like that go. No matter what.
Still, it was good to see him.
I slipped out of the seat as he walked up and threw my arms around him. He hugged me back, even lifted me off the floor a little—great big ol’ son of a bitch.
“Yancy,” he said, setting me down and backing up to arm’s length so he could get a good look at me. “You look …” He paused, lips pressing together into a thin slash. “Awful,” he finally declared. “Just terrible. Too much booze, too many cigarettes, too much junk food—it’s starting to show. You shouldn’t look so worn down for another fifty or sixty years at least. You’ll never make it to four hundred at this rate. And who in the world dresses you in the morning? A blind chimp?” His eyes roved over my attire, disgust plainly evident. “Just atrocious.”
“It’s good to see you too, dick. You look too healthy. You also look like a colossal douchenozzle. Now, come on, sit down. Can I order you a beer or something?” I slid into the booth next to Ferraro, while he glided in across from us.
“A tonic water,” he said. Guy was such a weirdo. I waved down a waiter—a rail thin guy, with a ratty shirt—and placed the order. The waiter shuffled off with a brief and unenthusiastic grunt.
“And who is this vision?” James asked after a moment, eyeing Ferraro appraisingly. The words would’ve been completely corny coming from anyone but him. From him, they just seemed like part of the package.
“Special Agent Nicole Ferraro, FBI,” she said, apparently unimpressed, “and I’d like to ask you the same.”
James leaned back in the booth, considering her, cataloguing her, trying to figure out where she fit into this all. I hadn’t told him much over the phone, so Ferraro was a piece of the puzzle he probably couldn’t place yet. The waiter came back and dropped off James’s tonic water in a spotty glass with a few bobbing ice cubes.
James shifted his focus to the glass then casually pushed it away. Bit of a neat freak. “Well,” he said, looking up at Ferraro, “I never like to disappoint a lady, but I’m afraid you should really leave this be. Yancy,” he said, “we really should do this alone. It’s very good to see you, but there are some pressing matters that we simply must discuss—matters, which it might behoove us to talk about privately. Pardon, Madam Agent, but frankly this is none of your affair.” He smiled his best movie-star grin, but his words hung heavy with threat.
“Hey, take it easy, alright?” I said. “She’s okay, I’ll vouch for her, and this sure as shit concerns her. We just finished a friggin’ trek through the Hinterlands, walked through a shadow Time Lap. Nasty business, part of the reason we need to talk.”
“Really.” It wasn’t a question. “And she knows about the Guild?”
“Don’t talk around me,” Ferraro said, staring James down like a criminal suspect undergoing interrogation. “Yes, I know about the Guild. Enough anyway.”
“She’s quite a bearcat, isn’t she?” he said to me with a smirk, the tension seeming to bleed away. “Consider for a moment, Agent, that some of the information I’m about to divulge could make you a liability and a danger to certain … parties. Are you sure it’s worth the risk? You can still walk away, walk back to your safe, sweet mortal world. I can easily forget I saw you here tonight. Your involvement in this matter need not continue.”
She crossed her arms, a small frown turning her lips down. “You don’t need to protect me. I’m more than capable of taking care of myself, so I’d appreciate a little professional courtesy here.”
He carefully plucked at a nonexistent piece of lint on his sleeve. After a long pause, he looked up—eyes fastening on Ferraro with laser-focused intensity. “Very well, though don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’m James Sullivan, Lieutenant Commander of the Fist of the Staff—the Guild’s special enforcement division. Now”—he turned his steely gaze on me, all the humor gone from his voice—“Yancy, I’m here of my own accord, but you should know that there is currently a standing order to arrest you on sight and bring you in for questioning. It is only because of our history that I haven’t done so already.”
“The hell are you talking about?” I asked, genuinely confused. “Why would the Guild want me in custody—up until now they’ve seemed pretty content to let me go my own way.”
“Up until now, you weren’t the prime suspect in the murder investigation of one of the members of the Junior Council, Maxim Kozlov.” His tone was soft, not threatening, but I’d seen James like this plenty of times before. Though he looked like a flamboyant dandy out of an oldies catalogue, he was more deadly than a cage full of tigers and he always got quiet before violence. The calm before the
cyclone.
“What? No, Jimmy—you can’t believe that.”
“Obviously, I’m not convinced,” he said, “or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. And you know I hate it when you call me Jimmy.”
“Look, I was only at Kozlov’s place following up a lead. I helped find Ben Altschuler’s kidnapped grandkid and figured out a Guild washout named Randy Shelton was targeting the members of the Junior Council who’d denied him admittance into the Guild. Kozlov was the other no vote against Shelton. So after helping Ben out, I called Kozlov up—when I couldn’t get through, I stopped by to check up on him and found him dead. That’s it.”
After I finished, James looked away and ran one hand over his slick hair. “No,” he said after a moment. “You must be mistaken about Shelton. I remember the boy—I administered his combat test. Four or five months ago, this was. He was …” He paused, thinking. “Passable. Yes, passable, but not in any way exceptional and certainly not strong enough to kill a formidable mage like Maxim. The man was a former judge, you know. You must be mistaken,” he said again.
“No, James. I’m not.” I placed both hands flat on the table, leaned forward in my seat, and fixed him with a level stare. “Look at me. I’m not wrong about this. I saw Shelton. But Shelton has a new friend: Koschei the Deathless, the Lich. Someone in the Guild is a traitor, James—someone high enough up to gain access to the Guild vault.” Silence spread between us like a thick curtain.
He looked down, considered the tonic water in the spotted glass, and then took it up and drained it. He set the glass down and wiped a hand across his mouth—a sure sign of his shock, James would never do something so lowbrow as not use a napkin. “Those are some very serious accusations. Death penalty, accusations. You’re sure of this?”
“Oh yeah. I’ve seen Shelton and it’s not a pretty sight. Plus, I’ve got a very highly placed source that assures me it’s Koschei.”
“All right,” he said, “start from the beginning. Tell me everything.”
I gave him a brief run down—told him about Old Man Winter, about the poison, the jailbreak, and our trip into the Hinterlands. He had a bunch of questions about the Time Lap, the Grail, and Fast Hands Steve, though overall he seemed to be handling everything well. I did leave out the info about the Crook of Winter and my inside source, Lady Fate.
After I finished he sat quiet for a long while, deep in thought. “If this is true …” he said, trailing off. “You must come in with me, stand trial, tell the council what you’ve told me. Offer proof, evidence—we’ll search the vault and if Koschei’s ring is gone it should get you off the hook. Can you corroborate any of this?” he said, looking at Ferraro.
“Most of it, yes,” she replied.
“It’s settled then,” he replied, “there’s nothing else to it. Turn yourselves in, the both of you. Let the Guild conduct the investigation, the Fist can handle Shelton. Mop up this Fast Hands Steve.”
“Not an option,” Ferraro said, shaking her head. “If someone on the council is responsible for giving Randy the ring in the first place, then that’s the worst thing we can do. Anyone could be the suspect, and if that person is highly placed, there’s a good chance Yancy will take the fall. Not to mention whatever will happen to me. Turning ourselves in would be a mistake, I just know it.”
“She’s right,” I said. “There’s no way I’m going to the Guild with this. Not a snowball’s chance in hell that I’ll throw myself on the mercy of those jackasses, present company mostly excluded. I trust you, but that’s as far as it goes. Plus, Shelton is not gonna get off so easy—that dickweed has a reckoning coming his way.”
“God,” James said. He stuck up an arm and flagged down the waiter again. The man plodded his way over.
“Yeah,” the kid said, bored to his toes. “What can I get you?”
“I’m going to need something a little stronger,” James said. “Why don’t you just bring over a bottle of Scotch, not panther piss either—the good stuff.”
Ferraro looked at me and mouthed the word, Panther piss?
“He’s a fossil,” I whispered back, “even worse than me, can’t stop talking in 1920s speak—he means shitty booze.”
James fished a hundred-dollar bill out of his lapel pocket and handed it to the kid, who suddenly looked a mite bit more interested. “As a tip,” James said. The kid hurried to comply, jogging across the floor and returning a few heartbeats later with a bottle of Auchentoshan Three-Wood single malt. Best stuff in the house, though still cheap as Scotch went.
James unscrewed the cap, poured himself a large sip, and tossed it back in a single long, slow pull. He poured another shot. “All right, you can’t go to the Guild. You’re absolutely right—with your history it might well end up as a kangaroo court. At least let me help you. Yancy, you’re a passable battle mage, maybe even good, but a Lich? No, that’s out of your league, I’m afraid. I, however, am a better battle mage and between the two of us?”
He picked up his glass and swirled the contents, as though the answer might lay somewhere inside the amber liquid. Likely, he was running through possible combat scenarios—guy was sharp as a friggin’ K-Bar. “Yes, between the two of us, it could be done.”
He was right, the Lich was out of my league; there was a damn good reason that ring had been locked up in the Guild’s big vault. Being a powerful mage isn’t just about how much raw Vis you can handle—there are techniques, skills, and complex theorems that take a long, long time to learn and even longer to master. Several lifetimes. Though the Lich was constrained by Randy’s natural Vis threshold—the amount of power Randy could safely draw and handle—he was still more knowledgeable than any mage alive, which made him a deadly opponent.
James was also right about being a better battle mage than me—though not quite as strong in raw power, he was a master combat strategist with twice my skill and a whole helluva lot more experience. But I had the Crook of Winter in my corner, which he didn’t know about, and besides, I wasn’t about to feed James’s gigantic ego by admitting I couldn’t do it without him.
“First, screw you—you’re not that much better—and second,” I said, “it’s better if you don’t help. If this all goes south, I don’t want to drag you down. Besides, having a set of eyes inside the council is the better long-term play.”
He fidgeted in his seat, a look of irritation distorting his normally suave features. “Well if you don’t want me to help, why did you even bother to call?”
“Oh, I do want your help, just not in the way you’re thinking. First, I need to find Randy, and I think you can swing it with your contacts in the spirit world. That son of a bitch is ours”—I waved a hand at Ferraro—“and we are the ones that are going to bring him down. Second, you need to warn Sigu Nakajima, from the Junior Council—she voted yes for Shelton, so she’s probably okay, but better to play it safe. Then you need to look in on Ben and his grandkid—make sure Ben knows what the deal is and finds someplace safe to bunker down.”
“Of course I can warn Sigu and Ben. But finding your man? What you’re asking for … it will be a costly endeavor. If there really is someone in the Guild orchestrating these events, then poking around like this could make me some serious enemies. But I can find Shelton—I’m James bloody Sullivan.” He nodded then took another drink. “Since you’re already asking me to move mountains, is there anything else I can do for you? Would you like the Hope Diamond, perhaps? Or the Crown jewels? Why, maybe you’d like me to lobby the Elder Council and nominate you for the position of Arch-Mage?”
“I asked for your help, not your sass,” I replied. “But yeah, actually, there is something else. You need to start looking for who leaked the ring in the first place. My source says whoever did this is looking to do much, much worse—turn themselves into a god, break apart all the old alliances. Shake shit up in a big way. No friggin’ clue who it is, but they’re high in the Guild.”
“Who is this source?” he asked. “If I’m going to stick my
neck out, I’d at least like to know whose word I’m acting on.”
I dithered for a moment. I knew Lady Fate was trying to do the right thing, but supernatural beings like her were often regarded with more than a little suspicion by magi—usually for good reason. They could be sly, fickle, and occasionally deceitful … maybe more than occasionally. Fine, almost always. So, if I told James, there was a damn good chance he’d walk away. Shit, there was a damn good chance he’d arrest me. But Lady Fate had rescued me from prison, helped me get my powers back, and had treated fairly with me so far. She seemed genuinely on the level. Time to roll the dice.
“Lady Fate,” I said finally.
He laughed, just a little bark. “The Crone? Yes, I suppose she might involve herself in something like this. She’s appointed you Hand of Fate in this matter?” he asked.
I nodded.
“And you trust her?” He rolled his eyes and sighed. “You’ve never been the best judge of character.” He paused and readjusted his tie. “Let’s say, just for a moment, that I believe you … where would I start? I’m an enforcer, not an investigator. I much prefer to leave the gumshoeing to the judges.”
“Start by narrowing your suspect pool down,” Ferraro said. “The perpetrator will have to be someone with power and access—means and opportunity. Though I don’t know how large the Guild is, there can’t realistically be many people with the credentials to get the ring out if it’s as dangerous as you both make it sound. That should cut your list of potential targets down significantly. And don’t forget to account for people you might normally overlook—maintenance workers, cleaning crews, law enforcement officials. All of them are potential suspects. Probably, you’re looking for someone that only has a moderate amount of political clout, otherwise they’d likely be making a more overt power grab. This is subtle, which suggests the suspect doesn’t have the muscle to move in the open. Not yet.”
I stared at her, my mouth open just a little too far. “Damn,” I said, “what she said.”
