“I’m glad to hear it. Don’t bother to contact me once the job is complete – if you did it right, I’ll be seeing it all over the papers.” Ming nodded, and with that, their meeting was over. Councilwoman Linden was out the door, leaving Ming in her shadows to plan how, exactly, to catch a magician.
“I am just absolutely thrilled.”
Daisy shifted in the back seat of Frisk’s car, squeezed between Angel and Rudolph as the former heaped compliments and exclamations of excitement onto her. Driving was Frisk, who kept glancing in the rearview mirror at her, and Amelia ignored her entirely from the passenger’s seat.
“Bet Swarz is stoked, too,” Frisk said as she steered them toward their destination, a sister establishment to their own speakeasy on the southwest side of town called Walter’s. “Seems awfully sick of trash like me and Vicks hanging around. I know he hates mana freaks – thinks we waste the stuff.”
They were, of course, talking about Daisy’s magic, which had become common knowledge around the office since her talk with Mr Swarz a few days ago. She hadn’t seen any of the warehouse folks since then, so she had decided to take Angel up on her offer for another night out. It was somewhere more daring this time, and Daisy hoped that without all her guards up to hide her magic, she might make a better impression on Frisk and her friends.
As excited as Angel and even Frisk were, Rudolph and Amelia both sulked while their girlfriends chattered with – or at – Daisy. She was fairly certain that neither of them did magic, and they both seemed a bit put-out by conversation. Maybe it made them feel that they owed some of their favorable standing at the company to their lovers’ good graces. Not a comfortable mindset to be in, Daisy was sure, but she didn’t know how to help either of them. She could barely even keep up with Angel’s questions.
“Now, you said that your grandmother gave you these artifacts. How many did you say you have?”
“Twenty altogether. Some more useful than others.”
“And to activate them, you – and do correct me if I’m getting this wrong – you apply your will to pull the innate magic out of them, rather than apply will to push the magic out of yourself as it is with methodical magic? That’s why you don’t need to replenish your mental energies with mana, yes?”
Daisy shrugged, hoping it came off more as ignorant than uncomfortable. “Maybe. You might be better off asking Mr Swarz that.”
Amelia glanced back at them. Her eyes narrowed into a glare for just a moment, clearly irritated with all the talk of magic, but it faded as she looked to Angel. “Hey, Angel, how come Mr Swarz doesn’t ever come party with us?”
Angel waved a hand, covered in a pristine white glove. “Oh, you know him. He’s just a grouch.” Even joking about Mr Swarz wasn’t enough to distract Angel from her interest in Daisy’s abilities, though. “So, tell me more about these artifacts. Can you explain to me what some of them do?” Angel didn’t notice it, but Amelia huffed and faced forward again when the older woman reverted her attention.
Before Frisk had come by Daisy’s apartment to pick her up, Daisy had decked herself in a short, pale gold dress decorated on the breast with white beads; white flats; and a charm bracelet. Five of the twenty trinkets she had mentioned to Angel were attached to that bracelet. She held out her wrist to Angel and poked at one charm, shaped like the silhouette of a dove in flight. “All right, so this one creates a nexus of silence – it muffles sound down to nothing for about a seven-yard radius. This one–” She tapped a simple, round nickel dangling near the bird. “–creates a pressure blast. It’s one of my more powerful ones; it can move a bit over a ton.”
Angel’s blue eyes glimmered with a hungry sheen as she examined the trinkets. “Astonishing! And where did your grandmother get these? Did she make them?”
Daisy refrained from pulling her arm away on instinct as her blood chilled at the question. Before she could make any reply, every passenger in the car was flung forward, straining against their seatbelts, as Frisk put her foot a bit too heavy on the brake. “Here we are: Walter’s.” She put the car into park and glanced over her shoulder at Angel. “We won’t be here long. Just gotta pick up Gina, then we’ll head to the Gin Fountain.”
“We aren’t staying here?” Daisy asked as they began piling out of the car.
“Nah. Walter’s is a drag. We just got some business relations here, is all. Gina’s friends with their cellist. They used to play together at the temple they went to as kids. She wanted to visit him before the night got going, not that Walter's ever gets going.”
“Plenty of time to stop in and say hi to our friends across town,” Angel said, linking her arm with Rudolph’s as their group followed Frisk from the curbside where she parked down a poorly-lit street in a neighborhood filled mostly with cafes closed for the night. Daisy knew the area – it was several blocks from her apartment, between that and the Catherine Eleanor Ruthell Women’s College where she had studied. It was a bit of walk from home, so she didn’t frequent it often, but they passed by a deli that was shuttered up for the evening where she had eaten before. Walter’s was a run-down bar snugly fit between a second-hand book store and a vacant brick building. “The Gin Fountain is only two streets over, too. We won’t need to cram all six of us into the car.”
“Not until the drive home,” Rudolph joked, looking a bit merrier already without Daisy between him and his lady. Daisy thought back to Mr Swarz’s warnings about the two of them, but she didn’t take it seriously. Angel was flirtatious, certainly, but there was a particular delicacy she applied to it, as though she were afraid of chasing Daisy off. For her own part, Daisy wasn’t much interested in any entanglements with Angel and definitely not Rudolph, who likewise seemed uninterested in her. She suspected that unless she actively responded to Angel’s attentions, the older woman wouldn’t press the matter.
The interior of Walter’s was nearly as shabby as its façade, but there was a sort of pleasantness to the dim lights and smoky air. It was cozier than Pinstripes, but, as Frisk and Angel predicted, it was a sort of quiet affair. A burly bouncer nodded them in when he recognized Frisk and Angel, and he otherwise paid them no mind. A band was set up on a small stage, but rather than playing, they chatted with a woman standing up there with them. The woman faced away from the front door, but judging from her bushy black hair, Daisy assumed that was Regina. A few other patrons milled about or lounged at tables with drinks, some of which glowed with a faint blue hint of mana. At the bar, a lanky woman wiped down the oak surface while lazily watching her customers. A short, dark-haired woman in a long coat sat before her, drinking in silence while staring into the pages of a battered paperback novel.
“I’ve got to give the bartender my greetings – professional courtesy and all,” Angel said to Daisy. “Why don’t you go with the girls to chatter with the band? I’m sure they’ll be more sociable.”
Daisy agreed, and together with Frisk and Amelia, she went to the base of the stage. Regina turned away from the three men sitting with their instruments as her coworkers approached. “Hey, Frisk. Lia.” She squinted at Daisy, apparently unable to remember her name, but she made an effort to appear polite. “It’s good to see you again. How have things been upstairs?”
“Fine, Regina. How are you?” There was a brief exchange of pleasantries – a few hellos and introductions to Regina’s musician friends, whose names Daisy forgot almost immediately. They then spent a while joking about Regina leaving the Stripes to play the piano at Walter’s, or for the Walter’s boys to quit to join the Stripes, before Angel and Rudolph came back over.
“It would be rude to leave so soon,” Angel said, “so would anyone like to join us for a few rounds of cards?”
Frisk pursed her lips and leaned against Amelia, clearly bored of Walter’s atmosphere already. “All right, but nothing too long. If I don’t get to a more electric scene soon, I’m gonna fall asleep.”
“We can play War,” Amelia said, running the back of a finger along Frisk’s chee
k. “That’ll keep you alert.”
Daisy laughed. “That’s one of those slapping games, isn’t it? I haven’t played that sort of thing since elementary school.”
“Yeah, not the kind of game for proper ladies,” Frisk said with a wink. “Exactly my favorite kind.” Angel looked less enthused, but she agreed to their proposal of a more physically aggressive sort of card game. While Regina settled at the piano to play a few sets with her friends in the band, the others found a table to play with a pack of cards Frisk withdrew from her purse.
The game started out a bit slow, with Daisy and Rudolph needing a few rounds to remember how to play and Angel being too delicate to stand any chance at winning. Frisk and Amelia weren’t afraid to smack everyone else’s hands each time a tie was laid, and as Daisy and Rudolph began to hold their own, the game got more noisily under way, earning them an annoyed glance from the woman drinking at the bar. Daisy thought that the woman was familiar – she had seen a woman in a trench coat just like that recently, she was sure – but her attention was drawn back to the game as Rudolph and Amelia both threw down threes. She slapped her hand down on the cards as quick as she could, beating Frisk by a millisecond and earning the scrape of nails on the back of her wrist in exchange for her victory. Daisy hissed as she pulled her hand back, taking the cards with it.
“Sorry ’bout that,” Frisk said, sounding more amused than apologetic. Daisy slipped her charm bracelet down her forearm a bit to examine the scratches. The skin wasn’t broken, and her dark arm was now decorated with three thin, white lines.
“It should be fine,” she said, shaking her arm until the bracelet fell back to hang naturally against the bones of her wrist, and they continued with their game. After about an hour, Frisk wound up with the biggest stack of cards – and Angel having her stack nearly depleted – just as Regina and her friends finished up a set. By then, Frisk was nearly bouncing in her seat to move on to a more exciting venue, and Daisy was inclined to agree. Thrilling as their game was, she would have preferred entertainment that was less likely to leave her with scars.
After Angel went to bid the bartender farewell, promising to give her regards to Mr Swarz, their group shuffled out together into the night, Regina in tow. Frisk again led the way, nearly skipping as she guided them to their next destination. The cool evening air made Daisy want to take her time with the walk, though. It was a clearer night than it had been in weeks, and she wanted to enjoy how well the outing was going, lest she make a disaster of it again.
Ming waited for nearly half an hour before getting up from her stool and wandering over to the table where a loud group had played their cards. One of her bruisers had been useful in suggesting where she might at least begin sniffing out magicians, pointing her to this low-key speakeasy, unlikely to attract the attention of law enforcement for how quiet it was. Unfortunately, aside from a few half-present mana addicts and a handful of people who appeared to treat the establishment just like a normal bar, few people appeared to be drawn to such an atmosphere.
Ming had also discovered that she had no notion of what a magician looked like short of images forwarded by Soot City’s population of pearl-clutchers. Those straw-magicians were foppish while still dressed in battered rags, wearing crooked and sinister grins and typically gaudy hats, but Ming wasn’t going to trust conservative propaganda on that matter. She assumed real magicians looked just like anyone else. How could she identify one from a distance? That noisy group from earlier had drawn her attention, but they appeared little more than a gaggle of ditzy young people. The boys in the band or the bartender herself were just as likely candidates.
She paused at the table, noticing a glint on the floor. She almost dismissed it as loose change, but when she knelt she could see through the shadows that it wasn’t round. Reaching out, she traced its outline with a single fingertip before picking it up and standing to get better light. It was a small, metal – maybe silver – silhouette of a bird with a steel ring looped through a hole punched through the top of its body. The point where the two ends of the little ring connected had gaped a bit too wide, allowing the bauble to drop from wherever it had previously hung. Just some lost piece of jewelry, but she was desperate for a lead.
Ming would have initially dismissed those fops as mana addicts. Most of those women, and even the man, were fairly scrawny in the manner that was symptomatic of emaciating mana addiction. The pale one with curly dark hair had certainly had the gaunt face of a body ravaged by the effects of the liquid. Ming herself had never tried mana, but she knew how it worked – bodies that didn’t need to replenish energies wasted by magic were overwhelmed by the effect of mana, creating an over-energetic high that put the metabolism into overdrive. Addicts tended to be skinny and twitchy after long-term use of the drug, but a magician would not be so affected.
Any member of that group could have been an addict, with the probable exception of the big woman in white. Further, she had been rather overdressed for a casual hole-in-the-wall type establishment such as Walter’s. She had overheard them talking about some gin place – there was a bar called the Gin Fountain in that neighborhood, wasn’t there? Some place too ritzy for Ming to patronize and exactly suited for a gaggle of pretty dames in flashy dresses. Could that be another mana speakeasy?
It might have been nothing, but…
Ming found a dark-stained glass left unattended by some lone patron who had stumbled off to the bathroom. Still pooled at the base of the glass was a bit of luminescent blue liquid, already beginning to congeal, as mana did when left exposed to open air for too long. She set the bird charm on the tabletop where the glass rested, taking the cup and tilting it until a drop of cerulean rolled from the bottom to the lip, dripping out and landing on the charm. Ming wasn’t sure what she expected to happen, but the mana sizzled as it settled onto the silver, bubbling as it was absorbed into the charm.
That appeared to indicate something, certainly.
She snatched up the charm and pocketed it before any of the sleepy patrons of Walter’s noticed the odd reaction. The night was still young, and the group might not have been so far ahead of her that she couldn’t still track them. She didn’t know which of its members had dropped the charm, assuming it hadn’t been left there by an earlier visitor, or how many among them might be magicians. It could be nothing, but it was worth checking into, and she would want backup.
Returning to the counter, she waved down the bartender. “Might I be able to use your phone?”
Not long after, Ming waited three alleys up from the Gin Fountain, lurking just beyond the circumference of a pool of lamplight above the intersection of Wight and Kellerton. Ming didn’t know the west side of town well, but she must have been near the universities if the city had installed electric lamps here. She saw Jase’s car wheel on by, and she followed at an easy pace to where he parked one more block down. He was already opening the back trunk when she joined him.
“Clubbing, eh Roxy?” He didn’t need to turn to face her as she approached.
“Not tonight, Jase.”
“Not ever.” He glanced over his shoulder. He didn’t smile or cock an eyebrow like some dandy – his mug was too ugly for that kind of casual charm, all pores and pink blemishes. His voice was too gravelly and flat to carry any kind of joviality, either. He just didn’t have much going for him by way of likeability, but he was one of Ming’s favorite cohorts. “When’s the last time you took a day off?”
“Stayed home from school once when I was nine. Had the flu.”
“Ah. So, this isn’t a date?”
Ming didn’t smile, either. She and Jase had that kind of dynamic – playful, but rigidly hidden under steely sullenness. That was how she liked to think of it, at least. Maybe Jase really didn’t enjoy her company, but that wouldn’t explain his dependability any time she came calling on him.
She joined him at the open trunk. The street where he parked was full of cafes and delis closed for the night, but even if the dead neigh
borhood did have a spare drunk or two staggering by, she and Jase together blocked any outsider’s view of the car’s contents.
“I think I got the scent on a decent target for this business for Daphne.” She had clued him in to the fact that they were on a headhunt when they spoke on the phone, but now she gave him a quick rundown of her deal with the councilwoman, keeping to bare details. Ming tried not to use last names or titles on the field for the sake of her clients’ privacy, lest anyone overhear that she was running hits for council members.
Jase was the sort to read the morning paper, though. He knew which Daphne would be involving herself in this ugliness. “Right – brought a middling stash. What I could grab from the shed on short notice.” He flipped up the corner of a felt blanket covering his gear. In the dark street, Ming could only see vague glints off of silver and black metal.
“Any reverb canons?”
“You gave me an hour, Roxana, and not a lot of info on who this target is. The hell kind of riot you trying to start, anyway?”
Ming wasn’t entirely sure. She needed to keep track of the group that had dropped the charm, and she had little idea of how to safely capture a magician. She had acted quickly – and, she now realized, rashly – in calling for backup. Of all things, Jase’s incredulity cleared her mind.
“You’re right – that’s overkill. I’m trailing a pack of girls and some fop with them, the ones who dropped the odd charm I mentioned on the phone. I suspect at least a few in this group might be mages. It might be best to try to lure one of this group away. The one who mostly likely dropped the charm, if we can.”
“You’ll have to be the one applying your seductive powers, then. Mine are on the fritz.” Again, no smile. “I brought stingers, though. A bit more precise than a reverb canon, you know?”
“What kind of stingers?”
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