Moonshine

by Jasmine Gower

  They busied themselves in their search for nearly half an hour more, checking the stage, behind the bar, in the pockets of strangers’ dropped coats. They were nearly out of places to pretend to look, and still there had been no sign that Wei had followed them. Daisy was feeling the deflating sensation of defeat when Frisk asked, “So, how much longer do we look before we give in and go catch up with the others?”

  Daisy took a casual look around the Gin Fountain. Silent, empty. She dared to glance up at Vinnie without moving her head, and even he had melded back into shadows. Everyone else must have been watching her and Frisk’s little show from hiding places, too, but it seemed Wei was not.

  “Maybe a little–” There was a screech of abrupt sound, of scraping metal followed by the whine of an accordion laced with wavering scratches. Daisy spun toward the stage. There were several large, abandoned instruments, but of course the sound had come from none of them. At the back of the stage was a gramophone that Daisy hadn’t noticed when she had been “searching” underneath the nearby piano. A black record spun on its table, delivering an upbeat but snide song through the needle and out the brass horn. The stage was otherwise empty. “What in the hell?”

  “Someone’s here.” Frisk hiked up her skirt to grab the pistol strapped to her thigh.

  Daisy whirled back to face the archway to the front foyer, though she still didn’t see anyone. “Are you sure?”

  “I told you Angel liked her sick games, didn’t I?”

  “But–” A gunshot went off, followed by a scream, but the echoes through the open hall made it impossible to discern the direction it came from. Daisy turned her onyx ring on her finger so the stone faced out from the palm. Before she could get into a defensive stance – very well a pointless effort, considering her narrow heels – Frisk grabbed her by the arm and pulled her over toward the bar.

  “Come on! We’re just the bait – let the others handle this.”

  Andre had not attempted to lean out from his hiding spot in the kitchen. He knew the cue, and would emerge only when Wei or her minions appeared. Until then, he leaned against the wall of the dark room, one hand on his cane and the other on Cyan’s back as the faerie squatted beside him.

  They had abandoned Daisy’s hand-me-downs in favor of one of Andre’s older coats to disguise the faerie, though the blue skin and inhumanly large eyes were a giveaway still. Lucky for them, there was little need for Cyan to blend in as a human at the moment. They wanted to keep him out of sight altogether, and if he were spotted in the ambush it would hardly make a difference.

  While Daisy and Frisk puttered around in the main hall, Cyan occasionally whimpered and pawed at Andre’s leg. Something unsettled him, but Andre did not know nor had any way to determine what it was. There were several vials of mana tucked into the inner pockets of his coat, but Cyan had stopped sniffing at those a while ago, after Andre had swatted him for it. He wondered, once, if it was that Cyan was trying to express concern over his or Daisy’s safety, but he pushed the wistful thought aside.

  “What in the hell?”

  Andre turned his head toward the ajar door leading into the main hall. Daisy and Frisk had been speaking softly enough before then that he hadn’t been able to catch their exact words even when he could hear their voices, but now Daisy raised hers.

  “Someone’s here.” Andre could hear, at that point, the aggressive whine of a record on a gramophone in the background.

  The cue.

  Andre pushed away from the wall just as a gunshot rang out. Cyan stood and clutched Andre’s arm as he stepped without hesitation to the door, but Andre shook him off. “Stay close behind me,” Andre said, pointing toward his heel in a feeble attempt to communicate. Cyan’s eyes only drifted down toward his feet at the gesture. He didn’t understand. Andre tried taking him by the wrist, pulling him closer until their hips touched. “Close,” he repeated, and let go of the faerie to swing his arm in a short, chopping motion. “No fighting. Stay close. I will protect you.”

  On “protect,” he settled his hand on Cyan’s chest. Cyan whined again and clutched at it, pulling it up to his lips to kiss. Andre tried to ignore the weight that settled in his heart. Cyan was a beautiful being, and there was so much of magic to learn from him and his kind, but Andre had promised Daisy. To pass up all the opportunities within Cyan left him feeling hollow, but his debt to his employee and friend was beyond mountainous now, and it was his curiosity that caused all this disaster to begin with.

  He had no choice but to part ways with the affectionate faerie.

  But the sounds of shouts and gunfire in the main hall reminded him that there were steps to be taken before Cyan could be delivered home. Gently pulling his hand from Cyan’s, Andre turned and rushed out of the dark kitchen.

  Chapter 16

  Frisk nearly threw Daisy behind the bar as invaders in long coats began rushing the dance hall. Daisy’s gut clenched at the sight as she caught herself on the bar top, steadying her wobbling legs as they threatened to collapse over her high heels. Unlike last time, when Daisy and Frisk had been able to disappear within the crowd to hobble to safety, the Gin Fountain was an empty cavern now, and any attackers would have to face them head to head. Daisy wasn’t sure if that made her more or less anxious, but if someone didn’t interfere soon, these attackers would corner her and Frisk behind that bar.

  Frisk grabbed Daisy by the shoulder and shoved her down before ducking beside her. The mage-hunters appeared not to notice them, which Daisy only realized as she peeked up to watch the three that had rushed in turn toward a specter pursuing them.

  Angel stalked with slow and deliberate footfalls after the three, a pistol in her hand and spatters of blood on the fluffed collar of her white fur coat. Daisy could hear muffled shouting, and it must have come from behind Angel, as the hunters before her did not move their mouths. Two held handguns while the third had what appeared to be some kind of small cannon cradled in his arms.

  “What is that, even?” No one looked Daisy’s way at her whispered question. The hunters were too preoccupied shaking in their boots as Angel approached them without a flinch or pause. “Does it shoot some kind of explosive?”

  “Not quite,” Frisk said. “It’s called a reverb cannon. Probably made from scrapped riot gear pawned off by some dirty cop. Their blast makes a shaky, whiney screech that messes up magicians – methodical magicians, at least. Screws their focus, and makes a lot of smoke besides. Oh, and it’ll kill you if you get hit with the bullet. ’Cause, you know, it’s still a cannon.”

  The man holding the reverb cannon leveled it to aim at Angel, but on the stage behind him, the heavy velvet curtain lining the back wall whipped aside, and Amelia came charging out with a wooden bat in hand. Underneath the music and the howling from the foyer, none of the hunters heard the light footfalls of Amelia’s satin flats, and the man with the cannon had no warning as she hopped from the stage and came up behind to swing the bat right into the base of his skull.

  Daisy bit down on her lip as she watched the man crumple, but neither Amelia nor Angel flinched at the violence. The former, instead, had barely finished the follow-through of her swing before turning on the woman to her right, aiming for her kneecaps. The third hunter spun to see his companion laying in a limp heap, and he was rewarded for his distraction with a shot in the shoulder from Angel’s pistol.

  Two more hunters entered behind Angel, but they were pursued by Regina, Vicks, and Jonas. Regina was wielding a fire axe half her own height, Vicks had his shotgun, and the ogre appeared to be unarmed. His long legs made it easy to catch the closest hunter, and he snatched the man up by the wrist, hauling him up to dangle in the air. Regina came in so smooth that Daisy would have thought they had practiced this, and she rammed the butt of her axe into the man’s crotch. The man wheezed and dropped whatever weapon he held – some kind of knife – and Jonas released him. He dropped to the floor and curled into a helpless ball.

  Vicks, meanwhile, chased after a nea
rly middle-aged woman holding a gun who was heading right toward Angel. He hesitated to shoot, probably because of Angel standing just beyond his target, so he instead called out, “Six o’clock, Angel!” Angel whirled, indifferent toward the man she had just shot in the back, and pistol-whipped the woman charging her. She hadn’t time to aim, so her attack only punched the woman high on the chest. Painful, but not enough to stop her.

  As the older woman straightened herself from recoil, she leveled her gun and fired point-blank at Angel.

  Daisy couldn’t see what happened, but there was a blast from the center of the conflict, and smoke and the smell of soot and sulfur dusted the air.

  “What was–?”

  “Stay down!” Frisk shoved Daisy in the chest as she tried to stand up straight, knocking her onto her backside. “I dunno – I think Angel used magic to cause a misfire.” She stretched her narrow neck to peer over the top of the bar at the conflict beyond. “I hope.”

  There was another blast – louder and tinged with a metallic echo, probably from the reverb cannon – and the smoke in the center of the hall thickened. Someone cried out from within it, and Daisy thought it might have been Angel.

  “Shit!”

  “Don’t worry,” Frisk said, steadying a hand on Daisy’s shoulder. “Those reverbs will throw off the methodical magicians, but we got a secret weapon.”

  A storm of butterflies flurried in her gut. “Me?”

  There was another gunshot and scream from across the room. Daisy could see Regina charge out from the smoke, rushing to the corner of the room to the left of the bar, where Andre had appeared without Daisy noticing. He knelt against the wall, clutching his head with one hand while Cyan pawed at him with motherly concern. The gun – or another one – fired again.

  “No, Dell, I didn’t mean you,” Frisk said, nodding across the room. In the balcony where Daisy had earlier seen Vinnie crouched, she could now see through the smoke and darkness two shimmering, iridescent points of light. A hazy silhouette was attached to those glowing eyes, and it shifted. When a third shot fired, the blast of light illuminated Vinnie’s snarling face for a sliver of a moment.

  “He can see their auras through the smoke?”

  “Spot on. Reverbs don’t mess up aural magic, neither.”

  “Daisy!” Andre hobbled over with the help of Regina. Cyan trailed behind them, glancing back and forth between his human companions and the chaos in the center of the room. There was still a faint echo from the cannon, and although it didn’t bother Daisy, Andre clutched one side of his head as he spoke. “There’s no reason for you to still be down here. Please, find a way to safety, and we’ll take care of this.”

  “These guys are gonna have bodies posted at the back exit,” Frisk warned, “just waiting for us to hightail it.”

  “There’s a fire exit on the second floor,” Regina said. “Down one of the back hallways. I’ll bet these people haven’t paid it any notice, so it should be safer than the front or back doors.”

  Daisy was embarrassed to find herself bristling. It wasn’t like anyone else in Stripes was exactly a heavyweight boxer, so why was Daisy the one being babied? She climbed to her feet, saying, “No. I can fight alongside the rest of you. I have my trinkets, I can–”

  Andre held up a hand. “I don’t doubt your capability, Daisy, but you are the one they are after. Whatever else happens here, let’s see their goal unfulfilled.”

  There was that. “I suppose if I just vanished from the scene, it could divide their attention long enough to give you all a better advantage.” She said that to convince herself as much as anything. It still felt like cowardice, though.

  Andre seemed happy enough to accept her reasoning. “The goal is to keep as much of our team alive as possible, yes. Now, go quickly – the smoke will start dissipating soon, if they don’t fire another of those bombs.”

  Daisy nodded and rounded the bar, sprinting off through the thinning smoke toward the stairway to the balcony level and activating her own smokescreen from the headband. Whether they fired that cannon again or not, they would never see her escape.

  Ming had held back while her bigger minions tried to deal with the magicians and their friends. Bruno and his team were local to this part of town, and it hadn’t taken long for them to catch up and join Ming as she advanced on the Gin Fountain, following the trail of those Modern Girls. While Bruno took a few the back ways, the rest went with Ming through the front.

  Ming and her crew had been lurking in the foyer – where they had gathered and paused to examine the scene of Daisy Dell and her friend shifting around the dance hall – when they were found by the lady in white and a few others with her. The woman had snuck up on one of Ming’s people, executing him with a shot to the base of the skull, and several more of Ming’s helpers fled into the main hall. The white lady, Regina Sadowski, an unknown human and an ogre followed them out there without noticing Ming huddled in a shadowy corner. The blond beau was with them, delicately tip-toeing around the man his lover had shot dead and lagging behind in his effort to keep blood off his suede shoes.

  Ming took the opportunity to lunge out at him with her knife in hand, hoping to catch him with the hilt for a debilitating but non-fatal strike. She wasn’t quick enough, and he noticed her approach and spun to block with a crowbar he carried. It was slow and unwieldy in his refined hands, but it was enough to crack against her knuckles and knock the blade away from her. Ming leaned back and powered a kick into one of his kneecaps before he could swing again.

  He toppled back into a pillar framing the entry into the main hall. “Ah! Angel!” But Ming rushed in and delivered a pound with her fist to the side of his jaw, knocking him limp. She might have gotten away with killing this one, but that would antagonize his lover in particular, and Ming still wanted to cling to whatever fragile hold she had on the possibility of future partnership with the magicians of this city. She doubted this Angel person would ever be interested in working with her, but if she killed the woman’s boyfriend it was entirely possible Angel would turn the hunt on her.

  Ming grabbed her knife off the floor and left him there, alive but unmoving.

  Slipping into the main hall, she found it already overrun with chaos and smoke. She pressed against the wall as she tried to make out movements in the haze and listened for her allies’ voices to discern their locations, but the smoke was too heavy and the room too wide and echoing. She followed along the edge of the wall, passing under the nearest half-circle balcony. There was a blast from above, and although she was not at an angle to be hit, she ducked. She heard a shout and saw a silhouette collapse to the ground. It wouldn’t serve her to pause and try to determine who fell or if they were dead, so she kept inching along.

  “Gah! Fucker!”

  “Vicks? Where are you?”

  Ming would have been happy scurrying along the wall, apparently out of sight from the vague shadows she could see struggling within the silvery cloud filling the center of the room, but she reached the stage in the back corner. Dropping to hands and knees, she crawled along before its front ledge. The smoke was beginning to thin, especially near the ground, and she hoped that everyone else would be too preoccupied with each other to notice her until she was in a less vulnerable position.

  A flash of yellow streaked ahead of her.

  Ming squinted to see through the smoke, which was somehow thicker ahead, away from where her team struggled with the magicians and their people. She scrambled after the movement until she reached the back wall and an opening leading to the upward staircase. It was filled with smoke, but she had not heard any reverb cannons being fired since she joined everyone else in the dance hall. It had come from some other source.

  One of the magicians – and one who could use magic in the wake of the reverberation.

  Ming pulled herself up and staggered blindly upward into the haze.

  The ringing in Andre’s head began to fade, but he still could not quite focus well enough to cast.
Many people unfamiliar with reverb bombs liked to say that it was only the echo their blasts created that unsettled magicians and distracted them from casting, but if that were the case, they would have a similarly debilitating effect upon non-magicians. Andre knew others could hear the ringing, but not feel the jarring pain in their inner ears that he was experiencing now. Something about the bombs – perhaps something about their smoke – could find the lingering presence of magic within magicians and react viciously to it. Apparently, the magic practiced by Daisy and Vinnie did not elicit the same side-effects. Those bombs had to involve some kind of artifice – some other obscure form of magic that Andre would have liked to study – which would suggest that somewhere in the city were other magicians willing to produce such weapons used to hunt their cousins and sell them to mercenaries like Ming Wei.

  An alarming thought, but one he did not have time to consider.

  With Daisy fleeing to safety, Andre stumbled away from the bar, needing to lean on his cane as disorientating shocks continued to echo in waves through his body, starting at the inner ears and washing down through his torso and limbs. All his old injuries on his right side flared, and even his left hand spasmed until he lost grip on the cane.

  A hand caught him before he fell, and he was surprised to find it wasn’t Cyan.

  “Lia’s still in that scramble,” Frisk said as she steadied him. “I gotta make sure she’s all right. We–” She broke off and raised her gun to fire at a man with a long, jagged-edged knife who rushed toward them from the thinning cloud. The bullet hit, but it must have only grazed his arm or passed through the loose cloth of his coat sleeve, as he continued without pause. Andre clambered in his mind for the root phrases for electricity spells, the syllables slipping easily from his thoughts amidst the buzzing, but Cyan darted past him before he or Frisk could attack again.