Hei Feng ignored her, but Moreno looked over at Isabella and for a moment his eyes widened. He put a hand on Hei Feng’s shoulder. “He isn’t an initiate yet, so I can’t do anything to stop you, but if you want him dead you’ll have to do it yourself.”
There was a long silence. Sylvia stood watching them, Moreno took a couple of steps back from Hei Feng’s side, and MoonCat even looked up from her phone to see what was going on. Sam tensed—if Hei Feng tried to do anything he could at least go down fighting.
Finally Feng gave an irritated little sigh. “Well, I suppose it’s too late now.” He jabbed a finger into Sam’s face. “If you reveal anything you have learned here to anyone you will die. Understand?”
Sam nodded, trying to look more frightened than he felt. “I won’t say anything.”
“Good.” Hei Feng turned to Moreno again. “If he breaks his pledge I’ll send a rabisu to tear him apart at noon in Times Square and you’ll have to do the cleanup.”
He strode out, followed by MoonCat. From the way she ignored Feng, Sam figured she must be his daughter. When they were gone Sam looked from Sylvia to Moreno, and his expression of bewilderment was perfectly genuine. “What just happened?”
“You’re not dead,” said Sylvia. “Now go learn some Egyptian or something. I need a drink.”
Sam gathered up his notebooks and headed for the exit. Isabella and Moreno followed him out. On the sidewalk Isabella waved a cheery goodbye to him and skipped away toward Fort Tryon Park.
“I’d watch out for her if I were you,” said Moreno, startling Sam, who had forgotten he was there.
“Isabella? She’s just a kid.”
“She isn’t ‘just’ anything. Where are you headed? I’ll give you a ride.”
“Butler Library, the big one at Columbia.”
“Come on, I’m parked around the corner.” Moreno led him to where a lovely old Citroen DS, painted deep maroon, sat proudly in a no-parking zone. Sam slid into the passenger seat, which smelled of leather and pipe tobacco, like an exclusive club.
As they cruised south on Broadway Moreno asked casually, “So: What’s your story?”
Sam shrugged. “I saw something weird, I started researching on my own, I tried a couple of workings, and then Sylvia found me.”
“Something weird?”
“A little man,” said Sam. He’d prepared this story with the help of Mr. Lucas; close enough to the truth that he wouldn’t have trouble remembering, but not enough to betray him. “Just three inches high. I wasn’t sure if I imagined it, but somehow I couldn’t put it out of my mind. So I quit my job and moved here to see what I could learn.”
“Could have been a jogah,” said Moreno. “Mostly harmless. How’d you go from that to doing real magic?”
“It was an experiment. I’m an engineer: You have to test everything. I wanted to see if the stuff I’d been reading was bullshit or not.”
“You were lucky. Most of what you read about magic is bullshit, and there’s people who work hard to keep it that way.”
“Are you one of them?” asked Sam, with a sidelong look at Moreno.
“Oh, sometimes, when I don’t have something more important to do. My real job is keeping the peace. You have family?”
“I used to be married,” said Sam. Even after a year the place where his wedding ring had been was clearly visible. “We broke up.”
“Kids?”
“No. Is that important? You asked before.”
“It’s important because the gift is inherited. Genetic, I guess you’d say. If you have any kids they could carry it. We like to keep track of potential mages.”
“I guess I must have slipped through the cracks.”
“It happens,” said Moreno. “Any brothers or sisters?”
“Not that I know of.”
“That simplifies things.”
It occurred to Sam that he really didn’t know. Did he have any long-lost siblings in Colombia? Was there any way to find out?
“You keep saying ‘we,’” said Sam. “So does Sylvia. And back there you said something about being initiated. Into what?”
“I can’t tell you,” said Moreno, but then he glanced at Sam and sighed. “Look, when you have people who can do real magic, you need some way to control them. To prevent chaos. So there’s an organization. I can’t tell you the name, and it wouldn’t mean anything to you anyway. It’s been around a very long time, and it exists to keep the secret and maintain order. You’ll find out more when Sylvia decides you’re ready.”
“What if I don’t want to join?” asked Sam. They were only a block north of campus.
“Oh, everyone joins, unless they’re hopelessly inept. Plenty of them, too.”
“But suppose I didn’t. Or suppose I joined and then decided to quit. What would happen?”
They were at 115th Street, and Moreno pulled over to the curb illegally at the crosswalk before answering. “If that happened I would have to kill you,” he said, very seriously. “See you around—Mr. Hunter.”
Smart guy, Sam thought as he crossed Broadway in a crowd of students. He knew Sam’s fake name, but how much more did he know?
Chapter 4
It was nearly two in the morning when the northbound D train rumbled into the station at 125th Street. Sam stepped aboard the last car and sat down, dead tired. Just as the train started to move again, Sam’s eyes snapped open, all fatigue forgotten. The car was empty, but he could feel a whole crowd of invisible presences.
“Hi!” Isabella peeked over the back of his seat, grinning. “Where are you going?”
“That way.” He pointed at the front of the train. “Shouldn’t you be at home?”
“I like to sleep on the trains.”
“Do your parents know where you are?”
For an instant she looked serious. “I don’t have any. Not anymore.” But then she brightened. “Don’t worry. My friends take care of me.”
He gestured at the air around them. “These friends?”
“These are just the ones who follow me around. I can call others when I need them.”
Sam looked at her, his long-dormant parental habits kicking in. She was wearing a new dress, all bright colors and sparkles. Her shoes were also new, with flashing LED lights. Her hair was gathered into two pigtails and tied with purple ribbons flecked with glitter. But he could see that her hair was uncombed and unwashed, and his nose told him the rest.
“Your friends should give you a bath,” he said.
“I don’t like baths.”
“Not even bubble baths?” A dash of Mr. Bubble had always overcome Tommy’s objections at bath time.
“Maybe. I’ll ask them.”
“Do you need anything to eat?” he asked. She was thin, but not unusually so.
“They bring me whatever I want.”
“There’s a place near my stop that stays open late. I’ll get you something.”
She laughed. “Okay, but no cauliflower.”
“It’s a deal: no cauliflower.”
Not without some embarrassment, Sam took Isabella to dinner at a Mexican bar and grill that stayed open all night. The waiter—who was also the bartender—was very solicitous of Isabella when they first came in, asking her name and where she went to school.
“What’s your name?” she asked him cheerfully.
“My name? Hector Vega,” he said.
“Hector Vega Ishchuch. N’pkudh,” she said in a clear, commanding voice.
Mr. Vega’s eyes unfocused for a second, and then he shook his head. “What can I get you?” he asked Sam, and gathered up the utensils from in front of Isabella, as if Sam was sitting alone.
“One pork taco, one order of chicken fingers, and a side of rajas.”
Isabella ate the chicken fingers and put away chips and salsa as fast as the waiter could bring them. When Sam insisted she have some of the rajas she made a face at him and pushed the squash and zucchini away from the corn and peppers, but in the end she did ea
t three spoonfuls.
“How’d you do that to him?” Sam asked her after Mr. Vega refilled the chips basket for the second time.
“People are spirits, too,” she said. “We just have bodies all the time. The other ones don’t. If you know someone’s name you can tell them what to do. I told him to forget about me.” Her voice dropped. “My friends taught me that. That’s why my real name’s a secret.”
“That’s pretty smart. Mine’s a secret, too.”
When Mr. Vega brought him the check, Sam brought up a subject he’d been avoiding. “Do you need a place to stay?” he asked Isabella.
She laughed at that. “I’ve got lots of places. Sometimes I live at the Plaza Hotel like Eloise in the book. Or there’s these neat apartments in the Public Library nobody knows about. I stay there sometimes. It doesn’t matter.”
Sam tore a page from his notebook and wrote the number of his burner phone on it. “If you ever need someplace, or if you need help, call me, okay?”
Isabella took it, folded it carefully, and then stuck it in her sock. “You’re nice,” she said.
* * *
About once a month Lucas left him a text message setting up a meeting. The process was never simple. Typically the text sent him someplace—never the same place twice—to pick up an envelope of written instructions. Those directions always involved at least one ferry trip, a stop in a church, a couple of changes of disguise, and multiple last-second jumps on and off subway trains. Timing was always very precise: He had to be on the boat at the turning of the tide, enter the church just before sunset, and leave it just after. At first they seemed like utter nonsense, but as he learned more Sam began to understand what he was doing and why.
In February, after he began studying with Sylvia, Sam met Lucas one evening in a patch of woods under an enormous skein of humming power lines in South Amboy, New Jersey. Lucas had cleared a patch of forest floor down to bare dirt and made concentric circles of salt. Within the circles he had set up a couple of folding camp chairs.
“Come in, come in,” he said, beckoning to Sam. “Make sure you step over the salt.”
“What if someone sees us?”
“I have guards posted, and we are completely alone within this circle.”
With a start Sam realized he couldn’t feel the protective spirit he’d bound to himself.
Lucas handed him a china cup of coffee and gestured at the open box of Turkish Delight. “Help yourself. Now, tell me about your studies. What has Sylvia been teaching you?”
“Oh, the basics. Astrological correspondences, sympathetic and symbolic linkages, things like that.”
“But no actual workings yet?”
“No.” Sam didn’t try to hide the frustration in his voice.
“I thought not. Until you are initiated, she will concentrate on theory rather than practice. The idea is to keep you interested, but not reveal anything useful until you’re part of the organization and subject to its laws.”
“How can I avoid that?”
Lucas nodded. “That’s the real trick. They will want your true name, and a sample of your blood.”
“How do they know if I give the right name?”
“You will be tested. You swear by your name, and then you are commanded to do something—typically painful or humiliating, or both. They try to choose an act you would refuse if you could.”
Sam’s mouth was dry despite the coffee. “So I just have to do it?”
“You must obey as if you had no will of your own. But your name isn’t as important as the blood. With your name an Apkal can command you to your face. With your blood he can send death from afar. That is the real power.”
“How long do you think it’ll be before my initiation?”
“It will be at Ostara, the start of Arah-Nisanu, the month of the Sanctuary. For the past few years it’s been held at an old speakeasy bar in Chinatown. Hei Feng owns the building.”
“That doesn’t give me much time.”
“No. I’m going to concentrate on workings which may help you prepare: how to influence minds and command people, spirits to guard your privacy, banishings to drive away supernatural spies, and how to find treasures and secrets.”
“Treasures?”
“You know—money. A lavish bribe always enhances the effect of a spell, and some of the workings require expensive materials.”
Lucas produced a thick sheaf of photocopied pages and the two of them spent the next four hours going over the rituals by the light of a little LED lamp. As the sound of traffic on the Garden State began to diminish and a church clock in the old part of town chimed two, Sam and Lucas got up and began to clear the site.
“It’s a pity we can’t use this place again. Never be predictable. If your friend Mr. Moreno were to learn of our meetings, I doubt either of us would survive very long.”
“What do you know about him?”
“He is the most dangerous kind of man: an honest one. He genuinely believes that the Apkallu serve a valuable purpose, and he considers his work defending their secrets a necessary task. I suspect he pities those he must kill, and dislikes doing it, but does so anyway. Avoid him if you can.”
* * *
In the quiet hours before dawn getting through Staten Island back to Manhattan took much longer than the outward trip, even without Lucas’s detours and security precautions. The sky over Long Island was turning pale when Sam reached Penn Station, so he decided to have breakfast at a diner he liked, up at Times Square.
Early morning had always been one of Sam’s favorite times, especially in a big city like New York. Before dawn there were no tourists, no hustlers looking for tourists to prey on, no young fools acting out their “I’m a cosmopolitan sophisticate!” fantasies. The men (and they were nearly all men) at the counter eating big breakfasts were trash collectors, power linemen, subway operators, cabbies, cops, construction workers, firemen—the people whose constant behind-the-scenes labor kept the city going.
“Sam?” said a woman’s voice behind him. “Sam Arquero?”
He felt a stab of cold to his core. They had found him out! He ignored her, but she tapped him on the shoulder.
“Excuse me, are you—”
He turned, ready to deny everything, but found himself looking into a face he knew.
“Ashley!” he said. “What the heck are you doing here?”
They moved to a booth, where she propped her carry-on bag on the seat next to her.
“I just got off the redeye from L.A. It’s too late to go home and change, so I thought I’d just hang out and then go in to work.”
“What are you doing nowadays?” he asked her. “Last I heard you were going to architecture school.”
“I did, and I got my degree. Then I started working for a developer, just as a temporary gig until I could pay off my loans. Except I found out I kind of liked it. We rehab old factories and warehouses. It’s fun. What about you? You went off to the Air Force.”
“I did, and then I got an E.E. at UConn. Married, worked for Sikorsky. Now I’m here.”
She glanced at his hand as he raised the coffee mug to his mouth. “Still married?”
“She died last year,” he said. He didn’t mention his son.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. What happened?”
“A bear attacked her.”
Ashley’s eyes widened, and she covered her mouth with her hands. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry. That’s horrible.”
Neither said anything for a moment. Sam tried to break the silence. “It’s been, what, twenty years?”
“We graduated in ’94, so pretty close.” She smiled. “I still remember that last summer.”
“It was pretty great.” Sam was a little surprised by the surge of desire he felt. The summer of 1994 had been a wonderful three months—he’d had a secondhand motorbike and an afternoon job, and he and Ashley had spent almost every evening screwing like, well, a pair of horny teenagers.
Thinking about Ashley and Alice
at the same time gave Sam a very odd feeling, a mix of desire and guilt and regret and…maybe a little spark of hope?
He checked his watch. “Listen,” he said, “I need to get moving. It’s been wonderful bumping into you like this.”
She pulled a card out of her shoulder bag. “Let’s stay in touch.”
He took it and glanced at it. “You go by Ash now?”
“Ever since college.”
“It suits you.” He pocketed the card and left some bills on the table. “Let me buy you breakfast.”
“Okay, but next time’s my treat.”
“I’ll think of someplace very expensive.” He got up, and there was a moment when he thought about whether to kiss her goodbye. But it had been a long time, and a noisy diner off Times Square didn’t seem like the right place to try it. He gave her a cheerful wave and headed for the door.
* * *
Sam spent the next three weeks studying the rituals Lucas had given him and tracking down special materials all over New York. On the night of the spring equinox he was up on the roof of his building just after sunset, sitting in the center of the Third Seal of Mars drawn in white paint on the tarpaper. He was nude, his body covered in protective signs. Getting them onto his back had required taping a marker to a stick and working with a mirror, and he still had the nagging fear that he had drawn them reversed. He fed elm leaves and sandalwood into a small fire before him, and invoked the Lord of Perfected Success, ruler of the third face of Pisces, whose reign was set to end at dawn.
He held up the ring he had made by hand at a metalworking shop in Brooklyn, and began to chant in Sumerian. It was a dangerous undertaking: He was calling harmful spirits to him, gambling that he could bind one into the ring before it could hurt him.
After his third repetition of the chant, just before Mercury sank into New Jersey, Sam felt a crowd around him—shapes like serpents or jellyfish. Or were they spirits of disease in the forms of gigantic bacteria and viruses? They pressed inward, as if they could overwhelm his protections by sheer numbers.
Sam began to recite the ritual of binding, focusing his will on one angular shape which was straining directly at his face. He held the ring directly in front of it and concentrated, commanding it into the metal. But the thing resisted, and reached past the ring to Sam’s head. The rooftop around him and the sky above blurred, dimmed, and then disappeared. He could see nothing.
The Initiate Page 4
