VI #2
“Special Agents Bligh and Plunket rushed in. Fishback was on fire. Screaming. Dying. No intruder—just a broken window.”
I tugged at what remained of his shirt collar, but it snapped off in my hand. I set it on the tabletop. “Someone got in via a fourth-floor window?”
“That’s what I said, Hamilton.”
I glanced up. “Yes, sir. I only meant… there’s no fire escape on the east side of the building. How did they get up there?”
Moore slowly and purposefully directed his attention toward Gunner. “I thought Mr. Gunner might have some insight on that.”
“My expertise lies in raiding airships, Director,” Gunner said coolly.
“Any criminal worth a dime knows how to make an escape.”
“I suppose I’d have to be caught first.”
“I need forceps,” I interrupted.
They both looked at me.
I pointed at Fishback. “I see a few wound tracks. If those fire bullets are anything like their aether counterparts, then there should be a bullet to extract. It might be of value to study.”
Moore stuck his pipe between his teeth. He turned around and began opening and closing a number of cabinets mounted to the wall.
They held a variety of odds and ends the field office had accumulated over the years: handyman tools, oversized evidence that couldn’t be properly stored on the second floor with the rest of the open and cold cases—at one point Moore pulled out a box of what appeared, from a distance, to be broken inkwells and handcuffs.
He puzzled over the contents a moment, shook his head, and shoved the box back onto a shelf.
Moore finally unearthed what he seemed to have in mind from my initial request—a black physician’s bag.
He walked to Fishback’s table, and standing on the opposite side, set the case down and opened the latch. Moore dug around, puffing on his pipe before saying, “Our first medical kit when the office opened.” He produced a rusted pair of forceps and looked at me. “Hand-me-downs from the war.”
I accepted the handle of the tool, mindful of how Moore held the tip of the forceps instead of flirting his fingertips close to my own.
Like how he used to. I said with forced nonchalance, “I don’t think Fishback will notice.
” I leaned over Fishback, tugged open the blackened flesh of his throat with my thumb, and held my breath as I dug into the hole.
For a moment, the only sound in the room was the squish of human innards.
“I suppose,” Moore started, “if Mechanical Man ran to your residence immediately after shooting Fishback and utilized the Fourth Avenue fire escape—”
“No.”
“My patience is understandably limited tonight, Hamilton. This is going to be the one time I ask you ignore my earlier request and pull those punches.”
“He wouldn’t have had the time,” I corrected.
“ Why .”
I looked toward the door. “Gunner, when did we arrive at The Buchanan?”
Gunner removed his pocket watch and studied the face. “Couldn’t have been more than a minute or two after Fishback swallowed that bullet,” he said, looking up and then nodding his chin at the crispy flesh and blood I was digging through.
“Perhaps you’re incorrect,” Moore said to Gunner.
“Doubtful.”
“Ah-ha.” I yanked a flattened, bloodied bullet from the back of Fishback’s throat. I offered it to Moore when he pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and held his covered palm out. “There was an atmospheric disturbance at the same time we reached The Buchanan,” I explained.
Moore took his pipe from his mouth and pointed it at Mechanical Man. “Fire?”
“Fire, yes, but not from him. The spell terminated here, at the office.”
In my haste to interrupt the mounting squabble between two adult men, knowing firsthand how absolutely infuriating Gunner could be with his matter-of-factness, I had failed to filter the magic explanation through my series of lies.
Survival was dependent upon downplaying my skills, and finally, for the first time in a decade, a sliver of truth had gotten out.
Moore was staring at me, bullet still in one hand, pipe still in the other. He’d picked up on that one word: terminate. He asked, his voice low and tone cautious, “And where did the spell originate ?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but I might as well have been catching flies.
“We saw fire, is what Hamilton means,” Gunner said, his voice filtering in like the smoke it sounded like. “On the horizon. Then your fellow here ends up kindling at the same time—so it must have terminated here,” he explained.
“But a spell being cast in one location, with the results seen in a completely different—”
“It’s manufactured,” I hastily said over Moore.
“It clearly doesn’t behave like aether-infused bullets, so we have nothing practical to compare the situation to.
” I quickly motioned to Moore’s bullet with my forceps.
“That bullet is a much larger caliber—it couldn’t have been Mechanical Man who killed Fishback. Most definitely someone else.”
I returned to digging bullets out of Fishback after that, finding half a dozen more and confirming the weapon he’d been shot with was, despite being quite unbelievable, likely a Gatling gun.
But other than that passing comment, my mind was elsewhere entirely.
Gunner had suggested—no, told me —twice now that he knew I wasn’t being honest about my magic.
I had declined to entertain the conversation both times, but I had an anxiety of sorts, not understanding what evidence he had in order to draw his conclusion.
It wasn’t merely because he’d witnessed me create aether bullets in Arizona.
Yes, infusing ammunition with aether took a skilled and practiced caster, but I was not the only man with this ability.
It was something else.
Something that Gunner had zeroed in on almost immediately but that Moore had overlooked for a decade.
And Gunner knew it scared the hell out of me.
So he’d lied. He hadn’t felt the manufactured fire spell when we’d been at The Buchanan.
He hadn’t seen the tendrils of magic. Hadn’t experienced the broken, chaotic web left in the wake of the magic used to kill Fishback and whose origin centered somewhere south of us—somewhere in the Five Points.
He’d not been privy to any of it, but somehow he just knew that Moore hadn’t known any of those details either, and therein lay the danger.
So he’d lied .
I moved to Mechanical Man after finishing my dissection of Fishback, making certain to not look Moore in the eye as I put Gunner’s old goggles on.
I snapped one hand, cast an aether spell, then moved my hands apart, stretching the magic as if it were bread dough.
When the blinding-white energy resembled a crude cleaver, I brought the raw magic down on the body’s arm, severing the gun from the elbow.
Aether was one of the most complex magics to exist, a combination of all the elements in an undiluted form that could be life-affirming or totally devastating, depending on how the caster wielded the force. And in this instance….
I let the spell dissipate afterward, tugged the goggles down, then picked up the weapon with both hands. I had to swallow the bile making its way up my throat before I managed to say, “Gunner, do you recall the pistol Ferguson had?”
“I do.”
I turned toward him and held the bulky pistol up in invitation.
Gunner unhurriedly pushed off the door, approached the table, then took the weapon from my hands.
He spun the cylinder, checked the chambers, then cocked the weapon.
“Could have done without the bits of flesh and bone, Hamilton,” Gunner stated, referring to Mechanical Man’s arm protruding from the metal band where the weapon had been fused to his body.
“The gun is reinforced with silver underneath the iron,” I remarked, struggling for a casual tone and not that of a man ready to upchuck at the sight of protruding bones. “You know how aether reacts.”
He made a sound in the back of his throat before saying, “Same weapon as Ferguson’s. More or less.”
“More or less?” I echoed, taking it back.
“Ferguson used a modified Waterbury. Same with this one,” Gunner explained. “Handcrafted, though, probably with what was readily available.” He tapped the bottom barrel. “In this case, the fourth barrel welded here is from a Jordan. Entirely different caliber. Explains why he had to fire twice.”
“Tick Tock is moving more than just ammunition,” I said in a rush of excitement as I turned to Moore.
He was already nodding. “Custom weapons.”
“And reinforced with natural elements to temper the magic enough for noncasters to utilize.” I weighed the pistol in both hands.
That wriggling sensation I’d picked up when Mechanical Man was freshly dead was gone now.
Whoever murdered Fishback, we’d have to catch the criminal alive so I could inspect their weapon properly.
Whatever that impression had been, I’d now confirmed it completely dissipated after death, and as far as I was concerned, it was a vital clue as to how this manufactured magic was a success.
“We finally have a starting point,” Moore continued. “We need to speak to our informants—ask about any stockpiling locations within the last month or two.”
“Please don’t say—”
“I want you to find Addison.”
I sighed heavily and set the pistol on the table. “Sir, with all due respect, the last meeting I had with Addison ended in a bar brawl and I had to pay for three broken chairs.”
“You were reimbursed.”
“It’s not about the chairs.”
Moore smiled and stroked his manicured beard. “I’d like you to come upstairs with me and examine the window.”
“Understood.”
“But then I want you to pull Addison out of whatever theater or saloon or back alley he’s in. This is our first break since October, and I need something to show for our efforts once D.C. learns of this mess with Fishback.”