VII
Laughter, the drunk and carefree sort, greeted me at the landing of the fourth floor.
I crossed an empty hall and entered the half-sized bullpen situated outside the room of cells for our select criminals.
The desks were empty, save for the four agents—two casters and their bruiser counterparts—congregating around the furniture closest to the open door to the jail.
Agent Rachel Plunket was a trouser-wearing, axe-wielding woman, who defied society’s expectations of femininity by chopping her glossy black hair to chin-length and pairing the look with, what was considered by The Delineator , a too-bright rouge to her lips and cheeks.
She hiccupped as she swallowed a laugh, then lightly smacked the chest of her male partner—Henry Bligh, himself.
When the tread of my steps penetrated their celebratory conversation, the group turned and immediately fell quiet.
Bligh, who sat on the edge of a desk, shifted like he made to stand in the presence of a senior agent, but then realized it was only me and he settled in like he would do no such thing. “Agent Hamilton?” he asked, a touch of surprise in his tone. “What’re you…?”
Coat pushed back, I dug my hands into my trouser pockets and walked through the row of desks. I said nothing to the group, kept my eyes straight ahead, and counted each step toward the jail.
—five , six , seven —
“Agent Hubris, you mean,” the other caster corrected before the group struggled to stifle their champagne-induced giggles.
I stumbled, paused, but then kept moving toward the jail.
—eight , nine , ten —
I stepped past the group, Bligh raised his fist, drunkenly coughed, and said under his breath, “Sodomite.”
I stopped. Turned.
—ten , nine , eight —
I sidled up to the group, my hands still in my pockets.
“I’m sorry, I missed that last comment.” I never acknowledged the crude, cruel comments Bligh spoke behind my back, but let’s just say that the day’s events had left me eating vinegar with a fork, and if there was one aspect of this shitstorm I could control… I prayed it could be this moment.
“You heard it,” Bligh countered as he rose to his full height and looked down at me.
I removed my hands from my pockets.
The other three agents behind Bligh shifted uncomfortably.
“I heard you were on prisoner watch?” I looked Bligh up and down, glanced at the empty champagne bottles on the desk, then back to his twisted expression. “It’s no wonder Fishback ended up dead.”
Bligh’s face grew red beyond the alcohol’s blush, and he made a fist, lightning sparks snapping and colliding around his knuckles. He took a swing at me, too wide, and stumbled as I side-stepped the attack. “You goddamn fairy—”
Lightning illuminated the eastern windows, and a crack of thunder boomed over the city.
Bligh regained his footing in time to study the change in weather that was most certainly not caused by his paltry skills.
I extended my arm, palm out, and cast a spell I hadn’t utilized in a long time—gravity.
If it was cast with just the right amount of care, a layman would mistake it for a brutal dose of wind magic.
Bligh flew backward and slammed into the far wall.
The other agents let out a commotion of gasps, calls to stop fighting, warnings that Moore was in the stairwell, but I didn’t care.
The stress of the night was bringing sounds to the forefront of my memory.
Sounds that I worked so hard to keep under lock and key.
The snap of my fingers being broken. The brutal banging of soldiers at the front door.
And the bodies. The screaming of young men, crying for their mamas.
Limbs blown off, guts hanging out, begging until their very last breaths.
Those sounds haunted me. They ate with me, drank with me.
They slept with me, and now, they made love with me.
Every single goddamn day, they were there, lurking, hoping to catch me in a moment of weakness.
And tonight, when I had no stamina left to tamp down the snap , the bang , the screams , Bligh had to rub my last bit of patience as raw as the nerves in my hands.
Gunner had said nothing changes in life until our own attitudes do.
And on a conceptual level, I understood this.
I agreed with it, even. But he had no idea how deep the depravity went within me.
I believed in the law. I believed in my badge.
I wanted to be a good man. But there was no atonement grand enough for the life I’d lived.
All I could do was lie, survive, and die.
But before I spent eternity smiling at daisy roots, I was going to put Henry Bligh in his place.
Damn the consequences. I didn’t deserve to feel the happiness that’d been bubbling in my gut earlier for any sort of considerable length, but Christ Almighty, how much abuse was I expected to endure when I was already a dead man walking?
All I had wanted was a single evening with Gunner.
I walked to the wall, still holding my palm out, watching Bligh struggle with all his body mass to wriggle free from the invisible density holding him in place.
He looked like a fly squashed with a rolled-up newspaper, and I admit I enjoyed the shock in his expression.
I twisted my hand slightly and Bligh rose off his feet, just enough that he gagged from the pressure on his chest.
I drew closer still, so he could hear me whisper, “If you so much as look at me from across a bullpen for the rest of your career, I will make you regret having eyes, Bligh.”
He kicked his feet and wheezed.
“Do you understand me?”
He tried to nod. It didn’t work.
“Bligh?”
“Y- yes !”
I twisted my hand farther and Bligh was raised higher up the wall.
The panic in his eyes was unmistakable now.
“It’s Moore,” Plunket hissed from the doorway near the stairs, where she and the other two had moved, leaving her partner to defend himself against me.
“Do not ever call me a sodomite again.” I lowered my hand enough that Bligh’s toes touched the floor.
He coughed, gasped, choked out, “I-I won’t.”
I dropped my hand, and Bligh fell to the floor like a brick wall had collapsed in on itself.
Moore’s distinct tread entered from the hall at my back just then, and a hush fell over the room. “What’s going on?”
Still staring at Bligh, who pressed a hand to his chest as he fought to catch his breath, I said, “Bligh had too much to drink.” Then I walked into the jail as Moore told the remaining agents to clear out.
The now-empty cell that’d housed a sniveling Fishback only a few hours ago was scorched black.
The leftover remnants of the manufactured magic were popping in and out of my visual field.
There was that same digging and burrowing sensation as in the basement, but second by second, minute by minute, it was dissipating.
The problem was still that gaping wound I could feel in the magic atmosphere.
And this manufactured spell, finally dissolving, was creating a sort of tangible barrier, resting just below the raw magic like a pollutant.
The narrow hall Moore and I had stood in while interrogating Fishback was littered with broken glass from the window on my right. I tugged my trousers up a bit, took a big step over the mess, spun on a heel, and crouched to examine the window fragments at an angle.
I felt Moore’s magic as he moved to stand in the threshold.
“Bligh was drinking on the clock,” I stated.
“So it would appear.”
“His ineptitude amazes me. Fishback looks like the sort of corned beef dinner I’d cook.”
“Don’t exactly know your way around a kitchen, do you?”
“I prefer restaurants.”
“Bligh will be dealt with for his indiscretion,” Moore concluded. “What’s wrong?”
“I think this window was broken from the inside.” I stood. “This isn’t the correct trajectory for the break to have come from outside. It looks—staged.” I glanced up.
Moore’s expression had sharpened like steel, but despite the control on the surface, there was a raging firestorm of magic just under his skin. “I don’t like what you’re suggesting, Hamilton.”
“I’m suggesting nothing, sir. I’m stating the facts as I see them.
” I pointed at the mess on the floor. “This isn’t how broken glass would fall if the window was smashed from the outside.
This is like someone collected the pieces off the sill and threw them on the floor.
” I directed my attention to the open window, but nearly dropped dead from apoplexy when I was staring at Gunner squatted in the frame. “Gunner!”
“Hamilton.”
“What the hell are you—how did—?”
“You did want to know if a break-in four stories up was plausible, did you not?” Gunner’s gaze cut to Moore. “Your security leaves much to be desired, Director.”
Moore crossed his big arms over his chest. “How’d you do it?”
Gunner raised a single eyebrow. He leaned backward, reached for something out of view, and yanked a chain into the open window. “Steam pneumatic grappling hook.”
“Do you have a permit for that?” Moore countered. His tone indicated he knew Gunner did not and he was merely proving a point by asking.
Gunner said, “I don’t utilize such novelties.”
“You fancy yourself an old-school second-story man?”
Gunner’s mouth twitched, but then he looked at me while saying, “I followed a set of tracks along this side of the building. I lost the trail after a block—snow covered them. But there was a turned-over trash can with this hook inside.”
“So why the broken window?” Moore asked. He stroked his beard. “Insult to injury?”
“If the intruder smashed it before leaving, they’d have undoubtedly stepped on the shards on the sill while climbing back out. But those aren’t cracked, nor are they wet from shoe treads,” I explained before shrugging. “Perhaps Bligh or Plunket broke it after the fact to dissipate the smoke.”
Moore grunted at the suggestion but nodded. “I’ve not had the opportunity to get the full story from either of them yet, but I’ll be certain to get confirmation about the window.”
I glanced at Gunner. He was still watching me. Behind him, it’d appeared the inclement weather had finally come to a stop. “The snowfall’s let up,” I stated, breaking the quiet. “I ought to find Addison while there’s still a chance. Before the fireworks, and the entire city is one big party.”
At that, Gunner shifted in his crouched position. “A sensible plan.” He stood and, still holding the grappling hook’s chain, moved to a ledge on the right, just out of view.
“Wait,” Moore murmured, putting a hand up to keep me where I stood. He glanced at the open window before asking, “Is this real, Gillian?”
A flush broke out across my body, like pinpricks of starlight under my arms, across my chest, up my neck.
Moore had never crossed this boundary with names.
Not once in a decade of working together, not earlier tonight when he tried to surprise me with a gift, not even during the fiasco at my apartment.
I was Special Agent Hamilton and he was Director Moore— always .
“He’s a wanted man,” Moore said to my silence. “A murderer.”
“A vigilante is perhaps more accurate.” I hastened to cut Moore off when he opened his mouth to protest. “Sir, what I said before, about not defending his past, that was the truth. But it’s also true that I would be dead if not for his intervention in Shallow Grave.”
“Transient affections will make you cynical toward true love.”
I smiled, a bit bitterly, brokenly. “I’m already quite cynical, and without Gunner’s help.”
“No. You’re pure-hearted and he doesn’t deserve you.”
“Sir—”
“It can’t last. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“When he’s gone, and he will be, I’ll still be here.”
I shook my head, opened my mouth to speak, but the moment was so beyond my comprehension that I felt I couldn’t recall a single word in the English language.
Falling into a sky of a million paper lanterns that turned out to be jellyfish swimming in a night that the sun forgot to awaken seemed to make more sense than this conversation did.
“Think about it,” Moore hastened to add, taking a few steps forward, glass crunching underfoot as he paid it no mind.
He reached out, and the tips of his fingers touched my hair as I moved away from him entering my personal space.
“I’d move Heaven and Earth to hold you every night.
” Then, the danger of our magics be damned, Moore leaned down and made as if he were going to kiss me then and there.
Yours,
Constantine G.
I felt like I’d been punched in the solar plexus. I gasped and blinked back the wet in my eyes. The words were finally there: “Loren, stop.”
Moore froze, midway to my mouth.
“I can’t explain it, just like you won’t understand it. Until Gunner moves on… no.”
“Gillian—”
“I’m so sorry.”
Moore let out a huff of air, like a steam mechanic in need of repair.
His shoulders dipped a bit, and then he shifted to one side and pressed his lips lightly against my cheek.
The rasp of his beard felt incredible, followed by the minor discomfort of our magics interacting—a nip of electricity, the heat of fire.
An involuntary shudder went through my body.
He pulled back and straightened to his full height. “Be careful—with Addison.”
“I can handle Addison.”
Moore smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I know you can.”
I considered apologizing again, but an instinct I didn’t entirely understand told me no, that’d make it worse. So I did the only thing I could think of to salvage our relationship and my career—hoisted myself through the open window and climbed into the cold night.
Gunner stood ready at the ledge with the grappling hook.
His eyes met mine. He knew. Whether he’d overheard our conversation, or this was simply another one of Gunner’s moments where he deciphered a complex web of actions and emotions from a single muscle twitch in my face, I couldn’t be certain. But really, what did it matter?
He knew.
How infatuated I was.
How desperate.
How preemptively heartbroken.
“My dear?”
But then Gunner said things like that—my dear. His dear. And I could pretend for a bit longer that whatever this was between us, it was beautiful and forever and there was no need to worry about the day I woke and he was gone.
I smiled. “Sorry about that.”
Gunner spared me further embarrassment by not shifting his gaze to the window at my back. He instead held a hand out. “Need a lift?”
I leaned forward, studied the distance to the snow-covered street below, then answered, “I’ll race you.” And leaped off the ledge.