XVI
Gunner returned to the apartment amid a self-induced whirlwind.
“This is Special Agent Gillian Hamilton with the Federal Bureau of Magic and Steam, and I’ve been trying to request—no authorization?
What do you mean? I’m the senior agent on this case.
Oh, to hell with that, sir!” I all but hollered into my PDD at the poor bastard at Convey & Dispatch.
I had one arm through my winter coat sleeve, the other hanging like a broken wing as I paced the parlor floor.
“This is a matter of citywide security. I need that code’s last pinged location traced now .
” I clenched my jaw as the representative insisted there was nothing he could do without the request coming directly from Moore, as it was simply too intrusive into the client’s privacy.
I swore again, louder, tore the PDD from my ears, and threw it at the wall. I turned while yanking my other sleeve on to see Gunner standing in the open doorway. “Constantine.”
His eyebrows rose in response.
I rushed toward him, grabbed ahold of his tie, gave it a firm tug, and like I’d flicked a switch inside him, Gunner melted against my body and kissed me hard. “I’m sorry,” I whispered against his mouth.
“For?”
He damn well knew. But he deserved to hear the words. “For my accusation—that you would lie. And it’s not my business, this other man. It’s not my business who you’ve slept with before me, or… or loved before me.”
The corner of Gunner’s mouth hooked up. “Gillian,” he said, and never had hearing him say my name in that husky voice felt so good. “If you ask me, I’ll tell you. But I’d prefer you didn’t. Not right now. It’s a loss I’m still working through.”
I quickly nodded and swallowed the knot of jealousy I couldn’t manage to let go of, despite the absurdity of it. If he wasn’t going to pressure me , I had to respect Gunner’s boundaries about this particular subject in return. “I understand.”
Gunner gently pried my hand from his tie, his smile growing as he did.
He leaned back to check the hallway, as we had, I realized, shared that moment in the open doorway.
Looking at me once again, Gunner smoothed his blunt fingertips against the grays on the side of my head. “What has you so upset?”
No authorization.
55387.
Henry Bligh .
“It’s Bligh,” I said in a rush. I pushed Gunner into the hall, shut the apartment door, and ran for the stairs. “Bligh is Tick Tock.”
“ What ?” Gunner’s tone was total disbelief as he followed close behind.
I should have liked to see that very human expression ripple across his typically flat features, but I was already rushing down the stairs and didn’t dare stop.
“I tinkered with McCarthy’s PDD, figured out the code he pinged most often.
When I rang it, Bligh answered, and he knew McCarthy—was expecting him!
” I jumped the last two steps, skidded around the corner, and kept going down the final set of stairs.
“He hung up on me and wouldn’t answer when I tried again.
I’ve asked the communication support in the city to triangulate Bligh’s location, but they won’t release the address to anyone but Moore. ”
“Why haven’t you called Moore?” Gunner returned, his feet hitting the landing behind me, and the two of us rushed out the front door, past Dawson and into the cold night.
“I did. Several times!” I called, heart pounding and blood pumping as I ran down the block. “He’s not answering. I can’t fucking imagine where he’d be—he was supposed to be interviewing Higgins.”
It was five blocks from The Buchanan to the field office—four streets and one avenue.
Even with the stitch in my side from the blow by McCarthy, we reached the alleyway with the unassuming side entrance in just over a minute.
The city had been a blur of steam-powered color—reds and greens burning like the eyes of a colossus—black and uneven cobblestone roads like broken teeth in its gaping maw, and all the while, the monster didn’t catch me—couldn’t catch me—because I was fueled by the mounting panic that something was very wrong .
Moore always wore his PDD around his neck.
I’d have believed he slept with it, for Christ’s sake.
His agents knew, no matter where he was, what he was doing, or the hour of day, Moore would answer.
And not to push a sense of egotism, but I was not the man Moore would choose to ignore.
Even if he was angry, livid, beside himself with me, with Gunner, with the concept of us , Moore would not choose this moment, this case , to enact some petty sort of revenge by leaving my calls pinging into the ether.
And if Moore couldn’t answer….
I skidded to a stop in the alley, found my keys, and unlocked the door.
While I hadn’t explained my sense of urgency to Gunner, he followed on my heels without question as I ran along the winding corridors and started up the stairs to the offices.
He had to have understood that the state director not answering calls from a senior agent was troublesome.
The two of them might not have liked each other, and that was putting it cordially, but I do believed Gunner held Moore in esteem.
In fact, if Moore wasn’t so good at his job and Gunner could come and go from New York as he pleased, I didn’t think the reluctant respect between them would exist.
But most importantly, Moore was my colleague, my boss, and the closest thing I’d ever had to a friend. I cared deeply for him, even if it was not in the manner Moore wished.
Rachel Plunket, Bligh’s bruiser partner, was coming down the stairs with a stack of files in both hands. She looked at me, blushed a furious shade of crimson, and tried to avert her gaze while slinking by.
“Plunket.” I sidestepped and cut her off. “Where’s your partner?”
She huffed a little, but the attitude toward me had always seemed…
forced, as if it were a performance for Bligh’s sake.
Plunket looked at me, the paperwork, me, Gunner, me again, then shot Gunner a second once-over.
A crease settled between her brows, like he was a familiar face she just couldn’t quite place at the given moment.
“Plunket,” I said again, more firmly. “Where is Agent Bligh?”
Plunket redirected her attention and then shook her head. “Still with Moore, I suppose. We’ve been regulated to paper-pushing duties after last night and—”
I held up a hand to stop her. “What do you mean, still with Moore?”
“Moore called him into a meeting, maybe fifteen minutes ago.”
“Without you.” It was not a question.
Plunket colored again, and it made her strong features pop. “Um, I don’t believe the impromptu oversight review had anything to do with our partnership.”
“That’s a very polite way of admitting your partner stepped in it,” Gunner said to her.
I moved around Plunket and continued up the stairs.
“Hamilton,” she called after me. “What’s going on?”
“If you see Bligh, you detain him,” I answered over my shoulder. “That’s an order.”
Gunner kept on me until we reached the fourth-floor landing, where I hastily led the way down the hall toward Moore’s private office, luckily in the opposite direction of an open-floor bullpen of scholar agents.
His door was closed. I knocked and called loud enough to be heard through the heavy wood, “Sir? It’s Agent Hamilton. I need to speak with you at once.”
No response.
“It’s an emergency,” I continued, grabbing the knob and trying it, only to find it locked. I looked at Gunner. “He never locks the door.”
Gunner put a hand on my chest, gently pushed me aside, then raised his foot and slammed his heel into the door.
The wood audibly cracked but seemed to hold, so Gunner smashed it again.
On the second try, the entire lock plate snapped, the door crashed against the inner wall, and broken bits of wood flew every which way.
The sounds of alarm from the bullpen were immediate, but I didn’t wait around to explain myself. I rushed inside and took in the particulars of the office—flashes of detail that registered like a piano student’s first attempt at staccato.
Curtain drawn across the window.
Tumbler overturned on the desktop.
Amber liquid and a shattered decanter.
An arm on the floor, just visible behind the desk.
“Moore!” I moved around the furniture, shoved his chair aside, and got down on my knees. Moore was unresponsive and bleeding from the side of his head. I grabbed his waistcoat in both hands, smoke and sparks already materializing between us, and shook him hard. “Moore. Please… Loren , wake up.”
A stampede thundered down the hallway and then voices were filling the doorway, agents from the bullpen demanding I identify myself at once.
I sat up so they could see me over the desktop.
“Fetch Dr. Lillingston at once.” The half dozen of them hesitated a second too long, and I snapped, “ Now !” As they scrambled from the office, Gunner hooked his hands under my arms and hoisted me out of the way.
I flailed wildly against him, saying, “Stop it— stop —let me cast aether.”
“Calm down,” Gunner ordered. He shoved me against the window and took up the space beside Moore. He pressed his fingers to Moore’s neck, and his eyes narrowed.
“No pulse?”
“I don’t think so.”
I put a hand to my chest as if my own heart were about to give out. “Aether won’t work without a goddamn pulse from the recipient.”
Gunner yanked off his bowler, threw it across the room, leaned over Moore, pinched his nose, and blew a deep breath into his mouth.
“Gunner,” I protested. “What’re you—expired air won’t do him any good.”
But Gunner ignored me. He blew a second lungful of air, a third, and after the fourth, Moore coughed and inhaled on a ragged breath. Gunner sat back and looked at me. “Come cast your aether.”
I moved forward without conscious thought, staring at Gunner with what I suspected was a wild and disbelieving expression, but then I was on my knees beside Moore’s head, his temple still bleeding, and I righted my focus to the matter at hand.
I put my goggles on, cast aether in one hand, and pressed the bright magic to the wound.
Even though I wasn’t physically touching Moore this time, my magic bridged the inches between us, and I could feel his heat warming the underbelly of my wrist. A bit of smoke coiled in the air between us, and Moore grunted in discomfort.
“No, don’t move. Don’t open your eyes,” I told him.
I poured more magic into the aether spell, already feeling the exhaustive side effects of such a complex magic being used in its most potent method possible—healing.
Destruction with aether was an incredible force, but it was always easier to break the world than it was to mend it.
As I’d done to Addison’s face, I stopped the bleeding and sutured the skin some, but the major complaints of any wound would still need to be addressed by medicine, not magic.
Aether couldn’t repair broken bones, torn muscle, or God forbid, raise the dead.
The caster simply didn’t have the energy required for that level of healing—even a caster such as me.
Cautiously, I curled my fingers into a fist, cutting off the aether’s energy stream and managing to keep my nerves from having a caustic reaction again.
I slowly unfurled my hand, tugged the goggles down, and dared to lightly press my fingers against the semihealed wound.
Moore winced as electricity jumped from me and nipped his skin.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m trying—”
“Gillian?” Moore asked, his usual smooth tenor rough around the edges.
“Yes.”
He cracked a smile and asked, his eyes still closed, “Are we alone?”
“Gunner is with me.”
“Ah….” A pause, and then he said anyway, “When I imagined having my head in your lap, it wasn’t quite like this.”
“Your head in my lap would result in spontaneous combustion and electrocution, Loren.”
“What a way to go out.”
I laughed a little, removed my hand from the still-red skin, and said, “I was scared for a moment.”
Moore hummed under his breath.
“What happened, sir?”
Moore opened his eyes and stared at me, looming upside down over his face. “Bligh had interrupted my interview… with Higgins. Yes. He was adamant about joining me.”
“Did you allow it?”
“I forbade it. He was infuriated.”
“Bligh is never happy,” I pointed out.
Moore was frowning. “Not like this. I must have sent him into the hall—I heard him answer a PDD call… wasn’t his Bureau-issued device.”
“I called him,” I explained. “I took apart McCarthy’s and traced the most pinged code. Bligh answered it, expecting McCarthy.”
“That’s right.” Moore closed his eyes and massaged his temples. “I remember thinking, does Bligh know Carl Higgins? Why, when this has never been his case, is he so insistent to be part of this interview? And when I heard McCarthy’s name….” He weakly snapped his fingers.
I glanced at Gunner and said, “Triangulating Bligh’s location is a waste now. He was here .”
“Call him again. He doesn’t have much of a lead on us.”
“I said he was a self-centered man-child, not stupid. He won’t pick up.” I looked to Moore once again. “How’d you end up in your office?”
“It’s a blur. I wanted to speak with Bligh—about what I’d overheard him say. I think… I must have poured a drink. I left the decanter on the desk.” He looked at me again. “One of my agents is a gangster.”
“It would appear as such, sir.”
“I needed a drink,” Moore muttered. “That’s the last thing I recall.”
Gunner rose to his feet and moved around us, broken glass crunching underfoot. “Bligh entered your office, grabbed the bottle, and smashed it over your head. He locked the door as he left and intended for you to bleed out.”
“Speculation,” Moore replied.
“Hardly. You’re covered in blood, whiskey, and glass.”
Moore’s expression grew quizzical as he looked down at himself. “Almost done in by my Dublin, twelve years.”
“Agent Hamilton,” a woman called from the doorway, slightly out of breath. “Dr. Lillingston has arrived. She’s on her way upstairs now.”
“Thank you,” I answered. And to Moore I said, “I have to find Bligh.”
“Dead or alive, Hamilton. And given the recent turn of events….”
“Understood, sir.”