XVII
“What’s the plan?” Gunner asked, following me down the hall that led away from Moore’s office.
The stairs came up on our right, and the half-sized bullpen that overlooked the cells where Fishback had met his end was on the left.
Just beyond either was the doorway that led to the open floor of scholar agents, several of whom were now hovering in the archway, watching me.
Watching Gunner.
It only took one of them to connect the dots: blue eyes, black hair, lean build, six feet.
“I’m going to kill Henry Bligh,” I answered, my tone mere window dressing for the blackness raging inside me.
I didn’t need a view to confirm a storm was rolling in across midtown—I could feel it.
Undoubtedly, the wary scholars at the end of the hall could sense it as well.
Perhaps my magic, a whirlwind of violence building by the minute that I felt no desire to temper, was all that kept them from proclaiming Gunner’s arrest in my presence.
I had been an enigma to them before, but now I was dangerous and they knew it.
Gunner grabbed my arm, pulled me to a stop, and spun me to look up at him.
If he was at all troubled by the agents surrounding us—him—he in no way showed it.
“We still don’t know where Tick Tock—Bligh—holes up.
That family isn’t hurting for country estates.
Why would he willingly use Mulberry Bend as a refuge? ”
“He’s been successfully maintaining two distinct lives—for months, at minimum,” I answered.
“He’s built Tick Tock up, by name alone, as a new terror to this city.
If a face is put to it now, he’ll lose that ever-present threat of death he holds over the other gangsters.
He’s not some sort of high collar criminal.
If Bligh is found out, his esteemed position with the Bureau, as well as his family inheritance, will be gone.
No, he’d absolutely keep away from Millionaire’s Row or any other location that could be linked back to his name. ”
“There’s still far too many possibilities around the Bend,” Gunner countered. “Warehouses, tenements, storefronts. These are not the sort of citizens who welcome a badge into their neighborhood, my dear.”
I smiled at that—one of self-mockery, but a smile nonetheless. “I thrive where I’m not wanted.”
“Gray looks good on you.”
“My director gave me explicit orders.”
“I know.”
“This isn’t vigilantism.”
The corners of Gunner’s eyes crinkled. “I know. What do you need from me?”
I gave the room over my shoulder a glance, then said, “I’m going to speak with Higgins. I think the connection between him and Bligh is a critical one—he might know the specifics of Tick Tock’s hideout on the Bend.” I looked at Gunner again. “Be ready outside.”
“It’s a shame,” he replied, his tone casual, if not this side of bored, “airships being prohibited south of Grand Central.”
“What’re you planning?”
Gunner merely smiled in response. He turned to go down the stairs, but I took his coat sleeve, pulled him toward me, and kissed him. I kissed him and made certain that everyone watching couldn’t mistake it for anything but what it was.
Love .
“If I’m going to war with gangsters and untold illegal magic, I don’t want to have any regrets,” I whispered after pulling away.
“You’ve made a scene,” Gunner said, just as quiet, although he hadn’t broken eye contact with me.
“This is who I am. I’m sick to death of being afraid. All these lies, survival or not, they’ve built a life that has no room for you—and that’s not worth it to me. If I cannot be both an agent and happy, to hell with them .”
Gunner smiled once again, so warmly that it could have thawed the winter night entirely and brought about an early spring. “I do believe this breath will matter tomorrow, Gillian Hamilton.”
I exhaled a choked-up laugh. “I’ll be downstairs in a moment.
” I watched him descend the stairs before turning to the group with their mouths agape.
“I want five agents on Director Moore’s office at once.
And if the doctor decides to move him out-of-building, I want a dozen more at his side.
A combination of caster and bruiser partners—Agent Boggs, please see to assignments at once. ”
Boggs, a middle-aged scholar who’d been with the Bureau for a number of years, albeit at a desk, seemed to waffle between taking a direct order from a senior agent and pointing out the obvious—a sodomite was among them. “ Ah ….”
“Was I not clear?” I countered.
“No—I mean, yes, sir. Of course.” And with that, Boggs turned and began barking orders, calling agents out by name, and taking control of Moore’s immediate safety.
I stormed into the half bullpen and called over my shoulder, “And someone arrest Agent Plunket! I have no idea what team she’s playing for…
.” Despite a boarded-up window and scorched cell on the other side of the two stone-cold sober agents standing guard at the jail door, this was still one of the most secure rooms in the building for housing suspects in the interim. “Out,” I ordered.
The team looked at each other, the bruiser declining to speak while the caster said, “Director Moore ordered—”
“Agent Henry Bligh just tried to kill Director Moore,” I interjected. “I’m in charge. Out .”
Thunder rumbled from outside the windows, and flashes of lightning were visible at the edges of the curtains.
Magic-induced static shot through the air, raising the hairs on my arms. But even as my emotions threw the raw elements into chaos, I could feel the energy bumping against the tangible threshold the illegal magic had been creating and building with every fire bullet shot.
Luckily, the two agents scurried from the room without further argument.
I held a hand out and threw the jail room door open with a well-timed blast of wind magic. As I entered the narrow hallway, Higgins made an audible squeak.
“Don’t you come any closer,” he exclaimed, pressing himself against the far wall of the cell. “I’ll scream. I swear it.”
The air rustled around me as I approached. “I hope you do.”
Higgins’s face blanched, his eyes bugging out, and I swore his waxed mustache drooped. Standing behind bars, sans suit coat, shirt caked and hardened with dried blood, his arm in a sling… he looked pathetic. “Wh-what do you want?” he all but whimpered.
“Tell me about the aether syrup.”
Higgins sniffed. Then sniffed again. “The—syrup?”
“Is there an echo?” I asked.
“It’s a sugar concoction,” he protested. “With a dash of liquid aether. It works wonders for the complications of women—uterine and ovarian pain, for example—”
“You’re not a doctor,” I shouted. “‘It works wonders….’ Christ Almighty . Next you’ll tell me it’s a miracle drug like laudanum.”
“Aether isn’t addictive.”
“No, it only has a curious side effect of sudden death if cast incorrectly. Did you, even once, consider the possibility that you were transporting and selling a magic-induced medicine cast by someone without the essential training? Or hell, someone with wicked intentions?”
Higgins’s mustache quivered as he sniffed and sobbed.
“I want a list of customers.”
“A list?” he repeated, and when the air kicked up around me, Higgins held out his good arm in protest. “I only mean, I can’t possibly! Half of the ladies in society come to me on the regular. There’s a demand and I’ve got the means in which to fill it.”
“Explain.”
“A little warehouse downtown for bottling and labeling. Warner’s Elixir is my side business.”
“How has this gone completely undetected by the Bureau?”
Higgins tried to shrug both shoulders and then hissed in pain.
“My enterprise is small, sir. Nothing on the scale of what Tick Tock was doing. And women—women are cunning. They know how to keep a good thing secret. Aqua Tofana killed some 600 unwanted husbands in Italy before the Queen of Poison was finally found out.”
No doubt Gunner would have understood that reference more than I did.
I shook my head. “You must have a principal customer. The one who is referring others to you?”
“Oh… uh… yes.”
“And she must have a name,” I ground out.
Higgins swallowed hard and said, “Martha Olin. You’re familiar? Her daughter, Emma, is about to marry into Old Money.”
I pushed Higgins out the front door of the field office, holding on to his cuffed hands from behind as we walked down the steps.
The sky was alight with bolts of lightning, the city echoing with the symphonic booms of thunder, and a wind had kicked up the top layer of snow, swirling it around us like miniature whirlwinds.
I was saying, “You’re going to direct me to this warehouse of— what on Earth ?”
Parked in front of the FBMS was a pristine white touring automobile.
The front body was an open-style with no hood, so as to flaunt the expensive brass and chrome steam engine and radiator.
The exhaust pipes on either side spit hot steam into the night air, and pressure gauges whistled in time with the wind.
The front grille had been completely dismantled and replaced with a unique Gatling gun that was fired from a crank on the driver’s dash once the roadster hit a certain speed.
I knew this because the Bureau had confiscated the custom automobile several months ago, citing half a dozen illegal uses of steam power.
The inclusion of a nonmagic weapon had caused the metropolitan police and FBMS to fight over who had the jurisdiction to see the case to its conclusion, and so the evidence had been parked on the west side of the field office under lock and key since, hell, September, I believed.
Gunner stepped around the front of the auto and said, while putting his goggles on, “You didn’t expect to walk to Mulberry Bend, did you?”
“How did you get this from evidence?” Then I held up my free hand and shook my head. “No, never mind. I don’t want to know.”
“ You ,” Higgins said suddenly, jutting his chin toward Gunner. “The Waterbury—that atrocious wardrobe—you’re Gunner the Deadly, aren’t you?”
The corner of Gunner’s mouth tugged upward, and I felt I knew his smiles well enough by now to know that particular look wasn’t amusement so much as a warning of danger.
I jerked Higgins’s handcuffs. “Don’t give him an excuse to shoot you again.”
“The Bureau is doing business with an outlaw,” Higgins continued, now struggling in my hold. “I’m reporting this. You hear me?”
“I’ll be happy to look into it for you.”
“Not you !” Higgins exclaimed. “You’re crooked. A double-dealing, two-timing—”
Gunner unholstered his Waterbury and took aim at Higgins’s face. “Stop.”
Higgins immediately fell silent, his mouth still hanging open.
“Where’s your warehouse?” I asked after a breath passed between the three of us.
Higgins sniffed a few times. “Bayard and Mulberry.”
“Nice neighborhood,” Gunner remarked dryly as he put his Waterbury away.
“That’s where Tick Tock is,” I said.
Higgins startled and tried to turn and look at me. “ What ?”
“Are you certain?” Gunner asked.
“Mr. Higgins’s best customer of his famous Warner’s Elixir is none other than Bligh’s mother-in-law, Martha Olin,” I explained. “Knowing she had access to some quality magic, Bligh could have easily been put into contact with Higgins. All of the social connections immediately fall into place.”
“I’ve never spoken to Mr. Bligh,” Higgins interrupted.
“No,” Gunner said to Higgins, turning his head slightly to study the other man. “But you spoke to Tick Tock—who you’ve never met in person, I’m sure.”
Higgins didn’t have a retaliation to that comment.
“Bligh— Tick Tock —knew you had an illegal caster out West for the aether syrup, so he simply utilized your already-established contact, right?” I asked Higgins.
“Yes, but Tick Tock needed an architect too, to build the manufactured spells. Luther, my caster, found the architect in California.”
“Luther,” I repeated. “Luther Jones?”
Higgins nodded.
“The Bureau’s been wanting him for years—thank you for the intel.”
“Who was the architect?” Gunner asked Higgins.
“I don’t know, honest. Luther only corresponded with me twice—once that he’d find someone so we could take on Tick Tock’s business, then again to confirm he’d found an architect he could work with.”
“Was the architect’s name Weaver?” Gunner pressed.
I shot him a look, but all of Gunner’s attention was on Higgins.
“Yes,” Higgins murmured. “I don’t believe it’s his real name, but you would know— criminals and their aliases.”
“You’re a damn criminal too, Carl Higgins,” I said firmly, giving his handcuffs another shake.
“How long ago was this?” Gunner continued.
“Gunner—” I started, but he held a hand up and cut my protest short.
Higgins awkwardly looked over his shoulder at me, then back to Gunner. “I don’t—that is—just last February? Yes, that sounds right. Tick Tock reached out to me, I inquired with Luther, and he’d found Weaver within the month. There were some prototypes that didn’t make the cut a few months ago….”
“Milo Ferguson,” Gunner replied. “You gave them to Tinkerer to test.”
An automobile rounded the corner of Twenty-Third Street, the hiss of its steam and bump of wheels on cobblestone barely audible over the storm.
“ I didn’t!” Higgins cried. “It wasn’t my idea at all. And Tick Tock was—I thought he was going to kill me. He was livid that some of the ammunition had been leaked because fools at the FBMS found out about it.”
I shook Higgins for a third time.
“Ow! My shoulder, little you bastard.”
The other auto, a black touring with brass fixtures so buffed and polished that the housing of the headlights and exhaust pipes built around the shape of the engine hood practically glowed in the dark, slowed its approach, nearly coming to a dead stop as it became parallel with the white touring.
Although distracted by the curious onlookers, I drew my attention back to the conversation as Gunner was saying:
“Weaver provided the prototypes to Tinkerer, didn’t he?”
Higgins said in a harassed tone, “Well, it must have been him. It sure as hell wasn’t Luther or myself—”
The activation of fire magic gave a sudden jolt to the atmosphere.
It crept up my spine, the spell close enough that I could feel the searing heat on my skin and half expected blisters to begin forming.
Then the toxic sensation of manufactured magic hit me, and the current of raw energy around us buckled and tore.
I turned to the black touring a second time and watched as Gatling Man, sitting in the passenger seat, maneuvered his weapon out the open window, pointed at us with a silver finger, and opened fire.