Chapter 5
Parade of Disasters
Malachy watched her wind down and down the spiral staircase with mounting concern.
He hadn’t been gone longer than a few minutes to check the wards. At first, he thought her sleep-fogged mind had not yet caught up from last night. Or, a darker part of his mind had whispered, her feelings for him had eroded in the light of day.
Now, the hopes he had clung to all night lay shattered at his feet in the pale morning. A cruel certainty writhed in his stomach. Cora had forgotten last night. All of it.
How? He would have noticed if she’d been that inebriated last night; he had seen her eyes every shade of bloodshot, glazed, and feverishly bright while on various substances. No, she had been lucid.
What the fuck was he missing? This was an equation that wouldn’t balance. A riddle with no true answer.
Or a demon afoot.
He cursed. How could—
The shrill ringing of the telephone cut off his thoughts. Very few people had the privilege of his home telephone number. Snatching up the receiver, he barked, “What?”
“Mal?” came the tinny voice of John O’Leary. “The Tribunal informed me of your recent release. Congratulations upon your return—”
“Get to the point, O’Leary.”
The memory mage cleared his throat. “There are several matters of critical importance which require your immediate attention.”
From the mild-mannered Memnomancer, this might as well have been a declaration of the apocalypse.
“Meet at the club in ten.” Malachy slammed the receiver down and raked back his hair. One clusterfuck at a time, he told himself as he hastily dressed in a three-piece suit. Black jacket, waistcoat, and tie, perfectly tailored and pressed, just as he had left them.
As soon as he put out these fires, he would make things right with Cora by any means necessary.
“How bad is it, O’Leary?”
John O’Leary adjusted the gold-rimmed spectacles on his pinched face. “Quite.”
Apocalyptic, indeed. Malachy eyed the mountain of paperwork awaiting him on the large desk in his walnut-paneled office at the Emerald Club.
“Your correspondence,” O’Leary explained.
“Grand.” Malachy grimaced at the precariously stacked papers.
Opening a bottle of his favorite Irish whiskey, he poured himself what would become the first of many full glasses.
He tried not to think of how he had shared a glass of the same whiskey with Cora last night, before she forgot it all with the morning.
He drowned the thought with a long drink. Soon, he would find her and make it right. For now, he braced himself and nodded for O’Leary to continue.
“I have arranged your meetings with the gang today. They will enlighten you further.” O’Leary handed him a schedule.
Malachy’s gaze swept over the meetings, booked until late, and snagged on Cora’s name near the bottom.
His heart lurched. “First, may I inquire about the full nature of the Tribunal’s business with you?
They were less than forthcoming when notifying me of your conditional release. ”
“After months of dithering, they gave me five years for a technicality.”
“Well, it is hardly your first offense, Mal.”
“Whose side are you on, O’Leary? Regardless, they’ll waive the sentence if I… take some rubbish out for them.”
The solicitor glanced up from his notes. “Rubbish?”
“I can’t tell you. They—” Malachy made the choking sign— “me.”
O’Leary’s brows rose slightly. Genuine shock, coming from him.
“A gagging spell. I see. Well. After the London Nightmare, the situation here has regrettably not improved. The sleeping sickness claims more victims by the day. The wealthy can afford feeding tubes, but the poorer victims have withered away until their beds became their coffins. Humans are increasingly suspicious, and mages are fearful of witch hunts. This situation has, ah, hindered business.”
Malachy swore. “Have you got the most recent accounts?”
“Aye.” O’Leary set down a ledger with neat columns of numbers, the margins crammed with meticulous notes. He hesitated before sliding it across the desk. “Business has been… less robust.”
Malachy could see what an understatement that was as he pored over the accounts with a furrowing brow.
Even with a new fleet of ships to make up for his magical losses after Koschei’s Egg broke, the booze shipments into Prohibition states were lagging far behind.
His transatlantic smuggling operation was hemorrhaging profits on both sides of the pond, from the cargo piling up in London warehouses to the docks sitting empty in Boston and Newfoundland.
“Why hasn’t any of the liquor made it across the fuckin’ pond this month?”
O’Leary shifted in his seat. “Lieutenant Randolph Potts of the London Metropolitan Police has not been subtle in tailing our operations. Our every move is being scrutinized by several pairs of eyes. Potts’s round the clock surveillance has severely limited our transportation capacity.”
It was not surprising, but no less irksome.
Potts, a decorated war veteran and even more decorated police lieutenant, had proven himself impervious to corruption and coercion.
He had no family to threaten, no dirty secrets to blackmail, no loose principles to bribe.
With his stodgy morality and competence—a damned inconvenient combination—the lieutenant had been a persistent pain in Malachy’s arse for years.
“Let’s keep the felonies to a minimum, then. In the meantime, O’Leary, siphon some of Potts’s memories to quell suspicions.” With a glancing touch, the Memnomancer could scrape a mind with the exactitude of a surgeon.
“Of course.” O’Leary agreed to ransacking the lieutenant’s mind with the same detached efficiency as filing paperwork. “However, given the scope of the copper’s surveillance, memory magic will be insufficient to curtail all suspicions. Potts has seeded much doubt against you in your absence.”
“Perhaps we should kill him.”
“Preemptively?” O’Leary’s brows knitted in consideration, as if the casual suggestion of murder was an inquiry on yesterday’s lunch. Then he shook his head. “Lt. Potts would only be replaced.”
“With someone more susceptible to coercion.”
“But the fingers would all point at you, Mal.”
“Damnit. Murder postponed until further notice.” Downing his whiskey, he poured another and turned back to the account books. “Profits from the steel factories we bought out from under Rune Borges remain strong. Good. Has our Ferromancer mercenary been tolerating his leash?”
“The dog has slipped his leash, I fear. Several times.”
“Of course,” Malachy muttered. Most days, he regretted backing Rune Borges to take over the late Verek's gang of Pyromancers and Ferromancers. Rune’s ego could not be satisfied by mere titles as the complicit figurehead of a rival gang. “What has Rune been doing?”
“Given his lack of business acumen, thankfully Mr. Borges has been disinterested in the steel factories. Our manufacturing expansion may continue unencumbered. Mr. Borges has been preoccupied with some sort of social club he brought over from the continent. Perhaps we should involve him in the Silvertown motor car factory? His fire and metal mages would prove useful for both the construction and assembly lines.”
Malachy considered. He stroked the stubble on his jaw, trying not to think about the ghosts of Cora’s touch still haunting his skin. But she fell into the grooves his restless thoughts had worn down in his mind, as inevitable as the pull of gravity. He forced his mind back to the current disaster.
“No, let’s keep Rune useless. For strategic reasons.”
“Noted. Mr. Borges’s gang was not the only one gaining power in your absence.
Julian Morro’s gang of Lumomancers and Umbramancers has also risen to some prominence, despite their leader being an…
American.” O’Leary uttered the word in an undertone, as if it was an embarrassing indecency.
“Between their illusion-casting and shadow-cloaking, they have quite cornered the intelligence market.”
Without Edwina Morton’s pack of Bestiamancers to sniff out London’s secrets, Malachy wasn’t surprised that someone else had filled the vacuum Mother had left.
The gang of shadow and light mages had slipped into London while Malachy slept, trapped in the Dream Realm by Ikelas’s demonic magic.
He’d had the misfortune of meeting their leader Julian Morro once before his arrest in February.
His impression of the platinum-haired, silver-tongued Lumomancer had been that Julian was more concerned with appearances than business.
The gang’s quick rise to power raised questions.
“What’s Morro’s end game?”
“That remains to be seen,” O’Leary said. “Madam Kalandra claims they have been spying on her business. She alleges that Mr. Morro illusioned himself as a Gilded Lily courtesan while, ah, entertaining a client.”
His brows rose with his curiosity. “Which client?”
“Madam Kalandra refrained from comment.” O’Leary adjusted the perfect angle of his pocket square. “There are some rumors that Mr. Morro is not, in fact, the boss, merely the spokesman. Some believe there is a shadow mage running the gang from the, well, shadows.”
“Who?”
Gold spectacles flashed. “Ari Razaq holds disproportionate influence over the gang’s business. Sloane Kilbride, as your spymaster, will have more information on Mr. Razaq, although it may not be… unbiased. According to Anita, the two Umbramancers have become, ah, romantically involved.”
Malachy knew nothing of Ari Razaq—something he would soon correct—but he trusted Anita’s needle-sharp nose for gossip.
The Sanguimancer’s letters to Rome had been rife with gang news, yet Sloane Kilbride’s apparent whirlwind romance with the fellow shadow mage had not featured. A purposeful omission?
Cora had also mentioned that Sloane was moving out of the flat above the club and in with her new boyfriend. Razaq, apparently.