Chapter 23
Devils
At the doorstep stood Lt. Randolph Potts. He was out of uniform this evening, looking bedraggled in his plain clothes. A crazed light shone in his eyes.
Malachy’s finger twitched on the trigger of the gun aimed at Potts’s chest. “You have thirty seconds to explain yourself.”
Potts’s response to this far from idle threat was to bark an offkey laugh that echoed along the empty street.
“For years we have been trying to find this place. Whenever we got a lead, my officers reported there was no such house at that address. Or that it was there and gone in the blink of an eye.”
Malachy’s grip tightened on the gun. “Fifteen seconds.”
“He said your house could only be found if it was seen and only seen if it was found. I thought him mad, yet here you are, precisely where he said you would be.”
A cold wash of unease prickled over Malachy. “Who?”
Potts took a step forward. “I used to think you were the devil himself. Now I know you’re just one of the devils stalking the streets of London.
Last night, my men followed you to that congress of devils in the bowels of Limehouse.
For the life of me, I still can’t figure out how you were both handcuffed outside the warehouse and in its basement at the same time. ”
Malachy’s mind whirred in circles. Potts’s shocked expression when he'd seen Malachy at the Protean Society meeting was now cast in a sinister light. The coppers hadn’t followed Malachy to Limehouse and arrested him, but a man wearing Malachy’s face.
“Both of you identical devils managed to slip away in the chaos. We captured a prostitute named Camille Borges, but she, too, slipped away. Somehow, she persuaded my officers to let her waltz out the front door. Like witchcraft.” Potts’s eyes gleamed in the light spilling from the doorway.
“I have seen the truth for myself. When you and your co-conspirators disappeared from the basement, I looked through that impossible doorway and saw another world.”
Icy horror shot through Malachy’s veins.
Potts had peered through the portal into Parallel London.
A human had witnessed the existence of magic due to his carelessness.
Camille Borges had used her Animancy to escape, but Potts already knew too much.
Malachy’s finger hovered over the trigger, ready to end this catastrophe before it swallowed him whole.
“Who else knows?” Malachy demanded.
“They won’t believe me.” A choked sound tore from Potts’s throat, half laugh, half sob.
“Not even my own men who were there, buffered by an invisible barrier while you slipped through a tear between worlds like roaches. Not even my superiors believed me when I gave them proof. I tracked your cargo shipments across the Atlantic. Some of your contraband arrived in Boston in two impossible days. But evidence against you has a way of disappearing, doesn’t it, Bane?
Everyone continues to deny the evidence before their own eyes.
Why can't they see? The Metropolitan Police even put me on leave, thanks to you.”
Malachy had exchanged words over lunch with the Commissioner to resume the generous contributions to his reelection campaigns.
“It’s the stress, they said, that's made me delusional. Unfit to serve, they said. But I have never been more aware. I know the truth about your kind.” In a fearful undertone, Potts whispered, “Mages.”
The word drove a stake of fear into Malachy’s heart. This was cataclysmic for him and Cora and mages everywhere.
From the corner of his eye Malachy glimpsed movement. Cora hesitated in the doorway of the library with a revolver in her hand. He willed her to stay out of sight.
“But only my patron believes me."
“Who?”
“Even if I knew his name, do you think I'd give it to you?”
Malachy performed a quick calculation. The risks could exceed the benefits if done hastily, but Potts had already made the decision for him. There was only one thing left to do.
He grabbed Potts by the lapels and traversed them to a distant field with nothing and no one in sight.
The moon, the only witness, was veiled by clouds.
The wind bayed a mournful howl over the rolling hills.
In the distance, London was a starlit night all its own, gas lamps glittering in the firmament.
Potts dropped to his knees on the freshly tilled earth and retched his guts out. Gasping, he looked around the incongruous surroundings with wide-eyed shock. His horrified gaze fell upon Malachy’s feet and slowly rose to his face. He scrambled back, trying to stand on unsteady feet in the mud.
“It’s true,” Potts breathed. “It’s all true.”
“Aye.” Malachy stepped forward, and Potts screamed and fell back, clawing at the mud for purchase.
“Wh-what are you going to do?”
“Glad you asked.” He steadily advanced as Potts slipped back. “I’m going to fuckin’ kill you.”
He aimed his gun at the lieutenant's chest and shot him through the heart.
The bullet painted the outsides with Potts’s insides. Surprise was etched into the lines of the lieutenant's face as he toppled into a pit yawning open in the earth, a grave dug by portal magic.
You’re no better than your Da.
Malachy wiped warm blood from his face, filled with the cold satisfaction of finally removing that persistent pain in his arse. The long-loose thread of Lt. Randolph Potts had been tied.
While the copper's death solved one problem, it opened a much larger one. Every finger would soon point at Malachy, the subject of Potts’s months-long intensive surveillance, unless he covered his tracks and armored himself in an iron-clad alibi.
He traversed back to his house to acquire his failsafe. The Unweaver waited for him in the entryway, armed with her black dress and revolver. She rushed to him when he appeared, worry shining in her eyes.
“What happened?”
“Potts knows. About me. About mages.”
Shock rippled over her features, then settled on grim determination. “He has to die.”
“Way ahead of you.”
“Then we need to get rid of the evidence. Where’s the body?”
Christ, he really could love her. He intertwined their fingers. “I’ll show you.”
Traversing back to the field, he nodded to the open grave. Potts was curled inside the damp earth, surprise frozen on his face.
“Commune with the bastard before you rot him.”
“What do you want to know?”
“The name of the man who was funding his surveillance. The man who told him how to find my house, and about mages.”
Their eyes met over the grave. She removed her gloves one finger at a time and tossed them to him, then hopped down beside Potts.
Her palms bracketed the bullet wound on his chest. Her eyes rolled back.
Necrotic veins flowered up her arms. For several minutes, her empty body remained eerily unmoving, as dead as the corpse she pried secrets out of.
Cora returned to her body, gasping. Her haunted expression shivered through Malachy.
She started to speak, then shut her mouth, shaking her head.
She planted her hands on Potts and pulsed death magic, unweaving the threads that bound his body.
Malachy watched the lieutenant decompose into the residue of a man, into a sludgy puddle indistinguishable from the mud they buried him in.
He helped Cora from the grave. Together, they packed dirt over the hole. It was deep enough that the deluge promised by the dark clouds rolling in would wash away their footprints but not the sludge that was once Lt. Potts.
A solemn silence, heavy with words unsaid, descended as dawn lit the horizon. Doubts lurked while the rising sun drenched the sky in rosy gold.
“Do you want to know?” Cora said quietly.
“No.” He slipped his hand into hers. “But tell me anyway.”