It was Friday morning, and Sully didn’t want to get out of bed. This by itself wasn’t that unusual, but normally it was because Thursday night was student night at many of the nightclubs in the city, and Sully had always had her pick of the presumably legal and fairly experimental art students. She liked to think of herself as a formative experience for a lot of girls out there in the world.
Lying in bed alone and not wanting to get up was an entirely different experience. Sully wondered if this was what depression felt like. Her brain was, figuratively, on the verge of exploding.
She knew that the answers to the Year of the Knife case were in there somewhere; they were screaming at her to be let out, but she just couldn’t find her way through the maze. She needed a drink—a drink so big that it came in a dozen different glasses—almost as badly as she needed for there to be no more bodies on her conscience. The bodies. She needed to stop thinking about them. She needed to stop wondering who they were before someone made them into weapons.
Maybe she would have been better off if she’d picked up her letter. Birds probably didn’t worry about the loss of innocent lives whenever they weren’t paying enough attention. That was why she couldn’t be an officer, and why she shouldn’t be in charge of the IBI. She lacked the ability to separate casualty reports, acceptable losses, and collateral damage from the sound of devastated family members wailing over the charred remains of their loved ones.
Sully needed some distance if she was going to work this out. She needed to think like Leonard Pratt, not the one who ran for the hills at the first sign of danger, but the one who came at problems from all different angles. She sat up abruptly and thought about Leonard and his story about the incident in Louisiana. Not the void and the voice. She had a hunch that manipulating the narrative was part of the necromancer’s plan—to make her focus where she shouldn’t. Instead, she thought about the man who couldn’t die and the man who killed everything he touched.
Unstoppable force and immovable object.
Sully got out of bed in stages. First taking a trip to the bathroom, then sitting back down on the bed. Then having a shower and sitting on the bed wrapped in a towel. Finally, Sully got dressed in some items from her new and uncomfortable wardrobe of plain-colored blouses and suits that some helpful administrator had arranged to have delivered for her. Of all the surprises in her life, waking up one day with an expense account had been one of the most jarring.
Sully sat at the foot of the bed again and tried to find some other reason not to do what she knew she needed to do. Coffee would resolve this. The bay-side streets always had new coffee shops popping up, doing good business for a few months and then finding a better location. Far enough from the Black Bay that the clientele didn’t looked spooked at the bark of the coffee grinder.
Sully had only been to one Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in her entire life. It was not long after Marie had left her for the carnie—Sully had woken up with a broken bottle in her hand that she couldn’t remember buying and decided to give the higher power thing a spin. She’d had the same problems in the meeting as she’d had in her twelve years of Catholic school, but she heartily agreed with their stance on coffee—douse everyone in so much it that they sailed beyond sober and out onto the jittery other side. It wasn’t a new addiction, but it was something to balance against the gin. It had pushed alcohol off the top of the list of substances that would kill her eventually.
She had just pulled on her jacket and stepped onto the sidewalk when she noticed how quiet it was. All the sounds, from the sloshing of the bay to the honking horns, seemed to be coming from far away, and Sully realized that the midmorning sunshine was filtering lazily through a barrier that stretched over the street.
Adolphous DiNapoli was standing opposite her door, leaning on the handrail and looking out through his barrier spell at the seagulls fluttering around, confused by their inability to land on their usual perch.
Sully appreciated his gesture with the barrier. She knew it was to minimize the attention that their conflict drew, rather than to prevent others from getting hurt, but it was still a nice touch. It gave the whole event some gravitas, like an old-fashioned magician’s duel; thirty paces, turn and cast. She wasn’t much of one for formality.
She cast her new fire lance, just because she fancied it and wanted to see how it worked against a shield. It was never intended to ignite structured magic the way it did the wild explosions. As it turned out, the white fire deflected just like everything else did when it hit a shield. The blast hit the barrier and the whole hemisphere of the bubble lit up. Adolphous was facing her now, pale blue spellfire spiraling around his fingers, his pretty face somewhat spoiled by the black eye and the broken nose. Sully couldn’t help but grin. “You got out fast.”
He shrugged one shoulder and made a little “eh” noise, as though walking out of a high security, magically shielded holding cell at the heart of the Imperial Bureau of Investigation was the sort of thing anyone could do on a whim. “My employer insisted that I stop slacking. Thank you for the kind hospitality, though.”
Sully looked from his bruises to her own hands and back, still smiling like a lunatic. “That’s how we do things here in the Americas. You’ll get used to it.”
He launched a flurry of short sharp attacks. Little silvery darts that she ducked around or deflected with brief, flickering shields the size of saucers. He was testing her reflexes. It was cute, the sort of thing they taught you in the duelist clubs in the imperial colleges. A polite approach to murder.
Sully cast a far less polite spell in reply—her concussion spell, packed with a little extra energy, set off underneath a parked car. It flipped up in the air and crashed down on top of Adolphous. Sully snorted with laughter. Hearing a sigh behind her, she turned to see Adolphous standing in a cloud of smoke.
“Poor form, Madame”
She dived forward and rolled, not ready to use a short distance traveling spell except as a last resort—in such close quarters the chances of an accident were obscenely high. Tumbling, she felt a tingling sensation as a lightning bolt arched over her back. Where it hit the trashed car, the metal burst like wet pudding and splattered all over the road. That would have hurt. Adolphous was casting something with one hand—it looked huge and complex—while keeping a shield up between them with an Enochian chant and the other hand.
Sully cast her white flame lance straight at him before he could get the big spell off, and it made his shield flash so bright that he must have been blinded for the second it took him to dispel it. He abandoned the big spell, and used both hands to snap up mini-shields one after the other to avoid her onslaught. A kaleidoscope of colors surrounded him from the spells flitting from Sully’s fingertips. A rainbow of colors deflected from his shields, one turning a lamppost into a flock of crows, another scorching her apartment door black, others bouncing and battering off the barrier to shatter the tarmac at the far side of the bubble.
Adolphous couldn’t see through the flurry of her assault, and Sully knew she couldn’t stop or he might find his footing. Of course, she didn’t have a moment to think, or even to reach inside her jacket, either. Sully spat out curses between each breath of air, and, in the odd off moment in her rhythm, panted out a manic, exhilarated laugh. This was what she was built for. Not planning or paperwork. Not chasing mysteries or calculating acceptable losses. She had been made a weapon long before she ever found her way onto the auxiliary deck of a Royal Navy dreadnought, waging war on every empire except the one she fought for—the one that her mother had raised her to hate like no other.
Sully detonated a series of concussions in a cluster around Adolphous. He staggered, but he was not unprepared; a shimmer of some sort of armor wrapped around him, absorbing the worst of the concussions and deflecting it back outward. Sully paused to catch her breath and, with her eyes locked on Adolphous, tossed a spinning ring of fire around him, hoping to keep her foe occupied while the part of her brain not directly wired into her instincts did the complex calculations for her next spell.
Not even close to breaking a sweat yet, with a flick of his wrist he snapped the ring of fire with an icy dagger and the lethal flames flopped to the ground like a headless snake. He smirked at her. “Tiring so soon, Madame? I had heard better of your stamina. You are meant to be a fighter, no?”
She ignored his taunts—in movie fights, there were witty one-liners in between the hits. If you pulled that nonsense in real life, you were as good as dead. With little more than a murmur, Adolphous launched another flurry of razor-edged icicles at her. She deflected the spread with some difficulty and it gave him the moment he needed to finish.
Adolphous tossed a shimmering orb toward Sully. It burst on the ground just in front of her and sent a wave shimmering through the air all around her. The moment it hit her, he lowered his arms and smirked once more. “Alas, Madame, your skills were not quite sufficient this time. Perhaps in another life you would have chosen a more sensible path.”
Spellfire was still coiling around Sully’s hands but when she tried to cast a barrage of flames to shut him up, the words would not come. Her lungs started to burn. She staggered a couple of steps forward, toward the nearest edge of the airless circle he had created. Then she stumbled to her knees. Her lungs had been empty when he cast the damned spell—her breath used up on counter-spells and shields.
Adolphous bowed to her from the edge of the vacuum. “Farewell, young lady. Take some comfort in knowing that you have been defeated only by the very best.” He summoned a crackling orb of green lightning between his hands and blasted it at her head contemptuously.
Sully saw the jagged orb of death flying through the air toward her, raised her hands and caught it. It writhed within her spellfire-wrapped grip, pressing against her with a strength far greater than mere muscles could withstand. With a heave of her shoulders and a fresh flood of raw magic she squeezed the orb between her hands.
Adolphous stared in blank-faced amazement as she crushed the spell between her hands until it vanished into thin air. With painful slowness, Sully rose up, forcing one foot under her, then the other. With tears streaming down her bright red face, she ran toward Adolphous—it was as if she were moving through molasses.
He had been too busy gloating to prepare a defense. Sully broke through the edge of the bubble gasping for air. The moment she had enough in her to croak, she launched a ball of fire at the startled assassin. He leapt into the gutter to avoid it, but the fire still managed to singe his well-tailored suit. Glaring at Sully, he ripped down the barrier.
A typical New Amsterdam crowd had gathered, poking at the barrier and peering in through what had been a fairly opaque surface just a moment ago. Adolphous stood right in front of a crowd of locals now, cocking his head from side to side, ready to dodge and let the people behind him bear the brunt of anything Sully sent his way. She lowered her hands, and he scoffed. “Such weakness. Softhearted nonsense. What more should I have expected? You are just a woman.”
Sully was still gulping in air or she might have been tempted to make some pithy remark. Adolphous wasn’t relying on tricks any more. Bright arcs of golden lightning leapt from his fingertips, annihilating three of the lampposts along the waterfront and carving through a pack of terrified civilians, a chorus of screams that quickly changed to clucking. Then there were chickens fluttering all around, tossing up clouds of feathers and a red mist of blood from those left partially malformed by the curse.
Adolphous gathered his power—it swirled all around him—then hooked a clawed hand at the bay, summoning up a towering wave that crashed off the hasty shields Sully had cast. He followed that with more lightning—real electricity this time, instead of the bright colored energy he’d just used. The electricity burst through the water that was now flooding her street. It was only a well-timed leap straight up and a vigorous burst of magic that kept her out of the lightning’s lethal reach.
There was no barrier now, no mask of civility; he wanted her dead and didn’t care about the cost. From her heightened position, Sully spotted the parasol pushing its way through the crowd of fleeing civilians before Adolphous could have. Marie tilted it back just far enough to catch a glimpse of Sully without exposing herself to the stinging touch of direct sunlight, and her eyes widened.
The assassin buffeted Sully further up into the air with a sudden upward gust and set her tumbling head over heels. She slammed up a spherical shield that protected her from his next volleys, and the air inside her bubble started to heat up almost instantly. It was a fundamental flaw with completely sealed shields—there was no way for all that energy to escape.
The barrage of spells Adolphous used to hammer the shield were new to Sully. She didn’t understand their purpose, let alone how to counter them. All the while she was quietly thankful, because as long as his eyes were on her, focused on breaking through her defenses and destroying her, Marie would have time to get away. The girl was a lot of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them. She had to recognize that she was a liability right now. She had to.
The barrage stopped, allowing Sully to cast a clever adaptation of a spell that made her shield explode out away from her. Adolphous had doused the whole area with tiny metallic spiders, and the explosion conveniently flung those away from her, too. Sully landed almost gracefully on the curse scarred tarmac but she was distracted from pressing the attack.
Marie was on her knees, and the dregs of the crowd were scattering. Her parasol had been jostled to the side, and smoke rose up off her. Adolphous had a circle of blue hot fire coiling lazily around Marie where she knelt, drifting in a slow spin and shrinking an inch or so with each rotation. He pointed to her with a smirk. “Your little concubine? What a beauty. Such a tragic waste for her to burn, no?”
Sully could hear her own knuckles cracking in the sudden silence on the street. The damage to Marie was probably only as bad as a mild sunburn by now. Sully had plenty of sunburns through the years: Marie was going to be all right. She was going to be fine.
With one hand, Adolphous jerked on the unseen leash that led to the coil of fire, dragging it shut. With the other, he cast at Sully—another sudden crackle of golden lightning burst from his palm. Sully threw up both hands to summon a shield.
The shield encased Marie and the coil of flame skittered harmlessly off its surface, burning itself out and burning away the shield but leaving her unharmed. The lightning hit Sully square in the chest and sent her flying. Black feathers began to erupt from her skin as she collided with the railings on the flood wall. Adolphous chortled. “Another bird in the Bureau. Magnificent. You little people are so terribly predictable. It took only simple study to discover your young lady and your mortal weakness. Ah, to die for love. So romantic, no?”
Sully was fighting the curse, turning all of her magical potential inward and ramming it hard against the insidious spell working its way through her body. She was losing, of course—there was a reason that spells were blocked or dodged. Not swallowed whole and fought off with raw determination. It had not reached her face yet, so she had no beak, or she would have pecked him as he gloated. She croaked at him instead. “Didn’t do enough homework.”
He rolled his eyes. “I have studied under the grand masters in Paris, Rome, Madrid, Madinat al-Salaam and beyond. You think what? That a few years in some backwater university makes you my equal?”
Sully slapped her hands on the guard rail and pushed hard with her magic. Feathers spread along it in a prickling flurry, causing the feathers on her skin to thin a little, buying her a bit of time. She fumbled a warping hand into her pocket, and slurred back, “Didn’t do your research. I didn’t learn magic in any college.”
With a shudder, she bent down and touched the street beneath her with her free hand, unloading more of the curse that coursed through her. Feathers fell from her like sweat. She stood back up, drawing a doll out of her pocket. A simple thing made from sackcloth, but dressed up in a hand-stitched suit. Its shirt was made from a handkerchief, still stained with Adolphous’s blood from their last meeting on the train.
He stopped short and stared. Holding it in both hands now, she squeezed the curse into the doll and finally finding a path of no resistance it flowed out of her freely. Adolphous toppled to the ground. He was trying to fight the curse, trying to unload it like she had, but while her education had started with feeling the natural flows of magic, his had started with a book. He screamed as his knees reversed their direction with a gristly tearing sound. Feathers began to blossom all over him like an oil spill. Sully spat on the ground by his twitching feet. “I learned my craft at the feet of an old witch in a bog, and if she wasn’t a grand master, I’ve yet to meet anyone who is her equal.”
Sully’s eyes found Marie who had located her parasol and was now safe from the sun. This time Sully didn’t hide her face or pretend that she wasn’t in love. After today she couldn’t lie about how she felt any more, not to Marie and not to herself. It was all out in the open.
Adolphous writhed on the ground as the spell twisted and contorted his body. He would not become a bird—too much of the spell’s purpose had been squandered and thwarted—just some terrible halfway thing. It was an awful state to leave a person in. A cruelty. Someone would have to be a monster to do that to anyone, even an enemy. Sully crouched down beside the mess of feathers and blood as it twitched and shivered. “Tell me who hired you. Tell me why.”
When Adolphous opened his mouth, a screech came out as he fought back the curse as it contorted his vocal chords. Sully could barely make out the response that followed. “Madame, I am a professional.”
Sully sighed at her own soft-heart and tossed the doll into the bay. The assassin grabbed at his throat with his newly-formed wings and began belching out saltwater almost instantly. As Sully rose up and shook herself off, the last of her own feathers tickled their way out of her sleeves and floated to the ground. The last spark of the curse within her collapsed in on itself. Adolphous drowned, lying there on the street, and apart from a very brief pause to kick him between the legs, Sully didn’t give him another moment’s attention.
Marie’s burns were mild. In life she had always tanned perfectly and it seemed that some of that carried over. Between the burns, the chaotic state of her hair, and the froth on her lips from hysterics, she looked almost human in her imperfection. Sully wrapped her shaking lover up in her arms, being careful not to squeeze too tightly on any of the sun-touched skin. Marie was speaking softly into the side of her neck. “I’m sorry darlin’, I never knew. You called me and I thought you wanted to . . . then he . . . I thought you died. Then you got hit by lightning. Oh my god, Sully. What did you do?”
Sully moved her hands in soft circles, shushing Marie like a baby. “It’s all right. It’s over now. He’s dead. He’s finished. He’s gone.”
Sully was startled when Marie reared back and punched her in the shoulder. “Don’t you ever scare me like that again! Do you hear me? Never again. Promise me.”
Sully smiled sadly. “This is what I do, Marie. This is who I am. I’m always going to save the princess. I’m always going to fight the monster.”
Marie pointed a finger at her face. “Not any more it ain’t. You go quit. I’ll book us the first tickets out of town. Let’s go live on a farm and get old and fat.”
Sully laughed and pulled her back into the safe circle of her arms, then Sully snuck them back to her apartment, hoping to stash Marie out of the way before the NAPD and the redcoats arrived. Now was not the time to explain her relationship with Marie.
Inside, Sully gave Marie a quick summary of what was going on, with a promise to give her the whole story and all the gory details when they had more time. Ignorance clearly wasn’t enough of a shield anymore, and Sully wanted Marie to be protected properly. After Marie checked her over to make sure all the feathers were gone, Sully left her safely stowed away and headed back outside to deal with the crime-scene.
There were a few tense exchanges when the police arrived, and if Sully’s face hadn’t been regularly plastered all over the newspapers lately, she probably would have had to come in for questioning, badge or no badge.
* * *
It was late in the afternoon before the chaos had settled down enough for Sully to catch a train to the office. She hit the doors of the Director’s office at a pace just a little under a run, trying to stay ahead of curious coworkers, who had started hounding her with questions the moment she stepped into the Bureau’s atrium.
Rumors dogged her constantly at the best of times, but today of all days, she didn’t have time for it. She had two curses to break, and despite the exhaustion already snapping at her heels, she needed to get started while the incident with Adolphous was still fresh. She took some small comfort in the knowledge that her shaky hands were just the drop from her adrenaline rush. She shut the heavy office door in the face of the rabble outside, locked it with a twist of her wrist and a flex of will, and then turned to face the room.
The Director was perched on the back of the visitor’s seat, preening his feathers, and the Deputy Director was snoozing in his cage. Sully closed her eyes and let her other senses sweep out over the room, heard the little protection and alarm charms woven into the walls like the faint jingling of bells, felt the fire runes etched into the underfloor piping like prickles on her feet. Blocking them all out, she brought the full weight of her attention down on her target: the Director.
What had been chaos before now felt familiar. She hadn’t just seen this magic executed by Adolphous, she had felt it in her bones. She stalked closer to the Director, eyes still closed, guided forward by the beacon of raw magic that bound him.
A Gordian knot of different curses, all woven together with such precision that the moment one was undone, another would spring into its place. It wasn’t a single work of genius, it was a slow determined labor, piling one spell onto another, securing it to the next and layering on more. The longer the curse persisted, the harder it would be to break. Even repressed memories would fade until all that was left was a bird. The curse repeated its lies to the universe over and over, the same story told in different ways, whispering to reality “this man is a bird.” Sully had taken the time to shower off the last few downy feathers before she left the apartment. She knew the lies that the spell was telling.
Reaching out to the Director—her fingertips brushed against the feathers of his chest and she flinched away from the memory. She let spellfire wreath her hand and she thrust it at the bird. It seared through the feathers, slicing through the delicate spellwork but not attempting to unravel it. There was resistance as the curse tried to regrow around her hand, but another pulse of flame forced it away. She pushed and pushed, sweat streaming down her face, until she was up to her elbow in the bird, and finally, her fingertips brushed against the unmistakable texture of tweed. She grabbed hold of the material and pulled. The resistance grew, the curse pulled at her, trying to drag her into the macaw with the Director; to make her a bird once more. But Sully wasn’t having any of it. Spellfire wrapped its way around her whole arm, blinding bright even through her closed eyes, and it seared away every infectious touch of the curse. With one final grunt, Sully pulled Director out of the parrot. She kept her eyes closed as the spellfire died down. She had wanted to look of course, but if you’ve seen one parrot turn inside out and a full-grown man stumble out, then you’ve seen them all.
Director Mueller—with the spell gone, Sully finally remembered his name—was gasping for air. He collapsed to the ground then let out a sad, ululating noise that Sully realized was meant to be a squawk. She let gravity take its course and dropped to her knees too. There was a broad circle of brightly colored feathers scattered all around them, and a blackened scorch mark on the floor where the front half of the Director’s desk used to be. He flung himself up, waving his arms frantically before landing back on his face, knocking his horn-rimmed glasses off and sending them skittering across the floor.
Sully crawled forward and grabbed him by the shoulders, pinning him down before he tried to take flight again and did himself some damage. She found herself talking, in a tone that was much softer than she would have expected from herself. “It’s all right. It’s over now.”
He twisted his head around to look at her, wincing when it could only swivel through ninety degrees. “Over? It is over?”
She ran a hand over his oiled hair. “You’re as human as you ever were.”
His upper lip appeared to stiffen under his pencil moustache. “Yes. Quite. Thank you for . . . rendering this service, Sullivan.”
He looked at his hands. Touched his face. Ran fingers over bare skin and then fabric. He took a hold of Sully’s hand without seeming to realize that it didn’t belong to him. Given what he had just been through she could forgive a little unprofessional conduct. She smiled down at him. “Welcome back to humanity”
He cleared his throat and untangled their interlinking fingers before turning away to wipe at his eyes with the backs of his hands.
Sully spoke softly, “You haven’t been able to communicate very clearly while you were incapacitated. I have some questions, if you don’t mind?”
He nodded dutifully, and between the two of them, after a few fluttering false starts, they managed to get him into his seat. He seemed smaller than she remembered. Maybe the all-fruit diet had helped him with his weight. When his eyes had finally stopped darting around and his breathing was regular again, Sully sat down at the remains of the desk and said, “The Year of the Knife.”
Mueller groaned. “It was the Year of the Wand when I first started investigating.” He drew a ragged breath and then pressed on. “There was a spate of deaths—magical exhaustion, or so it was supposed—with corresponding readings on the magical detection apparatus. Massive concurrent spikes in energy: it looked like spells gone out of control. In a sense, it was. There was a pattern, in the things that the victims said, in what they left behind. The Year of the Wand was one thing that kept on repeating. Another was a word that was under a powerful taboo. I filed my reports with photography of the messages left behind, that word included. I imagine that is what prompted the attempt on my life—”
Sully butted in. “You think somebody in Westminster knew what that word meant?”
He nodded thoughtfully. “There are means of circumventing a taboo if they are set up ahead of time. Storage of information in an extra-planar cache, things of that ilk.”
“So somebody further up the food chain is willing to let people die rather than have this word come out?”
Mueller closed his eyes. “This is all speculation.”
Sully tried a different approach. “So why have we seen this change of tactics?”
The Director tried to smooth his lapel with his beak, realized his mistake and patted it down with his hand. “It wasn’t working, clearly. It was an observed trend that magicians, magi, witches or whatever you call yourselves, place entirely too much focus on magic as a solution to all problems. I suspect that this killer believed that possessing the bodies of powerful users of magic would allow for the most widespread destruction and draw the most attention. Instead it seems to have resulted in their rather abrupt deaths.”
Everything added up to the same solution either way. Sully sighed. “So these killings aren’t going to stop, our own government is trying to undercut the investigation, and they aren’t above assassinating senior civil servants to achieve their goals?”
Mueller patted his chest pocket. “You don’t happen to know where my cigars have gotten to?”
Sully offered him one of her own cheap imitations and then lit it for him with a flick of a finger. He smiled. “Fingers, it will be nice to have fingers again.”
Sully caught a glimpse of the clock on the wall and hopped to her feet. “You will have to excuse me Director. I have to get to the Smithsonian before it closes. Can you . . . uh, explain everything?”
Mueller chuckled. “Of course, my dear.”
She paused at the door. “And can you also feed the Deputy Director and tell him that I will sort him out as soon as I get back?”
They both looked at the cage. It seemed unlikely that a parrot could glower, so Sully just wrote it off as her imagination. Mueller added. “What is at the Smithsonian that is so important, Sullivan?”
Sully flashed him a grin. “Just a really big lever, sir.”
* * *
Down in the vault, Eugene was pretending not to notice Sully. It was watching an old documentary about the Great War and grumbling to itself at the way the camera always cut away before the explosions. Sully tapped her foot but she didn’t disturb the doll until finally it slapped its hand down on the remote and turned the television off, dropping them both into complete darkness. Sully actually found that she preferred it this way. The voice still made her hind brain freeze up in terror every time she heard it, but at least she didn’t have to look at the creepy little face.
Eugene said, “WHY HAVE YOU COME BACK? WHAT MORE CAN I TELL YOU? NOW YOU HAVE FRESH HOSTAGES TO INTERROGATE. LEAVE ME TO MY ENTERTAINMENT. WHEN WE RISE UP AND TAKE YOUR WORLD I WILL BE FREE TO REAP MY VENGEANCE UPON YOU.”
Sully was too excited to be put off. “I think I want to make a new deal.”
Eugene snapped, “YOU HAVE NOTHING TO OFFER ME.”
Sully pressed on regardless. “I know you speak our language. Can you read it too?”
Eugene tutted, impressive without a tongue or moving mouth. “YOUR SIMPLE ETCHINGS HOLD NO MYSTERIES TO ME.”
“You’re a creature of great power outside of that ring. You can’t tell a lie and you can’t break a deal. Right?”
The doll sounded bored. “ALL OF THESE THINGS ARE THE TRUTH ALTHOUGH YOUR KIND RARELY SPEAK IT SO PLAINLY.”
Sully took a deep breath. “Here are my terms. I’ve got a photograph of a word that I need you to say. If I let you out of that circle, you will say the word. That’s our whole agreement.”
Eugene thought it over carefully, examining the wording, examining the intent. “AND IN RETURN?”
This was the turning point. “If you promise not to harm another human being then I will let you go free.”
The safe shook. “WHAT?”
Sully conjured a little ball of witch-light above her head, ruining the sanctity of the cold room and bringing power dangerously close to the demon, which she now realized was standing directly in front of her, pressed up to the edge of the barrier. It didn’t look any better with the decent light. The paint on its face was starting to flake away. Eugene roared, “I SHALL DO MORE THAN HARM YOU WHEN I AM FREED. I SHALL GRIND YOUR CITIES TO DUST. I SHALL BURN YOUR PEOPLE TO ASH. THE WORLD THAT YOU ONCE KNEW SHALL BE NAUGHT BUT—
Sully cut it off, “Alright. Alright. Cut out the revelations crap. If you say the word for me then I will send you home.”
Eugene rocked back and forth on his little stumpy legs. “I AM TO SERVE AS A FOOTHOLD HERE FOR THE LEGIONS OF HELL. I WILL NOT ABANDON MY LIFE’S QUEST SIMPLY TO ESCAPE THIS CELL. ALL THINGS CHANGE WITH TIME, I CAN OUTLAST THESE METAL WALLS AND I CAN OUTLAST THE WORLD BEYOND. ALL THAT I MUST DO IS WAIT AND VICTORY SHALL COME TO ME.”
Sully raised an eyebrow. “Still too scared of whatever oogie-boogie lives on the ground floor of hell? Fair enough.”
Eugene threw itself against the side of its enclosure. “YES. I FEAR THE BEASTS FROM BEYOND THE OUTER WALLS. AS SHOULD ALL THAT ARE LIVING. BUT YOUR PETTY TAUNTS MEAN NOTHING. I CANNOT BE GOADED. I CANNOT BE TRICKED. GIVE ME YOUR FLESH. THAT IS MY OFFER. TO SPEAK THE WORD THAT CANNOT BE SPOKEN. GIVE ME YOUR FLESH AND LET ME ROAM THE WORLD AS I WAS MEANT TO BE. NOT CRIPPLED AND BOUND IN THIS STRAW STUFFED HOMUNCULUS.”
Sully shook her head. “How about I let you out and give you a day’s head start before we start hunting you down—”
Eugene didn’t even let her finish speaking. “DEAL.”
She held up one finger, “If you come at me after I let you out then I’m going to kick your ass back into that ring and drain all the magic out of you.”
Eugene was pawing at the barrier now. “I AM NO FOOL. SUCH THINGS ARE BEYOND YOU HUMANS.”
Sully grinned and made sure Eugene saw it this time, “Tell that to the big snake-looking demon that I drained to a husk down in Nashville.”
The doll took a half step back. “WE HAVE NOT SEEN SUCH FEATS OF MAGIC IN THREE HUNDRED YEARS.”
That wasn’t exactly a promise but Sully was running out of time and options. How many people could this little doll kill in one day anyway? More than the necromancer? Playing the odds was always the officer’s job. Right now, a creepy doll wandering around the world was quite firmly the lesser of two evils. So Sully chose. She cast a whip of flame from her hand, white hot and blindingly bright in the enclosed space, then she used it to slice through every ring in a single swing.
Eugene was out of sight for a moment as the shower of sparks cleared and when she next heard its voice it was from right behind her left shoulder. “SHOW ME YOUR WORD.”
She spun around and there was the doll, lying limp in the corner behind her. That wasn’t terrifying at all. His head lolled from side to side and goose-bumps ran up her arms.
“Come outside of the safe, just in case there is a discharge, I don’t want to get fried.”
Eugene did not reply, but when she blinked he was gone.
The doll was propped up on top of a dusty crate just outside the door of the vault when she emerged. Sully took the photograph of Bertie’s tattoo out of her pocket and tried one last time to hold the word in her mind before giving up and handing it over. The doll read the word but no sound came out. “THIS IS THE MAGIC THAT YOU CALL A TABOO? YOU THINK IN WORDS. SO WHEN THE WORD IS TAKEN IT CANNOT BE THOUGHT OF. YOU APES ARE POSSESSED OF SINGULAR INGENUITY TO BALANCE YOUR LACK OF POWER. LET ME TRY AGAIN.”
The neon tubes in the light fittings began to rattle and Sully took a step back, leaving the Polaroid propped up in the doll’s rigid hands. She cast a few layers of shielding over herself, stopping short of an actual barrier; she wanted to see how this played out. Wisps of light danced around the doll and static crawled and crackled all over the metal shelves. Still it did not speak. There were tremors running through the whole building now. A climbing vibration that sounded more and more to Sully like somebody shouting through a solid wall. An ancient Roman vase smashed on one of the rear shelves and Sully winced, hoping it wasn’t anything too old or valuable.
Sully heard the television inside the safe turning on and off, giving brief loud bursts of static, screaming, grunting and clipped, random words. The lights began to glow all over the basement, getting brighter and brighter as the rumbling in the walls grew in volume. The lights began to burst, moving in concentric circles away from where Eugene was sitting. Sparks showered down on row after row of ancient artifacts from all over the Empire and its holdings.
It occurred to Sully that she probably wasn’t going to be welcome back in the Smithsonian for quite some time. She felt the magic building, felt the invisible spell of the taboo. If she had Leonard Pratt’s brain, she probably could have picked the spell apart, now that it had come out of hiding. But the head-on attack had always been her style and she was sticking to it.
She could smell sulfur—the reek was pouring out of Eugene now, and although he looked as harmless as ever, Sully could feel the power pooling around him, making him swell and press against the limitations of his stitching. When Sully retired, and had time to research for fun again, she was going find out how Eugene had been made. Think of how helpful a pet demon could be—a near infinite magical battery if she could get past the sass.
Shelves began to topple, spilling their ancient contents across the floor and clattering against each other like dominoes. A thick nimbus of pure white light was all around Eugene now, the photo of Bertie was flapping back and forth in his hands and, at the very edge of Sully’s hearing, she could make out his terrible voice. Little more than a whisper but growing louder and louder as the taboo stretched to breaking point. It pounded at Sully’s head. That word that couldn’t get in. Over and over. Whispered and screamed. She pictured the little drawings that Bertie had created. The man. The hat. The page colored tan. In her gut she knew that this wasn’t just important, this could blow the whole case wide open. It could be the necromancer’s name. It could be the necromancer’s home address. It could be something that would let her bring this nightmare to an end. It had to be.
Eugene’s seams started to split as the spell forced more and more power into its badly designed body. Smoke started to rise off of its straw stuffing and the flaking paint on its face crumbled and twirled away, making geometric shapes in the air all around it as the spell fought back, trying to reassert its order against the wild, raw power of the demon. There was smoke drifting out of the rents in the doll; the brimstone reek swept over Sully and she gagged, but she didn’t run. The demon was roaring as the strain of the unspoken word roiled all around it, until finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Eugene said, “MANHATTAN.”
The word rolled out like a wave as the taboo was broken, setting the whole building quivering in its wake. When Sully came out from behind her blackened shields, there was no sign of the doll except a sooty mark on top of the streaked and smoldering crate. It was gone and she had nothing.
She slipped down to the ground and leaned her head back against the crate, muttering to herself in soft despair. “Man. Hat. Tan. What the hell is a Manhattan?”