III

February 18, 1882

The wind magic piggybacked on the gales of the thunderstorm I’d manifested. Coupled with the static charge of lightning in the air and my very nonmagical rush of adrenaline, I’d not only crossed the cold and choppy expanse of the East River, but the dark structures of modest German-family homes in the Yorkville neighborhood. Steam-powered light seeped from the outline of windows, curtains drawn taut against the cold, the diluted yellow glow like the eyes of a sleepy monster.

The Second Avenue El was awash in a kaleidoscope of streetlamps—reds and greens and purples as far as the eye could see—and the incoming rumble, screech, and whistle of a South Ferry-bound train told me it was still early—before eight o’clock, when the line closed for the night. I altered my trajectory, and in a final burst of energy before my body could falter, could protest, shot south ahead of the train, following the steel tracks and steam pneumatics all the way to the Lower East Side.

I could hear the nightlife of the Bowery before reaching it—fiddles, concertinas, and bodhráns from Irish dance houses, and raucous laughter and shouts spilling onto the streets from bars that mingled with Yiddish singing and dandies hawking club scenes to passersby. The thunderstorm was abating as sheer exhaustion set into my bones. My magic gave one last pathetic thrust and flung me over the Third Avenue El tracks. I hit a roof, skidded and stumbled, careened head-over-heels, and fell off the opposite side. I grabbed at a fire escape, but its grates were so icy, I lost my grip and dropped into the alley below.

I struck the frozen, slushy cobblestones like a sack of potatoes. Remnants of wind magic followed me to the ground, picking up debris in its spiral. I coughed smoke and sparks from my lungs.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

I’d know that blaspheming mouth anywhere, and looked up.

Addison O’Dea, tall and lean, with fiery red hair and a face smattered with kisses from the Cliffs of Moher, hastily rubbed the ember of his cigarette against the brick façade of Pilly’s before tucking it behind one ear. His hazel eyes grew in the muddy lamplight as he approached. “Hamilton?”

“Addison,” I croaked, and more brilliant yellow sparks spewed from my mouth and bounced along the cobblestones.

He crouched at my side, mindful of the magic remnants, and grabbed both shoulders. “Oy, where the fuck you been? I ain’t heard from you since the New Year.”

A hiss of pain escaped my lips as Addison aided me first to my knees, then to my feet. Through the exhaustion and debilitating cold, I managed to say, “H-hide me.”

“What?”

“Now,” I all but begged.

Addison’s charming features were distorted by blatant confusion, but he didn’t again question me. Instead, he got one shoulder under my arm, gripped my waist, and because his height forced me onto my toes, practically dragged me through the unlocked door that led into the Fighters Only room.

The warmth was immediate, like a clumsy girl’s poke while practicing her needlework, only felt all over. The steam-powered lamplight was low, which probably had as much to do with the owner being cheap as it did an effort to hide the dirt and grime and blood. A few men, in various states of bruised and undressed, mingled around wash basins, laughing and boasting. Addison didn’t stop to speak with any of them as he hurried me into Pilly’s proper.

The scent of wet wool, sweat, and beer hit me like an exotic and expensive perfume after the rot, mold, and shit of Blackwell’s. The hall was doing a brisk trade of drink and cheap meals at the bar near the front door. Tables and benches were filling up with the evening crowd—men, and a few women, all of my own inclination, were there to bet and cheer over the bare-knuckle matches before passing a fighter a few coins for some of the private entertainment that went on upstairs.

Addison wove around an empty table near the Fighters Only entrance and dragged me up the first few steps of a staircase. “I’ve hefted barrels of flour more cooperative than you, Hamilton,” he said with a grunt.

“S-sorry,” I said, but it came out so softly that I couldn’t be certain he’d heard. And when I tripped on another riser, Addison scooped me up in his arms without further comment.

I worried we’d pass any number of people in the dingy stairwell and have to explain my questionable state. If I’d been able to make the ascent on my own, I supposed it’d have been easy enough for Addison to claim I’d gotten into the drink early and we were turning in for some evening pleasures, but not like this—not with Addison carrying me like a babe. Never mind that I was still wearing a wet and filthy prison garment too. But the upstairs was silent and still, and I supposed the night’s work was only just beginning for the fighters.

On the landing of the third floor, Addison turned left down a hall pockmarked with doors on either side. He came to a stop outside the second-to-last room on the right, gently set me on my feet, and dug a skeleton key from his trouser pocket. Addison unlocked the door, turned on the light, and gave a nod of his chin for me to enter.

I stepped inside and took in the less-than-modest setup: a dented and discolored brass bed frame with a lumpy mattress, a table big enough for a wash basin and pitcher, one of its legs broken and propped up with a brick, and a beaten-to-hell trunk, dated enough in design that it might have been in Addison’s care since he left Ireland as a boy. There was one window, a curtain pulled over the glass, and the walls had remnants of a once maybe blue wallpaper that had since been stripped away by both man and time.

Addison closed the door and said, “Rumor on the Bend is you don’t work for the FBMS no more.”

I reached back for the shoulders of my drab shirt and yanked it over my head. I dropped the stinking, sodden material to the floor, kicked my soaked slippers off next, then began on my trousers.

“The state of ye!” Addison exclaimed at my back. His steps grew close, and then he darted to stand before me. “You’re skin and bone!”

Addison set his hands on my bare shoulders, and the weight, the warmth, the texture, the concern—it undid me entirely. My still-numb fingers fumbled weakly with the tie at my waist while hot tears spilled down my cheeks. I could only imagine what I looked like through his eyes—a once-healthy man, an unbeatable special agent, as ornery as himself—now broken, bloody, filthy, starving, like the poor streetcar horses that’d been left in the gutters to die before the advent of steam technology.

“I—I can’t—”

Addison brushed my hands away and worked the knot of my trousers himself.

I wiped my eyes with the back of my shaking hand and asked, “If someone lied to you, would you feel betrayed?”

“Lied how?”

“Does it matter?”

“Aye, it matters.” Addison got the knot free and looked up.

“About everything,” I clarified.

Addison’s grip on the drawstring loosened, but he didn’t let go. “What are you—a spy or something?”

“No. Just a wretch.”

Addison held my hand for balance as he helped me step out of the trousers. He yanked the quilt from his bed and hastily threw it around my shoulders. “Athair was a drinker. Ar deargmheisce—máthair would say that.”

“What’s it mean?”

Addison shrugged and said, “Something like, mad drunk. He was always fallin’ down and pissin’ himself. Mad drunk.”

“Lovely,” I muttered.

“One night, the bastard comes home ravin’ because he’s short coin for the pub. He’s demanding to know where it is, right? I weren’t more than a wee brat then, Hamilton, and my family was starving. My baby sister had already wasted away.” Addison paused, and the spirited light in his eyes became subdued. “She cried until she weren’t strong enough to keep cryin’. Took a long time for her to die…. So I tell Athair I took the money. I’d bought a handful of shit potatoes. They had the blight, but it was better than starving, so I cut all the black parts off and we had supper for the first time in days.” Addison tilted his head to the side and motioned to a slash of lighter skin along his jaw. “See that? Cut me right here with a broken bottle. He was aiming for my mouth. Ar deargmheisce.” He turned and busied himself filling the basin with water from the pitcher.

“Your point?”

Addison opened a weathered satchel on the tabletop, and inside were a few toiletries. He plucked a sliver of soap free and said, “I ain’t never been honest about money since. But a lie or three don’t make you a wretch.” He turned, put the soap in my hand, and started for the door. “I’ve got a match tonight, but I’ll be back as soon—”

“You don’t understand,” I said over him. I watched Addison pause at the door and look toward me. “I was born at the Old Brewery.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It… it was a tenement. In the Five Points,” I whispered. “Demolished that same year, in ’52. My family moved to Gotham Court afterward.”

Addison’s brows rose, but he asked in a careful, neutral voice, “On Cherry Street?”

“Now aren’t you curious as to what else I’ve lied about?”

“Do you judge me for lying?”

“You were born into a world of famine. You were lucky to survive. No, I don’t judge you.”

Addison opened the door and said, “You know something, Hamilton? I’m a grown man, and yet you couldn’t pay me to venture into the Court. As far as I’m concerned, whatever you had to do to survive that shithole, it ain’t no one’s business but yours.”

 

 

The bare-knuckle boxing began shortly after Addison’s departure, if the echoes of whooping and hollering through the thin floors and walls were anything to judge by. I set the quilt aside, and soap still in-hand, limped naked to the basin. I scrubbed my hair and face clean with cold water, then moved the soap more gingerly over the rest of my body, every ache and welt protesting as I bent this way and that, every bruise making itself known as the grime was washed away. By the time I’d finished with the dirt under my nails, I’d gone through the entire pitcher and the water was a sudsy, muddy brown. I returned the quilt to my shoulders as if it was a king’s mantle, sat on the edge of the mattress, and sighed very, very quietly.

What now?

If I hadn’t been a criminal before, I most certainly was after escaping confinement.

Had I meant what I said to Barrie? That I intended to reach California in order to track down the architect who’d built the spells we’d seen in the ammunition employed by the mechanical men?

Yes, I did. It really wasn’t even a question.

The threat to the magic community hadn’t stopped with the deaths of Milo Ferguson or Henry Bligh. They were but two cogs in a greater mechanism already activated—petty criminals in an underground that Christ only knew went how deep. I’d begun a job in January, and with or without the backing of the law, would see it to its conclusion.

I figured there were two avenues to explore. The first was this supposed doctor—Sawbones—who’d been reconstituting Whyos into grotesque mechanical men with the ability to use the magic weaponry Bligh had been purchasing from out West. Sawbones had clearly been on payroll, considering he’d also transformed Bligh—at the gangster’s own behest. And I was certain Sawbones had been, at the very least, in communication with the mysterious architect and wanted caster, Luther Jones. Luther had worked for Carl Higgins, formerly of Grace Gallery, before being brought into the illegal enterprise Bligh had been building. There was too much knowledge Sawbones would have required regarding the artificial magic and how it interacted with the precious metals used to build the mechanical men to not converse with an architect in advance. That being said, the last intel I had on Sawbones was that he’d been building Bligh’s mechanical army in a warehouse on Bayard and Mulberry but had hightailed it before my arrival. I’d lost over a month’s time and now Sawbones might have been anywhere—working for anyone.

He was most certainly a danger, but for now, would remain a secondary concern.

Because the other path led to who was arguably the FBMS’s greatest fear: the architect. He had succeeded in embedding elemental magic into a tangible item, and granted, the only current way to control the spell inside the bullet was to have it shot by a mechanical man, properly reinforced to withstand the magic, it was only a matter of time before this forbidden knowledge became fine-tuned. Before anyone and everyone could control magic and further imperil the atmosphere as raw magic was taken and never restored by casters. Before casters like myself were kept prisoners to do nothing day and night but pump our magic into household items or—God forbid—more weapons of war.

The architect was who I had to stop. At any cost.

At least I had the basics to work with: the architect went by the alias Weaver. He had been recruited in California by Luther Jones in order to construct the illegal spells. And due to prototype weapons ending up in the hands of Ferguson last October, Weaver might have known the madman engineer.

I closed my eyes and then his husky monotone was right there, at the forefront of my memory, blotting out the shouts of the audience downstairs, the sighs of the wind outside, the groans of the old building—almost like I could reach a hand out and touch him again….

“What is your name?” Gunner had been so quiet.

My voice had shaken when I said, “Simon Fitzgerald—I’m the Butcher of Antietam. And they’ve finally found me.”

I’d taken one last look out the bedroom window, watched the D.C. agents step out of view as they made for the entrance of the building, and began to cry as I’d said to Gunner, “Please go. Please. If you love me, you won’t break my heart by staying.”

Gunner’s stunned silence had a wrecked quality to it. He’d said, after a long moment, “But you’ll break mine by leaving?”

He’d said nothing else. Gunner had stepped out of the bedroom, collected his coat and hat, and walked out of my life.

I had done it to protect him.

I had severed what I thought was an actual courtship in development, with a man who had only existed in my wildest dreams until recently, to keep Gunner’s neck out of the noose. Because surely that’s where he’d have ended up when the agents came upstairs to take me into custody.

Except that hadn’t made the hurt any more bearable. If anything, I felt as if I’d stabbed myself in the chest—my own words like a blade. And the look in Gunner’s eyes—distress? defeat?—it had been enough to bury me six feet deep.

But I had done it to protect him….

Goddamn it. I had to find Gunner while I was out West. To apologize. To explain that my cruelty was an act of love, and my demand that he leave was a last-ditch effort to save the life of the only person who’d ever called me his. But I also needed to prepare my heart for the very real possibility that he would not renew his affections for me. Having Gunner in my thoughts had been all that kept me alive on Blackwell’s—his soft mouth at odds with that rough, husky voice, his tough, callused hands juxtaposed by how gently he held me, grounded me in the present when the past tried to sweep me away—but I had hurt him. I couldn’t be selfish and demand he return his heart to me if he no longer wished to.

He owed me nothing, and I owed him everything.

“I’m sick to death of being afraid…. If I cannot be both an agent and happy, to hell with them.”

I had talked a good game until I had been caught off guard, forced to confront Simon Fitzgerald and thirty years of tragedy all in that single moment. It couldn’t have gone more wrong.

I rubbed my tired eyes and considered: How was I supposed to find a vigilante who roamed from Helena, Montana, to Tucson, Arizona, and as far east as Dodge City, Kansas? A vigilante who carried no Personal Discussion Device and who called nowhere home?

My spiraling thoughts were halted when the doorknob rattled. I scrambled to my feet, drew the quilt tight around me, was ready to fight my way out—

Addison stepped inside, two mugs pressed to his chest by his forearm and a steaming bowl balanced in his free hand. He’d lost his shirt since I last saw him, and his braces hung at his sides, dragging his trousers low. He was sporting a split lip, and the knuckles of one hand were scraped and bloody. But he looked at me, smiled that crooked smile of his, and said, “Now that’s much better.” He kicked the door shut with his heel.

“I used all of your soap.”

“A worthy cause.” He moved around the bed as I sat once again, and said, “It ain’t roasted lamb with mint sauce, but it’ll fill you.” Addison offered the meal.

The sharp and gamey aroma of boiled sheep reawakened the month-long pain in my belly, and I grabbed the bowl in both hands. I stirred the contents—a fat-heavy broth thickened with a bit of oatmeal, wedges of carrot and turnip, and the available scraps of meat and parts from the creature’s head that respectable upper-class citizens recoiled at. I shoved a spoonful into my mouth, then another, and another. I couldn’t even taste it I was swallowing so quickly.

“Hey,” Addison chastised. “Slow down. Make yourself sick eatin’ like that.” He passed me one of the mugs.

I accepted the beer and drank down half of it before coming up for air.

Addison was watching me in between sips of his own drink.

“I never thanked you,” I stated.

“No? For what?”

“For everything I should have thanked you for over the years but never did.”

“You ain’t trying to get a free tussle in bed, are you, Hamilton?”

“God no.”

Addison chuckled and set his mug beside the pitcher and basin. “You’ve always been good to me.” He reached for my chin, tilted my head back, and studied my face. “You need a shave.”

I laughed weakly. “That’s really the least of my troubles.”

“Aye, maybe. But wherever you’ve left, they’re searching for a shoeless, fever-eyed bastard who smelled like he crawled out of a sewer.” Addison let go and made for the door. “They won’t be expectin’ a handsome and wonderfully uptight special agent.”

“I’m not an agent anymore,” I admitted, mostly to the bowl of poor man’s winter stew.

Addison opened the door at my back and called, “Once a lawman, always a lawman.”

He was only gone a moment, but I finished the rest of the warm beer and ate every grisly cut of meat and mushy carrot chunk before he returned with a second set of toiletries. The habit was a bad one—eating like an animal, uncertain of where its next meal would come from, and it heralded back to my childhood—but after Blackwell’s, I couldn’t help myself. I tipped the bowl, drank the last drop of broth, and wiped my mouth on the back of my hand. My stomach did ache some, but I felt full and warm for the first time in over a month, and had Addison not insisted on further grooming (it was more a colorful threat, if I was being honest), I’d have curled up for a long, long sleep in his bed.

Addison stood before the bed holding a palm-sized mirror in one hand and a shaving mug in the other. He asked, “So you’re done with the FBMS?”

“It wasn’t my choice,” I said as I finished lathering my face with a shaving brush. I replaced the brush in the mug and opened the straight razor.

“You break the law?”

I wiped soap from the blade onto a ratty hand towel. I took another pass or two on my face before asking, “How much do you know about the Caster Regulation Act?”

Addison shrugged and shook his head.

I didn’t follow up until I’d finished shaving my neck. I said, while wiping the blade again, “Magic users are tested on a scale of one to five—five being the highest.”

“You a five, then? I bet you are. I’ve seen you lay ’em out.”

There was a sense of freedom in speaking of this now. I was no longer undermining my skills and padding reports with lies so those in positions of power above me didn’t suspect something was… off. I sighed, and even to me, it sounded so tired. So fed up. “My abilities break the scale.”

The mirror in his hold lowered a touch. “What’s that mean, then?”

“I lied about my level and the FBMS found out last month.”

Addison lowered the mirror the rest of the way, and I met his puzzled expression. “They punished you for—being too skilled?” Then realization sparked in his eyes, like a flame brought back to life among dying coals. “FBMS is afraid of you.”

I reached for his hand with the mirror and raised it up.

“You were arrested?”

“Among other things.”

Addison muttered some Irish cusses he’d picked up in the surrounding establishments over the years before asking, “Why’d Moore sit on his fuckin’ thumb while they hauled you off to the Tombs?”

I allowed Addison to believe I’d only been inside the walls of Manhattan’s jail and not deep in the trenches of Hell in the middle of the East River. “Moore had been relieved of his position while D.C. investigated the death of Henry Bligh.”

“The rich fellow who flaunted around the Bend as Tick Tock.”

“That’s right. Moore never knew about my skill level. He had no idea D.C. was coming to arrest me—only thought they were going to interview me regarding my involvement on the case.” I finished shaving and used the towel to wipe away bits of leftover suds. “I haven’t spoken to Moore since last month.”

Addison crammed the supplies onto the already-too-crowded side table. “He’s still with the Bureau.”

“Is he?”

“Aye.”

“But as State Director?”

Addison agreed a second time before he took the razor from my hand and said, “None of the other lads had scissors—”

“What’re you going to do?”

“Cut your hair.”

“No.”

“You look ragged.”

“I look fine.”

“Don’t be so hard-mouthed.” Addison kept one hand atop my head as he sheared the sides in the manner I typically wore my hair, as it hid a great deal of the premature gray. He was trimming the top the best he could with only a blade when he asked, “What will you do, Hamilton?”

“Finish the job I started.”

“As an outlaw?”

“If I must.”

“Will you send word to Moore tomorrow?”

“It’ll only endanger him.”

Addison made a sound of disapproval under his breath before saying, “Then what about Gunner the Deadly?”

I glanced up as cuttings brushed my nose and cheeks. “What about him?”

“I don’t think it’s smart—whatever you’re planning—to go at it alone. And Gunner was aidin’ your office in January, weren’t he?” Addison stopped trimming and met my eyes with a wry smile. “Unless that was blarney too.”

I felt warmth pool in my cheeks.

Addison laughed low and said, as he made a few final passes, “I thought so. He’s a real belvedere.”

“Can we not talk about this?”

“Why not?” Addison finished with a ruffle of my hair before he set the straight razor aside.

“I would just prefer not to discuss Gunner.”

“You do something daft?”

“But you’ll break mine by leaving?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose and took a breath. “I’m going to fix it.” But in a less sure voice, I added, “I’m going to try to fix it.”