XII

February 24, 1882

The middle of the night was when the Bowery was the loudest and deadliest. Most of the singing, dancing, and boxing that entertained customers of all different tendencies was winding down in favor of pounding back drinks at the bar or finding someone to heat a bed—or at the very least, a dark corner—for a short time. Music from competing halls drifted into the street as clients in various degrees of inebriation stumbled from the front doors in pairs or groups. Some were friendly drunks, laughing and talking merrily as they tried to find their way home. Others were the angry sort, picking fights with one another or complete strangers, their shouts and swears rivaling the fiddles and bodhráns.

But the vast majority of people lurking the street at this hour were gangsters, mainly Whyos smoking fat cigars and polishing their steam-powered brass fighting gloves. They prowled the neighborhood—some like Big Red Kate, a woman who wore her red-tinted goggles day and night, a bright rouge on her cheeks that matched the color of her hair, and carried an Excalibur, a pistol that shot superheated steam bullets that left behind her signature big red blister—clearly hunting for a rival gang who might have accidently staggered into their territory and so needed taking out. The less respectable Whyos—thugs, really, who paid no mind to leader Danny Driscoll—were looking for nothing more than some excitement and chaos, and it didn’t matter who they had to fight, fuck, or kill to scratch that itch.

Gunner and I had taken the Third Avenue El to Canal Street and were walking uptown along the Bowery in search of evidence of quintessence, when another flare struck the atmosphere. This one was so close and so powerful, it made my teeth ache, like I’d bitten down on a sheet of tin. I grabbed Gunner’s coat sleeve as I came to an abrupt stop, adjusted my vision to take in the tumultuous fray of raw magic, and reached to grasp the closest tendrils. The magic sparkled brightly and then shot around the corner on Hester Street.

“Hamilton?”

“This way,” I said, breaking into a run.

Gunner’s long legs allowed him to keep easy pace as I bolted toward the end of the block, dipping in and out of light from streetlamps and dodging drunkards unable to walk a straight line. I turned left, pushed off the wall of a club when my shoes skidded along the frozen cobblestones, and kept running toward the intersection of Hester and Elizabeth Street. A dark form was hunched on the ground, hardly more than a murky outline, as the city spent less on lighting side streets in this neighborhood than they did the main thoroughfares. My pounding feet startled the individual, because they stood abruptly, and I realized there was another form on the ground, motionless.

“Federal Bur—damn it—stop right there!” I shouted before hurling a ball of lightning. But the little criminal ducked, dodged, and scampered out of sight. I blew past the prone body, continuing until I was halfway toward Mott Street, when Gunner called my name. I lingered a moment, checked the doorway of a tenement, an alley on the northside of the street, and behind a few monstrous piles of rubbish, but whoever the culprit had been, they’d successfully eluded me. I returned to Gunner at a jog. He was crouched beside the body and hoisting them onto their side. “They’re still alive?” I asked.

Gunner didn’t have a chance to respond before the poor bastard began profusely convulsing and retching. Something dark and wet pooled around the man’s backside, and then the overpowering stench of loose bowels permeated the air. Gunner and I both took immediate steps backward in opposite directions, and we looked toward each other with a sort of helplessness until the man suddenly stopped seizing and went still. Gunner retrieved his bandana from a pocket, tied it around his face, and cautiously approached.

I opened my mouth to speak, but the stink of blood and stool and vomit had me gagging. I doubled-over, hands on my knees, and spat a few times to get the taste out of my mouth. “Christ Almighty.”

“I think he was poisoned.”

“With what?”

“Arsenic. A lot of arsenic.”

I glanced over my shoulder, watching Gunner pat the body down. “Any money or valuables on his person?”

Gunner looked up, a question in his expression. “No.”

I straightened and motioned in the direction the culprit had escaped. “Victim of a knockout gang.” I paused, considered that statement, and furrowed my brow as I murmured, mostly to myself, “No, that can’t be right.”

“Knockout gang,” Gunner repeated.

I glanced at him and hastily pointed to the body. “Rich sorts like him come downtown to slum, and one of these little street rats slips a poison into his drink. Once the victim’s unconscious, they rob him. What isn’t cash, they fence nearby.”

Gunner was squatted on his haunches. “Was it a knockout gang or not?”

“I—well—it looks like it.”

“Except if unconsciousness is the end goal, arsenic is a curious choice,” Gunner answered. “It doesn’t typically sedate a victim.”

“No. Certainly not as fast-acting as morphine or chloral either,” I added. “Which are the poisons of choice around here.”

“Someone wanted him dead,” Gunner concluded.

I hesitantly crouched beside the body, holding a hand against my mouth and nose because of the smell. “I’m certain this is where the quintessence spell was cast.” Reluctantly, I wrapped my hand around the dead man’s wrist. I expected to pick up the wriggling sensation of the quintessence—could practically feel that oily leech squashed between my fingers again—and the spell’s slow dissipation after the death of the individual it was cast upon. Instead, I felt something entirely different. Quintessence, yes, but very much alive and writhing just under the surface, with the sensation of aether mingling—interwoven—into it.

Aether was the strongest magic to exist, a literal manifestation of all the raw elemental currents consolidated into one. Despite its ability to annihilate, intentions and skill level of the caster taken into account, aether was light and life. So to feel such a whole and pure magic butchered and defiled by something illegal and… hollow—it was sickening.

None of this made any sense. Arsenic had been what killed this man. The infused quintessence enforced an immediate death by weighting the overdose symptoms, but the aether spell was distinctly cast with healing intentions—with another layer of quintessence cast to essentially sandwich the aether in place. And to what end? To… reinforce life? The man was deader than Julius Caesar. Aether couldn’t bring the dead back to life, because no caster could withstand the amount of power required.

Without warning, the soiled body gave a sudden lurch and bolted upright into a sitting position. The man’s head jerked to the right, tilted at an unnatural angle so as to look at me. His eyes were very dead. And yet, he reached with his left hand and clamped it over mine, which had been holding his wrist, the still-warm skin flaring with a renewed burst of quintessence and aether. I screamed and yanked my hand free from his hold, fell onto my backside, and crabbed backward until I’d put enough distance between us that I could stumble to my feet.

“What in God’s name?” I shouted.

Gunner jumped to his feet, unholstered his Waterbury, and cocked the pistol. He tugged his bandana down around his neck as he raised the weapon and pointed it at the dead man, who was staggering to his own feet. “What do I do?” he asked, his voice far calmer than my own.

“Shoot him!”

The dead man turned to face Gunner, and so Gunner shot. Three aether bullets tore through the man and blew his head apart. It was a perfect hit.

Perfect, except that the dead man was still standing.

“Hamilton?” Gunner asked, a touch warier now.

The man took a few ungainly steps forward, like he was simply a falling-down-drunkard and not a recently deceased individual, covered in their own blood and shit, with his head blown clean off. He reached an arm in Gunner’s direction, to which Gunner answered with another shot, this one hitting the undead man square in the chest. He reeled back a step or two, but remained on his feet.

“I’m wasting good ammo and running out of ideas,” Gunner called.

“I don’t—” I was about to say, I don’t know, but a moment of crystalline clarity hit me so suddenly, so intensely, it was like being pelted in the side of the head with a stone that had a sharp edge. I touched my temple, half expecting my fingers to come away bloody. “Barrie’s been experimenting with medicinal aether, but it’s never been legalized due to the uncertainty of how magic might interact with medications, or concern that the spell was performed by an unskilled caster and will hurt patients more than heal them.”

“The point, Hamilton?” Gunner asked before he shot the dead man in the knee, which only hindered him enough that he was now dragging his right leg while continuing to move after Gunner.

“Quintessence has been the missing ingredient! Put it in elemental bullets, in the armor of mechanical men, or in poisons and medicines—it’s a binding ingredient that keeps the spell from falling apart while being used by a noncaster.”

“What does this have to do with our friend here?” Gunner asked as he holstered the Waterbury.

“Barrie’s attempting what’s always been deemed impossible—bringing the dead back to life.” I raised both hands and fire erupted from my palms. “Move away!” I ordered.

Gunner ran to the south side of the street, giving the dead man a wide berth, before coming parallel with me and running for where I stood. As the undead turned around to follow Gunner’s movement, I unleashed an explosive fireball, completely engulfing him and lighting up Hester Street several blocks in either direction. The stink of burning hair and flesh was dreadful and the black smoke stung my eyes, but despite this torture, the dead man didn’t utter a scream, a cry, a single word. He just kept dragging his ruined body toward us.

I swore and made a cutting motion with one hand, which dissipated the spell at once. With how the two magics were interconnected inside this atrocity, it was a perfect cycle of the aether keeping the quintessence from having dissolved after death, and the quintessence fueling the aether at a consistent rate, more than any caster could ever perform on their own without overtaxing, even killing themselves. And it was this bypassing of the caster entirely that made resurrection possible.

This was Barrie’s plan. And he needed a caster of my skill level to provide the aether so the stress didn’t fall upon him when he was already charged with casting quintessence. Eugene Barrie had succeeded in surpassing the villainy of Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, because at least his Creature could think, rationalize, respond—all indicative of a soul being present, however violent or terrifying or ghastly it might have been.

But this undead man?

This monster Barrie fashioned?

There was no soul present.

Just a husk.

The memory of pulling the quintessence spell out of Gunner—the living, writhing thing inside that’d nearly caused a fatal overdose in my darling—gave me an idea. If I removed the spell from this undead, the aether would lose its potency and he’d cease moving, surely. And because he was already quite dead and I didn’t much care about salvaging his body, I opted for a less labor-intensive spell than what I’d performed on Gunner. I conjured a wind spell and hoisted the burned, blackened man up into the air before slamming him down on the cobblestone road. I cast gravity over the prone body, his bones snapping and the stones chipping and cracking as the weight bore down. A crater formed underneath him before the charred flesh began to slip and squelch free. That’s when I could see the quintessence being pushed up and out of the hole in the dead man’s chest, courtesy of the shot from Gunner’s Waterbury. Like an oily finger reaching toward the sky, a spell the size of an eel made itself known, and the sheer volume of pressure being asserted on the body caused the quintessence to pop free.

I lowered my hands, turned to Gunner at my side as he immediately drew out his Waterbury again, and said, “If you will.”

Gunner shot the flopping, wriggling mass, and the quintessence exploded in a spray of slimy refuse all over the cobblestone road, what was left of the dead body, across the front of a shuttered storefront, and even on the toe of my shoe. He holstered the pistol in a quick, fluid motion, then looked down at me.

“Well,” I stated into the passing silence. “That was new and wonderfully horrifying.”