New Amsterdam was a city the way decapitation was a paper cut. Both could make a person bleed and both would hurt like hell, but only one made bystanders start screaming. It was a quarter past midnight and the streets of Nova Europa’s capitol still pulsed with life. Not so long ago, Sully would have been in the midst of that crowd, in one of the clubs that lined Park Slope with the scent of gin on her lips and her arm draped over some silly young wannabe starlet’s shoulders. She wasn’t in a nightclub tonight, though—she wasn’t even in the streets. She was hard at work among the vermin in the subway beneath the city.
The tunnel was pitch black and the trains weren’t running there thanks to the New Amsterdam Police Department’s order to cut the power, an emergency measure to keep Sully safe. Although safe was a relative term given that she was tracking a serial murderer through total darkness. It was a dangerous job, but one that suited Sully perfectly—certainly better than her earlier stint in the navy or the retirement in academia everyone seemed to expect from her. The subway company had made a stink about the impact the outage would have on their business, but they’d been left no choice in the matter. Besides, it was the middle of the night—not rush hour—they would survive the loss of a few hours’ worth of fares.
Sully kept her eyes down so that she wouldn’t give away her position; they glowed a dull red, the tell-tale sign that she had conjured vision enhancing magic—in this case a modified night vision spell that allowed her to see in the sunless tunnels. She needed the element of surprise; she was in the killer’s territory now. The heat signature of a set of footprints led her along the narrow subway walkways. They were getting brighter the farther in that she traveled. The NAPD officers on the scene had warned her that there was a homeless population in the tunnels, so it was possible that she was chasing one of them instead of her killer, but she doubted it. There was a certain cosmic geometry involved in magic, and once you knew how to interpret the angles, it only took simple calculations to work backward from effect to cause. Sully knew that whoever was casting the spells that had been killing citizens of New Amsterdam was doing it from down here.
The footprints were glowing brightly now—she was close. All of the creeping around, the cat and mouse nonsense—it was making Sully tense. If alchemy classes had taught her professors anything it was that there were certain substances that reacted violently under pressure, and one of those substances was Sully. She’d started the night off angry, and it had only gotten worse after dealing with the solid wall of ignorance at the NAPD. The few cops who didn’t treat her like an idiot for being a woman treated her like an idiot for being Irish. It was enough to make anyone tetchy.
Giving up any pretense of stealth, Sully shouted into the maintenance tunnel, “That trick with the trains was clever. Simple thaumaturgy, transferring the force from the train up to hit the people above. It takes a twisted kind of mind to come up with something like that. I like it.”
In the tunnel ahead, purple spellfire appeared, sputtering from someone’s fingertips, presumably the killer’s. Sully’s face split into a wicked grin and she dropped into a low stance. Her own magic flowed out smoothly. She twisted the flames of it with her fingers and traced jagged glowing sigils that hung where she left them, drifting in slow orbits around her hands. The scent of ozone started to fill the air, the smell of the gathering storm overpowering even the stink of tar on the train tracks. The dust, which hung heavy in the air due to the constant disturbance from the passage of trains in adjoining tunnels, started to take on shapes of its own. Geometric patterns formed in the clouds around the two of them as they prepared their spells.
Sully was ready, but she held back for a moment. She wanted to see what she was up against. A sizzling green bolt burst out of the darkness toward her, some backwater hoodoo garbage that she wouldn’t have wasted the time of day on. She slapped it away with a half-formed shield and then returned fire: a sphere of ice that her opponent managed to dodge with a stumble. The spells were the only light in the tunnel, and she had to blink hard when her magic collided with a pillar and exploded in a shower of snowflakes and sparks.
Another green dart was cast at her. She ducked under it with a wild laugh, not even wasting the effort to deflect it, and returned to her feet close enough to see the man in the glow of the sparks trailing from his hands.
He was taller than her—but who wasn’t. He wore clean-cut clothes and appeared well-fed. Good, definitely not one of the homeless residents trying to defend their turf. She snapped her fingers and set off a series of small concussions in the air above him. He scrambled back from the din and clapped his hands to his ears in a vain attempt to protect his hearing.
Laughing now, Sully let a long, razor-thin coil of flame trail from her hand, then snapped it up to catch the next bolt he flung. The captured spell swung around her in an arc, charring a long curve into the concrete walls of the tunnel. She flicked it back toward him and watched the man’s glassy eyes follow the blaze of light. The green bolt hit him in the chest and his clothes started to disintegrate instantly. He frantically tugged at his coat, trying to get it off before the spell spread to his skin, but it was too late. Bruises blossomed across his newly-bared chest, and blisters rose to the surface in a horrid yellowed mass before popping in a shower of bloody fluids. He screamed and the magic in his hands vanished. Only Sully’s fire kept the tunnel lit as she stood and watched him die by inches, the flame of her whip coiling and lashing around her like a snake caught by the tail.
It was only after the man had collapsed onto the ground and was starting to decompose that Sully realized she was still laughing—although cackling might have been a better word. She stopped herself, feeling the build-up of adrenaline start to recede. She sat down on the side of the track and dug her cellphone out of her pocket, hoping for enough signal to call the office.
Lots of women worked for the Imperial Bureau of Investigation these days, but Sully could never quite shake the feeling that, apart from her, most of them sat behind a desk and answered a telephone. She didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of the line, so she used her formal drone. “Superior Agent Sullivan reporting.”
“What is your status Agent Sullivan?”
“Target is dead. Deceased. Extinct.”
The conversation on the other end of the phone was muffled until she clearly recognized the nasal monotone of Deputy Director Col-cross. “Agent Sullivan, I need you to be in Winchester Village in Yonkers. Immediately.”
Sully found herself straightening up despite herself. “What’s the situation, sir?”
There was a sound that might have been the grinding of teeth on the other end of the line. “We may be dealing with a breach but it is unconfirmed. I wouldn’t ask you to be there if I didn’t think you were required. Please be as swift as possible, there are civilians within the containment area.”
Sully had her little leather-bound notebook out of her inside pocket before the call had even disconnected. She scribbled out a formula and tried to be honest with herself about her own weight—it was crucial for the spell. As far as combat magic went, she was acknowledged as an expert by her peers, but traveling spells were not her area of expertise. For Sully, it was a brain grinding exercise in raw maths and she loathed it. Just when she was starting to think it would be quicker hiking back along the tunnel, the last piece of the spell clicked into place. She vanished in a soft thunderclap as the air rushed to fill the space behind her.
* * *
Aboveground, a taxi swerved to avoid the woman appearing out of thin air and nearly plowed into a streetlamp. The driver was out of the car and yelling before Sully had time to think. She tucked her notebook back in her jacket and yanked out her badge instead, shoving it in the cabdriver’s face until the torrent of Hindi slowed to a halt and he just stood there panting. She asked, “How fast can you get to Yonkers?”
He looked at her like she’d just appeared out of thin air and demanded a ride; he then carefully said, “Half an hour if Throgg’s Neck is clear.”
She weighed the information and then nodded. “All right, let’s go.”
They moved slowly through the Brooklyn streets, only getting up to a decent speed once they had cut across to the road that ran alongside Black Bay. By the time they were over the bridge to the Bronx, Sully had more or less forgotten that the driver was there and was already on her third phone call. The first two had been to different branches of the NAPD, where no one seemed to be able to get their heads around the idea that their serial killer was dead and that Sully had more important things to do than convince them of this fact. The third had been back to her own office at the Imperial Bureau of Investigation to see if somebody who spoke the complicated language of jurisdiction could explain the situation to the NAPD.
The IBI offices were on Staten Island in the midst of the shining towers of law firms, stock brokers and seers. It was the classiest looking place that Sully had ever worked, and she always felt as common as muck walking in wearing her street clothes. She probably should have been doing what everyone else in the building was doing, dumping half of her paycheck into tailors shops so she could blend in, but she was a lot more comfortable in her jeans. She blessed whichever bureaucrat had failed to make the dress code apply to her department.
* * *
The little gated community of Winchester Village was done up in the faux-Republican style that had been popular down south a few years back. The houses looked like big white blocks to Sully—white stucco walls and flat terracotta tiled roofs. Normally, they would have been dark at this time of night; the streetlights weren’t meant to reach all the way back past their pretty little gardens, but tonight, they flickered at the edges of Sully’s vision under the red and blue strobing lights of police cars.
She paid the taxi driver with a bundle of greasy notes, and he hauled ass away so fast that she wondered if his green card was shaky, or if he knew the meaning behind the big glowing dome over the house at the end of the cul-de-sac. She jogged across to the barricade line where the local residents politely hovered. Sully may not have been tall enough to see over them but she had no qualms about elbowing her way through the crowd.
She flashed her badge at the pale faced boy in uniform on the other side of the barricade and, when he didn’t respond fast enough, she hopped right over it and strode toward the group who looked like they were in charge. There were a pair of redcoats in the midst of a sea of blue and black uniforms of the NAPD, and it was the redcoats she focused on. The navy and the army recruited magicians for their power, the IBI recruited them for their intelligence, but the redcoats didn’t care if you could barely string a spell together. Redcoats were picked for their blind loyalty to the Empire. Their presence on the scene meant that the governor knew what was happening here—that the government was already involved. Sully groaned.
Covered in cold sweat and sporting a blank face, one of the redcoats had his hands in the air maintaining a barrier spell around the house, apparently with some difficulty. His superior officer was so entrenched in her jurisdictional pissing contest with the NAPD that she hadn’t noticed that he was burning out. Sully spun her around by the shoulder and snarled, “Relieve your deputy. He’s about to drop.”
The silver haired redcoat glowered at Sully but caught sight of her slumping coworker at the same time. She gave Sully a dirty look as she stomped off and Sully took the woman’s place in the huddle of officers.
The men fell silent and stared at Sully for a long moment until she rolled her eyes and flashed her credentials. “I’m with the IBI. Give me the situation.”
The assembly muttered and spluttered a moment before all eyes settled on an older man with a walrus moustache and an attitude that screamed detective-sergeant.
He huffed. “We have the situation under control.”
Sully didn’t raise her voice at him; that would be unprofessional. Instead, she calmly said, “If things were under control, I wouldn’t be sent out here at”—she glanced at her watch—“half past one in the morning. Now give me a report or I’ll find somebody who can.”
A sergeant can be many things—he can be rude, he can be stubborn, he can even be reckless—but one thing a sergeant cannot be is stupid. Behind the little eyes in the middle of his slab of a face, there were cogs spinning at high speed, and somewhere in that arcane mechanism, in the region of the brain related to having a career in the morning, a little alarm bell started ringing. He perked up and started reciting, “Our breach alarms went off a little after nine. We narrowed the search down with our magic detectors, I mean, ah, Schrödinger units until we got to this street. Then somebody called in the redcoats and we got things quarantined. They weren’t calling in the army until it was confirmed but they said that it looks like, ah”—he glanced around nervously—“one of the gentlemen downstairs may have come a-calling.”
Sully almost laughed at the superstitious nonsense. “They only come if you call them by their own name, sergeant. You can say ‘demons’ until the cows come home, and it won’t do any harm.”
He flinched when she said the word but went on, “We’ve managed to piece together a time line from witnesses, scrying, and the family’s social media. Mister”—he checked his clipboard—“Mister Underwood left work at about eight, got home just before nine. The family had already had dinner. He ate some leftovers. They all watched TV together for half an hour. That was about the time that our alarms started and the family went silent. We were on the scene about half an hour later.”
Sully blew her frustration out between her teeth. “So they have been in there with whatever came through for nearly three hours? What shape is your badge sergeant?”
He scowled at her and said nothing. The other men seemed to be intently studying their own folders or examining the barrier. She spat on the ground.
“How many kids are in there?”
He grunted. “Two girls. Teenagers.”
She stepped closer to him, breaking up the circle. “Your badge is in the shape of a shield. It is in the shape of a shield because you’re meant to put yourself between innocent people and harm. You had better hope that it killed those girls, sergeant. You had better hope that it was quick. Because if I go in there and have to see what it has done to them, and it has kept them alive for three hours because you were too chicken-shit to send in the redcoats, I will be coming for you. Do you hear me?”
The sergeant tried to posture, tried to answer back, but the weight of Sully’s power was behind her emerald stare. He was pinned like a butterfly to a board. Legally she couldn’t just kill him for following procedure. They were both agents of the Imperial law in their own ways. But then again, magicians were a law unto themselves. All magicians got a bit strange with time, and rules like “wear clothes” and “don’t kill people” seemed to fade in significance when you spent your days trying to puzzle out the equations to create your own miniature star or a cat with a human face. He nodded nervously and backed away.
Sully rolled her shoulders and took off her overcoat, handing it to some poor hapless boy in uniform. She trusted the NAPD as far as she could throw them, so she scooped up one of the Schrödinger units to check the readings herself.
The Schrödinger’s Box was a clever piece of equipment. They were originally used to detect when wishes were being made. When the laws of probability were getting skewed, the randomness of the breakdown of radioactive material inside their lead-lined core became a lot less random, but with a bit of time the technology was refined, and they could detect practically any magic nowadays. Sully saw that the readings were off the charts, so high that she was surprised white rabbits weren’t spontaneously appearing in people’s hats.
She found the exhausted redcoat and tapped him on the shoulder. He was still glassy-eyed when he turned to face her, and it was with some sadness she realized that in her report, he was going to be hammered just as hard as the bitch who left him holding the barrier so long it had lobotomized him. Assuming Sully lived long enough to write a report.
She held out a hand. “Give me your sword kid.”
He barely responded—whatever channels had been carved into his mind by the spell were cutting through the language centers of his brain—so Sully reached inside his jacket and drew his sword out herself. She strode over to the barrier, casting spells on herself as she walked. The middle-aged redcoat who’d taken over for him couldn’t do much more than glance sideways as Sully whispered an incantation, punched through the barrier, then stepped right through, letting it close behind her.
The house was lit up in a pulsing purple tone, and it took Sully a moment to realize that it was the red and blue lights outside being twisted by the barrier. There was no sign of damage to the structure, which gave Sully some hope. Demons were many things, but subtle wasn’t one of them. If there had really been one set loose in here, it would have demolished the place and been throwing itself at the barrier long before now.
Even so, something was going on, and Sully, never the quiet and retiring type, was about to find out what. There was an old industrial spell—primarily used in glass work and in the last century for making light bulbs—that Sully had tweaked slightly to create the effect of a grenade explosion. She whispered it then and every window in the house exploded outward. Spellfire was drifting off her fingertips and dancing around her, overflowing and getting caught in the currents of the spells she’d already cast on herself. At that moment, her sight, strength and speed were bordering on inhuman. Demons could swallow even the strongest of spells, so she armed herself with whatever advantages she could.
She kicked the front door off its hinges, and for the first time that night, Sully felt tired. All of the spells operating at the same time drained her reserves faster than usual. Magical exhaustion was serious business—the idiot outside was proof enough of that. Sully needed to make this quick. Whatever monster was in the house couldn’t have missed all of the noise she was making. To her heightened senses, even her footsteps seemed deafening.
Nothing looked out of place as she made her way into the home. The hallway walls were pristine and white; the only decorations were a woven wall hanging and a rug from the United Nations. Naughty Mr Underwood, dodging the trade embargo with the Native Americans, he was going to get a slap on the wrist for that, if he still had wrists.
It looked normal. But the smell—she knew that smell far too intimately to relax. There was a metallic tinge to it, like raw meat mingled with the unique sickly-sweet stench of a punctured bowel. The smell was coming from the doorway to the right. Glancing through, Sully took in an equally pristine dining room and a doorway hung with a beaded curtain that appeared to lead to the kitchen. She did not want to go into the kitchen—that was where the corpse stink was strongest.
Sully startled at the sound of a footstep above her—a leather soled shoe squeaking against polished wood. She readied her borrowed sword and crept up the stairs. Straining her ears to catch any sound of movement, any warning of what she was about to encounter, she heard something completely unexpected. First a little sob and, just at the edge of her senses, two heartbeats. Then the unmistakable sound of steel biting into wood.
Sully ran up the remaining stairs, her sword at the ready, the glow of spellfire lighting her way. There was a corridor at the top of the stairs, and some remnant of sanity made her creep along it instead of running. She came to a corner and halted. There was ragged breathing just around it and the regular thumping of metal into wood that gradually ground to a halt.
Sully had heard demons speak before. They rarely had anything smart to say, being more interested in screeching elaborate threats, but when they did speak it sort of sounded like a squid gargling rocks. The voice from around the corner didn’t sound like a demon’s—it sounded like a chorus of screaming voices all trying to squeeze through one mouth. “WE cAN SMELL YoU litTLE WITcH.” There was a staggering footstep. “COMe out anD PLAy.”
Whatever this was, Sully had never heard anything like it before. She took a steadying breath then stepped around the corner. It was a man, presumably Mr. Underwood. His clothes hung loosely on his body, everything slightly out of place. His thinning hair had fallen out of its greasy comb-over and was dangling off the side of his lolling head. He moved in a series of twitches; the overall impression was of a broken toy. In his hand was a kitchen knife, a big steely one that was stained with blood. The door behind him was covered in wild slashes, but he had not managed to break through. Sully took another deep breath and his head jerked around to follow the sound. Although his eyes didn’t seem to lock onto her, his mouth flapped open and that noise came out again, “TELL yoUR MASters. TELL them thaT WE aRE COMING BacK.”
Sully leveled her sword at him and hoarsely whispered, “Drop the weapon.”
His head rolled on his shoulders and his face twisted into an almost comical rictus, like he was noticing the bloody knife in his hand for the first time. Sully heard a sound like the wind rustling leaves and slowly realized it was meant to be a laugh. He took one staggering step forward, arms dangling limp at his sides. That was all the provocation that Sully needed. She darted forward and thrust the sword into his chest—close to the heart, if not straight through it. She felt the blade glance off a rib and lodge solidly in one of the bones in his back. When she couldn’t tug it free and he wasn’t falling, she leapt back, freeing her hands in case she needed them.
The man looked down at the sword sticking out of his chest with all signs of amusement. He took another dragging step toward her and hissed, “It IS tHE YEAR oF the KNIfe.”
Then he collapsed. He wasn’t bleeding properly yet—it was pooling under him but it wasn’t gushing out the way that it should be. Sully shuddered and quickly let all of her spells unwind before they knocked her out.
She heard a loud sob from behind the door, then the screaming cry of someone descending into hysterics. With a barely remembered incantation from her college days, Sully melted the lock then nudged the door open with the toe of her boot. The girls were inside, huddled around each other behind a barricade of towels, cowering under the torn shower curtain. They wailed as she leaned inside, so she had to shout to be heard, “You can come out. He’s dead.” Sully was talented in a lot of areas, but comforting the children of a man she’d just killed was a bit beyond her, so she beat a hasty retreat back downstairs.
Sully was about to head out the front door when she remembered the smell in the kitchen. She knew she didn’t have to go and look. She had done her part—killed the monster, saved the damsels in distress. She could leave now feeling pride in her work. But that treacherous part of her, the part that made her a good investigator instead of just muscle, wouldn’t let her go. It called leaving without looking cowardice, and if there was a spell to silence that voice in her head, Sully had never found it.
She walked to the kitchen. It was a modern looking room, all stainless steel and brickwork, but now it was accented with the very old-fashioned decoration of blood on every surface. There was arterial spray up over the hood above the oven, crusted on where the electric stovetop had been left running. The mother of the kids upstairs had been a classy looking soccer mum wearing a union jack dress from some weirdly patriotic but trendy designer. She was pinned to the kitchen counter by a couple of the kitchen knives. The husband had obviously gone to work on her. The coroner was going to have a hell of a time counting the number of stab wounds involved. The smell caught in the back of Sully’s throat again—she’d taste this woman’s death for days.
The shimmering barrier was still in place, the lights from outside the dome writhing purple on its surface like oil on a pond. With one well-placed spell and a bit of spite, Sully tore it down. There were screams and shouts and the sound of a dozen shotguns being cocked. The police were going to go down swinging if a demon came running out. She gave them all a smile. The backlash from the barrier going down had knocked the remaining redcoat unconscious. That was for the best, a hedge witch with a badge could start asking all sorts of awkward questions about now.
Sully saw the Detective-Sergeant making a hasty retreat and caught him by the back of his collar. He shook her hand off and turned to face her and take his lumps like a man. Sully leaned in close, her face twisted into a mask of rage, and whispered, “The girls are still alive”—he paled before she finished—“and unharmed.”
He let out a groan. “Jesus fucking Christ lady, my heart ain’t that good. Don’t do that to me.”
She gave him a pat on the shoulder. “You got lucky today. No demons. Something weird. But no demons. Do me a favor, I was meant to be off duty about a day ago, could you get the bodies shipped over to the IBI offices? I want my coroner to have a poke at them. There was something odd going on with the guy.”
He was nearly giggling with relief, “Yeah, sure, no problem sweetheart.”
She raised an eyebrow at the last word, and he coughed and corrected himself. “Sir?”
Sully went home to do her paperwork.