Spellbound (7 page)

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

The History of Wizards,
1926

New York City, New York

THERE WAS A KNOCK
on the apartment door.

Sullivan was already awake and waiting by the time the visitor made his presence known. He’d been a light sleeper his whole life, a trait that had only been reinforced during the war. The deep sleepers hadn’t lived through the nighttime poison gas barrages.

The echo of a man’s footsteps in the hall had been enough to rouse him, and the fact that those footsteps had stopped at his door had been enough to clear his head and put his big Browning .45 automatic in his hand. There was a bit of yellow city light leaking in around the curtains, just enough for him to make out the hands on his watch. Nearly midnight.

Odd time for a caller, but if it had been the Imperium, they probably wouldn’t have knocked.

The apartment was tiny, in a nondescript old building half a mile’s walk from the library. He lived there under a false name. He associated with no one, had no friends, didn’t even hit the bar downstairs. Nobody, not even the Society, knew where he was. He checked the black and gold ring on his finger, but its spells weren’t warning him of anything. Flexing his Power, he let his senses adjust to the world of pulls, mass, and density to get a sense of the surroundings. There was only one man in the hall.

The knock came again. A muffled voice called out. “Sullivan? You in there?”

He always left his clothes where he could find them in the dark. You never knew when you’d have to leave someplace in a hurry. “Who is it?”

“Sam Cowley. Can I come in?”

Cowley was from the Bureau of Investigation, one of Hoover’s men.
Unexpected.
Technically, he had violated the terms of his parole by bailing out last year, but Pershing had set things in motion to clear Sullivan of his obligations and Francis’ lawyers had made sure that everything had been signed, nice and legal. For all he knew, he should have been in the clear.

Besides, if the G-men had come to haul him in again, they would’ve known better than to send a lone agent. They would have sent a crack team and a whole lot of guns. Sullivan had cultivated a bit of reputation over the years. Throwing his shirt on, he kept the .45 behind his back and opened the door a crack.

He kept his voice flat. “What’re you doing here, Sam?”

“Looking for you, obviously.” Cowley stood there politely, hat in hand, obviously waiting for an invitation inside.

Sullivan stuck his head into the hall and looked around suspiciously. “How’d you find me?”

“Modern law enforcement has all sorts of scientific resources . . .” As in, none of your business. “We need to talk.”

Agent Cowley was a soft-looking, plain-spoken, but hard-working cop. They had worked together on several cases and Cowley was about as scrupulous as a government employee could possibly be, but Sullivan had been burned by the BI before. The list of people he trusted was a very short one, and he wasn’t about to start putting any of J. Edgar’s men on it anytime soon. “Time’s served. Hoover’s jobs are done. I’m square with the BI.”

“The director didn’t send me. Can I come in or not?”

Sullivan stepped out of the way. “Not much to look at, but have a seat.” He gestured at one of the two ratty chairs beside the round table in the kitchen. There really wasn’t much to the apartment other than the kitchen and a closet with a bed squeezed into it, but at least the rats were small, so he’d lived in worse. With Society money, he could certainly afford something nicer now, but nicer wasn’t low profile.

They shook hands. Sullivan was careful not to squeeze too hard. Cowley was a paper pusher, and Sullivan had a grip that could make boilermakers flinch. The crumbling old building had been wired for power, but it seldom worked right, so Sullivan lit an oil lamp on the table. As expected from a criminal investigator, Cowley immediately took note of the several mirrors hung on the walls and the items on the table: a notebook, a package of marking pens, a bloodstained towel with several scalpels and picks arranged on it, and some corked vials filled with a black liquid. “Whatever have you been up to?”

Casting spells, something that nearly everyone thought was impossible. After he’d figured out how to carve a healing spell into his own chest last year, he’d had a few of his fellow knights volunteer for the same treatment. Since he’d managed not to kill Lance or Heinrich, he’d started experimenting with some of the other designs that he remembered from his viewing of the Power. Since this was uncharted territory, he had stuck to drawing them on himself. It was terribly painful, but since he hadn’t died, he called that real progress. It was terrifying work, but the next time he went up against a magically augmented Iron Guard, he’d be ready.

“Nothing important.” Sullivan swept the containers of demon smoke off to the side, covered them with the towel, and set his pistol on top.

Cowley pulled out a chair and sat down. He didn’t bother removing his overcoat. Apparently he wasn’t planning on staying long. “Well, Jake. Good to see you again. Been awhile.”

“Since Chicago . . .” It had been after his initial encounter with the Grimnoir. Cowley and the other BI agents had been easily defeated by Dan Garrett’s team, but Sullivan had tried to chase them down on his own. He’d managed to fight his way through most of them, thereby impressing Black Jack Pershing, and the rest was history. “When your boss chewed my ass for getting tossed off a blimp.”

The G-man sighed. “You know, Mr. Hoover’s not a bad man. He just has a very stressful job. We put a lot of bad characters away.”

“He told me I was a slave.” It was still a sore spot. Cowley had no response to that. “How do you think he’d react if he knew that you could do even a little bit of magic?”

“Got me there . . .” Cowley said slowly. He was a passive Torch, with just the barest glimmer of ability to create and control fire. Hoover’s distrust of magic and dislike of its users was well known. It was a growing and popular sentiment in positions of authority, especially since the destruction of Mar Pacifica. “Times are changing. Probably going to get even tougher on magicals too, I imagine, after what happened today.”

Sullivan hadn’t been close to a radio all day, hadn’t seen the paper, and his only human contact had been beating the hell out of a gang of hoodlums, so he had no idea what Cowley was talking about. “What happened today?”

“You don’t know? An Active tried to assassinate President-elect Roosevelt.”

This was not what his people needed. “How bad?”

“I don’t have any details yet. My superiors did send out a cable that he’s alive. I hear it was bad. Big crowd of admirers there when it happened. The police in Florida are still collecting body parts, so they don’t even know how many people died yet. It’s a real mess down there.”

“They sure it was magic?”

“Don’t know what kind, but he was making the air explode with his bare hands.”

“Hmmm . . .” That sounded like the descriptions of a Boomer, though he’d never actually met one. “Imperium, anarchist, communist, or nut on his own?”

“Nobody knows yet.”

“This is a nightmare.” Sullivan rubbed his face. “Absolute nightmare.”

“Poor Roosevelt,” Cowley agreed.

“Poor Roosevelt, hell. Poor us. I saw a mob try to lynch a little kid once because they thought his magic was
scary.
What’s gonna happen when they’ve got a reason to be scared?”

Mar Pacifica had been his brother’s doing. His big brother had been a genius, an evil genius, but a genius nonetheless. The Imperium had drawn first blood, weakened its enemy, and gotten away with it. That same attack had cost Delilah her life.
Matty, I hope you’re slow-roasting in hell.

“Whole place is going to blow up now. Good thing it’s too cold to riot tonight,” Sullivan muttered.

“Not down South it’s not. I’ve heard some awful things have happened already. Business burned, random Actives gunned down . . .”

He’d have to get in contact with the Society quickly. They would be doing damage control, and hopefully, if the assassin belonged to some group, making the rest of them go away permanently. This kind of thing was exactly why the Grimnoir existed, protecting Actives from Normals, and vice versa. He’d gotten rather good at communication spells, and that was much cheaper than a telephone call, but first things first. He needed to get rid of Cowley. “So why the visit?”

“Listen, Jake, this isn’t Bureau business. I’m on loan to another agency tonight. Things are a little chaotic right now. I can’t talk about it. You need to come with me right now.”

“Where?”

“New Jersey.”

“Why?”

“A matter of national security.”

As a straightforward man, he had no patience for evasion. “No.”

“Look, I can’t tell you until we get there. It’s top secret.”

“I’m going back to bed.” Sullivan stood up.

“Well . . .” Cowley relented. “Fine. I don’t know what’s going on, exactly. I said I would ask you because I reasoned that you seemed to like me more than anyone else who works for the government.”

“That’s not saying much, Sam.”

“This place is surrounded.”

Sullivan went to the window and pulled back the curtains. Sure enough, there were police cars parked along the street. NYPD uniforms and plainclothes overcoats both, the men five stories below were huddling for warmth beneath the lamps. It was a modest show of force, but he wasn’t impressed. Sullivan had fought through everything the German army could throw at him and the Chairman’s personal Iron Guards. The hardest thing about getting through the bull’s perimeter would be not accidentally hurting any of them. “Why all the law?”

“There are some new rumors about you . . . Things that made my . . . colleagues nervous. In particular something about you fighting the entire Japanese Navy by yourself.”

How did the BI know about that? None of the Grimnoir would have talked, because they certainly knew how to keep a secret, but it could have come from one of Southunder’s men or the UBF volunteers from the
Tempest
. “That’s just crazy talk . . . It was one ship with a skeleton crew and there were about fifty of us.” It had still been ten-to one-odds, but there was no need to exaggerate.

“Who is
us
?”

Cowley, being a man of integrity, would probably make an excellent Grimnoir knight. However, that wasn’t Sullivan’s place to decide, though he would suggest the possibility to John Browning the next time they spoke. “Just some friends of mine.”

“I just know what I’m told. Orders are clear. You are to be driven to a certain location in New Jersey as soon as possible. You’re not under arrest. This is not to send you back to Rockville or anything like that. You have my word. This is a request from your government, but you absolutely have to be in New Jersey by morning.”

“And if I refuse, those cops down there pump my guts full of lead?”

“No. You have to be alive. That’s orders. I volunteered to come up and talk, because I told them you can be hardheaded, but you’re basically a decent sort. However, even if we have to shoot you down with tranquilizer darts and throw a net on you like some sort of wild jungle cat, you’re going to Jersey.”

Sullivan let the curtain fall. “Well, hell, Sam. Now you’ve got me all curious. And they do say that curiosity killed the wild jungle cat. Let me get my coat.”

There was one of the new Ford V10 Hyperions waiting. The engine was running and the exhaust formed a cloud in the chilly winter air. Cowley opened the passenger door and gestured for Sullivan to climb in.

“Nice ride,” Sullivan said as he sat down.

“That’s why we’re taking mine. Government cars are garbage scows in comparison,” said the driver.

He looked over to see who it was. “Well, that figures.”

“Evening, Mr. Important,” the woman from the library said.

“You left off the Nobody.”

This time she was wearing a cold-weather dress, and her hair was light brown rather than bright red and tied back neat and plain. “Let’s take a ride.”

“A wig . . . Too bad. I fancy redheads.”

Cowley got into the backseat and closed the door behind him. The Hyperion featured a state of the art interior heater, and that made the night slightly more bearable. The girl put it into gear and took off entirely too fast. One police car got in front and turned on its siren while another pulled in behind and did the same. Wherever they were going, they were planning on getting there quick.

“How long you been following me?” Sullivan asked her.

“Found you yesterday. Watched you all day today,” she answered, all business, eyes on the road. The socialite accent was gone, replaced with one that sounded vaguely East Texas, and he had no idea if it was real either. “It was easy to do, what with your nose in a book the whole time. You know normally men tend to notice me sooner when I’m all dolled up like that. It makes tailing men challenging.”

“I can imagine. Sorry, been preoccupied. Miss?”

“Hammer.”

“Nice to make your acquaintance, again. Miss Hammer.” Which probably wasn’t her real name either. There weren’t any females that worked at the BI other than clerical staff, and judging by the way she had played him like a sucker earlier, she was no stenotyper. “I didn’t know Hoover had started hiring lady agents.”

“He doesn’t,” Cowley chimed in. “Miss Hammer’s a—”

“Freelance consultant,” she said. “I don’t work for the government. I take care of odd jobs. I’m assuming you’re not offended by a woman in the work force.”

“Can’t say I’ve given it much thought. The mugging?”

“Oh, nothing I couldn’t handle, but I provoked those boys on purpose. Boys like that are rabbit dogs. They see something run, they’re going to chase it. Can’t help themselves, poor things. It’s in their nature. So don’t get feeling blue for hurting them. Only way a rabbit dog learns not to chase something is to beat the chase right out of it. You did them a favor. Maybe next time they smell fear, they’ll think twice.”

Got played again. “Did you get a good show?”