A Criminal Magic (21 page)

And then it's just the two of us, feet apart, standing in the middle of an empty hallway.

“Not a word of this,” Boss McEvoy snaps, as he smacks open Gunn's office door and barrels into the hallway.

“Of course,” Gunn answers behind him.

I instinctively step away as McEvoy approaches. But he doesn't even stop, just grabs Alex's shoulder and draws him forward like a horse. Before they reach the mouth of the hallway, I remember to release my manipulated wall. Alex looks back, once, before McEvoy drags him into the show space and out the double doors.

*    *    *

Gunn's little gift of a break before our showtime backfires. Instead of showing up looking rested and ready for the night, our troupe feels even more off than we did at rehearsal. Ral and Billy get downstairs only a few minutes before eight. Tommy and Rose are actually late, and I'd bet money they're already shined. Pinprick pupils, goofy grins. Not that they'll get spoken to for it, since Gunn isn't even on the floor—I'm not sure if the underbosses' meeting is still going on, or if Gunn's somewhere else, taking care of the rest of the “pieces” of his cryptic plan. So when the double doors burst open and the stagehands turn on the jazz and the patrons flood around our performance circles
in their evening best, it's the least prepared I've ever felt for a show.

I try to relax and just focus on my solo performance. My magic manipulation starts with a bin of feathers: I take a handful and throw a ring around the border of my performance circle. And then I orchestrate the feathers like a conductor, spinning them, bringing them together like a fluid current, until out of a white blur of magic, a dove is birthed. Sometimes folks will even stay right on their benches, sip their complimentary whiskey or brandy, and watch me do it twice.

But tonight I can't even revel in it. Tonight I'm just going through the motions, my mind always somewhere else. Running through what Grace told me about Stock spreading rumors, to thinking about Alex, to worrying about the blood-spell and Gunn, and then frustration and worry eclipse everything else.

By the time the Magical Storm finale starts, I'm tight, tense. I should have gone outside. I should have demanded a break. I feel like the lofted show space is tightening, like my magic has somehow caged and trapped
me
in—and it only makes matters worse that I'm working side by side with Stock for the next hour.

We're now inches from each other on the right side of the show space, in a little alcove safe haven off the aisle. To our left, the clustered audience stands, necks craned, mouths open, taking in the tropical storm my troupe has started to conjure above them. Tommy and Rose are on the other side of the space, sending a perimeter of lightning bolts crashing down around the audience like a fence of bright white paint. But the pair is clearly coming down off their shine, because their movements are dicey, imprecise. Every time a bolt comes a little too close to the audience, the patrons gasp delightedly, like it's all part of the show.

Only we know better.

Ral and Billy work together to bring their big-picture magic
to the immersive performance: a steady curtain of rain starts to fall from the ceiling, and a sweet, springy scent wafts through the show space. Some of the audience members gleefully reach their hands above their heads, to where the rain stops falling and forms shallow puddles of water in midair. And this is our cue—the time for me to come in with two strong gusts of wind, one coming from the double doors and blowing to the back stage, and an undercurrent blowing in the opposite direction. I focus on the space, imagine a thick, textured wind, speak my words of power. And as Ral and Billy's rain halts to a drizzle, my first strong gale begins to whistle over the patrons' heads.

“Haven't seen Gunn walking around tonight,” Stock says beside me. “Where is he?”

I keep my eyes above the audience, getting ready to conjure the second wind. “How should I know?”

Stock laughs. “You really need me to answer that?”

“Not now, all right?” I close my eyes to regroup.
Just focus on the wind. Just focus on the magic.

“So he's done with you, eh?” Stock whispers. “I know a scorned woman when I see one.” He laughs to himself. “You had to know that was only a matter of time.”

“For the last damn time, Stock, I am not, nor was I
ever
, with Gunn, so stop spreading lies about me.”

As soon as I say it, Stock's face bursts into a smile, and I'm angry with myself for even entertaining him.

I sigh and turn away. “You're missing your cue, dipshit.”

“You aren't the only one with a vision, Joan. I know when the time is right.” Then he leans against the cinder-block wall of the show space and crosses his arms.

Lord, he's a child. “Stock, I swear, do it now or—”

“Or what?” He leans toward me as a hot burst of lightning crackles feet away, and the audience gives a surprised, collective gasp. “You'll put me in your bloody nightmare box again, seal me
up nice and good?” He gives a disgusted laugh. “You think you're above us all, don't you? The Great Joan Kendrick. You did since you first showed up at the warehouse, looking like a drowned rat with a set of tricks you could count on one hand.”

I look at him icily. “Seriously, Stock,
enough
. We're here to work. Get it together.”

“No, you get it together.” He takes a step toward me, and I take a reflexive step back. “If you're not with Gunn like that, then you're up to something else with him, that's obvious. I've seen enough. I've seen you sneaking around with him like you're his own right-hand sorcerer.”

“Mind your own business,” I breathe out.

“See, that's the thing, it
is
my business.” Stock snaps a laugh. “It's all of our business—we're a troupe of
seven
, Kendrick, linked in a way we can't separate, even if I wanted to. So what you do? It affects all of us, not just the troupe but the magic itself. And you're poisoning us.”

I don't answer him. But just to spite him, to show him how much
he
affects
me
, I turn away and look up at my winds, which are still blowing hard and fast through the lofted show space. I raise my hands forward, and then I start churning them myself.

“Hey,” Stock says, as he glances up, sees his signature motion trick being stolen. “HEY!” he calls again, as Grace's thunder booms over him.

He grabs my arms, pulls them down, but I knock his hands away, and then he pushes me back. All my anger, my frustration, it all comes to a boil, and before I can help myself, think through it, I try to push him against the wall, but he grabs me first in one fluid motion and throws me on the ground.

A crowd of patrons look over, start pointing, whispering.

I stand up quickly, and my anger melts into something else, and then I can't stop the tears that insist on raining down. I turn to leave, to get my fresh air, to escape just for a minute despite
what's going on above our heads, and I start running down the aisle to the hallway.

“No way. We're not done, Kendrick—” I feel Stock's fingers lightly brush my arm as he reaches for me, forcing me to deal with him, but I manage to wriggle away.

“Get off me!”

He rushes after me. “You tell Gunn, I
swear
—”

But he never finishes his sentence.

Because a blinding shot of Tommy and Rose's lightning cuts right through him.

RIGHT-HAND

ALEX

My focus should be trained on McEvoy's gun, which is aimed at the goon who's kneeling on the side of the Jefferson Davis Highway, but I can't stop thinking about Joan. I replay the two of us at the Den together in the hall yesterday evening, surrounded by my magic, hidden together inside that gazebo without another care in the world. Birds chirping, a magic sun shining on her raven hair, her laughter and relief that I helped coax right out of her. I picture us a motion picture, black and white. I run the reel again in my mind, and then watch it once more in color.

I want her. And not in the way I've “wanted” other women before, when I know I have them—when I've gotten some vague sort of satisfaction as their eyes reflect interest, then fascination, then hunger. Joan's different. She's easy and tough in all the right ways. Smart. Beautiful.

In a strange way, I almost find myself needing to see her. Not just her, I guess, but the way she sees
me
—as someone to know, maybe even someone to trust. After my blowup with Howie, working around the clock on the street at McEvoy's side, I sometimes feel less than human. I'm so far in, so committed to playing this figment-gangster Alex Danfrey, that I'm starting to feel like a manipulation myself.

“Alex,” McEvoy snaps. “Where the hell are you right now?”

“Right here, sir.” I banish the daydreams away, the spell Joan's starting to have on me, and focus back on the sad thug McEvoy's got at gunpoint on the side of the road.

“Your story doesn't add up, friend.” McEvoy bends down, so that he's eye-to-eye with John, some low-level gambling bookie for the Shaws, and the latest object of McEvoy's wrath. “If Sullivan forced you to tell our contacts the wrong winner, that means Sullivan is lying to me.” McEvoy smiles a wide, taunting smile. “Do you think my underboss would lie to me, John?”

John is shivering, convulsing, and I have to look away. Traffic whizzes by on both sides, the Jefferson Davis Highway bumper-to-bumper with weekday traffic coming in and out of the city, but no one will spot us. From either side of the road, we're protected by my sorcered walls. The passing cars see nothing but a thin grass shoulder.

“Don't have all day, John—”

“No, sir, I mean, I don't know, sir.” John gasps for air. “I just do what Mr. Sullivan tells me. He was the one who heard the sorcerer's forecast about the horses, and I passed on what he told me to the list of Shaw clientele.”

McEvoy nods at me, my cue, and I cast my gaze away from John's pleading eyes. I hate days like this. I have nightmares about days like this. I wish there was a way to obliterate all magic on days like this.

I whisper, “
Knife and slice
,” and a knife no larger than a switchblade appears right above John's left hand, and slashes itself in one hot burst right across the top of his knuckles before it vanishes.

“What the hell, AHHHH!” John grabs his hand.

McEvoy flicks me an approving look, and then circles around our capture.

“Well, we have a real problem, John. I told my contacts that I could deliver a sure thing. You told all those contacts that the winner was going to be Maisy-Gray. And yet, here we are, the day after the race, where my short list of very important people watched as Royal Flush took the crown.” McEvoy raises his gun to John's temple once more. “Now the way I see it, the mistake is either the sorcerer's—which doesn't seem right, seeing as he's
fucking magic
—my underboss's, who knows I'd turn him inside out if he ever dared to betray me.” McEvoy bends down, rests his gun on John's nose. “Or yours.”

I keep my face blank as I try to connect the dots, for the next time I can sneak a call to Agent Frain. I've already got a laundry list of McEvoy's crimes and indiscretions, the many men and fingers he's—
we've
—broken on the side of the road. But this sounds like something McEvoy didn't have a hand in. Something involving Sam Sullivan, McEvoy's underboss who helps with the Shaws' gambling operation. Something happening at the racetrack, from what I can piece together, a natural forecast from a sorcerer somehow getting boggled, leaving McEvoy's clients—who bet on a sure winner—empty-­handed.

McEvoy's right about one thing. Sorcerers who are capable of forecasting nature—the ones who have learned to communicate with the natural world, who can
see
the fastest and strongest animals, see the way the winds blow and forecast a storm down to the hour—they're rare. Cagey, and smart. They don't come out of hiding and lend their insight to the mob unless they're damn well sure of their talents to judge the animals, the conditions, the track—and forecast the winner.

Which, of course, leads McEvoy back to the middleman.

As if sensing my turn of thoughts, McEvoy locks eyes with me, then nods toward John. This time I make the knife appear in front of the man's right shoulder, cut a swift gash across his pin-striped suit. Blood begins pouring out over the fabric. As
John reaches to grasp his shoulder, the knife disappears, and I conjure it on the other side to slash his left.

“AHHHH, you crazy micks!” John roars, and without another word, McEvoy raises his gun and finishes him off with a loud, hungry
POP
.

The bookie crumples into a ball on the grass shoulder.

McEvoy puts the gun into his holster again, loosens his tie. “Racist.” He sighs, looks around at the puddle of blood now staining the grass. “Clean this up, will you?”

My hands are shaking, my pulse jumping, but I swallow, try to swallow it all down,
remember why you're doing this, remember the greater goal
— “Of course, sir.”

I focus on the grass below the corpse, imagine parting it like hair, carving an indent right out of the ground. The dirt slowly divides, reveals a narrow valley, and the bookie's body falls into the ground. The earth merges back to swallow him whole.

“Remind me to pay another visit to Sullivan,” McEvoy mutters, as we approach his car. He leans on the hood of his Duesenberg. “God, I need a hit.”

And this is also part of our routine, a routine with its own messed-up sort of rhythm. “Why don't you get into the passenger's seat, sir? It's safer.”

So we switch places, so that I can cart McEvoy back into town, once he's high as a kite on my shine. We settle in. McEvoy digs in the backseat, then hands me a bottle of water from the crate of them he keeps for just these occasions.

I take it into my hands, close my eyes, center myself, let my power flow through me, transfer it into the bottle—

The shine has barely cooled when McEvoy grabs the bottle. He gobbles down a large sip and sighs. He doesn't say a word for a minute, until the magic has him, until all the gray fades from his skin and his eyes take on that pinpricked, otherworldly shimmer. “My God, Alex, this is a shot of heaven.” He leans his
head against the leather passenger seat and closes his eyes. “I needed this.”

I wait for a break in traffic, and then I release my protective manipulations and pull the car out onto the highway leading back into town.

We've ended every day like this—every run, errand, meet—since I was vetted in that parking lot weeks ago. I had no idea that McEvoy was a shine junkie. His habit has only bound us further together, tied my fate to his with one more knot. It makes me hate him a little more—because it's like he truly owns me, in every way. And as McEvoy sighs himself into a stupor each night, it truly drives home how dangerous this stuff is, how a habit can easily spiral into an obsession—and why the Unit needs to shut the shine racket down. The only silver lining of being McEvoy's personal shine tap? It gives me a window each day when he's vulnerable, a window I use to try and see more.

So as we cross over the Highway Bridge into the city, I ask softly, “Why do you think he did it?”

McEvoy shifts in his seat, keeps his eyes closed, says with a slight slur, “No clue. People do all kinds of shit that doesn't make sense.” He smacks his lips, turns to face the window. “Swore it was the sorcerer's fault . . . since John's been with us for years . . . but Sullivan and Gunn insist his forecast record is flawless.”

Gunn
 . . . I'm not sure how Harrison Gunn, underboss of the Red Den, has his hand in this. But then I remember how McEvoy visited Gunn yesterday evening, and how he mentioned Sullivan's name in the hall of the Den.

I steel myself, remember that for as dangerous as McEvoy is, right now he's wrapped in a cocoon of my magic. And as much as I just want to keep my mouth shut and focus on something light and warm, like Joan, I need to use every window I get. “Sir, does Gunn have something to do with what happened at the racetrack?”

“No,” he says slowly. “But Gunn helped Sullivan choose his
forecast sorcerer—Sullivan asked him for some names, since Gunn knows far more than any of us about magic. Half the time now he talks like a goddamned mystic—though I guess he always had a few screws loose, just like his old man Danny,” he mumbles. “Besides, I thought if anyone had ever heard of a top-notch forecaster picking a wrong horse like this, it'd be Gunn.” He waits a beat, breathes into the glass bottle. “Even still. Something's wrong. Wasn't the bookie.”

“Then whose fault do you think it was?”

But McEvoy's faded. He starts to purr gently.

I turn off 14th Street, thinking it all through—
a fixed race that somehow got botched, a winner forecast made by one of Sullivan's sorcerers, a sorcerer suggested by Gunn . . . John the bookie took the fall for it.
But it sounds like McEvoy doesn't think John should have, even though McEvoy just put a hole through his head.

Why?

I chase the thoughts away for right now as I pull onto Massachusetts. McEvoy's place is at the corner of 21st Street, a swanky, three-floor Queen Anne–style mansion in the heart of Dupont Circle. I parallel park his car outside his lush, overgrown gardens out front. By the time I cut the engine, McEvoy's full-out snoring in the front seat. I never wake him. I leave him in his shiny Duesenberg, put the keys into his lap like always, and then I walk the long trek home.

*    *    *

The next morning I hit the streets early, determined to claim a little bit of the day for myself before McEvoy comes calling, and before I dial the latest into Agent Frain. So I throw on my coat, scarf, and cap and head for the pharmacy around the corner for a paper and coffee. It's so quiet that I can hear the rustle of a tin can skitter across the blacktop.

But as I round the corner of the nearby alley, between Vermont Avenue and R Street, a car rips up beside me and stops with a screech. Before I can run, or even think, the door cracks open a few inches. Agent Frain leans across the front seat, with one hand on the door. He keeps his motor running.

“Get in.”

On seeing that it's him, I relax, but my heart still pounds from residual fear. I settle next to him quickly, pull the passenger door closed with a
whap
.

“You shouldn't be picking me up on the street. The deal was that I reach out to you,” I say. “This is blocks from Shaw territory. Next time, leave a note, tell me where to meet . . . out in the woods or something. Someone easily could have seen me.”

“Don't worry, it's early—but of course I scouted around,” Frain says. “It's all right. We'll be out of the city soon.” He eases his car back onto Vermont Avenue. “I've been waiting for you.”

I crouch low and rest my head against his cracked leather passenger seat. We make a left onto 14th Street, ride it over the Highway Bridge and out of town.

“Right off here should be fine.” Frain steers his car off the next highway exit and follows the road until it winds through a smattering of farms. He finally pulls us onto a stretch of hay-­colored grass, cuts the engine, and turns to face me. “You okay?”

It's a simple question, but a complicated answer. I'm exhausted, without a doubt, and most days feel like I'm owned by the devil. And yet, the more I see of this underworld, the more I believe in what I'm doing—and the more I think this dark world needs to come crashing down. “Guess it's been a long few months, sir.”

“But you're doing well. Better than well,” Frain says. “By the way, that Irish ship you tagged for us a while back, the
Emerald Jane
? We have the coast guard tracking it. Helped
us learn the identities of two dozen fae dust sweepers up and down the coast. Honestly, Alex, you've managed to do more in these past few months than some of our entire Unit teams put together.”

His words warm me, validate everything I've been through, guide me forward like a compass.
Just focus on why you're doing this, and the rush of being good at it
.
Leave McEvoy's darkness behind for now.

“I've got more,” I say, as I lean toward him. “Apparently there was a mix-up at the racetrack. Some Shaw sorcerer forecast a horse winner that was either wrong or got lost in translation. Some of McEvoy's bigwig contacts had a lot of money riding on it, whole thing was a mess. The sorcerer and the Shaws' gambling underboss, Sam Sullivan, both blamed the bookie—but the bookie swore he was just following orders.”

“More mistakes,” Frain says slowly.

I nod. “The Baltimore mix-up was the same sort of thing—the racketeering manpower that Boss McEvoy promised Baltimore fell short, and the Boss was left having to deal with the aftermath.” I shake my head. “I haven't seen anything happen to Kerrigan, the responsible underboss, for it. Don't think McEvoy's going after Sullivan about the racetrack mishap, either—instead he took out the bookie.”

“Both Kerrigan and Sullivan are underbosses, Alex,” Frain says evenly. “They're higher-ups. McEvoy takes them down, and he's got a lot of people to answer to.”