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“Does it speak to you, Mooch?” James asked, swallowing the amusement that threatened to show in his expression.
“Please,” Mooch said, his eyes filled with the kind of panic that could only be described as satisfying.
“Does your mark know of your betrayal?” James asked, taking another step closer.
“I didn’t mean nothing by it,” Mooch whined. “Maybe Viola and her rich toff did come and get me out of the Tombs. I know it was wrong to let them in, but she told me she just wanted to get something from her old room. You gotta believe me, Nibs—James. You gotta know I wouldn’t do nothing to hurt the gang.”
“But you did,” James said. “Maybe you didn’t mean anything by your actions, but they were a betrayal nonetheless. You think to compare me to Dolph Saunders? We all know one thing Dolph never tolerated”—he leaned closer until his face was a breath away from Mooch’s—“disloyalty.”
Before Mooch could so much as flinch away, James lifted the cane, and in a swift, impossible-to-stop motion, he placed the Medusa’s head against the tattoo on Mooch’s neck. She might have been kissing the dark ink on his skin, but at the touch of her cold silver lips, Mooch’s scream tore through the saloon.
As the mark turned bloody, James began to draw on the power of the stone as well. He’d been experimenting with the cane for weeks now, had determined that his connection to the Aether gave him more flexibility to use the marks than Dolph ever had. Dolph had needed to touch someone—skin to skin—to borrow their affinity, but James could feel the marks through the Aether that surrounded a person. Until now, it hadn’t been strong enough to do more than send a tingling bit of ice as a subtle warning to a single person. It had been enough to throw Viola off, but not enough to do any real damage.
With the power in the ring now on his finger, though? Things had changed.
Focusing through the Delphi’s Tear, connecting it to the power in the Medusa’s head, suddenly James could sense every person within his sight who wore the mark of the Devil’s Own. He felt their link to the magic trapped in the cane head, felt the oaths they had given, and he used that connection to send a warning to everyone in that room. A promise. A threat.
The men and women in the barroom, the dangerous cutthroats, brawlers, and thieves who had once pledged themselves to Dolph Saunders, began to shuffle uncertainly. He could feel their panic rising, sensed that they all understood a new order had begun. And then he watched as, one by one, they began to kneel.
A DIFFERENT CITY
1902—The Bowery
Viola Vaccarelli eyed the darkened entrance to the stables from the mouth of the alleyway where she stood waiting in the shadows with Jianyu. Though she itched to charge in and just begin already, they couldn’t risk being reckless. Ever since the events at the Flatiron Building a few weeks before, the city had been simmering. It seemed that every faction in the city had used the night of the Manhattan Solstice to tighten their control or increase their power.
Tammany had taken the Five Pointers’ open warfare on the Order and the deadly attack on the plaza near Madison Square as a sign of the Order’s weakness. In response, they’d increased the police presence throughout the city, and especially in the Bowery, to show who was truly in charge. The city might not be burning, as it had after Khafre Hall, but Tammany’s police patrolled the poorest streets in the city with impunity, looking for any reason to bust open heads.
Having lost Tammany’s previous support and help, the Order hadn’t simply sat back to lick their wounds, as maybe they should have. Instead, they’d created patrols of their own and filled them with the roughest native-born men they could find. Viola knew their kind. She’d grown up with men like this all her life. Stronzi, tutti. The patrols were more than willing to turn their anger and hatred for the newest waves of immigrants into violence. When they weren’t making trouble with the police, they prowled through the poorest tenements, searching for the Order’s lost artifacts. It didn’t matter if some of the people they injured in their searches weren’t actually Mageus.
But the power struggle between Tammany and the Order wasn’t the only danger in the city. With Paolo’s absence, every gang was out for more territory… and for the blood of its rivals. The hole that Dolph Saunders’ death had left in the power structure of the Bowery back in March had become the center of a building hurricane. Rival gangs didn’t hesitate to take up weapons over the smallest slight. They were making ready for war.
To Viola’s irritation, Nibsy had managed to maintain his hold on the Strega and the Devil’s Own through his alignment with the Five Pointers. But as more of Dolph’s rivals circled, there was no telling who would finally claim the Bella Strega and the territory that came with it.
Something was coming, of that Viola was certain. She’d seen the streets churn with riots enough times before that she knew they would soon erupt again. It was only a matter of when and a question of what might set them off. But this deep into the night, the city was almost quiet. Its ever-present noise was now little more than a gentle hum in the background, and it was almost possible to imagine a different city. Almost. But not quite, not when she knew that there was still violence stirring beneath. That violence had brought them to this part of town in the depth of the night.
The stables themselves were on the eastern edge of the Bowery, a little ways from the docks and nestled between buildings that held factories and sweatshops—far enough away from the nearest tenement that no residents milled around the streets. Viola didn’t mistake the emptiness for safety, though.
“You’re sure they’ve brought him here?” she whispered, glancing at Jianyu.
He gave her a single, nearly imperceptible nod. “Earlier this evening, but long after the horses were all in for the night.”
Another Mageus had been taken up by the Order’s patrols. Another soul that would have otherwise been lost.
For the last few weeks, word of abductions had been finding their way to Jianyu. A father taken from his pushcart. A brother who never returned home from his shift at the factory. One of the worried family members would appear on the street corner near the basement apartment where the two of them were currently staying, out of place in the neighborhood and desperate enough to turn to the very people they considered traitors. Jianyu never hesitated to offer his help, and Viola never bothered to argue against it. To her thinking, there was enough pain and suffering in the city without her adding more.
She watched for another long minute, waiting for some evidence of what was happening inside the stables, listening for any sound that might tell them when to make their move. Impatience grated against her already raw nerves. But too early, and they’d all be in danger. Too late, and…
They couldn’t be too late.
Jianyu was already removing the bronze mirrors from his pockets, small disklike objects that helped him to focus his affinity and pull even the smallest strands of light out of the darkness. And it was dark. In this part of town, the shadows fell heavier than normal across the streets. Near the stables, the lamps hadn’t been lit for the evening. Another sign that Jianyu’s information wasn’t incorrect. The Order always preferred to do their dirty work under the cover of night.
“If you are ready?” Jianyu asked, his expression tense with the effort of holding on to the light.
Viola nodded and stepped closer to him, looping one of her arms around his lean waist so he could wrap her in his cloak of magic. Then, hidden from any who might be looking, the two of them moved quickly toward the stables. Using Libitina, Viola made short work of the lock, and once the door was open, they let themselves silently into the building.
The air inside was even warmer than the balmy summer night, thick and moist with the breath of horses and the scent of hay. At first the only sound inside the stable was the soft shuffling of hooves and the occasional snort from a nearby stall. But then she heard it, muffled in the distance—the low moaning of someone in pain.
She exchanged a silent, knowing glance with Jianyu, and he nodded. Together they moved through the stables, past sleeping horses, until they came to another door. Not the stables then, but the next building over.
