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1983—The Bowery
With the music still pounding through the air and the bodies in the saloon still pulsing along with its rhythm, Harte quickly realized that the Guards weren’t making much progress. They were trying to press through the crowded dance floor to search, but no one seemed to care about their authority. If anything, they reacted against their presence, and suddenly Harte felt magic hot and thick in the air. Familiar magic. Old magic. It felt like walking into the Strega, and he knew immediately that there were others like him there. The Guards’ silver medallions were glowing, but the men who wore them didn’t seem to know where to begin looking.
Without hesitating now, Harte touched the person in front of him, sending a small jolt of his affinity into them—just enough to move them aside. Again and again, he repeated the action, moving away from the police and toward—
He didn’t know what he was moving toward. He only knew he had to get as far from the Guard as possible.
Before he could touch the next person, a hand grabbed his arm. Flinching away, he turned, ready to fight, but it wasn’t a Guard. It was a girl. She barely came up to his chin, but the set of her shoulders and the spark in her eyes made her seem larger somehow. Her hair was a riot of spikes and fringy layers around her face, straw-blond streaked with an unnatural black, and a row of safety pins glinted up the side of her ear.
She jerked her head in the opposite direction from the way he’d been heading and started to lead him. But he pulled away.
Turning back, she glared at him. “They’re here for you,” she shouted, pointing to be clear what she meant over the volume of the music.
“How do you—”
“Just look at you,” she shouted, glaring at him. “It’s clear you don’t belong. I don’t know what your deal is, but you’re going to put everyone in danger standing there like an idiot. Come on. There’s a back way out.”
Harte hesitated, but then he felt another wash of warm energy—cinnamon and vanilla cut through the reek of smoke.
“You can trust me,” the girl said. “We’re the same. I’m not letting those bastards win.”
This time when she turned, he followed her through the bodies, away from the police searching, and toward a narrow hallway filled with groups of people—couples wrapped around each other and men with their heads together, turned away from the rest.
“Through there.” She pointed down the gauntlet of bodies. A group of three men nearby turned to look at the two of them, their eyes like knives. But the girl narrowed her eyes at them, and they turned away.
From where he was standing, Harte couldn’t see a door on the other end of the corridor. There were no signs of where the hallway led, but when he turned back to ask, the girl was gone. Behind him, the saloon was still pulsing with the same angry rhythm, and the Guards were still searching for him. Remembering the warmth and the cinnamon of the girl’s magic, Harte plunged through the crowded hallway until he reached the end, where he found a door.
It could be a trap. He had no idea who the girl had been, and he’d had enough experience with Mageus who were more than willing to turn against their own kind for the right price to know that he couldn’t trust her just because of their shared connection to the old magic. But there was no going back. He couldn’t let the Book or the artifacts fall into the wrong hands, especially if Nibsy had told him the truth. If the stones were now unified, the Brotherhoods could use them to control Seshat, and through her, to control the power in the Book. There wasn’t really a choice. He’d deal with whatever was on the other side of the door once he was through it.
For Esta.
The alley behind the bar wasn’t empty, but to Harte’s relief, there weren’t any police, either. A few feet from the back door, a group of men laughed as they smoked. They barely noticed him as he walked past. Somewhere close by, sirens wailed their warning, urging him to keep moving.
The icy night air hit his cheeks like a slap, sharp and unexpected after the humid warmth of the saloon, but it was enough to remind him to be on guard. Without delaying any longer, he started walking, but he kept the hot anger of the noise and the crowd wrapped around him like a shield against the night.
Walking through the lower part of Manhattan was like walking through a dreamscape. Although the city he had once known was still there, enormous buildings now rose in the distance. The streets were devoid of horses and carriages, and the automobiles that occasionally passed weren’t the slick fishlike sculptures he’d taken in with a kind of awed wonder in San Francisco. These vehicles were enormous, hulking beasts made of angles and shining silver. The city looked as though time had taken its claws to it, leaving it scraped and torn. Shattered. And more dangerous than it had once been.
Harte turned onto First Street and kept walking until he found Houston right where he expected it to be. He crossed the broad street, then cut southeast through the part of the city that had once been his home. East of Bowery, the landscape changed, and he discovered the neighborhood was now divided by a park that hadn’t been there before. Where tenements had once tumbled atop one another, a wide stretch of snow-covered darkness now waited, broken only by the halos of an occasional lamp along the walkways. Even this late at night, there were people in the park. Some gathered in small clusters, while others slept on benches and alongside fences. They were likely harmless, but he decided on a longer route, taking Delancey Street instead of walking through the unknown park.
Finally, he turned south onto Orchard, and a few blocks later, he found the place he was looking for, the building where Esta had grown up. The bottom floors had once been a shop of some kind, but they were boarded up now. The tenements on either side looked empty. Their windows were covered with plywood and graffiti.
Actually, the whole building would have seemed abandoned to anyone not paying attention, Harte thought. But to someone looking carefully, the trappings of life were there, even with the windows dark and covered over. If there were answers to be found, they would be inside.
After considering his options, he went around the back. He wasn’t expecting Nibsy to return anytime soon—if ever—but Harte wasn’t sure who else might be inside. Esta had talked of a man named Dakari, of other team members and healers that Nibsy had used over the years. He’d have to be prepared for anything.
In a matter of seconds, he’d picked the lock and had the back entrance open. He waited, but nothing happened—no alarms sounded, and no one came running—so he stepped carefully across the threshold. Not even a second later, a cold blast of energy crashed over him, and a strange, dense fog began filling the space from the floor up. As it rose, he felt his affinity go dead. Cursing, Harte ran for the stairs, trying to get above the dangerous cloud.
Like most tenements, the building had a narrow, steep staircase running up through the back. The grime of the past had been washed away, and the worn wooden steps that should have been there were now sleek metal risers. The original gas lamps had been replaced with electric, but the lights were dark. He decided against turning them on. If the blast of cold was anything to go by, the entire building was likely set up like a trap.
When he reached the second-floor landing, Harte found that the space where a hallway should have been was now sealed over by a large steel plate. There wasn’t a lock to pick or a doorknob to turn, but there was a cold energy radiating from it that indicated some kind of ritual magic at work. He would need to search that floor.
He continued upward to the next floor, searching. The third level had been converted to a series of living spaces. A large room at the front of the house contained couches and a larger version of the television set he’d enjoyed back in San Francisco. There was a comfortable bedchamber with thick velvet draperies and silk paper on the walls. Leather armchairs flanked the fireplace, and over the mantel hung a portrait of Nibsy, older than Harte had known him but younger than the man he’d met in the subway station.
There were two other bedchambers on that floor. One that had clearly been empty and unused for years and another that felt more recently used, but without any of the personality or luxury of Nibsy’s own rooms. He made short work of searching the rooms, but there was nothing—and no one—there.
The fourth level had been left untouched and was clearly just storage. Nothing on that floor had changed in nearly a hundred years. The grime from oil lamps still crowned the ceiling and the walls were scraped and scarred from the families who had passed through them over the years. The individual apartments were filled with dusty boxes, but with the windows boarded up, it was too dark to see much more.
At the top of the building, Harte found another locked door. The dead bolt was surprisingly complex, but Harte managed to crack it after a few tries. When the door swung open, he found himself in an open space filled with shelf after shelf of books.
