A Criminal Magic (39 page)

Gunn still has Howie's pistol in his hand. He keeps it trained on me as he looks down at his wound. It's high, a shot right into his thigh, and the blood is thick and black as it seeps through that gray pinstripe suit. He presses his hand into his leg, trying
to stop the flow, and gasps from the pain. I almost feel bad for him, until I remember it's Gunn.

I focus on the pistol half-propped on his leg, loosely held in my direction with his trembling fingers, and whisper, “
Fly
.” The pistol floats like a cloud above his head and flings itself into the corner, as Gunn gasps again, winces from his pain.

I decide that I'm safe, release my protective wall, and cross the room for the money. Colletto's near-overflowing bag of cash is lying half-open, discarded on the floor beside his chair, and I grab it and throw it over my shoulder, ignoring how a splash of blood oozes from the strap onto my shirt.
Just go. Leave him
.

But I turn to face Gunn. He's now wrapped around his leg, shaking, sweating, those white-blue eyes as haunting as ever.

“You'll pay for this,” he mutters between heavy breaths, but still manages to look me in the eyes. “I'm going to make you pay—”

I bend down in front of him. “Something tells me that's not happening.”

“You're nothing but backwoods trash,” he roars, but then devolves into a series of hacks. “I could have given you everything, and you threw it all away.” He stops, his flailing lungs trumping his angry mouth.

I stare at him, the man who has driven me to the brink, who turned me around so much that I forgot which way was up. Murdered Alex, threatened me and my family, disposed of anyone and anything that stood in front of him.

Not that it's all his fault. I was far too willing to lose my way.

“Because you're a terrible human being,” I say. “Because you're a monster.”

At that, Gunn snaps a laugh. “If I'm a monster, Joan,” he says bitterly, “then what the hell are you?”

And then I can't keep my anger in check anymore. I lunge for his face, grab his jaw, and push up his chin, just like he did to me
in his office, when he thought the world couldn't touch him. I spit his own words from before right back to him. “A
survivor
.”

I release him, go to the corner, grab his pistol, and toss it onto the couch, giving him an easy way out, an alternative to bleeding to death. And then I rush to the door, open it, and look back to Gunn once more. “Good-bye, Mr. Gunn.”

I close the door with a click, peer at Gunn through the little glass window in the door. And then, quick as lightning, I take my switchblade, hold my breath, and dash it quick across my palm. I press my hand into the wall, run it slowly over the door, from one side of the frame to the other, and whisper those words from the night Mama died, those words that saved me in the clearing, the words that will always be a part of my being—of blood, intention, and sacrifice: “
Less of me, an offering to cage for eternity
 . . .”

I feel the pressure underneath my touch, a deep, thrumming pulse, like the throb of a phonograph turned up too loud. The door locks with a hard, unforgiving snap, and then the walls begin to hum and settle in.

Gunn realizes what I've done, I see him, I watch it all sink in. He looks around at his tomb, his face contorting with confusion, rage, panic—and then he spies me watching him through the door's glass window. His scream is silent, his mouth pulled into one long O as he silently bellows, “JOAN!”

But I turn away and leave him.

I run across the show space, to the back stairs, up to my room, out to the fire escape. I will get out of this. I will survive this fire. Ruby, Ben, and I will start a new life from the ashes. I just need to run,
fast fast fast
as I've ever run.

I clamber down the rickety metal of the fire escape, think of Alex whispering promises to me in this very spot, in those early hours of this morning when it felt like anything was possible.

And now he's gone
.

But Alex has given me something that no one can take from me, something I'll always love him for. Something I will hold on to when the days grow dark and the nights grow long. I'm someone who has made mistakes, far too many of them, I know that. I'm someone who might have as much darkness as she has light.

But I'm capable of love, and being loved—the truest, barest, most magical kind of love, regardless of what I've done. I'm capable of starting over, embracing who I am and what I was meant to do.

The past can't be undone. I know it's too late, that I'll never be able to undo what happened that night in our cabin's clearing. I can't save her, I can't save any of us from that awful, gut-wrenching mistake—

But I can let the past go.

I close my eyes, steel myself as I sprint toward my future.

And I can sure as hell save myself.

AFTERMATH

ALEX

I start pacing in the alley across from the Red Den, waiting for the other agents to unload their weapons, to suit up before we break into Gunn's magic haven
. God, Joan better be all right. She better walk away from all of this.

Agent Frain tucks his pistol into his holster and trots toward me. “You ready?”

“I'm ready.”

“Don't shoot unless fired upon, you got that?” Frain orders his team of agents. “The point is to take them all alive. Lock these suckers up for the rest of their miserable lives.” He looks at me and nods. “It all comes down to this, Alex,” he says. “Take us in.”

We head down the alley, Frain and me in front, more than a dozen Unit men behind us. We cross M Street, walk briskly across the parking lot, gather at the base of the wooden door that promises the Red Den's inside.

Frain leans into the door. “I don't hear anything. You're sure?”

I nod. “The bar's just a cover for the magic haven two floors below.” I conjure open the lock, and we filter into the quiet bar-front. “They'll be downstairs, in a lounge off the main performance space,” I tell the crowd. “We'll need to stick to the
shadows, surprise them. There'll be a troupe of powerful sorcerers roaming around, but I can reason with them.”
Because Joan already should have talked to them, won them over
.

A dissenting thought flares in my mind.
That's if she knows you're still coming for her, if Gunn didn't get to her first,
but I smother it.
This will still work. This will all work out. It has to
.

“All right, Alex,” Frain says, “lead the way.”

I lead them down the short hallway. The Unit men start whispering as I stick my hand right into the wall, feel the pressure of the force field, that intense, dark magnetic space where you can feel the fabric of the real world giving way to the magic. I walk right through the wall as the agents murmur in surprise behind me.

There's a reason sorcerers aren't caught easily, a reason the Unit needs a man like me on their side.

One by one the agents take their time, pass through the wall, and then we take the stairs to the lower level.

“There's a hallway on the right, first door on the left,” I whisper at the base of the stairs. “They're in the VIP lounge.”

We shuffle into the main performance space, guns out, footsteps light, past the circular stage where Joan and I made our magic together for so many nights. It feels like another time, another world.

But when we get to the first door along the corridor, Frain halts in front of it. There's a streak of blood, still wet and red, gashed across the door.

Frain looks into the small glass window of the lounge door and gasps. “Holy Christ.”

“Agent Frain?”

But he doesn't answer. So I angle around to steal a better look.

I can't . . . I almost can't process it. A heap of bodies lie around the center of the floor, like jigsaw pieces. Jigsaw pieces to
a puzzle of death. Pools of blood pockmark the carpet, gather at the edges, and soak it in an almost otherworldly red. Each body is riddled with bullets, lies twisted, folded, and arranged into an unnatural pose. It looks like a group execution, some mass suicide even, the bodies collapsed into a ring around a cardboard table posing as some cheap altar in the middle.

“Open the door,” Frain whispers.

A panic, a premature pang of loss and guilt is already creeping up my spine as the officer on my left twists the handle. I frantically search through the window as he attempts to pick the lock. I look for Joan's face, for her perfect face—

But I don't see her, thank God, she's not here.
Did she escape?

Did someone take her?

“Sir, it won't budge.”

“So try again, Agent Brennan,” Frain orders.

Brennan mumbles a “Yes, sir” and tries the lock again. And again, as I scan the faces to see who's been taken down—

They're familiar faces, all of them—Colletto, and the men he was here with the other night. And the Shaw men, Kerrigan, O'Donnell, Sullivan, Dawson, Howie—

But no Joan. No troupe. The sorcerers, gone like magic dust in the wind.

And then I spot Gunn.

Gunn, the invincible.

Gunn, the man who stood between Joan and me, who kept her in a cage. Gunn, chest rising, falling, the life inside him slowly bleeding out.

“Sir,” Brennan whispers, at the same time as I put it together, “one of the men in there—he's still alive.”

“You need to open that door,” Frain snaps.

“I'm trying, Agent Frain, but it's—it's like it's cursed.”

As confusion and disappointment set in, a deep, dark, unsettling possibility starts pawing at my mind as well. It toys with
me, just scratches at the surface—but I refuse to let it do any real damage. Not yet.

Frain surveys the door frame. “Kick it in.”

Brennan tries, then three agents attack the door, then five Unit men are running at it like an army, ready to take it down. It doesn't budge.

“Alex, we need you,” Frain says impatiently.

So I try in vain to open it with magic, attempt trick after trick—

Frain stops us with a raise of his hand. He crouches in front of the entrance, studying it, the lock, the window, the blood dashed across the door like a warning. “Where the hell are the sorcerers?” he says to me.

I give him the only answer I have. “I'm not sure, sir.”

Frain looks to Agent Brennan again. “Call this in to the station,” he says softly. “Papers are going to have a field day with this.”

Then Frain grabs my arm, pulls me away from the rest of the Unit, down the corridor toward the main performance space. He sets his mouth into a hard line. “This main sorcerer of yours, Alex,” he says slowly. “You believe she was kidnapped, held against her will by Harrison Gunn.”

I look back to the door marked in blood, in dark magic. I feel like I've been cut right in half, divided like a double-sided trick. Part of me wants to tell Frain what I think might be true, what I'm terrified might be true. The other part refuses to believe she could have done this. I swallow. “All signs pointed to that, sir.”

“Did she strike you as headstrong? Volatile? Violent?”

Yes, maybe, I'm not sure.
I don't look him in the eye. “Not particularly.”

“Alex, Christ,” he whispers, “was she dangerous?”
Far too dangerous, in more ways than one.

But Frain doesn't wait for my response, just paces back toward the lounge, like the answer must be in the puzzle of bodies on the other side of the door.

“We need to find the sorcerers,” he commands to the force, “all of them.
Now
. Dial the names in to the station. Alex, I want a full list of names,” he calls back to me. “And get a backup team in here. I want that gangster taken out alive, along with the evidence.”

I stand there, nodding, mind reeling.
Could Joan really have done this?

Did all of them do this, one highly orchestrated execution? A blood-drenched escape?

As the Unit men take notes, confer, study the bodies through the little glass window, another truth starts to itch, and in moments it's crawling all over me—

I might have actually lost her, I might never see her again—

Joan might be gone for good.

As realization sets in, I blurt out, “Agent Frain, stay here, I've got a lead.” I start sprinting for the double doors. “I'll circle up with you after!”

“Wait, stop, Alex, talk to me!”

But by the time I hear Frain's hurried footsteps behind me, I'm halfway out the double doors.

I sprint up the stairs, into the lot, dash across M Street and into the back alley toward Frain's car, with some vague plan to search the city for her. But as I pass the Unit's black cars, something catches my eye, just the slightest bend of reality, and I stop.

I run toward the brick siding of the town home on the alley's other side. The closer I get, the more the wall of the structure seems to distort, bend, almost looks like there's a flat replica of the brick in front of the actual brick wall. I touch the replica, feel my way to where it drops off, grab the edge of the
manipulation and step around it. Sitting behind it, watching her old world crumble to the ground, is Grace.

“Where is she?” I demand.

Grace doesn't look me in the eye. But I can see how tired she is, how beaten down. Purple circles under her eyes, shaking hands as she lifts a cigarette to chapped lips. “She thought you were dead. We all did.”

I crouch down, force her to look at me. “I need to find her.”

“Are you a cop?” she asks. “I see the black cars in the alley, I heard your voice. In one way, that makes you as bad for her as Gunn.”

“Regardless of what she's done or what she's about to do, Grace, I have to see her, before it's too late. Please, if you know where she is—”

Grace doesn't flinch, doesn't say a word.

“This isn't about what happened, this isn't about the cops.” I close my eyes. “Please. This is about her and me.”

And then, for the first time since I met her, since Joan told me that Grace can burrow into a mind as quick and cunning as a mole, I let my guard down. I welcome Grace in—pray she can find,
see
, my feelings for Joan.

Right when I'm about to give up, Grace stands briskly. At the sudden movement, something strange—shiny and metallic—slides up from her blouse, but she quickly tucks it back under the fabric of her shirt.

“She's taking a train to Philadelphia around nine p.m.,” she says reluctantly. “If you want a shot at seeing her again, you better hurry.”

I round her wall manipulation, jump into Frain's car, grab the keys from the top visor, and shove them into the ignition with trembling hands.

I screech Frain's car out onto N Street, cut in and out of traffic, tear around the circle that puts me onto Massachusetts with Frain's headlights cutting through the foggy January night.

I need to get to Union Station. Catch her. Stop her.
It's not too late.

I nearly drive onto the curb as I pull in front of the station twenty minutes later, grab the keys, and hobble out the door. I run into the huge, atrium-like entrance, follow it to a long, marble-­floored hall, and frantically search the
DEPARTURES
board at the end of it. I read the block letters:
PHILADELPHIA 9:16 P.M. ALL ABOARD
etched in white type. Boarding, but not departed. She's on platform three.

I'm not too late. . . . I'm not too late
.

I cut through the crowds, sidestepping my way to a teller for a ticket, throw some cash at him, and dart through the entrance to platform three. The thick clutter of overcoats and suitcases swarming the platform nearly swallows me, but I fight my way through it, using elbows and shoulders as I move forward, determined to find her. I search the windows of the train, each face I'm barreling past, each onlooker on the benches in the middle of the platform. My heart's pounding, my chest's heaving.
We can't end it like this—

And then, about thirty feet away, I spot a little girl and a young man, both oddly familiar, like two characters plucked from a dream, stepping onto the train. Joan's right behind them. She's sporting slacks, a coat, her hair pulled back and a broad hat disguising those doll-like features. A bubble of relief and hope and longing rises, grows, bursts inside me.

“JOAN!” I shout. “Joan, wait, Joan!”

She stops. She spots me across the platform, and her face says it all. Grace was right. Joan thought I was dead. She thought I was gone, and her own relief floods through her, breaks her right open. “ALEX!” she cries. “Oh my God.”

She bursts forward into a run, a clip-clop of her heels, and for a split second, everything else is forgotten.
This is it, this is our happy ending, I will have her, hold her
—

And then reality sets in. Joan stops running as her hand flies to her mouth. Her eyes grow big, wild—a storm of emotions clouding her face all at once. Longing, pain, triumph, regret. Her eyes flicker up to the train, and then I watch her hold out her hand.

I can't see everything, can't hear her words from here, but it looks like she points to where her wrist meets her palm, then points to the tip of her middle finger. She closes her hand, and the two points meet. And then she takes a step forward—

And in one step, somehow bridges the gap between us, through some kind of folding of the platform—a type of linked trick across space and time.

But I've never seen anything like it.

I gasp, my heart pounding, soaring, as Joan leaps into me. I wrap my arms around her, inhaling her, taking her in.

“I thought you were dead.” Her voice is cracked, soft and muffled by my shirt.

“Joan, God, I'm so glad I got here in time.”

She pulls away, looks at me with wild eyes. “Oh, Alex—” she gasps. “You don't know what I've done.”

And then I know for sure: it was her. There's no denying it anymore, and images from that lounge flood my mind—
the blood-soaked carpet, the twisted bodies, Gunn left for dead
—

“I went to the Red Den to find you. I saw it all,” I say slowly.

“And you're still here.”

I swallow. “Joan, you can't run.”

She glances back to the train and wipes her eyes. “What happens if I stay?”

I don't know, I don't know how I can spin any of this, if I have any more lies left in me—“
We'll work it out, together,” I push. “Joan, it's not too late for us.”

The conductor comes to the front of the train and shouts, “ALL ABOARD!”