James Potter And The Morrigan Web (5 page)

William knelt next to Magnussen’s body. The man’s wicked cane was still clamped in his dead fist. The handle was made of iron, crafted to resemble the head of a leering gargoyle. Magnussen had used the cane to cast his unspeakable spells. William wrested it from the man’s cold fingers, hating the weight of it, but wanting—needing—to break its power. He raised it in both fists and cracked it deftly over his knee, snapping it in two. The wooden shaft he tossed away, but the glinting metal head he peered at. It was horribly ugly, its gargoyle face leering malevolently. William lowered his gaze to the dead man again. A velvet drawstring bag was hooked over Magnussen’s slab of a hand. He gestured toward it.

“Your stolen goods might not be the sort of thing that would fit in a velvet bag, would they?”

“Could be,” the boy in the lead answered. He stepped forward, hesitated, and then dropped to one knee. He extracted the bag from the dead man’s hand, which fell back to the pavers with a heavy thump. The boy stood, peered into the bag for a moment, then glanced back at his fellows and nodded gravely.

“You three,” William said, “you’re like
him
. Ain’t you?” He gestured at the body again, using the hand that held the broken cane’s head.

The boy in the lead shook his head, but it was the larger boy who answered. “We’re sorry for what happened to Fredericka,” he said solemnly, with an unmistakable British accent. “This man may have been a part of our world… but we aren’t like him.”

William merely stared up at the three boys, measuring them. They knew about his poor, lost Fredericka. His cheeks burned. “I don’t know what’s in that velvet bag,” he said firmly, somberly, “and I’m sure I don’t want to. This is over. You go your way. And me and Helen, we’ll try to go ours. Fair enough?”

All three boys nodded. After a moment, they backed away, turned, and ran from the alley, taking their mysterious velvet bag with them.

William arose from his knees, and Helen leaned against him. He supported her with his left arm and she allowed him to collect her weight. She was trembling. He felt the hot weight of the pistol in her apron.

For the first time, he wondered how Helen had gotten to the alley. She lived with her family on the other side of the wharves, some fifteen blocks away. It was the middle of the night. William himself had been staking out the alley for weeks, hoping to catch Magnussen when and if he returned to the scene of poor Fredericka’s murder. Amazingly, the man
had
returned, just as bold as brass, walking as if he owned the whole street, or even the whole damn world. William had thought he’d been ready for him, but he had not been prepared for the man’s devilish, otherworldly powers.

But Helen had. She hadn’t wasted time on words. She had shot him dead, in cold blood.

But how had she known? How had she arrived in just the nick of time, pistol in hand, to kill the man responsible for her sister’s death? It was no small mystery. For now, however, there was no time to discuss it.

William dragged Magnussen’s body into the shadows and covered it with trash. He’d have to return later to dispose of the corpse. Fortunately, the riverfront was only a few blocks down the hill. The piers would be deserted at this hour. The murderer’s body might be found in the days to come, floating on the muddy river current, but then again maybe it wouldn’t. Either way, William didn’t care.

Silently, William walked Helen home. Neither spoke, despite the questions that hung in the air. For now, all that mattered was that it was over. Justice—at least the base version of it that was within their meager grasp—had been served. Whoever or whatever the awful old man had been, he was dead. Fredericka was avenged.

It didn’t bring her back, and the two of them had to live forever with the stain of murder on their souls, but for now William thought he could live with that.

He just hoped Helen could too.

William married Helen less than a year later. Their courtship had been brief but intense, forged in the crucible of their shared experience on that fateful night. They learned that age old truth—that a mutual secret is one of the strongest intimacies, and their secret was indeed terrible and binding. They had both lost someone dear to them, and both had participated in avenging that dear one. In the years that followed, William never regretted what had happened, but he knew that Helen did, in her deepest heart. After all, it had been her hand that had held the pistol. She had ended another person’s life. William wished it had been his finger on the trigger, just so that he could have spared Helen the responsibility. He was harder than her, and could have lived with it.

And yet, amazingly, they rarely spoke of it. It was the event that had brought them together, but as the years passed, it began to seem more like something that had happened in a dream. The only time it was ever fully real to William was on the rare sleepless night, when the world was quiet and the hours seemed endless. He would lie next to his wife and wonder: how had she known to come to the alley that night? Why had she walked those fifteen blocks with the pistol in her apron? How could she have arrived at that exact moment? She’d had to have left at least a quarter of an hour before Magnussen had even arrived in the alley. It was a deeply worrying mystery.

But William never did ask his wife how she had come to be in the alley that night, for one very simple reason: deep down, he really did not wish to know the answer. The answer, he suspected, might be even more worrying than the mystery.

Helen bore William four children. With the birth of their fourth—a son, to William’s great joy—they had finally saved up enough money to move out of the dingy warren of the wharf neighbourhood. William quit his job on the docks and bought a small farmhouse just south of Philadelphia where, at the ripe old age of thirty-three, he took up farming.

There were lean years, and even in the best of times the family rarely had more than two dimes to rub together, but they were happy, and they were often rather fortunate. When neighbouring crops rotted in unusually wet springs, William’s managed to survive. When foxes decimated nearby hen houses, their chickens remained untouched. When drought scorched other fields, William discovered a spring in a rocky glen on the corner of their property and used it to irrigate his crops.

It never occurred to him that these were unusual strokes of luck. Nor did it occur to him that they seemed to coincide with his wife’s somewhat charming eccentricities. Helen had developed a habit of walking through the fields in the mornings, talking softly to herself, or singing funny, lilting songs. William never heard her actual words. He was content to see her from a distance, meandering in the dawn sunlight, singing and petting the young plants with the flats of her hands as she went. He knew that other people might think her slightly crazy, but he knew better. Helen was a gentle, whimsical soul, and the farm life had been very good for her. It had awakened something in her, and that awakening made William glad.

He never noticed that his soggy fields grew drier and healthier as she circled them each morning. Or that the colourful symbols she painted on the hen house might be more than senseless squiggles and interlocking patterns. Or that she had buried something in the rocky glen mere days before he discovered the spring there.

But her son did.

His name was Phillip. He’d been named after his grandfather, whom he had never known. He watched his mother carefully, as only a son can, both idolizing and studying her. He saw her circle the fields each morning, singing her funny little songs, but he knew that she wasn’t singing to herself. She was singing to the plants as they pushed toward the sun, even to the dirt itself, encouraging and coaxing the fields in her lovely, simple voice. She made up the songs as she went. Phillip knew this because he sometimes followed her from a distance, watching with wide eyes, transfixed by his secretly magical mother.

His sisters didn’t believe him when he tried to tell them about their mother’s subtle magic. They were older and wiser than him, and reminded him of that at every opportunity. They laughed at him and scorned him and told him he was a silly baby. None of this dissuaded Phillip in the least. They were too old to recognize real magic, even if it lived in the same house with them.

One morning, Phillip saw his mother leave the house with a small tin box under her left arm and a garden trowel in her right hand. The dew was still beaded on the grass and the sun was barely a rose-tinted promise on the lip of the horizon. Phillip followed her, stealing along the edge of the east field, his bare feet swishing through the wet, tall grass.

His mother did not sing that morning. She walked silently, soberly, carrying the tin box and trowel almost as if they were a shield and sword. At the end of the east field, she turned left, toward the edge of the property. She didn’t usually walk in that direction. After all, there was nothing over there but the border fence and an old stony glen, full of bushes and scraggly trees. Phillip hid behind a stand of weeds and watched as his mother descended into the glen. By the time she stopped, he could only see her head and shoulders. She looked down for a long moment, as if examining something, and then she knelt down. Phillip could not see her for nearly five minutes. When she reappeared again, she straightened her work dress and looked up at the sky. She was not smiling, but she seemed happy somehow, or at least content. A moment later, she turned and climbed back out of the glen, carrying only the trowel.

Phillip hid himself in the weeds and watched his mother pass. Still, she did not sing, as she did on most mornings. But she hummed. It was a quiet sound, and Phillip suspected that this time her tune was for herself alone.

When he was sure she was most of the way back to the house, Phillip scrambled out of the weeds and dashed toward the glen. He followed his mother’s steps as closely as he could, looking around intently. After only a moment, his sharp eyes spied what he was searching for. One of the stones had been moved, and the earth beneath it was disturbed. The boy knelt and pried the stone up with both hands. The sod under it was still broken and soft. Almost reverently, Phillip combed through the dirt with his fingers until he touched metal. His mother had buried the tin box. But why? Was she planting it somehow? Was it going to grow into something? What strange magic was she working down here in the glen?

He almost didn’t open the tin box. What if he ruined the magic by peeking? Still, after a brief but fierce inner struggle, his curiosity won out. He brushed off the box, leaving it in its shallow grave, and then carefully pried off the lid. His eyes widened slowly.

The morning light poured into the tin box, lighting its contents brightly. There were two things inside, both made of metal. One was a pistol. It looked snubby and wicked, black with oil and tarnish.

The other was the head of an old cane, sculpted of iron, shaped like a leering gargoyle’s face. It seemed to stare up at him, coaxing him to pick it up, to hold its heaviness and run his fingers over its complex features.

Phillip did not pick it up. He sensed there was something wrong with it, something that might make it even more dangerous than the pistol. The cane’s head was magic, and the magic was alive.

The boy buried the tin box again, and ran back to the house. He had resisted the call of the evil iron cane. But he remembered it.

And it remembered him.

New Amsterdam was not entirely empty, despite appearances, and neither was the city of Muggle Manhattan that lay below it. Certainly, the great majority of the twin cities’ inhabitants had fled in the wake of the Unveiling (or, as the Muggle press had begun to call it, The Event), but there are always a certain number of people either too embedded, too opportunistic, or simply too forgettable to come under the jurisdiction of such things as curfews, quarantine zones, and evacuation orders.

All pathways onto the island were blockaded and guarded by military police. In the heart of the city, the deserted streets lay choked with cars, taxis and buses, all stalled in place like a great river of metal. The Lincoln tunnel was almost entirely blocked by a massive accident that had occurred during The Event. Dozens of vehicles had crumpled behind an overturned bus, forming a wall of twisted metal and gasoline-scented debris. In Times Square, yellow cabs and delivery trucks sat silent, collecting dust beneath acres of dark neon. Over this, the magical signage of New Amsterdam stood equally dormant, most still hovering in place, but unlit and eerily still. The giant clockwork woman still held up her car-sized tin of Wymnot’s Wand Polish, but her gears no longer cranked and her teeth no longer flashed. A nest of robins chirped and fluttered on her shoulder.