The Inquisitor's Apprentice (15 page)

Payton turned to face him, one eyebrow raised in polite disbelief. "Do I look like a janitor?"

"Uh. No. But Inquisitor Wolf said—"

"I really think you must have failed to understand him correctly."

"But—"

"Listen, Sandy—"

"Sacha."

"Whatever. Let me explain how things work here. I'll use short, simple words so you can understand me.
I
am the valued employee who keeps this office running like a well-oiled machine so that Inquisitor Wolf can solve crimes and catch criminals.
You
are a useless child whose only function is to gum up the works, get underfoot, and waste time that Inquisitor Wolf and I could be using to get real work done. So if you want a desk, go down to the basement and find one. On your
own
time. And meanwhile, you can make yourself slightly less useless by rushing the growler to the Witch's Brew."

And then Payton fished a dented old tin bucket from under his desk and tossed it casually (but very accurately) at Sacha's head.

Sacha reached up a hand just in time to catch the bucket before it hit him. Then he stared at it in shock and disbelief until Lily snatched it from his hand and marched smartly out the door.

She looked as if she knew where she was going. But of course she couldn't, or she would have been just as shocked as Sacha was.

Sacha had seen plenty of growlers in his day. He'd seen plenty of children rushing the growler, too—carrying it down to the local saloon to buy beer for their parents. It happened every day in every neighborhood of New York, despite all the laws that high-society do-gooders kept passing about selling liquor to minors. But Sacha had certainly never done it. Sacha's father disapproved of anything stronger than seltzer water. And Sacha's mother ... well, to hear her tell it, rushing the growler was a one-way ticket up the river to Sing Sing prison's fancy new electric chair. First came the childhood trips to fill it up for parents and aunts and uncles. Then came the scrounging of pennies to fill it for yourself. Then you were sliding down the slippery slope of mugging drunks, marrying a gun moll (or worse, a
shiksa!),
and signing on with Magic, Inc., as one of Meyer Minsky's hired thugs.

And it all began with that first fateful trip to rush the growler. A trip Sacha was now being ordered to take as part of his official duties for the NYPD Inquisitors Division. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

"Well," Payton snapped, "what are you waiting for?"

Without another word, Sacha turned and dashed out the door after Lily. He found her waiting for him about a third of the way down the long corridor. "So where is this Witch's Brew?" she asked as soon as he caught up with her.

"How should I know? I'm not in the habit of frequenting gin joints."

The door opened and Payton's head emerged into the hallway. "Fifty-second between Eighth and Ninth," he said, and vanished back into the office.

Sacha's stomach sank. Lily might be oblivious to the meaning of that address, but that was only because she'd grown up on Millionaire's Mile. Sacha, on the other hand, came from the real New York. And in his city, neighborhoods were rigidly divided by ethnic group—and each neighborhood was fiercely defended by its own magical street gangs. The Lower East Side was Jewish: you didn't set foot there without Magic, Inc., knowing your business. Chinatown was controlled by Confucian spellbinders and Immortals. Little Italy was the realm of the Italian folk witches called
streganonnas.
And Hell's Kitchen belonged to the toughest Irish gang in town: the Hell's Kitchen Hexers.

"Well, what are we waiting for?" Lily tossed her blond hair and marched off down the stairs without so much as a glance at Sacha. Did she just expect him to trot along behind her like a lapdog? Obviously she did! He muttered something rude under his breath about bossy women. But he didn't really have a choice, so in the end he followed her.

Within a few blocks, however, Sacha's outrage melted into bewildered amusement. Either Lily Astral didn't know the meaning of the word fear or she'd never walked down a New York City sidewalk before. She'd seemed reasonably normal when they were just following in the wide wake of Inquisitor Wolf's flapping coattails. But on her own she was a public menace.

She marched straight down the middle of the sidewalk like it was her personal property and she expected everyone else to step aside and make way for her. And the weirdest part of it was that most people
did
step aside. As soon as they saw her coming, they just sort of slid out of her way like tugboats clearing the harbor for a luxury ocean liner.

The only catch was that not everyone could see Lily coming. Sacha cringed as she sailed from one near disaster to the next. Bicyclists. Delivery boys. A dry grocer's clerk staggering along under stacked bolts of muslin and cotton. A handcart operator pushing a leaning tower of metal filing cabinets.

Lily was cheerfully oblivious to it all. In fact, the only thing Lily was not oblivious to was food. She kept making lightning-quick detours to investigate edible items in storefronts and on passing pushcarts. Most of them met with her immediate approval, and she seemed to possess an inexhaustible supply of pocket change. This made it really hard to get anywhere. And really frustrating for Sacha, who had to say no again and again because he was pretty sure that half the stuff she was eating wasn't even within spitting distance of being kosher.

"Don't they feed you at home?" he asked after he'd watched her devour a pretzel, a chicken potpie, two oranges, and more candy than he and Bekah saw in a month.

"Sure, but my mother's from New England."

"So?"

"So have you been there?" she asked in a decidedly odd tone of voice.

Sacha hesitated, not sure what she was getting at and not wanting to sound foolish. If it had been anyone but Lily Astral, he would have suspected a joke. "No," he said finally.

"Well, if you ever do go—take food."

He glanced sharply at her. Was that a glint of laughter in the cool blue depths of her eyes? Did Lily Astral actually have a sense of humor? It looked like she did. And now she was even smiling at him.

He'd barely started to smile back when she stepped in front of an omnibus.

Sacha jerked her back from the rails just as the frothing draft horses were about to trample her flat.

"There's no need to panic," she said loftily. "Horses don't step on people. They would have gone around me. I've seen it happen all the time at the polo grounds."

"But they
can't
go around you. The omnibus is on rails!"

"Really?" She peered down at the steel streetcar rails as if she'd never seen such a thing. "How remarkable! When did they put those in?"

Finally he managed to shepherd her safely over to West Fifty-second—only to discover a new danger looming between them and their goal.

"Look!" Lily exclaimed as they turned the corner onto Fifty-second Street. "There's the Witch's Brew. And finally some peace and quiet too! What a relief!"

Sacha wasn't so sure about that. Peace and quiet might be a good thing on the calm, tree-lined streets where Lily lived. But in the New York Sacha knew, a quiet street was a dangerous one. And this street was far too quiet. Between them and the Witch's Brew stretched a wasteland of blank walls and boarded-up storefronts. Half the block was nothing but a weedy abandoned lot. A huge hand-lettered sign on the jagged fence enclosing the lot read

ALL BOYS CAUT
IN THIS YARD
WILL BE DELT WITH
ACCORDEN TO LAW

Sacha was just about to say that they might want to take the long way around to the Witch's Brew when he heard the unmistakable
crack!
of a bat connecting with a baseball. The ball streaked out of the abandoned lot, bounced off a boarded-up window, and rolled down the sidewalk toward them. An instant later, a dozen raggedly dressed teenagers swarmed after it. The smallest stood a head taller than Sacha, and their bold swaggers and outlandish costumes—one of them even wore a stolen policeman's hat—marked them as Hell's Kitchen Hexers.

"Hey, look!" one of them jeered. "It's Dopey Benny Schleptowitz and his gun moll Irma!"

That set off a chorus among his ragtag little pack of hangers-on:

"Hey, Dopey!"

"Hey, Schleptowitz!"

"Hey, Irma!"

"Coochie coochie coochie coochie!"

"Other way!" Sacha told Lily, grabbing hold of her wrist and giving her a sharp tug backward as the Hexers came toward them.

"Why? They're just a bunch of harmless kids—"

"Just go!" Sacha yelled.

Maybe it was the look of terror on his face, or maybe it was the fact that the "harmless" kids had already started to come after them. But for once Lily didn't try to argue.

Five minutes later they had made it around the block from the other direction and were pushing through the front door of the Witch's Brew.

The first thing Sacha noticed was the smell of beer. It wasn't even ten in the morning, but the rich, yeasty perfume of triple stout already hung in the air like fog. Cigar smoke curled lazily around the cast-iron Corinthian columns and lent an underwater pall to the beveled mirrors and stamped tin ceiling. Electric ceiling fans whined and creaked overhead like propellers churning their way through a beery sea.

One side of the cavernous room housed a forlorn-looking coffee bar where a waiter was reading the newspaper behind a gold-plated coffee boiler. On the other side of the room—the side all the customers were on—was a brass-railed bar stocked with every kind of hard liquor Sacha had ever seen in his life and many he hadn't. Earlier shifts of drinkers had scuffed the bar rail and strewn the floor with broken shot glasses and abandoned lottery tickets. Several of the faces that turned to stare at the two children as the doors swung closed behind them were flushed and bleary-eyed.

The Witch's Brew was clearly a serious drinking establishment—and serious drinking had already been under way for many hours today.

"Well, well!" said the mountainous Irishman behind the bar. "If it isn't Little Miss Muffet and Little Lord Fauntleroy!" He leered alarmingly at the children. His teeth were the size of coat pegs. They looked like coat pegs too: long and widely spaced and oddly rounded. It was quite unsettling.

Before he could lose his nerve, Sacha stepped up to the bar and held up the growler. "I want this filled up," he said, trying to sound like a busy grownup with better things to do than waste time trading insults with bartenders.

"Do you, now? Well, come back in about eight years, and I'll be happy to oblige."

Before Sacha could argue, the man pointed to the hand-lettered sign that hung on the mirror behind him. Judging by the spelling, it must have been penned by the same person who'd painted the sign in the abandoned lot down the street:

WE SURVE NO MINERS!

"I'm sure," said the bartender with elaborate and completely insincere courtesy, "that such fine young ladies and gentlemen as yourselves can read a simple sign without my help. I'm sure you wouldn't want to be getting me in trouble with the police. No, I imagine that'd be the furthest thing from your innocent young minds. I think you'd best be on your way now. Send my kind regards to Commissioner Keegan. And remind him I've already paid this month. Nice and regular, like always. So if he's going to sacrifice some poor bugger to the temperance ladies, it better not be me!"

Sacha turned away, his shoulders slumping in defeat. But Lily grabbed the growler from him and stepped up to the bar as if walking into a Hell's Kitchen whiskey dive were all part of an ordinary day for her.

"But we're not
from
Commissioner Keegan," she said with a winning smile. "We're Inquisitor Wolf's apprentices. And he said you'd fill up his—grumbler—snarler—whatever you call it."

The bartender's face cracked into a grin that displayed both rows of coat pegs right down to their massive roots. "Inquisitor Wolf!" he exclaimed. "Well, and why didn't you say so in the first place? Hey, Sean! Fire up Big Bertha! Wolf's sent down for his morning coffee!"

Across the room, the apron-clad man leaped into action at the massive coffee machine. Minutes later, Lily and Sacha were trudging back toward the Inquisitors headquarters, their growler brimming with the strongest, blackest coffee Sacha had ever seen. Sacha was so busy feeling relieved and embarrassed that he only realized they'd turned the wrong way when a baseball whizzed out of the abandoned lot and hit him smack in the side of the head.

Lily caught the ball in midair as it bounced off his head, but before he had time to be amazed by this, they were surrounded by a jeering circle of boys.

They weren't real Hexers, Sacha realized, just aspiring gangsters. But that didn't mean they couldn't beat up two skinny kids. One of them—a potato-nosed teenager who looked like he was about five pounds short of being able to sign onto the fireman's local ladder company—jabbed Sacha in the chest, sending him stumbling backward. Another one was there to catch him, and for a while the two of them entertained themselves by batting Sacha back and forth like a tetherball. But they soon got bored with that and began casting around for something better to do.

"Let's sell him a raffle ticket!" one of them cried.

"Yeah! A raffle ticket!"

"Who's got a ticket?"

"Who's got a hat fer him to pull it out of?"

"Whew! Your hat stinks, Riley! Don't you never take a bath?"

"Bathin's fer girls!"

Soon the hat was proffered and the tickets—grubby scraps of newspaper—were tipped into it for Sacha to draw. Sacha had been shaken down by street kids many times before, so he sighed in resignation and prepared to do his part. Lily, on the other hand, didn't seem to know the script at all.

"Aren't you going to tell us how much it costs?" she demanded. "And what's the prize? And why should we buy anything from you in the first place?"

"'Cause we're the Hexers."

"So?"

The boy's eyes narrowed in anger. "Hey, Ratter," he called without taking his eyes off Lily. "Why don't you show her what you can do."