The Inquisitor's Apprentice (25 page)

But it was only a dream, after all! Bekah lay sleeping beside him; he could hear her breathing and make out the shape of her cheek in the faint light from the street lamp. His mother and father lay just beyond her. On his other side Grandpa Kessler was snoring away like a kettle at the boil.

Sacha sighed with relief and nestled into the thick feather bed. He was already half asleep when he saw a flash of movement in the shadows and heard the unmistakable sound of a footfall.

It must be Mordechai coming home late again, he told himself.

But Mordechai was already home. Sacha could hear him snoring over on his mattress by the door, a sprightly tenor accompanying Grandpa Kessler's thundering basso. Besides, this shadow was smaller than Mordechai. And it had come in not through the door, but through the open window from the fire escape.

Sacha watched, paralyzed by fear, as the figure padded around the room. It seemed to be looking for something. It searched among the hooks along the wall that held the family's scant clothing. It seemed to search by smell, not sight; it snuffled among the hanging clothes like a dog hunting for a scent. It pulled something out. A shirt, maybe. Sacha couldn't see clearly and was too terrified to raise his head. Then it started back toward the window.

Halfway there it stopped and wavered in the middle of the room as if it couldn't decide what to do next. Then it turned toward the bed.

It was staring straight at Sacha now. He closed his eyes and tried to slow his breathing so that it matched the rhythm of the rest of the family sleeping on either side of him.

Silence.

Then stealthy, halting footsteps that came toward the bed and paused as the dybbuk leaned over him.

Its breath was cold enough to stop clocks. But its touch was colder still, as cold and soft and heartbreaking as the first winter snow on a newborn's grave. Gently, gently, it ran a finger along his cheek. It touched his hair. It touched the hand that lay outside the blanket.

Then it was gone.

Sacha lay awake, silent and terrified, until the dawn broke through the windows and his mother rose to stoke the cookstove. He washed and dressed with fingers more clumsy from fear than from cold. He watched tensely as the rest of his family got up and dressed and took their hats and coats and mufflers off the hook ... until he was quite sure that the only missing piece of clothing was his own second-best shirt.

W
E'RE GOING WHERE?
" Lily asked the next morning when Wolf gave the address to the taxicab. "What on earth are we going to investigate on
Long Island?
"

"You don't think there are magical criminals on Long Island?" Wolf asked, sounding amused. "Well, we're not after criminals today, just advice. From the last honest man in New York ... or at least the last honest man I know about."

By the time they turned off of a quiet country road above Oyster Bay and rolled up a curving drive to a sprawling shingle-clad house shaded by vast oaks and copper beeches, Sacha had a pretty strong suspicion who Wolf's last honest man was.

Any remaining doubt vanished when the cabby reined in his horse to make way for a flock of peacocks, two Irish wolfhounds, a tame black bear, and a thundering cavalcade of boys, girls, and Shetland ponies playing the wildest game of Cowboys and Indians Sacha had ever seen in his life.

The children, the dogs, and one of the Shetland ponies escorted the visitors up the front steps of the house and onto the gracious porch that shaded the door. Wolf started to ring the bell, only to be stopped by a chorus of protests from the children.

"No, wait!"

"Let Bill do it!"

"Bill's better than a doorbell!"

Bill turned out to be the pony—and with a little nifty trick-riding and a lot of raucous laughter, the kids got Bill maneuvered into place in front of the door and coaxed him into delivering a sharp
rat-a-tat-tat
to the door with one iron-shod forefoot.

The door slammed open to reveal the unmistakable figure of Teddy Roosevelt.

"Good trick!" he cried. Reaching into his trouser pocket, he brought out a handful of sugar cubes and fed them to the delighted pony. "But your mother would never forgive me if I let you bring a horse into the house ... so don't tell her!"

TR was just about the most famous New Yorker in America and certainly the most popular. He came from an aristocratic family impeccable enough to earn him an automatic place at Maleficia Astral's dinner parties. Worse still, he'd been born so rich that he'd never had to work for a dime. But somehow, in spite of it all, he was a real New Yorker.

People said it went back to his childhood, when he'd had such severe asthma that his father had driven him through the streets of New York all night, night after night, in order to coax enough fresh air into his lungs to keep him from suffocating. Whatever the reason, TR loved New York—and he loved ordinary New Yorkers of every color, creed, and nationality with a feeling so frank and genuine that they couldn't help loving him right back.

When he'd been police commissioner, TR had been famous for his unnerving habit of disguising himself as a regular beat cop and wandering the streets of New York at all hours of the day and night in order to catch corrupt policemen in the act of taking bribes or collecting protection money.

"If you want to take out the garbage," TR had pointed out with his usual bluntness, "you have to be willing to get your hands dirty!"

At the moment his hands were very dirty indeed—but only because he was holding a partially dismantled worm farm.

"Come on in!" he told them after the gang of kids, dogs, and pony had trooped noisily through the hall and out the back door.

He shook Lily's hand first. "The youngest Astral, I believe. Isn't the name Lily?"

Then he gave Wolf a hearty slap on the back. "How'd you know I was back from Africa? It's supposed to be a secret, you rascal."

Wolf smiled. "Let's call it Inquisitor's intuition, shall we?"

Roosevelt harrumphed and then turned to Sacha. "They say you can see magic, young man. What do
you
say? Can you? Have you got a damned clue what you're seeing, or are you just taking everyone else's word for it that it's magic?"

Sacha blinked. In all the excitement over his supposed gift—from the awful moment in Mrs. Lassky's bakery through his hurried induction into the ranks of Inquisitor's apprentices, no one had actually bothered to ask him what
he
thought he was seeing.

"I don't know," he admitted.

"I'll bet you've got some ideas, though." TR grinned. "You look like the kind of chap who's got more things happening inside his skull than he tells the world about. Good thing too, if you ask me. Any boy worth his salt knows grown-ups aren't big enough to handle the truth. Have you met Morgaunt yet?"

Sacha nodded.

"And? What did you think of him?"

Beside TR, Wolf stirred restlessly. "Perhaps this isn't the time for—"

"Nonsense, Max! I thought the whole point of having apprentices was to avoid rotten apples by going straight to the tree. If you can't trust twelve-year-olds—"

"Thirteen!" Sacha and Lily both objected at once.

"If you can't trust thirteen-year-olds," Roosevelt continued, with a solemn nod to acknowledge the correction, "then who the dickens are you going to trust?"

Wolf shrugged fatalistically as if to say that he was perfectly prepared to face a life of trusting no one. But Roosevelt just took Wolf's silence for agreement and forged ahead. It was the same annoying trick Lily had used on Sacha more than once. And of course the most annoying thing about it was how well it worked. At least when Lily and TR did it. It must have something to do with being rich, Sacha decided.

"You were telling me about Morgaunt," TR prompted, bringing Sacha back to the present with a thump. "Did you see him work magic?"

"I ... don't know," Sacha confessed. "It didn't look like any magic I ever saw. It didn't feel right."

"What did it feel like?"

He remembered Morgaunt sitting in his dark library, swirling the bright golden tumbler of Scotch. He remembered how it had felt like all the magic in New York was being sucked into that single golden point of light.

"I—I can't describe it exactly. But I've felt it before. Sometimes when I'm on the subway, or just walking down the street..."

Sacha struggled for words. He remembered the larger-than-human quality of the magic he had sensed hovering around Morgaunt's library and Shen's orphanage. He thought of the strange ripple that had coursed through the air when the Rag and Bone Man showed up to rescue him from the dybbuk. He remembered all those times when he had passed a construction site or the big pits where they were digging the new subway lines, and felt ... what? A power far greater than any of Edison's dynamos. A power that was usually buried under the accumulated weight of dirt and mortar and cobblestones, but that could spring up in unexpected places like a volcano erupting from deep underground. Sometimes he felt that the everyday city was just a curtain hung before a darkened stage. Behind it, invisible but ever present, hovered all the lives, all the deaths and loves and sufferings of the millions of souls who had lived in the great city. And they were becoming something. Something that had never existed anywhere under the sun before.

"It's New York," TR told him. "It's the city itself you're feeling. Every city has its own peculiar magic. Its own soul, you might say. And the soul of a city like New York has a power beyond imagining. That's Morgaunt's insanity. He doesn't just want to control the people who work magic. He wants to harness magic itself. He wants to turn New York into a machine that does nothing but make money for him. He's a fool! And he'll destroy us all if we don't put a stop to his foolishness!"

"Teddy," Wolf warned.

"No, Max, they need to know about this!" He turned to the children and went on, speaking with burning intensity.

"Inquisitors don't just protect ordinary people from magicians. They protect magicians from themselves, too. That's the job you two took on when you became Wolf's apprentices. Protecting people like Morgaunt and—"

Wolf cleared his throat and gave TR a warning look.

"Max has a point this time," TR said after a moment. "Why don't you two go play while we talk things over privately?"

Sacha could have screamed with frustration. He and Lily both cast a look of silent protest in Wolf's direction. But Wolf might have been made of stone for all the attention he paid them.

"Run along and play," TR repeated. "You won't, of course. If you've got an ounce of spirit in you, you'll be listening at the keyhole for all you're worth. But I warn you: I can jerk a door open as fast as the dickens, so you'd better look lively!"

Despite TR's jokes about listening at the keyhole, the heavy oak door turned out to be thick enough to muffle all sounds of conversation except for a vague and tantalizing murmur. When the two men finally reemerged, Sacha and Lily were slumped on a red velvet canapé, looking as discouraged and frustrated as they felt.

"You're hunting big game," Roosevelt told Wolf as he flung the door open. "You'd better be ready to shoot when you catch up to it."

"It's not the catching that worries me," Wolf said. "It's what happens after that."

"So you came all the way out to Long Island to find out if I'd stick by you? I've got a lot of faults, Max, but deserting my friends isn't one of them." TR turned to Sacha and Lily. "What about you two? Will you stick? Can we count on you? What sort of stuff are you made of?"

"I'll do the best I can," Sacha said, torn between admiration for Roosevelt and guilt over the secrets he was keeping.

"That's the spirit!" TR cried. "When people ask you if you can do a job, tell 'em yes! Then get busy and find out how to do it! Each of you, quick, before you have time to think about it: Who's the man you admire most in the world?"

Sacha had never asked himself this question in his life, but he didn't have to think for a heartbeat before answering it: "My father."

"Why?" TR grilled him.

"I guess ... because he's always put his family first? And he's honest. And he works harder than anyone I've ever met."

TR flashed his infectious grin at Sacha. "Bully for you! Grow up like your father, and you'll be a man I'd be proud to call my friend."

Then he turned to Lily, who was watching this exchange with a curious expression on her face. Suddenly he looked serious and forbidding. "And you, Lily? Do you feel the same way
about Your father?
"

The angry flush that flooded Lily's face was all the answer he needed.

"You're a good girl, Lily. And you'll make a good job of your life if you've got the guts to live up to your own ideals. It won't be easy. But I don't pity you. And I guess you wouldn't thank me if I did. You and I are a lot alike." He grinned the big gap-toothed grin that cartoonists loved to caricature. "That wasn't a compliment, by the way, so you don't have to thank me for it!"

"I—I—oh," Lily stammered.

TR turned back to Wolf. "You've got two good ones here," he told him. "Hang on to them."

I
S THIS WHAT
ye call keeping Mr. Morgaunt's name out of the papers?" Commissioner Keegan raged, waving a crumpled copy of the
New York Sun
in Wolf's face.

They were standing in Morgaunt's library again, Lily and Sacha flanking Wolf while the police commissioner stood before them and Morgaunt lounged in his chair. He didn't have a glass of Scotch in his hand this morning—but other than that, Morgaunt looked as if he hadn't moved a muscle since the last time he'd had Wolf dragged onto his astronomically expensive oriental carpet.

"Er ... may I?" Wolf asked, reaching for the newspaper.

"Is this discretion?" Keegan shook the paper in Wolf's face again. "Is this efficiency? Is this privacy?"

Wolf made another unsuccessful grab for the paper, but Keegan jerked it away.

"Do ye think this is all a bloody game?" he growled. "Don't ye remember what happened to Roosevelt? Or are ye looking for a rematch? If so, I'll thank ye to warn me. I'll get out of town till the fight's over, and so will every other cop with a brain in his head!"