But what then?
Take out all the Shaws?
Take out the Feds?
“Alex”—McEvoy brings me back—“don’t fuck with me. I’ll ask you one more time. Why are you after me?”
I freeze at his word choice, after me. But that’s not what he means. He can’t know. There’s no way he can know.
I close my eyes, try to think, but time keeps moving forward, and fear is crawling up my spine, stealing my breath, my words. I hear a sigh, and then the sound of metal on leather, a holster—
My eyes fly open to see McEvoy’s gun trained inches from my forehead. Then he says softly, and not unkindly, “Afraid time’s up, Alex. Pity.”
Say something. Save yourself, my mind shrieks. But it’s my body, my magic, that finally steps in—
A flat wall of stone erupts out of the ground in front of me, ten feet long, ten feet high, rumbles fast and furious as McEvoy’s bullet sounds, the hungry pop of his gun echoing through the cold air and cracking against the rock.
The wall saved me, stopped the bullet just in time—
In an odd, dissociated moment, the first thing I feel is a pang of pride for quick magic. And then I double over. My magic only did what it had to because McEvoy almost killed me he wanted to kill me—
“ALEX!” McEvoy barks.
I hobble to stand, sick and twisted behind the wall. I almost run, but I force myself to focus, to remember the endgame. Keep going you can do this you’re almost there—
I walk around my protection wall, approach McEvoy slowly to stand by his side. I need to give McEvoy the truth—at least, the version of the truth that I’m able to give him.
So I keep my eyes trained on my stone wall manipulation, the one that now cuts the parking lot in half. And then I reach down inside, channel everything I’ve got left, and perform a stacked trick, by conjuring a two-dimensional image of a man right onto my wall. A man I loathe—the man I know that McEvoy hates more than anyone for killing his cousin in cold blood—perhaps the one person who does bind McEvoy and me together, despite everything else.
I can draw the gangster from memory. The dark hair, large figure, creased face—
And then McEvoy’s standing, gun in hand, face-to-face with a replica of the D Street boss, Boss Colletto. McEvoy gasps and raises his gun higher on instinct.
“The real reason I want to work with you?” I say beside him, and then I force myself to finish the trick. I look back to my fabrication of Colletto on the stone wall and imagine the entire wall glass, and my mind shattering it with a hammer. The replica and the wall burst into a million shards, break against the night sky, and finally swirl away like dust. “Revenge,” I say numbly. “Simple as that.”
McEvoy wrestles his gaze away from the last flickers of my shattered manipulation. He glances at Win, who’s on the ground, dumbfounded, unsure whether what he just witnessed was a dream or real. And then Boss McEvoy lets go with a sharp cackle of a laugh, the caw of a crow across the empty lot.
“Oh, Danfrey.” He slaps me on the shoulder, once, his grasp heavy and possessive. “We’re going to work out just fine.”
A MAGICAL STORM
JOAN
Gunn tells our troupe we’re stopping rehearsal early today. He doesn’t explain why, though of course I already know: there’s a gathering of all the underbosses at the Red Den this December evening, but Gunn and I can’t miss a day of analyzing and discussing Mama’s dark blood-magic spells, so he and I need time to meet before. We’ve been scheming in Gunn’s office every evening for weeks, since that day I first confessed that I knew a set of special spells—the day I spent over an hour locked in there after rehearsal, doing my best to answer his nonstop questions.
I don’t know how much Gunn’s told Boss McEvoy or the other underbosses about our little side meetings, but I know my charge—I’m not to tell a soul.