“Madre de Dios,” Gina breathed. “What does it say?”
Katie nudged the book further into the light. “14 October 1995,” she read. “Last year, Gin.”
“He probably has the new one with him. What does it say?”
“It says ‘Passed as a ten?’ and there’s an address on Long Island. Flanagan’s, Deer Park Avenue. Babylon. Some names. And then it says ‘pursuant to the disappearance of Sean Roberts—flower and several oak leaves were collected from a short till at the under-twenty-one club.’ And then it says ‘Faerie money?’ Spelled F-a-e-r-i-e.”
“He’s crazy,” Gina said definitively. “Schizo. Gone.”
“Maybe he’s writing a fantasy novel.” Katie wasn’t sure where her stubborn loyalty came from, but she was abruptly brimming with it. “We are reading his private stuff totally out of context. I don’t think it’s fair to judge by appearances.”
Gina jostled her elbow; Katie shrugged the contact off and turned the page. Another record of a disappearance, this one without supporting evidence taped to the page. It filled up six pages. After that, a murder under mysterious circumstances. A kidnapping … and then some more pages on the Roberts disappearance. A broken, bronze-colored feather, also taped in, chimed when she touched it. She jerked her finger back.
One word underneath. “Resolved.” And a date after Christmastime. Doctor S., it seemed, thought he was a cop. A special kind of … supernatural cop.
“It sounds like Nick Knight,” Melissa said. Katie blinked, and realized she had still been reading out loud.
“It sounds like a crazy man,” Gina said.
Katie opened her mouth, and suddenly felt as if cold water drained down her spine. She swallowed whatever she had been about to say and flipped the journal to the flyleaf. There was indeed an address, on West 60th. “He’s not crazy.” Not unless I am.
“Why do you say that?” Melissa, gently, but Gina was looking at Katie too—not suspicious, or mocking, anymore, but wide-eyed, waiting for her to explain.
“Guys,” Katie said, “He’s a magician or something. Remember how he vanished on Gina? Remember the ink that you somehow just don’t see? Remember the damned invisible rings?”
Melissa sucked her lower lip in and released it. “So did he kill that woman or not?”
“I don’t know,” Katie said. “I want him to be a good guy.”
Gina patted her shoulder, then reached across to also pat the journal with her fingertips. “I say we go to his apartment and find out.”
There were drawbacks to being a member of Matthew’s society of Magi. For one thing, nobody else liked them. And with good reason; not only was the Prometheus Club full of snobs, Capitalists, and politicians, but its stated goal of limiting and controlling the influence of wild magic in the world put him in sworn opposition to any hedge-witch, Satanist, purveyor of herbs and simples, houngan, or priest of Santeria he might want to contract with for ritual supplies.
Such as, say, a white, virgin cockerel.
New York City was not bereft of live poultry markets, but given his rather specific needs, Matthew wasn’t sure he wanted to trust one of those. He’d hate to find out at the last minute, for example, that his bird had had a few sandy feathers plucked. Or that it was, shall we say, a little more experienced than Matthew was himself.
And then there was the recent influenza scare, which had closed several poultry markets. And what he really needed, now that he thought about it, was an illegal animal; a fighting cock.
He booted his desktop system, entered an IP address from memory, wended his way through a series of logon screens, and asked about it on the Promethean message board.
Fortunately, even if Matthew didn’t know something, it was a pretty good bet that somebody in Prometheus would.
Before close of business, he was twenty blocks north again, edging through a flaking avocado-green steel door into the antechamber of a dimly lit warehouse that smelled of guano and sawdust and corn and musty feathers. It drove the eyewatering stench of the cockatrice from Matthew’s sinuses, finally, and seemed in comparison such a rich, wholesome smell that he breathed it deep and fast. He coughed, sneezed, and waved his hand in front of his face. And then he did it again, feeling as if the inside of his head were clean for the first time in hours.
There was a desk in a cage—not unlike the ones inhabited by the clucking, rustling chickens, but far larger—behind the half-wall at the far end of the dirty, hall-like room. Matthew approached it; a stout woman with her white hair twisted into a bun looked up from her game of solitaire.
He cleared his throat. “I need to buy a cockerel.”
“I’ve got some nice Bantams,” she said through the grate. “And a couple of Rhode Island Reds.” Not admitting anything; those weren’t fighting cocks. “You got a place to keep it? There are zoning things.”
“It just needs to be pure white.” He hesitated. “Or pure black.”
She reached up casually and dropped the shutter in his face. Of course. He sighed, and rapped on the grate, rattling the metal behind it. No answer. He rapped again, and again.
Five minutes later she cracked it up and peered under the bottom, through the little hole for passing papers and money back and forth. He caught a glimpse of bright black eyes and a wrinkled nose. “I’m not selling you any bird for your Satanic rituals, young man.”
No, but you’ll sell me one for bloodsports? Matthew sighed again and stuck his hand through the slot, nearly getting his fingers up her nose. She jerked back, but he caught the edge of the shutter before she could slide it closed again. His biceps bulged inside his shirt sleeve; his tendons dimpled his wrist. She leaned on the shutter, and couldn’t shift him.
“Young man.” A level, warning tone. She didn’t look intimidated.
Oh, what the hell. “It’s for the cockatrice,” he said.
Her hand relaxed, and the weight of the shutter lifted. She slid it up; it thumped when it reached the top. “Why didn’t you say so? About time somebody took care of that thing. Though I notice you didn’t give a shit when it was just in East Harlem.”
Matthew glanced aside. The cops were always the last to know.
She hesitated. “You’ll need a human virgin too.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, biting the inside of his cheek. “I’ve got that covered.”
When he returned home, there was a woman waiting in his apartment. Not surprising in itself; Jane had a key and the passcode for the locks. But it wasn’t Jane. It was the homicide detective, Marion Thornton.