After Jianyu bowed slightly and headed out into the night, Dolph turned his attention to Nibs. “After you take care of the boy, people will need to be warned. ?We’ll need to be vigilant, at least until we figure out what’s causing this.”
“I’m on it,” Nibs said, and hurried off in the direction of the Bowery, taking a group of the bowler-hat boys with him.
Dolph waited until they were gone before he looked to Esta. “Well?” he asked, dispensing with any pleasantries.
She knew what he was asking. “I think he’ll talk,” she told him, wishing that alone was enough to fix the future. ?To save Dolph from that fate. “He said he had something to take care of, but he should send word to you soon.”
“What else?” he asked, eyeing her as though he knew there was more.
She hesitated. “He won’t take your mark.” ?When Dolph was silent, she continued. “I told him it was negotiable.”
Dolph’s expression creased. “That wasn’t for you to say.”
“I didn’t have much choice if I wanted to keep him interested. Maybe if you’d warned me, or if I even knew what the mark was, I could have come up with something else.” She leveled a frustrated glare in his direction, ignoring the danger he posed. “He’s willing to talk now. From what I understand, that’s more than anyone else has managed to get from him.”
Dolph glared back at her, but he didn’t argue any further. ?After a long, tense moment, he turned to glance back at the door where they’d taken Tilly up to the apartments above. It stood empty and silent.
“How bad is it?” Esta asked. But Dolph didn’t have to answer for her to know the truth. She could see it in his anguished expression, in the tightness of his posture.
“For Tilly, it’s as bad as it can be,” he said. “For the rest of us? It’s something new, and that rarely bodes well for our kind.”
THE WEIGHT OF NIGHT
Dolph waited until the Strega was completely clear before he locked the doors and ventured out to discover what he could. Pulling his cloak around him and the brim of his cap low over his face, he headed south, toward Fulton Street and the notorious Dead Line. When the lights of the Bowery grew dim and the streets grew darker still, he switched the patch over his eye, so that he could navigate the night without falling into a coal cellar or some other trap laid for unsuspecting marks.
Rats rustled in the gutters as he passed, and the wind cut through his heavy cloak, but the cold March winds barely touched him. How could they, when everyone already said ice ran in his veins?
Let them say it, he thought bitterly. Ice or no, his ways had saved enough that he wouldn’t apologize for them. He’d carved out a life for himself, hadn’t he? He’d battled against all odds to achieve what he had. His own family had seen him as a liability, had tossed him out when he couldn’t work anymore at the factory that had mangled him as a child. To them, he was another mouth they couldn’t feed, so they had sent him away to save the others.
He couldn’t blame them, really. Desperation and fear could make anyone do nearly anything, and sometimes a single sacrifice was necessary to save many.
Back then, Dolph had been so angry, full of vinegar and bile. He’d been too stubborn to accept death or the boys’ workhouse as his life, lame foot or not. And he’d been too smart to follow anyone else. While the other urchins begged for bread or stole coins from fat pockets, the secrets Dolph stole helped to make him who he was. Those secrets would either save him—or kill him—in the end.
Let the others fight over ragged strips of land they could never own. He knew the truth—there was a whole land made for him and his kind. Or there would be soon, if he had anything to do with it. Once the Brink came down, the Mageus could be free to do whatever they would. Once the old magic was restored, no one would be able to stop them. Without the Order of Ortus Aurea holding them back, they could remake the whole country as a land for magic. Those without it could learn for themselves what it was to live narrow, hen-scratched lives.
They were close now, closer than he’d ever been. Soon he would have Darrigan, and then he would have Jack Grew, and then the Order would be in his sights. But first he needed to deal with this new danger that had risen up in their midst.
He walked on, not bothered by any of the shadowy figures who huddled in doorways, their cigarettes flickering like fireflies in the bitter night air. Before he was within a block of Fulton Street, Dolph could already sense something wasn’t right. There was a cold energy sizzling in the air like a live current, a warning to any with magic to stay away.
He pushed on, closer still, until he could force himself to go no farther. At the corner of Fulton and Nassau, he turned east and followed the icy energy along the length of Fulton. It felt almost as though he were walking along the perimeter of a high-voltage fence that was invisible to the eye. Like the Dead Line has come to life.
Dolph continued to walk, feeling his way along the Line as it ran down Fulton. ?As he walked, he fought the strangest urge to reach out and run his fingers through the energy beyond the sidewalk’s edge, to stir its power.
Maybe it was some new trap. Or maybe it was because he’d been touched already by the Brink, that its power was now a part of him.
Magic was like that. Whether natural, like that of the Mageus, or corrupted, like the power the Order was able to wield, like called to like. Magic, whatever its form, could tempt the weak with its promise of power. Which was part of what the Sundren were afraid of—that magic was a drug, like the opium that trapped so many. Those without an affinity for it feared that magic was a compulsion. Those who had touched power knew it wasn’t a completely unfounded fear.
In the old countries, there were stories of magic—and Mageus—run rampant. Plagues and deaths blamed on the same people who had once been asked to heal and guide. But that was before the Disenchantment, before the Ortus Aurea and other Sundren like them began hunting his kind and penning them in, destroying even the memory of a world permeated by the old magic as they took power for themselves.
The Order believed themselves to be men of reason. They called themselves enlightened, but in the end they were merely human, wanting what they didn’t have and taking what wasn’t theirs because they could.
This new danger was definitely man-made. Unnatural. The power it radiated felt broken, as though a part of the world had become unmoored from itself. Whatever had happened to the Dead Line, like the Brink, it had been designed to control. To punish.
He had no idea how this new threat worked. He wasn’t sure if it was simply a line or if its power had engulfed the entire southern end of Manhattan, and he wasn’t sure if it was like the Brink—which would allow entry into the city but not escape—or if it would destroy any who crossed in either direction.
But if this new line was the Brink, if it marked a constriction of their territory, who was to say it wouldn’t move again? If it continued to creep north, they would have nowhere to go.