Secondhand Sorcery

Bernie. Bernie Willard. Mister Bernie Willard, that was his name, that was the way Dad said it, every time he told the story. Bernie the real estate big shot, the real deal, the man who bought and sold Long Island. He had a very nice house, and a very nice wife, and a girl who was not his wife but got a very nice house of her own. The wife did not like the girl. The wife wanted a not-very-nice (and expensive) divorce. So the wife disappeared one night—never to be seen again—and Mister Bernie Willard thought he would get away with it, because he also had a very nice lawyer.

And he was almost right. The judge let him off. But Dad and his buddies on the force weren’t feeling so generous. They learned Mister Bernie Willard’s girl had her own boy on the side, a boy she liked very much—and they were pretty sure they knew how Mister Bernie Willard would feel about that. Dad had a private talk with the girl, explained what needed to happen. He found her cooperative and understanding.

Two days later, the maid came in to do her morning clean and found Mister Bernie Willard cold and stiff. Half a bottle of his prescription medication had fallen into his scotch somehow. Funny how that happened. There were questions raised, and lots of quiet reprimands, but Dad stayed on the force, and he saw to it that the girl stayed out of jail. She got a good chunk of Mister Bernie Willard’s estate.

How many times had Dad told that story? Too many to count. Always behind closed doors. Nadia carried the story with her through three tours of duty overseas, where plenty of small-time pimps and dealers found their way into small shallow holes in empty fields. Then on to federal service, where they had her doing the same thing to a bigger breed of bastard. This, she knew, was how civilization kept running—men like her finding the not-men, the wolves hiding in the flock.

She liked to address them all as “Bernie,” just for a laugh, to watch the bewildered expression fly across their faces in the instant before she—

“Dammit! You didn’t do it that time either. How long are you going to keep us here?”

Nadia shook herself awake, and remembered once more that her father had been an accountant, not a policeman, and that she had never been to America in her life, let alone joined its army or federal service. All these strange ideas retreated to the back of her mind, where they calmly coexisted with the truth, coloring all her memories in shades of a harsh but necessary justice.

And there was Hamza, leaning against a pile of old crates with a frown on his face. She could barely see his expression by the daylight coming in through the building’s few windows. Behind him, Rhadamanthus looked much calmer—but that was easy, because Rhadamanthus didn’t even have a human face. Nadia looked up at him to avoid catching his master’s eye; his twelve glinting jewels swung around to stare up at the ceiling instead.

It was Sunday, which usually meant Town Day. Any other Sunday, Nadia would be walking down the streets of Thessaloniki with Fatima and the Metic girls, all masked up and closely watched by Gulya or Zeinab as they browsed the store windows for things to spend their stipends on. A squad of armed Praetorians would circle around them the whole time, discouraging conversation with the locals. It was never very fun, except compared to being stuck at base.

But Hamza was seventeen, Papa Titus’s oldest and most trusted child. He had imperium, drew real wages, could tell even Lictors what to do. On his Sundays, he would be wandering town on his own, meeting up with one of his girlfriends so he could buy her a present and they could go smoke hash. Instead he was stuck in this dismal old warehouse, trying and failing to teach Nadia how to use their familiars together. She could understand why he was grumpy.

“Could you maybe wait for me to call Ézarine again, and you call Rhadamanthus halfway through to show me?” she timidly proposed.

“What would that do? I already know I can do it. You’re the one who needs to learn.”

“But I can’t!”

“Sure you can. Just wait until he’s started his sequence, then start yours, so they merge together. I’ve done it with people and familiars I don’t even know. This should be easy.”

Nadia gritted her teeth. Given how annoyed she was already, it might be better that Ézarine was a no-show so far. “I barely even know what my familiar does yet. I don’t have enough practice starting her up alone; it’s too much to try and interrupt Rhadamanthus with her.”

“If you do it right, it’s not interrupting at all. The two stories just mix together smoothly.”

“I know! I just can’t do it, okay? Rhadamanthus gets started, and he runs away with my attention. How do you control that?”

Hamza threw up his hands and turned away. Rhadamanthus made his feelings even clearer by swinging his long scythe-arm around to hack another stack of crates in half; splinters of wood and plastic went flying, and Nadia had to shield her face.

Ézarine and Rhadamanthus were the first two familiars in the family who might have a chance of working together, if you didn’t count Yunks—and Papa Titus wasn’t about to go on missions in person. Frustration and a need for justice sounded like compatible feelings; in theory, they should be able to draw off the same human substrate, get closer together than other familiars could, and maybe wind up more powerful together than separate.

It would be wonderful if it worked, because then Papa Titus would send her off with Hamza on most of her missions, and she would have all his experience backing her up, instead of going in alone like the others. And Hamza would be a much more reassuring partner than Ruslan, or Fatima, or (God forbid) Yuri.

But first she had to learn how to work with him, and he wasn’t the best teacher. “What if I just practiced calling and dismissing Ézarine?”

“You can’t do it now. Only during the keystone sequence, when they’re still forming. You do it now, they’ll fight, and you’ll—”

“Yes, I know about ambivalence! I mean if you send Rhadamanthus away beforehand, so I can just practice my part. This is all very new to me, I’m not as good at it as you are.” Hamza frowned—probably thinking of how much longer this would take—so she added, “What we’re doing so far isn’t working, right? So let me try my way.”

Hamza still looked mad, but nodded, and gangly, graceful, ten-foot-tall Rhadamanthus collapsed like a marionette, twirling and wrapping his long limbs around himself, tighter and tighter, until he disappeared. All the memories of Bernie Willard went with him. “Okay. Your turn. This should be easy, we’re both pissed off already.”

“There’s only two of us,” she protested, but he was right: Ézarine came out in a heartbeat. Nadia barely had to try to call her, and she was there, her skin like marble this time. She wondered what made her look different—and how their eight Praetorian minders, dawdling outside the doors to shoo away curious pedestrians, were taking the sudden transition from self-righteousness to irritability.

Dutifully Nadia dismissed Ézarine, then called her again, playing for the fourth time ever her miserable story of scornful girls in cafes and mothers who would not listen. It was draining to feel a dead man’s memories and obsessions so intensely, over and over, but it needed to happen. Papa Titus had high expectations of his children, and Hamza knew it as well as she did.

Now it was five times. Now seven times. Now nine, and she was starting to forget who was Nadia and who was Claude. Little details came up that she hadn’t seen before: how freely Yvonne from the cafe had spent Claude’s money, how Caroline from university always talked on forever about how complicated her damned feelings were, how Nadia—no, no, how Claude—kept finding men’s things in Michelle’s apartment.

She was about to call Ézarine for the tenth time—though she was now doing it so quickly that the familiar flickered in and out without properly leaving—when the thought of Bernie Willard came back into her head. Bernie Willard and his money, and his power, and his collecting women like horses and putting them down when they got unruly and just who did he think he was? Did he think the rules didn’t apply to him?

Bernie Willard’s woman in the cafe, young, pretty, and silly, dithering about whether she would do it or not, as if this were even a question, as if this hadn’t been something that needed doing for years, as if men like her Bernie weren’t hurting the whole rest of the world while she hung around in his horrible old castle living off his money and doing whatever he told her to do. What was the stupid girl waiting for? She had to know what had to be done.

Bernie Willard in his base. He was in his fifties, but bald and wrinkled already, with a grey beard and a big nose, his mean little black eyes flicking everywhere while he talked, his Yunks looming behind Nadia like an old dead tree blocking the light of the sun, while she wilted and said yes sir, no sir, and there was no hope and no freedom and she would die in that castle, following his orders to help him suck the blood out of the world like the dirty fat tick that he was, he had destroyed Guryev and taken Yuri away from her and now he was eating her alive as well but she would never have the courage to rip his heart out and stomp on it like he deserved—

“Nadia.” Something clenched down on her arm very tightly, and Bernie Willard skittered away into the back of her mind again like a cockroach running under the fridge. But the rest of her was slower to wake up and let go. There was something important she needed to do, and she’d put it off too long already. She reached over to pry the fingers off her arm so she could get to it.

They didn’t let go. “Nadezhda, that’s enough. Open your eyes.”

She did, and saw Hamza’s broad, bearded face frowning down at her. Rhadamanthus was behind him again, but bigger than Nadia had ever seen him before. His skeletal frame shone brightly now, and the twelve stones, set around his blank face like the numbers around a clock, burned with a terrible red light. Ézarine was beside him, a hand on his emaciated chest, her head swinging back and forth on the watch for anything or anyone that might threaten her beloved. Her skin was like clear glass, gleaming gold from a fire somewhere inside her, but the moody mass of her hair was a black stormcloud drifting around her body. Nadia could feel the lightning lurking in that cloud, the thunder that waited to break out in her voice.

Hamza’s other hand, the one that wasn’t clenching her arm tightly enough to cut off the circulation, reached up and yanked her face around so she was forced to look him in the eye. “You need to send her away now. Send Ézarine back, Nadia.”

“But she just got here. And I’ve never seen her so beautiful.”

Somehow, the grip on her arm got even tighter; the fingers of his left hand dug into her face. “Send. Her. Back.”

For half a second, she thought about refusing, and making him let go. Ézarine was stronger than he was, and they had important work to do. But this was her brother Hamza. Hamza hadn’t done anything to deserve that, it was … it was someone else she was after. To hurt him would not make things right. So she obeyed.

Something seemed to shift under her feet as Ézarine disappeared into her own hair. Hamza let go, and stepped back shaking his head. Rhadamanthus abruptly shrank by at least a foot, and got dimmer. Hamza took a deep breath, then looked over his shoulder at his familiar, who once again spun away into nothing.

Once both familiars were gone, Nadia suddenly remembered a large number of inconvenient things which she had somehow forgotten. And noticed that Hamza was eyeing her very intently. Oh. Oh, dear. “Well, I did it,” she said weakly, trying to put a smile on her face. It felt like even her toes were shaking.

Hamza didn’t smile back. Not that he smiled often. Usually he was quiet, and kept to his room when he wasn’t wanted for anything. But he would always flash a grin if he felt like you needed it. Not now.

“Um. How much of that did you—“ He crossed his arms, and Nadia shut her mouth. He’d seen all of it, of course. Everything she had. And maybe the Praetorians out there too. “I didn’t mean all that, not, like, you know, I don’t really want to, not really—I’m not planning anything or—it’s not like—I got a little carried away,” she ended, just to shut herself up.

Hamza put a hand up to his face, rubbing his temples. It was hard to say what he really thought about Papa Titus, though if he wanted to kill his father he’d had plenty of chances. He’d been with the Family since before it was a family at all, in the partnership years with Nick Vitelli, when Hamza hadn’t been anything more than an underage errand-boy who happened to be around to recover Rhadamanthus when Vitelli got killed. And now he was as good as the heir to the whole business.

Nadia tried again. “Hamza, I promise, it didn’t mean anything. I really don’t want to make any trouble. It’s just that Ézarine and Rhadamanthus together—“

He held up a hand to silence her. He was thinking hard, which wasn’t something he usually did. Not that Hamza was stupid, exactly. Just not … reflective, the way the rest of them were. Or complicated. If his work was done, and he had a full belly and a full wallet, he was happy. She could tell he didn’t like having this dropped in his lap. He paced back and forth a couple of times, always with half an eye on her.

“Okay,” he said at last, leaning against the dirty old crates again. “You did what we came here to do, right? At least once. Now you’re tired and stressed out, and we’re going to go back to base. We can try again some other day. It’ll be all right. That’s what I’ll tell him. And that’s all I’ll tell him. Okay?”

“Thank you, Hamza,” she said in a small voice. She was scared to be more expressive; it might annoy him into changing his mind.

“It’s not your fault. You’re only twelve, and it’s new. We’re just going to have to be … careful, right? You and me both. You understand?”

She did. She didn’t want to say anything else, but she had to. “What about the Praetorians?”

He shook his head. “Those punks? You let me worry about them. All they want is a paycheck, anyway. They don’t want to get involved in all this any more than I do.” He didn’t specify what he thought ‘all this’ was.

The ride back to base felt much longer than the twenty minutes it really was. Long, and very quiet. Nadia shuffled in and all but ran to her new tower bedroom, where she buried herself in a book she’d read twice already so she wouldn’t have to think about what might be going through Hamza’s head right now. Or what kind of gossip might be spreading among the Praetorians even now.

She made little progress through the book. Every noise she heard, or thought she heard, through the thick walls made her jerk up her head like a startled rabbit. Luckily almost everyone was still around town shopping. With any luck Hamza would have a good time with his girls, and whatever he thought about today would look a lot less threatening through the drugged haze of hindsight. With any luck.

Eventually she tossed the book aside and went to her prayers, the way she always did in the end. But peace did not come so easy now that she had that little knot of hot anger always ready to go off inside her. She said the words, and they meant nothing. It was hard, so hard, not to hate Papa Titus for making her do this to herself, even if Ézarine was marvelous. Would it be so wrong, after all, if she … did what she wanted to do, in this case?

Her icons did not answer.

She was long past trying to read, and about to give up on trying to pray, when she heard an odious clatter on the stairs, and Yuri burst into her room without knocking, a lit cigar clenched in his teeth.

“Get that disgusting thing out of my room!” she snapped.

“It’s not disgusting, it’s real Greek tobacco. The Marshall Family supports the local economy.” She snatched it out of his hand, threw it on the floor, and ground it out under her heel. “Hey, I just bought that!”

“Those things will kill you, Yuri. And they stink.”

He put a hand on her shoulder. “Oh, my dear devoted sister. Tobacco takes decades to kill you, and it’s fun in the meantime. You know I’ll eat a bullet long before the cancer hits. I need to enjoy life while I can.”

“I would enjoy life better if you were not making my new room smell like a crematorium. Why are you here, Yuri?”

“Just sharing the good news. We’ve got another mission.”

Nadia’s heart forgot to beat. “We?”

“Yep. I mean, I don’t know if the Tit wants you involved personally so soon or what, but it’s a big job and he’ll want all the help he can get.” He was grinning hugely.

“When, and where?”

“As soon as we can swing it, is what I hear. As for where, somebody across the Atlantic grew a big old pair of balls in a hurry. No more tests, diversions, or raids; we’re going straight into Fatih this time, to rip our distinguished Slavic cousins a brand-new asshole.”