The Last Magician Read online

“You can’t stay in here all the time. You got a business to run.” Nibs walked over to the window and opened the shades. “People who depend on you.”

  “You don’t value your life much, do you, boy?” he growled as the brightness shot a bolt of pain through his head.

  Nibs gave him a scathing look. “I’m almost sixteen, you know.”

  Dolph gave a halfhearted grunt of disapproval but didn’t bother to look up at him. “If you keep using that mouth of yours, you won’t make it that far.”

  “If you drink yourself to death, I’m not gonna last the month anyway,” Nibs said calmly, ignoring the threat. “None of us will. Not with Paul Kelly and his gang breathing down our necks. Monk Eastman’s boys have been making noise too. If you don’t get back to work and show them you’re still strong enough to hold what’s yours, they’re going to make their move. You’ll lose everything you’ve built.”

  Dolph thumped the bottle onto the desk. “Let them come.”

  “And the people who’ll get hurt in the process?”

  “I can’t save them all,” he said with a pang of guilt. He’d sent Spot and Appo to their graves, hadn’t he? And he hadn’t even been able to protect Leena, the one person he would have given anything—everything—to protect.

  “Leena wouldn’t have stood for you acting like this,” Nibs told him, taking the risk to come closer to the desk.

  “Don’t,” Dolph warned, meaning so many things all at once. Don’t speak of her. Don’t remind me of what I’ve lost. Don’t push me to be the man I’m not any longer. Don’t . . .

  But Nibs didn’t so much as blink at his tone. “That’s the message she gave me that night, isn’t it? You’re still trying to figure it out?”

  Instinctively, Dolph picked up the fabric and rubbed his fingers across the faded letters. “Leena would have wanted me to.”

  “Can I see?” Reluctantly, Dolph handed the fragile scrap over to Nibs, who studied it through the thick lenses of his spectacles, his face serious with concentration as he tried to decipher the Latin. “Have you figured it out? What book do you think she means?”

  “I can’t be sure, but I think she means the Book.”

  Nibs glanced up at him over the rims of his spectacles, confusion and curiosity lighting his eyes. “The Book?”

  Dolph nodded. “The Ars Arcana.”

  Surprise flashed across Nibsy’s face. “The Book of Mysteries?” He handed the scrap back with a frown. “That’s only a myth. A legend.”

  “Maybe it is, but there are too many stories about a book that holds the secrets of magic for there not to be some truth to them,” Dolph said, accepting the scrap with careful fingers.

  “There are?”

  Dolph nodded. “Some stories claim the Ars Arcana might be the Book of Toth, an ancient tome created and used by the Egyptian god of wisdom and magic, lost when the dynasties fell. Others say it was a record of the beginning of magic, stolen from a temple in Babylon before the city crumbled. They all end with the Book’s disappearance.” Dolph shrugged. “What’s to say that someone didn’t find it? What’s to say the stories aren’t true? If the Ars Arcana is real, what’s to say the Order doesn’t have it? Look at the devastation the Brink has wrought. . . .”

  “But the Order—”

  “The Order’s power had to come from something,” Dolph said irritably. “They aren’t Mageus. They don’t have a natural affinity for magic, so how did they come to have the power they wield now, even defiled as it is?”

  Nibs shook his head. “I’ve never really thought about it.”

  “I have. Who’s to say that this book isn’t the Book? What else would Leena have been willing to sacrifice herself for?”

  Nibs hesitated. “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know.” Dolph let out a tired breath and placed the scrap on the desk before him. “Leena was no green girl. If anyone could handle themselves against the Order, it would have been her. Even you didn’t see how badly it would turn out.”

  “I’m sorry. . . .”

  “I don’t blame you. It was her choice, and mine. But I don’t know if I can make that choice for anyone else.”

  “But Leena’s message . . .” Nibs frowned. “What if this book—the Ars Arcana, or whatever it is—what if it is the key to our freedom?”

  “I don’t know if I can ask anyone else to put themselves at that kind of risk for a hunch.”

  “They’re already at risk,” Nibs said. “Every day more come to this city, believing they’ve found a haven only to find themselves in a prison instead. Every day, more and more Mageus arrive and become trapped by the Brink—by the Order.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Dolph grumbled, tipping the bottle up again and frowning when he found it empty.

  “They need someone to protect them. To lead them.” Nibs took the bottle from Dolph.

  It can’t be me.

  Dolph rubbed his chin, and the growth of whiskers there surprised him. Leena would have hated it. She liked his face clean and smooth and often ran her fingers over his skin, leaving trails of warmth behind.

  She used to run her fingers over his skin, he corrected himself. But she’d been gone for months now, and Dolph hadn’t felt anything since then except for the ice lodged in his chest. And the emptiness that filled his very soul.

  “I can’t lead them, Nibs. Not anymore.”

  The boy cocked his head, expectant, but didn’t push.

  “It’s gone.”

  An uneasy silence grew between them as Dolph wondered if he’d ever been so young. By the time he was sixteen, he’d already put together his own crew. He’d already started on this mistake of a journey to change their fortunes. He had just over a decade on Nibs, but those years had aged him. And the past few months had hardened him more than an entire lifetime of regrets could have.

  “Everything is gone?” the boy asked carefully.

  Dolph licked his dry lips. “Not everything, no. But when I reached through to get Leena, the Brink took enough.”

  “The marks?”

  “I can’t feel them anymore. I won’t be able to control them either.” He met Nibs’ questioning eyes. “They won’t fear me if they know.”

  “So we don’t let them know.” Nibs gave him a long, hard look. “Control doesn’t have anything to do with fear. Control is all about making them think following you is their idea.”

  “If they find out, they’ll turn, and without Leena—”

  “Even without Leena, you still have Viola for protection. You’re not defenseless.”

  Nibs was right. Leena’s ability to defuse the affinities of anyone around him who meant to do them harm had helped him build his holdings, but Viola could kill a man without touching him. He was making excuses, running scared, and that was something he’d never done before.

  “Do it for her,” Nibs urged. “If she sent you this message, it’s what she wanted. Going after the Book, going after the Order, don’t you think it’s what she intended for you to do?”

  “Fine. Put some people on it—people we trust. But I don’t want word getting out about what we’re looking for. If anyone else found out that the Ars Arcana exists . . .” He didn’t finish the thought, but they both understood how dangerous it could be if others knew that he was after it. A book that could hold the secrets of magic? Whoever had it could be as unstoppable as the Order.

  Which meant that Dolph had to be sure to get it first.

  “I’ll get on it,” Nibs said, “but would you do me a favor?”

  “What now?” Dolph asked, furrowing his brow in irritation.

  “Get yourself a bath or something. The gutter out back smells better than you do.”

  ISHTAR’S KEY

  Present Day—Orchard Street

  The first indication that something was wrong was the entrance to Professor Lachlan’s Orchard Street building. When Dakari got them back, the building looked the same from the outside, but inside, things had changed. There was a
new, ultramodern lobby, complete with a security desk and a guard she’d never seen before. And extra security measures on every floor, at every door.

  The building had always been something of a fortress, an odd place to call home, but now its austerity made the unseen threats outside its walls seem that much more foreboding.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it.

  The brightly lit workroom in the basement of their building, where Mari once had produced everything the team needed, was nothing more than a dusty storage closet. Esta had returned from 1926 to find Mari was gone.

  It wasn’t just that Mari was no longer part of their team. Mari no longer even existed.

  Esta had used every skill she’d learned over the years from Professor Lachlan to look for her friend. She’d searched immigration records and ancestry registries for some sign of Mari or her family, but instead Esta had found the unsettling evidence that her world had somehow changed.

  It was more than Mari’s disappearance. Small shifts and subtle differences told Esta the Order of Ortus Aurea had grown stronger and become emboldened in the late twenties and beyond, when they hadn’t before. Waves of deportations. Riots that hadn’t existed before. A change in who had been president here and there. All the evidence showed that the Order was more powerful now than they had been before Esta and Logan went to steal the Pharaoh’s Heart.

  With shaking hands, Esta did the one search she’d been dreading—the night of the heist. She had to know if that had been the source of the changes. She had to be sure.

  She wasn’t surprised to find herself inserted in the historical record where she never should have been. Not by name, of course. No one there that night could have known who she was. But she found a small article that talked about the break-in and the theft of the Pharaoh’s Heart.

  They knew she’d taken the real dagger.

  And from the sparse two inches of print, it was clear they knew that Mageus were behind it.

  She’d underestimated the danger they faced. She’d been raised to defeat the Order, trained since she was a young girl in all the skills necessary to do just that. Esta had read the history—public and private—and spent her childhood learning about the devastating effects the Order had on Mageus in the past. She trained daily with Dakari so that she could fight and defend herself against any attack, and still she hadn’t truly understood. Maybe it was because the Order of Ortus Aurea and all they’d done so long ago seemed more like myth than reality. The stories had been so monstrous, but in actuality, the Order itself had always been little more than a shadow haunting the periphery of Esta’s vision, the boogeyman in her unopened closet. It had been so easy to slip through time, to take things from right under their noses, that she’d never understood . . . not really.

  Yes, the Order had created the Brink, and yes, that invisible barrier had effectively stripped the country of magic—and Mageus—over the years. Maybe there had once been a time when everyone knew magic existed, and certainly there was a time when people feared and persecuted those who had it, but by the end of the twentieth century, old magic—natural magic—had been mostly forgotten. A fairy tale. And as the public forgot magic, they forgot their fears. The Order had gone underground. It was still a threat to those few Mageus left, of course, but without public support, it operated in secret and its strikes were limited.

  The changes in the Professor’s building, the small differences in the history books, and, most personally, the erasure of Mari’s very existence made Esta think that might no longer be the case.

  She had caused this.

  In the choices she’d made, she had somehow traded Logan’s life for Mari’s, traded the relative safety that had been her life for this other, unknown future. She hadn’t even realized that was possible.

  She had known that traveling to other times carried risks, but Professor Lachlan had taught her that time was something like a book: You could remove a page, scratch out a word here and there, and the story remained the same except for the small gaps. He had always believed it would take something monumental to change the ending.

  Apparently exposing her powers to save Logan had been enough.

  • • •

  Three days after she brought Logan back, Esta found herself sitting at the end of his bed, watching his slow, steady breathing. He’d lost a lot of blood, and Dakari’s affinity for healing hadn’t been strong enough to stave off the infection his body was fighting. He still hadn’t come to.

  It wasn’t that she’d ever been particularly close to Logan, but he was a part of the Professor’s team. They needed him. And seeing him pale and so very still shook her more than she would have expected.

  She knew the moment Professor Lachlan entered the room, his soft steps punctuated by the click of the crutch he used. Esta didn’t turn to greet him, though, not even when he took a few steps through the door and paused as he often did when he had something to discuss with her.

  “Don’t say it. Please—don’t even say it.”

  “Perhaps I was going to thank you for saving him.”

  “Bull.” She did turn then. Professor Lachlan hadn’t moved from the doorway. He was leaning, as usual, on his silver crutch.

  She wasn’t sure exactly how old he was, but despite his advanced years, the Professor was still fit and slender. He was dressed in the same uniform of tweed pants and a rumpled oxford shirt he’d worn when lecturing to scores of undergraduates at Columbia over the years. He was a small man, not much taller than Esta herself when he straightened, and at first glance most people overlooked him, often dismissing him as too old to be worth worrying about.

  Most people were idiots.

  The cataracts that had plagued him for years clouded his eyes, but even so, they were astute, alert.  Three days ago, when she’d told him what had happened and tried to explain about Mari, he’d simply listened with the same impassive expression he usually wore, and then he’d dismissed her.  They hadn’t talked since.

  “You were going to tell me I broke the most important rule,” Esta said. She’d been waiting for this lecture for three days now. “I put us all at risk by blowing our cover and exposing what we were to the Order. I already know that,” she said, feeling the pang of Mari’s loss more sharply.

  “Well, then. It’s good of you to save me the trouble.” He didn’t smile. “We need to talk,” he said after a moment. “Come with me.”

  He didn’t wait for her agreement, so Esta didn’t have much choice but to leave Logan and follow the Professor down the hall to the elevator. They rode the ancient machine in silence, the cage vibrating and rattling as it made its way to the top of the building he owned. It had once been filled with individual apartments, but now Professor Lachlan owned all of it. She’d grown up in those narrow hallways, and it was the only home she could remember. It had been a strange childhood filled with adults and secrets—at least until Logan arrived.

  When the doors opened, they stepped directly into the Professor’s library, its walls lined floor-to-ceiling with books. These weren’t like the unread, gilded spines of Schwab’s books, though. Professor Lachlan’s shelves were packed with volumes covered in faded leather or worn cloth, most cracked and broken from years of use.

  No one had a collection like his. He’d purchased most of the volumes in his personal library under false names. Others, he’d had Esta liberate from reluctant owners over the years. Many of his colleagues knew his collection was large, but no one knew how extensive it was, how deep its secrets went—not even the members of his own team. In truth, no one dead or alive knew as much about the secrets New York held as James Lachlan did. Esta had spent almost every day of her childhood in that room, studying for hours, learning everything she needed to blend in during any time in the city’s history.

  She’d hated those hours. It was time she would have rather spent on one of their daily walks, the long, winding strolls that Professor Lachlan used to teach her the city, street by street. Or better, prowling throug
h the city herself, practicing her skills at lifting a wallet, or sparring with Dakari in the training room. The long hours she’d spent learning in that room had served her well, though. That knowledge had gotten her and Logan out of more than one tough spot.

  But it hadn’t helped at Schwab’s mansion. She made a mental note to do more research on the blond—Jack—whoever he was. If their paths crossed again, she’d be ready.

  Professor Lachlan made his way slowly into the room, straightening a pile of papers and books as he went. Clearly, he was in no hurry to get to his point.

  It was a test, she knew. A familiar test, and one she was destined to fail.

  “You said we needed to talk?” she asked, unable to stand his silence any longer.

  The Professor regarded her with the expression he often wore, the one that kept even the people closest to him from knowing his thoughts. He might have made an excellent poker player, if he’d ever cared to gamble. But he never did anything unless he was already sure how it would turn out.

  “Patience, girl,” he told her, his usual rebuke when he thought she’d acted impulsively—which was all too often, in his opinion.

  He took a few more labored steps toward his desk, his lined face creasing with the effort. When his cane slipped and he stumbled, she was at his arm in an instant.

  “You should sit,” she said, but he waved her off with a look that had her stepping back.

  He hated it when anyone fussed. He never wanted to admit that he might need some fussing every so often.

  Never expose your weaknesses, he’d taught her. The minute someone knows where you’re soft, they can drive in the knife.

  “I don’t have time to sit.” He leveled an unreadable stare in her direction. “You allowed a member of the Order to see you.” His tone made it clear that the words were meant to scold as much as to inform.

  “What was I supposed to do?” she asked, lifting her chin. “Leave Logan? I saved his life. I brought him back to you. I kept our team together.”

  Professor Lachlan’s expression didn’t so much as flicker, but something in the air between them changed. “You lost sight of your assignment.”