The Glass Magician Page 6

  Time started again when the buggy hit the black water. Ceony jerked forward and grabbed the seat in front of her. Pain shot up her wrists. Darkness flooded the cab. Cold water pooled at her feet.

  Snow-cold chills spread from Ceony’s chest into her limbs, freezing her solid. Her thoughts shut down. Her heart stopped beating. Her throat went dry. Her legs turned numb.

  “No no no no no no no no no!” she cried, but her voice sounded from somewhere else, somewhere distant. Water poured into the buggy, climbing like thousands of chilled spiders up her calves, knees, thighs—

  Emery pushed against the door as water gushed in through the buggy’s glassless window. The entire car slanted, its nose pushing for the river bottom.

  Drowning. She was drowning. Tears poured down her cheeks, but she still couldn’t move, not even as the water climbed up her legs and over the seat, up her blouse.

  “I’m going to pull you out,” Emery said, his words airy and quick.

  “No no no . . . ,” Ceony muttered, wide-eyed, clutching to the upholstery with white knuckles. “No no no no . . .”

  Emery grabbed her arms, yanking them away from the driver’s seat, and hooked them around his neck.

  “Take a deep breath!” he shouted. “Hold on to me. Don’t breathe again until we’re out!”

  The water climbed to her stomach, her breasts, her collar.

  She started convulsing.

  Emery cursed, inhaled deeply, and sealed his lips shut just as the water flooded above their chins, foreheads, crowns.

  Ceony squeezed her eyes shut and dug her nails into Emery’s neck, clinging to the fabric of his collar. She moved forward, jerked, and felt the top of the buggy window scrape against her back and thighs.

  The next thing she knew, darkness engulfed her. Everything was cold save for Emery’s neck and the burning in her lungs. She felt him kicking beside her, but the water . . . it didn’t end. It didn’t end!

  And suddenly Ceony was seven years old again, falling into the Hendersons’ fishpond, thrashing for the surface but only finding handfuls of mud and silt. She couldn’t breathe!

  And then the wetness broke and warm summer air touched her skin. Ceony sputtered and sucked in a hot breath, which scorched her throat like fire. She cleaved to Emery in the weightlessness of the water, like she was falling—

  “Shhh, shhh,” Emery urged her. One arm was wrapped tightly around her torso, pressing her to him, while the other swam back and forth, treading water. Then he stopped moving, and they began to sink. Ceony cried out, but the hand gripping her waist shot up and covered her mouth.

  Emery kicked and they floated once more, only this time Emery held a small plastic case in his hand. He used his teeth to open it. Inside rested a Folded piece of paper.

  He pinched it in his mouth, dropped the plastic case, and grabbed the paper with his wading arm. The water started to pull them under, but Emery whispered “Conceal” and threw the paper into the air. Ceony watched it unfurl in the starlight, expanding until it hovered over them like an umbrella a few feet above the water.

  Emery continued to tread, inching toward the shore, the Conceal spell following them as they went. Conscious thoughts trickled back to Ceony bit by bit through the remnants of her panic. The buggy, the water. How had she gotten to the surface? Emery?

  She squinted toward the road in the starlight, just barely able to see a silhouette there, at the edge of the bank. The man in the lights. She had seen a man.

  Her feet hit muddy ground, and Emery stopped moving, his eyes glued to the figure he too had noticed.

  A light appeared farther down the road—another buggy. For a brief moment it highlighted the tall, lanky form of the man standing there, his curly hair and dark skin. Ceony squinted, thinking she recognized him, but he vanished in a cloud of smoke before she could place him. The buggy lights slowed their approach, the driver perhaps perceiving the signs of the accident.

  Both of Emery’s arms embraced Ceony as the water surrounded them. “I’m sorry,” he whispered into her wet hair. “I’m so sorry. It’s all right now. You’re all right.”

  He kissed her forehead.

  Ceony came fully back to herself. She realized she was still crying, her tears scorching compared to the cold river water. Her teeth chattered.

  Ceony buried her face in Emery’s wet clothes, shivering, and stayed that way until a second set of buggy lights appeared on the road. Someone beamed a Gaffer light out onto the water.

  “They’re looking for us,” Emery whispered. “Reveal,” he said, and the spell hiding them folded itself back up and dropped into the water. Emery let the current carry it away. Then he helped Ceony up and guided her to the steep shore. She clung to him, not even loosening her grip when he waved one arm to the searchers, asking for help. One of them returned to his car, perhaps for rope, or another light.

  “That wasn’t Grath,” Ceony murmured.

  “No, it wasn’t,” Emery agreed.

  Ceony detected familiarity in those words.

  Whoever their attacker had been, Emery knew him.

  CHAPTER 6

  CEONY SAT IN A chair in the corner of the South London police station, thumbing the wet remnants of Fennel, who had been in her bag when the buggy hit the river. Emery had assured her that the dog could be repaired. At the moment, though, the paper magician was speaking to a local detective and Mg. Juliet Cantrell of Criminal Affairs behind a locked door, and Ceony sat alone in the empty police station, cradling the soggy remnants of her dog in her lap.

  She stifled a yawn, and a hiccup, thanks to the small dose of cognac Mg. Cantrell had given her to calm her nerves. The cherrywood cuckoo clock on the back wall struck thirty minutes past midnight.

  Ceony turned her gaze to the door Emery had disappeared behind nearly an hour ago. He had been involved with law enforcement on a deeper level for years, Ceony knew, but she still wished she could hear the discussion. Emery had seemed rather adamant that she wait out here. Was he trying to protect her, or did he simply not trust her?

  She had been as useful as a sack of weevil-eaten flour when the buggy went over the riverbank. Had she been alone, she would be dead in the water, floating alongside the driver, whose name she didn’t even know.

  The driver. The crash blurred in her memory, but she remembered his gruesome death clearly. A simple swipe of another’s hand, and he had died. An Excision spell; Ceony had no other explanation for it.

  The door opened. Ceony perked up, but only the detective emerged, holding an unmarked, yellow folder full of papers. From a glance, she could tell the folder had a “no-eyes” lock on it—it would only open when given a specific command, though that command did not necessarily need to come from a magician. Emery had taught her about that spell just last week.

  The detective glanced around, set one paper on an unoccupied desk, and then crossed the room toward Ceony. He pulled up a chair and sat across from her, their knees just two feet apart. He held an expensive pen with a tiny Smelting seal on its end—a seal that would light up when the pen was about to run out of ink. Ceony had used similar pens during her schooling at Tagis Praff.

  He set a ledger printed with the seal of Criminal Affairs on his lap.

  Criminal Affairs, though strictly a branch of the Magicians’ Cabinet, worked closely with all of England’s law enforcement both domestically and abroad. A few magicians even worked with detective agencies that weren’t associated with Criminal Affairs. Ceony assumed involvement with the Magicians’ Cabinet got overly political, so she couldn’t blame them.

  Ceony took a long look at the detective before her, his coffee-stained shirt and what looked like a Smelted gun in a holster over his shoulder. Smelters often operated alongside law enforcement; had Ceony become a Smelter like she’d originally planned, she might have been here under a different capacity.

  The detective frowned. “Do you need a blanket, Miss Twill?”

  Ceony shook her head, though her wet waistband had begun t
o itch. “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “I’m sorry to make you repeat yourself,” the detective apologized, “but could you recount your story once more? Give me as many details as you can remember.”

  Chewing on her bottom lip, Ceony nodded. She recounted the accident as best she could, trying to keep her voice smooth, though that proved difficult when she spoke of the driver’s fate. She couldn’t recount more than the beginning and the end of the story—once the buggy hit the water, her mind had just stopped working.

  Useless.

  The detective asked her a few more questions, then thanked her and stood, returning his chair to the desk he had borrowed it from. A few moments later, he disappeared back into the closed room where Mg. Cantrell and Emery were still talking.

  The front door to the police station opened, and in walked Mg. Aviosky, a very exhausted-looking Delilah, and Mg. Hughes, a Siper—rubber magician—whom Ceony had formally met after Emery’s brush with death three months ago. Mg. Hughes sat on the Magicians’ Cabinet for Criminal Affairs, and Ceony knew from the third chamber of Emery’s heart that he was the one who’d involved Emery in hunting Excisioners in the first place.

  Ceony stood and set Fennel and the rest of her soaked belongings down on her chair.

  Mg. Aviosky reached her first and seized her shoulders, taking a moment to look her up and down. “You have a knack for getting into danger, Miss Twill,” she said with a click of her tongue, followed by a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness you’re well.” Her face paled. “Magician Thane?”

  “He’s fine, just a bump on his head,” Ceony said. She hadn’t noticed the injury—and the dried blood coming down from Emery’s hairline—until they had reached the police station.

  She was completely and utterly useless.

  “He’s talking with Magician Cantrell,” she finished, gesturing to the closed door across the room. She had met Mg. Cantrell—a Smelter—only briefly. She had seemed far more interested in Emery’s account of the accident than in Ceony’s.

  Delilah pushed forward and gave Ceony a tight hug, but spared her the double kiss. “Oh, Ceony, I’m so sorry. How dreadful this must be.”

  “I’m all right,” Ceony said, though she felt less than confident in her answer. She felt tired, frightened, worried, relieved, anxious—did “all right” fit with any of those?

  “You’ve filed your reports?” Mg. Hughes asked. He sounded gruffer than Ceony remembered, but that could have been due to the late hour.

  She nodded.

  Mg. Hughes frowned and rubbed his trimmed white beard with his thumb and forefinger. “A knack for danger is something of an understatement. This is the third incident you’ve been involved in this week.”

  “Third?” Mg. Aviosky repeated, eyes bugging behind her thin glasses.

  Mg. Hughes nodded. “I received a report yesterday evening concerning the reappearance of Grath Cobalt. Seems he’s back in town, and he paid Miss Twill a personal visit.”

  Delilah gripped Ceony’s arm to her chest and shuddered.

  Mg. Aviosky’s skin paled. “But he left England!”

  “So we thought,” Mg. Hughes said. “But he’s come back for this one.”

  “No, he’s come back for Lira,” Ceony interjected, adjusting her damp shirt with her free arm. The towel she had been given upon her arrival had already soaked through and now hung off the back of her chair. “He thinks I have the secret to restoring her.”

  But Ceony barely understood how she defeated Lira in the first place. They had fought outside the cave. In a struggle for Lira’s knife, Ceony had sliced open the woman’s eye . . . and in a moment that her memory could still not piece together, Ceony had written Lira froze on a piece of damp paper. Written as she would a story illusion. Only Lira’s frozen state was no illusion.

  “Seems he didn’t like your response,” Mg. Hughes said, intrigued.

  “No,” said a tired baritone behind them—Ceony recognized the voice as Emery’s. “This wasn’t Grath.”

  They all turned toward Emery. Mg. Cantrell, who had also emerged from the office, was busily writing something in a ledger at a nearby desk. Delilah’s grip on Ceony’s arm tightened even more.

  “Ceony agrees with me on that much,” Emery said, giving Ceony a sympathetic look. She felt a surge of relief that the paper magician wasn’t angry with her for making a bad situation worse—or, at least, he didn’t seem to be. “I don’t know for sure. I had a poor vantage point and it was dark, but I suspect that Saraj Prendi might still be in cahoots with Grath.”

  Mg. Hughes frowned. “We haven’t heard high or low on Prendi for nearly three years.”

  “I imagine you have,” Emery said, “you just didn’t know it was him.”

  Mg. Hughes scoffed, but he didn’t debate the point.

  “Who is Saraj?” asked Delilah.

  Mg. Hughes sighed. “Perhaps you should take your apprentice to another room, Patrice.”

  “Please let her stay,” Ceony said. “She should know, too. She was almost part of it.”

  Delilah’s mouth dropped, but she kept her wits about her enough not to ask how for the time being.

  Mg. Aviosky nodded, and Mg. Hughes shrugged.

  “Saraj Prendi is an Excisioner who hails from India,” the Siper said. “At least, his lineage is Indian. We don’t have enough details on his history to confirm his place of birth. But we do have a solid criminal profile on him.”

  Gooseflesh prickled Ceony’s arms.

  “Which is?” Mg. Aviosky asked.

  “He’s unpredictable,” Mg. Hughes said. “Sometimes he does solo jobs; sometimes he works with large groups of Excisioners, such as the one Grath Cobalt used to lead, until our sting operation in 1901 disbanded it. Two things we do know are that Saraj Prendi likes to show off, and he has a distinct lack of conscience.”

  “Show off,” Ceony said, “like with explosions.”

  “Perhaps,” Mg. Hughes said, “but we have no evidence to link him to the paper mill. In fact, we have nothing to tie the mill to these other events save for you, Miss Twill.”

  Ceony thought of the Indian man she had seen in the crowd outside the mill after the explosion, thought of the strange feeling of being watched that had prickled her skin that day. She shuddered.

  “I think it was him,” she whispered. “I think . . . I think I saw him, outside the mill. Dark skin, dark eyes . . . thin, with a half beard, right? I think he was there.”

  Emery’s brows drew together, making his forehead crease. His eyes glimmered in a way that reminded Ceony of the heat that rose from sunbaked cobblestone streets.

  Ceony’s body itched under her clothes. What if Saraj had gotten close enough to touch her? What if one simple gesture on that road had sent her blood flying, too?

  “Well,” Mg. Hughes said, sounding quite sober, “if that’s the case—”

  Ceony shook her head hard enough that Delilah, who was still clinging to her, stumbled. “But they can’t be working together! Grath wanted me to cooperate with him. He wants to hear what happened at Foulness Island from my lips. If he kills me, he won’t get his answers. Even if this other man is Saraj Prendi, he couldn’t possibly be working with Grath. Grath wants me alive, and I think it’s fairly obvious that Saraj does not.”

  “Very astute,” Emery commented darkly.

  Mg. Aviosky nodded. “A good point, if an uneasy one.”

  Mg. Hughes returned to rubbing his beard. “And yet they both seem fixated on Ceony. I can think of no motivation for Saraj outside of Grath’s direction, unless they’ve become cross with one another. But if I recall correctly”—he glanced to Emery—“Saraj greatly disliked Lira. I highly doubt her well-being would be any motivating factor of his.”

  Emery nodded.

  “So, if they are working together,” Mg. Hughes said, “they have different agendas. Methinks there’s a great deal of miscommunication going on between our suspects.”

  “And a great deal of speculation is go
ing on in this room,” Emery said, pushing between Mg. Hughes and Mg. Aviosky to reach Ceony. He rested a hand on her shoulder, which immediately earned him a frown from Mg. Aviosky. “And this is all the speculation we can manage for one night. Ceony and I need to find somewhere to stay in the city until this can be sorted out.”

  “I’ve already made arrangements,” Mg. Aviosky said, though that frown still tugged on the corners of her lips, as though a string tied her mouth directly to Emery’s resting fingers. “There’s a flat not far from my home that you can lease for the time being. It’s in a well-populated area. I have a driver waiting to take you there.”

  “Thank you,” Emery said. “I appreciate it.”

  Mg. Hughes stayed behind to discuss Mg. Cantrell’s findings while Ceony and Emery followed Mg. Aviosky and Delilah out to the street, which was illuminated by tall lamps glowing with enchanted fire encased in glass that wouldn’t snuff it out. Mg. Aviosky’s buggy seated eight and had glass that covered every window. Mg. Aviosky used a spell to tint the back windows black, concealing the automobile’s passengers in the dark of night.

  Big Ben chimed one in the morning when the automobile pulled up to a twelve-story brick building four blocks from Parliament Square. Ceony and Emery’s temporary flat was located on the top floor, and it consisted of a long living room, a large bedroom, a narrow kitchen and vanity room, and a bathroom.

  Emery headed straight for the sofa in the living room. His footsteps reverberated along the wooden flooring until he stepped onto an old country rug, which muted the sound.

  “Ceony,” Mg. Aviosky said before Ceony could step through the doorway. Delilah remained outside in the car, leaving Ceony and her former mentor alone. “I think it would be best for you to go abroad for the time being, since these incidents seem to center around you. I know a paper magician in Kingsland, Wales, who could take you on, so as to minimize the interruption—”

  “No!” Ceony said, a bit too quickly. “I’d like to stay with Emery. Magician Thane, I mean.”

  Mg. Aviosky’s eyebrows knit together, and Ceony cursed herself for using Emery’s first name in front of her. An apprentice never called a magician by his or her first name. Such a thing wasn’t proper.