<--Younger | The First New York Magician | Older-->

I made it to the City Hall Park station on the N/R/W line and wearily pulled myself up the end of the platform. There were two or three people in the station, but they were all clustered near the exits. My left arm wasn't really working, and I was too afraid of what I might see to examine it in detail. I could smell smoke and the reek of long-chain explosives residue from my coat as I staggered my way to the stairs, ignoring the unabashedly suspicious looks directed my way by my fellow New Yorkers. Hell, I would've kept an eye on me, too.

Emerging onto the streets, I took stock of the light traffic and decided I hadn't lost any time in the incident - it was still early morning. Hailing a cab took longer than it should have, until I turned to hide my left side. I slid into the cab and gave the hack my address. With no more than a few looks at my battered state, he took me home.

I undressed as I went through my apartment, heading for the bathroom. I abandoned my coat in the foyer, and by the time I made it to the bathroom I was in my briefs and carrying my gun in its shoulder rig, which I draped over the towel rack. Turning the taps for a hot shower, I finally stood in front of the mirror and looked at my left side. The arm was bright red over most of its surface, with patches of greasy black. My hand was a dark mottled purple, which I realized on close examination was the result of burst capillaries under the skin where the shock from the grenade had leaked through my containment cast.

All my fingers worked, albeit painfully, and that was more luck than I'd had any right to count on. I stepped into the shower, raised my face to the water and stood there for just under an eon until my body started to respond to my commands again and my left side had steadied into a dull but strong ache. It felt like my left hand had been hit with a sledgehammer - which, technically, it sort of had been.

I staggered from the bathroom into my bedroom, picking up my pants on the way, and collapsed on the bed. I don't remember anything else.

* * *

Light woke me. I lifted my head from the same spot it had fallen on and squinted at the gray expanse of window in my bedroom. The cloud cover looked complete. As I tried to get my head working, something wiggled at my thigh. Swearing, I reached under myself and pulled my pants out from under me. Rolling over, I extracted my cell phone from the front pocket and glanced at the number. Kharan, of course. I punched the button.

"Kharan?"

"Michel? Where are you?"

"I'm home, Kharan. I'm sorry. Where are you? Are you still in the office?"

"No. I'm at my daughter's apartment. I left the office an hour or two after you did. What did you find? I presume you haven't found her, or you would have called me." The rebuke was quiet, but there. I winced.

"Kharan, I'm sorry. I didn't find her. I know slightly more than I did yesterday, and I'm sure she's alive, but I don't know where she is."

There was a silence. Then, "I understand. Thank you, Michel. I have to ask this - when you think it is time, you must tell me to go to the police or to hire investigators."

I sat up and rubbed my face. "I will, Kharan. It's not time yet. You have two days or so until the police will do anything, and PIs would just be backtracking what I've done so far. But they'd have trouble. I had witnesses they won't have."

"What does that mean?"

"The bartender who was involved is dead."

"You didn't-"

"No, actually, Kharan, I didn't. I shot him, but I didn't kill him. Something else did that. Something connected with whatever happened to your daughter."

Kharan blew out a breath, the harsh noise of his overloaded phone mic blitzing my right ear. "Michel, I am going to the police when the seventy-two hours are up. I will wait until then, but I cannot wait any longer. I will not volunteer anything to them about anything other than my daughter, but I...I cannot fail to act, when she, she needs me."

"I understand, Kharan." I said it quietly. "You do whatever you need to do to help her. And so will I."

He sniffed, once, loudly. "Call me if...if you..."

"I will, Kharan. Get sleep."

He hung up. I dropped the phone and lay back across my bed, feeling the remnants of the anger smoldering down somewhere in my core. I'd met Galina a few times socially; I'd only known Kharan for perhaps six or seven years, but I'd seen his love for his daughter, and his pride in her. Her mother lived somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area, if I remembered correctly. I wondered idly if Kharan had told her.

Then I hauled myself upright, dressed, cannoned up, and headed out the door into the wan light of day.

* * *

I spent eight hours checking with all the Elders and those in the Trade that I could locate. Nobody knew anything, or at least, I was pretty sure none of the humans did. As far as the Elders went, none of them admitted to me to knowing anything. If I knew which ones had been lying, if any, that might have told me something - but I'm not that good.

Early evening found me in the Old Town Bar in the Flatiron district, an old-fashioned watering hole for serious drinkers. I was drinking neat Bourbon and going over what I knew with the assistance of a Moleskine, a fountain pen and my fallible memory. I'd stopped at the bar on Thirty-Fourth in the middle of the day; it looked unremarkable closed at that hour. Breaking in quietly had taken me around thirty minutes of effort, and as a result, I had the one cartridge case I'd left and the CDR resting neatly in its jewelcase in my pocket.

Technically, I could have just fired up the summoning cast recording again and maybe tried to go head-first into the portal if it opened, see if I could come out ahead on the other side. The problem was that who or whatever was on that side undoubtedly knew that I was being a problem. Two accomplices and a golem construct hadn't come home after meeting me (I was feeling mulish enough to add the bartender to my score, even if the other side had tried churlishly to own-goal there).

"Right," I said to my drink, startling it into slopping over the glass slightly. "What to do."

A huge man, not just fat but built on the lines of an armored personnel carrier, eased himself down on a stool next to me, waved at the tender and then levered his torso around to look at me. "You're not easy to find when you're not knocking heads," he said.

I looked up at him and the fire dripping silently from his eyes. "Hi, Azif."

The Djinn ordered a shot and a beer and waited for it to arrive. Paying the tender, he raised the shot to me. I raised my Bourbon and we drank together. "I hear you're looking for something."

"Strangely enough, you hear right, Azif. What's the word?"

"What are you looking for, precisely?"

"If you heard I'm looking, then you know-" I said, but broke off as the other shook his currently-massive head. "What?"

"I don't know, because I wasn't told, and I don't know because all I know is that you're looking for something. Because that's all He told me."

I sat back in my high chair (what is it about babies and drunks? They make the same noises, get the same dribble stains, get the same furniture...) and looked at the wrestler Azif was riding as he calmly ordered more drinks. Then I thought about it for a bit, and then some more. Then I picked up my new Bourbon. "You know what I'm looking for, but you're not here on His business, or with His approval, bless his squamous and rugose tentacular beard."

Azif grimaced. "Please, don't be flip about Him."

"Sorry, can't help it, he's a squid."

The other shook his head wearily. "Fine. I might know something, I might not. I truly don't know if what I have heard is true."

"What have you heard?" I was holding on to my patience, but it was getting difficult. I made a mental note to look into maybe starting some meditation, or some efficacious drugs, because I wasn't going to do anyone any good flying off the handle this easily. After all, Azif sounded like he was trying to help.

"What do you know so far?" countered the Djinn. "Tell me. I will help where I can."

"Okay." I laid it out, the whole story as I knew it. Azif just listened. When I finished with myself sitting at the bar where we were even now, he nodded. "You said something important."

"When?"

"You told Sharansky that whatever was doing this needed-"

Light dawned as he was talking. "-power! They'd need huge amounts of power. Honking, big, fucking..." I trailed off and started flipping through my Moleskine.

"What are you looking for?"

"Actually, my cell phone, which was somewhere under...ah." I held it up, triumphantly, then started punching the infuriatingly tiny chiclet keys of the thing as I asked it what I had just realized I needed to ask. It took over five minutes, what with the shitty signal and the tiny keys, but finally I yelled "HA!" and turned the phone around to show Azif, who squinted at it.

"I see...I see New York One News."

"And what're they writing about?"

"A service outage, yesterday night. No, wait, two; one near City Hall-"

"Yeah, that was me, I torched a golem and blew a wall over one of the tracks. And?"

"Another outage on the Upper West Side...ahhhh, I see. A power-related outage."

"Yeah." I retrieved the phone, started packing my belongings into my coat as I stood. "There's only a couple things other than Con Ed in town which use enough power you could easily pull off a summoning cast with no warning without making it real obvious exactly where you were getting the juice. The subway is number one."

"Where will you look?"

"Upper West Side...the substation for the old IRT line, now the 1, is up there. That's where."

Azif raised his glass as I prepared to leave. "Well, good luck."

"Good luck? You're not coming?"

"I told you, Michel, I'm not here for Him."

"Then why are you...wait a minute."

Azif looked faintly guilty.

"There's a pool on me, isn't there, you son of an ethereal bitch."

"I never said that."

"No, you just figured you'd tip the home team, right?"

"You're so awfully suspicious," said the Djinn in a hurt tone.

"Well, okay, Azif. Tell you what. I'll try my hardest to forget you gave me this little tip if I end up talking to anybody in the know, all right? And we'll talk about what that's worth later."

"Hang on, I helped you! How do I owe you anything?"

I slapped him on his rider's shoulder. "Think about it." Then I grinned, as evilly as I possibly could manage, and headed out of the bar.

* * *

As I rode the number 1 train uptown, I thought about my state of mind. I was still angry, but I tried to divine what I was angry about. At least, most angry about. By Seventy-second street, I was convinced that Galina's kidnapping was still by far uppermost on my list of Things To Be Angry At, and I decided that meant I was okay to continue.

I got off the train at the Ninety-sixth street station, ignoring the perpetual signs of construction as the MTA tried gamely to install a modern subway station at one of the area's busiest intersections on a cut and cover subway line. Using one of the underpasses, I moved over to the downtown track and started prowling around at the downtown end of the platform. Although this reminded me that I spent what was probably way too much time in the New York Subway system while not on a platform or in a train, I persisted until it looked like nobody was looking my way (which took a bit) and then slipped into the tunnel on the local track. Staying against the inner wall to minimize the chance of being spotted, I went perhaps fifty feet before finding what I was looking for - a large set of manhole covers in the bottom of the tunnel right next to an access door in the western side. The door looked like it hadn't been opened recently. The manhole covers, though...despite being covered in Subway Funk(tm), there were bright scratches around the edges of both of them; metal that hadn't re-rusted fully. They'd both been opened, probably within the past couple of weeks. I nodded grimly to myself, and headed back for the station.

See, the New York Subway is something that most of us (me definitely included when I'm not up to my neck in forteana) take for granted. We look at the trains, and the stations, and sometimes feel a bit of civic pride, but then we go our way. The subway? We can see it, it's right there.

Only it isn't. Not all of it. The IRT was originally powered by a generating station called (appropriately) the Interborough Power House, a block-square huge building with lovely Gothic touches which took up from West 58th to West 59th street near the Hudson River. Near enough to take the huge shipments of coal that ran in to supply the boilers to turn the generators.

But there was only that one power house. They sent power across the City. Sending power means one thing in the modern world, if you want to go any distance - alternating current. The problem? Subway trains, like all variable speed electric motors of the time, used direct current. So dotted around New York City are substations, which took a staggering 11,000 VAC in from the Powerhouse at 25 hertz and converted it down to DC.

That was the other reason for private power. It wasn't possible (or feasible, I should say) at the time to build a rectifier that could handle the 60 hertz power that Con Ed was offering at the voltages and amperages necessary. So 25 hertz it was.

I was moving west on Ninety-sixth street. The Columbia, the first of the completely-out-of-touch-with-the-neighborhood tall residential towers that had invaded the Upper West Side in the 1980s still rose defiantly (and now, I thought, somewhat smugly) at the corner of Ninety-sixth and Broadway. I had gone half a block towards the river, following the approximate path (as best I could) of the power conduits that the manholes below had shown me, when I found what I was looking for.

It was a mostly non-descript building. Okay, hell, it was completely nondescript, really. It was sort of four floors, fifty feet wide. Two large arched windowframes flanked one of the most drab and uninviting metal grille doors I've ever seen. I sidled up through the darkening night and peered through the grillework.

The IRT Substation (this, if I remembered correctly, was Substation 14) had some light inside. There were the expected and usual dark hulks of machinery. But that was all. I sighed and inspected the lock. There were three, actually, and they looked like they weren't kidding. I suppose with the new paranoid era of Homeland Security, not to mention 11 kilovolt power supplies in a litigious society, I shouldn't have been surprised.

I wasn't, really. If I had been, I wouldn't have taken the time to pick up a useful tool on the way. It looked like nothing so much as a burglar's jimmy on steroids, because really that's what it was. It had a reversing joint in the middle, though, so to lever the jaws apart you needed to also lever the back edges, flat paddles of metal, apart rather than together. Perfect for my purposes.

I managed to wedge the tips of the tool in between the gate and the doorjamb, which left the handles hanging approximately at my chest height. I looked around to make sure there wasn't anybody within a hundred feet - there wasn't - and then sighed again, pulled another concussion grenade from my coat and wedged it in between the paddles of the jimmy. I took five seconds to think if there was really any other option, but couldn't come up with one that got me in quickly enough with little enough warning - so I pulled the pin and trotted down the block twenty feet, stepping into the shadow of a Salvation Army thrift store's doorway.

There was a tremendous BANG. Then there was a tinkling of metal bits landing on and across Ninety-sixth street. Luckily, traffic had been stopped for a red light. I ran back up the street and looked; the metal gate was hanging open, half off its top hinge. I kicked it once, hard, to get room, then drew the Desert Eagle and charged through the portal.

I made it into the inner machine room before I could take a good look around, which was where I went wrong. A cold metal ring laid itself against the bone just beneath my right ear, and a voice - one deep and accented enough for me to recognize it - said, "Your gun, please, Mr. Wibert."

Shit.

* * *

<--Younger | The First New York Magician | Older-->