“And that will restore Oliver?”

  I nodded. “Children’s auras are blessedly resilient.”

  Grateful tears shone beyond her glasses, and she smiled. I gave my potion a final stir and tapped the wooden spoon against the pot, smiling myself. I’d never used my magic to help a child before, and it felt good. Wholesome.

  “Aren’t you worried about pulling the fire alarm, though?” she asked.

  “In what way?”

  “Well, what happens if the firefighters get there before you leave?”

  “Not likely. Did you see the article in the Gazette last week? The budget cuts to the fire department have been so severe that one of the engine companies had its truck repossessed for nonpayment. I shouldn’t laugh, but the point is they’re barely operational these days. I’ll be long gone before they respond.”

  She pushed herself to her feet. “What can I do?”

  I felt my smile tighten. This was going to be a one-wizard operation, and I didn’t want someone with delusions of innate magic getting in the way. I struggled for how to respond until I remembered our conversation on the ride to Brooklyn.

  “You talked about carnelian crystals earlier and their power to amplify intentions?”

  I felt guilty for dangling something that would do absolutely nothing, but Kayla was already nodding. “The carnelian’s particular design allows energy to pass in easily, but once there, it becomes trapped,” she said. “The confined energy bounces from wall to wall, vibrating at higher and higher frequencies so that by the time it achieves the escape threshold, the intentions someone binds to it are that much more potent.”

  I affected an expression of interest.

  “I’ll perform an actualization ceremony for a successful outcome,” she decided. “I’ll time it to align with when you’ll be in the building.”

  “Great. Speaking of the building, do you have an address for me?”

  She retrieved a folded piece of paper from her hemp bag and handed it over. “It’s a housing project in Prospect Heights. Clark keeps the student-info forms in his office, so I had to be a little crafty.”

  “Is something going on with you guys?”

  She stared at me, unblinking. “Why do you ask?”

  “I thought I picked up some tension between you earlier.”

  “We were in love once.”

  “You and Clark? Really?”

  “What’s so odd about that?”

  “N-no,” I stammered. “It’s just not something I would have pictured. I mean, not that I was picturing anything.”

  “You think I’m too freakish for him?”

  “Look, it’s really none of my business.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter now.” A shadow seemed to pass over her face. “I should start cleaning the crystal for tonight’s ceremony.”

  She climbed down the ladder from my lab. I was about to thank her, but it felt disingenuous, and something told me she knew I was only humoring her.

  “I’ll call you when I’m done,” I said, but she didn’t answer.

  6

  I was relieved to find that the address wasn’t a massive tower like some of the city’s other projects, but a crumbling four-story row house. Except for an old man pushing a tarp-covered cart down the block, the street was empty, the coming darkness appearing to have driven everyone indoors.

  I’d downed my stealth potion in the cab a few blocks back, and it was already starting to take tingling effect. Cinching my coat, I arrived at the building’s front gate to find it ajar. At the building’s main doors, I wasn’t so lucky. Closed and locked.

  I was armed with dragon sand, but I didn’t want to compromise the families inside by destroying the lock. Instead, I eyed the panel of buzzers, family names rendered on plastic labels that had either faded or fallen off. Before I could press a random button, the door shot open and two young men emerged.

  I stumbled back. They strode past me, joking and shoving one another, not so much as glancing over. My potion was nearing full strength.

  I recovered in time to slide a foot into the closing doorway and slip inside. In the dingy lobby, caged bulbs blinked overhead. The elevator door was taped over with a giant X, suggesting out of order. I took the graffiti-tagged stairwell to the top floor, where I spotted the door to Oliver’s unit and a faded red fire alarm on the wall.

  Opening its cracked plexiglass housing, I took a steadying breath—let’s hope this thing still works—and pulled the tab. For a moment, nothing happened. Then a white light began to strobe, sending out a series of piercing blats. Before long, the door across from Oliver’s apartment opened and a woman’s head appeared. A second door opened farther down the hall, and another woman peered out.

  “Smell any smoke, Wanda?” she asked.

  “Not a whiff. Damn system’s acting up again.”

  “Least it’s not at three in the morning like last time.”

  “Yeah, but it might take until three for them to turn it off.”

  I hadn’t counted on the residents experiencing enough false alarms to ignore this one. Swearing, I dug out my vial of dragon sand and tossed several granules in front of a nearby utility closet.

  Backing away, I whispered, “Fuoco.”

  The granules erupted into columns of flames. Wanda, who’d begun to close her door, stopped and stared.

  “Fire!” she screamed.

  Her neighbor’s head reappeared, the sudden manifestation of flames sending her eyes wide too. The two women ducked back inside long enough to summon their families, who emerged in a multi-generational stampede toward the staircase. Wanda went door to door, slapping them with her palm.

  “A for-real fire!” she shouted. “A for-real fire!”

  Oliver’s mother led her son out of unit 402B by the wrist. As the door closed behind them, I summoned a sheet of hardened air between the latch assembly and doorframe to keep it from locking. As they hurried past, Oliver, who was still wearing his cape from that afternoon, turned toward me. I was pressed to the wall and still concealed by the stealth potion, but for a moment I could have sworn his gaze found mine through the smoke. He then disappeared into the stairwell behind his mother.

  “Entrapolare,” I called, covering the flames with a dome of hardened air.

  Deprived of oxygen, the spreading flames dwindled until they were dispersions of smoke.

  With the floor cleared, I darted into 402B and closed the door behind me. The unit was small, plain, and neat. I could see Janelle’s efforts to cover the worst of the cracks in the walls with framed pictures, and carpet stains with cheap furniture accents. The warm smells from the kitchen suggested I’d caught her preparing dinner.

  Drawing my cane into sword and staff, I made my way into Oliver’s room—the one with the Garfield bedspread—and looked around. His room was simple, like the rest of the unit, with a small desk and shelves for his books and toys. Beside the head of his bed was a closed closet door.

  Home of the Babaroga?

  Remaining back a safe distance, I slid the door open with a force invocation. Small shirts and pants hung from hangers, while shoes lined the floor. There was barely enough space for his clothes, much less a resident monster, but I knew better. The room dimmed as I switched to my wizard’s senses, and astral energies pulsed into view. Their colors spanned the spectrum, but like Oliver’s aura, they were worn and faded, as though the Babaroga had leached the life from them too.

  On the left side of the closet, I honed in on a beating knot of gray energy. With each pulse, frazzled tendrils expanded and contracted. I’d never felt a Babaroga’s essence before, but I knew I’d just found it.

  The source was inside a plastic toy bin. I approached cautiously until I was standing over it. As the last vestiges of the astral realm faded from my vision, I expected to find myself looking down at an old artifact, but it was a brass-colored button, like the kind you’d pin to a shirt. I removed it from the bin and turned it around. It depicted an embossed face, but not a Babaroga’s. It was Garfield the Cat.

  “What in the…?”

  I brought the button to my nose and sniffed. The metal was tarnished, but it smelled of copper—a prime storage medium for energy. But how had it come to contain a Babaroga’s essence? I would figure that out back at my place. I was digging for my salt bag when pounding shook the apartment door.

  “Fire Department!” a man shouted. “Is anyone inside?”

  Are you freaking kidding me?

  Recalling how readily I’d dismissed Kayla’s concerns about them showing up, I felt like a fool. I froze until the firefighter moved off and began pounding on the next door down. Another member of the team silenced the alarm.

  All right, I thought at the copper button. Let’s get you into the salt and—ow!

  Something pierced my palm, and I dropped the button. In the web of my hand, blood welled from what looked like a jagged row of teeth marks. On the floor, thick shadows spread from the fallen button like ink. When they began to morph into a shape, I half expected a chunky cat, but it was a woman. A stooped, rag-covered woman with points of eyeshine glinting from her tangled hair.

  The Babaroga.

  As I fumbled to reclaim my sword from my staff hand, the salt from my bag spilled all over the floor.

  The apparition cackled madly and lunged toward my face.

  7

  With a grunt, I swung my staff at the incoming apparition: “Respingere!”

  Light gathered around the opal inset in the wood and detonated as a flash of force. Furniture toppled and framed pictures crashed from the walls. But the haphazard force also caught the Babaroga’s apparition. As her shadowy form spun away, I set my feet and pulled my thoughts together.

  She’s a specter, meaning susceptible to salt.

  All of the salt that had been in my bag was now scattered across the floor, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I just needed to trap her in a column of hardened air and then whip up the spilled salt to scatter her into history. I had barely completed the thought before she shot toward me again.

  Dammit.

  Staggering into a backpedal, I drove my sword forward. The blade disappeared through her gut, but it was like impaling smoke. I tripped over a fallen chair and landed hard on my back. The Babaroga’s shadow leered over me, gnarled hands grasping the sides of my head. I heard more than saw her wet mouth open. A smell like spoiled meat in a back-alley dumpster hit me full in the face.

  “Disfare!” I gagged.

  Energy surged through my mental prism, shook down the length of my arm, up my sword, and out the apparition. A burst of hot, foul smoke washed over me. I lay there for a moment, talking down the bile trying to climb my throat while making certain she was really gone. Finally, I stood and peered through the haze.

  No more Babaroga, not even in my wizard’s vision.

  I spotted the copper button where I’d dropped it. Garfield’s face smirked up at me. Apart from a scum-like residue of gray energy, the button was clean, too. I would still need to burn it back at my place. Retrieving the button, I began gathering the spilled salt into a pile when I caught voices outside the door.

  “You sure someone’s in there?”

  “Yeah, I just heard a bunch of commotion,” another voice answered.

  “Whoever’s inside, you need to evacuate the building! The fire’s out, but you’re at risk of smoke inhalation!”

  Great, the firefighters were back. As pounding shook the door, I shoved the pile of salt back into the bag and buried the copper button inside.

  “Break it down,” one of them said.

  I’d been planning to straighten up the place before leaving, but there was no time. I opened the back window, fumbled with a latch for the security bars, and stretched a leg out onto the fire escape. Behind me, the door splintered and slammed open. A pair of firefighters lunged through the lingering smoke.

  “Hey!” one of them shouted.

  “Who are you?” the other one called. “What are you doing?”

  All of my casting had burned through my stealth potion, and I was in plain view. I pulled the security bars closed behind me, uttered a locking spell, and began scrambling down the metal steps. The firefighters arrived at the window a moment later. They shook the bars, but couldn’t get them to open.

  “Stop!” one shouted.

  I heard the other one speaking urgently into a radio. It suddenly occurred to me that fire wouldn’t be here without a police escort, which meant I really needed to book it. The rickety escape rattled underfoot and whined against its bolts. At the second floor, the escape ended, its extendable ladder missing.

  Panting, I downed another stealth potion. Now I just needed a couple minutes for it to take effect. I climbed over the rail, dangled from one arm, and dropped into the littered alleyway below. At the same moment, a police cruiser swung into the alley’s far end.

  Shit.

  Since becoming a wizard, I’d managed to stay off the NYPD’s radar. My mentor warned me to keep it that way. “After all, what good is a jailed wizard?” he would ask in his Irish brogue. Not that I needed the reminding. My very tenuous teaching gig at Midtown College was reason enough. An arrest would give my department chair and adversary, Professor Snodgrass, all the reason he needed to can me.

  As the cruiser came closer, I searched for refuge. There!

  I crawled over to where someone had dumped an old recliner. It was angled against the wall, and I crouched inside the growing shadow being cast from the oncoming headlights. The cruiser skidded to a stop a few yards short of my hiding place. Doors opened and slammed shut. Footfalls approached.

  “Oscurare,” I whispered.

  The invocation thickened the shadows around me.

  “Did you see which way he went?” an approaching female officer asked.

  I thought she was asking her partner, which would have indicated they’d spotted me, but a firefighter responded through her radio. “I lost sight of him when he dropped a few seconds ago. Couldn’t have gone far.”

  Flashlight beams appeared. One sliced past me and panned the back of the building beneath the fire escape. The freshly-downed stealth potion tingled inside me but had yet to spread through my system.

  C’mon, dammit, I thought at the potion, willing it to take faster effect.

  A flashlight beam haloed my recliner. A moment later, the female officer drew even with me, but she’d swung the beam back out ahead of her. I squinted at her uniformed silhouette, dreading the moment she would pivot toward me. At her back, her partner’s radio squawked with police jargon.

  “Shit, it’s a one-eighty-seven a few blocks away,” he said, already retreating. “We’ve gotta take it.”

  She hesitated, panning the remaining length of alleyway.

  “C’mon, Vega,” he called.

  A white flare blinded me. The beam had hit my face!

  I awaited the inevitable command to show my hands, but it never came. The officer hadn’t been tracking the beam, apparently, because her footsteps fell in behind her partner’s. Only when the doors slammed shut and the police cruiser reversed did I release my breath. My knees jittered as I straightened. With the stealth potion finally taking effect, I watched until the cruiser disappeared.

  Almost had me there, I thought at the mystery officer. Almost.

  8

  “If you’re trying to creep me out, you’re succeeding.”

  “Hmm?” I stirred in my reading chair. Off to my right, Tabitha’s green eyes glowed from her divan.

  “You’ve been staring at nothing for the past hour.”

  Had it really been an hour? I checked my watch. “Just thinking.”

  “Well, I’m only now achieving something resembling comfort, and you’re threatening everything I’ve worked for.”

  “Wouldn’t want that,” I muttered, stretching my arms overhead.

  After the close call at the housing project, I’d made my way to the nearest subway stop. Back home, I wasted no time liquifying the copper and expunging the last of the Babaroga’s residue. But had I really expunged her? From a Garfield button? And that easily? Those were the questions I’d been mulling for the last hour.

  I stood and began working the stiffness from my legs.

  “What’s that vile smell?” Tabitha demanded, wrinkling her nose.

  I sniffed my shirt collar. “Oh, when I dispersed the Babaroga, her smoke got all over me.”

  “That horrid woman in the boy’s picture? Good riddance. Not that the boy was much better. I can’t believe you allowed those little nitwits to manhandle me, as if I were a common plaything. Sometimes I wonder if death by decapitation wouldn’t have been a more dignified existence to this one.”

  “Starvation works too,” I suggested.

  The phone on the kitchen counter rang, interrupting our verbal sparring.

  “Hello?” I answered.

  “How did everything go?” Kayla asked.

  “Given the neighborhood, about as well as could be expected.” I proceeded to tell her what had happened, leaving out the firefighter and police parts. Some juvenile part of me didn’t want to admit I’d been wrong. “I dispersed the Babaroga’s energy and melted the button,” I finished, “but I’m still puzzling over how the energy came to inhabit the button in the first place.”

  “Could it have transferred there from a more potent source?”

  It was a good question and something I’d been considering. “Possibly, but it’s not in Oliver’s apartment.”

  “Which means he’s safe now?”

  “I’d like to think so, but something’s still bugging me.”

  “Your intuition,” she said knowingly. “It does that to me too.”

  She hadn’t brought up her crystal ceremony yet. Before she could, I came to a decision. “Remember how I told you that once the Babaroga’s energy was banished, Oliver would begin recovering? I think that’s going to be our best metric for how tonight went—seeing how he looks tomorrow.”