And it all began with that first fateful trip to rush the growler. A trip Sacha was now being ordered to take as part of his official duties for the NYPD Inquisitors Division. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“Well,” Payton snapped, “what are you waiting for?” Without another word, Sacha turned and dashed out the door after Lily. He found her waiting for him about a third of the way down the long corridor. “So where is this Witch’s Brew?” she asked as soon as he caught up with her.
“How should I know? I’m not in the habit of frequenting gin joints.”
The door opened and Payton’s head emerged into the hallway. “Fifty-second between Eighth and Ninth,” he said, and vanished back into the office.
Sacha’s stomach sank. Lily might be oblivious to the meaning of that address, but that was only because she’d grown up on Millionaire’s Mile. Sacha, on the other hand, came from the real New York. And in his city, neighborhoods were rigidly divided by ethnic group — and each neighborhood was fiercely defended by its own magical street gangs. The Lower East Side was Jewish: you didn’t set foot there without Magic, Inc. knowing your business. Chinatown was controlled by Confucian spellbinders and Immortals. Little Italy was the realm of the Italian folk witches called streganonnas. and Hell’s Kitchen belonged to the toughest Irish gang in town: the Hell’s Kitchen Hexers.
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Lily tossed her blond hair and marched off down the stairs without so much as a glance at Sacha. Did she just expect him to trot along behind her like a lapdog? Obviously she did! He muttered something rude under his breath about bossy women. But he didn’t really have a choice, so in the end he followed her.
Within a few blocks, however, Sacha’s outrage melted into bewildered amusement. Either Lily Astral didn’t know the meaning of the word fear or she’d never walked down a New York City sidewalk before. She’d seemed reasonably normal when they were just following in the wide wake of Inquisitor Wolf’s flapping coattails. But on her own she was a public menace.
She marched straight down the middle of the sidewalk like it was her personal property and she expected everyone else to step aside and make way for her. And the weirdest part of it was that most people did step aside. As soon as they saw her coming, they just sort of slid out of her way like tugboats clearing the harbor for a luxury ocean liner.
The only catch was that not everyone could see Lily coming. Sacha cringed as she sailed from one near disaster to the next. Bicyclists. Delivery boys. A dry grocer’s clerk staggering along under stacked bolts of muslin and cotton. A handcart operator pushing a leaning tower of metal filing cabinets.
Lily was cheerfully oblivious to it all. In fact, the only thing Lily was not oblivious to was food. She kept making lightning-quick detours to investigate edible items in storefronts and on passing pushcarts. Most of them met with her immediate approval, and she seemed to possess an inexhaustible supply of pocket change. This made it really hard to get anywhere. And really frustrating for Sacha, who had to say no again and again because he was pretty sure that half the stuff she was eating wasn’t even within spitting distance of being kosher.
“Don’t they feed you at home?” he asked after he’d watched her devour a pretzel, a chicken potpie, two oranges, and more candy than he and Bekah saw in a month.
“Sure, but my mother’s from New England.”
“So?”
“So have you been there?” she asked in a decidedly odd tone of voice.
Sacha hesitated, not sure what she was getting at and not wanting to sound foolish. If it had been anyone but Lily Astral, he would have suspected a joke. “No,” he said finally.
“Well, if you ever do go — take food.”
He glanced sharply at her. Was that a glint of laughter in the cool blue depths of her eyes? Did Lily Astral actually have a sense of humor? It looked like she did. And now she was even smiling at him.
He’d barely started to smile back when she stepped in front of an omnibus.
Sacha jerked her back from the rails just as the frothing draft horses were about to trample her flat.
“There’s no need to panic,” she said loftily. “Horses don’t step on people. They would have gone around me. I’ve seen it happen all the time at the polo grounds.”
“But they can’t go around you. The omnibus is on rails!”
“Really?” She peered down at the steel streetcar rails as if she’d never seen such a thing. “How remarkable! When did they put those in?”
Finally he managed to shepherd her safely over to West Fifty-second — only to discover a new danger looming between them and their goal.
“Look!” Lily exclaimed as they turned the corner onto Fifty-second Street. “There’s the Witch’s Brew. And finally some peace and quiet too! What a relief!”
Sacha wasn’t so sure about that. Peace and quiet might be a good thing on the calm, tree-lined streets where Lily lived. But in the New York Sacha knew, a quiet street was a dangerous one. And this street was far too quiet. Between them and the Witch’s Brew stretched a wasteland of blank walls and boarded-up storefronts. Half the block was nothing but a weedy abandoned lot. A huge hand-lettered sign on the jagged fence enclosing the lot read
ALL BOYS CAUT
IN THIS YARD
WILL BE DEALT WITH
ACCORDEN TO LAW
Sacha was just about to say that they might want to take the long way around to the Witch’s Brew when he heard the unmistakable crack! of a bat connecting with a baseball. The ball streaked out of the abandoned lot, bounced off a boarded-up window, and rolled down the sidewalk toward them. An instant later, a dozen raggedly dressed teenagers swarmed after it. The smallest stood a head taller than Sacha, and their bold swaggers and outlandish costumes — one of them even wore a stolen policeman’s hat — marked them as Hell’s Kitchen Hexers.
“Hey, look!” one of them jeered. “It’s Dopey Benny Schleptowitz and his gun moll Irma!”
That set off a chorus among his ragtag little pack of hangers-on:
“Hey, Dopey!”
“Hey, Schleptowitz!”
“Hey, Irma!”
“Coochie coochie coochie coochie!”
“Other way!” Sacha told Lily, grabbing hold of her wrist and giving her a sharp tug backward as the Hexers came toward them.
“Why? they’re just a bunch of harmless kids—”
“Just go!” Sacha yelled.
Maybe it was the look of terror on his face, or maybe it was the fact that the “harmless” kids had already started to come after them. But for once Lily didn’t try to argue.
Five minutes later they had made it around the block from the other direction and were pushing through the front door of the Witch’s Brew.
The first thing Sacha noticed was the smell of beer. It wasn’t even ten in the morning, but the rich, yeasty perfume of triple stout already hung in the air like fog. Cigar smoke curled lazily around the cast-iron Corinthian columns and lent an underwater pall to the beveled mirrors and stamped tin ceiling. Electric ceiling fans whined and creaked overhead like propellers churning their way through a beery sea.