One side of the cavernous room housed a forlorn-looking coffee bar where a waiter was reading the newspaper behind a gold-plated coffee boiler. On the other side of the room — the side all the customers were on — was a brass-railed bar stocked with every kind of hard liquor Sacha had ever seen in his life and many he hadn’t. Earlier shifts of drinkers had scuffed the bar rail and strewn the floor with broken shot glasses and abandoned lottery tickets. Several of the faces that turned to stare at the two children as the doors swung closed behind them were flushed and bleary-eyed.
The Witch’s Brew was clearly a serious drinking establishment — and serious drinking had already been under way for many hours today.
“Well, well!” said the mountainous Irishman behind the bar. “If it isn’t Little Miss Muffet and Little Lord Fauntleroy!” He leered alarmingly at the children. His teeth were the size of coat pegs. They looked like coat pegs too: long and widely spaced and oddly rounded. It was quite unsettling.
Before he could lose his nerve, Sacha stepped up to the bar and held up the growler. “I want this filled up,” he said, trying to sound like a busy grownup with better things to do than waste time trading insults with bartenders.
“Do you, now? Well, come back in about eight years, and I’ll be happy to oblige.”
Before Sacha could argue, the man pointed to the hand-lettered sign that hung on the mirror behind him. Judging by the spelling, it must have been penned by the same person who’d painted the sign in the abandoned lot down the street:
WE SURVE NO MINERS!
“I’m sure,” said the bartender with elaborate and completely insincere courtesy, “that such fine young ladies and gentlemen as yourselves can read a simple sign without my help. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to be getting me in trouble with the police. No, I imagine that’d be the furthest thing from your innocent young minds. I think you’d best be on your way now. Send my kind regards to Commissioner Keegan. And remind him I’ve already paid this month. Nice and regular, like always. So if he’s going to sacrifice some poor bugger to the temperance ladies, it better not be me!”
Sacha turned away, his shoulders slumping in defeat. But Lily grabbed the growler from him and stepped up to the bar as if walking into a Hell’s Kitchen whiskey dive were all part of an ordinary day for her.
“But we’re not from Commissioner Keegan,” she said with a winning smile. “We’re Inquisitor Wolf’s apprentices. And he said you’d fill up his — grumbler — snarler — whatever you call it.”
The bartender’s face cracked into a grin that displayed both rows of coat pegs right down to their massive roots. “Inquisitor Wolf!” he exclaimed. “Well, and why didn’t you say so in the first place? Hey, Sean! Fire up Big Bertha! Wolf’s sent down for his morning coffee!”
Across the room, the apron-clad man leapt into action at the massive coffee machine. Minutes later, Lily and Sacha were trudging back toward the Inquisitors headquarters, their growler brimming with the strongest, blackest coffee Sacha had ever seen. Sacha was so busy feeling relieved and embarrassed that he only realized they’d turned the wrong way when a baseball whizzed out of the abandoned lot and hit him smack in the side of the head.
Lily caught the ball in midair as it bounced off his head, but before he had time to be amazed by this, they were surrounded by a jeering circle of boys.
They weren’t real Hexers, Sacha realized, just aspiring gangsters. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t beat up two skinny kids. One of them — a potato-nosed teenager who looked like he was about five pounds short of being able to sign onto the fireman’s local ladder company — jabbed Sacha in the chest, sending him stumbling backward. Another one was there to catch him, and for a while the two of them entertained themselves by batting Sacha back and forth like a tetherball. But they soon got bored with that and began casting around for something better to do.
“Let’s sell him a raffle ticket!” one of them cried.
“Yeah! a raffle ticket!”
“Who’s got a ticket?”
“Who’s got a hat fer him to pull it out of?”
“Whew! Your hat stinks, Riley! Don’t you never take a bath?”
“Bathin’s fer girls!”
Soon the hat was proffered and the tickets — grubby scraps of newspaper — were tipped into it for Sacha to draw. Sacha had been shaken down by street kids many times before, so he sighed in resignation and prepared to do his part. Lily, on the other hand, didn’t seem to know the script at all.
“Aren’t you going to tell us how much it costs?” she demanded. “And what’s the prize? And why should we buy anything from you in the first place?”
“’Cause we’re the Hexers.”
“So?”
The boy’s eyes narrowed in anger. “Hey, Ratter,” he called without taking his eyes off Lily. “Why don’t you show her what you can do.”
A scrawny boy stepped out from the little cluster of Hexers, grinning nervously. “What d’you want, Joe? Hives or Boils?”
Joe hesitated. But before he could answer, a third boy chimed in. “Aw, can’t you do any better’n that, Ratter? It’s been nothin’ but hives an’ boils all month long. We’re gonna be the laughingstock of the neighborhood if you don’t come up with some new hexes soon!”
“Did I ask for your opinion?” Joe said scathingly. He turned back to the scrawny hex caster. “Give ’er the hives, Ratter!”
“Now, look,” Sacha interrupted, putting his hands up. “I’m sure we can work this ou—”
But it was too late. even as Sacha spoke, angry red welts were spreading across Lily’s perfect peaches and cream complexion.
“Oh!” she cried, putting her hands to her face as if she was desperately trying not to scratch at them.
“Now, now, boys,” said a voice from over Sacha’s shoulder. “Is that any way to treat a lady?”
Their rescuer turned out to be a handsome boy a few years older than Lily and Sacha, with an open, friendly face and impossibly blue eyes that sparkled with barely contained laughter. He looked like the kind of nice Irish boy even Sacha’s mother would approve of.
When Sacha looked back over at Lily, her hives had vanished and she was practically swooning in gratitude. He would never have imagined she could act so silly.
“Thank you!” she fluttered. “Thank you so much, Mr. … well, I don’t even know your name, do I?”
The young man sketched a humorous bow. “Paddy Doyle at your service, miss.”
Sacha frowned. he was sure he’d heard that name before. But he didn’t have time to remember where, because the Hexers were exploding into wails of outrage and frustration.
“Paddy!” Joe yelped. “You ain’t gonna let ’er off buyin’ a ticket just ’cause she’s a girl, are you?”
“For sure I’m not.” Paddy turned his bright blue gaze on Sacha, and though he was still smiling, he didn’t look nearly as friendly as he had just a moment ago. “I believe the tickets are a nickel apiece. Or ten cents, if you’d prefer to pay for the young lady.”
“What?” Lily spluttered. “You’re not going to stop these — these—hooligans?”
“Actually,” Paddy explained in his charming Irish brogue, “I’m with the hooligans.”
He flashed Sacha and Lily a conspiratorial wink, as if to say they were all good friends and there was nothing to worry about. Sacha didn’t have any illusions, though. he shrugged in resignation and reached into his pocket for his subway money. But before he could fish out the coins, Lily opened her mouth again.