To Sacha’s ordinary sight, the street still looked the same as always. But now the men lounging on the front stoops and the women gossiping on the fire escapes seemed to be part of a separate world, as if he were looking up at them through deep water. And in the silent underwater world that Sacha was trapped in, there was another presence — one that was at once mysterious and frighteningly familiar.
He turned to face the shadow that he already knew he would see behind him.
The watcher stopped when he stopped, and they stood staring at each other across the littered cobblestones.
“Who are you?” Sacha called out. “What do you want from me?”
A faint breeze whispered down the street, lifting the hanging laundry only to let it drop back limply the next moment. It seemed to Sacha that the breeze also stirred the watcher’s hair and clothes. But the watcher himself never moved.
“Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?” Sacha taunted. He took a step forward.
For a moment the watcher seemed to hesitate. Then it stepped forward too. Just one step. Just enough to let the smoky halo of the street lamp light its face.
Its eyes were black pits — dark pools of shadow in a face already cloaked in shadow. But even in the flickering gaslight, Sacha could see that the dybbuk was no longer the disembodied wraith that it had been when it first began following him. He could see it clearly now. He’d racked his memory for weeks trying to put a name to that face, trying to understand why it seemed so hauntingly familiar. He’d compared it to every face in his family, every face in his neighborhood. But there was one face he hadn’t thought of … one face he knew better than any other…
He broke and ran, sprinting for home across the slick cobblestones. But the dybbuk was faster than he was. Or rather — and this thought made his heart stutter in terror — it was exactly as fast as he was.
He stumbled and almost lost his footing. Now the dybbuk was so close that he could hear its breath behind him.
Then, just as he was sure the creature was upon him, Sacha felt a ripple run through the very bricks of the city, as if it were a pond and some unseen hand had cast a stone into it. An instant later, he heard the most beautiful sound of his life: the silvery jingle of streganonna bells on a horse’s bridle.
He knew, somehow, that it would be the Rag and Bone Man who rounded the corner. He jumped up onto the broken-down cart and peered anxiously over his shoulder as the Rag and Bone Man flicked the reins and his ancient horse shambled forward.
“Did — did you see that?” he asked.
The Rag and Bone Man gave a single nod of his grizzled head, but he kept just as silent as ever.
Sacha glanced sideways at him. Who was he really? Why was there a file on him in Inquisitor Wolf’s office? And what would Sacha see if he ever worked up the nerve to sneak a peek inside it?
The Rag and Bone Man pulled up to Sacha’s building, and Sacha scrambled down and took the cast-iron steps two at a time, desperate to get inside before his rescuer left. He raced up the tenement stairs toward the warmth and light and life of home.
He slipped through the Lehrers’ room, trying not to wake them. He bolted down the dinner his mother had left out for him, reassured her that he was safe and sound and hadn’t caught pneumonia, and got into bed, exhausted.
He was fine, he told himself, hoping to stave off the nightmares. The Rag and Bone Man had saved him. Again.
But he knew that the Rag and Bone Man hadn’t really saved him. He had only delayed the inevitable.
CHAPTER TWENTY. The Path of No Action
FOR THE NEXT few weeks, the Edison investigation seemed to go completely cold. If Wolf was still working on the case — and Sacha caught just enough snatches of eavesdropped conversation between Wolf and Payton to be pretty sure that Wolf was still working on it — he didn’t tell his apprentices about it.
Instead, he let them tag along on his other cases. And he had lots of them. Sacha and Lily watched Wolf solve cases of magical insurance fraud, magical embezzlement, magical blackmail … and one unnerving murder where a respectable businessman apparently died of a heart attack but turned out to have been done in by means of a nasty little spell that made its victims’ blood boil in their veins.
Gradually Sacha began to see the method behind Wolf’s famously eccentric inquisitorial technique. He learned to respect Wolf’s silences and to wait for the astonishing leaps of logic that would often follow them. He came to recognize the vague, unfocused gaze that meant Wolf was scouring a crime scene for the one thing that didn’t fit, the one loose thread that he could tug on to unravel the most subtly woven conspiracy.
Sacha began to despair of ever becoming the kind of Inquisitor that Wolf was. He just didn’t have the talent, he told himself. And the one talent he did have was starting to seem completely useless. After all, what good was being able to see magic when the Inquisitors were never called to the scene of a crime until the magic was played out and the criminals long gone? Even Lily’s bulldog tenacity seemed more useful for a real life Inquisitor than Sacha’s strange second sight.
Yet Wolf’s faith in Sacha never seemed to waver. Wolf would even make odd, disconnected comments from time to time that suggested he assumed Sacha would become a far better Inquisitor than he was. It should have made Sacha proud, but it just made him feel like a fraud. Especially when he knew he was lying to the man.
Even worse, Sacha was no closer to figuring out what to do about the dybbuk. In fact, he could barely bring himself to think about it. Every now and then he would see the hazy halo around a street lamp or smell the dank river air wafting up from the docks — and he would flash back to that terrifying moment when he stood in the dark street face-to-face with the dybbuk and thought … almost thought… But whenever he tried to face the memory a wave of shame, terror, and confusion swept over him.
As if that weren’t enough, Hester Street had been struck by a perplexing wave of petty crime. First Mrs. Lassky’s cat went missing. It came back a day later, but Mrs. Lassky couldn’t stop wondering how it could have gotten out of a locked room when the only key was in her pocket.
Then someone started stealing food: from Lassky’s Bakery and the dry goods store next door; from the Lehrers’ room. From the IWW headquarters upstairs; even from Mrs. Kessler’s own bread box. And the weirdest thing was that whoever was stealing the food wasn’t eating it. People kept finding crumbs dribbled down the stairs and scattered in dark corners.
And last — but far from least scary — was the curious case of Sacha’s missing socks.
Mrs. Kessler had been knitting a new pair of socks for Sacha. It had taken forever, since Grandpa Kessler always seemed to be around when she had time to work on them, which meant she couldn’t use magic and had to do it the slow way. When she finally cast off the last stitch, she rushed them into the wash so Sacha could wear them to work the next morning. Naturally, she washed his old socks too; Mrs. Kessler was not a woman to waste hot water. Then she hung both pairs out to dry on the fire escape.
In the morning the new socks were still there, but the old ones were gone.
“What kind of meshuggener steals an old pair of socks when there’s a brand-new pair hanging right next to them?” Mrs. Kessler asked.
“Maybe it was a pigeon,” Uncle Mordechai hazarded. “Feathering its nest with the stolen fruits of other people’s labor like the Wall Street Wizards and Robber Barons!”