Before Chevie could wonder why the strange accent had her brain singing “Consider Yourself,” the cloud dissipated, revealing the figure of a boy huddled over an old man.
The boy was alive but the man was not, probably because of the knife jutting from his chest. Being dead was not the only thing wrong with this guy: the blood congealing on his torso was yellow, and one of his arms seemed to be that of a gorilla.
Don’t think about it now. Do the job.
“Okay, kid. Move away from the dead . . . thing.”
The boy blinked, searching for the source of the orders. “I never done it, miss. We need to leave this place. He’ll be coming for me.”
Chevie made a split-second decision, reaching into the pod and yanking the kid out by his collar.
Chevie held him on the floor with the palm of her free hand.
“Who’s coming, kid? Who’s coming for you?”
The boy’s eyes were wide. “He’s coming. Garrick. The magician. Death itself.”
Great, thought Chevie. First a monkey guy, and now Death itself, who is also a magician.
Chevie felt another presence in the room and looked up to see Agent Orange in all his gray glory moving down the corridor toward the pod.
“That’s a good way to get yourself shot, Orange. What are you doing here anyway? I never pressed the panic button.”
Orange pulled off his silver sunglasses and surveyed the devastation. “Well, Agent Savano, when half of London blacked out, I guessed the WARP pod might have been activated.” Orange hesitated six feet from the hatch. “Did you look inside, Chevie?”
“Yes. I looked. Am I gonna die from radiation poisoning now?”
“No, of course not. Is there . . . a man in there? Is my father in there?”
Orange’s father? This posting cannot get any weirder.
Chevie returned her gaze to the restrained boy. “There were two people inside. This boy and a man. I really hope the man is not your father.”
But the way this day has been going, I just bet that monkey guy is Orange’s dad.
Chevie realized that she had never really trusted Agent Orange, but at this moment she actually felt sorry for him.
Macho-Nerds
BEDFORD SQUARE. BLOOMSBURY. LONDON. 1898
Albert Garrick sat slouched on the cold basement floor, eyes tightly closed, preserving the ghost image of the orange sparks branded on his eyelids.
Magic is real.
It was a revolutionary thought in this industrial age of logic and reason. It was difficult to maintain belief in what he’d just seen once the evidence had disappeared. It would be much simpler to dismiss the entire event as delusion, but he would not.
I am being tested, he realized. My night of opportunity has arrived, and I must find within myself the mettle to seize my chance.
Garrick’s faith had always been in bone, blood, and butchery—in things he could wrap his fingers around and throttle, substantial things. There was nothing ethereal about them, but this was something different, something extraordinary.
Magic.
Garrick had been fascinated by magic for as long as he could remember. As a boy he had accompanied his father to the Adelphi Theatre in London and watched from his perch in the wings as his old da swept the stage and kow-towed to the talent. Even then, this deference had angered the young Albert Garrick. Who were these people to treat his father with such disdain? Hacks, most of them—hacks, hags, and hams.
Among the ranks of the players there was a hierarchy. The singers were top dogs, then the comics, followed by the chorus pretties, and finally the conjurers and animal acts. Albert watched, fascinated, as the petty dramas played out every night backstage. Divas threw tantrums over dressing-room allocation or the size of opening-night bouquets. The young Garrick saw cheeks slapped, doors slammed, and vases hurled.
One particularly vain tenor, an Italian named Gallo, decided that the magic turn was not affording him due respect, and so he decided to ridicule the man at his birthday celebration in the Coal Hole public house on the Strand. Garrick witnessed the encounter from a stool beside the fireplace, and it made such an impression on the lad that he could recall the incident even now, almost forty years later.
The magician, the Great Lombardi, was built like a jockey, small and wiry, with a head that was too big for his body. He wore a pencil mustache that made him seem a touch austere, and a slick helmet of pomaded hair added to this impression. Lombardi was also Italian, but from the southern region of Puglia, which Gallo, a Roman, considered a land of peasants—an opinion he shared often and loudly. And, as Gallo was the star turn, it was understood that Lombardi would stomach the constant jibes. But Gallo should have known that Italian men are proud, and swallowed insults sit like bile in their stomachs.
On that particular evening, having treated the assembly to a raucous rendition of the “Drinking Song” from La Traviata, Gallo sauntered across the lounge to the magician and draped his meaty arm across the little man’s shoulders.
“Tell us, Lombardi, is it true that the poor of Puglia fight with the pigs for root vegetables?”
The crowd laughed and clinked glasses, encouraging Gallo to further mischief.
“No answer? Well then, Signor Lombardi, tell us how the women of the south borrow their husbands’ straight razors before Sunday ceremonies.”
This was too much: the taciturn illusionist quickly drew a long dagger from his sleeve and seemingly stabbed Gallo upward under the chin, but no blood issued forth, just a stream of scarlet handkerchiefs. Gallo squeaked like a frightened child and collapsed to his knees.
“On the subject of razors,” said Lombardi, pocketing his trick blade, “it seems as though Signor Gallo has cut himself shaving. He will survive . . . this time.”
The joke was most definitely on the tenor, who, humiliated beyond bearing, took the morning ferry from Newhaven to France, reneging on his contract and ensuring that he would never work a music hall in Great Britain again.
It was a beautiful revenge, tied together with the bow of wordplay, and the young Garrick, perched by the fire, vowed to himself, Someday I, too, will have the power to command such respect.
It took six months of fetching and carrying, but eventually Albert Garrick persuaded the Great Lombardi to take him on as an apprentice. It was his door to a new world.
Garrick thought of his vow now, sitting in the killing chamber of the foreboding house on Bedford Square.
Someday I, too, will have the power.
And that day had finally come.
Garrick dipped his fingertips in the small pool of black blood on the bedsheets, then watched the thick liquid run down his long pale fingers. The patterns reminded him of war paint worn by the savages in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Extravaganza, which he had taken Riley to see.
Someone will come to clean this mess, he thought, and daubed his cheeks with stripes of a dead man’s blood.
They will come, and I will take their magic and their power.
BEDFORD SQUARE. BLOOMSBURY. LONDON. NOW
Special Agent Chevie Savano was feeling pretty under-informed. The first thing she did when she got the strange boy under lock and key in a holding cell was to storm into the pod room and prepare to have it out with Agent Orange. Her indignation seeped out of her like water from a sponge when she saw her partner kneeling at the hatch, staring morosely at the body inside.
“It’s . . . my father,” he said, without looking up. “He must have been dead or dying going into the wormhole. The rapid energy loss might explain the multiple mutations.”
Chevie had never expected to hear the words wormhole and mutations spoken outside of the movies.
“You need to tell me everything, Agent Orange.”
Orange nodded, or maybe just allowed his head to droop. “I know, of course. But first we have to call in a cleanup team. I don’t know what my father left behind. Get me the London office and tell them to send a full hazmat team. It’s probably unnecessa
ry, but I have to go back and check.”
“Go back where? What is that pod? Some kind of transporter? If we had that technology, surely the public would have found out.”
Orange’s laugh was hollow. “There are a thousand Web sites dedicated to suppressed technology; two have even posted blueprints of the pod. People believe what they see in the Apple store, not what some nutjob conspiracy theorist tells them.”