The Searcher sat on the opposite end of the bench from Tabitha, turned toward her just slightly, knees pressed together. With her shoulder-length blond hair pushed back with a headband, and dressed in a short flouncy skirt, she looked no older than Tabitha, perhaps even younger. The giveaway was her eyes, which held an ancient depth of exhaustion that called to mind a mummy awoken in its tomb. Although Tabitha had spoken to Searchers hundreds of times, the sight of their eyes still sent a chill of terror down her spine.
“It’s the Reservoir you want,” she told Tabitha. “Not this lake that’s next to us, and not Turtle Pond, either. Every year people make mistakes, and it slows the whole process down. What you do is, you go up to Eighty-Fifth Street—”
“I’m familiar with it.”
“You’re sure. Don’t go to Meadow Lake in Flushing, either. That’s only if you normally work in Brooklyn.”
Tabitha’s voice was breathy with impatience. “Yes, I know.”
The Midsummer Census was less than a month away, and the previous night the Searcher had decided to nudge her from her sleeping place in the pond near the ice rink to request this meeting. She couldn’t just talk to Tabitha then and there. She had to meet her at “her office,” which was the terrace of the Bethesda Fountain farther uptown in Central Park. Searchers drove her mad in ways that three hundred years of daily life never could.
“Everybody needs to be counted,” she reminded Tabitha. “You need to be there at two AM. I know in other places it’s midnight, but this is New York, so we have to be more discreet. Come in elemental form only, and remember, you don’t have to bring your partner. You just need to name him when the Leaders ask.”
Tabitha offered a brittle smile. “I don’t have a partner, remember?”
The Searcher’s eyes rolled upward, as if these petty facts tried her patience to the limit. “Well, that makes it easier, doesn’t it. I had you confused with somebody else. Now that you’ve reminded me, I wanted to talk to you about your range. There are only four Searchers assigned to this entire borough, and since I’m supposed to keep a special eye on you, I really prefer that you stay below Twenty-Third Street. That’s my area, and it’s—” she closed her eyes delicately to emphasize her words—“an unbelievable hassle to run all over town trying to keep tabs on someone.”
Tabitha’s face contorted in dismay. “Below Twenty-Third Street? Are you kidding?”
“It’s the oldest part of the city. Do you have any idea how many women drowned there in the past three-hundred-plus years? I’ve requested better staffing, but it doesn’t make a difference. So anyone who’s a special case, I ask that you stay in my area.”
Tabitha ran her tongue along the inside of her bottom lip and considered whether she dared challenge her. After a moment’s hesitation, she said, “You can’t . . . actually . . . limit where I prowl. Only where I sleep.”
The Searcher twitched the inner corners of her eyes. “Then please sleep below Twenty-Third Street. There are many lovely fountains, and a few very nice rooftop pools during the warmer months. There’s also a fair number of abandoned spaces and buildings under construction, if you prefer to sleep in the likeness.”
Tabitha smiled mildly. It was an archaic term for sleeping in human form that she rarely heard Mara use anymore—a reference to how God created Eve from Adam’s rib, but a chapter earlier in Genesis, he had created man and woman at the same time, in his likeness. Nobody knew what had happened to Adam’s first wife, but she was said to be Lilith, who was one of the Leaders now.
“All right,” said Tabitha. “By the way, can I ask where you’re from?”
“Connecticut, 1797.”
“So how did you end up in Manhattan?”
“My partner wanted to come here, and I followed him.”
She nodded. She didn’t dare to ask how long the partner had been gone, or what had happened.
The Searcher let her go, and as soon as Tabitha had made it far enough away that she no longer worried about being spied upon, she checked the notifications on her phone. She had found a guy who did a weekly podcast about New York crime history and emailed him for further information about Cian O’Malley. Days earlier, she had tracked down his mugshot—taken twenty years into his incarceration, and showing a fortyish man with a hardened face and unnervingly light eyes. It was startling to put a face to the name and see someone who reminded her very much of the men she had avoided in her nighttime travels of years past. She hadn’t found any further information about either of the other two men, but had reached out to the guy who listed himself as the genealogy contact for Johnny Poole, the hapless victim.
An email had shown up from the podcast guy, a mere two days after she had sent it. She clicked through excitedly.
Dear Michelle, it began, for that was the false name she was using these days.
This type of crime (barfight between gang members, somebody gets stabbed) was extremely common, and offhand I don’t see anything else about that incident in particular. O’Malley’s name appears in the papers a couple other times, however. Looks like he was arrested as a pickpocket about ten years earlier—he would have still been a kid then, right? He’s also mentioned in an 1868 article about his brother Sean, who’s been arrested for recruiting girls to a house of ill repute. Screenshot is attached.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Tabitha clicked on the image. There was that shaky font again. She enlarged the one relevant sentence: O’Malley’s family is already infamous, as his brother Cian is a convicted murderer at Sing-Sing and the father was known in former days as a notorious thief and bludger.
It didn’t help much, but at least it gave her another possibility to search for. She mused on the idea that Sean could have gotten ahold of the relic and stashed it in the brothel—yet she knew that idea was fantastical. It was nothing but a shoot-from-the-hip guess, and in any case, the brothel would be long gone.
She breathed a sigh through her nose and looked east, toward the tall buildings and posh apartments of the Upper East Side. She had planned to stick around so that later tonight she could visit the Kid. But she felt irritable from the talk with the Searcher, and a little hopeless in her electronic detective work. It had been easier, somehow, to search the city square by square, although it was becoming increasingly clear that in all these months, that had been little more than a child’s treasure hunt.
In her mind’s eye she saw the Photographer—his pretty face, his dependable body. She thought of his pleasantly smoky smell.
She hiked her backpack to her shoulders and began her steady journey downtown.
~ * ~
Tabitha was finishing up with the Photographer when the sound of sirens first caught her attention. As she dressed, she saw the flickering of red lights beyond the tall windows and hurried outside. It was only after she was back out in the street that she realized she had forgotten to take the money.
A block away, the street was crammed with fire trucks, lights whirling and radios squawking. Despite the very early hour, neighbors were creeping out to watch the scene unfold—leaning out of windows, taking up vantage points on roofs, and stepping out onto the street to observe. At first glance Tabitha saw the flicker of flames darting from an upper window, but within moments, a hose came on and the flames disappeared in a gust of steam. There was a shout, and a group of firefighters in turnout gear and air masks popped open the front door with a crowbar and moved inside.
Tabitha looked at the woman watching beside her. “Do you know who lives there?”
“It’s a drug house. It was boarded up.”
“Hopefully nobody was in it, then.”
The woman answered with a sharp laugh, and Tabitha pulled her jacket more tightly around her shoulders. Like any of the others on the street, she had a voyeuristic interest in fires like this one, but they also filled her with a particular sense of dread. Sam had long ago described to her what his own experience had been like—how he had come home late from the tannery, eaten the bread and pea soup his mother left for him, and fallen asleep in the downstairs room as he always did, unsuspecting of the imminent danger. When he awoke to the sound of shouts outside, the air was chokingly thick with smoke, and he could hear the roar of the flames above him. The door was right there, he told Tabitha, but all I could think about was my mother and Anna and Riona in the bedroom. He rushed up the stairs, but the fire met him at the top. It was the smoke, he said, that got to him first.
The story he told bore similarities to hers. The panic and pain, and then a sudden silence, during which he could see everything but feel nothing. Then in the blink of an eye he was on the roof, looking out upon the city over which dawn had just broken, when the air above him opened in a circular flash of light like a whirlpool. The angel reached for him, her hand a sharp flare of sunlight, and he ducked and dove back into the house beneath him. I just wanted to get back into my body again, he said. I wasn’t ready to go.
When you did, did you feel pain? Tabitha asked him. It was the third day they were together; he had not spent a moment apart from her since that afternoon on the train. Evening had fallen, and they were sitting on the roof of a factory in Lowell, watching the stars emerge from the twilight sky. He looked distant and uneasy when he spoke of the memory, but she wanted to hear every word.
Yes, he said, but in my heart, not my body. I felt terrible about my mother and sisters. About how my mother didn’t deserve this, after all she had suffered already. And next thing I knew, I was drifting through the air a hundred feet away, and I thought now I was surely on my way to either heaven or hell. I’d really never taken those ideas seriously, so it was rather scary. All the sins I’d done, you know? The swearing and drunkenness and fornication and self-abuse. My fondness for all those might explain how I earned my current state.
She smiled. Wouldn’t explain it for me. I was a good Puritan girl.
I was joking, mostly. If that was the measure, we would have far more company down here. I expect I stayed because I love the world too much. There wasn’t enough hate in me to earn a place in hell, but I didn’t want peace and rest, either. I wanted life.
Tabitha pressed her scarf against her mouth and watched the firefighters smash out the plywood that had covered the other upstairs window. A cloud of smoke rushed out. There was the crackle of a radio transmission, and a few moments later, the back doors of the ambulance swung open.
“That doesn’t look good,” said the woman beside Tabitha.
“Do you think somebody was in there?”
Before the woman could respond, two EMTs clunked a gurney out of the back. They were working slowly, giving the eerie sense that there was no particular rush.
“My guess is yes,” she said. She turned to Tabitha and lifted a corner of her mouth in an ironic smile. “It’s a strange world, isn’t it?”
Her mouth still half-hidden behind her scarf, Tabitha pulled in her breath. Sam had often chided her for not being able to identify a fellow succubus—Sam could detect their smell, which was like standing next to a waterfall, he said—but the clues were hard for her to detect, even when she knew. Incubi were somewhat easier for her, but they all smoked to cover up the hint of match smoke that they smelled of naturally, and it took some effort to single out the scent. Yet there was no mistaking the expression the woman had used, or the way she had delivered it. Tabitha’s nostrils flared, and she thought—or perhaps she imagined—she could detect that watery fragrance.
“Indeed it is,” she replied.
The woman’s teeth flashed in a brief grin before she turned back to the scene before them. She had long, nearly black hair partly pulled back at her crown, and she wore a close-fitting motorcycle jacket and a short black skirt. Tabitha herself had on smoky eye shadow and dark eyeliner, but this woman looked like she had just come from a club. Without the cue, Tabitha never would have guessed what she was.
In only moments, the woman abruptly continued down the block and was gone. As she disappeared, Tabitha felt the impulse to catch up with her and get her name, but the density of the sidewalk crowd inhibited her from drawing attention to herself. Regretful, she stayed for another half hour and watched the work before her, all the way up until the body bag appeared from the building and was eased onto the gurney.
Mercy be upon their souls. Sam still muttered that when he passed a cemetery. She hoped the luckless resident would receive mercy, at least, whether or not they had yearned for peace.