The Inquisitor's Apprentice

and Italian and English. One gaggle of girls was setting up rickety card tables. Another group was magically unpacking boxes of pamphlets and broadsheets — so enthusiastically that Sacha was sure one of those pieces of paper zinging around the room was going to give someone a nasty paper cut. A third group was huddled around the stove poring over the hot-off-the-presses evening edition of the Yiddish Daily Magic- Worker, which one of the girls seemed to be translating into Italian for the others.

“These are your strikers?” Wolf asked Moishe. “Aren’t there any grownups working at Pentacle?”

“The grownups are all bourgeois reactionaries,” Moishe said with a dismissive shrug. “They have to ‘make a living’ and ‘feed their families.’”

Wolf scrubbed a hand through his hair as if he thought the friction would help his brain work better. “Is there somewhere we can talk that’s a little more private?”

“Sure,” Moishe said. And stepped straight out of the open window.

Lily gasped.

“Well?” Moishe said, looking back in at them from the fire escape. “Are you coming or not?”

“Phew!” Lily whispered to Sacha as they stepped out the window behind Wolf. “I didn’t know there was a fire escape. I thought he was going to fly or something.”

Sacha gave her an incredulous look.

“Well, they are the Industrial Witches of the World, after all.”

“Witches don’t fly,” Sacha said scathingly. “You’ve been reading too many penny dreadfuls.”

“That’s ridiculous! And what do you know about witches anyway?”

Sacha decided he’d had it with Lily Astral’s know-it-all attitude. “A lot more than some Fifth Avenue debutante who’s using her daddy’s pull to make Wolf let her play at being an Inquisitor.”

Lily spluttered in fury, but Sacha was already stepping through the window onto the fire escape.

Outside, Sacha relished the fresh air and quiet — or rather the relative quiet, since Moishe was already talking Wolf’s ear off about how the Pentacle strike was going to blow the lid off Big Magic’s corporate conspiracy to keep down the working witch.

But eventually Wolf brought the conversation back around to Morgaunt’s accusation.

“You’re kidding me!” Moishe cried when he finally figured out what Wolf was getting at. “J. P. Morgaunt is accusing me of trying to assassinate Thomas Edison? That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard! What are you going to do now, drag me off to jail and throw away the key until Morgaunt tells you to find it again?”

“Actually, no.”

“Why not?” Moishe sounded insulted, as if he actually wanted to be arrested.

“Because I don’t arrest children.”

Moishe put his hands on his hips and glared ferociously at Wolf. Sacha could tell that he was trying to look dangerous enough to be worth arresting. It wasn’t working.

Wolf managed to keep a straight face, though he did succumb to a suspicious fit of coughing. When he had recovered, he started explaining about the dybbuk.

“Dybbuk, shmybbuk,” Moishe scoffed. “There probably is no dybbuk.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Isn’t it obvious? It’s a red herring Morgaunt’s throwing out to distract people from the real crime.”

“What crime?” Wolf asked hopefully.

“Why, Morgaunt’s crime, of course. running a magical sweatshop!”

“Oh, right.” Wolf sighed. “That.”

“Everyone knows he pays off the Inquisitors to turn a blind eye to it. And then they go around shutting down mom and pop operations and hounding his competition out of business. and if he gets his way with that Etherograph of his, it’s only going to get worse. Magic-workers will become fugitives. They’ll have no choice but to take whatever rotten deal he gives them or the Inquisitors will deport them. I’m telling you, someone in this city has to stand up to him or—”

“Right … well … getting back to the dybbuk…” Wolf interrupted.

Moishe shrugged. “What do I know from dybbuks? I’m a dyed-in-the-wool atheist. The only people in the Lower East Side who know from dybbuks are rabbis. And they’re all just gutless bourgeois reactionaries who want us to let the Morgaunts of the world stomp all over us so we can reap our reward in heaven or Brooklyn— neither of which, allow me to point out, has ever been scientifically proven to exist.”

“But — but—” Sacha stammered, “Brooklyn — I mean, come on, Moishe! The subway stops there!”

“Hah! If you believe everything you read on a subway map, I’ve got a bridge to sell you!”

Sacha was still shaking his head when he followed Wolf and Lily downstairs. Wolf pushed through the front door, muttering something about a cab, and Sacha rolled his eyes. There hadn’t been a cab sighted on Hester Street in living memory!

Still, Wolf raised his hand and forged into the crowd like a swimmer wading into rough surf. And, sure enough, an energetic little horse came trotting around the corner just in time for its driver to jump down and usher Wolf inside.

“I’ll give you both a ride back to the office,” Wolf said while Sacha was still staring. “Otherwise you’ll never get home for dinner.”

Sacha hesitated. It was late afternoon by now, and it really didn’t make any sense for him to ride all the way back to Hell’s Kitchen just to take the subway home again. But he couldn’t think of any excuse for staying behind. So he climbed in, resigning himself to a long, pointless, expensive round trip.

By the time Sacha finally climbed out of the subway at Astral Place, night was falling.

He hurried nervously down the Bowery. It was that deserted time between rush hour and the after-dinner theater crowd. The only people on the sidewalks were tourists going slumming in Chinatown — and all the petty and not-so-petty criminals who preyed on them. The Elevated roared overhead every few minutes, spitting steam and coal dust. Every time it passed, Sacha looked around warily.

He sped up, trying to look tougher than he felt and telling himself he was only a few short blocks from home.

He had just passed the reassuring lights of the Metropole when he realized someone was following him. Within the space of a few ragged breaths, he went from wondering where that odd echo of his footfalls was coming from to knowing for dead certain that there was someone behind him.

He cursed himself for not having gone into the Metropole. Uncle Mordechai might have been there. Or at least someone he knew well enough to ask them to walk him home. But it was too late now. There was nothing for it but to keep going.

He turned the corner onto Hester Street, hoping to see a friendly face or two smiling at him from the front stoops of the tenements. But there was no one. The shoppers and pushcart peddlers were long gone. The cobblestones were littered with old food and bits of tailors’ clippings and sooty drifts of crumpled newspapers. Misshapen piles of crates and boxes loomed outside the shop fronts. Laundry dangled from the fire escapes like hanged men. Sacha had never seen Hester Street so silent and lifeless. Even the mannequins in the shop windows seemed to stare out at him with blank, uncaring expressions.

It was dark too. The Bowery was one of New York’s famous White Ways, lit up night and day with Edison’s new electric lights. But back in the narrow tenement streets, people still made do with gaslight. And not much of it either. The flickering halos around the occasional lampposts were only faint islands of light in an ocean of shadows.

Now he was a block from his building. Now half a block. Now three storefronts away. And still the footsteps sounded behind him. Not gaining on him, not falling back. Just following. Sacha felt like he was caught in one of those awful dreams where you run and run until you finally realize that the only way to wake up is to stop and let the monster catch you.

Finally, the urge to look back became unbearable. He glanced over his shoulder, trying not to be too obvious about it.

And there it was. A moving shadow just beyond the glow of the nearest streetlight. It was vague and indefinite and yet unmistakably there. He couldn’t see its face. But there was something unnervingly familiar about the set of its slim shoulders.

Sacha looked away, gauging the distance that still separated him from the front stoop of his own building. His