The Inquisitor's Apprentice

lady in a hat decorated with several pounds of passenger pigeon feathers hadn’t tripped over his foot and poked him with her parasol.

He’d been up half the night. When everyone else was asleep, he’d snuck out onto the fire escape with an armload of Grandpa Kessler’s Kabbalah books and shivered under the dim light of the street lamps while he read everything he could find about dybbuks.

It wasn’t pleasant reading. No one knew how to kill a dybbuk, short of killing its victim along with it. A dybbuk was part of you — like your arm or your leg or your heart. Once someone summoned it here, it was only a matter of time until it stepped into your skin and stole your life — and sent you back to spend all eternity in whatever hell dybbuks came from.

Some men had managed to survive having a dybbuk. But only great and pious rabbis. And even they hadn’t defeated their dybbuks. They’d only learned to live with them, like a man sharing his house with a half-tamed lion that would devour him the moment he let down his guard. As he read one terrible story after another, Sacha began to feel honestly sorry for Thomas Edison. If a dybbuk really was after him, he was worse than a dead man. And there wasn’t a thing anyone could do to save him.

Which meant that the only way for Sacha to protect his family was to find out who had really summoned the dybbuk.

Sacha was still racking his brain over how to do that when he got to work — which was how he managed to offend Philip Payton yet again.

The trouble started when he reached the Inquisitors Division headquarters just as Maximillian Wolf hopped out of a hansom cab.

“And how are you settling in to the job?” Wolf asked. “Any questions? Anything you need?”

Sacha thought Wolf was probably just being polite, but he supposed he had to say something. “Well… I guess a desk would be good. Or at least a chair?”

“That seems reasonable.” Wolf waved airily. “Just have a word with Payton. He’ll sort you out.”

But when they reached his office, Wolf blew through the anteroom without saying anything about it, and Sacha was left to muddle along on his own.

Lily Astral was already there, laughing with Payton as if the two of them were old friends. Sacha cleared his throat a few times, but no one noticed him.

“Uh … excuse me. I need someone to clean up a desk for me to work at?”

Payton turned to face him, one eyebrow raised in polite disbelief. “Do I look like a janitor?”

“Uh. no. But Inquisitor Wolf said—”

“I really think you must have failed to understand him correctly.”

“But—”

“Listen, Sandy—”

“Sacha.”

“Whatever. Let me explain how things work here. I’ll use short, simple words so you can understand me. I am the valued employee who keeps this office running like a well-oiled machine so that Inquisitor Wolf can solve crimes and catch criminals. You are a useless child whose only function is to gum up the works, get underfoot, and waste time that Inquisitor Wolf and I could be using to get real work done. So if you want a desk, go down to the basement and find one. On your own time. And meanwhile, you can make yourself slightly less useless by rushing the growler to the Witch’s Brew.”

And then Payton fished a dented old tin bucket from under his desk and tossed it casually (but very accurately) at Sacha’s head.

Sacha reached up a hand just in time to catch the bucket before it hit him. Then he stared at it in shock and disbelief until Lily snatched it from his hand and marched smartly out the door.

She looked as if she knew where she was going. But of course she couldn’t, or she would have been just as shocked as Sacha was.

Sacha had seen plenty of growlers in his day. He’d seen plenty of children rushing the growler, too — carrying it down to the local saloon to buy beer for their parents. It happened every day in every neighborhood of New York, despite all the laws that high-society do-gooders kept passing about selling liquor to minors. But Sacha had certainly never done it. Sacha’s father disapproved of anything stronger than seltzer water. And Sacha’s mother … well, to hear her tell it, rushing the growler was a one-way ticket up the river to Sing Sing prison’s fancy new electric chair. First came the childhood trips to fill it up for parents and aunts and uncles. Then came the scrounging of pennies to fill it for yourself. Then you were sliding down the slippery slope of mugging drunks, marrying a gun moll (or worse, a shiksa!), and signing on with Magic, Inc., as one of Meyer Minsky’s hired thugs.

And it all began with that first fateful trip to rush the growler. A trip Sacha was now being ordered to take as part of his official duties for the NYPD Inquisitors Division. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“Well,” Payton snapped, “what are you waiting for?” Without another word, Sacha turned and dashed out the door after Lily. He found her waiting for him about a third of the way down the long corridor. “So where is this Witch’s Brew?” she asked as soon as he caught up with her.

“How should I know? I’m not in the habit of frequenting gin joints.”

The door opened and Payton’s head emerged into the hallway. “Fifty-second between Eighth and Ninth,” he said, and vanished back into the office.

Sacha’s stomach sank. Lily might be oblivious to the meaning of that address, but that was only because she’d grown up on Millionaire’s Mile. Sacha, on the other hand, came from the real New York. And in his city, neighborhoods were rigidly divided by ethnic group — and each neighborhood was fiercely defended by its own magical street gangs. The Lower East Side was Jewish: you didn’t set foot there without Magic, Inc. knowing your business. Chinatown was controlled by Confucian spellbinders and Immortals. Little Italy was the realm of the Italian folk witches called streganonnas. and Hell’s Kitchen belonged to the toughest Irish gang in town: the Hell’s Kitchen Hexers.

“Well, what are we waiting for?” Lily tossed her blond hair and marched off down the stairs without so much as a glance at Sacha. Did she just expect him to trot along behind her like a lapdog? Obviously she did! He muttered something rude under his breath about bossy women. But he didn’t really have a choice, so in the end he followed her.

Within a few blocks, however, Sacha’s outrage melted into bewildered amusement. Either Lily Astral didn’t know the meaning of the word fear or she’d never walked down a New York City sidewalk before. She’d seemed reasonably normal when they were just following in the wide wake of Inquisitor Wolf’s flapping coattails. But on her own she was a public menace.

She marched straight down the middle of the sidewalk like it was her personal property and she expected everyone else to step aside and make way for her. And the weirdest part of it was that most people did step aside. As soon as they saw her coming, they just sort of slid out of her way like tugboats clearing the harbor for a luxury ocean liner.

The only catch was that not everyone could see Lily coming. Sacha cringed as she sailed from one near disaster to the next. Bicyclists. Delivery boys. A dry grocer’s clerk staggering along under stacked bolts of muslin and cotton. A handcart operator pushing a leaning tower of metal filing cabinets.

Lily was cheerfully oblivious to it all. In fact, the only thing Lily was not oblivious to was food. She kept making lightning-quick detours to investigate edible items in storefronts and on passing pushcarts. Most of them met with her immediate approval, and she seemed to possess an inexhaustible supply of pocket change. This made it really hard to get anywhere. And really frustrating for Sacha, who had to say no again and again because he was pretty sure that half the stuff she was eating wasn’t even within spitting distance of being kosher.

“Don’t they feed you at home?” he asked after he’d watched her devour a pretzel, a chicken potpie, two oranges, and more candy than he and Bekah saw in a month.

“Sure, but my mother’s from New England.”

“So?”

“So have you been there?” she asked in a decidedly odd tone of voice.

Sacha hesitated, not sure what she was getting at and not wanting to sound foolish. If it had been anyone but Lily Astral, he would have suspected a joke. “No,” he said finally.

“Well, if you ever do go — take food.”