The Inquisitor's Apprentice

“Phew,” Rosie gasped. “That was just about the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me!”

“Do you think the police are going to come?” Sacha asked apprehensively.

“I doubt it,” Rosie said. “If the police came down to Twelfth Street every time someone heard gunshots, they’d wear out the soles of their shoes in a week. So why do you think that kid thought you killed his father?”

“How can he possibly think we killed his father?” Sacha asked.

“Not we, Sacha. You.”

“Don’t be silly. He meant Lily and me, obviously.”

“But you were the one he was looking at,” Lily argued. “You were the one he was shooting at, too.”

“That’s crazy!”

“Is it?” She started ticking points off on her fingers. “You show up for your first day of work as an Inquisitor and, presto bango, suddenly there’s a dybbuk running around town. Rosie here is the first one to see the dybbuk, and what did she tell Wolf right on that very first day? That she knew it was a dybbuk and not just an ordinary demon because it reminded her of you.”

“She said it reminded her of a nice Jewish boy,” Sacha protested. “Last time I checked there were a few million of those in New York City.”

“Well, actually,” Rosie offered, “it did kind of look like—”

“Oh, shut up, Rosie!”

“Well, you don’t have to be rude!” she huffed.

But Sacha didn’t need to apologize because Lily was already ticking off more points on her fingers. “Then Mrs. Worley can’t find your soul—”

“That’s ridiculous! She said herself that the Soul Catcher was just a parlor toy!”

“Then Antonio’s father was killed when you were at Morgaunt’s house — probably because the dybbuk followed you there!”

“I’m leaving!” he shouted. “I’m not going to listen to another word of this!”

“Because you don’t believe me?” Lily challenged him. “Or because you don’t want to admit it to yourself?”

Sacha stared at her, trembling with anger — anger that he told himself was completely, entirely, one hundred percent justified.

“All right, Little Miss Know-It-All,” he snapped, forcing the thought of his mother’s stolen locket down into the darkest recesses of his mind, right next to that awful glimpse of the dybbuk’s face that he had been so resolutely not thinking about for the last few days. “Tell me this. If it’s my dybbuk, then why does it keep attacking Thomas Edison?”

Lily’s shoulders slumped in defeat. “I don’t know. But Mrs. Worley said—”

“She said that Morgaunt couldn’t have used the etherograph to make a dybbuk. And even if he did, how could it be my dybbuk when no one’s ever made a recording of me?”

“Are you so sure about that?” Lily asked in a decidedly odd tone of voice.

“Of course I am!” Sacha snapped. But then suddenly he wasn’t sure at all. “Wait a minute. remember all those tests they gave us before they made us apprentices? Remember the one where they had us sit in a dark room and try to do magic? They could have done a recording then.” He stopped. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Because they didn’t give me any tests except the normal IQ test everyone always gets.” She dropped her eyes and flushed slightly. “Sacha, that cylinder Morgaunt played for us? It was you, wasn’t it?”

And then she did look at him. A look that slipped through his ribs like a knife blade and cut him to the heart. He hated the very idea of having Lily Astral look at him like that.

Don’t think you know me just because you listened to some stupid song, he wanted to tell her. And then he realized that he wouldn’t want to tell her that if he didn’t secretly suspect she was right. Which made him even more furious.

“You’re wrong,” he told her between gritted teeth. “You’re dead wrong, and I’m going to prove it.”

“How?”

It sounded like a challenge. Or maybe Sacha just wanted it to sound that way. A small part of him knew how unreasonable he was being. But it was easier to be angry than to be reasonable. Anything was easier than admitting that Lily might be right.

“By summoning the dybbuk myself!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX. On Horrible Bird Feet

TWILIGHT CAME EARLY on that gray fall evening. And it found Sacha shivering in the shadows across the street from his grandfather’s shul.

He’d spent the last two hours hunched in the darkest booth of the Cafe Metropole drinking coffee he couldn’t afford and feverishly poring over the armful of practical Kabbalah books he’d managed to smuggle out of the house under his coat. Rabbi Kessler disapproved of practical Kabbalah so strongly that he wouldn’t even keep those books at the shul. Instead they lurked on a high shelf at the back of the Kesslers’ only closet, safely hidden from impious eyes and rash young aspiring Kabbalists.

That had been a lucky break for Sacha tonight. Or maybe not so lucky. Summoning a dybbuk had seemed like a good idea (sort of) in broad daylight. But as the street lamps flickered on and night settled over the city, it was starting to seem like a very, very bad one.

He huddled into his coat and tried not to think about what else might be hiding in the shadows with him. It felt odd to be watching Grandpa Kessler’s shul from across the street instead of sitting inside with the rest of the students. He was seeing it from the outside now, like a stranger would. It looked shabbier than he remembered, and yet somehow more exotic and otherworldly too.

Mostly, though, it looked small. It was just one shop in one street in one neighborhood of a city with a million streets and a thousand neighborhoods. You could walk away from it and turn a corner or two and never find your way back again. And in New York you could do the same thing with everything else in your life, even being a Jew. People did it every day. Now, looking at his grandfather’s little shul while he waited for Rosie and Lily to join him, Sacha realized for the first time in his life that he could be one of those people. He didn’t know whether to be excited by the idea or frightened of it.

Lily arrived first, sneaking up so quietly that he practically jumped out of his skin when she touched his elbow.

“Whose school is this again?” she asked.

“Look — just never mind, okay?”

“Oh, a little nervous, are we?”

“Yes. and you’re not helping.”

“Are you sure you want to go through with this, Sacha? I mean, don’t feel like you have to impress me or anything. Just say the word, and we can go tell Inquisitor Wolf everything.”

“I’m fine!” Sacha snapped.

“Okey-dokey. Now where is that Rosie! If she’s finked out on us—”

But there she was, bustling along the pavement toward them.

“Sorry!” Rosie cried.

“Shhhh!”

“Sorry! My mother just would not go to sleep. I was at my wits’ end trying to figure out how to get out of the house without her hearing me. How’d you two manage it, anyway?”

“My sister’s covering for me,” Sacha said guiltily. “My parents think I’m at shul.”