<--Younger | The First New York Magician | Older-->

Heart's filthy lesson
Heart's filthy lesson
Heart's filthy lesson

The bar was a tiny hole in the wall, tucked away off of Thirty-Fourth street. Its overriding characteristic, if you'd asked me, was `narrow.' Although it went back perhaps sixty feet into the building, at no point was the space wider than around nine feet. With a full bar along one side, that didn't leave a whole lot of space for clientele. The inhabitants were game, though; there must have been forty people stuffed into the narrow space, swilling beers and cheap liquor and watching the ball game.

I wasn't watching the game. I was sitting at the bar, one hand wrapped around a plastic mug of Budweiser and the other snaked inside my Burberry, pressed flat against a worn leather pouch with an ancient bit of flint in it. The pouch was stained a deep but multi-layered shade of brown, legacy of the hundreds of times I had lain my blooded hands against the old leather; this day's offering of slick iron was soaking into my fingertips and the leather alike. My eyes were closed, trying to modulate the surge of hunger as the spearhead drank in the blood and pushed the shout of a thwarted hunter into my forebrain.

I'd lost the trail just outside the bar, and come in to try again. The wordless cry of loss ringing in my head was a new sensation, but one whose meaning was perfectly clear. The spearhead couldn't find its quarry; I was as close as it could bring me. I pulled my hand out of my coat, moved it to join the other around the beer. My eyes were watering behind closed lids, waiting for the pain in my head to fade.

Nothing.

I lifted a hand to the tender, felt him nod and head over. By the time he'd reached me, I had my eyes open again and a fifty dollar bill on the bar atop a Polaroid. He raised his eyebrows and looked at the two of them, then at me. I crooked my own brow back in a gesture as universal as bars and tapped the bill. He rubbed his chin once with his right hand, considering, and I knew he'd seen her. The rest was just dancing.

He made the bill vanish and leaned in. I turned my head to listen. "She was here last night. Came in with a crowd, maybe four or five. Well dressed. Lost track of them around midnight; saw the crowd leave."

I turned slightly to be heard over the bar noise. "Was she with them?"

"Can't say. Saw the crowd leaving. Didn't see her `pecifically."

I nodded and picked up the Polaroid, sliding it into an inside pocket, and dropped another fifty on the bar. He nodded back, dropped another beer in front of me, and moved off to serve his customers. I swilled cheap but cold rice-brewed beer and wondered what the hell had happened to confuse Bobbi-Bobbi's spearhead so completely.

There's always the diamond friendly
Sitting in the laugh hotel
The heart's filthy lesson
With her hundred miles to hell

The bar looked completely normal. No strange energy flows. No dark patches (other than where the lighting sucked). No runes written above the entrance in darksign, nor the glow of faith at work. Just a bar in middle Manhattan, but one where a young girl had come in the night before and, as far as my talismans could tell, never left.

I finished the beer and threaded my way through the crowd towards the jakes in the back. My belt, bulky underneath the coat, clacked against the big pistol riding in a shoulder rig. Below the flat pouches of the talismans I'd added five small cylindrical compartments, and all five were full. I pulled the leather to adjust the hang to avoid the gun and entered the men's room.

It was everything I'd expected of the place, and I looked around briefly while attending to business. It was a one-holer; the battered toilet was pretty clean, given that it was early in the night, and the trash can not too overflowing with paper towels. I finished, rinsed my hands, and exited. Instead of returning to the bar, I turned right and tried to door to the women's room. It was open, so I slipped in. The room was a mirror image of the men's across the wall, single convenience and a sink with scratched and cracked mirror opposite. I turned in place, slowly, just looking. Nothing caught my attention.

Damn it.

Flushing the toilet produced nothing. I looked for another moment. Someone tried the door; I blocked it with my foot and said "Out in a sec." Then before turning around, I shot the simple bolt latch to prevent interruption.

Something changed.

I stood there for a second. I couldn't tell what it was. There was something different. The air had gotten deeper, somehow. The noises of the bar were still coming through the door, but there was something else, somehow - and it didn't feel like a cast, just a sound. Or a lack of sound. I shut my eyes again and listened as hard as I could.

Very faintly, I could hear a hiss of white noise, almost at the lower limit of audibility. I opened my eyes and opened the bolt on the door.

The noise stopped.

I pulled the door open and pushed past the redhead waiting outside. She gave me a dirty look, but I ignored it and moved back to the main area of the bar, looking around. I spotted the Jukebox near the back, where the main bar ended. Moving to it, I looked at it carefully. It was dormant, no songs selected; the game was still on. Taking a dollar out of my pocket, I fed it to the `box and punched up a number at random. The usual mechanical dance of components fed a CD into the mechanism; I watched it spin up. Somewhere softly behind the bar, Bono sang abstract songs of money and power. The volume was set low, but it was still clear.

I moved back to the rear and pulled open the door to the women's room. The redhead was looking into the mirror over the sink, examining her forehead. She turned to face me. "Hey! Asshole, wait a second!"

I ignored her and listened. Sure enough, nothing. I pushed her out of the bathroom, closed the door and shot the bolt. As soon as the bolt slid home, Bono's voice floated out of speakers somewhere above the drop ceiling. I could feel my face tightening in anger, and I unbolted the door (causing the music to stop) and slammed out. The redhead, who had waited to try and give me grief, looked at my face and flattened herself against the wall. I went back to the bar and slammed a hand down on it, loud. There was a pause as the noise overrode the game, its watchers, and the various conversations; then the bartender moved over with a frown.

"What?"

I leaned in again. "How long have you had that Jukebox?"

He frowned harder, puzzled. "Dunno. Long as I worked here. Five years at least."

"When was it last loaded? The music, I mean?"

"Uh, I think last week."

"Who did it?"

"Owner. They're all his CDs."

"I need to get into it."

"Hey, if it took your money-"

I reached out and took the tender by the shirt collar, gently twisting. "No. I need to get into it now."

People were edging away from us. He thought about getting blustery, but I was about three inches taller than him and outweighed him with a much smaller body fat percentage. Also, I think I looked really angry. He shrugged. "I don't have the key."

"You can't get me in?"

"No, man."

I knew I was skating on thin ice, but I was pretty angry by this point, given what I had already guessed about the Jukebox. "Fine." Releasing the bartender, I reached my left hand under my coat and grabbed the lowest of the five cylinders on my bandolier and turned towards the Jukebox, some five feet away. Stretching my right hand towards it, I moved my forefinger knuckle to the top of the cylinder and the pad of my thumb to the bottom and squeezed, hard.

Inside the leather tube, there was a pop more felt than heard as the flexed metal clip I'd put inside it bent backwards across its fold, snapping down. The contact touched the photo strobe capacitor that was suspended inside the case, and with a slight click the cap discharged across my fingers and into my hand

It wasn't as much energy as a gunshot. Not nearly. But I'd learned over the years that when you didn't need that much energy, it was really nice to be able to avoid pulling guns. I caught the storm of electrons as they raged through my hand, arcing across the sweat, and willed my pocketwatch to turn the energy. It flooded out my right hand, kinetic displacement, and the front of the jukebox shattered and fell away as the force of a (very) hard punch grounded itself across the whole of its glass façade.

There were a couple of screams, and people moved away from the jukebox. But, on the plus side, I hadn't pulled a gun and started a stampede. People were staring at me, but nobody looked like they wanted to get involved. I moved to the denuded Jukebox and yanked the storage rack containing its CDs out with a crashing noise and the tinkling of dropped components, then set the rack on the bar. I carefully started flipping through the shiny discs, ignoring the sputtering of the bartender.

Halfway along, I came to one which had the characteristic blue-green color of a recordable CD. Pocketing it, I finished the stack. None of the others had that color, and all of them had printed labels. I turned to leave, then swung to face the `tender again. Reaching across the bar, I handed him a business card. "When your boss complains, tell him to call me. I'll pay damages. If he calls."

Then I swung out of the bar and headed downtown to my office.

Oh, Ramona, if there was only something between us
If there was only something between us
Other than our clothes
Something in our skies
Something in our skies
Something in our blood
Something in our skies

Paddy? Paddy, who's been wearing Miranda's clothes?

The offices of Wibert & Sharansky were dark and empty - Saturday night taking its toll. I locked the doors behind me and went into my office. Opening one of the myriad secret drawers in my desk, I pulled out three small bottles and placed them on its top. Touching the first, which swirled with orange, I pushed a bit of energy into it and felt a snap as the fire ward went up around my desk. The second bottle resulted in a water barrier just behind it, and the third threw up a barrier to life energy. Three gifts; three wards. I hadn't yet come up with one for earth magic, but felt relatively sure that anything I might evoke would be constrained by at least one of the three barriers.

I removed the Desert Eagle from its holster and placed it on my desk. Then I reached back behind my chair and slipped the CDR into an expensive Onkyo disc player sitting on the credenza and hit `Play.'

There were a few seconds of silence, with the same feeling of expanding space that an open but quiet audio projection brings, and then the noises started. I frowned, listening carefully, but all that I could hear was an interwoven series of white noises, almost swishing sounds, and nothing else happened.

Figuring that the CD would give whoever went into the bathroom at the bar some time to get there and lock the door, I fast-forwarded two or three jumps. After the third button press, a horrible warbling sound leapt from the speaker. It sounded like nothing so much as a backward Gregorian chant being performed underwater by someone with a tumor in their throat. I gripped the Desert Eagle reflexively and listened. The sound went on for around thirty or forty seconds, then there was a pause - and as the sound stopped, the feeling of a presence flooded the small shielded space around my desk. Nothing manifested visually, but there was an overwhelming feeling of being observed-

-and the spearhead inside my bandolier, still straining to find my partner's daughter, suddenly came alive, transmitting the impression of a point directly over my desk. I turned my eyes to the air, trying to determine what was there, and caught a brief flicker of a reddish-white smear - a quick glimpse of an unfamiliar horizon - and then there was a wordless scream of rage and the portal slammed shut. I was thrown backwards in my expensive office chair, slamming against the credenza. When I opened my eyes from the instinctive flinch I'd hunched into, the office was empty, my wards singing softly in tones of elemental power against the windowpanes.

Oh Ramona, if there was only some kind of future
Oh Ramona, if there was only some kind of future
And these cerulean skies
Something in our skies
Something in our skies
Something in our blood
Something in our skies

Paddy, Paddy?
Paddy will you carry me, I think I've lost my way
I'm already five years older, I'm already in my grave

<--Younger | The First New York Magician | Older-->

Lyrics quoted in this writeup are taken from the David Bowie song The Heart's Filthy Lesson, off the album Outside.