Chris Moriarty - The Inquisitor's Apprentice

“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.”

He glanced sharply at her. Was that a glint of laughter in the cool blue depths of her eyes? Did Lily Astral actually have a sense of humor? It looked like she did. And now she was even smiling at him.

He’d barely started to smile back when she stepped in front of an omnibus.

Sacha jerked her back from the rails just as the frothing draft horses were about to trample her flat.

“There’s no need to panic,” she said loftily. “Horses don’t step on people. They would have gone around me. I’ve seen it happen all the time at the polo grounds.”

“But they can’t go around you. The omnibus is on rails!”

“Really?” She peered down at the steel streetcar rails as if she’d never seen such a thing. “How remarkable! When did they put those in?”

Finally he managed to shepherd her safely over to West Fifty-second — only to discover a new danger looming between them and their goal.

“Look!” Lily exclaimed as they turned the corner onto Fifty-second Street. “There’s the Witch’s Brew. And finally some peace and quiet too! What a relief!”

Sacha wasn’t so sure about that. Peace and quiet might be a good thing on the calm, tree-lined streets where Lily lived. But in the New York Sacha knew, a quiet street was a dangerous one. And this street was far too quiet. Between them and the Witch’s Brew stretched a wasteland of blank walls and boarded-up storefronts. Half the block was nothing but a weedy abandoned lot. A huge hand-lettered sign on the jagged fence enclosing the lot read

ALL BOYS CAUT

IN THIS YARD

WILL BE DEALT WITH

ACCORDEN TO LAW

Sacha was just about to say that they might want to take the long way around to the Witch’s Brew when he heard the unmistakable crack! of a bat connecting with a baseball. The ball streaked out of the abandoned lot, bounced off a boarded-up window, and rolled down the sidewalk toward them. An instant later, a dozen raggedly dressed teenagers swarmed after it. The smallest stood a head taller than Sacha, and their bold swaggers and outlandish costumes — one of them even wore a stolen policeman’s hat — marked them as Hell’s Kitchen Hexers.

“Hey, look!” one of them jeered. “It’s Dopey Benny Schleptowitz and his gun moll Irma!”

That set off a chorus among his ragtag little pack of hangers-on:

“Hey, Dopey!”

“Hey, Schleptowitz!”

“Hey, Irma!”

“Coochie coochie coochie coochie!”

“Other way!” Sacha told Lily, grabbing hold of her wrist and giving her a sharp tug backward as the Hexers came toward them.

“Why? they’re just a bunch of harmless kids—”

“Just go!” Sacha yelled.

Maybe it was the look of terror on his face, or maybe it was the fact that the “harmless” kids had already started to come after them. But for once Lily didn’t try to argue.

Five minutes later they had made it around the block from the other direction and were pushing through the front door of the Witch’s Brew.

The first thing Sacha noticed was the smell of beer. It wasn’t even ten in the morning, but the rich, yeasty perfume of triple stout already hung in the air like fog. Cigar smoke curled lazily around the cast-iron Corinthian columns and lent an underwater pall to the beveled mirrors and stamped tin ceiling. Electric ceiling fans whined and creaked overhead like propellers churning their way through a beery sea.

One side of the cavernous room housed a forlorn-looking coffee bar where a waiter was reading the newspaper behind a gold-plated coffee boiler. On the other side of the room — the side all the customers were on — was a brass-railed bar stocked with every kind of hard liquor Sacha had ever seen in his life and many he hadn’t. Earlier shifts of drinkers had scuffed the bar rail and strewn the floor with broken shot glasses and abandoned lottery tickets. Several of the faces that turned to stare at the two children as the doors swung closed behind them were flushed and bleary-eyed.

The Witch’s Brew was clearly a serious drinking establishment — and serious drinking had already been under way for many hours today.

“Well, well!” said the mountainous Irishman behind the bar. “If it isn’t Little Miss Muffet and Little Lord Fauntleroy!” He leered alarmingly at the children. His teeth were the size of coat pegs. They looked like coat pegs too: long and widely spaced and oddly rounded. It was quite unsettling.

Before he could lose his nerve, Sacha stepped up to the bar and held up the growler. “I want this filled up,” he said, trying to sound like a busy grownup with better things to do than waste time trading insults with bartenders.

“Do you, now? Well, come back in about eight years, and I’ll be happy to oblige.”

Before Sacha could argue, the man pointed to the hand-lettered sign that hung on the mirror behind him. Judging by the spelling, it must have been penned by the same person who’d painted the sign in the abandoned lot down the street:

WE SURVE NO MINERS!

“I’m sure,” said the bartender with elaborate and completely insincere courtesy, “that such fine young ladies and gentlemen as yourselves can read a simple sign without my help. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to be getting me in trouble with the police. No, I imagine that’d be the furthest thing from your innocent young minds. I think you’d best be on your way now. Send my kind regards to Commissioner Keegan. And remind him I’ve already paid this month. Nice and regular, like always. So if he’s going to sacrifice some poor bugger to the temperance ladies, it better not be me!”