Chris Moriarty - The Inquisitor's Apprentice

Sacha was about to ask Lily if she did anything at all in her spare time but read pulp magazines when Wolf caught up with them.

“That went well,” he said. “I think you two made a good impression.”

Lily started to ask a question, but Wolf waved it away. “Come on. You two have had a rough day; I’m going to send you home early.”

He marched them across the courtyard to the little blue door through which they’d first entered Shen’s domain.

But when he opened the door, Sacha and Lily both gasped. Instead of the courtyard with the mulberry tree and the white mice, they were looking at an uptown street — Seventy-second Street, to be precise, just at the corner of Fifth Avenue, next to the Astral mansion.

“But — but — that’s magic! ” Lily protested.

“Inquisitors are law enforcement officers, Lily. Our job is to prevent people with magical abilities from misusing them. Don’t you think that would be rather difficult to do if we couldn’t use magic ourselves?”

Lily looked horrified. Clearly she had never thought of this before.

“Do you have a problem with magic, Lily? Some kind of phobia? If so, you won’t make a very good Inquisitor.”

“I — no — I mean—” Lily’s face was practically scarlet, though Sacha couldn’t tell if it was with embarrassment or anger. “But if Inquisitors are allowed to use magic, then who prevents them from abusing magic?”

“That is an excellent question,” Wolf replied, “and I wish I knew the answer to it. Now, go home. And apologize to your charming mother for the scraped knuckles or she’ll be calling up Commissioner Keegan to complain about me.”

Lily opened her mouth to ask another question. Then she gave a little shrug and turned to go. But just as she was about to step through the door, she turned back and walked over to Sacha and held out a hand for him to shake.

He took her hand, feeling silly and awkward. She didn’t seem to notice his awkwardness, though; her grip was as firm and no-nonsense as her clear-eyed gaze.

“Good job back there with the Hexers,” she told him. “You ought to stand up for yourself more often. You’re too quiet. It makes people think they can walk all over you.”

“So you think I should go around insulting street gangs instead?”

She grinned. “Life’s too short to walk away from a good fight.”

Sacha started to grin back, but he stopped when he noticed Wolf watching them. He cleared his throat awkwardly. “Anyway,” he said, “sorry about your hand.”

“Hah! You should see the other guy!”

Lily strode through the door, and a moment later he saw her dashing up the marble steps of the Astral mansion.

“Your turn, Mr. Kessler,” Wolf said cheerfully. “Where to?”

Sacha panicked. “I — uh — that is—”

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a little magic.”

“Actually, yes.” Much as he hated letting Wolf think he was afraid, Sacha knew this was the perfect excuse. “Can’t you just drop me at the nearest subway station? If it wouldn’t be too much of a bother.”

Wolf gave Sacha a smile that tied his insides in knots. It made Sacha feel as if Wolf actually liked him — and suddenly he felt horribly guilty for lying to him.

“No, Sacha,” Wolf said gently. “It’s not too much bother. And anyway, grownups like to be bothered. It makes us feel useful. But you’re not the sort who bothers grownups with your problems, are you? Pity. You should try it sometime.”

Silence stretched between them until Sacha thought he was going to burst into hysterics if someone didn’t say something.

“A man solves his own problems!” he blurted out. It sounded like the sort of thing his father would say.

“I see. and are a man’s friends allowed to help?”

“I—”

“Never mind. We don’t know each other very well. I don’t suppose you have much reason to trust me. What subway stop did you have in mind?”

“I — uh — Astral Place?”

“Astral Place it is.”

THAT SATURDAY MORNING Sacha slipped into the Hester Street synagogue late and settled into the last row. You could never hear anything back here, because the old men in the congregation were always wandering in and out and gossiping to each other. But this morning it was the gossiping old men he wanted to see — and most especially his grandfather.

He waited patiently until prayers were finally over and the only people still hanging around were Rabbi Kessler’s little gaggle of would-be Kabbalists. Then he tagged along while they meandered over to the storefront shul on Canal Street and settled in to do the three things Kabbalists did best — or at least the only three things Sacha had ever seen any Hester Street Kabbalist do. One: shaking their heads over the latest bad news from Russia. Two: complaining about how all the young people were too busy chasing girls and baseballs to remember their religion. And three: discussing the possibility on a purely theoretical level of maybe perhaps coming up with a tentative plan for coaxing an obviously reluctant Messiah into coming back sometime in the next few millennia to do something about the sorry state of the world.

Finally Sacha managed to get his grandfather alone for a minute and ask him about Edison’s dybbuk. After a lot of thought, he’d decided to tell a mostly true version of the story, but without mentioning his mother’s locket or the alarming fact that the dybbuk had followed him home the other night.

“Isn’t that just like the goyim ?” Grandpa Kessler asked when Sacha finished his story. “Here’s Thomas Edison, rich as the czar, with everything a man could want in life, but he runs into a two-week stretch of bad luck and suddenly he’s looking around for a Jew to blame. Us Jews, our luck goes down the crapper for two thousand years and we call it being the Chosen People.”

“Yeah, well, that’s New York for you,” Mo Lehrer said, ambling over to join the conversation. “The whole city’s coming apart at the seams, and the Inquisitors are running around investigating how some rich goy got Yiddish luck.”

Sacha laughed at the joke and caught himself thinking he’d like to share it with Lily. But of course he could never do that. He was quite sure that no one in Lily Astral’s family ever complained about having Yiddish luck.

“But … well … do you think a rabbi could have summoned the dybbuk?” he asked tentatively.

“Of course a rabbi could have,” Grandpa Kessler snapped. “Any rabbi worth his salt can summon a dybbuk — well, except those hoity-toity uptown rabbis who don’t study Kabbalah anymore and spend all their time pretending to be Episcopalians. But the point is, no rabbi would have.”

“Why? Because dybbuks are evil?”

“No, dummkopf ! Because they’re magic!” Rabbi Kessler yanked at his beard in frustration. “Do you have anything between your ears but baseball scores? Don’t you remember anything you learned for your bar Mitzvah ? The last thing any real Kabbalist would ever do is work magic. As it is written, They may not save so much as a hair on their heads by magic .”

Sacha had been hearing that proverb about not saving so much as a hair by magic ever since he could remember — while at the same time watching housewives all up and down Hester Street use magic for just about everything except saving a hair on anyone’s head. And come to think of it, one of Mrs. Lassky’s most popular recipes was her Hair-Be-Here Hamantaschen.

“But why can’t Kabbalists use magic?” Sacha asked. “Everyone else does.”