Cursed Moon (Prospero's War) (10 page)

“I’ll just take the aspirin and an ice pack.” She certainly didn’t look or sound happy about it. In fact, she looked pretty pale and her movements were too careful, like any sudden gesture would jack up her pain level.

And then I really felt like an asshole. Because deep down I had to admit that I hadn’t talked her out of using potions to keep her from feeling guilty. I’d done it to save myself guilt.

But by the time I realized this, the nurse had shrugged, muttered “Suit yourself,” and walked away shaking her head.

October 20

Waxing Crescent

T
o get to Crowley Penitentiary for Arcane Criminals, we had to take a ferry to the center of Lake Erie, where a small island called Crook’s Point squatted near the border between the United States and Canada.

As the main correctional facility for magical criminals on the eastern seaboard, the prison’s location was no coincidence. The beaches on the island were laced with iron sand and salt to dampen magical attack. Plus the magnetic properties of the magnetite crystals acted like a sort of organic metal detector. But the island’s location also was effective for one far more mundane reason: No sane person would swim across the frigid five-mile expanse separating the island from the mainland. In fact, in the penitentiary’s hundred-plus-year history, only a few less-than-sane men had tried and met tragic ends.

There weren’t many boats in this part of Lake Erie. The penitentiary forbade any unapproved watercraft from coming within a mile of the island. But I could see a couple of sailboats and barges crawling along the water’s surface closer to the mainland. Overhead the sky was heavenly blue and the few billowy clouds conspired to make one think of sheep frolicking. And the sun glinted off the skyscrapers of downtown Babylon like it was a golden city where dreams came true and paupers could become kings. But I knew the effects were just tricks of light—illusion. I knew Lake Erie bore monsters in her belly, and I was more than familiar with the nightmares that plagued Babylon.

I didn’t mind the slow boat trip because it gave me time to practice my approach. Abraxas Prospero had already served five years of a fifteen-year sentence for distribution of illegal Arcane substances, as well as conspiracy to commit murder via Arcane means. So why contact us now? I didn’t believe for a second the iron bars of his cell prevented him from knowing everything that went on in the Cauldron, but I couldn’t imagine what he’d know that could help with the Johnson case.

“You glare at that water much longer the whole lake’s going to boil.” Morales nudged me with his shoulder.

I clenched my jaw and turned that glare on my partner. “I’m so glad you’re enjoying this.”

He chuckled. “Aw, c’mon, Prospero. It won’t be that bad.”

I bit my tongue. Not only was the meeting with Uncle Abe going to be bad, it might very well end up being disastrous. Uncle Abe hadn’t maneuvered me into this situation to do me any favors.

Instead of retorting to Morales’s claim, I used a fingernail to chip away at some flaking paint on the boat’s railing. “You ever been to Crowley?”

He shook his head. He’d only been in Babylon for a few months. “You?”

I shrugged. “Not in an official capacity, but I went some when I was little. Mom had some cousins get collared for cooking charges.”

He just nodded.

I glanced up at him. “What, no cracks about my fucked-up family?”

He raised a brow. “Aren’t all families fucked up?”

My lips quirked. “I guess so.” Morales and I hadn’t been partners long, but what little he’d told me about his own past supported his point. “Still, I’d feel a lot better if I knew what Abe’s angle was.”

He nodded and turned his gaze out toward the water. Then we both fell silent as we nurtured our own theories about the reason for the meeting. It wouldn’t be any good to compare notes because we both knew whatever Abe had planned was something we’d never see coming anyway.

“You ever seen the Lake Erie Lizard?” Morales asked out of the blue.

“How do you know about that?”

He shrugged. “Been reading a book on the city’s history. They mentioned it a couple of times.”

I chuckled at the unexpected turn of conversation. “I haven’t thought about that old wives’ tale in years.” He raised his brow as if he was waiting for a real answer. I shook my head. “Nah. Lots of kids in the Cauldron claimed they saw it growing up, but I never did.”

“What do you know about him?”

I shot Morales a rueful glance. “How do you know it’s not a girl?”

“Please, all the best monsters are dudes: Mothra, Godzilla, King Kong.”

“What about Nessie?” I asked, raising a brow.

He grimaced. “
He
probably hates that sissy nickname. Admit it—males are superior at the whole monster thing.”

I knew he was just trying to distract me, but the very real monsters I’d known in my life came in all genders and sexes. If I wanted to get into an argument, which I didn’t, I’d have told him it wasn’t men who made the best monsters, but humans. But I didn’t want to start an existential debate, so I told him what I knew about the Lake Erie Lizard.

Back before a Chinese alchemist and some unfair trade laws destroyed the American steel industry, the city of Babylon was hardly a mecca of progressive thinking. There was lots of money, sure, but it was earned at the expense of the area’s abundant natural resources. Factories churned chemicals into the Steel River unchecked—which incidentally is why the damned thing caught fire several times over the years—and into Lake Erie.

Once the factories closed down, most of the city’s pollution was caused by neglect instead of apathy. Buildings sat like empty, rotting shells. Mother Nature started reclaiming the buildings on the outskirts of town; in the center of the city the structures became rabbit warrens filled with the homeless, the strung out, and the clinically insane. It was only in the last decade that major efforts had been made to revitalize the city’s lagging economy and culture.

As for the waterways, there was a pretty determined effort by the city to clean up the river. Eventually you hardly ever saw rats riding rafts of garbage down the canals anymore and the fires stopped altogether—with the exception of the occasional floating alchemy lab explosion.

Despite that cleanup effort, some damage couldn’t be undone. A lot of the pollution’s legacy could be seen in the animal population, especially in the lake. Every couple of years, there was the inevitable news story about some kid who managed to hook a three-eyed fish or a bird born with a leg sticking out of its head. But no story got as much play in the annals of Babylon folklore as the Lake Erie Lizard.

“The first stories started back in the sixties,” I began. “According to the legend, a man was out fishing alone one night. When he was pulling the hook out of his final catch, the hook pricked his finger. He rinsed it off in the lake, but it wouldn’t stop bleeding. He started rowing back to shore because his wife would worry if he was too late getting home. Apparently he was about two hundred yards from shore when something bumped his boat. It was dark, so he couldn’t see anything, but he assumed he’d just rowed over a large log or something.”

I shook my head and smiled, remembering the fevered accounts of the monster whispered by kids in my neighborhood. They always involved some variation on someone cutting themselves in the water, as if the monster was some sort of shark-like creature that could detect a few drops of blood in the trillions of gallons of water that made up Lake Erie.

“What happened next to our fisherman depends on the teller,” I continued, “but most versions involve a large lizard-like creature rearing up over the boat and forcing it to capsize. The man had to swim for his life back to shore, but the monster swallowed his boat whole.”

“I take it you find the tale suspicious.”

I shrugged. “You ask me, it’s just a story parents made up to keep their kids away from the water. Rip currents can get pretty bad.”

Morales leaned his forearms on the boat’s edge and peered into the steel-gray water. “I dunno, Cupcake. This lake’s gotta be what—a hundred feet deep?”

“Two hundred in some places.”

“Right. Just saying, maybe there’s things down there we don’t want to believe in.”

“One time Uncle Abe told me he had summoned the lizard using a potion he cooked with blood and dew gathered from a rose petal under a full moon.” I rolled my eyes.

“Did it work?”

“He said it did, but Abe said lots of things.”

Unbidden, a memory rose from the depths like the Lake Erie Lizard. Me at age five, sitting on Uncle Abraxas’s lap.

“Mama says I don’t have no daddy.”

Abe laughed, making his belly jiggle. “Darlin’, you don’t need a daddy.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll always have your old uncle Abe.” He chucked me under my chin. “I’ll always take care of you.”

“And my mama?”

When he smiled, his eyes twinkled like he knew all my secrets. “Yes, Katie Girl. I’ll take care of your mama, too.”

A cold wind rose up off the lake. Goose bumps spread over my arms, but they had more to do with the memory than the temperature.

“Hey?” Morales said. “You’re not gonna get seasick, are you?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Good, because we’re almost there.” He pointed over the bow.

The black shores of Crook’s Point rose out of the lake into steep cliffs. On the far rise, the gray stone walls of the prison loomed like a storm-shrouded castle out of an old faerie tale.

But the inhabitants of the prison weren’t warmongering goblins or dragons guarding faerie gold. They were hardened magical criminals—rapists, murderers, criminally insane masterminds who’d hex you dead for your last smoke.

I leaned against the ferry’s railing and ignored my sudden urge to tell the captain to turn back around. To call Gardner and tell her I’d give up my task force role and return to patrol, but then I remembered that she’d said I wouldn’t even have that shitty job to go back to.

Morales leaned in and whispered, “Don’t let him see your fear.”

I looked up to see hundreds of small windows facing out from salt-blackened walls. My gut was churning like the Great Lake before a midwinter storm. Without a doubt, I knew Abraxas Prospero watched me from behind one of those thick, bulletproof panes.

Cold spray from the gathering waves hit my face like a slap of sanity. I stood straighter, shoving my anxiety down to the deepest recesses of my psyche. Morales was right. Abe Prospero was like a snake—he’d taste my fear on the air. Then he’d use it against me by spewing venom from that forked tongue.

I pasted on a smile and looked up at Morales. “What fear?”

The corners of his lips rose and he tipped his chin as if to say “Atta girl.”

I turned back toward the shore, where a contingent of prison guards had already gathered to escort us to the main gates. Morales was wrong to assume it was the distant past that had me worried. Instead it was more recent events—just six weeks earlier to be exact—when I betrayed my family and my team by cooking a dirty potion and then covering up the secrets the magic had whispered in my ear.

“Kate?” Morales called from the dock. I shook myself,
realizing he’d exited the ferry without me noticing. I raised my chin and climbed out of the boat without accepting his offered hand. If Abe had invited me to my doom, I damned sure was going to go down fighting.

The guard showed me into a white room. A single white table with a chair on either side. There was also a pane of two-way mirrored glass next to the door, so we could be observed. There were no handles on the interior of that door. Prison guards waited on the other side to open it if there was trouble. Two fluorescent bulbs buzzed overhead behind steel cages. But mostly the room was just a white box.

Before I’d been allowed in, they’d made me empty my pockets and check in any Arcane substances or magic defense weapons. I didn’t balk at any of these demands. An alchemical wizard as powerful as Abraxas Prospero could MacGyver a magical weapon from little more than some pocket lint and a discarded paper clip.

He stood in the dead center with his hands bound at his waist, his ankles chained, and his back ramrod-straight. His jumpsuit was blinding orange, like a street sign warning of a need for extreme caution. His white hair was combed neatly back, and his sharp blue eyes glinted like shards of glass behind simple wire-framed glasses. To someone who’d never met him before, he’d probably look like a mild-mannered accountant or someone’s grandpa. But I knew him better than most, and was well acquainted with the monster that lurked under that placid facade.