Iron Cast Read online

  Ada couldn’t hear the sirens from the basement, but she knew what was happening as soon as the first musicians started maneuvering down the stairs with their bulky instrument cases. She’d known a raid would happen eventually. According to Charlie, the cops broke up shows at the larger, ritzier Red Cat at least once a month. So far, the Cast Iron had remained below the notice of the bulls, but the bribes Johnny paid could go only so far.

  Ada had said good-bye to Charlie almost half an hour ago. He wanted to make it back to the Red Cat in time for the last set. She could have found another dance partner or asked Danny to make her a drink, but all she really wanted was some solitude. Now that the initial excitement of the evening had worn off, her fatigue had crept back, more insistent than ever.

  She kept her seat on the couch as the musicians filed in. They didn’t seem concerned by the ruckus upstairs. Someone pulled out a deck of cards and started dealing. Ada stood up when Johnny and Jackson emerged from the stairwell. Worry had started edging into her chest, pressing against her lungs.

  “Where’s Corinne?” she asked.

  “Being a pain in my ass, as usual,” Johnny said, with uncharacteristic shortness. He disappeared into his office with Jackson right behind. The door slammed shut.

  There was a creak of footsteps on the stairs, and Ada ran to the base. Gabriel was coming down, alone.

  “Have you seen Corinne?” Ada asked, aware that panic was bleeding into her voice.

  Gabriel hesitated on the bottom step, his eyes darting around the room. The thin line of a frown appeared between his eyes.

  “I thought she would be with you,” he said.

  Ada didn’t need to hear more. She slid past him and ran up the stairs. He called after her, but she opened the panel and ducked out. Gordon had not left his post. He watched her with his usual air of unconcern as she closed the panel. He popped a few sunflower seeds into his mouth.

  “Has Corinne come through here?” Ada asked.

  Gordon pointed silently toward the door leading into the club. Ada could hear muffled shouts and banging that could only be the bulls, tearing the place apart in search of hemopaths. She swallowed the acidic fear rising in her throat. She didn’t know if her escape had been reported to the local precinct yet. She did know that the next time they arrested her, they’d lock her so deep in Haversham Asylum that even Corinne would never be able to find her.

  Ada sucked in a ragged breath and climbed the five steps to the door. She turned the brass handle in slow, agonizing degrees and pushed her palm against the smooth wood until the door creaked open a couple of inches. She peered through the crack, expecting any second that someone would yank it open from the other side. She could see Danny behind the bar, arguing with one of the cops.

  After a few seconds, Danny caught sight of her and inclined his head toward the stage in the briefest of gestures, then resumed his vehement denial that he’d ever seen any hemopath activity in the Cast Iron. The backstage door was open, and Corinne was being prodded by a burly uniformed officer onto the stage and down the steps to the dance floor. She was loudly declaring that she’d only come here for a good time and had never so much as talked to a hemopath in her life. Ada bit her lip, thinking that they might actually be convinced. Corinne’s dress was nice enough, and she knew how to carry herself like a blue blood.

  Then another cop produced a burnished gray rod, no bigger than a pencil, and Ada knew it was over. She didn’t let herself think anymore. There was no time for that. She was halfway to the stage when the cop pressed the iron against Corinne’s neck and her gasp of pain revealed her as a hemopath. They were grabbing their earplugs as Ada reached the microphone, the melody already thrumming in her throat. She’d hummed only a few notes when the hands started lowering, earplugs forgotten. She watched their faces as they searched the room in confusion. They spotted her, but not soon enough. Their faces were already slack, eyes glazing over.

  Since the law had passed six months ago, there had been a push in law enforcement to develop hemopath-resistance techniques. Given enough time, the cops would probably find ways to withstand emotions and illusions, but Ada had been honing her skill a lot longer than they had been learning to resist it.

  It was a fluid melody that she offered, deceptively complex—but then trust was a complex feeling. With enough focus, she could concentrate the full force of the music on the cops in the room. Danny would still feel residual effects, but he would be able to keep his head about him at least.

  Corinne looked up and met Ada’s eyes. She was smiling. She extricated herself easily from the cops, who were standing in dumb fascination, ready to believe anything that Corinne wanted to tell them . . . or show them.

  She patted the shoulder of the man next to her in an exaggerated show of sympathy. Then she started to speak to them in quiet tones. She was fiddling with her brass pocket watch, a habit that had become a ritual. They hung on her every word, nodding occasionally, even laughing once. Ada focused on her melody, layering trust and blurring the edges of their memory. The instinctual harmony between her and Corinne extended beyond the shows they played for regs.

  Movement on the other side of the room caught her attention. Gabriel was standing in the doorway to the storage room, watching the cluster of cops around Corinne with visible unease. He was reaching for his gun when Ada caught his eye. She shook her head, careful not to drop any notes. He would be starting to feel the effects of her song now, though not with the same overwhelming intensity that she was aiming at the bulls. His hand drifted back to his side, and he blinked.

  Corinne had almost finished whatever she was murmuring to her rapt audience. Ada could tell that she was building up to the big finish. Her brown eyes were bright with a triumph that Ada had learned to both relish and dread.

  “Oh my stars,” Corinne cried, with a sudden Southern drawl that had Danny snickering behind the bar. The policemen didn’t seem to notice her abrupt theatrics.

  “I think that bank down the street is on fire.” Corinne flung her arm in the direction of the front door. There weren’t any windows there, but the cops were falling over each other to stare at the blank wall.

  “I don’t—”

  “Wait, I see it, there’s smoke!”

  “Let’s go.”

  “And maybe just to be safe you shouldn’t come back,” Corinne called after them with a wave.

  The door swung closed.

  For a few seconds the Cast Iron was silent. Then Danny guffawed and hurled a dish towel at Corinne.

  “Getting a little sloppy, don’t you think, kid?” he asked. “They’ll be back before long.”

  “Not a chance. I made sure to explain in detail how thoroughly they had searched the place,” Corinne said. “Not a hemopath in sight. What a regrettable mistake.”

  “Still,” Danny said with a shrug. “Better leave the acting to the thespians.”

  Corinne put her hand to her heart as if wounded.

  “Why must you hurt me, Danny? I’ve been practicing that fire gag for weeks.”

  “What poem did you use?” Ada asked, hopping off the stage.

  “ ‘That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire,’” Corinne said. “Hopkins.”

  “Appropriate.”

  “Not really—the poem is a foray into questions of transience and immortality. Also clouds.”

  Corinne grinned at her and lifted her hand, palm up, for their signature handshake. Ada knew it was the closest thing to gratitude Corinne would ever express, but she didn’t mind. The two simple taps of their fingertips together somehow held more significance than words ever could.

  “That was a close one,” Ada said. “If they’d already been wearing their earplugs—”

  “But they weren’t,” Corinne said. “Did you lay down some memory loss?”

  “The past half hour should be a haze for them.”

  “Then we’re in the clear.”

  “Doesn’t it seem strange that they were plain old uniforms and not HPA a
gents?” Ada pressed. “Since when do the bulls deal with hemopaths? I think there must have been agents here we didn’t know about.”

  “If there were agents here, then why did they let us fleece those cops?” Corinne picked her fingers through her hair, which was tangled and damp with sweat. “They probably just got bored with raiding hemo joints and decided to make the bulls do their dirty work.”

  Ada wasn’t anywhere near appeased, but she didn’t have the energy to argue with Corinne, who was still reveling in their success. Ada couldn’t find the same exultation inside herself. Manipulating regs who weren’t paying for it always left her feeling hollow.

  “I’m just sad that Danny-boy was the only one to witness our brilliance,” Corinne said.

  Ada frowned and glanced toward the back door.

  “What about—” But she cut herself short, because Gabriel was already gone.

  Johnny’s office always seemed warmer than the rest of the basement, with two lamps that cast equal amounts of golden light and muddled shadow. There were overflowing file cabinets in three corners of the room, and a coat rack in the fourth that held a moth-eaten scarf and a fedora that Johnny had never worn.

  Corinne felt at ease in the cramped space, even though half her time there was spent apologizing for whatever her most recent reckless stunt had been. Ada always managed to avoid the hot seat, which Corinne thought was unfair, considering she wouldn’t get into nearly as much trouble if she didn’t know Ada would be there to bail her out of it. She fidgeted in the chair that was facing Johnny’s desk while he shoved some paperwork into one of the overflowing file cabinets. There hadn’t been time to change out of her dress, which was ripped at the back seam and still smelled of Harry’s grime. She knew the black kohl lining her eyelids was smudged, and the cupid’s bow of her mouth had faded. It didn’t really matter in here, though. Johnny had seen her looking much worse.

  “I’m not your headmaster,” he said at last, dropping heavily into his chair. “Frankly, I don’t feel like giving a lecture on how vital it is to keep our customers happy, and how important it is to not, say, purposely send them into a panic.”

  “That’s good, then,” Corinne said. “Because it doesn’t sound like a lecture I’d pay much attention to anyway.”

  Johnny’s expression betrayed some amusement at the quip, but mostly he just looked tired.

  “The Cast Iron is losing money,” he said. “We can’t last on two or three shows a month, especially if they’re cut short like tonight. I have no idea how Carson is keeping the Red Cat open.”

  Corinne fingered the shabby arm of her chair, picking at the flaking leather.

  “I was trying to give the songsmiths more time,” she said. “I wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”

  “I know.”

  She met his eyes, trying to read his face in the dim light. She could count on one hand the people in her life she was scared of disappointing, and Johnny Dervish was first and foremost. Johnny sighed and picked up his pocketknife. Absently he chiseled into the wood of his desk with the tip.

  “That mark you’ve been trailing—the jeweler,” he said. “You said he drops off money for his mistress on the second Friday of every month? That’s tomorrow.”

  Corinne hesitated.

  “You want us to pull a job tomorrow? Ada’s picture will be all over the police stations by morning.”

  Johnny gouged into the wood a little deeper. With the shadows darkening the circles under his eyes, he seemed more exhausted than Corinne had ever seen him. He had inherited the Cast Iron decades ago, when he was only a few years older than Corinne was now. She couldn’t imagine what it was like to watch his life’s work crumble from the peak of its glory. The Cast Iron had been her home for only four years, and the mere thought of its closing felt a little like dying.

  “If I can’t afford to pay the bills and bribe the right people, then the Cast Iron will go dark,” Johnny said. He looked up from the desk and met her eyes, unblinking. Corinne knew what he wasn’t saying. If the Cast Iron closed, there was nowhere for her and Ada and Saint to go. Boston was an unforgiving city, ribboned in iron and steel. There were thousands of hemopaths in Boston, but jobs for their kind were scarce. Corinne had known desperate hemopaths to swear fealty to Johnny like serfs of the Middle Ages. Unlike his predecessor, Johnny ran the club like a business instead of a social fraternity. Those who did the work earned a cut of the profits. Some of the jobs were less legal than others, but in times like these the line was blurred at best.

  Others might be able to find work with Luke Carson at the Red Cat or the Witcher brothers at Down Street, but Ada and Corinne had been a part of Johnny’s inner circle for years. Carson and the Witchers would never trust them. Loyalty to one of the iron-free clubs was loyalty for life. And Corinne couldn’t return to the life she’d had before.

  “We can do it,” she said. “We know the patrol routes.”

  Johnny folded the blade and tossed it into an open desk drawer. “Quick and clean,” he said. “I can’t handle another news headline like last summer.”

  “So no elephants then?”

  “No elephants. And stay away from the councilman.”

  Corinne grinned. The so-called Bengali banker scam had been run once or twice in history to moderate success, but it wasn’t considered by grifters to be a tenable scheme. Corinne had modified it for her and Ada’s peculiar skill set, and the resulting con was her magnum opus as far as she was concerned. She refused to apologize for it. Despite nearly popping a vein when he’d first heard about it, Johnny had since made peace. The two thousand dollars that Corinne and Ada had scored softened the blow. It was enough to keep the Cast Iron supplied with food and booze for half a year.

  “We’ll go in the morning,” she said, heading for the door.

  “Take Gabriel along,” Johnny said. “Someone’s got to show him the ropes around here, and I’ve got my hands full.”

  Corinne paused with her hand on the doorknob, trying to decide the best way to dodge the responsibility. She wasn’t sure what it was about Gabriel Stone that irked her so much. It might have been the way he’d spoken to her in the alley, or his refusal to argue so that she could prove herself right, or the way he seemed generally unimpressed. Possibly a mixture of the three.

  “Are you sure I’m the best person for that job?” she asked.

  “No, but Ada tends to be competent enough for the both of you, so I’m not concerned.”

  Corinne weighed the consequences of arguing further, but in the end it seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. As long as Gabriel kept a lid on the moralizing that regs were so fond of, she might be able to keep a civil tongue.

  “Fine. But if he can’t keep up, we aren’t going to hold his hand.”

  “Fair enough,” Johnny said, leaning back in his chair and thrumming his fingers on the desktop. “Get some sleep. You did good tonight, Corinne.”

  She shut the door behind her without a reply, but the rare praise suffused her as she crossed the dark common room to her bedroom, so that she barely felt the cold.

  Despite the weariness deep in her bones, Corinne lay awake for a long time that night, running through the events of the day in her head, comforted by the occasional creak of Ada’s bed. When she’d been cornered by the bulls tonight, it had never occurred to her to be worried, even when they’d touched the iron to her skin. She’d known that Ada wouldn’t be far away. It was an incontrovertible fact of her existence that Ada would always be there for her. That was what had made the past two weeks almost unbearable. She’d felt like half of her was missing.

  With a small, strangled sound, Ada sat bolt upright in bed. Corinne pulled herself up onto her elbows, squinting in the darkness. Ada panted for a few seconds, rubbing her face vigorously, then flopped backward. A nightmare. Corinne lay back down, listening to her friend’s uneven breathing for a few minutes.

  “We can talk about it, if you want,” she said at last.

  Since t
hey’d left Haversham, she’d seen the changes in Ada—the muted fear and disquiet that Ada tried valiantly to hide. The asylum was iron-free, touted as the “humane” alternative to prison for hemopaths, but that didn’t make it any less a prison. Every cell was solitary, every surface cold and unyielding. Corinne remembered seeing an old photo once, with the founders of the asylum in their Victorian garb, staring humorlessly from the shadow of the great brick structure. The camera hadn’t captured the wrought-iron fence around the perimeter. Or the fact that hemopaths who were taken there never seemed to have a court date or a sentence. Once they were taken through those iron gates, they never came back out.

  Ada hadn’t spoken, though Corinne could tell by her breathing that she was still awake.

  “I don’t think we should go tomorrow,” Ada said at last. “The HPA will be looking for me.”

  Corinne stared at the dark ceiling, trying to pick out the images from the magazines that she and Ada had pasted up there. For her side of the room, Corinne had chosen castles on the moors in Europe and poems and reviews from the Literary Digest and the Atlantic.

  “Boston’s a big city,” Corinne said.

  “Not that big.” Ada’s voice was soft and slurred with sleep. “I don’t want to go back there, Cor.”

  Haversham Asylum for Afflictions of the Blood had been a looming presence at the edge of Boston since its construction thirty-six years ago, but it was only in the past year—since the new law had passed—that stories had started trickling through the hemopath clubs about what its true purpose might be. The theories ranged anywhere from lobotomies to ritualistic slaughter. Corinne chewed on the inside of her lip and thought about the man the two HPA agents had brought to the basement. She knew that there was something comforting she was supposed to say to Ada, but she also knew she had never in her life managed to say the exact right thing.