ON E
Every now and then, a mirror must be smashed.
Tonight was one of the nows. I stumbled across the room to look through the cupboard for a dustpan, then belatedly remembered it was still in my father's house with the rest of the things I'd left behind after he died. Sharp, Maddie, real sharp. Some investigator I was. And some daughter. Rather than pick up the jagged shards by hand, I half-sat, half-fell back down on the davenport, raised the glass again in my off hand and took a somewhat unsteady sip.
Cognac, for Meister Gerhardt. He would have liked that. The liquor carved a smoky, glowing trac k down my throat. It was thoroughly unlike the rough fire of the whiskey I had drunk for Samuel Givens. Or the bathtub gin I raised for Markus Collins. Or the pint to remember Seamus bloody MacInnes. So much for Prohibition. They had begun to blur, names and faces slippery with too much alcohol, too many cigarettes. But even if I could not name them all, I knew exactly how many empty chairs there were to drink for at this table. I just couldn't recall, at this precise moment, how many of them I'd already toasted.
It was that night again. The night I knew they were gone forever.
The cognac throbbed in my throat like a sullen sunset over Elliott Bay: always obscured by the clouds but never quite willing to give up. A bit like me, I suppose. Ten years. Christ, to put it like that. It was ten years since I'd seen them alive, the Meister and his Circle. Ten years since they'd gone to a war-torn Europe to do what must be done, and perished in a muddy field somewhere in France. Ten years since the Great War had swallowed them with barely a trace, down that hungry black maw along with so many other pieces of my life I would never get back. Ten years ago.
It was not even as if I had known Meister Gerhardt - Gerd, as he preferred to be called when not teaching us - for all that long when he left. I was the oh-so talented but desperately clumsy apprentice, too strong to be left untaught but too young for the lessons he had to give. I was bright with power and stupid with youth. He should have turned me away, but he didn't. Was that my father's doing? I wondered. He knew his daughter, knew I'd get into more trouble learning on my own than I ever could making a wreckage of Gerd's Teutonic tranquility along with his sanctum. Which I did, on more than one occasion. The first year as an apprentice is often called the Year of Wonder. The real wonder was that he kept me on at all.
I'd studied under the Meister's exacting tutelage for not quite two years when he left for war-torn France. He was no soldier, at least not the kind one normally pictured, huddled yet heroic, in the frigid trenches of Europe. He was more like a college professor, old and wizened and more comfortable in his tweed suit than in ritual robes. But his role in the conflict was one no doughboy could have performed: he had taken his Circle into the hell of the Great War in order to oppose his estranged former brethren, the occult masters of die Orden . And so they had gone, and served. And died.
Two years. Not so very long to be an apprentice, and yet his impact on my life could not have been more profound. The shards of the mirror on my living room floor were testament to that, if anyone could hear their sharp-edged, reflective whispers. I might have been capable of it, once. Not tonight. Tonight was for breaking mirrors, not enchanting them. Even though it had been years since I’d used the Art, I had already had enough of that to last me a lifetime.
I raised my left hand and stared at the traces of liquor remaining on the inside of the glass like the raindrops clinging to my apartment window. My father would have had stern words for me, seeing me like this. He was no teetotaler, no Prohibitionist. Michael Sheehan liked to raise a pint on a warm summer evening, so he did, but unlike many of his fellow Irish cops I never once saw him staggering drunk, nor even hung
Every now and then, a mirror must be smashed.
Tonight was one of the nows. I stumbled across the room to look through the cupboard for a dustpan, then belatedly remembered it was still in my father's house with the rest of the things I'd left behind after he died. Sharp, Maddie, real sharp. Some investigator I was. And some daughter. Rather than pick up the jagged shards by hand, I half-sat, half-fell back down on the davenport, raised the glass again in my off hand and took a somewhat unsteady sip.
Cognac, for Meister Gerhardt. He would have liked that. The liquor carved a smoky, glowing trac k down my throat. It was thoroughly unlike the rough fire of the whiskey I had drunk for Samuel Givens. Or the bathtub gin I raised for Markus Collins. Or the pint to remember Seamus bloody MacInnes. So much for Prohibition. They had begun to blur, names and faces slippery with too much alcohol, too many cigarettes. But even if I could not name them all, I knew exactly how many empty chairs there were to drink for at this table. I just couldn't recall, at this precise moment, how many of them I'd already toasted.
It was that night again. The night I knew they were gone forever.
The cognac throbbed in my throat like a sullen sunset over Elliott Bay: always obscured by the clouds but never quite willing to give up. A bit like me, I suppose. Ten years. Christ, to put it like that. It was ten years since I'd seen them alive, the Meister and his Circle. Ten years since they'd gone to a war-torn Europe to do what must be done, and perished in a muddy field somewhere in France. Ten years since the Great War had swallowed them with barely a trace, down that hungry black maw along with so many other pieces of my life I would never get back. Ten years ago.
It was not even as if I had known Meister Gerhardt - Gerd, as he preferred to be called when not teaching us - for all that long when he left. I was the oh-so talented but desperately clumsy apprentice, too strong to be left untaught but too young for the lessons he had to give. I was bright with power and stupid with youth. He should have turned me away, but he didn't. Was that my father's doing? I wondered. He knew his daughter, knew I'd get into more trouble learning on my own than I ever could making a wreckage of Gerd's Teutonic tranquility along with his sanctum. Which I did, on more than one occasion. The first year as an apprentice is often called the Year of Wonder. The real wonder was that he kept me on at all.
I'd studied under the Meister's exacting tutelage for not quite two years when he left for war-torn France. He was no soldier, at least not the kind one normally pictured, huddled yet heroic, in the frigid trenches of Europe. He was more like a college professor, old and wizened and more comfortable in his tweed suit than in ritual robes. But his role in the conflict was one no doughboy could have performed: he had taken his Circle into the hell of the Great War in order to oppose his estranged former brethren, the occult masters of die Orden . And so they had gone, and served. And died.
Two years. Not so very long to be an apprentice, and yet his impact on my life could not have been more profound. The shards of the mirror on my living room floor were testament to that, if anyone could hear their sharp-edged, reflective whispers. I might have been capable of it, once. Not tonight. Tonight was for breaking mirrors, not enchanting them. Even though it had been years since I’d used the Art, I had already had enough of that to last me a lifetime.
I raised my left hand and stared at the traces of liquor remaining on the inside of the glass like the raindrops clinging to my apartment window. My father would have had stern words for me, seeing me like this. He was no teetotaler, no Prohibitionist. Michael Sheehan liked to raise a pint on a warm summer evening, so he did, but unlike many of his fellow Irish cops I never once saw him staggering drunk, nor even hung
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