The Gangster (Magic & Steam Book 2) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  The Gangster

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

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  About C.S. Poe

  Also by C.S. Poe

  The Gangster

  by

  C.S. Poe

  The Gangster

  By: C.S. Poe

  1881—Special Agent Gillian Hamilton, magic caster for the Federal Bureau of Magic and Steam, has recovered from injuries obtained while in Shallow Grave, Arizona. Now back in New York City, Gillian makes an arrest on New Year’s Eve that leads to information on a gangster, known only as Tick Tock, who’s perfected utilizing elemental magic ammunition. This report complicates Gillian’s holiday plans, specifically those with infamous outlaw, Gunner the Deadly, who promised they’d ring in 1882 together.

  The two men stand on the cusp of a romance that needs to be explored intimately and privately. But when Gillian’s residence is broken into by a magical mechanical man who tries to murder him on behalf of Tick Tock, he and Gunner must immediately investigate the city’s ruthless street gangs before the illegal magic becomes a threat that cannot be contained.

  This might be their most wild adventure yet, but criminal undergrounds can’t compare to the dangers of the heart. Gillian must balance his career in law enforcement with his love for a vigilante, or lose both entirely.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Gangster

  Copyright © 2021 by C.S. Poe

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law. For permission requests and all other inquiries, contact: [email protected]

  Published by Emporium Press

  https://www.cspoe.com

  [email protected]

  Cover Art by Reese Dante

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  Edited by Tricia Kristufek

  Copyedited by Andrea Zimmerman

  Proofread by Lyrical Lines

  Published 2021.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-952133-26-8

  Digital eBook ISBN: 978-1-952133-25-1

  For Trish, Andrea, and Dianne.

  I am grateful to call you my dream team and my friends.

  I

  December 31, 1881

  “Stop!” I shouted as I gave chase to Fat Frank Fishback through the chaotic fray of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

  Fishback—who was, in actuality, all arms and legs—skidded and slipped on the frozen cobblestones, righted himself, and made a sharp left toward a dilapidated tenement listing hard to one side. He shoved a big-boned woman from the open doorway and disappeared into the unsound structure.

  “Sonofa—” I raced in the same direction, moved past the startled woman, and called a curt apology over my shoulder as I barged unwelcomed and unannounced through someone else’s home.

  The interior was dark, and despite the night of winter already upon us, no lamps had been powered on. Steam piping had been installed throughout the Five Points earlier in the year, but it was obvious these people were too poor even for steam energy to light their home. The odds of finding an illegal syphon installed somewhere on the property in order to suck the teat of the city’s steam grid were quite good. The installation in the slums had created a point of serious contention with government officials and the Old Money of New York City. Strongly worded letters had been published in the newspapers proclaiming it a waste of taxpayer dollars to light the streets of the wretched. As if these folks chose to live in squalor.

  But despite the opposition, City Hall went forward with the investment. Funding had passed in January, and it became a matter of New York wishing to assert its dominance over other major metropolitans in the United States. The desire to proclaim itself superior to the likes of Boston or D.C. was a hell of a driving force. The mayor had used Grand Central Depot as his selling point—if tourists felt like they’d entered the city through the doors of a palace, then even the most unfortunate among us must have access to the latest advances in steam technology.

  Access and means being two entirely different points, of course.

  But I digress.

  I wasn’t here to chastise a too-full tenement of occupants barely earning enough to keep bread on the dinner table. I was here for Fishback. Nothing more.

  I dodged the shadow of a resident coming out of a room, his curses now joining with the woman’s—a symphony of fury and protests left unanswered in my wake. I raced along an extended narrow hall, shoved off the far wall in order to make the tight turn down a second dark passage, shot up a short flight of stairs, and finally caught sight of Fishback when he opened a door exiting onto a side alley, his rail-thin body briefly illuminated by the kaleidoscope of urban nightlights.

  “Stop right now!” I hollered.

  Fishback gave me a triumphant expression, stepped outside, and slammed the door shut.

  I didn’t slow my run, merely held an arm out, palm forward, and dipped into the ever-present elemental magic that encompassed Earth. The stream of raw energy churned and whipped at my request for its power, filled my body, and then erupted in a gale of wind. The whoosh of bitterly cold air blew the door off one rusted hinge and left it sagging like a broken wing. I ran outside, onto a set of rickety wooden stairs, hoisted myself over the banister, and jumped to the alley below.

  I landed on the balls of my feet, shoes barely scratching a whisper from the cobblestones as magic aided me safely to the ground. But the door’s now-unfortunate state had been what startled Fishback. He straightened from the bent-over position he’d been in and spun around to face me. His chest heaved as he fought for breath the winter air had stolen. Fishback’s gaze flicked to the door and staircase behind me, and then his face blanched. His eyes grew wide. Panicked. Like a cornered animal ready to bite and scratch and claw until one of us was dead.

  I had no illusions about my person. A man just shy of thirty, brown hair mottled with gray, a height and build hardly bigger than most women’s, and no weapon on hand. So no, it wasn’t my appearance that scared Fishback, a gangster known for squeezing the life out of coppers with his bare hands.

  It was the technicality that I was not a copper. Special Agent Gillian Hamilton, active caster with the Federal Bureau of Magic and Steam, thank you very much. And it was my magic that had put the fear of God into Fishback.

  “Fishback—” I started.

  He turned on one heel and ran for the mouth of the alley.

  “I said stop,” I yelled. I tugged the brim of my bowler down and started running again. “Federal Bureau of Magic and Steam, Fishback. You’re under—”

  A glass bottle whizzed in front of me from the tenement on the left. I stumbled back a step to avoid being knocked out and turned my face away
as it shattered against the outer wall of the building I’d just exited. Above me, the thrower shouted from an open window in a gravelly voice, “Magic pig in the alley!”

  I broke into another sprint before a second bottle could hit its mark and slammed into the congested traffic of Baxter Street. All around me were unsupervised packs of children, stray dogs, wagons coming and going in either direction, and pushcarts everywhere, laws be damned, hawking the last of their oysters, knishes, and pickles before crowds dispersed for the evening. There were steam pipes crisscrossing building facades, rattling and pinging as residents powered on lamps and radiators. More metal tubing ran along the gutters of the streets, suppling steam energy to the yellow, red, and green streetlamps.

  The voice from the window was still crying, “Magic pig! Right there.”

  There’d been such volatile magic employed throughout the Great Rebellion that by the end of the war, Congress had enacted the Caster Regulation Act of 1865. On the surface, it aimed to bring the magic community out of hiding and make our intrinsic abilities legal to perform without fear of violence or jail time. But the finer details of the law required that every scholar—those who studied raw magic and documented the manmade spells—architect—the ones who fabricated the spells—and caster—those who performed the magic, such as myself—undergo mandatory documentation with the federal government. Keen and critical oversight of magic usage would protect soldiers and civilians alike from what happened during the war.

  That’s how the Federal Bureau of Magic and Steam was founded.

  I’d come forward when I was eighteen and applied to the regulation, but due to my atypical caster level, the Bureau jumped to offer me a job, a badge, and perhaps most importantly, respect. For the last decade, I had been doing my damnedest to represent the magic community, to educate citizens and eradicate detrimental old wives’ tales, all while upholding law and order in the city.

  It was, to say the least, an ongoing campaign.

  I dodged between two pushcarts and stepped onto the road, only to be abruptly cut off as three men moved to stand in front of me. Fishback disappeared into the throng of people.

  “Step aside,” I ordered, pulling back the open lapels of my coats to show my badge.

  They were all taller than me. Bulkier than me. With the sort of wicked smiles seen on men who used their fists to demand respect. The one on the left had his arms crossed over his barrel chest, with the stub of a smoking cigar clenched between his teeth. On the right was a man with a handlebar mustache and a badly set nose from a long-ago fight. In the middle was Tommy McCarthy, a known member of the Whyo gang that ran this neighborhood. He wore mechanical fighting gloves, the cogs spinning and pressure gauges releasing steam as he flexed his fingers.

  “Look what we got here, boys,” McCarthy said. He smiled widely, showing off a broken canine. “A copper on our streets.”

  “I’m not here for you, McCarthy.”

  “Know who I am, do you?” The steam whistled as he made a fist with one glove. “Scared, ain’t ya?”

  “No.”

  McCarthy blinked almost comically, glanced at Cigar Stub and Broken Nose, then tried to regain his footing by saying, “You ought to be.”

  “You’re interfering with official matters pertaining to the Federal Bureau of Magic and Steam, and I will arrest you if you don’t—”

  “Arrest me?” McCarthy echoed with a bark of a laugh. “You ain’t even tall enough to suck my cock,” he replied, reaching down with one mechanical hand to cup himself through his trousers.

  “I have no tolerance for your crude behavior. Step aside.”

  Broken Nose pushed back the folds of his coat and unholstered a Waterbury pistol. He pointed the three-barreled weapon at my head and cocked the hammer. “How about I put a few bullets through your brain instead?”

  As the aether was galvanized, manufactured magic snapped and crackled in the air around me. A strong jolt shot up my spine and I shook it off. It was merely a physical response to the illegal spell reaching out to interact with my own magic. But seeing that Waterbury—

  An unkillable, deadeye marksman.

  His finger pulling the trigger.

  And blowing Milo Ferguson’s head off.

  Those same fingers had held my chin just hours before while he whispered words that were seared into my bones like a cattle brand: It’ll remind me of you—

  No.

  Thunder rumbled from overhead.

  I raised a heavily scarred hand, palm looking as if it’d been used to press drying ferns, then snapped.

  A bolt of lightning tore down from the sky and hit Broken Nose’s pistol. The Waterbury exploded into a smoldering heap of scrap metal, and the ignited aether round knocked him off his feet like a horse had kicked him in the chest. The spark jumped to McCarthy’s mechanical gloves—cogs and wheels flew every which way, pressure gauges went haywire, and steam valves burst. He dropped to his knees, screaming while tearing the gloves from his hands.

  I looked at Cigar Stub, one hand still raised, electricity pulsating in my hold.

  He stumbled backward several steps before fleeing without a care for either of his two-bit gangster friends.

  I rolled my eyes and lowered my arm. The magic grated against the damaged nerves in my hand, and I shook it a few times to quickly dissipate the spell. Ignoring startled, wary, and gawking onlookers on the street, I carefully picked my way around McCarthy and Broken Nose, both groaning on the ground. I broke into a run in the direction I’d seen Fishback go and was surprised to find him within a minute. His form was hunkered down on the stoop of a shop shuttered for the night. A nearby streetlamp was blinking erratically, the red color pulsating like we’d been enveloped in the city’s heartbeat.

  Fishback raised his head at the sound of my steps. He shot up and started to run.

  Finally having a clear shot of the man, I held my arm out and sent a violent gust of bitterly cold winter wind after Fishback. It threw him to the ground and kept him pinned to the cobblestones. I approached from behind while removing a pair of handcuffs from my coat pocket.

  “I’ll weep the day a man listens to me on the first command.”

  I hadn’t pegged Frank Fishback to be a crier.

  It took an astonishing amount of degradation of one’s own morality to become known for having perfected the art of strangulation. For the New York police force to fear a single man. For the mothers and wives of coppers walking the beat to ward against evil when the name Fishback was uttered.

  And yet, here he was.

  Crying.

  Fishback sat behind the bars of a cell on the fourth floor of the New York field office at Twenty-Third and Fifth, where if he’d been on the north end of the building, he’d have had a beautiful view of Madison Square Park and Lady Liberty’s dismembered right arm. Fishback’s attire was still in a state of disarray from the arrest, and he had a shiner on his cheekbone from where I’d thrown him to the ground. But aside from those shuddering breaths and a wet nose he wiped on the back of his hand every few moments, Fishback had remained as silent as a mouse.

  I stood in the narrow hallway opposite of the cells, window to my back where cold air leached through the old glass, staring at Fishback. I absently tapped the purple-tinted goggles hanging from my neck in beat to the hiss and ping of steam clanking through the building’s heating system.

  “How hard did you hit him?” Director Loren Moore asked in a thoughtful, almost curious tone. He stood to my left, as tall as an oak tree and built just as sturdy. He was over a decade my senior, with age-appropriate steel gray speckled into his ash-brown hair and well-groomed, if fashionably out-of-date, beard.

  “I supplied ample warning to stop,” I countered.

  Moore lifted a pipe to his mouth, snapped his fingers over the bowl to light the tobacco with a flicker of fire magic, then took a few puffs. A heady cherry scent settled over us as Moore studied our guest. “Talk to us, Fishback.”

  Another quiet sob
wracked Fishback’s thin body. He shook his head while staring at the floor.

  “You had a good thing going,” Moore said, taking the pipe from between his teeth. “A real entrepreneur. Contracted by the Whyos to murder honest cops. How many counts, Hamilton?”

  “Twelve, sir.”

  “Twelve,” Moore said to Fishback. “Twelve times in two years you’ve pissed the police force off, and still they’ve not been able to organize themselves enough to touch a single hair on your head. So what happened?”

  Fishback raised his head. He swallowed convulsively, his gaze darting back and forth between Moore and me.

  “Was it the money?” Moore asked. “Is that why you started middle-manning the sales of magic ammunition? Not so smart, was it, Fishback? Because once word of magic involvement gets out on the streets, you become my problem.” He made a gesture toward me. “And when I have a problem, I send for Agent Hamilton.”

  The compliment pooled in my belly and brought warmth to my cheeks. Loren Moore had been my director since the start. I’d spent years proving myself beneficial to the Bureau by taking on some of the worst backlogged cases that no other agent wanted to handle. My unrelenting hard work had been noticed—fairly early on, I think—but it had taken a few years before Moore began promoting me through the ranks. Now, I hadn’t come into this career looking for an elevation in my status. I had just wanted to do some good. And while enforcing the law wouldn’t minimize the skeletons in my closet any, it was a sort of… penance, if you will. And the relationship that had grown between myself and Loren Moore over the last several years was a bit like a weed sprouting between the cracks in cobblestones. Despite the odds, Moore trusted me, believed in me, respected me—and sometimes that was all that got me out of bed in the mornings.

  I quite enjoyed Moore’s company, and I do believe the same could be said for him, which was something, considering I am not the most likeable person. And while he was my superior, I truly believed that had I not worked under him, we might have been real friends. Although, when Moore praised me, I couldn’t help but wonder if the weight of his words, the lingering silence in the moment, was wholly imagined, or if there was something unspoken he was hoping I’d pick up on. Moore was a bachelor, after all, but was he confirmed? Like me?