CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

On the ride back to the Greenwich Temple, the Baron stared out the cab window at the brick rowhouses in the midday sun, and he reasoned out exactly what they’d accomplished.

Breaking into the vassal meeting hall would have unfortunate repercussions. It wasn’t that New York’s cult would hold it against them, not when it was ostensibly the mistake of a meatheaded pair of door guards. Tammany would tell Boss Tomasso, “If you’d paid attention to your history lessons,” or “if your guards hadn’t been goddamn stubborn,” then the Baron and Zombie would’ve been in and out without any property damage. As it was, the Baron was doing them a favor, paying for the mess and reigning in the Zombie—that’s what New York would say. They’d treat d’Holbach and his friend as a force of nature, destructive but inevitable, part of the cost of doing occult business on the eastern coast of the United States.

The real problem was that they’d invaded a Cosa Nostra hideout and made a lot of noise. People would notice that a severe offense had been dealt to the boss, and Tomasso had left it unchallenged—his belly exposed to his ruthless competition. Sooner or later, the Cosa Nostra would respond to the Baron’s actions. They wouldn’t go after him directly, not with the threat of the Zombie looming like nuclear war and mutually assured destruction, but there’d be either a favor demanded or the offense returned at some point in the future.

Another entry was added to the bill of life, the Baron thought, and they’d be tallying up several more before they left this city. At least there were some benefits too. The Zombie’s reputation and even his legend would be renewed, and that was good for everyone. Knowledge was vital in the occult world. Ignorance could kill.

The world changed too quickly. Invention brought hope, but time eroded man’s wisdom like sandcastles in the tide. Right after the failed Salem task in 1914, every cultist within 300 miles had recognized them on sight and treated them with respect, if only as a matter of self-preservation. Everyone understood the risk. If just one person didn’t understand the consequences of their actions—if just one person killed the Baron—so many would die.

The legends were numerous and terrifying. Entire kingdoms had been overthrown by invincible hands. Royal courts had been cleared, armies scattered, boats sunk, fields burned and cults literally strangled to death, one throat at a time.

Of course, the Zombie was a great friend. The Baron couldn’t imagine spending the centuries without him. Still, he was also the Zombie’s conscience, and it frightened any man of good sense that within twenty-five years, a new generation came along and forgot all the lessons that their predecessors had learned with blood. They doomed themselves to repeat the mistakes of the past, to rediscover the threats of cultic legend.

One could only trust that the next generation and their new ideas would somehow improve upon the old. Any other belief would lead to cynicism and despair.

He turned to the Zombie, who was lost in his own particular form of introspection. The partition window was shut, so they could have a quiet conversation. “Thank you for sparing Enzu’s life, my friend. We need allies in New York, and he’ll remember your mercy.”

The Zombie roused. He had a serious expression, suggesting a rich internal conflict that he would honestly claim wasn’t there. “I’m glad I didn’t kill him,” he admitted softly, “but I won’t spare everyone that threatens you. Remember that.”

“Of course. The Pact keeps me alive.”

The Zombie nodded solemnly, satisfied with that answer. “Honestly, it’s enough that I half-killed him.”

“Why’s that?”

“There’ll be people lining up to yell at him for hitting you. Nobody would be thinking about that if he was dead.” The Zombie leaned towards the Baron. “Changing tracks, who are you planning on talking to at the Temple? Is it Jacono? You think he was made?”

“Yeah, Jacono,” the Baron said. “I’m guessing New York assigned him as part of the team to scuttle the boat.”

“I figure someone would’ve mentioned that.”

The Baron shrugged. “Think about it. He had Naval Reserve tattoos, but they said he was in the war, so he must’ve deployed in the Pacific theater. It only really occurred to me after Mario described his personality. They acted like he was a bastard, but they kept him around.”

“He sounded like a piece of shit,” the Zombie said.

“That’s the thing. All else being equal, Tomasso would’ve fired Jacono and shipped him off to some backwater burg to watch people cut dope for nickels on the hour, but he didn’t, so yeah, I’m thinking he was a made man for Tammany and the Cosa Nostra both.”

In the occult sense, a made man was someone granted enough prestige to wish for the hereafter—to go to the gods when they died. A portion of those lucky few would be the children of nobility like the young Osman. The rest would be zealot-soldiers for the New York cult, and Jacono fit that model to the letter. Relatively speaking, these made men were rare, but they were valuable for their secular combat skills and fearlessness through faith.

“But why would he be working the boat job?” the Zombie asked.

“Any vassal cult would’ve had at least one made man on hand during an important task. They can report back if everyone dies.”

“True.”

“The rest is just guesswork, but you heard what Mario said. A man on cocaine shot someone in broad daylight, and the victim didn’t expect it to happen. Sounds like a deal gone bad.”

“I admit, it is suspicious.”

“And we have the dead man’s name, so I’m going to follow it up, see if he has anything to say. Assuming he was made, this is our best shot.”

“Assuming he was made,” the Zombie agreed.

If Jacono were a made man, then they were in some sense lucky that his evil had earned him an unjust and undeserved reward. There weren’t any other obvious sources for information about the task to scuttle the ship, and Jacono had died today. The best time to question his spirit was now, while he’d still be capable of caring about this world.

About a week after death, most dead could barely muster attention for anyone except friends, family, and loved ones. And after a month? The dead rarely responded then, and if they did, they were supremely disinterested in the affairs of the living.

Nobody was sure why inhabitants of the hereafter quickly abandoned their emotional investments in this mortal coil. Every cult had their own explanation, most of which boiled down to the belief that paradise lay beyond death, and it was bigger and better and even more real than this world. A few believed cynically that it was a draining darkness, barely preferable to the simple oblivion that awaited those who didn’t wish for salvation, but these people tended to remain quiet. Being outed as a heretic was a quick way to lose your cultic ties.

Nobody would ever know the truth because the dead never spoke about the experience of death, the nature of the gods, or the nature of the hereafter. Neophytes often asked them, but the dead simply didn’t respond, and nobody knew if they could even hear the questions.

Death kept its mysteries.

Still, the Baron was hopeful. There was no other reason the Cosa Nostra would’ve tolerated or trusted a cold-blooded killer like Jacono unless he was proven to be an unwavering devotee of the cult. Murderers in-general were a liability if they didn’t have loyalty.

Sometimes it bothered the Baron to know that he worked on behalf of criminal organizations with large body counts, but his discomfort was often far less important than the job. In his heart, he was selecting the lesser of two evils, and even the most virtuous man had to act with the tools at hand or stand aside while the secular world careened towards nuclear Doomsday. Compromise wasn’t equivalent to the approval of moral evil; it was the recognition that the path with the most possible good inevitably allowed for a small degree of bad.

He hadn’t yet found a better way to live, and he couldn’t abide fleeing to a hermitage. His conscience wouldn’t let him, knowing he had the means and resources to shift the world towards a greater ontological good. He’d never sit back and watch civilization die in nuclear fire.

After paying the fare, the Baron and the Zombie were dropped off outside the 8th Street Bookstore. Just inside the entrance, the young Osman was standing by a rack of popular magazines, looking vaguely dazed. Recognition of the Baron didn’t bring him any relief, but he seemed eager to talk and opened his mouth the moment they were inside.

“It’s been busy,” Osman said. “They’re dividing up the… trash.”

The Zombie grinned for the first time since they’d left the East River. “Did they divide it with a bonesaw? Or was someone picking at the gristle with a steak knife?”

Osman looked distressed. He was taking the Zombie seriously, like a dull-witted audience shocked by dark humor. He implicitly believed that because he took the world seriously, it would always take him seriously as well.

“We’re not here to work on the disposal,” the Baron said. “We need to get back into the temple, and I need to report to the Greenwich Oracle. Is he here?”

“Maurice? I haven’t seen him leave. Here, I’ll unlock the door for you.”

The Zombie picked up a copy of Amazing Stories off the display and sniffed the glossy cover noisily. Osman hesitated. The Zombie laughed.

“Why are your clothes torn up?” Osman asked him.

“I was shot and stabbed.” The Zombie reached into a pants pocket and pulled out a dime. “Here, ring me up for the sci-fi rag.”

Osman held out his palm, and the Zombie dropped the dime daintily and started for the temple door. Osman hurried along to let them up, and after fumbling with the keys, he had the door open. A shout came down the stairs.

“Who is it?” Porter yelled. “We’re closed up here.” The tall cultist came running down the steps. “Gods damnit Osman, you can’t open the door for anyone.”

“It’s the Zombie,” the neophyte said.

Porter came into view. “Oh! Oh—good on you, Osman. You’re learning.”

“They need to speak with Maurice—”

“Yeah, send ‘em up, lock the door after us.” Porter waved them in.

The temple was running double security, a sensible move after an unexpected death. Likely they’d wrap the pieces of Jacono in trash bags and carry them down a fire escape in the back, but until then, they had to keep watch over the main entrance.

The Baron and Zombie followed Porter up the steps.

The cultist paused at the top landing and said, “Fair warning, Baron. They’re butchering the dead guy.”

“Right in the middle of the temple hall?” the Baron asked.

“They’ve completed all the funeral rites already. It’s easier, I guess.”

Funeral rites could mean anything from a classic Christian rite to a completely cultic ritual. If Jacono was a made man, they’d be honoring his corpse as the vehicle that carried his soul from labor to labor until he’d earned enough prestige to buy salvation.

“What creed was Jacono?” the Baron asked.

“Is that the dead man? I don’t know. They’re just doing the standard New York stuff. They put a penny in his mouth.” Porter opened the door at the top of the stairs, but closed his eyes and turned away. He wasn’t interested in seeing a man broken down, and the Baron could guess why. There was something unwholesome about the similarity of human flesh and raw pork. The Baron entered the hall and shut the door after the Zombie was through. Porter remained on guard.

The corpse was already in pieces on the nearest table. A tidy old man in an apron was sawing at stiff joints on dismembered legs. The rest of the body was fortunately nestled in black plastic. Jacono had spent hours bleeding out; his meat was mostly dry, but the butcher’s waistline was brushed with the slightest smear of ruddy darkness, and the cleaver was greasy. Nobody else stood around the table, at least not while he performed this thankless deed.

“Who are you?” the butcher asked.

“I’m the Baron d’Holbach. This is the Zombie. We’re looking for the local Oracle. We can identify the dead man.”

The old man pointed with the cleaver like a steel flag. “He’s at his desk.”

“Thanks.” Notably, the butcher didn’t ask for Jacono’s name. He simply didn’t care. After dozens of disposals, it’d be easy to stop caring. He was the criminal equivalent of a medical examiner, professional and practiced. Beneath his hands, there wasn’t a dead person—there was only the work, the orderly breakdown and eventual cremation of inconvenient flesh.

They followed the aisle up and down the varying levels to the Oracle’s desk at the end of the row. The Greenwich Oracle, Maurice, was carefully writing in his record book with his fountain pen. Beautiful calligraphy spread across the page, a summary of recently completed tasks in the neighborhood and the rough value of prestige awarded. The chilly smell of alcohol rose from the fresh ink. He glanced up at them. “Baron.” He returned to the page.

The Baron took a seat at the desk without waiting for an invitation. The Zombie stood behind him, folding over the cover of the magazine and reading quietly. Maurice was closed in now, forcibly concentrating on the task at hand; either he’d shut down after the butchery started, distancing himself from the morbid reality in his temple, or he’d caught word of the Zombie’s assault on the meeting hall and felt vaguely responsible. Maybe both.

“The dead man’s last name is Jacono,” the Baron said.

Maurice frowned at his pages. “Yes, Tomasso called us with the news, and then the High Oracle called after him. You can imagine the conversations I’ve had.”

“Ah, of course.”

Maurice looked up, holding the pen nib away from the paper. “I believe you said we would share information for our mutual benefit.”

“Which is why I’m here,” the Baron said.

“You didn’t tell me that you’d attack our vassals.”

“I didn’t have to.” The Baron placed his hands on the table. “It’s part of our deal with the High Oracle. Cultists in New York territory are obligated to talk with us—even vassals are—and we’re allowed to enforce that agreement without any complaints from New York.”

Maurice frowned. “I understand, and the vassals brought it on themselves, but I want you to understand something in return. We can’t fully control them, and it takes effort to moderate them. The High Oracle himself is going to spend all afternoon on the phone.”

The Baron could sense the Oracle’s frustration. He didn’t want any involvement in ongoing political conflicts with New York vassals; he was implicitly pleading for the Baron to own the blowback of that morning’s events. “We can handle any consequences,” the Baron insisted. “The only thing I need from New York is a general reminder of the Zombie’s Pact.”

“Oh, we’re reminding them, Baron! We are!” He gestured towards a wall with a pen, presumably towards Tammany itself. “A dozen Tammany operators are going to be calling all afternoon, flapping their gums at errand boys. Everyone is going to hear that you’re back.”

“Good,” the Zombie said, his only contribution to the conversation so far.

“Thank you,” the Baron added more kindly.

Maurice shrugged. “Thank the High Oracle, then do him a favor. He told me to ask you to lay low till tomorrow morning.”

The Baron grimaced. “You can ask, but I’m not inclined to do it.”

The Oracle finally set down his pen, aghast. “Why wouldn’t you?”

The Baron couldn’t say that they were under time constraints—that’d reveal too much about their mission—but he could make an emotional appeal. “There’s six good working hours left in the day. If we need to talk to people, I want to interview them soon. Not tomorrow.”

Maurice squinted through his thick glasses, as if he’d suddenly developed a new level of astigmatism. “They won’t open their doors, Baron. Not while rumor goes round about Tomasso’s boys getting whipped in his own clam bar.”

“They should—”

“Yes, they should!” Maurice interrupted. “But you’ve already flexed your muscles, and we need time, Baron! We’re making calls, changing minds! We want people to know they should open doors before you go knocking again. Why on Earth wouldn’t you give us that time?”

Shit. There was no answer the Baron couldn’t give that would seem suspiciously stubborn. He supposed this was the cost of a forced entry this morning, an afternoon of lost work. “Fine,” he agreed. “After we’re done here, we’ll head to the Biltmore and lay low until tomorrow. Then it’s back to work. No complaints?”

The Greenwich Oracle relaxed. “No complaints from us, Baron. I’ll make sure Gagliano knows you’re doing him the favor.” He cast a meaningful look at the Zombie, who ignored him and continued reading. After a moment of indecision, he returned his attention to the Baron. “Did you learn anything important that the vassals might’ve left out of the report?”

The Baron nodded exactly once. “I think Jacono was a made man.”

“Hmm… Cosa Nostra or?”

“Both Sicilian and New York cult. The locals hated him, but the boss kept him on board. He sounded like a psychopath.”

Maurice leaned back in his chair, looking up towards the strip of sky peeking through the ridgelights. “I hadn’t heard anything about that. Jacono isn’t a name I recognize though. Who inducted him, assuming he was made?”

“I don’t know. I’m not much of an expert on the Five Families. Someone said Luciano?”

“That’s a secular family, but Luciano doesn’t have many of their men in the cult. Jacono might be Lucchese; that’d make him one of Gagliano’s hitmen. Then again, Tweed was recruiting veterans after the war and assigning them to various vassals. It’s hard to say without checking the records. You think he already had the afterlife?”

The Baron rapped his knuckles on the desktop. “Exactly. It’s all speculation, but it fits. Either that or Boss Tomasso was holding onto a firecracker with his bare hands.”

“Well, it’d explain a lot about the murder, but it asks more questions than it answers.” Maurice steepled his fingers under his chin. “Revenge killing?”

The Zombie flipped down his magazine. “It’s a coverup. Based on the story I heard at the docks, Jacono knew something that he wasn’t supposed to tell.”

“What do you think he knew?” Maurice asked.

The Zombie’s answer was to flip the magazine back up and ignore the Oracle.

Maurice looked to d’Holbach. “Do you have any thoughts on this?”

“Not yet, but I came back here to speak with him. If he’s in the hereafter, he might be able to identify his killer or at least the motive for his murder.”

“And you think he’ll listen to you?” Maurice asked.

“I’d hope so. We’re currently investigating his death.”

“And you’re making the wish?” Maurice clarified.

“Yes,” the Baron said. “I want to remember the answers easily, if that’s fine with you?”

That was a sentiment Maurice would understand entirely. Whenever the gods added knowledge to the wisher’s mind, it was deeply inserted and took months to forget. An Oracle could reliably recall details about tasks given years ago. The record book was almost unnecessary, but it served as a public way of preserving occult history, and in the rare cases where tasks remained outstanding, the records could be accessed without spending the Oracle’s time recalling what was and wasn’t already completed.

The Oracle opened a drawer and pulled out a sheet of standard line paper and a metal ballpoint. “All right. I’m ready when you are.”

“Zombie,” the Baron asked, “any suggestions?”

The invincible man ignored the question in a typically rude way, talking about anything else: “Should I read about the Empire of Women or The World of Whispering Wings?”

“They both sound terrible.”

“Empire of Women it is,” the Zombie said.

The Baron laughed to himself. “He’s got nothing to add,” he said to Maurice. “Let’s get started.”

“Here’s hoping Jacono is a made man,” Maurice said.

“If he isn’t, that’s still good to know.”

Several considerations informed the Baron’s actions in the temple.

First and foremost, this wasn’t an expensive wish. By tradition, it was incredibly cheap, one of the world’s few twelve-hour wishes. Its restrictions and rules were widely believed to be the source of its low price, but the Baron usually regarded it as the occult equivalent of a party favor. It proved the hereafter was real in some sense, and it ensured that people were emotionally invested in the system of prestige and in completing otherwise awful tasks. They were on the hook, searching for immortality beyond the prison of their flesh.

Still, even if it was cheap, it wasn’t a simple wish. There were three important rules to speaking with the dead. First, one could only speak with those who’d wished to go to the gods when they died. Second, the dead couldn’t communicate their own condition, the nature of death, or the nature of the gods. Finally, the dead could only be contacted within the confines of a true temple.

These restrictions were ancient, older than any cultic tradition, and often believed to be part of the original ruleset. No explanations had ever been provided or learned from the gods. Most cultic traditions asserted that the divine mystery of death was an indescribable necessity, both purposeful and ineffable. Reality depended upon it, they said, like a building on a foundation. It supported the entire affair and was hidden by it. To inspect it directly would require the shattering of the world.

The Baron hated that logic. It was totally arbitrary, explaining only a lack of facts.

His personal guess was that the rules had been implemented when burials were ritualized, sometime in the Lower Paleolithic between 30,000 and 300,000 years ago. Whether the rules prompted the rituals or the rituals prompted the rules, he didn’t know. Maybe both changes were the result of some other incident, a discovery or a Fall.

It didn’t matter. No Fall preceding the Zombie’s was on record, and the rules about death were written in verse on the same Akkadian tablets that described the invincible man. Nothing older remained. The secular world had ground it to dust long before even the Zombie was born, and without evidence, there was no scientific point to occult theories. They were more like philosophy. And always, the dead remained silent about their fate.

The Baron could have snuck in and wished to contact the dead by himself, but he wanted to control what Jacono told the world. If Jacono had anything to do with the ship’s scuttling, and if the ship was related to Nagy or the Cat, then the Baron wanted to censor the salient details before they were jotted down in New York’s account. Meeting Maurice face-to-face was the best way to gain New York’s full trust in an incomplete report. Making this wish was a rare bid for control over information taken from the dead.

“I wish to speak with the dead man Jacono,” said Baron d’Holbach.

There was a sense of sudden potential, like static charge before a lightning bolt. Then the feeling drained out of the temple through a point somewhere overhead, and it pulled with it the smallest part of d’Holbach’s prestige. In its wake, the opposite feeling reigned, a sensory vacuum drawing the vitality out of the world like a dark singularity. He was touching the hereafter.

“He’s here,” the Baron said.

Maurice uttered quickly, as in prayer: “Gods, grant us grace as we work, for we work to earn grace.”

Jacono was there. The dead man wanted to know: Who spoke?

“I’m Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach. I’m the Philosopher.”

Thoughts formed in the Baron’s head: Jacono wasn’t interested in strangers, even those with famous names. There was nobody he expected to speak with him now. He wasn’t loved in life. Now life was over.

“He isn’t interested in talking with us. Jacono, there are two men here to listen. One is the Oracle of Greenwich Village. The other is the Zombie.”

Living myths deserved no more of Jacono’s attention than anything else. Life was hardly interesting before. It was tiresome and painful and filled with alcohol and women that made him hurt in the morning and crave them in the evening until he had them again. Life was uninteresting now, and Jacono didn’t want to think about living anymore.

“Jacono, would you answer a couple of questions?”

Questions were answered out of memory. Jacono didn’t want to remember.

“He was unhappy with life.”

Maurice scratched out the Baron’s words in shorthand. “You should ask him your questions immediately. Angry souls don’t stay long.”

“Jacono, do you know the name of your killer?” the Baron asked.

Jacono didn’t know the man who murdered him. That was one question.

“He doesn’t know. Do you know why you were killed?”

Jacono had been on the SS John G. Paines on the night it was sunk. His killer didn’t want Jacono to speak with any other survivors. That was two questions.

“Maurice, was the ship they scuttled the SS John G. Paines?”

“That’s the one. It was an old Liberty Ship.” A Liberty Ship was a rudimentary cargo ship built for use in World War II.

The Baron reported the obvious conclusion: “Then Jacono was part of the team contracted to sink the boat. He was killed to keep him from tipping off his friends, the other survivors of the task.”

“Tipping off what?” Maurice asked.

The Baron asked Jacono, “Why was the killer afraid you’d speak with the survivors?”

Jacono could’ve spoken with them about the task or the deaths of the cultists. He could’ve warned them that his killer was searching for something; if they’d picked up anything on the boat, Jacono’s word could’ve sent them into hiding. That was three questions, one more than promised. This interrogation didn’t interest Jacono. He wanted to leave.

“The others might’ve gone into hiding,” the Baron said. “The killer will be looking for the rest of the survivors. Jacono, do you know what the killer wants?”

There was an artifact called the Cat o’ Nine Lives. Jacono hadn’t heard of it before, but his killer had expected it to be on the boat.

“He’s not sure,” the Baron reported to Maurice. “Jacono, do you know the names of the other survivors? How many are there?”

Jacono was confused. He’d just named the killer’s desire. Why did the Baron lie? Why did the Baron hide the true answer, given to him by the dead?

“I’m talking about the survivors of the boat task, Jacono. We need their names.”

Why did he omit the facts? Why did he twist Jacono’s meaning to his own ends? This was appalling. A monster called a man back only to ignore his words. A fool ensured that the truth would be forgotten as soon as it was known.

“It’s very important,” the Baron insisted to Jacono. “If we figure this out, we can get justice for your death. We can restore the balance of power. Understand?”

The balance of power?

The Baron waited a long time, as if listening to a speech. “I agree, Jacono, this is a hard world for the living, but we can’t become fatalistic. The threat of nuclear war isn’t a death sentence. Life will go on, and you can still help.”

Was the Baron suggesting that Jacono’s knowledge could prevent an atomic war?

“That’s right, Jacono. Exactly that. We need the names of the other survivors.”

Seven were sent on the task. Three survived, including Jacono. The other two were Bettino Lucci and Rufino Piazzi.

“There were two other survivors from the boat. Bettino Lucci and Rufino Piazzi.”

Jacono hoped he hadn’t made a mistake, but it wasn’t really his business anymore. Let the living sort out of the lies. He was finished forever.

“He wants to go,” the Baron said, “I think for good.”

Jacono departed, letting go of whatever connections fettered him to the living world, and the hole closed up. The ambience flooded back into the void and filled the temple hall with the fullness of the day. Nothing physically changed, but everything felt more real again.

“He’s gone,” the Baron reported. “Maurice, did you write it all down?”

A few more pen scratches ended with a tap on the paper—a period. “Everything you said, word for word.”

The Baron rubbed his scalp. He could feel the dark stubble like sandpaper. “I’m certain the killer will look for the other survivors, and if he found Jacono, he can probably find them too. Do you know who has records to check if Lucci and Piazzi were also made men?”

Maurice tapped the butt of the ballpoint against the table. “Tammany Hall keeps a register of cultists, mainly to track who does and who doesn’t have a guarantee for the hereafter yet. I could call the archivist, but he won’t have their addresses.”

“Would you at least know which temple they frequent? If Tammany have records showing where they completed tasks, could someone find them in a sane amount of time?”

“I don’t know, but I can ask. I’ll have to make the call though. Tammany won’t want to hear from you again today.” He glanced at the Zombie. “Either of you.”

“That’s fine.” The Baron stood up. “When do you think you’ll have the info?” If they found the survivors quickly, they could potentially save lives and take down Jacono’s killers simultaneously, all while making massive forward progress in tracking down the Cat.

Maurice checked a pocket watch. The Baron was strangely impressed. The Oracle’s antiquarian costume even extended to his timepiece, as if Maurice had ransacked his grandfather’s closet. “They’ll have to call someone in to unlock the archives. Honestly, it’ll be tomorrow morning at the earliest. Rush or not, there are thousands of file folders to search by hand, and the archivist usually runs a response time measured in weeks. That’s assuming they’re even on record. Most of the cultists don’t bother to register with Tammany.”

The Zombie grinned over his reading material. “Organization isn’t their strong point.”

Maurice frowned but said nothing.

“Once you have something to share,” the Baron said, “would you drop a message at the Biltmore’s front desk under Dufraine? We can help each other here.”

“Sure,” Maurice said, “I am curious though. We haven’t posted a bounty or offered a reward yet. Why are you interested in Jacono’s death? Really?”

The Baron could answer this question easily, since the truth and the lie were almost exactly the same. “We came to the city looking for well-paid work, and that means sticking our nose into other people’s business whenever it might lead to a payout.” The Baron rested his hands on the back of the chair. “There’s a personal angle too.”

“Always the virtuous atheist,” the Zombie muttered.

“What’s that?” Maurice asked.

d’Holbach answered, “This is a murder. Someone has to make sure justice is served, and I’m honestly afraid that New York will satisfy itself with a sacrificial scapegoat, finding someone to kill instead of finding the actual killer.”

Maurice laughed. “That’s rather offensive.”

“I’m not saying you’re heartless,” the Baron replied warmly. “I’m saying New York’s cultic system is too big to truly care. It’ll want an ending to a story—not the actual story, understand?”

The Oracle shook his head. “I don’t know how you maintain your mix of cynicism and idealism.”

“I was there for the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, and World War II. I believe in absolute morality, Maurice, but even a humanist like myself has to admit that recognizing evil doesn’t resolve it, and there’s only so much good that can be done in a day.”

“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do something?” Maurice smiled at his own joke and stood up behind his desk. “I’m going to my apartment to make the call. Someone should search the records tonight.”

“Thank you.”

“Is there anything else I can help you with before you leave?”

“No, you’ve done more than enough.”

“One thing, before you go.” Maurice adjusted the straps on his suspenders. “I’m going to have to tell Meister Schuler about everything we learned here. He was asking about the boat task, and Jacono was working on it.”

“I have no objections,” the Baron said, flashing a well-rehearsed smile. No other reactions were acceptable at that instant. Worry would be the surest sign of guilt.

“Good. I don’t think Schuler will mind your attention on the case, but if he ever wants you out of the way, please step aside. The Diviner isn’t bound by any agreements.”

“Of course,” the Baron said agreeably. “Have a good evening.”

He left with the Zombie in tow. When they passed the butcher, the man raised his blade in mild salute. There was nothing left of Jacono’s body but a pile of carefully wrapped packages to be tossed into an industrial incinerator. They waved back, one set of hired hands to another, and left through the door.

Porter unlocked the stairwell to let them out. “Did you talk to the dead man?” he asked the Baron.

“That’s right. He was a made man,” the Baron replied.

Porter paused before leading them down. “Did he have any complaints about how we’re handling him?”

“Not one. He only told me what happened, then he moved on.”

“So he was at peace with our rites?”

The Baron doubted that Jacono cared about the treatment of his corpse, but as a gentleman, the Baron could answer Porter’s question. “I think the Temple has treated him well.”

The cultist seemed satisfied. “Thanks, Baron.”

“You’re welcome.”

They descended onto the stairwell, and Porter closed the top door behind them. They knocked at the bottom, and Osman opened their exit onto the bookstore.

“Already done?” the neophyte asked.

The Baron smiled. “We’ll have the information we need by tomorrow.”

The Zombie waved his magazine towards the young man. “Osman, quick question.”

“Yes, Zombie?”

“Would you try to steal the secret of immortality from the Empire of Women?”

Osman adjusted the collar of his shirt to try to cover the errant tufts of body hair that snuck out along the edges. “There’s an Empire of Women?”

The Zombie half-folded the magazine over, raised it over Osman’s head, and gently bopped him. Osman flinched like he’d been smashed with a tack hammer. The Zombie laughed loudly, and other people stopped to look at him. “Only in books!” he said to the impromptu audience. “There’s only an Empire of Women in the printed word.”

Osman didn’t seem to understand why that was funny.

The Baron didn’t have time to explain it. “Don’t think too hard about it. That stuff is practically pornography to him.”

“It’s wonderfully unreal,” the Zombie said.

“We may come by later Osman,” the Baron said. “Keep out of trouble.”

“Yes, Baron,” Osman said. “Have a good afternoon.”

Once they were out on the street and far from the bookstore, they stopped in the shade of a sycamore set into a sidewalk planter, and the Baron expressed the worried thought that’d been caught in his throat ever since the name “Schuler” had been spoken aloud. “I fucked up, friend.”

The Zombie raised a dark eyebrow. “How?”

“I forgot about the Diviner, and Maurice is about to give Tammany enough info to put Schuler on our trail. If he starts to get suspicious, we’re not equipped to stop him.”

“Maybe. I’ve tussled with Jackson Davis—”

“He wasn’t lucid, and he still knocked you through walls for a laugh. Meister Schuler is clear-headed—he’s practically sane! Starting tomorrow, we need to be fast and careful, otherwise we’ll be fighting a wizard in hostile territory, and we will be fucked.”

Author’s Note:

He forgot about the Diviner, and even the invincible man won’t repel that threat.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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June 29, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

The neighborhood near the docks was an old memory of prosperity. There were too many businesses and very few homes. It’d once survived on an itinerant population of hungry sailors, starving for food, booze, and sex with young women. They’d puked money on command if it opened a bottle or a pair of legs. Now they’d moved on, and their desperate, foolish paychecks had gone with them.

Even in a city as densely populated as New York—even though property was in demand only a few blocks away—there were empty places with windows and doors boarded shut. Decades might pass before there were enough people to muster a recovery, and it’d be some time yet before immigrants were drawn there by the promise of cheap housing.

So the cavities of empty structures remained, standing out like missing teeth in a smile. People naturally avoided the area, fearful that someone might demand their wallets if they didn’t want their jaws to meet the same gap-toothed fate. Their concerns weren’t entirely misplaced. This was the urban hinterland, and barbarians camped there, well-organized and entrenched, the Cosa Nostra.

Governments called them the Sicilian and American Mafia, terms twisted out of the word mafioso in the 1860s. It meant “swagger” and outlined the roughest boundaries of their ideals. Members were aggressive, fearless, even bullying, but mafioso wasn’t what they called themselves. They didn’t have a real name. In the presence of fellow members, they said they were part of the “cosa nostra,” Italian for “our thing,” the only name the organization needed—the only one they effectively used. To them, every other name was an outsider’s fiction. 

About ten minutes into their search, the Baron spotted the Mercury Eight exactly two blocks from the intersection. It was parked in a narrow alley beside a clam bar. The front window hosted a sign scribbled on butcher paper—Closed for Emergency.

“During lunch hours, no less. This is definitely the place,” the Baron said. “Hit the back entrance. You can talk us in through the door.”

They went around through the narrow, grease-lined alley until they found a heavy wooden door with a classic speakeasy slot. The area smelled like rancid fries; someone had tossed out a canful of melted animal fat against the opposite building, and it was congealed in yellow blobby streaks. It was doubtful that anyone had ever used this entrance during prohibition, but the sliding steel panel didn’t look that old either. It was probably used to safely deliver small packages without unlocking the door.

After a couple of deep, relaxing breaths, the Baron knocked for the Zombie.

A heartbeat later, the panel snapped open and remained empty. Nobody could be heard moving inside, nor could anyone be seen through the dark gap. There was a blank plaster wall just across from the door. The Zombie leaned forward and whispered, “We need inside.”

One eye swept in to peer from the gap, small and piggish under a meaty brow. The Zombie punched the door over the slot—a tremendous wooden thud—and the eye jerked back like he’d been socked in the face.

“Beat it!” the man inside shouted.

“I’m the Zombie. You can’t keep me out.”

The panel snapped shut. They could hear the jingle of a door chain being set.

“I’ll pull out the steel with my bare fingers!” the Zombie shouted through the door.

No response.

The Zombie mouthed to d’Holbach: Now?

The Baron nodded, grimacing with anticipation.

The Zombie straightened his fingers, pulled back his arm to strike, and then slung his whole body forward. His weight was behind the finger jab. He was striking with enough force to crush digits, shatter bones, hemorrhage and traumatize against the strength of steel.

He hit the slide panel with a slight ding and stopped motionless.

The Baron burst into raucous laughter.

“Oh come on.” The Zombie pulled back and looked up at the sky. “Come on!”

“That one is going in the notebook!”

“Zero momentum. Zero!”

“That’s the best outcome this month. Total anticlimax!”

The Zombie readied himself again. “The second time is the charm.”

“Watch out behind the door!” the Baron shouted joyously.

The Zombie slung himself forward again, this time with less skill or coherency. Chaos and sabotaged coordination were all that he embodied, limbs flying forward at bad angles, a man throwing himself to perish against the door. Physics demanded a catastrophe of ruined joints, torn tissues, fragmented bones, and black contusions of pooling blood.

Instead, the door exploded inward like someone had shot it with a Civil War cannon, and big slabs of its fragmented mass slammed into a large man in a leather jacket. The Zombie tumbled in without stopping, head going down and heels up, moving as if the wood were no more substantial than air. His victim slapped like a side of beef against the wall behind the door, head literally cracking the plaster and instantly blacking out, while the Zombie landed like an asteroid on a tiled kitchen floor, bouncing and smashing like he was made inconsistently of rubber and lead, throwing up splashes of ceramic chips and powdered grout.

For an instant, the mess rained down around him like someone dropping-kicking a dozen plates of fine china. Everyone in a block radius would’ve heard his entrance.

“I’m home!” the Zombie shouted at the top of his lungs, before the unconscious man tumbled onto him like a two hundred pound sack of flour and smashed him again chin first into the tiles. There was a nasty crack of damaged flooring, and the Zombie rolled the man off his shoulders while laughing wildly. “Where’s my fucking bowler?” he yelled. “Ah, fuck it!”

“Still alive?” the Baron shouted, asking about the man behind the door.

“Breathing!” the Zombie yelled. He scrambled to his feet, finding himself in a short hall adjoining a kitchen on his left and a meeting hall on his right.

Someone came from the right side holding an old Beretta like a goddamn Italian stereotype. The Baron hunkered down, moving fast enough to thump the outside wall. The armed man was tall, lanky, frightened—when he saw the debris, he shouted something incoherent and fired twice. The first bullet struck the Zombie in the shoulder in a burst of frayed nylon. The second one hit him just below the eye. He blinked and jerked back.

The half-smashed bullet just rolled off his cheek and fell to the floor.

“Bare hands!” the Zombie yelled. He charged the armed thug.

“He’s the Zombie!” the Baron roared from behind cover.

The tall man started emptying his shots at the Zombie. Some of the bullets missed, one of them smashed into dust, and one must’ve disappeared on one side and reappeared on the other before popping a stock pot in the kitchen. Then the fifth and last round deflected at an impossible angle, flying out the door and shooting the brick wall across the alley.

“Fuck!” the tall man shouted.

The Zombie headbutt him in the chest, knocking him cleanly off his feet and flat onto his back with a meaty slap. He emitted a miserable noise halfway between a groan and the hiss of steam escaping. He rolled over and started curling up.

“Be careful damnit!” the Baron shouted. “If you hurt me, he’ll kill you!”

At this point, the Baron couldn’t follow, but the Zombie knew what to do. He skipped over the prostrate man and into the backroom, where the rest of the Cosa Nostra would be hiding. A table spread low between a hanging lamp, and six men were seated around it, all facing towards the back door. Three were already armed.

“Hi—” the Zombie began.

Their guns spoke for them, barking out a cavalcade of fear and hate.

“Morons!” the Zombie yelled, even as they blasted him and the faux wood paneling behind him. They weren’t listening, not to him at least. Only to their own gunshots and adrenaline.

The Zombie rushed the nearest armed man on the left. He was packing a revolver, down on one knee and aiming; he must’ve practiced at the range. One, two, three bullets in the center of mass. The Zombie felt one round rolling down the inside of his shirt. He seized the revolver and the next shot went off in his hands, fragmenting, reflecting and peppering the shooter’s legs. Then the Zombie had the gun; he ripped it out of the man’s hands, and he threw it in his face. The shooter yelped, then dropped down off his chair, grabbing at the minor flesh wounds on his calves. From this moment forward, it’d be a rout.

Anyone who wasn’t armed was hitting the tile floor or going under the table. Two others were still shooting. The Zombie looked for the nearest object at hand; there was a glass ashtray. He picked up and pitched it overhand towards the head of the table.

The target tried to flinch away but got thumped in the side of the neck for his trouble and went down yowling.

The one last armed man threw down his empty Beretta and went for a shoulder holster with a snubby magnum.

“Two guns?” the Zombie asked.

The answer was a cocked hammer and a deafening boom. The Zombie grabbed the edge of the table; it was oak, far too heavy to lift, but he arched over in a way that should’ve pulled his back if the table didn’t flip. It whipped edge up and over towards the shooter; two more rounds punched holes through the rising surface in gouts of pale splinters. Then the table hit the man like he was swatted with a paddle, and he flipped back over the chair behind him and landed in a heap, screaming bloody murder the whole way.

“Anyone else?” the Zombie yelled.

One of the men rose up behind him and tried stabbing him in the kidney. Once, twice, the blade stopped dead. Then Zombie turned and decked the man in the ribs hard enough to play his lungs like the drums. Whump—the assailant went down gasping and clutching his side.

“Fuck,” the Zombie said, feeling the loose flaps of wool across his back. “You lacerated a perfectly salvageable jacket.”

No answer to that except for coughing, wheezing, and wordless pained whining. The fight was over, and the casualty count was in. One brained behind the door, one curled up on the floor, one with minor wounds on his leg, one looking pissed with a hand on his neck, one collapsed beside the toppled table, and one sinking to his knees and gasping for breath.

Only two people hadn’t fought; one was very old, with loose skin collecting on his collar like a rooster’s wattle. The other was skinny and mouse-like, with a tiny mouth and broad Mickey ears.

“Are they done?” the Baron shouted through the door.

“Out of ammo,” the Zombie called back. “Or down.”

“Don’t reload!” the Baron yelled. “Hold your fire! I’m not invincible!”

The Zombie smiled congenially. “If anyone hurts him, I will kill you.”

His opponents were sitting around in silent, wide-eyed shock, panting with discharged firearms in their hands, uncocked and impotent. They would follow the rules.

The Baron walked through the ruined doorway into the back hall, holding his hands over his head. “I’m not armed!” he called out, looking down at their first victim. The door guard was groaning, regaining consciousness quickly. He ought to survive.

“Nobody is moving!” the Zombie shouted from deeper in the building. “You can come in!”

The Baron lowered his hands and stepped daintily past the fallen man. “Please, don’t do anything stupid,” he called ahead. “Don’t aim a gun at me. Don’t shoot.” He came out of the little hall into the meeting room. It was a broad, deep area with old shelves for storing kitchen equipment. It’d long ago been converted to a safe haven for local criminal activity. 

The Zombie was staring down a bundle of injured men. At a single glance, nobody had clearly died, which was encouraging. If they were lucky, this incident would bolster their reputation for the rest of this investigation—if not for several years to come.

“If anyone hurts him,” the Zombie said, running his hand through his hair to make sure it was smoothed, “then I’ll kill everyone here. If he dies? Then that’ll just be the start.”

The Baron stopped beside his friend, meeting the eyes of the oldest mobster in the room. “Hello,” he said kindly. “Are we all calm now? Have we gotten it out of our system?”

The Zombie laughed, answering for the gangsters. “Sure,” he said. “We’re calm, aren’t we boys?”

Including the man who’d blacked out in the hall, there were eight New York cultists in the building. The Baron glanced back at the door guard, who was crawling out of the hall and into the meeting space. “Is he armed?” he asked the crew in the room.

“Yes,” said the old man, scratching his rooster-wattle throat.

“Someone make sure he doesn’t try pulling his gun.”

The tall, lanky man—the first one to shoot at the Zombie—uncurled dutifully, got up, and sidled past the Baron to help the injured door guard get to his feet. After a moment, they walked together, arms over shoulders, back into the room to stand with the rest of their crew.

“Who the fuck are you?” asked the old man.

The Baron nodded. This man acted like the local boss, which meant he almost certainly was. “I’m Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach. Some of you might know me by other names. The Philosopher. The Atheist. Doubting Henry. You can call me the Baron. The man who walked me in is my associate, the Zombie. Next time, do yourselves the courtesy of opening the door.”

The Zombie pulled out his penny knife and whipped it open with a single flick of the wrist. “Want to see a trick?” He grinned manically. Nobody answered.

“I think they do,” the Baron said sternly. This really was a good place to sow the seeds of fear, churned up and soft-minded as the Cosa Nostra were after their beating.

“It’s sharp.” The Zombie proffered his left wrist to the crowd, then jammed down with the knife and started working at the sleeve of the jacket. Several people, including the Baron, flinched at the stab. He got the tip through the sleeve and yanked it outwards from his body twice, slicing the cloth open with a light ripping sound. “Cuts through nylon like nothing. But now…”

The Baron wanted to close his eyes. He couldn’t stand to watch, but he had to. His fearlessness was part of the propaganda. He steeled himself for the next step.

“Keep your eyes peeled folks.” The Zombie pulled up his left eyelid with a finger. Pale, almost white flesh peered out from above the shining orb of his eye. Tiny red vessels forked like blood lightning near the edges. He took the tip of the blade and set it in the corner of the socket, right in the tear duct. Then slowly, he slipped the point of the blade under his eyelid and pushed it up over the ball. The blade’s shape pressed on his skin from the inside, tight against the thin, fragile membrane. The edge cut along his cornea, scraping away tears. He tilted the handle out from his face and slid it in deeper, until the blade had vanished a centimeter beneath his eyelid.

The audience was mortified. Some of them closed their eyes or looked away.

The Zombie gripped the blade tight and twisted hard. There was a loud snap.

“Jesus Christ!” yelled one of the cultists.

The Zombie pulled the remainder of the blade away; its tip was now broken and pinned beneath his left eyelid. He began to laugh.

“Jesus, what the hell?” asked the old man.

Continuing to laugh, the Zombie jammed the broken blade under his right eyelid and twisted violently. There was a click of snapping steel, and another chunk of knife was pinned under his other eyelid like a bad contact. “And for the last act!” he shouted, still blinded by his own blade.

He jammed the stump of the knife into his right ear. “Invincible!” he shouted. The blade stopped dead. “Invincible, invincible!” He stabbed again and again, until it finally and suddenly sank in with a metallic squeal. “Haha, there we go.” He released the handle of the blade and it stuck. “I present to you, perfect invincibility!” He bowed.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” the old man muttered.

“You!” The Zombie pulled out the knife from his ear. The blade was curled over, stamped under pressure into the shape of an ear canal. He threw it at the audience, who scattered back to get out of its way. “Can’t!” He yanked out the bit of blade from under his left eye and flicked it away like a coin. “Win!” So went the other piece, evidence of man’s futility against him. The Zombie bowed again, relishing the show of power.

“Does everyone understand who he is now?” the Baron asked.

There were a few slow nods. A grunted aye. Nobody else spoke for fear of being singled out.

For those who were simply too afraid to ask, the Baron answered the question: “He is the invincible man. The Golem, the Soulless, the Sinner. In this era, he’s the Zombie. Whatever the name, he’s real, and you cannot stop him. By pact, he protects me, for all of my days.”

The crew grew strangely relaxed, going beyond fear into a place of grim acceptance. They waited placidly for instructions or action, maybe even to die.

“Will the cops be coming after the ruckus?” the Baron asked.

“Yeah,” the boss said quietly, “they will.”

“Can you call Tammany to scratch the visit?”

“Yeah,” the boss said, “I can.” He pointed to the thug with the shrapnel-peppered leg. “Bill, go to the front and call the Hall. Tell them to speak with Chief Guccetti. We had an accident, but nobody’s hurt and there’s no damage to anyone’s property. That’s what happened.”

The man rose to his feet slowly, then limped through the kitchen and into the bar beyond.

“What’s your name?” the Baron asked the mob boss.

“Tommaso.”

“Not Anglicized. I respect that.”

“I hear you’re a virtuous man,” Tommaso declared, “and yet you come here and break my things. You wanna tell me why you’re siccing this monster at my door?”

“Do you know the details of the Pact?” the Baron asked.

Tomasso narrowed his eyes. “You have the stage as long as that thing is here, so feel free to enlighten me.”

The Baron saw steel in Tomasso’s answer. He replied plainly: “If I die, the Zombie kills everyone involved and everyone related to them. Your guard didn’t take him seriously.”

“That justified breaking a door?”

The Baron looked genuinely frustrated. “Despite what people think, I’m not the Zombie’s keeper. He keeps me, and the best I can do for the world is be his conscience. I’ll admit, this was more violence than I expected, but I thought it would stop at the door.”

“Good intentions,” Tomasso muttered.

“I’m aware,” the Baron said, “but trust me—you’ve never met a man who values true virtue as much as me, and if you’re a good man too, you’ll do what’s right. In our lives, we all face certain limits and expectations, but the Zombie is different. There’s no force that can stop him, and you’ll never be rid of him. When people don’t believe in him—or think they’re exempt somehow? They risk more than my life or their own. They play with the lives of everyone they’ve ever known and loved. I’m sure you understand.”

“I understand,” Tommaso replied gruffly.

“Good. See that this story spreads beyond this room. Tell everyone what happened when your boys fought the Zombie. The people need to know.”

The Zombie was walking up to each man and staring at them closely, like a man inspecting fine pieces of art with an experienced, almost bored detachment.

“Let’s just be thankful it’s only a door,” the Baron continued, “I can pay to replace that—”

There was a crunch. Fragments of tile broke under a shoe.

The Baron reacted, turning, throwing his arms over his head. He was already on edge and the reaction was well-trained, practiced for one bloody decade in the 19th century. He recognized the new assailant before a sap smashed onto his forearm. His left hand went numb instantly; it was like bumping his funny bone with a tire iron and dipping his hand in bubbling wax, heat and pain and shock.

“Enzu!” the Baron shouted, grabbing at the sap arm with his other hand.

They’d missed Enzu—the cultist who’d come from Tammany Hall. Eight people in the building? No, there were nine, including the one they’d followed here. The Mercury Eight was outside. Enzu must’ve been in the bar making a phone call.

But why attack? He knew better. He knew the Zombie.

The Baron held on for a few bloody seconds before Enzu gave up and kicked out, hitting the Baron in the stomach. It was well-placed—the Baron could feel his intestines jamming up into his diaphragm in a blast of pain and instant nausea. He folded over Enzu’s shoe, tried to grab the ankle instead, but was shoved away, falling ass-first onto the floor.

The Baron gasped for air. Enzu was a dead man—should’ve known better. The Baron had to say something. He squeaked and tried to draw in a breath through icicles in his gut.

The Zombie was charging at an unburdened sprint. There wasn’t any fear of self-harm, falling, or collision. Any of these things would merely make the Zombie more dangerous. The Baron was already out of the way. Enzu had done the Zombie a foolish favor. Enzu, who shouldn’t have to die, was vulnerable. He saw the Zombie coming, and it hardly mattered.

He dropped the sap and reached into his trench coat, revealing a holstered M1911. The quick release was closed. He hadn’t expected to need this. He was slow to pull.

The Zombie slammed into him like a runaway train. They crashed into the wall, and Enzu whoofed as the air exploded out of his broad chest. The first hit had come up safe.

The Zombie backhanded the bearded man once. Enzu was dazed but still aware. The second hit had come up harmful, but not fatal.

Sooner or later, fickle fate would roll against Enzu’s life. The Baron sucked in the scorching air of hell into cramped lungs and coughed, “Don’t!”

With the man pinned to the wall, the Zombie leaned his elbow against Enzu’s throat, grabbed the man’s gun hand, and squeezed with manic, self-harming strength.

Enzu began to scream half-choked, low and gurgling, because his fingers cracked as easily as a steel cigar case. The Zombie leaned in harder.

“Don’t kill him!” the Baron half-shouted, his voice descending into a groan.

The Zombie’s teeth were bared in a fanatic snarl. He threw his weight behind the press against Enzu’s airway. He twisted the man’s broken hand, letting pain push out the old air but stopping him from drawing in the new.

“Zombie!” the Baron yelled, pushing up. “Don’t fucking kill him!”

The Zombie was huffing, shuddering.

Enzu’s eyes were closed. Snot was running from his nose freely and collecting in his mustache. His tongue was visible between his lips, emerging with unswallowed spit dribbling and drooling through his beard and onto the lapels of his trenchcoat.

The Baron got to his knees and grabbed the Zombie’s belt. “Don’t fucking do it.” He tugged. “Don’t fucking kill him.”

The Zombie gave the Baron a tiger’s glance. “He tried…”

He gently shook the Zombie’s waist. “Let him live, god damnit. Don’t fucking kill.”

The Zombie stared Enzu down. He must’ve laid down enough pressure to start a blood choke. Enzu was turning pale and going out, sagging.

“Friend,” the Baron pleaded.

The Zombie scoffed and pulled back his arm, but he didn’t let go of the broken hand, and he kept the weight of his lower body against Enzu, pinning the New York enforcer to the wall. Enzu spent a couple seconds twitching before the blood rushing back into his head was enough to revive him. Then he started coughing horribly, gagging and heaving but not actually vomiting.

The Baron let go of the Zombie’s belt and looked at the others. They were all staring. He raised a palm at them. “Stay there,” he said. “Stay.” He slowly rose to his feet. “Enzu.”

The Zombie spoke first. “Tell me why you struck the Baron.”

“Enzu,” the Baron begged. “Tell him why?”

Enzu recovered slowly, but once he’d had a couple of breaths, he could speak. “I thought you would kill them.” His voice quavered. “I wanted you for a hostage. To save them.” He coughed, grimaced, and closed his eyes. “My hand,” he whispered.

The Baron took a deep breath, trying to clear away any chest pains by letting the air push everything back into place. Nothing was cramping. Nothing was terribly injured. Feeling was seeping back into his left hand, and he could make a fist easily.

“That’s reason enough to kill you,” the Zombie said.

“He’s a good man,” the Baron said. “Zombie, he tried to save vassal cultists. These aren’t his people. They’re disposable to Tammany, but he tried. Forgive him.”

Enzu twitched miserably in the Zombie’s grasp.

The Zombie stepped back and released the man’s hand. Enzu squealed and grabbed his wrist below the broken bones. He stared with dread at the swollen digits.

The Baron very carefully patted the Zombie’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

The Zombie lightly touched the Baron’s fingers with his own hand, but he didn’t turn to look the Baron in the eye. This was not acceptable to him. Mercy was not in his nature. He was an unbreakable man in a soft world, and no two interactions were ever alike. All human contact was like this, tentative and slow, or it wasn’t safe. The Baron let go, and the Zombie went to stand by the wall, staring down the silent crowd with a glare that could wither plants.

“Enzu,” the Baron said, “forgive the Zombie.”

Enzu cast the Baron an intense stare. It was impossible to tell if it was fear or anger that opened his pupils wide. “Okay,” he finally said. “I forgive him.”

“Good. Someone drive him to the hospital. Anyone but the man who witnessed the killing.” To Enzu he said, “You’re going to need surgery. I’ll pay the bill.”

Enzu shut his eyes and concentrated on ignoring the pain in his broken hand.

Tommasso picked the tall, lanky man who’d shot the Zombie first. “Take him,” he ordered.

“You did the right thing,” the Baron told Enzu, “even if it was a bad idea.”

“It was the worst idea,” the Zombie muttered.

The lanky man led Enzu out the shattered door, and the Baron rubbed the spot across his arm where the sap had struck him.

The ache felt cold, deep, and chilly. Enzu had literally smacked a nerve, but with every motion, sharp twinges of pain brought some welcome relief. The ache briefly disappeared, and warmth returned to the bruised muscle.

Now was the time to make amends. The Baron faced the boss, straightening his back. “Tommaso, I owe you a personal apology. This is beyond anything I expected, and what I’ve done to you is wrong, even if it wasn’t intended. Will you accept restitution for the door and any medical bills for your men?”

Tommaso glared indignantly at the Baron. “I don’t want your charity, I want you gone. But I will take money for the door.”

“Deliver the bill to the Biltmore, under Ray Dufraine. They’ll send it up with my messages.”

“Fine. Now why are you here?”

The Baron felt guilty, but what could he do? Finishing his business was the best way to mollify the local boss. “Are you the Cosa Nostra running rackets along the East River docks?”

“Three of my boys shot at your freak. What do you think?”

“We need to speak with the witness who called in the death of one of your workers. We saw his body at the Greenwich Temple after he dodged, and we need the details.”

“Why do you need any of that?” Tomasso asked flatly.

Somewhere outside, the Mercury Eight could be heard roaring into life. Enzu was on his way to receive a little medical care. If he was as important as the Baron suspected, it was likely that Tammany would use an expensive wish to speed the healing process. “We’re investigating the deaths of dock workers,” the Baron answered. “You heard about the four lost in the ship scuttle?”

Tomasso squinted. “I have.”

“We’re looking for connections between the dead man and that task.”

“You working for New York on this?”

“I’m reporting to High Oracle Gagliano. He gave me a letter.” Dropping the name of the former head of the Lucchese family to a mafioso like Tomasso had the intended effect. He straightened instantly, as if Gagliano were watching and judging in that very room.

“Fine. Meet Mario,” the boss said. He indicated the small, mouse-like man with wide ears. “He was with Jacono, working a small task after lunch.”

“Jacono is the dead man?”

The wide-eared man stepped forward. “That’s right,” Mario said. “Sonuvabitch got shot.”

“What was the task?”

“Nothing big. We was opening some boxes and kicking crap into the river down by the piers. These three guys showed up though, with these bolt cutters? They’d been cutting the locks and walking up and down the river.”

“Three guys? What did they look like?” the Baron asked.

“All three were in suits. They were looking tweaked. Blow, I think. Racoon eyes. The ugliest bastard was all pale and sweaty, like he had the flu or something.”

“I need identifying features. Facial hair, structure, particular clothes.”

“Black mustache on the ugly man. He didn’t speak much either, but he did lots of nodding whenever the other two asked for directions. Clean shaven on the other two. No chin on one, hair too long. Reminded me of one of them monks from the movies. Robin Hood fellow.”

“Friar Tuck?” the Zombie asked.

“Yeah. The other guy was good looking. An asshole though. He wouldn’t shut up.”

“What happened when they found you?” the Baron asked.

“They already had their guns out.” Mario frowned. “Like they was hunting us or something. Jacono said it was alright, he knew those guys, but they told him to throw his piece in the river. Real nice gun too. I chased it to the bottom with my piece of shit. Then they said they wanted to talk us up about the task we were finishing. I said sure, but they said, one at a time.”

“They were isolating you?” the Baron asked.

“Yeah, well, sorta. They took Jacono first, but they didn’t stop me from following. They didn’t seem to care as long as I couldn’t hear.”

“They let you witness the murder?”

“I don’t think it was meant to be a murder, least not at first. They walked us to the block by the old office building—it’s too far south for the patrols—and they started grilling Jacono in the middle of the road, yelling at him real loud.”

“What about?”

“First about some shit in his pockets, but he didn’t have nothing but his wallet. Then they asked a bunch of questions about his friends. Jacono didn’t have much to say to that.”

“A man with no friends?” the Zombie asked.

“Jacono is—well, was all business. He killed two men in the war, and you’d think that would’ve humbled the man, but not Jacono. Something about war just sucked the feelings right out of him. He was colder than frost.”

The Baron carefully swallowed and continued rubbing his bruise. The deep pain was subsiding to a heavy throb, but he’d have a dark bruise there for days. Enzu hit hard.

Mario continued, “The quiet guy with the mustache didn’t like his attitude. I think he was their boss or something? He was getting upset, even though he wasn’t saying a word. He kept tapping the other two on their shoulders and whispering into their ears. Jacono didn’t like that and kept yelling, ‘speak up, speak up,’ but that made the boss really pissed. He had the chinless guy punch Jacono a few times, just a beating around the ribs, but enough to hurt.”

“Did he fight back?” the Zombie asked quietly.

“You’d think he would, wouldn’t you?” Mario rubbed his face with a palm. “I don’t know what got into him. Jacono was all placid, really rolling with the punches. I think the mooks yelling at him thought they were getting somewhere, but the boss wasn’t happy. He finally said something—I wish I could’ve heard it, but he was so damn quiet. Jacono seemed eager to please, and the mooks… Ah, shit, that pale motherfucker.” Mario took a deep breath. “Look, I hated Jacono. There’s no tears here, man, but it was awful. The boss pulled out this huge revolver like he was going to plug a bear in the mountains or something. He shot Jacono in the chest. Just executed him in the street. I don’t think Jacono really saw it coming. Them boys didn’t either. The mooks I mean? They were shitting themselves.”

“They didn’t know the boss was going to murder Jacono?” the Baron asked.

“They were jumping back. Jacono panicked. He made some kind of wish, I don’t know what it was. Maybe to dodge, maybe something else. I don’t blame him. The boss plugged the asphalt twice after the gods snatched Jacono, screaming like he’d shot himself. There was blood and bullets on the ground. The mooks were looking at me, yelling something. I was already halfway down the block though and couldn’t make out a word. The boss made a wish then, like, you could feel it. You could hear it. He cleaned the ground, pushed gravel over the bullets, even sucked up the smell of powder. Sounded like someone whipping a towel. It popped my ears.”

“Did they come after you?” the Zombie asked.

“Kind of? The mooks ran up to the alley by the office and came back out driving a sedan. They picked up the boss and started after me.”

“Do you remember the make?”

“Nah, I’m no good with cars. Only one thing stood out. They raced after me, but I was already backtracking into the warehouses, and they didn’t want to hang around after killing, not after Jacono dodged. They idled for a second in the street, then took off and went south, but I got a good look at their windows—the glass was green.”

“Green glass?” the Zombie asked the Baron.

“Tinted windows?” the Baron asked the room.

“Sounds like E-Z Green,” said one of the crew.

“I’ve only seen it once,” Mario said, “that’s all I’m saying. They drove a plain car, but they had colored glass windows. It looked like beach water. You know, from Florida?”

“We ain’t all been to Florida,” Boss Tomasso said.

“Did you catch any license plate numbers?” the Baron asked.

“No. The plates were off,” Mario replied.

“Not much help,” the Zombie muttered.

“It’ll do,” the Baron replied quickly. “It’s good info.” They could use the green glass to potentially ID the killer. “One more question, Mario. Did Jacono act weird or mention anything interesting in the last few days? Doesn’t matter how strange it is. It might help us identify his killers.”

“No, not much to say. Jacono isn’t a talker.”

“Any breaks from his routine?”

“Sure, he left work early on Thursday. Don’t know where he went though.”

“Think he was with the crew scuttling the ship?”

“I wouldn’t write it off, but Jacono was born for the Luciano, and he still didn’t have any friends here. They were an Anastasia crew on that one, uh, the Ozone Park Boys.”

“Jacono wasn’t likely to work with them?”

“Not unless one of them was his brother or cousin.”

The Baron asked the Zombie, “Anything else you can think of?”

The Zombie frowned. “This is a dead end.”

That wasn’t an attitude the Baron wanted the Zombie to take in front of the people he’d thrashed to get this interview, but it was true. “As I said, it’ll help soon enough. Mario, you did good. Watch your back, and if you have somewhere else to go for a week, go.”

Mario looked down at his shoes.

The Baron pulled out his wallet. “How much do you make in a week?”

“Fifty,” Mario replied quickly—too quickly.

An obvious lie, but the Baron wouldn’t dispute it. He pulled out his wallet and found the largest bill on hand. “Here’s a fifty. Get out of here for a week.”

Mario stood and accepted the bill, moving through three emotions in rapid succession. First, elation. Then disbelief. Then the realization that if he was seeing this, he was fucked. Money never came in sizes that large, not without a hidden price.

“My wife ain’t going to believe I didn’t steal it,” Mario joked.

Nobody laughed, not even him. This much money wasn’t a curse, but it was physical proof that his life was in danger.

“Now what?” the Zombie asked the Baron. “Back to the hotel?”

“No,” the Baron said. “We’ll see if we can interview the dead.”

Author’s Note:

We’re done brawling, but we’re not heading home yet. The dead can speak secrets, and our boys might need a few to crack this case.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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June 29, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

After leaving the 8th Street Bookstore, the Baron was forced to idle on a payphone call near Tompkins Square Park. The operator on the other end wasn’t allowed to merely swap the plugs on the Tammany Hall switchboard without question. Secret procedures had to be followed, and approval from jumped up functionaries had to be acquired. Such was life in the world of global powers and secret cults.

After about fifteen minutes of bouncing from skeptical secretaries to mid-level management, they finally found someone who’d met the Baron before and could confirm his voice over the phone.

“State your name and intentions,” said a very, very old man.

“I’m Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, and I need to report my plans to the High Oracle himself, per his standing request for my operations inside his city.”

“Ah. It’s you,” the old man replied bitterly. “The operator will handle it.”

After another click, a beleaguered operator took over, and the Baron waited another ten minutes until someone could transfer him to the High Oracle’s personal line. Oracle Gagliano was sixty-eight, already one year retired, but he was still willing to speak with “the Devil himself,” so long as he had something interesting to say.

A soft click on the line signalled the end to an interminable wait. A loud sniff followed it. Then Gagliano rasped: “Baron d’Holbach. What are you calling me for?”

“Good morning, High Oracle. There was a dead man in the 8th Street Bookstore.”

“Yes—one of our secretaries called the store to warn Maurice.” A shuffle—the sound of the phone being moved around on the desk. “Is that why you called me?”

“No, High Oracle. The cultist looked like he might be Cosa Nostra.”

“That’s because he is, Baron.” The disdain in Gagliano’s voice was thicker than honey. “Are you going to say something I don’t already know? Or should I hang up the phone?”

The Baron had expected this response, but he’d needed to make sure Gagliano was on the same page before dropping the actual news. “I’ll be investigating the murder, High Oracle. Per our Salem agreement, I’m required to inform you of my operational goals.”

There was no response. Not even the sound of breathing.

“We’ll be heading down to the docks soon,” the Baron added.

“That’s very generous,” Gagliano said curtly.

The Baron waited for further explanation, but nothing happened. No approval. No rejection. More silence. He decided to fish for a favor. “It’d be easier if I could meet with the local boss.”

“It would be,” Gagliano agreed.

“Could you get me his name and address?”

Finally, there was an audible intake of breath, a sound of frustration. “Why do you need to know them exactly?”

“Honestly, High Oracle, I can’t say. Not yet.” Mentioning the Cat o’ Nine Lives would be like lighting a stick of dynamite to illuminate a dark room inside a dusty fertilizer factory, and any unannounced investigation would indicate that he had something to hide. Furthermore, any lies would be checked and found wanting. Only this deliberate obfuscation gave Gagliano the least reason to suspect anything truly significant was happening in his city.

“Not yet?” Gagliano asked after a few seconds of reflection.

“It’s basic client privacy. I’ll tell you everything when it’s over.”

“Well, then we’re tigers of a similar stripe, aren’t we? I can’t say anything about the local boss. Not to you. Not yet.”

“Not until I tell you why I’m going?”

“Exactly. Call me back if you change your mind. I trust you won’t make a mess in the meanwhile.”

“Not in the middle of your territory.”

The High Oracle hung up.

The Zombie was standing outside the phone booth, staring down pedestrians while eating literal handfuls of grass and bird seed that he’d scooped up off the park lawn. The Baron hung up the phone and stepped outside, meeting his friend’s gaze.

“What’s the news?” the Zombie asked through a half-full mouth, spitting wet bird seed and fluttering shreds of grass onto the sidewalk.

The Baron ignored the mess. “Gagliano is irate, but he’s not trying to stop us.” He peered down the street, towards a smoke shop a couple of blocks west. “I’m going to buy a cigar. Then we’ll take a Checker and start our investigation at the docks. Hopefully we finish before lunch.” He glanced meaningfully towards the Zombie’s hands. “Do you want anything from the shop? A pipe to chew on? Something made of glass?”

“Do you think they have marbles?”

“No.”

“I’m fine then.” The Zombie held up a fistful of grass. “Mind if I finish this first?”

The Baron shrugged. “Just keep things clean.”

The ride to the East River Docks wasn’t particularly long, but there was enough time for the Zombie to pick up and eat all the grass that he’d spilled onto the cab floor.

The Baron tipped the cabbie handsomely.

After they arrived, they split up along the waterfront, looking for witnesses, signs of activity, or anything else interesting. The Zombie jogged north, seeking beggars and men of low stature who might’ve heard a gunshot; the Baron walked southeast, hoping to find secular laborers working the East River on a Saturday morning.

They planned to rendezvous in only a quarter hour. The Baron didn’t expect to travel far, but a good vantage point would do most of the work in the least time. He ambled towards the river, passed right over the sidewalk, and needled through a line of squat warehouses. White-painted walls were awash in grey dust and crusted at the corners with an era’s worth of grime. The push of grass and small flowers suggested disuse. Nobody washed the walls or the alleys.

A padlocked gate barred the path between two walls, but he leaned down to the lock and whispered, “I wish you were open,” and it was. With a rattle of chains and a squeal of hinges, he reached the banks of the river itself, scanning everything with attentive eyes.

Solitude colored this stretch of open waters. There was nobody else working on a Saturday morning; or at least, they’d all fled after the shooting. At a surface level, this was a waste of time and prestige. Yet he watched, soaking in the details and comparing them to his memories. So much was the same, if not for the isolation.

Here, the docks rose out of opaque waters. Heavy currents stirred the sediment and tugged at the thick, tarry pilings. For the sake of the moored boats and as protection against the tide and weather, all of the piers were paired up and covered with wide wood-roofed tunnels ending at concrete boat launches, which connected them to the banks. These launches ramped up into the warehouses, and one roof—merged into a single stretch by decades of patchwork construction—saddled those buildings for kilometers in either direction.

These padlocked gates and doors kept pedestrians from moving up and down the waterfront unseen, but sometimes, with the right connections and keys, the way was opened for smuggling. The Baron knew that would be the East River’s most lucrative business these days.

A century ago, this had been a better place. The warehouses had been the industrious heart of a district. Privately owned merchant ships had flourished on the water. The docks had been a shelter even for those just passing through, a stopping point along the tidal strait connecting Upper New York Bay to Long Island Sound. It’d been a place for rich sailors to rest for a night, an integral part of the gateway to the Atlantic Ocean.

Unfortunately, times changed and technology allowed mankind to engineer a new coast for Lower New York Bay. With better planning and calmer currents, Brooklyn could handle larger shipments from today’s modern manufacturers. Bigger boats could safely dock, and a well-funded Port Authority could ensure safety and order. The artificial port had proven superior, and the industry of the East River had all but disappeared. What remained was mostly private fishing and recreational boating, and the empty warehouses stood like skeletons of better times.

The Baron turned away from the warehouses, relocked the gate, and met up with the Zombie one block from the water. He found him just outside a late 19th-century office building, which had been erected to house import / export businesses bringing in small commodities from along the Eastern seaboard. Now it was mostly empty but for the bottom floor, and while signs suggested that a tax assessor operated out of the block, he wasn’t in on Saturdays.

“He does taxes,” the Zombie noted, looking over the signs, “that means something.”

The Baron frowned. “What? You want to dig through someone’s records?”

“Yeah, you wanted the local mob boss. He has properties, right?”

“Of course.”

“On paper, they’d make money—stand out in this dump.”

“Sure.”

“And once we have some addresses, we could knock on some doors.”

The Baron dismissed the idea with a wave. “We don’t have that kind of time. Let’s stick with eyewitnesses. Were you able to question anybody about the site of the shooting?”

The Zombie smirked. “Yeah, some beggars heard a gunshot a few blocks north of here. The police poked their nose in around half an hour ago, but nobody came up with anything.”

“Did you look at the site?”

“No. You said to meet up here at eleven-thirty.”

“I’ll want to take a look at the place anyways.” Baron d’Holbach opened his jacket and picked out a steel cigar case from his inner pocket.

“Oh! Did you get anything for me?” the Zombie asked like a hopeful child.

The Baron paused. The Zombie had explicitly declined anything, and yet here he was, begging like a dog in order to tease his friend. “You know what?” the Baron asked.

“What?” the Zombie replied.

“The case was pretty cheap.” He popped the lid, took out his precut cigar, and held out the steel tube to the Zombie.

The Zombie grinned. “You shouldn’t have.”

“You’re right,” the Baron said, “I shouldn’t reward your bad behavior, but here we are.”

Grinning broadly, the Zombie took what was offered and started slamming the open end of the steel tube against his palm. For a normal person, this would’ve sliced open skin. For the Zombie, it was a fun test.

Meanwhile, the Baron took his zippo and ran the flame gently over the tip of the cigar.

There was a metal crinkle. The tube suddenly collapsed in the Zombie’s palm like it was made of cardboard. The Zombie laughed. “Oh man, seven strikes to break it down.” He started trying to crumple the tube up a little further. “This’ll take a bit.”

The Baron carefully drew a few times, then opened his mouth and blew away the first peppery mouthful of smoke. It wasn’t a particularly expensive cigar, but the best cigars wouldn’t be found in a place that sold loose leaf tobacco by the pound. The Baron believed that price wasn’t the biggest factor in any case. Skill was more than half the enjoyment of cigar smoking. The flavor and energy of each draw was affected by the talent of the smoker, and he had more experience than anyone else on Earth. The burn was mechanically even, and he waited just long enough for the tip to cool before drawing again.

“I needed this cigar,” he told the Zombie.

“Yeah. Concentration. I know.” The Zombie was clapping his hands over the jagged crumple of steel, waiting for it to collapse as arbitrarily as it had the first time.

“Come on. We’ll walk there.”

The Zombie led the way, though his attention was centered on his hands. He was slowly smoothing the jagged edges of the crumpled steel ball. The Baron followed behind him, concentrating on his smoke. Finally, the ball smashed down twice in a row, becoming fairly compact. He showed it off to the Baron, who was appreciative.

“Very round,” he said.

The Zombie popped it in his mouth, chewed noisily for a moment, and then pulled out the steel shaped into a little toothmarked patty. “Aren’t those aromatic?” he asked.

“Very,” the Baron said.

“I don’t know how you can enjoy a smoke with the East River right there.”

“Do you remember Europe? Do you remember how it used to smell?”

The Zombie shrugged and nibbled at the edges of his steel mess. “I honestly didn’t pay that much attention at the time. Nobody washed.”

“You still don’t wash.”

“I don’t have to. It’s too bad that you don’t wash though.”

“Lies and slander. I picked up pipe smoking to stop smelling the alleyways.” He made another draw on his cigar, swirled the smoke around his mouth and blew it out. “And you.”

The Zombie popped the steel wad back in his mouth and started chewing until it began to make the creaking, squeaking sounds of shredding metal. “Oh, here we are,” he said with his mouth deliberately full, spraying little flecks of steel on the ground.

The Baron hummed around his next draw. “Doesn’t look much different than anywhere else.” They were between the city block and waterfront warehousing, and the paved quasi-street before them was empty but for a few pallets leaned against the near side of an office-building. Its walls were stained with dark lichens, and a rake leaned awkwardly against its brief stoop. Several loading docks were shut and locked behind rolling, darkly painted garage doors. More pale dust gathered in the gaps. “Why here?”

The Zombie swallowed his steel. “I met a guy with only his bottom incisors. He said a gun was fired around here, where nobody worked. Doesn’t look like anyone works here, does it?”

“They dragged the dock worker to a quiet place before putting a bullet in him?”

“Something like that. Maybe he came voluntarily.”

“We know there’re witnesses. Greenwich got a call about it.”

“Tax records!” the Zombie sang out.

“No, we’re not looking for the local boss in a filing cabinet.” The Baron knocked off the ash, pulled out his zippo and carefully relit the end. “The only reason you want to go in is because you’d have to break a door and a couple of drawers.”

“Maybe,” the Zombie said coyly.

“I appreciate your love of pointless property damage, but we really don’t have the time. This shooting is going to be retold over and over in the back room of a laundromat or restaurant, and nobody will write down a word of it. What’s said now won’t be anything like what’s remembered tomorrow. It’ll change that much in the retelling.”

“You make these people sound like idiots.” He spoke with appreciation for the Baron’s disdain, not sympathy for those insulted.

“We’re all idiots then,” the Baron said. “Let’s take a look around.”

The Baron kept time with the mechanical action of smoking and paced over the ground in a methodical zig-zag. There was a patch of asphalt a few meters across where the pavement was immaculate—only dark gravel, perfectly black tar, and nothing else. Considering the amount of blood the dead man had drained all over the sanctuary carpet, there should’ve been a mess here. Someone must’ve made an inefficient wish to clean up everything.

“Find any signs of a gunshot?” he asked aloud.

“Nope,” the Zombie said. “This place is barren.”

“I think someone wished to clean the ground. Not just the blood, but everything. Maybe they were afraid of a cop smelling gunpowder. Or they were lazy.”

The Zombie joined the Baron in staring at the cleaner stretch of asphalt. “Eh, this is deliberate, not lazy. It’s too… complete. It smacks of careful thinking.”

The Baron nodded. It was a strong alternate theory. “You don’t want to leave evidence, and the only people who’ll care about the conspicuous cleanliness are already aware that someone died here.”

The Zombie adjusted his bowler to shield his eyes from the sun overhead. “Do you think this will lead to the Cat o’ Nine Lives?”

“You know how it goes. One murder after another is a symptom of two possible diseases. One is institutional fear, when crimes are committed to cover up crimes. The other is war. In either case, these are probably connected deaths. Nagy, and this man.”

“This is the wrong season for war,” the Zombie said. “Hope it’s just fear.”

“Very poetic.” The Baron walked over to the stoop, made sure it was relatively clean and sat down. “Who cleaned up here? The killers or the witnesses?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, it does.” The Baron let the cigar go out without another draw.

The Zombie stood by the stoop. He never sat unless he was reading or eating, and only because he liked to set things on the table. “Who has more to lose?”

“The killers. They can’t be identified after killing a New York cultist.”

“A vassal cultist,” the Zombie corrected.

The Baron wagged his cigar to knock off the cold ash. “When it comes to vassals, it’s the principle, not the person. New York’s promise is that its vassals are untouchable, and an army will come down on your head if you cross them.”

“Is that true?” the Zombie asked.

“I don’t know, but New York wants it to be true. Rumor has it that some cults are competing to join up. Better to serve than live free in the wilderness of say, Baltimore.”

“Ha. That city is a racist powder keg without a war industry.”

“I’m just saying, New York’s reputation is built on revenge. The killers must’ve cleared this place. Maybe they destroyed evidence. Maybe they were being careful. Now, the witness tells the local boss what happened, and the boss keeps his boys indoors while they report to New York. Why risk going outdoors while the pavement is bare, right?”

“Wait,” the Zombie said. “You’re thinking we’re not entirely late to the party?”

“That’s right. New York won’t be happy with people sitting tight, not inside their home city. I’m betting they’ll send a primary cultist out here to snoop around. Follow me?”

The Zombie gave the Baron a thumbs up. “The patient fisherman.”

“So let’s wait and see if someone shows up.”

“If someone does, do we push hard?”

“No, let’s play ignorant on this one. I’ll relight my cigar, say we just arrived, and offer to collaborate. Once they’re talking, then you push for the boss’s location.”

“Play it slow, low pressure?”

“Exactly. Less intimidation now means more chances to intimidate bigger men later.”

“I like that logic.” The Zombie waited with folded hands. “I wish I’d bought a copy of Amazing Stories back at the bookstore. Or brought my briefcase for that matter.”

“The bags were delivered to the Biltmore. We’ll get it when we check in.”

“Can you wish me a magazine?”

The Baron laughed. “How many lives would that magazine be worth, if it manifested out of thin air? Five? Six?”

“What’s a life, one hundred years?”

“Honestly, I have no idea how much prestige that’d cost. Might as well go for broke and wish for a fictional issue while you’re at it.”

“Haha. Do you think the gods would write the stories?”

“I don’t know if the gods could. They don’t really relate with us anymore.”

“Not in your mythology, they don’t. I bet a god would write a damn fine sci-fi story.”

“What about?”

The Zombie spread his hands wide, as if reading off a billboard. “Man proves there are no gods. What does it mean for morality?”

The Baron snorted. “Based on a true story?”

“Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.”

A few minutes later, a forest green Mercury Eight pulled through an alley to the north and started down the paved lot alongside the warehouses. It was the newest generation, bullet-shaped with headlights bulging above a chromed bumper, part of the new ostentatious economy class of vehicle. It was a screeched message, “I am middle class!”

The Baron stood up casually, pulled out his zippo, and lit his cigar again. Blowing smoke into the still air, he waved at the oncoming two-door and stepped in its way. The Zombie followed close behind.

The Mercury Eight rolled up, tires hissing on pavement, and pulled to a stop. Cheap brake pads squealed lightly. The man inside the vehicle was in his late 50s, chubby-cheeked and bearing a heavy salt-and-pepper beard. Despite the spring weather, he was dressed in a trench coat and leather gloves—a goon packing heat and planning on leaving no fingerprints.

The goon put on the parking brake and shifted his vehicle into neutral. He rolled down the window and leaned halfway out. “Can I help you gentlemen?”

The Baron looked confused and glanced at the Zombie, who frowned right back in perfect mimicry. “I’m sorry, I was going to ask you the same.” He took a draw off his cigar.

“Ask me what?” the goon said.

“What’s your name?” the Baron asked. When the goon hesitated to answer, d’Holbach relaxed his expression and said, “I’m the Philosopher, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach. This is the Zombie.” He offered his hand to the open car window. “We’re here to investigate a body discovered at Greenwich.”

The goon accepted the Baron’s hand reluctantly. “I’m Enzu Guerra.”

“Mr. Guerra.” They shook. “Can I call you Enzu?”

“Yeah, sure.”

The Baron took another draw off his cigar. “What’re you here for, Enzu?”

“You’re the Atheist out of Boston, right?”

“I am. The High Oracle wrote me a letter of passage.”

Enzu pursed his lips. “Boss Gagliano wanted me to take a look around here.”

“The spot where the guy was shot? Yeah, we’re almost on top of it.”

“We are?” Enzu leaned out a little further, looking down at the blacktop with a squint. “Where’s the stain?”

“We think it got wiped.” The Baron took a couple of steps back and pointed to his feet. “Right here, a few meters in every direction. Someone wished to clean it up.”

Enzu leaned out a little further, but he obviously couldn’t see much of a difference from where he sat. “That so?” he asked.

“It is so,” the Zombie said.

The Baron grinned congenially. “We’ve been arguing whether or not the shooter or the local witness cleaned it up.” This was a lie, designed to fish for information. When Enzu didn’t immediately bite, he added: “We saw the cops poking around here a few minutes ago. The witness might’ve cleaned it to avoid an investigation.”

Enzu’s eyes bugged out a little. “The cops were here?” He was definitely armed.

The Zombie took a step towards Enzu, who pulled back into his car like a turtle into its shell. “Yeah, someone heard a gunshot. They didn’t find anything though.”

Enzu squinted with worry. “Did you talk to them?”

“I’d never talk to cops,” the Zombie said with a smile. “I just watched them walk around like idiots. Hey—are you going to meet with the witness any time soon? We’re not too familiar with the area, and we’d like to sort out some details with him.”

The Baron clarified quickly: “What my partner is saying is, we need a ride to the local hangout.”

Enzu was all the way back in his car now. “Sorry,” he replied quickly, “I’m not heading anywhere but back to Tammany Hall. Thanks for the tips though.”

“That’s fine. Can you give us directions before you go?”

Enzu shook his head in short, rapid jerks, almost like a twitch. “Sorry, I don’t know the area that well. I’m just from Tammany.” He started rolling up his window, then paused with an inch left and yelled, “I’ve got to go. Again, thanks for the tip!” The window went all the way up, and he popped the parking brake and shifted into reverse.

The Baron cast his most disappointed look at the Zombie as Enzu executed a three point turn and left the way he came. The tall immortal began to grin, wider and wider as the car retreated.

“Just—” the Baron began to say as the car turned the corner, but the Zombie took off, sprinting for the alley, and d’Holbach was forced to yell after him: “Just get the first street he turns onto!” Then d’Holbach walked after him, methodically puffing on the remains of his cigar.

Once he reached the alley, he could see the Zombie standing at the far corner, peering around the rough brick trim. “Two blocks north!” the Zombie called out.

The Baron caught up to him a few seconds later. “It makes sense. The boss won’t be far from the docks. Five dollars says we’ll see the Mercury parked somewhere close to that intersection. Hell, we could probably recognize the front business.”

“I’m not wasting five bucks.” The Zombie breathed deep, nose flaring like he’d caught the scent of a wounded animal. “But I am looking forward to knocking on some doors.”

The Baron chuckled. “You think they’ll let us in?”

“Hell no. We’re outsiders, and they aren’t afraid anymore. We’ll have to break in.”

The Baron smiled around the stump of his cigar. Criminal trespassing wasn’t the noblest act, but nobody finished a high-stakes investigation without putting pressure on someone somewhere, and his friend’s enthusiasm was infectious. “I hope you’re wrong, but if you’re right, then you’re right. People need to know what it means when we come knocking.”

Author’s Note:

Delicious, delicious grass, gang. Eaten by a monster out of legend.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other readers!

Join the Patreon to support the story and access 4 weeks of early chapters!

June 29, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

There were maybe twenty idle cultists in the temple of the Greenwich Oracle. They stood up one at a time or in pairs and started towards Porter and Osman.

“A wounded dodger?” the Baron asked Maurice. “Were there any violent operations this morning?”

Maurice frowned. “The outstanding tasks are all safe. Excuse me.” A shout to Porter, “I’m on my way!”

“Do you want any help?” the Baron asked.

“Ah—yeah, actually, I’d appreciate it.” Maurice adjusted his suspender straps. “There are too many rooms to search.” He started off towards Porter, and the Baron and the Zombie jogged after him.

“What’s the news?” Maurice asked when Porter was in earshot.

Porter threw a thumb over at Osman. “He took the call.”

Osman spoke without confidence. “It was from the East River Docks. They said someone, um, dodged a gunshot wound, um, twenty minutes ago?”

“Dodged with a gunshot wound,” Porter said. “With!”

“But he’s in the temple, right?” Osman asked.

Porter moaned.

The Zombie walked around behind Osman. “Who made you a cultist?”

Osman swept about. “What?”

“Was it your father? The General? Did you turn twenty-one recently?”

Osman must’ve learned a bit about the Zombie in the last few minutes. He watched the Zombie’s bare hands like they were decorated with daggers.

The Zombie wriggled his fingers and reached out for Osman’s right shoulder. The neophyte quivered slightly, torn between the urge to retreat and the prey’s instinct which told him that if he ran, the predator would spring.

The Zombie whispered sweetly, “A boy made of glass, asking stupid questions…”

“Please, don’t haze the neophyte,” Maurice said.

The Zombie laughed at Osman and the Oracle. “What’s the rush? This is the closest temple to the docks, isn’t it? If the dodger is here, why isn’t he calling out for help?”

“I don’t know yet,” Maurice replied.

Several of the other cultists arrived. Most were dressed low-class—tank tops, jeans, and brightly colored daddy-o’s. One of them was like a beatnik who’d cribbed his look off a movie rather than from an actual beat poet. They listened attentively, trying to figure out the fuss and exchanging brief comments.

“Maybe it’s because he’s a corpse,” the Zombie offered.

The Baron decided to curb the Zombie’s enthusiasm. “We’ll still need to look. It’s the decent thing to do.”

The Zombie snorted. “When did I ever care about decency?”

The last stragglers of New York cultists bunched up beside Maurice. The man dressed like a beatnik said, “What’s happening, man?”

“There’s a wounded dodger,” Maurice told them.

The beatnik slapped a greaser in a blue daddy-o on the shoulder. “Told you.”

The Baron made a subtle gesture at the Zombie, tapping himself twice on the chest with two fingers. It meant “follow my example,” and it was only used when it was actually important that the Zombie fall in line. This dodge could give them insight into local factions, their conflicts, the outstanding blood feuds—everything and anything about local politics would be useful at this stage. They needed to fill in the fine details or they’d never find any suspects for Nagy’s killer.

The Zombie didn’t hide his disappointment, but Maurice seemed to read his exasperation as boredom more than anything. “Fine. I’ll help,” the Zombie said.

“Thank you, both of you,” Maurice said. “Porter, split up the crowd. Check the west apartments.” The Oracle looked up at the steep stairwells crawling along the walls. “We need all hands on the third floor. I’ll work the east side, and we’ll meet up in the middle.”

“Young Osman, come with me,” the Baron suggested. This boy was the son of the General of the New York cult, and it’d be smart to butter him up for the future.

“What?” the neophyte asked the Baron. “Why?”

“The Zombie is going to sprint, and we’re going to stay out of his way.”

Osman was immediately relieved. He’d puffed up like a rooster when he’d recognized the Baron down in the bookstore, but a blasphemous atheist was infinitely preferable to the company of a monster. “Where are we going?” the young man asked.

“We’ll take the apartments near the Oracle’s desk, east side. The Zombie can run down and start at the other end. Just like Maurice said, we’ll all meet in the middle.”

“I’ll hurry this up,” the Zombie said. Without much windup, he took off, sprinting in dress shoes for the far corner of the chamber at the very end of the row.

“I’ll start here and work towards the Zombie,” Maurice suggested.

“Sounds good,” the Baron said. “Osman, let’s go.”

d’Holbach and Osman marched quickly towards the stairwell to the left of the Oracle’s desk. It was at the southeast end of the rowhouse; since it was very close to the dodge point at the docks, there was a strong chance the dodger would end up there.

Once they were well out of earshot, the Baron said to Osman, “Do you know why I wanted you to come with me?”

“No, sir,” Osman said.

“My title is Baron. I’m not a knight.” They reached the foot of the stairswell. Each one was a repurposed fire escape—no ladders and high railings—which hit three apartment doors on the way up the brick wall. “I planned on giving you some friendly advice. Would you like that, Osman?

“Yes, Baron,” Osman said.

“Good.” They started clambering up the black-painted metal; shoes clanged on the steep mesh steps. “This is the right time to learn. You’re young. You’ll say stupid things to dangerous people, and they’ll forgive you because you’re too ignorant to know better.” The Baron half-pulled himself upwards with the railing.

“If you’re talking about my greeting in the bookstore, I’m sorry, Baron,” Osman said.

The Baron paused, looking down. “That’s kind of you, but first piece of advice—don’t apologize until someone demands it. Not unless it’s tradition. Being a cultist is a lot like being a criminal, Osman. Did you know that?” He started climbing again.

“No, Baron. My dad said it was like being a Freemason.”

“It is for your father. It might not be for you.” They passed the second story door. Up and up. “Once they have you finishing tasks, you’ll understand. Second piece of advice—just learn from your mistakes the first time. Someday they won’t accept ignorance as an excuse.”

“I understand.”

“Oh, and third piece—don’t tell powerful men where they are and aren’t welcome. You might as well learn that one now. On a bad day, the Zombie might’ve hurt you.”

“I’m sorry, really. I’d seen a picture of you in Tammany, and I’d heard about Salem.”

The Baron paused and looked down at Osman. “Were you at the fire?” The question was rhetorical. Salem had nearly burned to the ground in 1914, and the neophyte couldn’t be older than twenty-five at most.

“No, sir,” he said. “I mean, Baron.”

“Then it’s nothing you need to worry about.” The Baron started upwards one final time. To the side, in the open air, the hanging tapestries seemed to close the space up. Three stories over the floor, lines of sight were obscured, not opened. The great weaves were almost in reach. They reminded the Baron of the low hanging boughs in a dark grove. One could hide between them.

They reached the third story door. Osman was breathing a little heavier, but the Baron was no worse for wear. He put his hand on the door. “Before we go in, I have a question. Have you ever seen a dead body?”

Osman’s eyes opened wide. “You think the man is dead?”

The Baron sighed. “So you haven’t?”

“No, Baron. I’ve never seen a corpse.”

The Baron rubbed his forehead. “So you’re a gatekeeper because they don’t know what to do with you.”

Osman winced and opened his mouth to object, but a second thought brought his ambitions down, and he sagged. “Yes, Baron. I’m afraid so.”

At least the young Osman seemed to know how poor his position fared in the occult space around them. “Did anybody even tell you about the sanctuaries?”

“A little.”

“Do you know how someone dodges then?”

“They make a wish, and then they end up in the temple?”

The Baron squinted at Osman. It was a sad state of affairs in New York City, but he supposed it was their proximity to Tammany Hall itself that created the problem. Osman was part of the New York cult nobility. They didn’t go out into the field for years, sometimes never did, and they were paid for easy temple jobs with prestige tithed from other people. Osman was a child of vast nepotism, a useless cultist who showed up and expected that someday he’d have enough prestige to ensure a place in the hereafter. The worst part was, he would.

“Do you often work with your father?” the Baron asked. “General Osman?”

“He lives in Tammany Hall,” Osman said. “I don’t see him much.”

“He hasn’t paid anybody to teach you in his place?”

“No, Baron. He said I shouldn’t have to work much.”

“I see. Well, I hope your father forgives me, because I’m going to teach you something today.” The Baron opened the door. Behind the brick wall was a fairly large New York apartment lit by windows with the curtains drawn. Hardwood floors creaked underneath the Baron’s feet, and the air carried a hint of old lemon cleaner. Nobody had been staying here for a while. There was a staleness to everything, as if it’d all settled years ago and needed to air out. “So let’s start at the beginning. Have you ever made a wish, neophyte Osman?”

“No, Baron,” Osman said. “Porter tells me I’m supposed to save my prestige.”

“For the wish to go to the gods? For the afterlife.”

“Yes.” Osman followed the Baron into the apartment.

There’d be a few rooms that’d form the sanctuaries. Probably the bedrooms. There was little furniture in the main room, just a long couch and a table with two chairs. Folded blankets and sheets were laid out on the table, in case someone needed to sleep in the apartment. In a little kitchen alcove, a spotless oven waited to be used for the first time.

 “If you make a wish, it costs you prestige,” the Baron said. “The bigger the wish, the more it takes to make it come true. Are you with me so far?”

“I know this much, yeah.”

“Good. What happens when you make a wish that you can’t afford?” The Baron opened up a bedroom door. The room was pitch black and chilly, but there was nobody inside. There wasn’t even a bed. There was just a heavy throw rug in the middle of the floor.

“The wish doesn’t come true?” Osman ventured.

“No. If you have prestige, any at all, you can make a wish, and it might be granted.” The Baron let go of the handle and the door very slowly shut itself. It was best not to force anything when it came to a sanctuary. There was no confirmed case of a magic door severing a hand from a man’s arm, but the urban legends were plausible enough to make even Baron d’Holbach careful. “Did you see that room?”

“Yes. That’s a sanctuary, right?”

“That’s right. They’re abnormal, anomalous. The cultists say they’re holy, but I think they’re just spatially strange. It’s like the door opens on disconnected spaces.”

“Which means?” Osman asked.

“I’m saying that one door opens onto several copies of the same room.”

“Ah, okay.” That was something Osman could vaguely understand.

The Baron went to another door. There were four off the main room, excluding the bathroom which was already open. “Listen, the so-called gods value two things. The first is the prestige they grant, and the second is human life.” He opened another door onto an empty, cold room.

“Life?” Osman asked. “Like human sacrifice?”

“With some limitations. They’re not interested in killing you. They just want to exact a toll equal to the favor of granting your wish. Have you ever heard the others talk about prestige in units of time?”

“I have.”

“So prestige and time are interchangeable. If you can’t pay with prestige, they’ll take some of your time.”

“So they make you older?” Osman peered into the open, chilly room. “And I guess they put you in one of these weird rooms to do it?”

“That’s close, but not quite right.” The room shut itself behind the Baron. “I’m not going to argue metaphysics with you, but here’s the official story. The gods claim there is free will. Do you know what this means for your future?”

“No, Baron.”

“It means that history isn’t predetermined. It also means that you have no set lifespan. The gods can’t subtract years from a future that doesn’t exist yet.” The Baron went to a third bedroom. “Not that I believe this is the truth, mind you, but I’m the Atheist, right?”

“Maurice calls you the Philosopher,” Osman said quietly.

“A much better title, I agree, but it’s still meant with disdain. Or at least it was when it was coined.” The Baron opened a third door onto an empty room. “The gods are clever. They want to grant your wish at the moment you make it, but they also want some of your life, and there’s nothing they can take from the future. So what could they do? How could they exact their pound of flesh?”

“I don’t know, Baron.”

The Baron approached the fourth bedroom door, and the last room in the apartment that could be a sanctuary. “The gods need you to wait, Osman. That’s the only way you can pay the time they’re owed.” He hesitated before opening up the sanctuary. Osman might not be ready for a corpse, and this was the most likely spot to find one, though it wasn’t guaranteed.

“So you go into a sanctuary and wait until your debt is paid?” Osman asked.

“Yes. Days, weeks, even years. You wait.”

“Huh. Do the gods feed you?”

For once, the young man was using his brain. The Baron smiled. “Thankfully, no. You don’t have to eat, drink, or use the restroom. You don’t even have to worry about going crazy. The gods start you out in a torpor. You can wait half-asleep while you grow old. But you’re still not quite getting it. I don’t think anyone ever does until they’re told.”

“Get what?” Osman asked. “This doesn’t seem that hard to understand.”

“The gods want to grant you the wish the moment you make it, but you have to wait before it is granted. You can’t wait afterwards, so what do they do with you? How do they make it work out?”

“They… can’t?” Osman asked uncertainly.

“They can because they cheat. These sanctuaries are more than hidden away. They’re nowhere in this world until it’s time for the door to open, and nobody can be found in a room until their wait is finished. Do you understand now?”

“No, Baron.”

“Then I’ll spell it out plainly. When you go into debt, the gods place you in a sanctuary in the past, and you’re trapped there, aging until you catch up to the present when your wish was made.”

“So it’s time travel?” Osman was skeptical. “Like the H. G. Wells book?”

“Like the book, but simpler. People in sanctuaries can’t see the past. That’s what the sanctuaries are for, you see? The gods abhor a paradox. They’re just looking to make you age a little, and storing you in the past is the easiest way.”

“Why don’t they just change your age? Why mess with time?”

The Baron frowned. Osman was clearly thinking of time travel as an incredibly complex thing. He was imagining men shaking hands with themselves and destroying the universe. He was raised on stories of arbitrary travel with arbitrary rules. He didn’t have the advantage of a philosophical mind. The Baron had learned about the sanctuaries from a position of profound ignorance with few assumptions, and all he’d discovered was that the gods were excellent at keeping their mysteries. There was no time travel model to speak of because nothing about their time travel could be modeled. It underdetermined many sets of possible rules.

Compared with that, the task of making someone artificially old was vastly more complex. Every cell in the human body would have to be changed immediately, ravaged in perfect mimicry of time and entropy. It wasn’t worth the effort when the debtor could be moved back and allowed to age naturally in a controlled environment.

“Just trust me,” the Baron said, “the gods are lazy, and it’s simpler this way. It may not sound like it, but this is reliable and fair. Making you older wouldn’t be as clean.”

“Huh. Can you die in a sanctuary then?” Osman asked. “Of old age, I mean?”

“Of old age, disease, and injury, yes. And if you die before your debts are paid in full, you earn nothing. Your wish doesn’t come true if you aren’t alive to receive it.”

“That’s terrible.”

“It is. But before I open this door, I want to tell you something important. When someone deliberately wishes for more than they can afford in order to escape to a temple, that’s called dodging. They’re ripped away because they deliberately accrued debt. Unfortunately, the smallest unit of debt allowed is equivalent to twelve hours of life.”

“Twelve hours… oh.” Osman looked down at his shoes. “Oh shit.”

“It’s a disaster when someone dodges while wounded. It’s a foolish thing, or at least something very desperate. There’s a very real chance that someone bled out behind this door hours ago. Are you okay with seeing that?”

“I don’t know, Baron.”

“Then look away while I open the door.”

Osman turned his head. Baron d’Holbach opened the door.

“You can look,” the Baron said. “It’s empty.”

Osman shuddered. “Thank God.”

The Baron rubbed his clean-shaven scalp. “Maybe,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Nevermind.” Nobody had quite figured out the pattern for finding people in sanctuaries. It was almost probabilistic, which had implications for the physics of sanctuaries. He wasn’t about to break that notion down with Osman however. “Let’s get out of here.”

He opened the front door onto the fire escape landing.

“Baron?” called up Porter.

“I’m up here!” the Baron shouted down. “Nothing inside these.”

“The Zombie says he found the dead man!”

“Fantastic,” the Baron said, and meant it. The Zombie’s presence would discourage anyone from moving or removing the body before d’Holbach had a chance to look it over.

He and Osman clambered down the stairwell, shoes ringing out, then jogged silently along the aisle towards the corner at the other end of the building. The Zombie came out of the far apartment and leaned dangerously far over the railing, waving with both arms.

“Don’t fall!” the Baron shouted at him. “You could break through the floor!”

The Zombie stepped back and laughed loud enough to be heard echoing off the far wall despite the reams of hanging decorations.

The Oracle met them along the way. “The Zombie’s got it.”

“We heard. Is the man dead?” the Baron asked him.

“Apparently. You know as much as I do.”

They reached the base of the stairwell below the Zombie, where a few of the New York cultists were already gathered. “Any orders boss?” asked the beatnik look-a-like.

Maurice snapped his fingers and pointed. “You and you, get down to Tammany Hall. We’ve got a body to dispose of.”

The cultists started off immediately.

“Dispose?” Osman asked. “What if he had a wife?”

“She’ll learn later,” Maurice said curtly. “Get downstairs and greet anybody from Tammany that shows up. Do your job.”

“Yes, sir!” Osman ran off after the others.

Maurice started his way up the stairwell and d’Holbach followed immediately.

“Osman’s father wants him to be dead weight?” the Baron asked the Oracle.

“That’s right,” Maurice said, audibly unhappy with the idea. “The General can afford to pamper the kid, and I can afford to take care of him.”

“That’s miserable.”

“No, that’s royalty.”

They reached the third story, where the Zombie ushered them indoors with a tip of his bowler. “My friends, I present to you, one dead asshole.”

Just beyond the vestibule to the apartment, the nearest sanctuary door was propped open with a chair, and the Zombie had drawn back the curtains to let in more light. They could see a prostrate figure, lying at the entrance in a pool of black, dried blood. He’d been clawing at the wooden door panels while he bled out.

“Damn,” Maurice said. “Messy.”

The Baron skirted around the Oracle, approaching the dead man. “Small-time Mafia?” Baron d’Holbach asked, stopping beside the Zombie to inspect the corpse.

“Absolutely,” the Zombie said. “He’s got a shitty revolver in his jeans, left pocket.”

The Baron knelt close to the head of the corpse, looking him over. He was dressed like a dock worker in spring; his rolled up sleeves revealed thick, sunburned arms coated in old Navy Reserve tattoos. His newsie cap was stuck in the blood by his head; his right cheek was mashed into the hardwood floor. His short, black hair and thick mustache were in the style worn by Italian immigrants, but whether or not he was Sicilian was hard to tell. He was heavily tanned.

Maurice was waiting several steps back. “Looks like he came up out of the torpor.”

“A man in mortal pain doesn’t sleep.” The Zombie pointed to the middle of the dead man’s back. “The bullet didn’t pass through either. Frangible. An autopsy would dig up nothing but fragments. Very professional. Useless as ID.”

“Do you have any idea what wish he used to dodge?” Maurice asked.

“Penny wish, I think.” The Zombie grinned broadly, pulling out a small, grimy penny out of his pants pocket. “Found it with his blood on it, which means he thought it through. He was already shot, and still chose to run with a wish.” The Zombie kneeled beside the Baron “But you can’t make good decisions when you’ve been hit center of mass, can you? You panic and overthink it, and you die. Or you choose to die. Either way, there’s no escape.”

The Baron grunted. The penny wish was an ancient trick. A cultist was given a minimal amount of prestige to carry around with him—a unit sometimes called the half-day. If he had zero prestige, he couldn’t make any wishes until he received more.

The cultist then put a penny in his left pocket. When it became necessary to escape—to dodge to the temple—the cultist wished that the penny was in his right pocket instead. While teleportation was generally perceived as incredibly expensive, it was reasonable to imagine that the penny had always been in the other pocket or was moved by sleight of hand, so this wish was valued at a deep discount of a single day.

The wish cost twenty four hours, and the cultist had spent half upfront. The remaining debt was only twelve hours—the shortest possible time to wait in a sanctuary. It was still too long for someone like the dock worker with a bullet in his chest.

“Maybe he recognized the assassins,” Maurice said thoughtfully. “He might’ve had a good reason to try his luck with a dodge.”

The Baron frowned. “I don’t know. This corpse doesn’t tell us much about anything.”

The Zombie shrugged. “No wallet, only a billfold. Yes, I checked.”

“Do you know where he worked?” the Baron asked Maurice.

“This guy? No idea. I’m not even sure if he was working his real job on a Saturday. He was at the East River Docks though. Why do you ask?”

“Mostly curious.”

Maurice frowned at the dead man. “Are you thinking of looking for the killer? New York might put up a bounty.”

“I don’t know,” the Baron lied. “If I figure anything out, I’ll tell Tammany Hall.”

“Good,” Maurice said. “They’re going to be pissed.”

The Baron stood up and turned to face the Oracle. “If you’re looking for our help, you could do us a favor,” he added.

“What’s that?”

“If you get a name or cult attached to this corpse, you could leave me a message at the Biltmore. My room is under the name Ray Dufraine. I don’t know if the man here is important, but it might help everyone out if we keep trading info.”

“You’d owe me a favor back,” Maurice said.

“Of course.”

“Then it’s a deal,” Maurice said, offering to shake on it.

The Baron gripped the Oracle’s hand—heavy, an ex-laborer’s meaty paw—and he gave it two brief shakes before releasing it. “Thanks for your help, and I’m sorry about your loss. If we stumble across anything, we’ll be in touch.”

“You’re welcome.” He pinched the bridge of his nose just below his glasses. “It smells like blood in here. Are you good to go?.”

“Yes, Oracle,” the Baron replied.

Maurice turned towards the door, and the Baron and Zombie followed him out of the apartment and down the metal mesh stairs. Footsteps echoed off the far brick walls. When they reached the floor of the chamber, he turned to them. “Oh, I almost forgot to ask you.”

They walked down the aisle to the open temple door. “What is it?”

“We were talking about Schuler and Jackson Davis, and I was wondering, why don’t Diviners wish away the gift? If their sensitivity makes them crazy or gives them seizures, why stick with it? Why don’t they go back, if they can cure their madness?”

The Baron paused in the doorway. “You want to know their motivation?”

“I suppose I do.”

“It’s the same reason that flagellants whip themselves, Maurice. Suffering makes them holy. It makes them special. I think they stick with it because the struggle gives them meaning. Without it, there’s no purpose to their lives.”

“That’s grim,” Maurice said.

“It’s existentialism,” the Baron said. The Zombie darted around him and started down the steps, dress shoes tapping rapidly on the wood. “We’ll be heading out now. I hope you don’t have any trouble disposing of the corpse.”

“We won’t.” Maurice took a deep breath. “I’ve missed a task while talking with you already. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to work.”

The Baron nodded, thinking the same thing. It was time to go from here to the docks—to see if this death could bear any relevant info for their case.

They exchanged their goodbyes, and the Baron followed the Zombie down and out through a bookstore filled with people browsing magazines and paperbacks. These readers were looking for a moment’s entertainment, while a murdered man laid over them, quiet and still. What a strange world it could be, containing both trifles and graves.

The young Osman was standing at the front window. He waved miserably at the passing Baron, and d’Holbach waved back with a heart full of pity for the living and the dead.

Author’s Note:

Trifles and graves, equally fleeting.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other readers!

Join the Patreon to support the story and access 4 weeks of early chapters!

June 29, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

Like most temples, the 8th Street Bookstore was a small, secular front for a much larger occult operation. It was the only shop on the row with links to Tammany Hall, and it’d been largely self-sustaining after Greenwich began to attract artists and literary figures during the interwar period. Since the 40s, fiction magazines had become an entertainment mainstay, and the 8th Street Bookstore’s thorough selection made even the largest news stands look sparse. Rare publications were collected and sold to enthusiasts of the obscure, and it was said that on a good day, a buyer could find Californian scifi fanzines on the shelves. The bookstore was, in every sense of the word, legitimate. It was also the sole gateway to the upper stories—a unified facility stretching across the entire block where cultists could rest, take sanctuary to pay their debts, and review tasks from the gods for Greenwich and the surrounding neighborhoods.

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach was approaching the bookstore with the Zombie at his heels when a gaunt, starved man stepped out of the shade of a shop with an awkward twitch, like a marionette. He was wearing a black Anglican cassock and paused directly in the Baron’s path, blinking at d’Holbach through small, Franklin-style bifocals with lustrous copper frames. A mess of dirty blond hair spilled off his head, truly messy, contradicting the neatness and beauty of his costume and giving him the atmosphere of an insane uncle, once important but nearly impotent with dementia—a man whose servants waited in ambush each morning, simply to ensure he didn’t leave the house indecently exposed to both heavens and earth.

As recognition caught up to him, the Baron was confident that they’d only managed to shield the world from this man and could do nothing else. “No threats,” he warned the Zombie. “I think I know who this is.” Those suspicions were confirmed when a group of anxious bodyguards in expensive suits caught up with the twitching gentleman.

“Atheist,” the man hailed lazily, throwing his head back at a weird angle as if listening to the sky. He made a noise halfway between a hum and a moan. “Dee-hole-bach!”

“Do we know you?” the Zombie asked.

“Meister Schuler,” one of the minders said. “Please. It’s lunchtime.”

Schuler adjusted his glasses down his nose, then up again to exactly the same spot, as if he were adjusting to bring the Zombie into view. “I see the favorite pet.” He gave a complicated gesture at the Zombie, who stepped back out of its swaying path. “There’s the man who owns the Atheist dog.” He closed his eyes and listened. “I am here!” he shouted suddenly.

The Zombie grinned. “Who are you?”

“The master scholar,” Schuler muttered to himself. “I can hear you…”

The Baron knew about Meister Schuler, and he’d long-prepared this moment in his head. He stepped forward, invoking their contractual rights like a magic spell. “Meister Schuler, we have permission from the High Oracle of New York to pass unheeded through all territories in the city. If you don’t believe us, call Tammany. They’ll verify our free passage.”

Schuler’s eyes opened. He seemed disappointed, but hearing the official title of High Oracle made him straighten, as if a sea of distractions were drawn away by the tide. “Of course, I’m sorry. Baron d’Holbach and his Zombie, continue on!” He bowed deeply, and after he rose, his minders took him by the wrists and gently led him back to the shade beside the walk. “Some other day,” he called out to them, “they say, some other day!”

After getting out of earshot, the Zombie asked. “Have we met him before?”

“No, but I know him by his symptoms. He’s North America’s oldest Diviner, its Wizard—whatever you want to call him.”

Once every few decades, an Oracle with a god complex wished to hear every task on Earth—to hear the voices of the gods everywhere and at all times. That was at minimum one to two tasks per second, if not far more. Inevitably, the mental onslaught of alien information drove them insane, but it also gave them access to a lot of subtle knowledge about the occult.

“Ah, so that’s New York’s holy man,” the Zombie said. “That’d explain his minders. They wouldn’t want to lose him.”

“They couldn’t lose him,” the Baron replied. “He’s stable. Skilled. Prestigious. Given his age, it’d even take you a while to kill him.”

“Probably,” the Zombie agreed cheerily.

The Baron stared at Meister Schuler’s back, staggering along the sidewalk near the end of the block. “I just wish we knew why he was on a leash in Lower Manhattan though. It feels like a message.”

The Zombie peered in the same direction, watching as Schuler’s minders guided him towards a small restaurant. “If he wanted us to know something, he would’ve told us. I’ve known a few Wizards. Not one of them can shut up.”

“Maybe.” The Baron turned to face the Zombie. “Lucidity wasn’t in the cards today by the looks of it, so there must be a compelling reason to have him out in public.”

“New York is investigating something then,” the Zombie suggested.

“No. Kill that line of thought. They’re not investigating the Cat. Meister Schuler is important, but if New York knew the stakes? They’d deploy an army. At best, Schuler’s presence is about intimidation, not investigation. They’re showing off a weapon.”

“To who?”

“Impossible to say.” He looked the Zombie straight in the eye. “Don’t even assume you know why he’s here. The worst thing we can do is start with a conclusion and match the evidence to fit. Just stay on your toes. New York is feeling restless.”

The gaunt figure of Meister Schuler finally relented, and he let his minders ferry him into an expensive deli famous for its sandwiches and Greek salads. It was hard to believe he was still a Cosa Nostra hitman. Maybe the insanity helped.

“Should we go in?” the Zombie asked.

“Yeah.” The Baron walked past the front of the 8th Street Bookstore, and the Zombie fell in behind him. The shelves behind the windows were shallow and deep, with pulp magazines tilted and overlapping in tidy patterns like fish scales. Browsing was done by title alone, not sampling. The arrangement made it easy to see where a patron had opened a cover to sneak a few sentences. A small colored marker sign was taped up: “YOU READ, YOU BUY”

Past the storefront shelves, the Baron could see a large number of secular customers, minding their own business, and a couple of clear cultists, watching d’Holbach with practiced scowls. “The door guards see us,” the Baron said. “I’ll greet them.”

The Zombie chuckled. “I’ll grin menacingly.”

One of the cultists was faking an interest in the magazines and his faux browsing was messing up the display. Baron d’Holbach pulled open the front door and immediately waved to him with a couple of fingers. “A good day to you, sir.”

The cultist was short, very young, and thick body hair could be seen edging around the collar of his shirt. He scowled at the Baron. “Atheist. I know your face.”

The Baron sighed. Idiots loved to waste his time. “Nevermind, you’re dismissed.” He waved at the other, taller cultist, who was working the cash register. “We’re here to speak with the Oracle of Greenwich Village.”

The short cultist at the magazines wasn’t letting this go. “Hey! You’re not welcome in New York. Not here.”

The Zombie had been idling behind the Baron, but now his interest was piqued. “Do you think your opinion matters?” A smile split his face like a knife wound out for a leisurely stroll.

“We have permission,” the Baron said, dismissing his interlocutor.

The cashier joined the conversation. “What’s happening here?”

The first cultist jabbed a finger towards the Zombie, “This prick is trying to intimidate me.”

The register wrangler saw who he was talking about and his eyes went wide. “You should be intimidated—“

“What?” The shorter man sneered. “Fuck him, this is our turf.”

“No, fuck you, Osman. That’s the Zombie!”

Young Osman’s face screwed up. “What, like the movie?”

“Come on, Baron.” The cashier started towards the back, away from the short, confused cultist. “I’ll teach that asshole about the Pact in a second.”

“What the hell, Porter?” Osman called after them. Nobody responded, and he was soon obscured by higher shelves stacked with well-arranged hardcovers and haphazard piles of paperbacks. Their destination was beside the restroom at the back of the shop.

“Sorry about that,” said Porter.

“It’s fine,” the Baron said. “Did your temple receive a letter from the High Oracle?”

“Yeah, you’re checked in.” Porter pulled a key out of his pocket and unlocked a door marked Employees Only. “Head upstairs, the Greenwich Oracle should be in his chair.”

“Is he expecting me?”

“He knows you’re in town.” He opened the door and ushered the Baron and the Zombie inside. “It’s just the neophytes who don’t know up from down.”

“Is that Osman’s son?” the Baron asked.

“Yeah, General’s boy,” Porter replied.

“Make sure he learns.” The Baron glanced at the Zombie. “For his safety.”

“Tsch. Already planning on it.”

Porter closed the door behind them, and they climbed up the carpeted stairway, narrow and steep. It was an architectural no man’s land between the shop and the temple, closer to a pitched ladder than a true staircase, providing little more than a functional connection between the secular world below and the occult chambers above. Time and traffic had ground the fibers until they were fraying and thin, and the steps creaked audibly.

“That’s the only entrance?” the Zombie asked. “How do people leave at night?”

“They don’t,” the Baron said. “Half the apartments up here are for cultists to board until someone can let them out in the morning.”

“Seems like a fire hazard.”

“Did you look at the outside of the row?” They reached the top of the stairs, and the Baron ran up against a thin white door. “There’re at least thirty fire escapes on this block.”

“Is this the place you spent all that time on the phone asking about?”

“I’d hoped we might stay here for free.” The Baron shrugged down at the Zombie, who’d paused on the step below him while he worked the door’s stiff handle.

“Nah.” His companion frowned. “I couldn’t stand being cooped up here all night. I’d get bored.”

“That’s why I opted for the Biltmore.” The Baron opened the door and stepped out into a single cavernous room, three stories high and stretching the entire length of the rowhouse—at least half a kilometer of open air.

“Hmm,” the Zombie judged. “Nicer than it looks from the street.”

It was a warm auditorium of ruddy brick walls and heavy crimson carpets. The skeletal supports of the original buildings still hung in space, and the chamber’s inconsistent ceiling rested on a series of towering steel columns connected by suspended I-beams. Tapestries, curtains and other beautiful sheets of cloth were hung from the high bars in careful formation, filling the high chamber with ranks and rows like feudal heraldry. The elevation of the floor changed multiple times. Stairs and ramps linked aisles to aisles.

The vast space was lit from above and below. Bright, morning blue descended through ridged skylights, while ensconced lamps painted the red brick walls from below in buttery yellow. The combined hues flooded through the entire chamber, resulting in a space that was simultaneously airy and cozy, a magic trick achieved without the need for divine intervention.

Dozens of tables, pews, couches, desks, and chairs were scattered about—at least ten different floor plans straddled the space with haphazard, even arbitrary borders. Black mesh stairwells crawled up the broad walls at regular intervals, leading up towards ancient doors. The original three stories were preserved as apartments on both sides of the row, and there were several dozen full rooms where people could stay. Many of them contained sanctuaries—individual rooms set aside for occult functionality.

A few groups of people were seated together at tables or on couches. Several more were alone—reading, thinking and napping. Quiet voices could be heard murmuring in the distance. All other noises were muted by the cloth overhead.

“Oracle?” the Baron shouted. He shut the door behind himself and went for the nearest rise. They were leaving the bookstore behind and climbing over a shoe shop. At the far end of the temple chamber, they could see a young Irish man seated at a tremendous steel desk. He was dressed in a style lifted from the last century, wearing a fine shirt and suspenders like an accountant or clerk.

The young man waved. “Over here!”

They descended off the shoe shop and followed an undulating carpet road up to the desk at the head of the 8th Street Temple. The Oracle was toe-headed and pinch-faced like he’d been eating lemons, but he smiled well enough and his thick glasses made his fresh eyes appear larger.

“Good morning, Oracle!” the Baron called out.

The young man came around the desk and stepped forward to shake d’Holbach’s hand. “Morning, sirs! I’m Maurice Clare, the Oracle of Greenwich. Judging from your fine appearance, I’m guessing you’re the Philosopher, and the man behind you is the Golem?”

“The Zombie now,” the Zombie said.

“Of course! How can I help you, gentlemen?” Maurice asked.

The Baron glanced around. “I have a couple of quick questions. Does everyone dodging from the harbor arrive here?” It was a long shot, but Nagy might’ve made it back to a temple before he perished, and they needed a good idea where he might’ve landed if he’d wished himself into debt.

Maurice pursed his lips. “Not the whole harbor. New York is too big. The government took count in 1950—we were twelve million strong and growing, more populous than most countries. That’s twelve thousand cultists at least, not to mention all the visiting vassals, the organized crime…”

“Right,” the Baron said, “just making sure.”

Maurice hardly noticed the Baron’s acquiescence to the truth. “There’s a bunch of warehouse temples, though we’re looking for more locations like the bookstore here.”

“Of course,” the Baron agreed, following the Oracle’s gaze upwards. “It’s lovely.”

“It’s necessary.” Maurice’s eyes traced the brickwork, stopping at the skylights along the ridge of the row. “We just haven’t found a good place to hide a temple in a skyscraper, and nobody wants to build a second temple in the local underground.”

That actually caught the Baron’s attention. “You have a first one? Underground?”

“Oh yes. In the abandoned City Hall station.”

The Baron was impressed. The New York underground was notoriously poor for temple construction. Secular intrusion was almost impossible to prevent, and it was an absolute requirement from the gods that only cultists could walk on sacred grounds. Sanctuaries in particular were massive violations of the natural order and had to remain hidden from the public eye. The Baron and the Zombie were the only known exceptions to this rule. They weren’t cultists in any literal sense of the word, but they were allowed to enter without risking the sanctity of the location. “I hadn’t heard about any underground temple,” the Baron prompted, curious if Maurice would provide any more details about its construction.

The Oracle smiled proudly. “It’s been about 7 years now. We acquired the old station during the war, and Tammany pushed to make it a temple. Most of the other Oracles had their doubts, but one of the sanctuaries picked up a ten-year debtor in 47. We knew it was working then.” Maurice skedaddled around his desk, returning to his well-cushioned wooden chair. “We don’t need to stand around. Please, take a seat. Relax.”

“I am relaxed,” the Zombie said.

The Baron chose the chair directly across from the Oracle. A framed photograph of a pretty young woman faced outwards to impress visitors, but nothing else personal was in view. Spread out across the desktop was a single bound volume of vellum, open to a half-blank page where the Oracle could write out in elegant calligraphy the tasks he received from the gods. His fountain pen and inkwell were straight at hand, and judging by the lightest bite of alcohol in the air, he’d been writing before they came in.

The Zombie stood behind the Baron like a sentinel, slowly rocking on his heels.

Once everyone was settled, Maurice spoke up. “My father used to say, you treat the devil politely. You have to show respect, even if there’s evil at hand.”

“Especially if there’s evil at hand,” the Baron said. He tended to let insults about his atheism go, especially when there was nothing to win by taking offense.

“Think nothing of it. The High Oracle called us this morning. Our temples are your temples for the duration of your stay. You said you had a couple of questions?”

“Yes, well…” The Baron was here to figure out if there was a task that might’ve attracted Nagy to New York City, but he couldn’t ask about Nagy himself. Plausible deniability would be key to all his interactions with New York. “We’re here to look into some recent tasks,” he said. “Could you tell us about everything big that was announced or completed in the last month?”

“What do you mean, big?” Maurice asked.

“The kind of task that Oracles might’ve heard in other states.”

“Ah—there’s been several so far. A couple murders, maybe five saved lives, the formation of an Off-Off-Broadway troupe here in the Village.” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, one of the bigger ones was to cause a SoHo art gallery to default on their loan—”

“That was big?” the Baron asked.

“Apparently it required a lot of extremely difficult electronic fraud. Langley was the only cult that had the resources to pick it up. We negotiated a token price for working in our territory and they took care of it. Big prestige.”

“Anything else?” Routine murders, pedestrian salvations and art projects weren’t the kind of tasks that Nagy would’ve crossed oceans to participate in.

“Yeah. Two others. One was to sneak a bomb onto a domestic plane—not to detonate it, just to make sure it was there to ground the plane and make a fuss. I think Langley picked that one up as well. The other was to scuttle a cargo ship in the harbor. That was outsourced to some dock workers, but the task had a body count.”

Alarm bells rang in the Baron’s head. “They completed it?”

“Yeah. Thursday night. The Port Authority has been working in shifts to dredge up the debris since it happened. I think four cultists died. Tammany Hall managed to spin their casualties as part of some diesel explosion that sank the vessel.”

The Baron wove his fingers together and rested them in his lap, pondering what a body count might mean. He’d start with the fundamentals and work through the logic.

The system of prestige began with a simple conceit. The Oracles wished to hear the gods, and in turn, the gods assigned tasks through the Oracles, offering a reward for their completion. The bigger the task, the bigger the prestige. Since greater tasks were more difficult and required more resources, the gods announced them across wider regions, often speaking to many Oracles at once. The gods divided their prestige equally across those who completed the task, but about two-thirds of tasks were phrased in such a way that only one person could officially complete it, even if hundreds were necessary to finish it.

These narrow rewards encouraged ruthless competition, murder, and deceit. Rival cults could steal hard-earned prestige by showing up at the right place and time to pull the proverbial trigger. This practice went by many names, but one of the most common to date was “sniping,” a metaphor invoking the assassination that it often involved.

There was a body count, a sunk boat, and Nagy was a trained killer. If he’d come to the United States for any task, this was it. “Do you know why they died?” d’Holbach asked.

Maurice shrugged, showing the perfect lack of care that any leader needed when their missions led to death and destruction. “They were killed by the explosives they used to scuttle the ship. The Port Authority couldn’t even collect whole bodies.”

“Their corpses might’ve been blown up,” the Zombie suggested.

d’Holbach agreed. There was no way to know if the dock workers had died before the cargo ship was scuttled. Nagy might’ve plugged a few before going down. Scratch that—if he was there, he’d absolutely killed someone before dying himself.

Maurice frowned. “Were you speaking with Meister Schuler outside?”

“We met him, yes,” said d’Holbach.

“Are you working with him?”

“No. What was he here for?”

“He was asking if anyone had been talking about the ship scuttle before Thursday.”

“Did anyone?”

“Not here, but he’s been going from temple to temple all morning. He also said the same thing—that their corpses might’ve been blown up. Were the workers killed before the ship went down?”

“Maybe.” The Baron leaned back. “It’s not really important. We’re just fishing for opportunities. I don’t plan on sticking my nose in Schuler’s business, not with a completed task like that.” The Baron was selling bullshit, but Maurice bought it without question.

“Yeah, he’s nuts. Nobody really wants to work with him.” The Greenwich Oracle rubbed an eye. “Smart as a whip though. He kept guessing how I’d finish my sentences. It was uncanny.”

“He’s very skilled. The last Diviner in North America didn’t fare so well.”

“We bought his house,” the Zombie said.

Maurice concentrated for a second. “Are you talking about Andrew Jackson Davis?”

“That’s the man. After the wish crippled him, he moved to Boston and started taking phenobarbital and paraldehyde so he could write. He finished almost thirty books on spiritualism, most of them too far gone to be relevant. I’m not sure he even remembered the system of prestige. He’d sink into these awful trances and just babble tasks for hours in an empty room.”

“You met him?”

“In 1900. He was in his early 70s.” The Baron made an idle pass at his pockets to find a cigar. Nothing. He promised himself that he’d buy one as soon as they left the temple. “The only thing he could really remember was the Fall of Truth. He still moaned about Elizabeth.”

“Who?” Maurice asked.

“The Apostate,” the Zombie interjected.

“Fascinating.” The Oracle of Greenwich scratched his throat. “You said he took phenobarbital? Paraldehyde? What for?”

“He suffered from seizures. It’s the way the so-called gods talk,” the Baron said. “It’s too much to handle physically.”

“What do you mean? They don’t actually talk.”

“Right. The task is made and the knowledge is just in your head.”

Maurice nodded. “Yes. It’s like I remember hearing something.”

“Now humor me here. Assume for a moment that you don’t have a soul, and that your memory is all in your brain.” The Baron tapped his forehead. “This means every task received causes a change up here. Synapses get shuffled around. Chemistry gets mixed up and moved. Your brain is edited, understand?”

“Meister Schuler’s brain is edited a few times every second then,” Maurice said.

“Exactly.”

“I never get sick though.” Maurice looked over at the record book on the table. “I spend a lot of time working here. If it’s really brain editing, the gods are great editors.”

“I’m sure they are,” the Baron said, “but they’re not perfect.”

Maurice balked a little. “Well—”

The Zombie interrupted, “The Falls prove they’re imperfect.” He tapped his chest with the flat of his fist. “I’m here for a reason.”

“They still don’t make me ill,” Maurice noted.

The Baron tapped a temple with a finger. “That’s because your brain is able to follow neurological rules most of the time. Stuff fires together, it wires together. Hebbian theory.”

“It… what?” Maurice asked.

“I mean that the brain is self-organizing, and it changes slowly based on interactions and input. You live in the world, and you react to it sensibly.” The Baron shifted in his chair. “Schuler’s brain doesn’t get to self-organize. He’s being rebuilt multiple times a second, and all the changes are at odds with the reality that he experienced just seconds ago. I think he’s just well-practiced at rationalizing the invasive thoughts. Maybe he compartmentalizes. It’s like he can ignore the changes.”

“Mr. Jackson Davis couldn’t do that, though?”

“Not without medicine. Not without depressed brain function. If he was stressed, he’d go into convulsions. Hearing all those tasks took their toll.”

The Zombie smiled wistfully. “I scared the hell out of him.”

The Baron rolled his eyes. “Loud noises scared him.”

“I showed him a penny knife.”

“Don’t ask,” the Baron told the Greenwich Oracle.

“This is all assuming that we don’t have souls, of course,” Maurice noted.

The Baron carefully suppressed the urge to shrug. “I don’t think it’s much of an assumption, but I’m not here to argue against dualism. I don’t know how you’d reconcile Schuler’s behavior with a soul theory though.”

Maurice frowned. “Psychology, maybe?”

“One science substituted for another?” Psychology was a lesser science in the Baron’s view, as it remained agnostic to so much else that had already been learned.

“I don’t know. This isn’t my area of expertise. I’m a man who knows the rules and the prices and writes down the jobs.” Maurice smiled. “Why something happens isn’t my business.”

“Ah, I understand.” The Baron rose from his chair. “Well, thank you for your help.”

“Are you leaving already?” Maurice asked. He was obviously enjoying the Baron’s conversation and was probably looking for a way to invite himself to lunch.

The Baron grinned congenially. While he was often polite, he couldn’t abide the Oracle’s prideful ignorance, and there’d be an argument if he stayed. As far as he was concerned, knowing the facts was everyone’s business. If the Oracle of Greenwich believed otherwise in order to protect his beliefs, this would be the limit of their friendship.

The Baron had many acquaintances and few true friends.

“We’ll be heading to the Biltmore to check in,” the Baron said.

“Do you mind if I ask you a question first?” Maurice asked. “It’s really an opinion I want.”

“Wait,” the Zombie said. He raised a hand.

“I don’t mind,” the Baron said.

“Quiet!” the Zombie yelled.

The Baron turned. “What is it?”

“Someone’s sprinting—”

The door to the entrance along the far wall flew open, rattling as if it’d been kicked, and the cashier exploded into the temple chamber with the short, hairy neophyte in his draft.

“What the hell?” Maurice asked.

“Those are the boys from downstairs,” the Baron said.

“Porter and Osman,” Maurice said. “They’re the gatekeepers on shift. One second.” Maurice stood up and shouted through cupped hands. “What’s the emergency?”

Porter stopped two buildings away in the chamber and shouted back. “Sanctuary call! There may be a man bleeding out in the temple!”

Author’s Note:

Sometimes, men arrive from far afield, bloodied and perishing.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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June 29, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

Like most of New York City, Manhattan was a sandwich of former villages, towns and districts forced to merge by the tremendous economic pressure of an ocean meeting a river, where the lion’s share of trade and immigration met with opportunity seekers and investors. Raw resources had been close at hand, and expansion had been cheaper than good planning.

Manhattan around Grand Central Terminal had blown up during the 20s. Industrialists had turned oil and railroad fortunes into diverse empires and rebuilt the area around Central Park to manifest a vision of prosperity in granite and steel. Their growth had pushed south against poverty-stricken Greenwich Village, threatening to devour and gentrify, forcing a metamorphosis from a marshy slum to the heart of counterculture. It was a necessary adaptation. Business encysted the area, even flourished around it. Lower Manhattan was a garden of skyscrapers and the physical embodiment of a new postwar economy. In the shadow of that mighty avatar, only a strong identity could bind the community together.

In every little decision, when there was opportunity to reinforce or erode, to sell out or hold on despite the costs, Greenwich survived because it was a place which resisted and resented, which celebrated iconoclasts. It was a good place for a secret meeting.

As far as the Baron and the Zombie could tell, nobody followed them on the cab ride south to Greenwich Village. After telling the cabbie to take them to Caffe Reggio, they closed up the cab’s central window partition to talk.

“Why were we being tailed?” the Zombie asked.

Baron d’Holbach idly patted his jacket pocket. He knew he hadn’t brought any cigars with him, and he definitely couldn’t smoke in the cab, but he was feeling the urge. “Malik has his own agenda. He and Denisov weren’t in agreement about hiring us.”

The Zombie hummed thoughtfully. “Denisov was the ranking cultist. He had an Apple of Perun and the Lazy Woman.“

The significance of those artifacts was clear. Not only was Denisov highly regarded and trusted back in Russia, but he was a member of the inner circle of the conquered Orthodox cult. Technically he would be a member of the Unified Soviet cult, but the Orthodox / Bolshevik division was still widely known. “Do you think Malik was Bolshevik?”

The Zombie shrugged. “Hard to say.”

The Baron agreed. “No Bolshevik would be caught taking orders from an Orthodox, not while they’re running the secular government, but Denisov was clearly in charge.”

“We’ll have to ask him,” the Zombie said.

They pulled up at the end of the block in Greenwich Village, paid the cabbie and got out onto the walk facing MacDougal Street. In classic New York style, the bottom floor of every residential building had been hollowed out and converted into a cubbyhole shop capped by a giant glass window, while the upper floors were divided and redivided into hundreds of tiny, privately administered apartments. These residences were mostly meant for sleeping and were too cramped otherwise, so Greenwich Village spent its days outdoors. The sidewalk was full of people, many of them seated on lawn chairs or stools listening to local speakers, poets, and buskers with instrument cases cracked open for spare change. Food vendors hawked their particular flavors of meat and fat, while locals avoided the tourists from Upper Manhattan.

As long as the rooms were tiny and the streets were full of immigrants and outsiders, this neighborhood would be dominated by the working poor and the cultural vanguard. The Baron had seen its like before in Paris and Boston, and it was always wonderful while it lasted. Unfortunately, Greenwich’s charm and artistic innovation were self-defeating. Gentrification was inevitable, and the Baron predicted that before the century was out, upper-crust socialites would transform this street into a quiet, high-class neighborhood with one-third of the population and almost none of the charm.

Caffe Reggio had dominated this row of Greenwich shops since the interwar period. The owner Dominic Parisi had brewed the first Italian “cappucino” on American soil using an incredibly expensive, hand-crafted espresso machine of bronze and chrome, and as the drink’s popularity had grown, so had his wealth and the quality of his cafe. He’d given it the air of a curio shop, distributing sculptures, carvings, busts, paintings and other imported Italian miscellany across the brown plaster walls. Everything was suspiciously rustic; the chairs and tables were expertly hewn to look sturdy, not comfortable, while the surfaces were coarsely textured. It was as if the craftsmen had been allowed only five minutes to work before they were sent away for a lack of funds.

It fulfilled the beatnik’s dream of visiting an authentic Italian cafe, even though the Baron knew from personal experience that no self-respecting Italian would run a classy business out of a place that looked like a well-swept barn packed full of stolen art.

They stopped under the canopy over the front door and peered through the glass into the dark interior. Denisov was seated just inside at the nearest table, still wearing the amulet and the apple.

The Baron and Zombie stared expectantly at the Soviet.

After a moment, Denisov noticed them and stared back. It was safe.

The Baron opened the door for the Zombie and they walked inside. Before they could even sit down, the espresso machine hissed threateningly like a train boiler fit to burst.

Denisov lifted a finger at them to halt. “One moment,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the industrial grade coffee contraption. “He’s brewing my drink.”

Dominic was well-known, having been photographed numerous times for articles in newspapers and magazines. Even at his advanced age, he came down every day to operate the tremendous machine with his wrinkled hands. He held up a small cup full of milk, then pulled a lever. The boiler opened a valve, and a blast of steam ripped through a nozzle with a noise like someone detonating bombs in a munitions dump. Some of the patrons covered their ears automatically, shutting up while the milk was steamed and foamed. The deafening roar delighted the Zombie; he turned to listen like it was a distant melody.

Almost as quickly as it started, the lever was released and the sound stopped. “That happens every time they make an espresso?” the Baron asked wryly. “Who wouldn’t want to stay here and listen to that note again?”

No response from Denisov, nor from the Zombie.

The Baron glanced back and forth, meeting their eyes in turn. Neither was biting; Denisov’s mood was sour, and the Zombie was pretending disinterest for fun. “Either of you?” the Baron asked. “No? Well, I for one will remember that sound in my nightmares.”

“Were you followed?” Denisov asked, jumping straight to the point.

“We shook them,” the Baron replied.

The Zombie stuck his lower lip out, an exaggerated expression. “It cost me my blue coat.”

Denisov looked him over. “That explains why clothes are part of your fee.” His eyes darted back to the Baron. “I’d invite you to sit, but we’ll move in a moment.”

“Whatever you prefer,” the Baron replied.

Dominic Parisi was coming over with a single cup of cappuccino, its fine velvety head stiffer than a plank. “Your guests have arrived?” he asked Denisov.

The Soviet gestured at a door behind the counter. “Can we take this in the lounge?”

Dominic was very old, almost decrepit, and his mustache was shock white. He smiled, and his yellowing teeth showed gaps and spots of shining metal where cavities had been filled. “I recognize both. Salem, yes? Atheist and… Golem?”

“Please, call me Baron d’Holbach,” the Baron said.

“And I’m called the Zombie now,” the Zombie said.

Dominic laughed. “Like the movie!” he said. “I love zombie movie. Are you zombie?”

“I’ve never died.” The Zombie pulled a penny knife out of his pocket. “Want to see a trick?”

“No, he doesn’t,” the Baron said quickly. “Mr. Parisi, the name is a joke based on a pet philosophical theory. As far as you’re concerned, the Zombie is just a man.”

Dominic was wise enough to know when he’d pressed too far. “My apologies, I’m no cultist. I know names, a little history. Nothing more.”

The Zombie put his knife back in his pocket. “Can I touch your espresso machine?”

“No. It’s beautiful, but very hot. You’d burn your hands.”

The Zombie grinned and laughed, twice, almost like a bark.

“He can’t be burned, only insulted,” the Baron corrected. “Mr. Parisi, please, show us the back. Zombie, don’t leave fingerprints on his machine.”

Dominic led them through the back door and served Denisov his cappuccino at a small formica table in a brick corner stinking of tobacco smoke. The Soviet took a seat in an old metal chair, creaking beneath a cotton cushion. The Baron sat down across from him. This spot was tailored for private meetings—both occult and secular. d’Holbach thought he could make out the remnants of cocaine stuck in the table’s many hairline cracks.

“Do artists come back here often?” the Baron asked Mr. Parisi.

The old cafe owner stood back one step, then held an open palm towards Denisov. “With friends, girls,” he answered the Baron. “I serve them coffee.”

Denisov silently dismissed Dominic with a five dollar bill.

The owner grinned. “Very generous,” he said as he backed out of the door.

The Zombie was still standing.

“There’re plenty of chairs,” Denisov said to the invincible man.

“I like standing,” the Zombie replied. “It keeps my pants clean.”

Denisov sipped from his scalding cappuccino.

“I often stand all night,” the Zombie continued with a strange lightness.

“Ignore him,” the Baron said. “What’re we here for?”

“Malik.” Denisov set down his cup of coffee.

“Why? Aren’t you part of the Orthodox leadership? You must outrank him.”

“Things aren’t that simple.” Denisov leaned back in his chair a little and waved his hand slowly over the cappucino. “He’s keeping an eye on me for the Bolsheviks. He sent the tails. Very tedious.”

The Baron glanced back towards the door, a momentary twitch of paranoia. “Were you tailed then?” he asked Denisov.

“Yes, but they dropped my trail on the UN grounds. Then I rode here. As I said—very tedious.” The drink wouldn’t cool very quickly under a head of stiff foam, but he continued waving. “How much do you know about the Bolsheviks and Orthodox Church?”

“Mostly secular history,” the Baron said. “Distorted too, but I know that there’s been a constant struggle in the Soviet cult since the First World War.”

“Allow me a moment to explain. It will help you to understand.”

The Baron nodded. “If it matters, we have time.”

“We’re all ears,” the Zombie said, showing a rare degree of patience.

Denisov touched the side of the coffee cup to test for heat, then opted to cool it a little longer. “Before the 19th century, our cult was little more than a loose brotherhood. We used the Eastern Orthodox Church as a secular body, but we rarely organized above a local level. What we shared were beliefs and records. We could work together, plan together.”

The Baron knew this era well. “I assume this changed when London tried conquering Central Asia?”

“Just so. The Great Game forced us to centralize through the mid-century. We collected the Apples, the Cat, the Lazy Woman, Solovei’s Whistle—we went to war.” Denisov lifted his coffee to try sipping again. He drank a little deeper and seemed satisfied. “We had a rich tradition to draw from. Hundreds of major artifacts, thousands of minor artifacts, and a large pool of prestige. It was good for us, and for business.”

“You managed to bring down London during the Exhibition.”

Denisov wagged a finger. “No, no. That was the Apostate. Still, London’s cult was destroyed in the Fall of Truth, and the British Empire was in decline. Going into the 20th century, we were the largest cult in Europe. You know what they say about idle hands? We had no common enemy, so we fought ourselves.”

“The old guard versus the Bolsheviks?” the Baron guessed.

“Yes. Our neophytes opposed any contact with the Tsar or the nobility, while the Orthodox fathers were a little more forgiving of secular integration.”

The Zombie tilted his head slightly. “Did you induct any nobles?”

“Pfah, no,” Denisov said, chuckling over his coffee. “Those men never worked. No. We wanted to merely influence secular power, but the Bolsheviks wanted to take it for themselves. Lenin was the heart of their cause—influential, a true believer. Unlike Stalin, he aimed to improve the lot of industrial workers and would’ve made a benevolent dictator.”

“Their worst misfortune was his birth, their second worst was his death.” The Baron was paraphrasing Winston Churchill. Lenin had died of syphilis, upsetting Bolshevik power dynamics and setting the stage for the rise of Stalin.

Denisov scowled. “A fine quote, and mostly right. After Lenin’s death, Stalin was ruthless. He’d accrued a lot of occult power from the assassination of Rasputin, and he was ready to seize control of the party in ‘24. Most of my faction still blame the monk for Stalin’s rise to power. Rasputin’s antiwar counsel made him important to the course of history, and the gods put a task on his head to kill him before 1917. In response, we fed Rasputin the Cat to safeguard his life at the Tsar’s court, but he betrayed us to the Bolsheviks.”

“A mistake,” the Zombie suggested.

“Indeed.” Denisov sipped his coffee again. “The monk was killed by his new masters on the banks of the Nevka one day before the deadline. Stalin collected the prestige for the task and the Cat for the Bolshevik faction. He retired from the occult after that, but you can imagine how much money he made, selling wishes all over Russia.”

“Why didn’t you take the Cat back?” the Zombie asked. “You have the Apples.”

Denisov sighed. “They were still our comrades, and there was the war. We assisted the Bolsheviks in the revolutions. When the White Army received foreign support, we sided against them despite their Tsarist ideology. The Soviet cult was for Russia, first and foremost, and the Bolsheviks were responsible cultists. Stalin didn’t use the Cat. He kept it for us, waiting until we could offer him something valuable enough for its return to the Orthodox faction.”

“That didn’t last,” the Baron guessed. “Stalin was impatient.”

“Correct. The interwar period saw the purges and the suppression of the church. We’d worried about Marx’s atheism, but we’d never expected Stalin to use it as an excuse to persecute the Orthodox leadership. We persisted only because we had the most occult power. The artifacts, the prestige—it was a stalemate that lasted until World War II.”

“You said you fed Nagy the Cat. The assassin was Orthodox, but the Bolsheviks fed him?” the Baron asked. He was starting to assemble a picture from all this complicated history, though the exact stakes weren’t yet clear. He waited for Denisov to answer.

“It was World War II. London was toothless, New York was neutral, and Langley was occupied with the Americas. The Bolsheviks needed a capable soldier to kill members of the Thule Society.”

“The Nazis,” the Zombie corrected.

Denisov put a hand on his heart. “May Nagy’s soul be blessed for burying them all.” He dropped his hand to the formica, slouching over the table with an air of exhaustion. “My point—the Bolsheviks offered to feed the Cat to Nagy in exchange for operational command over him for the duration of the conflict. We agreed.”

“You must’ve wanted the Cat terribly,” the Zombie said.

“We wanted a known quantity. If the Cat was in Nagy, it was safe, and we were optimistic that our reconciliation would unify the Soviet cult. Of course, it didn’t.”

“Then Nagy comes to America and dies. What was he here for?” the Baron asked.

“I don’t know, and I don’t think Malik knows either. It was a mission handed down from Stalin himself. A rare dip into the occult from an old man, waiting to die.” Denisov lifted the cup and finished his cappuccino in a single draught. He wiped a line of milk foam from his lips with the back of a knuckle. “The situation is dire though. It’s vital that you find Nagy’s corpse, find his killers and retrieve the Cat.”

“Why? What’s at stake here?” the Baron asked.

“When we asked for the Cat, the Bolsheviks demanded a security. If Nagy betrayed them or died and let the Cat fall into enemy hands, we promised to give them these.” He touched the amulet and the golden apple. “Two artifacts for one, and far more offensive power than they’ve ever had. Malik already demanded payment, but the Orthodox leadership bargained for a brief stay while I attempted to recover the Cat. I have a few days left, maybe a week at most, to return the Cat to the Bolsheviks.” Denisov squeezed the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry for putting this much responsibility on your shoulders.”

“What do you mean?”

“Except for me, all Russian cultists in America are Bolshevik, and Malik’s men will attempt to retrieve the Cat. Malik could then claim that Nagy betrayed the Bolsheviks, demand the security payment, and keep the Cat for his faction. If we didn’t pay him, the Orthodox leadership would be rightly labeled as traitors within the party. If we did pay him, the Bolsheviks would own half of the Soviet cult’s most powerful artifacts, and we’d be shamed for trusting the Cat to Nagy. There’s already talk of Bolsheviks seizing the Orthodox banker, and we could be forced to pay up or lose our lives in the coming months. Our fate hinges on the recovery of the Cat, and I don’t have any manpower except what I can hire.” He pointed at the Baron. “You.”

“If I find the Cat, I save the Orthodox leadership?” d’Holbach asked.

“More than that, you shift the balance of power within the USSR. The Bolsheviks are dangerous men, Baron. They want to use Orthodox artifacts and prestige to fight the Cold War. They think they can succeed where London failed and create an empire founded on the marriage of occult and secular might. The Orthodox cult opposes cultic action for a reason. This world teeters on the edge of a nuclear war. An occult conflict could easily escalate to secular armageddon.”

“Why not someone else?” the Baron asked. “Why only us?”

“We’re worth it,” the Zombie said.

“I’m not saying we aren’t up for the job, but you’re putting all your eggs in one basket.”

“There’s nobody else,” Denisov said. “New York would just take the Cat, if they haven’t already. They have no respect for the Soviet cult. The local Vatican chapters are under New York control. Langley keeps an eye on secular mercenaries using CIA resources. The Mormons? Langley control. The Jews? Would they risk crossing the major powers, even if by accident? All the other major cults are too far away to intervene. Could you imagine trying to contact Ethiopia?”

“And you can’t fly in your own men without alerting Langley.”

“We can’t do anything without tripping over a CIA spook.”

The Zombie spoke up. “Have you considered the possibility that Malik’s men double-crossed Nagy?”

“The Soviets are all accounted for, and the Bolsheviks would face the same personnel issues that I face now. Who would they hire to kill Nagy that wouldn’t take the Cat for themselves? How would they hire them without alerting Langley or New York? It’d be a massive risk, not one Stalin would take. If they wanted the Cat back, Nagy would’ve let them cut it out. I admit, it’s a real possibility that Malik is still at fault, but how he’d do it and why—I don’t think he’s that much of a fool. Nagy’s death has already put the Soviet cult at great peril. If New York or Langley knew what’d happened, this city would become a war zone until the Cat was seized.”

The Baron rapped the table with his knuckles. “Whether or not Malik is involved in losing the Cat, he still needs to find it. If he had it already, he wouldn’t be spending the resources to trail us. He’d be framing the story to implicate Nagy while running back home.”

“I’ve seen Malik’s preparations,” Denisov said, “He’s already started an investigation. Gods help us if he steps on somebody’s toes or loses a cultist to a rival cult, but he’s in the search with full force and has no more clue than you or I about the Cat.”

“Is he a threat to the locals?” the Baron asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen him run an operation.”

“I hate to ask this, but it’s for your own safety. Would he be a threat to me?” The Baron leaned slightly over the table. “Would he threaten my life or attempt to kill me?”

Denisov hesitated. He glanced at the Zombie. This question clearly hadn’t been at the forefront of his mind, but it was very important that the Baron gauge the danger to himself.

For the first time today, the Zombie stopped smiling. “Denisov?”

Denisov furrowed his brow, steeling himself. “Please, understand, the Orthodox faction cannot make decisions for the Bolsheviks.”

The Zombie spoke quietly, but his voice was filled with steel. “Fight him if you have to, because I won’t bend the rules. It’s mutually assured destruction.”

The Baron didn’t say anything. He waited for Denisov to react.

The old man took a deep breath before he spoke. “If Malik attempts to take your life, Baron, I will see to it that the full force of the Soviet cult comes down on his head. But I can’t promise that he won’t try. I don’t know him well enough.”

The Zombie pulled out the second penny he’d taken from the cabbie, jammed it between his front incisors, and started biting it in half. The copper sliced cleanly and quietly, and he caught the front half with his palm. Then he smiled and started chewing on the bit in his mouth. Little flecks of shining, fresh copper could be seen on his teeth.

“Frightening, isn’t he?” the Baron asked.

“Yes,” Denisov said slowly.

“Your promise is as good as a contract.” The Baron smiled; his point was made. “Don’t worry, Denisov! I value my life for a reason. The Zombie gives no exceptions. His Pact wouldn’t have any force if he started favoring third parties.”

“It’s principle,” the Zombie said. He popped the second half in his mouth and swallowed without chewing. “Nothing personal.”

“No offense taken.” Denisov reached for his pompadour as if to smooth it, but caught himself and didn’t touch it. “Just do whatever you can to finish the job. Many, many lives might depend on the result.”

The Baron nodded once, curtly. “We’ll do everything we can to recover the Cat, even if we have to take it out of someone’s gut. But this doesn’t make us Soviets. We’re not vassals to your cult, and we won’t help you beyond the bounds of this job.”

“Of course not, but I know you have limited allies. If you do this, I’ll make sure the Orthodox leadership understands that they owe you both a favor.”

“That’s good,” the Baron said, “I’ll hold you to that.”

Denisov tapped the rim of the cappuccino cup. It made a ceramic clink on the formica. “If I go back to Russia without the Cat, I’ll be abandoned by both the Orthodox leadership and the Bolsheviks. If you find it, you’ll have saved my life.”

The Baron had little to say to that. They hadn’t saved him yet. There was one thing, however, that he was interested in. “Speaking of personal favors—Denisov, before you came to America, you were the record keeper for the Soviet cult in Stalingrad, yes? I’m interested in the Fall of Truth, the last ageless person. The wish she made.”

Denisov was surprised. “You want our file on the Apostate?”

“On Elizabeth, yes. Rumors in Boston say that she’s still alive.”

“She probably is. During the interwar period, she killed a man and evaded Nagy in Germany. That was the last time we saw her.”

The Baron shifted in his seat. “Do your records detail that encounter?”

“They do.”

“Then I want a copy. That’s my personal price.”

 Denisov nodded. “After this is over, I’ll hand deliver our current file on the Apostate. Maybe you’ll find something useful inside.”

“Thank you. That’s more important to me than you’ll know.”

“Do you really think she can help you answer your questions? The legends—”

“I know the legends. I was alive when they were made.”

“Do you doubt them?”

“No, not at all.”

“Then what do you expect?”

“I don’t know yet,” the Baron said succinctly, “but I won’t until I meet her.”

“The Lady of Our Fall,” Denisov said.

“She’s Elizabeth,” the Baron said. “Not any of those ridiculous names. Just Elizabeth.”

“Of course,” Denisov said, though it was obvious that he didn’t agree. He checked his watch. “We’ve been here too long already. I need to return to the UN grounds before Malik figures out I’m missing. After today, assume that I’ll be followed and watched at all times. Avoid contacting me unless absolutely necessary. I’ll spend most of my time at the diplomatic mission.”

“It’ll be best if we play this close to the chest,” the Baron agreed.

“I’ll leave first. Gentlemen.” The old Russian diplomat rose from his chair. “I hope to see you with the Cat o’ Nine Lives in hand.” He left, and as he opened the door leading out of the back, they could hear Dominic Parisi’s terrifying espresso machine like the Trumpet of Jericho bringing ruin to the walls.

The Zombie very carefully patted the Baron on the shoulder from behind. “Keep your mind on the Cat,” he said. “We’ll worry about the Apostate another time.”

“Yes,” d’Holbach said. He didn’t correct the Zombie. When a nameless man only had a title, he couldn’t begrudge him the right to apply titles to others.

“Where should we begin?”

The Baron pushed back his chair and stood up, rolling his shoulders back. There was a lot to do, and the balance of power might depend on it. “We’ll start by looking for reasons Nagy might’ve been in town.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out Denisov’s letter. “There’s a temple in the 8th Street Bookstore. We can walk over there and question the Oracle of Greenwich. Maybe there was a task Nagy was here to finish.”

“Or to stop someone from finishing,” the Zombie suggested.

The Baron balled up the letter. “Eat this. We don’t need any evidence lying around in trash cans. Not even ashes.”

The Zombie grinned. “You’re always telling me not to eat things.”

“Today is an exception. I already let you get away with the pennies.”

The Zombie took the paper ball, popped it in his mouth, and swallowed without chewing.

“You didn’t want to taste it?” the Baron asked. “So greedy.”

The Zombie laughed.

The Baron checked his own watch. In the dimly lit room, its radium dials were bright enough to glow gently green. “That’s long enough. Time to save the free world.”

Author’s Note:

The stakes have been set. It’s time to start our investigation!

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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June 29, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

The Baron made no move to check the note in his pocket. Before he could investigate anything, they had to step outside the easy surveillance of the Soviet Mission. The Baron fell in alongside the Zombie, following Malik down the hall towards the elevator.

“What’re you thinking?” the Baron asked his friend.

The Zombie pulled off his bowler, spun it around on the side of its curled brim, and tossed it back up onto his head with practiced ease. It landed slightly askew. “This is better than I imagined,” he replied, adjusting its fit with a quick tug.

Malik stopped at the elevator and pressed the call button.

The Baron smirked at the Zombie’s whimsy. “Don’t get too excited about cracking heads. We’ll spend most of this weekend asking questions.”

“A waste of time,” Malik opined. The elevator door opened, and he ushered them into the car. “Unlike comrade Denisov, I don’t put any faith in your success.”

The Zombie stood at the back of the car, and the Baron tucked himself into a corner and smiled up at the Russian man. “Do you know something we don’t?”

“Nothing you ought to know,” Malik said.

“Ha, a politician’s answer. As true as it is empty, I’m sure.”

Malik scowled but otherwise refused to dignify the Baron’s insult.

“Do you think Nagy killed anybody?” the Zombie asked.

“He went down in a fountain of blood, I’m sure,” the Baron said.

The elevator reached the ground floor, and the door opened onto that narrow hall off the anteroom. “Yakov!” Malik barked. “Show these men off the property.”

The security guard materialized with both hands already outstretched to grab shoulders and pull on garments, swiftly approaching. A mistake.

“Don’t!” the Baron snapped, all humor out of his voice.

The guard paused and looked to Malik. The Zombie was standing utterly still, staring at the guard’s nearest hand like a dog admiring a steak.

“Don’t touch the Zombie,” the Baron said quietly. “Not if you want to keep that hand.”

The guard asked, “Malik?”

“It’s fine,” Malik said coldly. “Just walk them out.”

The guard snatched his hand back and gestured for them to follow. A few hurried footsteps later and they were deposited outside the front door of the mission. The guard already escaping behind the imaginary safety of iron bars, terrified mostly because the Zombie was a threat that he couldn’t properly measure or engage.

“I wouldn’t have hurt him that bad,” the Zombie said, stepping out from under the portico.

“Oh, I believe it, but it’s a secular mission run by a secular diplomat. We’d be behind bars before the hour was up.” The Baron shaded his eyes and looked up at the fourth floor. He almost expected to see Denisov looking down at them from one of those windows. They needed to review the note in his pocket as soon as possible. “Let’s find a cab.”

The Zombie followed the Baron to the roadside, idly chatting all the while. “I don’t know. They waived security measures for us. That’s a lot of freedom.”

“Yeah?” The Baron waved a hand towards a coming cab, raising and dropping his arm with the ease of someone used to receiving service. “Freedom for what?”

The Zombie rubbed his hands together like a man considering a menu. “Hmm. I wager you could’ve kicked the guard in the testicles and they wouldn’t have complained.”

The first cab swept by without stopping, but the Baron couldn’t see anyone in the seats. “You’re incorrigible. Help me flag down the next one.”

The Zombie scoffed. “You’re standing by the curb. You do it.”

“I’m not a beanpole.”

“I’m not a white man.”

“This isn’t the time for your racist taxi driver theory.” They both waved at the next cab, and it rolled up to the curb. The Baron opened the door for the Zombie.

The Zombie paused in the door, just before sitting down. “They think I’m your servant. That’s the only reason they stop.” The cabbie looked back in the rearview mirror at him as if to say, I’m right here. Please don’t talk about me when I’m right here.

“They stop because we’re paying customers.”

The Zombie scooted over, and the Baron hopped in after him.

“Where to?” the cabbie asked. He was an old white man in an Ascot hat with a cauliflower nose. He sniffled and wiped it with the back of his sleeve.

The Baron shut the door. “Start for the Biltmore.”

“Madison and 43rd,” the cabbie confirmed.

With the door shut, the cab pulled away from the curb but passed no more than a couple meters before someone in a Sunday suit, holding a newspaper, put his foot out into the street and tried to flag it down. The cabbie slowed.

The Zombie thumped the center partition with his fist. It made a startlingly loud noise. “Double fare from both of us,” the Zombie said, “don’t stop.”

“Do what he says,” the Baron added tersely.

“Yes, sir.” The cabbie pulled away from the curb and sped up.

The Sunday-suited man took one step further into the street and shouted at the departing cab. “Stop! I’m going south!” He even reached out to rap on the window, but the cab was already going too fast. He gave up and threw the newspaper after them.

“No company?” the cabbie asked.

“Confidential discussions. Just keep your eye on the road,” the Baron said.

“Understood, sir.”

“That man?” the Baron asked the Zombie to confirm.

The Zombie nodded and briefly made the sign for binoculars with his hands. Espionage. A spy, scout, or tail. “He might’ve been questioned later,” he explained.

The Baron understood. They had to watch what they said in here. The man in the Sunday suit was probably a tail, and the cabbie would be questioned later. So far, the only thing anyone could learn from this conversation was that they had something to hide from the public. It’d be plausible that they were referring to the job they’d just accepted.

“Can’t be too careful,” the Baron said, patting his pocket meaningfully. The Zombie gave him a questioning look, and the Baron pulled out Denisov’s note. “I’ve been thinking of some places to start,” he said. He unfolded the note and showed it to the Zombie.

It read: Multiple tails. Shake and meet at Caffe Reggio at 10AM. Wait no more than 30 minutes. Eye contact to confirm privacy. If under surveillance, depart for 8th Street Bookstore, New York cult temple. Greenwich Oracle at that location.

“Are we heading back to the Biltmore first?” the Zombie asked.

“We’ll look for somewhere to get lunch,” the Baron said, tapping on Caffe Reggio.

“Speed up a little,” the Zombie said to the cabbie. He leaned a little towards the window and watched the passenger mirror in his peripheral vision. They’d be heading south on Park for about twenty blocks, so this was a good strategy to check for tailing vehicles.

The Baron folded up the note and put it in his pocket. “Grand Central Station have any good restaurants?” he asked the cabbie.

“Yes sir. The lower concourse is all bars and diners. I eat there myself on Sundays.”

“Change of plans then. Can you drop us off on 42nd?” That was the main entrance to Grand Central Terminal, and a good starting point for shaking any pursuers.

“Yes, sir.”

A few seconds later, the Zombie grinned. “You know, I really like the Chevies this year. They’re keeping up with the newest styles.” He tapped the partition lightly. “Nothing like a classic Checker cab though.”

“Yes, sir,” the cabbie said with a smile.

The Baron leaned over a bit and looked in the rearview mirror. There was a black Chevy 4-door following about half a block back. It was moving a little faster to keep up with the cab, and at least two men were inside.

“Good eyes,” the Baron said, settling back into his seat.

The Zombie grinned with effortless cheer. He had an experienced eye for tactics and violence, while the Baron was better with strategy and negotiation. Together, they summed up to one excellent spy. Hopefully, it’d be enough for the challenge at hand.

There was some kind of conflict between Denisov and Malik’s factions, and the Baron and Zombie had already agreed to take sides in it. This wasn’t a surprising complication, but it was disappointing. They’d have to be extra careful while taking their first steps in the investigation, and any extra friction could scare off potential informants.

The Baron leaned against the cab door, looking out the window to savor this small moment without choices or consequences. On the center median rested beds of seasonal flowers—irises, tulips, and other spring plants. Long ago, he might’ve known their specific names, but nowadays, he could barely identify anything. Gardening was a time consuming skill, and he hadn’t practiced it after immigrating to the New World. In general, the life of leisure he’d once led in France seemed increasingly abstract and frivolous.

The best things he could remember were the discussions in his salon in Paris, and only because he was fond of discussing philosophy with the Zombie or teaching neophytes about his unusual views on the occult and the system of prestige.

More and more, he found himself busy with jobs like these instead of standard tasks from the gods. Cultural memories were shorter in North America, that much was certain, and the major powers treated him with a measure of respect that he’d never found on the other side of the Atlantic. Even resentment in Boston was beginning to fade. The Salem task would be 38 years unfinished this June, and most of the old guard was retiring or dead. 

The 20th century was strange, changing everything. The Baron didn’t resent it, but instead of growing familiar with the years, the world had become increasingly alien.

A few blocks further, the Zombie asked the cabbie, “How much do you think the fare will be?”

A quick glance at the fare meter. “90 cents after doubling.”

“25 cents first quarter, a nickel each after, then doubled?”

“Yes sir.”

“Here’s a dollar.” The Zombie pulled a full dollar out of his wallet and passed it through the partition window. “Do you have a couple of pennies?”

The man reached a tray at the foot of the dash and came back with a pair. He dropped them in the Zombie’s outstretched hand. “Here you are.”

“Thanks.” The Zombie leaned back, surreptitiously popped one of the pennies in his mouth and started quietly chewing. The other went in his pocket.

The cabbie turned on west 46th, a one way street that’d cross Vanderbilt after a block. The Zombie took off his bowler for a second and rubbed his hair with his hand. Then he looked around, as if merely shifting in his seat, and settled back down. “There’s a lot of traffic.”

“Terminal is always busy,” the cabbie replied.

The Baron grunted. The Chevy was still behind them. Otherwise the Zombie would’ve said, “Not too much traffic,” or something to that effect.

They pulled onto Vanderbilt, heading south again. “You good at the corner?” the cabbie asked politely.

“Corner is fine,” the Baron said.

The cabbie stopped at the curb near the southwest corner of the terminal, at Vanderbilt and 42nd. From here, they’d have to enter the building, pick a stairwell to descend, isolate their tails, and then shake them in that order.

“Thank you,” the Baron said.

“Yes, sir,” the cabbie replied. “You have a good day.”

The Baron got out, followed shortly by the Zombie. They took a few steps onto the walk towards the south facade of the building, and they paused in the middle of pedestrian traffic, stretching and looking around. A few faces cast irritated glances towards them, but in general, the crowd flowed past them like river water. The people here represented all walks of life, rich and poor, immigrant and native-born. It wasn’t a good place to hide, but they needed a moment to assess the situation before entering Grand Central Terminal.

“We’re back in less than an hour,” the Zombie complained. They’d come to this part of New York by way of train; they were staying in the Biltmore here in Terminal City; and they’d come here again before they left. The movement of this place would aid them throughout this investigation, but the novelty of it would wear off soon enough.

The Baron tried to see it with fresh eyes one last time. It was a large building, monolithic and stately with twenty-foot arched glass windows reflecting the sunlight. Doric columns, balustrades beneath parapets and flowing sculptures adorned the otherwise empty facade, adding complexity through a blend of the geometric and organic.

The terminal covered forty-nine acres of land, and the main concourse alone was nearly twenty acres of open space. It handled the passage of more than one hundred rail lines across more than sixty underground platforms. People flowed through it in throngs so deep and thick that the population rivalled a small town at times, and the terminal had its own police department to keep order and investigate crime. Two men could be swallowed up in its vastness, slipping up and down ramps, stairways, elevators and tunnels. They could worm through the earth, fugitives. What hope did a tail have in there?

The Baron dropped his gaze and asked towards his feet. “See anyone?”

The Zombie chuckled. “They’ve parked north of here. Two or three men.”

“Anything else?”

“No. If they’re ahead of us, they’re probably at the Biltmore already.”

The Baron resumed his walk towards the terminal entrance, following the flow of the crowd along the block to the main entrance of the terminal. “We need to swap cabs and head south. Let’s hit a restroom in the lower concourse and come back up at the northeast corner.”

“A restroom visit,” the Zombie said. “Classic!”

They passed through glass doors into a chilled foyer—a sloped space that channeled the flow of the crowd towards a waiting hall between the south facade and the Main Concourse itself. The Baron and Zombie simply kept pace with the people around them, entering the waiting hall and its grand arrangement of benches like pews to the railroads themselves. Hundreds of people were seated here—families, couples, and single travelers, spending their time with conversation while waiting for the clockwork schedules of trains to whisk them away. The murmur of this mass was like the rumble of the surf, but it was nothing compared to the crowd ahead. That was a storm of people. That was the ocean itself.

The flow of the crowd passed between the ticket offices, heading down along a brass-railed staircase, passing below the ground floor and into the Main Concourse itself, while the ceiling ascended towards magnificent heights—nearly forty meters overhead. Behind them, those grand windows of the south facade finally found their space, releasing the golden light of the sun into the empty air, where the voices of thousands echoed and diffused into a dull roar.

They didn’t have to look back to know that the Russians were chasing after them, keeping them in view. In a place this open, there was no escape from good eyes. Quickly, they navigated through clusters of people in the vast field of the Main Concourse, weaving and negotiating passage with smiles and polite apologies, sometimes scattering nebulous arrangements of travelers or forcing them to collapse. In the soles of their feet, they felt the trains rumbling out of tunnels. The Baron recognized the industry of man at work, oily and metallic, but admirable if yoked and held in service of reason and peace.

They reached the north wall and skirted the edge of the concourse, popping in and out of shops and restaurants as if browsing, then made for a stairwell marked for the Lower Level Dining Concourse and the lower platforms. Down, down into the bedrock they fled.

They arrived in a large but shallow chamber, whose walls were made exclusively of storefronts and doorways. Any open path was marked with a lit sign, and at the end of narrow concrete tunnels, one would find train platforms buried like tombs. This was the belly of the station. They were here on the verge of the underworld, where souls could be lost.

The crowd in the Lower Concourse was thin this early in the day, and they made a point of stopping several times to look over bar menus set on stands. This gave them ample opportunity to note the presence of three men dressed in flat grey suits, who idled about a dozen meters away whenever they halted. Most of the time, these tails were clustered together, talking and laughing, as if they were sharing a joke while deciding on a place to eat.

“There’s a restroom.” The Baron pointed out a set of doors nestled in an alcove between restaurants along the eastern wall of the concourse. “The tails won’t follow us inside.”

“Professionals,” the Zombie agreed.

If the grey men followed them in, the Baron and Zombie would have a chance to study their features for identification. Nobody experienced in espionage would risk it.

The Baron pushed through a swinging door into a shallow tile cave lit by yellow, almost orange lamps. It gave the place an unfortunate urine ambience, even if washes of harsh soap dominated the senses and overwhelmed all other smells. There were a half dozen stalls, three of them occupied. As was custom, men had hung their suit jackets on the outside hooks rather than wear them into the same cold, claustrophobic boxes as the toilets.

They waited a few seconds in silence. There was a young man at the mirrors and sinks, checking the pimples and razor burns on his throat. Everyone else in the stalls was attempting to defecate with an impossible stealth. The Baron and Zombie would have to do everything in similar quiet.

d’Holbach pointed to the Zombie’s bowler. The Zombie passed it over and started stripping off his neatly pressed, navy-blue jacket. His white shirt was as clean as if it’d been worn by a mannequin.

The Baron put on the bowler, then took off his own forest green jacket and turned it inside out. It wasn’t exactly reversible, but the mix of colored edging and pale striped lining gave him the appearance of a carnival barker or entertainer at a glance.

With his navy jacket hooked over one hand, the Zombie pointed to some of the others on the stalls. The Baron nodded. Those would do.

The youngster had turned to watch them.

The Zombie chose one jacket that was true wool and light grey. Then he handed his own jacket to the Baron and started donning the stranger’s clothes.

“That’s not yours,” the youngster said.

“I’m taking it,” the Zombie replied flatly. He finished putting the grey jacket on, a little tight but close to the right size, and he took his own jacket back from the Baron.

“Who is taking what?” asked a man inside the stall.

The youngster spoke with bewilderment. “This Chinaman is taking your jacket.”

The Baron pointed to the door. Time to put on a show.

The Zombie started walking away.

“Just a goddamn second,” the man in the stall cried out, otherwise indisposed. “I see your feet!” he yelled. “Don’t walk away!”

“I’ll call the police,” the youngster said.

The Zombie snorted. “Shove it punk.” He opened the bathroom door.

“Stop him goddamnit!” the man in the stall yelled. “Somebody—Jesus.” There was the sound of feet shuffling and toilet paper being whipped off the spool in a hurry.

The youngster followed the Baron and the Zombie into the concourse. “Thief!” he barked, pointing at the Zombie. The Baron stopped and gawked.

“Who are you?” the Zombie asked innocently.

People were already stopping to take notice. At least ten people were approaching in small clusters. “What’s happening here?” asked a short, fat man with thin glasses.

The tails, a few restaurants down the line, were waiting for a man in a dark green jacket and a man in a blue jacket to emerge. They hesitated to approach the commotion.

“This kid,” the Zombie said sadly. “He was trying to swipe this jacket. We’re taking it to the lost-and-found first.”

“Bullshit!” the youngster yelled. “He’s stealing that grey jacket!”

The Baron scowled. “Do we need the police to sort this out? What happened to you boy? When did you get to stealing clothes at the station?”

The youngster was flabbergasted. “These men are lying!”

The door to the bathroom flew open, and a wiry, fit man with a heavy beard charged out and shouted, “My jacket!” The youngster whipped around to face the sound.

In one smooth motion, the Zombie unfurled his navy blue jacket, wrapped it around the youngster’s head, yanked it to bring him off balance, and then shoved him toward the oncoming man about as hard as he could manage. They collided with an audible thump, and the youngster slumped to the floor, groaning. The air was knocked out of the bearded man, but he was too tough to be put down by an accidental headbutt. He took one shuddering breath and drew himself up to his full height. Then he stepped past the fallen and put up his fists.

“I’m getting the police!” the Baron shouted, and he turned to run down the concourse towards the nearest stairwell. He looked back only once.

“I got him down,” the Zombie yelled, pointing to the youngster. “There’s your thief!”

The bearded man swung at the Zombie, a right hook, well-practiced. He was probably a lightweight boxer, a sportsman in his spare time. The Zombie flinched a little early, but the act would be good enough to convince the average onlooker that the punch hurt.

The man’s fist hit the Zombie with a crack like splintering wood, and his whole arm slung back, whipped away with serious force. The Baron hissed sympathetically. That was the worst possible result. The man faded from the Zombie, knowing something terrible had happened to his limb but barely understanding it. Numb for an instant.

The Zombie covered his face and howled, “My jaw! You broke my goddamn jaw!”

But most of his words weren’t audible, because the man with the shattered fist and fractured forearm looked down at his limp right arm and started screaming.

“Out of the way,” the Zombie yelled, “I need a doctor!” With his head down and his face covered with his hands, he shoulder-checked his way through the oncoming crowd. One person stopped him briefly, two reacted to his shoulder normally, but one big man went down like he’d been hit by a charging bull. Then the Zombie was through them, and the screaming man and dazed youngster were drawing the most attention. Before the inertia of the crowd could shift, he was gone.

The Baron was up the second flight ahead of the Zombie, who was sprinting after him at full speed. “Do you think they saw us?” the Baron asked.

“That was a nice blue jacket,” the Zombie said, blazing past him.

The Baron was fit, but he didn’t have the Zombie’s supernatural advantage. He charged after him, reaching the upper concourse at the top of the stairwell almost ten seconds after the Zombie.

“We’re clear if we keep moving,” the Zombie said, finally answering the Baron’s question. His appearance was still tidy and clean; he’d never sweat nor sag, no matter the effort. “I’ll take the lead. Try to look calm. You can’t look like you’ve been running.”

The Baron nodded and controlled his breathing by force of will. The Zombie walked ahead, slowly ambling and looking at the shops. The Baron relaxed his face in order to appear incredibly bored, a skill he’d refined among the French nobility a very long time ago.

Once they knew they were clear, they took the northwest exit as planned. The commotion had kept the tails back long enough to lose them. It was the spy’s instinct—to avoid the center of attention.

Once they were outside on 47th street, they crowded up against the building. The Baron took off the Zombie’s bowler and handed it back to him. Then he turned his jacket right-side out. “That was impressive, but we’ll have to be more careful around here.”

The Zombie tossed his hat onto his head, and this time, he didn’t even need to adjust its landing. “That’s not my fault. I didn’t expect him to actually punch me.”

“I’m not blaming you, but we have to avoid attracting secular authority.”

The Zombie looked at the Baron appraisingly. “Do you think it was fun?” he asked.

“Mostly,” the Baron admitted. “But you know the saying.”

The Zombie grinned. “Yeah. It’s all fun and games until someone else loses an eye.” They walked down to the curb. There were several cabs idling. “He’ll live.”

“He will,” the Baron agreed. “Let’s just keep moving. We don’t have that much time, and Denisov will be waiting.” It was time to take a cab to Caffe Reggio.

Author’s Note:

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other readers!

Join the Patreon to support the story and access 4 weeks of early chapters!

June 29, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

It was the spring of 1952 on a warm Saturday morning in New York City, and Lower Manhattan was swarming with the nouveau riche, flaunting their postwar prosperity. Heavy 4-door sedans clogged the streets. Pedestrians strolled across unmarked crosswalks, a parade of mutely colored polyester suits and nylon dresses. The old rich showered disdain over them from the windows of penthouses and rooftop eyries, but the common people were ignorant and unaffected by the resentment of movers and shakers. Despite the ever present atmosphere of engine exhaust, the city felt clean. Brick facades were well-washed. Cars were waxed and glossy. Paint shone like candy shells. It was desperately happy.

A yellow and red taxi stopped outside the Permanent Mission of the USSR to the UN, two blocks east of Central Park. There was a delay reaching the curb. Park East Synagogue was finishing up its Shabbat services on the far side of Hunter College, and Orthodox Jews were spreading out along 67th, Lexington, and Park to meet with their gentile drivers. The words on their lips were “atomic” and “nuclear.” Attendance was at a record high, and every good family was doing their part to hasten the World to Come.

Two hurried men hopped out in the middle of Park Avenue. One was a notably tall, lightly-bearded, self-described Asian gentleman with short hair, a fine black bowler, and an exquisitely pressed navy blue jacket. He grinned broadly at the chaos and hooked his thumbs under his lapels. The other man was a European, bald with high cheek-bones over a clean-shaven face. He projected a tight, compact energy like that of a wrestler.

The cabbie complained about the fare, but the European only laughed at the pettiness of it all and passed a second bill from his wallet through the driver side window.

The sedan stuck behind the cab beeped its chintzy little horn, but the taller man was unmoved, and he remained relaxed as if the rude noise was as sweet as a songbird.

The European hotfooted it around the back of the cab, gently tapping the Asian on the shoulder as he passed. “Out of the street,” he cried.

“Get off the road!” added the driver of the car behind them. He was leaning out the window, an obvious target for a rude gesture.

The Asian man obliged him with a finger.

The European waved his friend over. “Come on, damn it. We’re late.”

“I’m coming,” the Asian man said, walking out of the street about as slowly as possible. He paused and cast the irate driver one last smile before mounting the curb.

“Wonderful first impression,” the European groused. “You know the Soviets are watching.”

The Asian man wandered onto the sidewalk, ignoring his friend’s idle discipline. A Jewish child was standing beside his mother, staring at him like he was something out of a zoo. A little two-tone leather bag dangled from the child’s fist.

“Hello,” the Asian said to the kid.

“Can I help you?” asked the child’s mother. She was young and serious, commanding and wealthy. She wore a real silk blouse with ruffled shoulders.

“Is that a bag of marbles?” he asked the child.

The kid nodded very slowly and lifted the bag towards the Asian, unsure.

The man reached for his wallet. “Five dollars for it?”

“No sir!” the mother snapped, pulling her child around behind her with an arm.

The European interrupted the exchange physically, standing face-to-face in front of his friend. “Marbles later. Soviets now.” After delivering that command, he whirled about to smile at the young mother. She was sharp and pretty like a glass flower. “My apologies. He finds the strangest ways to bother beautiful women.”

“It’s a good day for work,” said the Asian, his thick eyebrows rising above his grin.

“It is,” the European agreed, lingering only long enough to see the mother’s flattered smile.

They marched up to the portico of the Soviet mission, passing between two ionic columns in the shade of a small balcony, and the European keyed an intercom set beside a locked door covered in decorative iron gratings. At ground level, the facade was all white limestone, though every floor above was made of the same red-brown brick as every other turn of the century building in this part of Manhattan.

To either side of the portico, wrought iron fences launched out and sharply turned, tracing the exterior to separate a diminutive lawn from the surrounding sidewalks. Beyond a few trees, this grassy gap wasn’t much for decoration, but the Soviets had kept it in place as a paranoid buffer between the walk and the building. Flag poles struck out diagonally from the second story, flying the large red flags of the USSR. A light breeze swept up the street, making them snap low and soft like someone was unfolding sheets to make a bed.

“This looks like a nice place,” the Asian said.

“Quiet now,” the European said.

“I’m a house mouse.”

The European couldn’t help but smile. “Not a church mouse?”

“The Christians wouldn’t have me.”

The intercom crackled to life. “Name?” asked a man with a mild Russian accent.

The European replied promptly, “Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach. My associate should be on your appointments as the Zombie.”

There was an audible shuffling of papers. “Zombie? Yes, one second.” There were a few more clicks on the intercom system before the voice returned, confused. “I’ve been told to ask you to leave your weapon outside?”

“He’s not my weapon,” said Baron d’Holbach, “and he’s non-negotiable. Tell your boss that you couldn’t keep him out anyways. That’s not a threat, just a fact.” He looked at the Zombie, who shrugged. This happened sometimes, but the Baron was experienced at handling the mix of fear and rumor that preceded the Zombie’s arrival at a secure location. He pressed the intercom again. “Ask Viktor Denisov and Andrey Malik. They expected us ten minutes ago.”

There were another couple of clicks from the internal switchboard. The guard would be talking with Denisov for a few seconds.

Then a final click. “Welcome to the Mission,” the voice said.

There was a buzz and the snick of an electronic lock, and a uniformed security guard opened the front door to let them in.

“After you,” the Baron said, gesturing to his friend.

“Of course.” The Zombie grinned and stepped forward. “Safety first.”

They followed the guard into a lavish anteroom with wood-paneled walls and checkered granite flooring. The door hissed on pneumatic hinges and shut behind them with a heavy whuff of chilled air. They were led past a hardwood security desk, where a couple of other men in uniform were taking turns watching a bank of heavy CCTVs and reading magazines and newspapers printed in Cyrillic. They glanced up expectantly at the leading security guard. Pat these men down? Give them name tags?

The guard shook his head and guided them out of the anteroom, around a corner, and into a broad hall, where a narrow old-century elevator was nestled into an alcove. The security guard pressed the call button, then turned to frown at his unusual guests.

The Baron waited calmly while proper security measures were waived on his reputation. The Zombie rocked impatiently on his heels and smiled at whatever cameras he could find and the places where they might be hidden. The door finally opened with a mechanical bell.

They all stepped in the elevator—a cramped vehicle likely meant for one man and his servant-operator. With only centimeters between the guard and the Zombie, the guard’s frown deepened.

“I have a weapon on me,” the Zombie remarked as the doors were beginning to close, with all the gravitas one would use to comment on the weather.

To his credit, the man froze but did not otherwise panic.

“Don’t worry,” the Baron assured the guard. “If he wanted to stab you, he wouldn’t have said anything. Really.”

The Zombie pulled a closed penny knife. “Want to see a trick?”

Baron d’Holbach looked sidelong at the Zombie. “The question is, do you want this job?”

“Damn.” The Zombie pocketed the blade. “I do.”

The Baron smiled at the guard. “Thought so.”

The elevator opened on the fourth floor, all wood-paneled walls and hardwood floors, and Denisov and Malik were already waiting by a secretary’s desk with serious looks on their faces and nobody else in sight. The Baron and Zombie stepped forward to meet their guests. The security guard remained in the elevator.

“Baron d’Holbach,” Denisov said curtly. He was a middle-aged man, broad-faced and craggy, with silver hair slicked back in a Stalinist pompadour. He so perfectly fit the mold of the Russian politician that the Baron would’ve pegged him as a diehard Bolshevik, if not for the prominently displayed ikons on his neck and waist. There was an iron amulet of a reclined woman and a small net bag hooked to his belt. It held a single golden apple.

He was carrying two of the Orthodox cult’s “nuclear options.”

“Can you throw that indoors?” the Baron asked.

There was an instant when Malik’s face screwed up with disdain, but it quickly passed. “We’re precautious, not foolish,” he said. He was young, severe, and bore a thin mustache trimmed with almost mechanical precision. It was meant to be masculine, but the dark hair only emphasized a mild pallor and the thinness of his lips on an already long, narrow face. Even when calm, he looked a little angry. The Baron immediately suspected that Malik was high on cocaine, a habit picked up from American politicians with 20-hour workdays.

“Only an idiot would take offense,” the Baron said, testing the man’s attitude.

Malik snorted derisively.

Denisov smirked. “You’re well-versed, Baron.”

“I’ve had an Apple thrown at me,” the Baron replied. He offered his hand to Denisov, who shook it generously. “I understand though. Precaution.”

“Thank you. Yakov, we’ll take them from here.”

The guard punched a button and descended with the elevator.

“I’ll be honest,” Malik said to the Baron, his tone suggesting he was going to be more hateful than anything. “I don’t have confidence in your discretion. Half of New York will know you were here today, and you have no control over your…” He sneered at the Zombie.

The Zombie looked away and started circling around the room with his eyes on the ceiling, as if the conversation didn’t concern him in the least.

“Tammany Hall already knows,” the Baron said, referring to the New York cult. “We needed a letter of passage before we could check in at the temple. Didn’t you?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Denisov waved a hand dismissively. “Your objection is noted,” he said to Malik, “but this is my decision. Now, gentlemen, if you’ll come to my office, time waits for no one, and there’s a man missing.”

The Zombie was already by the hall, so he ambled along in front of Denisov until they reached an open door to a corner office. The shaded windows let in more than enough light to see by, but the room was otherwise unlit and dim, and it smelled like stale cigarettes. Denisov settled down behind his desk and indicated a plush chair for the Baron.

He accepted it with a smile, sitting across from the Russian. Both Malik and the Zombie remained standing just behind him.

Denisov nudged an ashtray towards the Baron. “Do you smoke?”

“Only cigars,” the Baron answered, “I can’t stand the taste of burnt paper.”

“Ah, I’m sorry. And you, Zombie?”

The Zombie held out a hand. “Can I eat one?”

Denisov pulled out a pack from a desk drawer and offered one. The Zombie took it, sniffed it loudly, and popped the whole thing in his mouth like it was candy.

Malik scoffed audibly. “Foul.”

Denisov lit his own cigarette with a paper matchbook. “Baron d’Holbach,” he said after his opening draw, “We need a neutral party. One of our best agents went missing two days ago.” As he spoke, the air puffed out of him in staccato bursts like a smoke signal. His punctuation was a complete exhalation. “We suspect foul play.”

The Baron had been called for this kind of job before, but generally the client wasn’t so coy with the details. This was the first he’d heard of it. “From who,” he asked, “and why?”

Denisov sniffed. “I don’t know, and I couldn’t tell you why. That’s why we need someone we can trust, someone without outside interests.”

“This sounds like work for secular police.”

Denisov nodded and took another draw on his cigarette. “Unfortunately, there are circumstances to consider.” He glanced at Malik, as if looking for permission, but then he steeled himself visibly and pushed onwards. “Do you know the name Janos Nagy?”

“The assassin!” the Zombie said happily, his mouth still full of tobacco, paper, and filter-foam.

“Is this a trick question?” the Baron asked.

“He was in service to the Soviet cause since the February Revolution,” Malik said sharply. 1917, the first of two revolutions in Russia. “He was a soldier.”

The Zombie swallowed his cigarette mash and laughed. “We know him. He killed Nazis before they were called Nazis. Gods—why wouldn’t we know him?”

The Baron not only knew Nagy, but also knew why Nagy shouldn’t have had anything to do with the United States of America. “You’re implying a Russian assassin is in New York City.” It was more of an accusation than a statement. When Denisov didn’t respond, he said louder, “The cultic assassin, in Langley’s backyard!”

“You’re well aware of the gravity of the situation…” Denisov began.

Malik spoke over him, “We should be taking care of this ourselves.”

“Quiet!” Denisov snapped at Malik. “Someone must’ve recognized and killed him, Baron.”

“How do you know?”

“His loyalty is beyond question—”

“How do you know someone killed him?” Baron d’Holbach pressed.

Denisov snubbed out his half-finished cigarette and rubbed his forehead with a thumb. “During World War II, we fed him the Cat o’ Nine Lives.”

“The Cat!” The Zombie was ecstatic.

The Russian covered his brow with a hand. “He had six lives left when we dropped him off at the harbor. He didn’t meet six accidents in one evening.”

Denisov was right, of course. If Nagy hadn’t returned, it had to be murder, plain and simple, but Nagy wasn’t the kind of man that could be killed by just anyone.

“You want the Cat back,” the Baron said incredulously. He left out—in the middle of New York, in Langley’s shadow, out of the hands of assassin-killers. This job was absurd.

“Yes, and I want justice for Nagy.”

The Baron stared at Denisov with awe. “We’re not hitmen. We only kill in self-defense.”

“I’m not asking for you to sic the Zombie on Brooklyn.” Denisov straightened in his chair. “I want a minimal body count. Once we know who the murderer is—assuming the Cat is in our hands—we won’t even have to take action. Diplomatic pressure will do the job. At worst, we ask New York to police their vassals. It’s as easy as that.”

“Easy is a bad choice of words.” Malik crossed his thin arms. “Nothing here is easy. If you aren’t ready for the work, you should leave. We’ve no time for half-measures.”

The Baron couldn’t tell if Malik actually wanted him to leave or if he was trying to goad him into defending his reputation as a cultic mercenary. “It’s not a question of strength or resources,” the Baron explained. “Information and recovery are tricky. We might fail, and I want some guarantees of payment before I go chasing after dead men.”

“I’ll pay a bonus for starting today,” Denisov said promptly. “Fifty-percent.”

“On top of the price we discussed over the phone?” the Baron asked.

“Of course. It’s a generous offer.” Denisov tugged on a cigarette in his pack, then thought better of starting to smoke another and set the pack down. “More than enough.”

The Baron glanced at the Zombie, who grinned encouragingly. The Cat o’ Nine Lives and a killer—this was the kind of entertainment that the Zombie lived for, and it was the kind of challenge that he encouraged the Baron to take. “The price is adequate,” d’Holbach agreed, “but there are also big risks hiding the Cat from other cults. We could lose our reputation for neutrality.”

“Depending on the circumstances…” Denisov said. “Maybe.”

“Those risks are yours alone,” Malik said. “We offer money, not guarantees.”

Denisov glared at his hands. Flexed his fingers. Baron d’Holbach studied him closely. The division between Denisov and Malik was difficult to gauge but it was clearly there; Denisov wanted outside help. He didn’t want Soviet footprints in American soil or Soviet fingerprints on American throats. Malik seemed to believe he could operate with impunity in foreign territory—a dangerous attitude. There was value in accepting the job simply to discourage Malik from running an operation.

“I know you’re a responsible man,” the Baron said to Denisov. “If you’ll do your best to protect our reputation as independent agents, we’re your men.”

Denisov answered d’Holbach before Malik could respond. “Of course, we’ll exercise discretion at all times. Do we have a deal?”

The Zombie clenched and unclenched his fists rapidly. He was too excited for anyone’s good, but he was keeping it to himself. This was the Baron’s negotiation, and he knew it.

“One more question,” the Baron said, “how much can you tell us about Nagy’s mission?”

“Very little except that he was last seen in Brooklyn on Thursday.”

“That’s all you know?”

“That’s all I know,” the man said regretfully. “We can’t even call for his ghost in a temple. New York and Langley would both hear about it within a day.”

Baron d’Holbach found that to be suspiciously ignorant, but Denisov seemed earnest. “If you learn anything more, will you drop us a message?”

Denisov played with the inner wrapper of the cigarette pack, tugging on the paper idly. “Without question,” he said after a few seconds. “Where are you staying?”

“The Biltmore on 43rd and Madison. Under my false name.”

There was a crinkle of paper while Denisov closed and pocketed the pack. “It’s settled then.” He offered a hand to the Baron. “Your assistance is a tremendous relief.”

They shook, and the Baron felt a thin piece of paper folded in Denisov’s palm. The Russian flexed gently to deposit the note and released the shake smoothly.

The Baron dropped his hand below the desk and slipped the paper in his pocket. “We’ll begin immediately.”

Malik grunted. “Fine, I’ll see you out.”

“Nagy,” the Zombie whispered to himself with glee.

Malik walked out the door, and the Baron quickly stood to follow. The Zombie trailed close behind them, laughing quietly. Denisov closed his office door.

Their footsteps pattered out into the silent hall of an empty floor. Nobody else was around to witness the deal or prepare arrangements. It occurred to the Baron that for the moment, they might be the only four people in the world who knew exactly what work had been accepted. It was unusual to see back room deals made in actual back rooms.

The course of history usually turned on violence and speech. Decisions were made before hundreds of eyes, and even the most secret plots were arranged with the implicit knowledge and approval of vast and powerful organizations. Rarely did one or two men craft the fate of nations. Even rarer did those men pass their labor to hired mercenaries.

In secret, in an empty place, the Baron and Zombie had accepted responsibility for something larger than themselves. The exact scale and shape of their role wasn’t visible, but if Nagy and the Cat were involved, their influence would be larger than it had any right to be.

The Baron couldn’t yet look at the note in his pocket, but he knew the truth in his bones. Bigger stakes would soon reveal themselves, and this job would matter. Great events would begin here and now—on a fine Saturday in New York City.

Author’s Note:

We’ve met our well-dressed heroes!

As always, thank you to my beta readers for helping with this chapter!

Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other readers!

Join the Patreon to support the story and access 4 weeks of early chapters!

June 29, 2026