Ghost of a Chance

As Alex tried to catch his balance, three more shots rang out. Two hit him in the upper back and he lost his balance. The third shot skimmed his hip as he went down and distracted him enough that instead of catching himself, he landed on his face.

The impact stunned him and he was vaguely aware of someone rolling him over and ransacking his pockets before taking his red-backed rune book and running off.

10 The Engineer

Alex’s pocketwatch showed two-thirty when he used it to open the door to the brownstone and limped inside. The shield runes he’d written on the inside of his suit jacket had saved his life, slowing the bullets enough that they wouldn’t penetrate. That said, he still felt like someone had worked him over with a Louisville Slugger.

His hip was another story.

The bullet had hit below the protection of his jacket, scraping a trough out of his flesh. Fortunately it had only grazed him, but he still bled like a stuck pig. By the time he got home, his pant leg was wet with blood and the handkerchief he was pressing against the wound was saturated.

“Iggy,” he called from the tiled floor of the brownstone’s vestibule. “I’m bleeding, bring your vault rune.”

Even though Alex knew how to write cleaning runes now, he didn’t want to waste them on the Persian carpets that covered the floor between the vestibule and the kitchen if he didn’t have to.

“What happened?” Iggy said, hurrying down the stairs from the direction of his room. He was dressed for the evening in just his shirt and slacks with a smoking jacket over top and slippers on his feet.

“Somebody took a shot at me,” Alex said, holding up his blood-soaked handkerchief. “Several shots, in fact.”

“How bad?” Iggy said, tracing a door on the wall with a piece of chalk he took from the pocket of his smoking jacket.

“I took three in the back, but the shield runes stopped those. One took a bite out of my leg but it doesn’t look too deep.”

“It’s bleeding enough to be serious,” Iggy said, lighting a vault rune. “You feeling light-headed?”

“No.”

Iggy opened his vault and motioned Alex inside.

“What happened to your face?” he asked as he directed Alex to the table in the middle of his operating theater room.

Alex touched his forehead and felt the bump there. He’d forgotten about that.

“The shots took me by surprise,” he admitted. “I fell on my face. Damn near knocked me out.”

“Can you take off your trousers?” Iggy asked as he rummaged through one of his cabinets full of potions.

Alex unbuckled his trousers and let them fall to the floor. It was better than letting Iggy cut them off as it would take less magic to repair.

“Here.” Iggy handed him a small vial of red liquid.

Alex drank it and handed back the container.

“And this for that black eye,” he said, pressing a small square of flash paper to Alex’s eyelid. “Hold still,” he said, taking out a cigarette case and his lighter. A moment later he touched the smoldering end of the cigarette to the rune paper. It flashed and Alex resisted the urge to jerk back. He felt a tingling spreading out over the right side of his face and he knew the rune was taking effect.

Iggy examined the gash in Alex’s hip.

“Not too bad,” he said, getting out his sewing kit. “Now, lie on the table and tell me what happened.”

“I was looking into Andrew Barton’s missing motor,” Alex said, laying on his side with his hip in the air. “It was stolen from the loading dock of his factory right after it had been put on a truck.”

“Convenient,” Iggy said, using a cotton ball to dab an ice-cold liquid on the wound. Alex winced as he began sewing it up, but the cold had penetrated into the gash and he couldn’t feel the needle.

“That’s what I thought,” Alex said. “Whoever did it had a window of about a minute to get in and get out with the truck. I figured they were watching from the alley across the street, so I checked it out.”

“Find anything?”

“Nope,” Alex said. “From what I can tell you can’t even see the loading dock from that alley. I was just about to leave when someone shot me in the back and stole my rune book.”

“It’s probably a good thing you fell on your face then,” Iggy said. “If the man who shot you had realized you weren’t really hurt, he’d have shot you in the head for good measure.”

Alex hadn’t considered that. His clumsy stumble might just have saved his life.

“Did you see the back-shooting coward?” Iggy asked, washing the stitches with iodine.

“Just his arm,” Alex said. “The rest was a bit… blurry.”

“You were dazed. Was there anything distinct about the shooter’s arm? What did his footsteps sound like when he ran? Did you smell anything?”

Alex searched his memory. He hadn’t heard the shooter approach. The first sign of his presence was when he turned Alex over. His face swam, blurrily into Alex’s minds-eye but the only detail he could clearly see was a mop of black hair.

“What happened next?” Iggy probed as Alex recounted the memory.

“He searched my jacket pockets. I remember seeing his arm. His skin was brown.”

“Asian maybe, or Latin,” Iggy said.