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Chapter 9

August

Even with her glamour back in place, walking through the Bullhorn offices with Honora Holtzfall felt like carrying a bomb. Any second, one of the other reporters would realize Trudie had never walked with this much careless assurance, and they’d draw and quarter the Holtzfall girl. And him with her.

But as they wove through the pit of crowded desks, not a single journalist looked up from the typewriter they were hammering away at. They were as oblivious to the most famous girl in the city as they were to the coffee going cold by their elbow.

August’s own desk was littered with photographs, notebooks, camera equipment, and pieces of a broken magimek bird that he’d been trying to put back together. Just ten years ago, the way to get messages across the city was to fasten charms around the feet of real pigeons. Those disease-ridden birds had since been replaced with metallic birds, courtesy of LAO Industries. They cost three times as much as a living bird, but that was progress for you. August had bought this one secondhand, and it had died the first time he tried to send a message to the office. By the time he’d run all the way back with the headline in hand, the Herald had beaten the Bullhorn to the punch.

Honora perched delicately on the only uncluttered corner of his desk, crossing her legs with a flourish. She picked up the dented shell of the magimek bird, turning it over a few times. August ignored her. Undoubtedly the Holtzfalls had a whole aviary of the things.

“Move your legs,” August instructed, nodding at the drawers that she was currently using as a footrest. Honora lifted her legs absently as she picked at one of the little gears in the bird’s chest, forcing August to duck under her stockings. “The only reason I can think your mother might still have her jewelry in my pictures”—August started rifling through his drawers, looking for the right thing amidst the mess of paper and celluloid—“is that every other journalist got there after the police. I got there before them.” He pulled out a sheaf of photographs.

“And how did you manage a thing like that?” Nora asked, peering down as he flicked open the manila file for her.

“Can you keep a secret, Honora Holtzfall?”

“I don’t know.” The heiress had turned the magimek bird upside down and was examining the charm inscribed on it. “Did you hear who Micha Bamberg was out with at the Netthaus last week while her fiancé was away on business?”

August didn’t trade in gossip. He left that to Eudora Binks at the Herald , but Micha Bamberg was very much engaged to one of the Bittencourt boys. He couldn’t remember which one; they all looked like identical rich jackasses to him. It was a business alliance, as most marriages among the wealthy families were. Honora Holtzfall herself was the product of one such merger, between the old magic of the Holtzfalls on her mother’s side and new power of LAO Industries on her father’s side. The Bittencourt–Bamberg wedding was designed to unify her father’s industry with his father’s shipping power. If she was stepping out on him, it would cost a lot of people a lot of money. August found himself leaning forward, interested in spite of himself. “Who?”

“Then I guess I can keep a secret.” Honora, disguised as Trudie, winked disconcertingly. “So?”

August sighed. “There’s this cop. In return for not sending a certain picture I took to his wife, he got me this.” August pulled a small circular disc from under a pile of papers in his desk drawer.

“That’s a police vox.” Honora stopped her fiddling, her attention now wholly on the charm in August’s hands. Police voxes were enchanted with a carefully guarded code, to keep the police’s movements secrets from anyone who might want to eavesdrop.

“I heard about the body the same time as the police did, thanks to this. Except I was closer. I got there maybe a minute before they did. I took as many pictures as I could.” He nodded to the photos on the desk. “And then I backed off before they could start asking me why I was at the scene of the crime before the rest of the press.”

He leaned back in his chair, watching as Honora Holtzfall flicked through his photos with the intense detachment of an investigator taking in every detail. Not a girl looking at her mother’s murder. First it was just a single picture of the body, the one that had run in this morning’s paper. Then his photographs showed the cops arriving, obscuring Verity’s lifeless form, until finally…

“There!” Honora held up the last picture. “The necklace is gone.”

August leaned forward even as she returned to the picture before it. It was so plain as day he felt a fool for not seeing it before, in the mad dash to break the story first. The necklace draped around her neck in one picture, gone in the next.

He had taken three photos after the cops arrived. The last had been used by the Bullhorn the week of Verity’s murder. It showed her without her jewelry, just like every other paper in town. It was pure chance someone had picked the earlier picture to run in this morning’s story about Honora. It was the only picture in the whole city of Verity Holtzfall still wearing every piece of jewelry the mugger had supposedly taken.

Before August could speak, Honora took the middle picture out of the pile. It was of cops milling around the body. She pressed her fingers against it. There was a slight jolt in the air, like static electricity. She was using magic. Except she wasn’t channeling it through a charm.

There had been rumors for years that the Holtzfalls brimmed with so much magic they didn’t even need charms. But there were so many rumors about the Holtzfalls it was hard to know which to listen to. This was the first time August had ever seen anything like this. If this was true, someone ought to look into that other rumor about them owning a diamond as big as the Paragon Hotel.

Honora’s magic acted on the pictures in front of her, making the still pictures come to life, as if it were a film reel instead of a static photograph. As August watched, the police officers paced around the crime scene, putting up barriers, sending out a vox call for help. All standard police procedure. And then…one cop quickly glanced around before crouching next to Verity’s body. It happened so quickly that they wouldn’t have noticed if they weren’t looking for it.

The cop reached out, momentarily obscuring the camera’s view, and when his hand came away, the necklace was gone.

“Well, I’ll be damned…” August felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up all at once.

“ You won’t.” Honora raised her hand, and the picture snapped back into place, becoming the same frozen image that August had taken. “But he will be when I find him.”

She stood up abruptly, knocking one of the pictures off August’s desk as she strode for the exit.

“Wait,” August called after her. “What color dress are you wearing tonight? Should I get a boutonniere to match?”

But Honora was already gone, pulling the grated elevator doors closed behind her.

August slumped into his worn-out wooden chair. He could feel pins and needles in his fingers. The rush that came from being on the trail of a really good story. That need to chase it down. At times like this, he wondered if his father had got the same feeling when he saw a good mark with a fat wallet. And then he’d wonder if this ecstatic rush was what had driven his father to make so many mistakes. That got him in so much trouble.

Just then, the small magimek bird on his desk twitched, making August start. It flapped its little metallic wings a few times before resurrecting entirely, perching expectantly on his desk.

August had been working on that thing for a week, and Honora had fixed it in a few minutes. The infamous Holtzfall beauty, who was by all accounts flighty and foolish and self-interested…

August had a feeling he had already made his first mistake in underestimating Honora Holtzfall.