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gotta go get ready for bingo at the senior center. If I don’t get there early enough that bitch Harriet Krauss steals all the good dotters.”
    I nodded as if this were a problem I often dealt with myself. “Good luck, Baba. And thanks for the tea.”
    She winked saucily and said, “You can thank me after some hot stud gives you a ride on his spitting kielbasa.”
    After that gem, I quickly extracted myself to go enjoy some quality time with junkie snitches, who were much less disturbing to be around than horny septuagenarians.

Chapter Four

    A lot of people believe police work is all shoot-outs and high-speed chases. Truth is most of our hours are filled with paperwork or sitting on our asses in shitty city-issued cars waiting for something suspicious to investigate. That day, however, I was in my own shitty Jeep, since Eldritch’s suspension meant I wasn’t officially on duty.
    However, if Gardner let me on the task force, I wanted to arm myself with as much information as I could find about this new potion. That’s where the third part of police work came in—working informants.
    As usual, I found Mary in the park near the empty playground that was originally built for the kids of factory workers at Babylon Steel. The area used to have green grass and bushy trees and lots of colorful monkey bars and swing sets. Back then, America was still the capital of the steel empire begun by Carnegie and his cronies. But starting in the 1960s, the steel manufacturers’ hubris caught up to them when some Chinese alchemists revolutionized steel processes and took advantage of the deregulation of foreign imports. It wasn’t long before the steel industry here collapsed completely and ushered in a more dubious threat to the fabric of America: the magic industry.
    Sure, magic had existed throughout our history books, but mostly it had been framed as the superstitions of less educated societies. However, after an alchemist changed the economy of America, modern scholars and scientists took the old wives’ tales and studied them for the first time using scientific methods. Turned out all the witches who were burned in the Middle Ages hadn’t been just the innocent victims of the Catholic Church’s war on women. Sure, magic had always existed, it’s just no one really understood how it worked. That was until a scientist named Ezra Green discovered the genetic marker for magic was tied to left-handedness.
    Now, five decades later, everyone and their mothers used “clean” magic to wash their clothes and add zip to their sex lives. Instead of steel and iron funding America’s power, magic was the currency that kept us going. But the damage to Babylon and the rest of the Rust Belt towns couldn’t be undone. Especially since the illegal dirty magic industry had set down its black roots in our soil.
    The park I stood in had once been a symbol of Babylon’s bright future, but now it was nothing more than a barren scrub lot filled with bent, rusted sculptures exploring the theme of urban decay.
    I continued to make my way toward Mary. Her back was to me, but the alto of her lullaby floated to me on the breeze. Her hunched shoulders curved protectively around the burden strapped to her flat chest.
    I hesitated, worried I might be interrupting nap time. Little Man was always so grumpy when he hadn’t had his morning rest.
    My footsteps on the gravel path gave me away and she turned, ready to defend her precious burden. Mary’s misshapen head reminded me of old-timey illustrations of Humpty Dumpty, except covered with random tufts of long brunette hair. Despite the deceptively large cranium, her brain had the mental capacity of a toddler.
    Speaking of toddlers, the baby carrier strapped to her chest was custom-made and filled with alternating bands of salt slabs and body armor. From his perch on Mary’s chest, Little Man watched my approach through drooping lids. A blue knit cap perched on top of his small bald head. His tiny