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lay flat in the water, and began to swim toward the shore. He wasn’t even halfway there before his father and Titus Hardcastle found him on their brooms. By then, the sun was going down, a bank of low clouds had sprung up, and it had turned into a thoroughly, unabashedly horrid day.
     

    New Amsterdam was not entirely empty, despite appearances, and neither was The shot sounded so small in the cramped alley. It could have been a length of hickory wood being snapped in half, or a brick falling flat into a puddle. The sound of it—a flat pop , with no echo—barely registered in William’s thoughts until the man across from him lowered and dropped his cane, then collapsed to his knees. The look on the horrible old man’s face was not surprise, but affronted confusion. He opened his mouth, drew a shallow, halting breath. Before he could speak, however, his eyes went blank. He fell forward onto the brick pavement, dead.
    Some distance behind him, the pistol still raised in her tiny fist, was a young woman. Her face was deathly pale, but composed. “For Fredericka,” she said faintly, speaking to the dead man. “From her fiancé, William. And from me, her sister. Helen.”
    A ribbon of smoke snaked from the pistol’s black eye. Jerkily, Helen lowered it.
    William had been sure he’d been about to die, to join his beloved Fredericka in the afterlife, and had been ready to welcome that new reality. Now, instead, Fredericka’s murderer lay dead among the trash, felled by a single unexpected gunshot. The villain, Magnussen, may have been powerful—he may even have had unearthly, mystical powers—but he hadn’t been powerful enough to stop an unseen bullet from knocking him clean into the next life. And whatever judgments awaited him there.
    William approached the dead man, barely able to believe it was over. Helen joined him a moment later, shakily, the pistol stowed in the pocket of her apron.
    Three young men appeared in the mouth of the alley, following Helen. William saw them, and for one brief moment he considered running away, taking Helen with him. After all, the alley had become the scene of a murder. They could both go to Hempstead prison for the rest of their lives. Still, something about the young men told William that they were not exactly surprised by what had happened, nor that they planning to whistle for a copper and scream bloody murder.
    Faintly, Helen said, “These three say he stole something from them. They followed him here, hoping to get it back. They won’t turn us in, I don’t think. They just want their goods back.”
    William glanced up at them. The boy in the lead nodded seriously. He had unruly dark hair and looked to be about fourteen. Behind him was a bigger boy with a look of strained solemnity on his squarish face. The third was blonde, thin and wide eyed, staring down at the corpse.
    William knelt next to Magnussen’s body. The man’s wicked cane was still clamped in his dead fist. The handle was made of iron, crafted to resemble the head of a leering gargoyle. Magnussen had used the cane to cast his unspeakable spells. William wrested it from the man’s cold fingers, hating the weight of it, but wanting—needing—to break its power. He raised it in both fists and cracked it deftly over his knee, snapping it in two. The wooden shaft he tossed away, but the glinting metal head he peered at. It was horribly ugly, its gargoyle face leering malevolently. William lowered his gaze to the dead man again. A velvet drawstring bag was hooked over Magnussen’s slab of a hand. He gestured toward it.
    “Your stolen goods might not be the sort of thing that would fit in a velvet bag, would they?”
    “Could be,” the boy in the lead answered. He stepped forward, hesitated, and then dropped to one knee. He extracted the bag from the dead man’s hand, which fell back to the pavers with a heavy thump. The boy stood, peered into the bag for a moment, then glanced back at his fellows and