Disclaimer from Chapter 1 applies. Also, in case no one realized, the characters' opinions on religion and potential world domination are not necessarily those of the author.

Sorry this one took so long. I was looking for a way to dump exposition on you without you noticing it was an exposition dump.

It was a disaster. Complete disaster. Everything he had hoped and planned for had gone utterly awry.

"How does it feel," he had asked Balthazar, "To have fought for centuries to prevent this moment from happening, only to come up short?"

Well, now he knew. Maxim Horvath, first of Merlin's three apprentices, oldest and arguably most powerful remaining follower of Morgana, sorcerer of the 777th degree, had lost the war.

After watching his Mistress rendered into dust by a one-two punch of magic and science, he had fled while the Prime Merlinian was reviving Balthazar. Executing a series of rapid-fire teleports to cover his trail, he nevertheless had not made it out of Manhattan, halting his rush to escape on the edge of Central Park. He spent the night there, slinking under the trees and clutching his cane in a white-knuckled grip. He cursed himself for cowardice, but he knew returning to Battery Park would only result in his own pointless death, and while he had followed Morgana loyally, he had never followed her blindly.

Morgana was gone now, and she was never a sentimental woman. Mourning wasn't the proper way to honor her passing. Revenge was.

There, too, was the fact that her death left a power vacuum. A space to be filled. Sitting on a bench near the towering shape of Cleopatra's needle, Horvath trailed a finger over the trophies he had retained. A ring belonging to a foolish stage magician. A pentacle owned by a wicked little girl. And Merlin's ring, no longer required by its master. He twisted the tiny dragon free of his cane and peered at the inscription: Take me up. Cast me away.

He felt a little cast away himself. Still, he could feel the enchantments that thrummed through the ring's magical core. Spells to draw power, to hold it, to key it to react to the right person at the right time. He thought he could almost see his former master's ghost reflected in the winking jewel. Any ring worked best for its rightful owner; after multiple times interfacing with a sorcerer's nervous system, they formed a kind of link. And anything linked to a person strongly enough could be used to ensorcel them. Why, in the old days, Morgana had told him, when she and Merlin were young and magic was stronger, a good sorcerer could curse someone using a footprint he had left, or the ground over which his shadow had passed. There was no need to go to those extremes, though. Not when he had a perfectly good link to the Prime Merlinian resting in his hand.

He smiled. It wasn't over after all. Not yet. Morgana would never return, but that left him as the obvious heir to her legacy. And he would not abdicate.

Full of purpose once more, he left the park in a flicker of wind and magic. He needed a base of operations, and he knew he had one friend left in the City.

Niccolo Candelario looked to be in his late fifties. In reality he was thirty years older. He had buried two wives and had a host of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, most of whom he avoided like the plague. His father had been a civilian facilitator for the Morganians; he had kept a list of who still lived, who did what best, and who could take on an apprentice if a child of talent was discovered. It was not a volunteer position. Morganians who came to see the list always offered a substantial bribe, as well as additional protection spells to keep them out of Balthazar Blake's clutches. Niccolo's father had been a wealthy man.

It all fell apart in 1929, after Maxim Horvath had been locked in the Grimhold. A kind of panic had swept the Morganian camp. Almost everyone went into hiding. Dozens had removed their names from the list without paying. No one would update. They had tracked whom they could, but once Niccolo's father had died, there was not a soul left who could guess at how many Morganian sorcerers remained.

Niccolo had forgotten about it for decades until the night when Horvath had appeared at the diner off 163rd Street where he worked, demanding soldiers to fight for him. He had connected him with Drake Stone, the only Morganian he knew in the country. And he had hoped to be able to forget the whole damn thing again. His father had believed in the cause, but in his opinion, the only good thing about sorcerers was their money.

Now, a few days later, it was 5 AM, and he woke from uneasy dreams to find an all-too-familiar shape looming over his bedside. With a hoarse cry, he catapulted himself out from under the covers and groped for the revolver on his nightstand. It immediately melted in his hand.

"Relax," said Horvath in his low, cultured tones. "I'm not here to harm you. I'll even pay this time."

"There isn't anyone else," he snapped, sagging against the wall, half-relieved, half-annoyed. "Except Magda Siracova in Bulgaria, and everyone knows she's off her nut."

"Oh, is she still alive? I'd have thought all the absinthe would have done her in. Well, something to keep in mind. Insane people can still be useful." He wandered over to the chair in the corner of the bedroom and sat, crossing one leg over the other casually. "But I'm not after more cannon fodder just yet."

Niccolo picked his bathrobe up off the floor and pulled it on without taking his eyes off the sorcerer. "What do you want, then?"

"I want to hide behind your concealment charms. They must still be in effect or Blake would have gotten to you by now."

Slowly, he knotted the belt around his waist. True, the only reason he stayed in the aging flat he had grown up in was because the layers of protections Morganians had placed on it over the years were still useful. But Horvath implying he needed a hiding place was more than a little ominous.

"What happened to Stone?" he asked.

Horvath's expression darkened. "The man was an idiot."

"You killed him?" He sidled away. "But he was…your kind."

"I don't have a kind, Candelario," Horvath waggled his cane for emphasis. "I'm my own man, and I needed his power. But never mind that now."

"How do I know I'm not next? I should call the police. I should…" He didn't move. There was nothing he could do more quickly than Horvath could reach him with magic.

"Yes, take your time, consider your options," the sorcerer soothed. "I think you'll find humoring me is your best choice for now. Unless you'd like to be bound with cold-forged iron and forced to do my bidding."

Niccolo paled. The faery blood that ran through his veins had been thinned by three generations, but it was powerful enough still to extend his lifespan, and virulent enough to make him subject to a Morganian summoning circle. He swallowed hard and folded his arms across his chest. "Not my kink," he grumbled. "How long are you staying?"

"At least a week," Horvath said. "You have a guestroom, I presume?"

"It's storage," he sighed, "But I can unbury the bed."

"Good. Go do it; I'm exhausted." Horvath reached into a pocket and pulled something out, tossing it to him.

He flinched instinctively, but managed to catch it. It was a gold pocketwatch, easily worth thousands. His jaw dropped.

"My assets are…not terribly liquid at the moment, but I assume that will buy your loyalty for a while."

Candelario ran a finger over the object and smiled. It put things in a much better light. Provided it wasn't just a rock enchanted to look like gold, of course. He glanced up at Horvath, slipped the watch in his robe pocket and made for the door of the room. "You want coffee or anything?" He asked as an afterthought.

"Thank you, but no. Sleep is what I want now. Knits up the raveled sleeve of care and all that."

He nodded politely and scurried off to the spare room. Damn it, he was always a sucker for the carrot-and-stick routine.

He picked up a tourist guide for her at the information kiosk, and she thumbed through it slowly as they walked down Mulberry street, brow furrowed as she tried to take in foreign concepts in bright print. At least she wasn't staring at the people around them. She was used to the skin colors of the Arawak slaves her uncle had taken, Tituba and John, and she had seen plenty of black slaves working the sugar plantations in Barbados, but Asian features were wholly unfamiliar. She hadn't asked any embarrassing questions yet, but Drake was anticipating a display of the casual racism of her time period at any moment.

"I want a history book," she said at length. "I don't understand most of this."

He shrugged. "I'll show you the internet later. You can catch up."

"I have a great deal of catching up to do," she somehow managed to dodge a bicycler zipping by without looking up from the guidebook. "If we live. I will have to find another teacher…"

His eyes strayed to a pretty young woman cleaning up a fruit display at the front of a grocery, her sleek black hair knotted into short pigtails wrapped with flowers. "Hold on a sex…er…sec, Abby. I'm just going to ask directions."

Abigail made a noncommittal sound, then folded the book closed and stared after him as he loped over to the Chinese girl, arranging his features into a winning smile.

"Uh…ni hao?" he ran his fingers through his hair in a way he seemed to think was charming. "You live here? Is this your place?"

"My aunt's. I'm only here on weekends. Is there something you want?"

"Well, a friend of mine was here the other night when the fire happened, right? And he was telling me this crazy story," Drake chattered at the girl cheerfully and began to handle the produce, as if considering whether to buy.

Abigail went back to her guidebook, tuning them out, but a minute later she felt her senses tingle subtly. Looking up, she saw something yellow float past. Taking it for a stray piece of paper, she reached after it, then paused as it drifted toward the young woman talking to Drake.

It was a golden butterfly.

She frowned thoughtfully. It was February, and the air still held a significant bite. A delicate insect abroad in this weather seemed strange.

The Chinese girl swatted at the butterfly lightly as it made a halfhearted attempt at the flowers in her hair. It recoiled, alighted on a ripe mango for a moment, then took off down the street. After a glance back at the preening Drake, Abigail followed it.

The insect pushed itself higher into the air and flew erratically around buildings and vehicles, leading Abigail slowly around one corner and up another street. A moped zooming past startled her, shattering her concentration on her quarry, and when she looked around again, the butterfly was gone. Now, however, there was something else to look at. Across the street from her was a small knot of cops and cop cars, a yellow police line stretched along the sidewalk.

"Kind of weird, huh?" a young Chinese man in a sharp business suit paused to follow her line of vision. "My girlfriend works in the church office. She's pretty freaked out."

"What?" she edged back a step, wary of friendly strangers. "What do you mean?"

He nodded at the police activity, and this time when she looked she saw a red scrawl across the brick and concrete of the looming building. It was a sequence of what she could only presume were Chinese characters, repeated several times. "I can't read that," she frowned.

He looked amused. "Actually, neither can I. My grandmother's so pissed off I never learned. But my girl can. She says it's a slogan from, like, 1890-some. 'Support the Qing! Destroy the foreigner!'"

"The Qing?"

"The ruling house of China in the 1800s. There was some political unrest. Westerners bringing in opium and trying to take over the country."

"But we are not in China now."

"No, whoever the vandal was, they're a couple centuries late and in the wrong hemisphere." He sobered. "But they're not playing. One of the priests got attacked, too. He's in Intensive Care, but they think he'll make it."

"Are they certain it is connected?" Wheels turned in her brain.

"Fairly. The same stuff is painted all over the church walls." He glanced at his watch. "Sorry, I gotta get going. But just FYI, the Church of the Transfiguration isn't open to visitors today, if that's where you were headed."

"Oh. Mm…thank you," she watched uncertainly as he jogged off down the sidewalk, hailing a cab at the corner.

A moment later, Drake appeared at the same corner, looking around frantically. He relaxed when he saw her and loped over, now carrying a large paper bag of produce from the grocery he had just left. "You shouldn't wander off like that, Abby," he complained as he got close. "It's not like we can do a spell to find one another if you get lost."

Ignoring this, she peered in the bag. "Why did you buy all that? Don't you have food at home?"

"Hey, fresh ginger root is hard to come by. And, uh, I don't know what the spiky things are, but she said they're good." He shrugged. "Bob can figure out what to do with them."

"…I see." She raised an eyebrow at him.

He grinned innocently. "Got her number, anyway."

"Did you get any useful information?" She sighed.

"Actually, yes. She knows a paramedic who was at the scene after the explosion. Lots of minor burns, and the guys who were performing the dragon dance were pretty shaken up, but there were no bodies recovered."

"That would seem to indicate Sun-Lok is alive in some form, somewhere." She pointed at the graffiti across the way. "I'm told that may have a significant meaning." She relayed what the young businessman had told her.

Drake nodded slowly. "Honestly, where Chinese history is concerned, your guess is probably as good as mine," he admitted, "but that sounds like the right time period for when Sun-Lok was supposed to have been captured. Could be Horvath didn't have time to get him caught up once he was released."

"He certainly didn't take much time to explain things to me," Abigail grumbled. "But he never intended for me to live long."

"No point dwelling," he elbowed her gently. "You want to check out this church?"

It was only a few blocks away, an elegant, towering building whose grounds appeared to be closed for the moment to all but law enforcement. Abigail eyed the elegant statue of Christ over the doors and raised an eyebrow. "Papists?" she murmured thoughtfully.

Drake gave her a look. "We don't call them that any more, Abby. Freedom of religion and all that?"

"Hm? Oh. I meant no offense," she glanced up at him. "All religions strike me as equally foolish, to be frank."

"Yeah?" Given her background, he was surprised. "What about what we do?"

"Sorcery is a skill, not a faith."

"I'm inclined to disagree," he said, and beckoned her around an alley, hoping to find a place to sneak in. "You can't see magic. Can't touch it or taste it. But we believe in it. We believe in using it to make a better world. I mean, it's only a better world for us, not for everyone, but still. And we believe in the Lady."

"Lady Morgana," she murmured. "Who would bow to no man."

He recognized the phrase from an old initiation ritual in his own Encantus. He had never been one to delve too deeply into the philosophy behind Morganian rites, but the way she said the words caught his attention. "…you mean that differently than the way I understand it, don't you."

She smiled faintly. "My master taught me that even the best of men seek to rule their women. You can choose a benign ruler or a wicked tyrant, but either way you choose a lock and chain."

"It's not like that anymore," he said. "Women can do whatever they want."

She shook her head. "Social mores have evolved, perhaps, but the fundamental nature of humanity does not change."

"…You know I'm not like that, right?"

She gave him an opaque look. "I've already seen you collect girls like dolls. It's only that you don't expect to keep them long."

Stung, he watched as she turned and moved on ahead, running her fingers over a chain link fence separating two lots. "At any rate," she said softly, "Morgana must be dead now."

"We don't know that," he protested. "Like you said, maybe Horvath just failed to free her…"

She glanced back at him. "Maybe." The word carried little hope.