Chapter Text
In the legends of King Arthur, the knight Percival had been a naïve country boy who rose to acclaim because of his fortuitous streak of dumb luck. Despite the namesake, it wasn’t the story Malachy Mac Conmara was prone to thinking of whenever he crossed paths with Percival Graves, Director of Magical Security for New York State.
The old tales of Fin MacCumhail told of his three sons and the nightly watches they took to prove their worth. The first son scouted the countryside and brought back for his father a cup that always gave the drinker his fill, no matter what he wished to drink or how much he wished to have. The second son brought home a knife which, when sliced against a bone, yielded enough meat to feed as many as were there, and so the two eldest watchmen brought plenty and prosperity to their father’s kingdom. The third son, in his eagerness to prove his own worth, went out and killed a hag and when she screamed her dying scream, her own sons came to avenge her. The third son killed two of the giants, but the youngest ran away. When he told his father of how he had saved the land from a wicked hag and killed two of her sons, Fin MacCumhail was far from impressed.
‘I wish you had left them all alone,’ Fin said, ‘for the last giant will be back and he will bring nothing but trouble.’
Something about Percival Graves had always reminded Mac of the third son in the story.
Beneath the shadow of the Third Avenue El, the shopfronts and tattoo parlors of the Bowery looked like a derelict carnival. Garish red signs were painted with flaking white, windows proclaimed low prices and even lower standards. A crowd, mostly men in dirt-spattered workmen’s caps, had gathered around the site of the explosion and were arguing among themselves about what had happened.
“It was a green fireball!” Somebody insisted, “I swear it was green!”
“No, it was black smoke! A big huge cloud of the stuff!”
Mac unobtrusively pushed his way to the front of the crowd to see what the hubbub was about.
Between a flophouse and a barber shop, a stack of rubble leaned up against the remains of a back wall. Presumably it had been a building at some point.
“That’s a still blowing up if ever I saw one,” Mac said loudly enough for the mundies around him to hear. “If you try to stretch your jag juice with rubbing alcohol and the kettle blows, the fire turns any number of colours.”
He had no idea if that was true or not, but it sounded reasonable.
Shoving his hands into his pockets, he left the crowd to mull over his suggestion and headed towards the ruined building. A young security officer charged with guarding the barricade and keeping the mundies at a distance held up a hand to stop him. From the current angle, the kid appeared no different than the blue-uniformed flatfoots of the non-magical variety.
“Excuse me, sir, you can’t come through here, that wall is still unsound and—“
Mac smiled. The kid clearly thought he was a mundy. He pulled out his badge and introduced himself:
“Mac Conmara. I was requested.”
“Oh, geez,” the kid replied with a thick Brooklyn accent, “I’m sorry, sir. A G-Wiz, I mean, a Federal Auror, that’s… is this really that important?”
“I don’t know yet,” Mac replied patiently, putting his badge away, “you aren’t letting me through.”
“Sorry, sir! Of course!”
The young officer opened an invisible hole in the barrier, like pushing aside a theater curtain. To the crowd watching, nothing was happening except Mac having a brief conversation with an officer and getting to walk by the barricade in order to cross to the other side of the street. They even saw him head beyond the other curve of the perimeter and into the rest of the crowd that circled the site like the seats of an amphitheatre.
To Mac, walking through the barrier was like stepping from a painting back into reality. The edges of things seemed sharper, the distance realer, the shapes of the universe more natural. When he looked again at the kid who’d let him through, the illusion of the blue uniform had revealed itself and he was wearing the standard greys and blacks of city security.
The building was a mess. The explosion had left huge chunks of stone and brick floating mid-air, miniature versions of the floating mountains of Shangri-La, while a huge cloud of toxic looking green and black dust swirled up and down with almost lung-like regularity. City aurors took turns climbing in and out of an enormous crater in the ground to recast the modified ebublio charms they were using as gas-masks.
“Any ideas what happened?” Mac asked the kid.
“You’ll have to ask Director Graves. He’s down there.”
“Happen to know what this place was?” He pulled something that looked like a white silk handkerchief from the pocket he kept his wand in and a small silver flask from his coat. The flask was filled with clean water he poured onto the piece of silk while he spoke.
“No, sir, they didn’t tell me anything but ‘keep the mundies out’.”
Mac gave the fabric a twist until it was still wet but not sopping.
“A tip for the future,” he said, doubling the handkerchief over to form a large triangle, “nobody ever tells you anything. You always have to make it your business to ask.”
He tied the damp fabric over his mouth and nose like a bandana and headed over to the remains of the building. It was tricking to keep his footing on the sides of the crater while avoiding being clocked in the head by one of the suspended bricks, but he managed.
A couple of the aurors who’d been at city security in Mac’s day gave him friendly nods or waves. The newer ones shot him sidelong glances of concern. By his count, there were about twenty-five officers of Magical Security on scene. A disturbingly high amount.
Percival Graves was in what appeared to be the blast point of whatever spell had gone wrong, barking orders at his people to get samples and take photographs before the evidence dissipated. He was in a long tailored coat with a crisp white lapelled black suit underneath. The shoulders of the coat flared ever so slightly upwards, almost like pauldrons on a suit of armour, and the belled sleeves had a slashed detail that revealed a white lining inside. Mac tried not to think derogatory things about the other man’s somewhat flashy style.
“Is that you, Mac?” Graves called out upon noticing him, “You look like you’re going to rob a train.”
His voice had a distorted, far-away quality from the ebublio mask.
“Well, you did catch me in the middle of my day,” Mac quipped dryly.
Graves pushed through his personnel, who scattered to their tasks, and shook Mac’s hand with friendly enthusiasm.
“Would you look at us, huh? Did you ever think I’d be Director of Security for the whole state? And you! Working your way up the federal ladder! Give it another ten years and you could be running the national show!” Graves said it in a tone that conveyed a warm reunion between old cohorts, but Mac knew how he meant it.
This is my state, I made it up the ladder, and you might think that because you’re federal you outrank me, but you’re still a small fish in the big boys’ pond.
“Not in another hundred years,” Mac said amiably, “I haven’t got enough imagination for a position like that. Everyone knows I just plod along and stick to the book, and that’s how I like it.”
Both men smiled at one another. The kinds of smiles you might see on a pair of crocodiles on opposite sandbanks.
“Thanks for coming down, surprised the bureau could spare you,” Graves said.
“It’s my lunch hour, but I don’t mind. Not when an old friend needs a hand,” Mac replied. “What is all this? I don’t recognize the spell.”
“That’s because it isn’t one spell, it’s a timed combination,” Graves explained. “We’re calling them Hex Bombs. We’ve been seeing them in random locations throughout the city over the last five months, although now I’m not so sure those locations were random.”
“How do they work?”
“The boys in the ivory tower are still trying to figure that one out, but we think several basic hexes or curses are trapped in an object – best guess is some kind of glass sphere, small though, like an aggie – and set to go off all at once. We’re not sure how it’s done, or why you’d want to use one instead of a more direct destruction spell.”
Once he was told, Mac noticed the different fingerprints of magic colliding with one another. An impressionist painting of ill intent, a seemingly full image from a distance, but in actuality countless dots forming to create an illusion. And, he realized, each dot would need to be numbered, accounted for, and analyzed to see if it could possibly give away the identity of the caster.
“Sounds like something kids might put together without knowing how bad the damage could be,” Mac said, looking up at the debris floating almost thirty feet above street level. Whoever set the thing was lucky it hadn’t hit the track and knocked a train full of mundies into the slums. “Have you talked to the owners of the joke shops?”
Graves looked grim.
“Come here, I want to show you why I asked for you in specific,” he said, stumbling over the busted bricks and past the remnants of old potion making supplies.
He led Mac to the back wall, the only piece of the building that had managed to stay intact, and nodded towards a glowing symbol. It had the appearance of being hastily painted on like graffiti, if someone had learned how to paint with what Mac immediately thought of as fluid colour. Shades of blue and green melted into each other, shining like molten metals, coursing through the pattern of the symbol. It was a symbol he knew well.
The triskele. The triple spiral. A mark of ancient Irish magic.
Graves watched as Mac’s eyes narrowed with concern.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Mac said, almost too softly to be heard through the cloth that covered his face.
“My number one theory is we’re looking at the start of a new gang war,” Graves said. “The Banshees, or even a revival of the Rabbits, trying to make a point. I can’t say for certain with only this to go on. I thought, given your history, you could point me in the right direction.”
Mac turned his back on the symbol and took it the remains of the room. It looked like tables had been set up, but he couldn’t really be sure what kind or how many. There was a bar, some potion-making equipment, nothing that really spoke to the nature of the place. Not after whatever combination of hexes had been used had turned most of it into green dust. Unless it had just smashed the furniture and the green dust was what had happened to the people.
“Is this location significant in any way?” He asked Graves.
Graves couldn’t supress a sudden, sharp laugh.
Two of his nearby officers looked at him and Mac with unsettled confusion.
“You finished your work?” Graves called to them.
“No, sir.”
“So get back to it,” he ordered, before clapping a hand on Mac’s shoulder and leading him back towards the edge of the crater. “Come on, let’s get some fresh air. This spell’s starting to wear off, I’m getting light-headed.”
****
By the time they got to the boarding house on the outskirts of Washington Heights, Newt was getting tired. It had been an overwhelming few hours, and he was surprised to learn how much a person could fit into a day when they weren’t waiting in a mountainside tent, trying to hear a Garuda call. It was a pleasant tiredness, given the complete emotional collapse he was on the brink of before lunch. But he’d enjoyed walking the colourful streets of the unfamiliar city, following Tina around unassuming corners to pop through doors labelled ‘Exit Only’ and finding himself transported to a new part of a new neighbourhood. She’d been annoyed at his reluctance to take the subway, but adapted to it quickly.
“Mr. Zoumadakis is one of the most highly respected landlords in the city,” she said before they knocked on the bright blue door, “he’s got a clean place, everything legal, and he’s got flexible rates. He also likes to keep on MACUSA’s good side, so let me do the haggling. What’s your budget?”
“Is there an amount between nothing and almost nothing?” Newt asked.
“I can work with that,” Tina nodded.
The building was a very welcoming sight to Newt with its faux-Georgian façade and peaked roof. The stoop turned sideways to accommodate the narrow road, along which were parked several cloth-top automobiles. Sitting in a row of near-identical buildings, it did nothing to stand out as a boarding house for the magical community, and this reminded Newt of home.
Tina took the knocker in hand and gave a solid, forthright series of taps.
“Did you say Zoumadakis?” Newt said suddenly, “That sounds familiar…”
The door was opened with a welcoming enthusiasm, and the olive-skinned, moustachioed man on the other side said:
“Brooms.”
“I’m sorry?” Newt smiled.
“The family makes brooms, finest tempestarii brooms in all of the Mediterranean,” the man said, reaching out his hand to shake. “Tassos Zoumadakis.”
His hair was white as snow and his handshake was strong.
“Mr. Zoumadakis, I don’t know if you remember me—“ Tina began, but Zoumadakis cut her off with an enthusiastic nod.
“From the inspection, five or six years ago, after that terrible business down the street with the kallikantzaros,” he shuddered. “I get a cold chill thinking about it. I hear you’ve been promoted to the federal branch since then.”
“I’m not here on business,” she said, trying to sidestep the question, “my friend’s in a tricky situation, and I was hoping you had a room available for him.”
“There is always a room available for any friend of yours, dear lady,” Zoumadakis gracefully took her hand and gave it the lightest of kisses.
Newt cleared his throat. He hadn’t done it intentionally, he wasn’t sure why he’d done it at all, but the old Greek gave him an amused wink and ushered the pair into the front parlour.
The house had a wonderful sense of summer to it, despite the miserable weather outside. Every surface gave the sense of being kissed by the sun, a lazy warmth permeating the home’s bright interior. The walls were white, but not wintery, the floors were a warm, dark wood and decorated with coiled rugs, and the air smelled faintly of earthy olive groves and sea salt. It was undeniably well-kept, but it was a bit of a disappointment to Newt, who had been hoping for a cozy English interior to match the exterior architecture of the building.
“I know your rates are more than reasonable,” Tina said, taking off her hat and coat and having a seat, “but I have a problem on my hands. Mr. Scamander is a magizoologist from Britain who’s scheduled to meet with the Department for Guardianship of the Environment on Wednesday morning.”
“Most interesting,” Zoumadakis said, pouring three cups of tea from an ornate silver service. He handed one to Tina and then one to Newt.
“Unfortunately, he’s had a very difficult time at the port, and all he’s got with him are the contents of his suitcase…”
“Meaning very little money, perhaps?”
“Meaning very little money.”
Zoumadakis looked at the tattered suitcase and brushed a knuckle thoughtfully along the side of his mustache.
“Might I have a look inside?” He asked.
“I don’t see why you’d want to,” Newt stammered, feeling his pulse speed up and the drop of sweat starting to form on his temple again.
“The lovely auror has said all you have is what is inside your suitcase, which I of course believe to be true. But she may not know what’s inside. Simply put, a man with a suitcase full of mothballs is in a very different situation than a man with a suitcase full of pearls.”
Newt swallowed hard.
He hadn’t had much trouble with the suitcase since they’d left the MACUSA building, which was certainly heartening, but he was having a terrifying vision of Zoumadakis flipping open the latches only to have his face melted off with a spray of erumpent fluid.
Tina gave him a look that seemed to ask ‘if it made it through all the spells that have been cast on it already, what are you worried about?’ The same look was also managing to ask ‘what the hell is in there?’
Seeing little choice in the matter – they had come all this way, and Tina had repeatedly asserted that he was going to be robbed or killed if he tried to find lodgings on his own – Newt passed the suitcase to Tina who passed it along to Zoumadakis.
“I promise not to gossip about the contents,” Zoumadakis said with a stage whisper, clearly misinterpreting the looks shared between Newt and Tina.
He lay the case across his knees, popped open the top and made a grunt of surprise.
“Pastries?” He said.
“Did you say pastries?” Newt asked, confused.
“Yes,” Zoumadakis said, spinning the case to face him. “Pastries.”
Newt sprang to his feet in shock. Inside the suitcase, instead of the dummy panel with his shirts and toothbrush and bedside reading, were twelve squashed but otherwise delicious-looking pastries.
“I don’t…” he started to say, and then it dawned on him. “The muggle! The one who fell down those steps! He has my case by mistake!”
It only took a moment for Tina to understand the implications of what he was saying.
“Oh, Newt!” She groaned, jumping to her feet and putting one hand on her hip and the other to her forehead. “You didn’t!”
“Troubles?” Zoumadakis asked.
“Nothing to really worry about,” Tina told him, “just a little mix up. A mundy switched luggage with Mr. Scamander by mistake. I can sort it out.”
“I certainly hope there’s nothing sensitive in that case of yours,” Zoumadakis said.
“Nothing!” Newt and Tina said at the same time.
“Mr. Zoumadakis,” Tina put on her most diplomatic expression, a softening of features that made her look more exhausted than anything else, “will you please look after Mr. Scamander for me? I know my superiors would be extremely grateful, and we can settle the matter of his room and board through official channels tomorrow morning.”
Zoumadakis stroked his moustache thoughtfully.
“Alright,” he said.
“And you,” Tina pointed at Newt’s chest, “stay here. Take a long bath. Have a nice dinner. Don’t go anyplace until you hear from me again.”
“What are you going to do?” Newt asked, not looking at her but at the suitcase full of pastries.
“I’m going to find Mac, and I’m going to ask him to track your suitcase, and then I’m going to get it back from the mundy.”
She threw her coat on and stormed out of the house, slamming the front door out of frustration.
A few seconds later, she stormed back in and took the case full of pastries from Zoumadakis.
“I might need this,” she muttered embarrassedly, opting not to look either man in the face as she left for the second time.
****
Unfortunately for Tina, Mac would not be easily found. He was, at that very moment, walking down a Bowery street with Percival Graves. Under normal circumstances, the thick scents of pipe smoke and refuse would not have seemed like a refreshing or welcome change, but being in the settling dust of the Hex Bomb had been more uncomfortable than either of them had realized. Mac’s eyes had stung with the comparative cleanliness of the air when he’d stepped outside of the barrier.
“This whole area used to be very upper crust,” Graves said, indicating the neighbourhood with a flourish of his hand.
“So they say,” Mac gave a sidelong glance to a sign announcing a girlie show featuring ‘Egyptian Temptresses.’
For the almost thirty years he’d been living in New York, the Bowery had been a slum. It had more sex workers than the Tenderloin in its heyday, more flophouses than the Lower East Side, and, worryingly, a large number of restaurant suppliers. Like many magically inclined citizens, Mac was loathe to visit it. Not because of its shabby cheapness or any mundane dangers it might pose, but because it had always been a second home to the poisonous young men of the magical community. Pure-blood, fallen noble families, anti-Kabbalist, anti-hoodoo, anti-folk-magic, anti-non-human. Bigots who’d been responsible for some of the most violent riots the city had ever seen. Still, it had been upper crust. A hundred years ago.
“Did you ever hear any stories about John J. Catherine?” Asked Graves.
“One or two. I came away with the impression that he wasn’t very good company,” Mac shrugged. Controversial high society figures were not his subject of interest.
What little he knew about John J. Catherine in particular pertained to the invention of secret curses and the collection of secret artifacts.
“Catherine was probably the darkest wizard New York’s ever seen, outside of the Trench Sisters.” Graves went on, “The man excelled at the unthinkable. Sometime around the 1840’s, he built a private gentleman’s club in the most prestigious neighbourhood of the time. He called it The Wendigo Club. Any conclusions you might draw from the name won’t be far off.”
“I suppose this is the part of the conversation where you reveal that we were just standing in the remains of the former Wendigo Club,” Mac said as they passed a cheap movie house.
Graves nodded, glancing up as the Third Avenue El rattled above them.
“The last monument to John J. Catherine and his work.”
“I don’t see the point,” Mac said as they crossed the street and turned to walk back in the direction of the explosion, “Catherine has been dead for good long while, his ghoulish ‘club’ hasn’t been operating since then, I’m assuming. Why destroy it now? What’s there to gain?”
“That’s what I was hoping you’d tell me,” Graves admitted. “The last time the Irish gangs went after the Lords of Gotham—“
“The last time it was over something a lot more contentious than a dead necromancer, and it was the Dead Rabbits who did the fighting. They don’t use the triskele,” Mac said with a little more bitterness than he intended.
The Dead Rabbits had been one of the most relentlessly violent magical gangs New York had ever seen. Mostly made up of impoverished young Irish immigrants from Five Points, they had been so careless in their battles against the American-born pureblood Lords of Gotham that even the mundies knew their name. But their grievances hadn’t come from nowhere. At the time the fighting broke, tensions over folk magic regulation had reached a boiling point. Mac had thought that particular fight, like John J. Catherine, was long dead and buried. It hadn’t done much to improve local sentiments.
“Hey, I don’t like these implications any more than you do,” Graves said. “You’re forgetting I’m Irish, too.”
By Mac’s standards, Graves was not Irish. His parents were both born in America, he was born in Connecticut, and he’d never been to the British Isles. But he had an Irish grandmother. This didn’t qualify him to speak on matters pertaining to local Irish issues or the tenements, since he’d spent most of his life between the family’s country home and a Fort Tryon estate where he currently resided.
“I’ll ask around the neighbourhood,” Mac said, meaning Hell’s Kitchen, “but I think it’s a frame up. I can’t see why anyone would put the triskele on a job like this.”
“So what do you want me to do here? Tell everyone that we’re not investigating the first real lead we have on these attacks because Mac doesn’t want people to think badly of old symbols?”
Mac looked around at the mundies starting to peel off from the crowd around the explosion. Whatever rumours they were going to spread had all been chosen, but the magical community hadn’t even gotten started.
“I want a few days to let you know if there’s any reason to make this public,” Mac said. “You go around riling people up, and you’ll have another riot on your hands, or a gang war that could’ve been prevented.”
A chime sounded, clear and pretty, from inside Graves’ waistcoat pocket. He pulled out a copper watch and flipped it open. The face of the clock had been replaced with a short message.
“They need you back at the bureau,” he told Mac. “We’ll talk again later.”
****
Zoumadakis showed Newt to a small, very cheerful room with a bed, a dresser, and an en-suite that could’ve only been created by magic, given the seeming size of the building and the fact that it contained a sink, a toilet, and a full-sized bathtub.
“Breakfast in the dining room at seven, lunch at one, dinner at eight,” Zoumadakis said. “Anything you need can be found in the top right drawer of the dresser.”
“Very kind of you, I appreciate it,” Newt smiled.
“Hmph,” Zoumadakis grumbled, closing the door behind him as he left.
Newt collapsed in a crumpled heap on the edge of the bed. The mattress was very soft, and his muscles ached. And his skeleton ached. And he felt emotionally drained and like his brain was going to explode with all the horrible possibilities of what was going wrong outside of his control. And he was desperately worried about his suitcase.
He ought to take a nap, he thought, a nice half hour of rest. He might never get the chance to sleep on a decent bed again, just flea-ridden prison cots with rough blankets and no pillows. But his eyelids wouldn’t stay shut.
A bath, then. That wasn’t a bad idea at all, he’d probably never get a decent bath again, either, and the Golden Hinde hadn’t had particularly modern bathing fixtures.
Newt went into the en-suite and remembered that all his things were in the false panel of his suitcase. He was about to head downstairs and ask Mr. Zoumadakis if he had any spare toiletries for guests, when he remembered what he’d been told about the drawer.
He opened it and found a bar of soap, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a sponge, and a spare face cloth.
An idea occurred to him.
After he cleared the bath items out of the drawer, her closed it very gently and crouched down in front of the dresser.
“Drawer?” He said sweetly, “I know you probably specialize in linens and things – very nice ones – but it would be extremely useful if you could give me suitcase? I need it, you see.”
Hoping with every fiber of his being that this would somehow work, he opened the drawer.
His suitcase was not inside.
But there was a small, white, rectangular card. Newt looked at it, puzzled, knowing for certain that it had not been in there when he cleared the other things away.
In very neat, deep black ink, two words appeared:
Aκoλoύθησέ με
Newt blinked at the writing, hoping fervently that he wasn’t looking at the Greek words for ‘I have contacted the police.’ He was more than a little relieved when the texted morphed into its English translation:
Follow Me
With nothing to lose, Newt picked up the card for a closer look. As soon as it was out of the drawer and in his hand, the writing again changed. This time, the card went blank except for a pair of footprints that pointed on a diagonal towards the door, and winked on and off the stiff paper as though they were walking.
Newt decided to walk to the door to see what would happen. When he got there, the footprints were swapped out for a tiny, animated illustration of an Ancient Greek warrior opening a very modern-looking door. So Newt turned the knob and stepped into the hallway.
He followed the card, stepping very lightly to avoid alerting Mr. Zoumadakis of what he was up to, out of the front door and onto the sidewalk. When the footsteps started to point him east instead of south, he was surprised. Surely the suitcase would be back towards the direction of the bank? But, for some reason that wouldn’t have made sense if he really thought about it, he decided that the card had a better geographical grasp of Manhattan than he did, and so east he went.
As he passed muggles on the sidewalk, he did his best to look like he was trying to find a specific address on his card, and none of them paid him much mind. He moved as quickly as he could manage, occasionally glancing up to make sure he wasn’t flattened by an oncoming milk truck, and noticed that he was heading into a commercial area where the family businesses had names like Kaczka Pawn Brokers and Maslanka’s Ice Cream Parlour.
He could hear the laughter of children playing in one of the alleyways, and wondered what time in the afternoon it was.
“Sir!” A voice called to him. “Excuse me, sir!”
Newt quickly pocketed his card and looked up to see a muggle police officer in a blue uniform wave him over. Next to him, an elderly woman with curlers in her hair and slippers on her feet was clutching her housecoat tight around her chest to keep out the cold. Newt looked at the officer with polite enquiry as he walked over.
“Something the matter, officer?” Newt asked.
“Do you speak Polish?”
“No, I’m afraid not. I’m just passing through the neighbourhood,” Newt explained apologetically.
“Me too,” the officer grumbled, “my shift’s almost up, but she seems to be in distress about something.”
The group of children came running out of the alley in a burst of laughter, and the old woman in her house coat called them over and told them something in Polish.
“She says we’re supposed to tell you what she’s saying,” the leader of the children, a little girl with blonde braids tied in green ribbon, said to the policeman.
Newt and the officer exchanged friendly nods, and Newt slipped a few steps away so he could pull out the card and get his bearings again. Behind him, he could hear the old woman speaking quite animatedly, and then the little girl reporting:
“She says animals came out of the upstairs apartment. Like a safari. There was a rhino with a flaming horn and a white monkey and a platypus and a giant rat made of pink skin…”
Newt froze and his eyes went wide with panic. He turned slowly back towards the children and the old woman.
“What does she mean?” The policeman was asking in confusion.
“It’s real funny!” The little girl reported. “She says she was washing the stairs in front of her apartment and she heard a big crash and saw the wall fall down outside the window, then she saw the rhino and all the other things go running towards the park, and she went for help.”
“A… rhino?” The policeman said slowly.
There was a direct correlation between the apartment building the old woman was gesturing towards and the direction the card was telling Newt to go. He decided it was very important to get there before the muggle policeman, and so he started hurrying towards it.
The card led him to the third floor of the building, where a door was hanging off its hinges. Assuming that this must be the right place, Newt carefully pushed his way into the room. The hinges creaked a long, low creak.
He found a small, one-room apartment with a bed with a suitcase on it, a tipped over chair, a lamp, and a gaping void with jagged edges showing off the bleak November sky.
Admittedly, Newt had not been in many muggle apartments, but he was fairly certain they were supposed to have walls. He took his wand and cast a quick spell to repair the damage, hopefully in time to have prevented the neighbours from noticing. Apart from the old woman downstairs, but he’d have to deal with her later.
“Oh, god, is the wall fixing itself?” A rather distressed voice asked from under the chair.
Newt realized with a start that the man he’d met outside the bank was trapped, and he quickly lifted the chair and helped the man up.
“I’m so terribly sorry about this,” Newt said earnestly, “are you alright?”
Jacob dazedly found his feet, then looked at Newt.
“You’re the guy.”
“That’s right.”
“From outside the bank.”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m afraid I accidentally switched our suitcases when they got knocked over. I’m terribly sorry.” He gave another wave of his wand and a soft incantation that fixed the broken door and put all the furniture right.
“Switched our…?” At first, Jacob looked confused. Then realization dawned on him and his eyes went wide as saucers. “That’s your suitcase! This is your fault! The little thing that came out of the egg and the big thing that destroyed my room, and the thing that bit me! What were all those things? Who are you?”
“Did you say one of them bit you?” Newt asked urgently. “Which one?”
“The, uh, the weird looking one.”
There was a pause.
“I’m going to need you to be more specific.”
“It was pink and really ugly?”
“The murtlap?”
Now it was Jacob’s turn to look unimpressed.
“Are you asking me to correctly identify the rabid animal that jumped out of your suitcase?”
“It’s not rabid, I assure you, but I would like to see the bite, please.”
If he had been less dazed, less depressed about his bad luck with the bank, less overwhelmed by walls magically fixing themselves, Jacob Kowalski might have decided that whatever was going on was something to be as far away from as possible. But he wasn’t thinking clearly and his neck was itchy and this English guy seemed like some kind of expert.
“I can’t really see it,” Jacob said, turning his head and angling his neck towards Newt, “but it’s on the back but more like the side? The side-back of my neck?”
“The good news is these kinds of bites usually clear up in a matter of minutes,” Newt said cheerfully as he started to take a look. “Oh. Oh dear.”
“Oh dear?” Jacob gulped. “Why are you saying that? What’s wrong? Oh god, am I going to die?”
“No! Nothing like that! It wasn’t a big oh dear…”
“So it was a little oh dear?”
“More like a medium oh dear,” Newt said. Backing away from the bite, sitting on the edge of the bed and mulling things over. “It is a complication.”
“What kind of complication?” Jacob asked, tipping the chair right side up and taking a seat of his own.
“I’m a wizard, you see, and this suitcase – my suitcase – carries several species of fantastic creature that I’m not legally allowed to bring into America, but all of which are invaluable to my research or in need of sheltered care. And now it appears several of them have escaped, which is a nuisance on its own, but I’ve also got to look after you. You should be observed by someone familiar with murtlap bites and treatments for the next twenty-four hours, because it looks like you’re having a mild allergic reaction. So I can’t just obliviate you.”
Jacob nodded slowly, deeply hoping he hadn’t just heard the word obliterate.
“So, what you’re telling me is you’re a crazy person and I’m probably dreaming,” he decided.
“I promise you, by the end of tomorrow evening, you won’t remember any of this,” Newt said reassuringly. “Now, how many creatures escaped? Do you happen to know?”
“Uh, the little one that hatched, the yeti looking one, the one that stole all my spoons before it left, the big one that wrecked the wall, and the ugly one that bit me, and I think that’s it.”
“That’s… manageable,” Newt nodded. “You’re going to have to stay with me while I find my creatures so that I can keep an eye on your bite, but it probably won’t be too much trouble.”
“Is it optional? What’s the worst thing that can happen?”
“Flames shooting out of your anus.”
“I will stick with you while you find your creatures. It probably won’t be too much trouble.”
“Excellent!” Newt pursed his lips, “The only thing I’m not sure of is how we’re going to find them.”
The two of them sat in silence, contemplating. Newt trying to find the quickest solution for rounding up his creatures, Jacob trying to wrap his head around what, exactly, was going on.
“Aha!” Newt smiled, pulling the card from the boarding house dresser out of his pocket, “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this right away! Card, can you please guide me to the erumpent who has escaped my case?”
The card flashed an illustration of Newt’s suitcase.
“Yes, I know, but I’ve found that now. I need to find something else. Something that was in the suitcase.”
The card went blank for a moment, then the little Greek warrior from before appeared. He shrugged and shook his head as though there was nothing he could do, then enthusiastically picked up a suitcase and gave Newt a thumbs up.
Jacob watched the other man talk to the tiny piece of paper and tried not to interrupt by running away as fast as he could.
“I know, you’ve done very well, but I need to find my creatures before things get out of hand, can’t you do anything to help?” Newt was saying to the card.
The Greek warrior illustration gave Newt another sympathetic expression, then disappeared.
“Well,” Newt said to Jacob, “it was worth trying.”
“Yeah, no, sure, of course it was. So, is there somebody who looks after you that we should maybe call? Like a senior wizard who could help out here and clarify the situation a little bit?”
“You’re right. We’re going to have to go to MACUSA. I’ll just have to take my medicine.”
“You forgot to take your medicine?” Jacob said, an unexpected note of relief in his voice, “That’s something I can understand! You shouldn’t have done that, you probably need it. Let’s go take care of it and maybe somebody at this hospital can take a look at my bite and tell me what’s actually happening, and we’ll both be happy.”
Newt sighed with resignation.
“I suppose it’s the best thing.”
He waved his wand, and around them the room redecorated itself to a pristine state, then he grabbed the lapel of Jacob’s jacket with one hand and his suitcase with the other. A quick flourish apparated them into a back alley near to the bank where they’d first crossed paths.
Upon processing the quick succession of events and his new location, Jacob wheezed out:
“You’re a wizard, holy shit, holy shit.”
“I told you that already,” Newt said, looking concerned.
He raised his wand in front of Jacob’s face.
The poor man was terrified that Newt was about to turn him into a toad or blast him with a lightning bolt for being slow on the uptake. In the cozy confines of his apartment, the whole thing had felt like a fever dream colliding with some bad shrimp; he could’ve talked himself out of believing most of it the next morning. He would’ve decided a rat bit him while he was sleeping and given him some crazy hallucinogenic germs and then he would’ve gone to a doctor.
But now this real-life wizard was probably going to turn him to stone and donate him as a piece of art to the Rockefeller collection.
“Follow the wand with your eyes,” Newt asked, like a doctor giving a physical.
Jacob did as he was told, watching it move from left to right and back again.
“Good. If you feel suddenly feverish or, ah, flatulent, tell me right away,” Newt said, putting his wand away. “And if you have any more of these short term memory lapses, I’ll have to put you in the suitcase with a cold compress on your head.”
“I don’t want to go in the suitcase. I’m too big,” Jacob said dazedly.
“Oh, don’t be silly! There’s plenty of room, I’d just have to shift a few things around!” He waved the concern off and walked out onto the busy sidewalk to get his bearings.
All he had to do was find the cluster of skyscrapers and pick the right one. Or at least find the delicatessen, because he was sure that Mrs. Beiderman would give him directions. He turned to his right and nothing looked familiar. Then he turned to his left and nothing looked familiar.
“Oh dear,” he said quietly to himself.
“A big oh dear, or a little oh dear, or a medium one?” Jacob asked.
“I can’t remember where exactly MACUSA… is. It’s in a skyscraper, with a lot of silver and glass and a sort of modernist sculpture nearby. You wouldn’t happen to know it?”
“That’s a description of all the skyscrapers.”
“I was worried about that,” Newt muttered, and patted his pockets for the map Tina had given him.
He opened it and found that the neighbourhoods she’d marked out for him were still clearly noted, as well as the few local landmarks she’d thought might be of interest, but he couldn’t see the MACUSA building.
“She said it was in Midtown,” he mentioned to Jacob. “Would that help?”
“…No.”
“Oh! Here! Hester Street!” Newt said, remembering his advice for emergencies. “If you can get us there, I can find Tina, and then we’ll be moving along nicely.”
“You want to go to Hester Street?” Jacob said with an amused grin. “Alright. I’ll take you to Hester Street, and I’ll get to see whatever nutzo thing happens there, and maybe I’ll start getting used to it.”