A single patron sat in the farthest booth, quietly eating a bowl of stew, reading a book about a boy wizard. Gretchen had recently introduced him to some of the current literature—all balderdash! Coralis gnashed his teeth and vowed to have a long talk with the author. Her facts were all wrong.

Coralis removed his dripping trench coat and sodden hat, and a row of pegs shaped like dragon claws flexed to grip the coat and hat firmly in their talons. The proprietor, a woman in her mid-hundreds (but who looked much like she was in her mid-thirties) leaned casually across the bar, resting on her elbows and smiling.

“Molly.” Coralis had not seen her in over fifty years, but she hadn’t aged a day.

“Coralis.” Her voice, with its lilting Irish accent, was just loud enough to reach the patron in the back, who promptly dropped his spoon, splashing thick drops of gravy onto his gray flannel shirt. He looked up sharply from his book like a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

Coralis’s reputation as a despiser of books about wizardry stretched to every corner of the Wandmaker universe. He was a stickler for facts—not fiction.

Coralis placed a fist on the bar top and extended two fingers. Molly set out a cocktail glass and selected a bottle containing a glowing blue liquid, filling the glass to the two-finger line. Three short taps on the glass with a pencil-sized wand of rutilated quartz, and Coralis brought time within the bar to a standstill.

“Ah, that’s better.” He stomped over to the patron, who had frozen holding a spoonful of stew just shy of his mouth. “What have we here? Do even the First-Order Wandbearers fancy themselves to be wizards these days? It’s no wonder the world is in such a rotten state.”

“I was going to warn him you were on your way here, but I figured, why spoil all the fun.” Molly had a round face and a pleasant smile. She was a first-generation immigrant—one of the first Irish to settle in what was known as the Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan. Her father had been a Wandbearer Monarch who’d died in the great gang wars of the 1850s.

She had all the right qualities to make her an excellent Wand Master, but chose to live a quiet life in relative obscurity. Still, she was a street-tough New Yorker, not to be trifled with.

“Your message said it was an urgent matter,” he said brusquely. “I hope it has nothing to do with wizardry.”

“You’ll not need to take that attitude,” she scolded. “If I say it’s urgent, then bet yer finest wand that it’s darned important.”

“Humpf.” He turned the patron’s spoon to a slight downward angle. “Let’s get to it, then.”