The Last Magician

by Lisa Maxwell

  He took the cuffs from her, frowning as he examined them.

  “I didn’t break them, if that’s what you’re wondering,” she said when his brows drew together in a puzzled expression. She held up the hairpin she’d used. It was the only useful thing about the elaborate style that one of Dolph’s people had done for her earlier that day.

  Esta had tried to tell them that Harte Darrigan wasn’t going to be impressed by a new outfit or hair, but they’d insisted. Seduce him, they’d said, but a con only works if the mark wants what you’re selling.

  The handcuff trick did seem to impress him, though. For a moment at least.

  But a second later, he shrugged indifferently and pulled his armor back into place as he hung the cuffs from the hook where she’d found them. “An easy enough trick to manage with some practice, I suppose. It’s not a secret that I keep those here.”

  “Try another pair,” she challenged. “There’s not a lock that’s ever stopped me before.”

  “After that trick at the museum, I don’t doubt it. But I know how to pick a lock too, sweetheart.”

  “Bet you I’m faster.”

  As he studied her, she could see the internal struggle. A part of him, she knew, itched to test her, to show her that he was better. But the other part eventually won out. “Like I said, I’m not interested in your games, and I’m still not interested in whatever Dolph Saunders has planned.”

  “Maybe you should be.” She took another step toward him. “How long do you think this gig is going to last for you?” she asked.

  “As long as I want it to.” He gave her a smug look and then set to fastening the buttons on his shirt.

  “The same tired tricks can only work for so long.”

  “They’re not tricks,” he corrected. “They’re effects. And I can always come up with new ones.”

  “Same tired audience, though. Eventually they’re going to want something new. Someone new.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, but his expression wasn’t so sure.

  “But if the Brink came down,” she continued, ignoring his outburst, “you could get out of this town.”

  “Who says I want to?”

  She couldn’t help but laugh at that.  The yearning in his expression was so stark, it was unmistakable. “If you could leave New York, you could have a new town whenever you wanted one.  A new audience every night. The whole world would be open to you.”

  A strange expression crossed his face for the briefest of moments, transforming it. But then he seemed to collect himself, and his usual mask of pleasant indifference snapped back into place. “Who says I need Dolph Saunders to get out of this town?” He finished straightening his collar in the mirror before taking a black silk tie from the hook nearby.

  She didn’t like this newfound confidence of his. “He can offer you protection,” Esta said, grasping for some other angle to disarm him. She reached for the information she’d been armed with. “You and your mother.”

  Harte went very still. “I don’t take threats lightly.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be a threat,” Esta told him, confused at his reaction.

  “Considering that very few know I even have a mother, I’m not sure how I could take it as anything else.” He was still tense.

  “Everybody has a mother,” Esta said with a halfhearted laugh, trying to appear more relaxed than she felt. Something had changed when she mentioned his mother. Apparently, Dolph and Nibs had given her just enough information to hang herself. Any ground she might have gained had slipped away, taking more with it.

  Harte was silent for another long, uncomfortable moment, studying her as though he was looking for some hint at what her game was. In that moment, he looked every bit the Magician she’d expected to encounter. Cold. Ruthless.  And completely capable of double-crossing anyone.

  After a moment, he spoke. “I’ll consider Dolph’s proposal if you tell me something.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, wary.

  “What, exactly, does Dolph have on you?” He took a step toward her, his head cocked to the side in a question.

  “Nothing,” she lied. He was too close and the room felt suddenly too small. She lifted her chin. “I’m useful to him.”

  “Is that all you are?” Harte asked, studying her more intently. “Useful? It seems so . . . pedestrian.”

  She couldn’t stop the image of Charlie Murphy, red-faced in the street, from flashing through her mind. And she couldn’t help but think of Dolph, sailing to the prison on Blackwell Island, helpless against the Brink.

  “Ah, so he does have something on you,” he said, satisfied. “I figured as much.”

  “You figure wrong,” she said, but the game had already changed. She’d managed to hold her own at first, maybe even caught him off guard with the handcuffs, but now he was on the offensive.

  Harte Darrigan shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Dolph has never been one for charity cases,” he told her. “Whatever help or promises he’s made you, he’ll take it out of you in kind. That’s how all the bosses downtown work, and he’s no different. Once you’re in, it’s impossible to get away.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, lifting her chin. Hadn’t she seen with her own eyes what Dolph was doing, how he was helping the weakest among them?

  He ignored her protests. “Tell me, do you already wear his mark?”

  “His mark?” she asked before she could stop herself.

  She cursed inwardly when Darrigan smiled, because she knew she’d just revealed that there were other things about Dolph Saunders she didn’t understand, things that Harte Darrigan knew about, which gave him an edge she couldn’t afford.

  “I’m sure you’ve seen the tattoo he gives those in his crew. It’s always been the price of admission for his protection.” He turned from her then and took a vest from a hook on the wall. “It’s not one I’m willing to pay.” His storm-cloud eyes were steady on her, determined. “Ever.”

  She hadn’t been around long, but she had noticed the tattoos that some of those around the Strega wore. She just hadn’t understood what they were. “He may be willing to negotiate that point,” she told him, a bluff if there ever was one.

  He tossed a disbelieving look in her direction as he buttoned the vest. “I can’t imagine he would. No mark, no way to control me.”

  Just then, his dressing room door opened, and Esta turned to see a woman with aggressively red hair peek her painted face in. “Harte, dear,” she started to coo, but when she saw Esta, her eyes narrowed. “Oh. So sorry,” the woman said, not at all sounding like she was. “I didn’t realize you were entertaining.”

  “I wasn’t,” Harte told the woman, who stepped into the room without being invited. “She was just—”

  “Having the most delightful chat with a dear old friend,” Esta interrupted, using the woman’s unexpected appearance to her advantage and taking back control. She infused her words with the notes of an Eastern European accent as she offered her hand to the woman. “It’s so lovely to meet one of his leetle theater friends,” she said with a smile that was all smug condescension. “I am Esta von Filosik, of course.”

  The woman’s eyes went cold. “You say you’re a friend of his?”

  “No—” Harte started to say, but not before Esta spoke over him.

  “Of course!” she lied easily. “We met ages ago, in Rastenburg, when he studied under my father. We were but children then, but we became”—she paused dramatically and slid a warm look to Harte—“quite close. Did we not, darling?”

  “So this is what you’ve been running off to?” The woman’s mouth went tight.

  To Esta’s immense satisfaction, Harte Darrigan—for once—seemed at a loss for words.

  “He left to continue his studies, but now we are reunited,” Esta told the woman, sidling up to Harte and slipping her arm through his in a proprietary way. He started to pull away, but she held him
tight. “And you are?”

  “Evelyn DeMure,” the woman said, making an obvious show of looking Esta over from head to toe.

  As she did so, Esta felt the warm energy of Evelyn’s magic wrap around her, and she had the sudden feeling of being drawn to her, the sudden desire to release Harte. She couldn’t seem to stop her arms from falling away. . . .

  “Evelyn,” Harte warned.

  A moment later, the warmth faded, but Esta had already released her hold on his arm.

  “Is there something you needed?” Frustration simmered in his voice.

  Evelyn gave Esta a smile that was mostly teeth before she turned to Harte. “A letter was delivered for you just now,” she said, holding out a crumpled envelope. “Next time get someone else to take your messages, would you? I’m not your errand boy.”

  “No one could confuse you for a boy, Evelyn,” he said with a grin obviously meant to charm, but the woman didn’t soften. His smile faltered as he took the letter from her outstretched hand. He tore the edge of the envelope, but even once he pulled out the folded sheet of paper, Evelyn didn’t seem in any hurry to leave.

  “I thought you weren’t allowing visitors backstage anymore?” she said, glancing again at Esta with a look as sharp as one of  Viola’s knives.

  Harte didn’t seem to hear her. He was too busy reading the note, his brows furrowing over narrowed eyes. Then, all at once, he balled the paper in his closed fist, and when he looked up, the fury in his eyes had Esta wanting to take a step back.

  “Usually I wouldn’t,” he said, looking at her with a stony, unreadable expression. “But for an old friend, I had to make an exception.”

  Everything in her went on alert. Esta had no idea what was in that note, but something had changed in him. All playfulness was gone. She didn’t know what this new game was, and she had a feeling that she shouldn’t stick around to find out.

  “I was actually about to leave,” she told Evelyn. “It was lovely to see you again, Harte. Do think about my proposition?”

  He stared at her, his mouth tight. “Perhaps we could discuss it in more detail?” he said flatly. “Soon.”

  It was a victory, but she couldn’t help feeling like there was something else happening that she didn’t understand and wasn’t in control of.

  “Tomorrow, perhaps?” she asked, hopeful and wary all at once. “We could continue our discussion?”

  His gray eyes bored into her. “I’m not sure about tomorrow—I’ve got some things to clear up. It might take a few days,” he told her. His voice carried a curious note of determination.

  “I’ll look forward to it,” she told him, trying not to show her unease. Then she pasted on a smile. “Until then? It was lovely to meet you,” she told Evelyn, before turning to take her leave.

  Just as she was opening the door, he grabbed her wrist and tugged her back toward him.

  “That isn’t any way for old friends to part, now, is it?” he asked softly, almost playfully, but the look on his face didn’t match his tone.

  He was already pulling her toward him. “As you said, we were once so very . . . close.”

  She had to force herself not to pull away. Esta needed Evelyn, who was still watching with ice in her eyes, to believe that she was who she claimed to be. Within the hour, the entire theater would know about the curious visitor in Harte Darrigan’s dressing room. You couldn’t buy gossip as effective as that. He’d be stuck with her.

  But before she could find a way out of his grasp, she was in his arms. All at once she was back in the Haymarket. His eyes held no warmth or seduction, but her stomach flipped just the same at the intensity she saw there.

  He gave her a moment to pull away, to refuse him and what she knew was about to happen. But pulling away would mean destroying the cover she was trying to establish. Instead, she looked up at him, met the challenge head-on. Dared him to go through with it.

  It’s an act, she told herself, when amusement sparked behind those gray eyes of his, when they softened just a little. Professor Lachlan had warned her about the Magician. Don’t be taken in by him. Get the Book before he does and stop the—

  Then his lips were on hers and she felt the warm energy of his affinity wrap around her, sink into her skin, violating the boundaries between them in a way she didn’t have time to prepare herself for and couldn’t protect herself from. His energy was hot, electric, and there was something about it that pulled her in even as she knew that it was a trap.

  Despite the heat of his magic, the kiss itself held no passion or warmth. It was over before it had barely begun, but something had happened. He’d gained something more than her embarrassment.

  “Until later, then, sweetheart?” he murmured as he released her. His expression was impassive, even as his eyes glittered with victory.

  “I’ll look forward to it,” she said, and was glad to hear that her voice trembled only the tiniest bit. It wasn’t fear but fury that jangled through her—fury at him for laying a hand on her, fury at herself for not being ready. Then she let herself out of the dressing room and pulled time around her so that she could get out of the theater without anyone seeing her shake.

  THE MESSAGE

  Harte stared at the open door, trying to figure out what he’d just heard and seen. The wild thoughts and images twisting through the girl’s mind didn’t make any sense at all.

  “Well,” Evelyn drawled, her rouged lips pursed. “That was instructional.”

  “Yeah,” he said, more to himself than her. “It was.” And yet he couldn’t help but think he knew even less now than before.

  “You two are old friends?” She gave an indelicate snort. “And I’m the Virgin Mary.”

  Her words shook him from his thoughts, and he finally realized Evelyn was still watching him. Her bright hair and painted face looked tired and garish in the dim light of his dressing room lamp. It wasn’t only the shadows that it cast over her face that made her seem older, a worn-out shell of who she might have once been. It was that he was looking at her now compared to the girl—to Esta—and seeing their intrinsic difference.

  The kiss had left him with more questions than answers, and it had shaken him in a way he couldn’t think too closely about.

  From the way she ran out of there, he had a feeling that it had shaken her, too. Rightly so, he supposed. After all, when he took her off guard and pushed past her defenses, he’d sensed that while the girl might have come with a message from Dolph, she’d also come for herself.

  “So the note . . . Was it important, or what?” Evelyn asked, nodding toward it.

  “Just something I have to take care of,” he told her. He tucked the crumpled paper into his pocket and grabbed his jacket. “I have somewhere I need to be.”

  He left Evelyn in his dressing room and headed out with the sinking feeling that he might already be too late.

  The paper had been monogrammed with the familiar symbol of the Five Point Gang—a cross with an extra arm that mirrored the legendary intersection of Orange Street, Cross Street, and Anthony Street, which was now the turf of Paul Kelly. It was the same symbol they’d branded into the skin on his shoulder when he’d made the choice to take Kelly’s offer. Seeing it would have been enough to set him on edge, but the address written in a strong, slanting hand—Kelly’s own—was only a block from the apartment he’d rented for his mother last May.

  He knew at once the note was a warning about how much Paul Kelly could still control Harte’s future. Certain it would be pointless to go to his mother’s apartment, he went off in search of the address in the message instead.

  • • •

  The toffs who went slumming south of Houston might have thought that Chinatown was where the opium dens in the city were, but in reality, joints were hidden all over town. Knowing his mother, it wasn’t a surprise that the address on the paper led to one of the worst he’d ever seen.

  When he found her on a low platform in a dingy basement on Broome Street, he was already to
o late. She was barely conscious, her head supported awkwardly by a small wooden stool and her hand loosely clutching the long pipe. Scattered on the floor nearby were three shells, their curved bowls containing the dark evidence of her latest binge.

  He had his suspicions about how she’d obtained so much of the sickly sweet drug, but he didn’t really want to know. It was bad enough that he had to see her like this. And to realize he still cared enough to be disappointed.

  Still, even as her cracked lips moved in some silent conversation within her drug-induced dream, she was alive and mostly safe. Whatever she’d done to him—what he’d driven her to do—pieces of the woman he’d once known remained beneath the years of disappointment and madness. Part of her would always be the fairylike creature who had spun tales of a distant land for the small boy he’d once been.

  It was his own fault she’d chosen to leave him. His own fault for driving her away.

  Her hair was gray now, and he couldn’t stop himself from cringing as he pushed the greasy strands away from her face. “Ma,” he said gently, trying to rouse her. “Come on. It’s time to go.”

  She opened her drowsy eyes. Her light irises were glassy, her pupils large and vacant-looking from the effects of the drug, but she smiled at him before her eyes drifted shut again.

  “No, Ma,” he told her through gritted teeth. “You have to wake up. We have to go.” He had to get her out of there. He needed to get her somewhere safe before Kelly or his men found her again. Or before she ran up an even bigger bill he would end up paying.

  A soft moan gurgled from her throat in response, but her face remained slack, her breath shallow.  Then she opened her eyes again, and for a moment they focused on him. “No,” she whispered. “Please, no . . .”

  “I’m not going to hurt you, Ma,” he said, pulling his hand back from her.

  “Leave me alone,” she told him, her voice ragged with fear and disgust. “Unnatural boy. You made him go.  You took him from me.”