by Kat Ross
“Oh, I almost forgot.” He reached into his pocket and handed me one of the little wooden puzzles they sold in Chinatown. “A parting gift. It’s called a kong ming lock. Give it to your sister to pass the time.”
I turned it over in my hand. It looked like the sort of thing that would drive me crazy for days. “Can’t. She’ll know where it came from. Instantly.”
“Would she?”
I slipped the puzzle into my pocket. “She knows you better than you know yourself.”
Moran looked pleased at this. “Well, then.” He adjusted his hat, running a gloved finger along the brim until it was just so. “Perhaps we’ll see each other around. I’m staying at the Fifth Avenue Hotel with Mother while the house is repaired.” He winked and trotted down the front steps.
“Wait!”
Moran paused and looked back at me expectantly. He stood on the sidewalk in plain view and if Myrtle were watching from one of the upstairs windows, I was doomed.
But I didn’t care. I wanted to know. Not about Emma Bayard or Quincy Hughes or any of those minor details. I wanted an answer to the question that haunted me then and always would.
“What did it say to you?” I drew an uneven breath. “In the music room, when you were sitting at the piano together?”
James Moran regarded me impassively for a long moment. Then he doffed his hat and bowed at the waist.
“Good day, Miss Pell,” he said softly, and there was something cold and frightening about him again.
I rubbed sweaty palms on my skirt as I watched him walk away.
Moran’s black brougham waited at the corner. When he reached it, he turned back and our eyes met one last time. I thought he was smiling. Then he climbed in and the driver shook the reins, guiding the carriage into the flow of traffic up Sixth Avenue.
My sister’s waspish voice echoed down from the second floor.
“Harrison!”
I sighed, shut the front door and climbed the stairs. Myrtle was lying in bed surrounded by the morning papers, a cigarette burning in an overflowing ashtray. I knew she’d recruited Connor to make runs to the tobacconist shop. She wore a dressing gown with dried egg yolk on the sleeve. Mrs. Rivers must have braided her hair a few days ago and one side wasn’t too bad, but the other was an absolute mass of knots. I could see the pearl handle of a pistol sticking out of her pocket.
Suddenly, the fog of misery I’d been living in for the last month lifted and I started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Myrtle demanded.
“I don’t know. I suppose we are. Would you like some fresh coffee?”
“No.” She scanned the newspaper, her grey eyes intent. At least she had kicked the morphine. “The police say the fire was an accident. Most likely an ember from the fireplace that got past the screen and set the carpet alight.”
I tried to plump her pillows and she swatted me away. “The Moran mansion was gutted, yet the master of the house escaped unharmed,” she murmured. “How lucky.”
Did I imagine the edge to her voice?
“Indeed.” I stubbed out Myrtle’s cigarette before it set our own house on fire. “Or unlucky. I mean, for the good people of New York.” I gathered a stack of dirty plates and started for the door.
“I don’t see it that way,” Myrtle said.
I turned back, a heavy weight of dread in my stomach. This time I was sure I detected a current of amusement running beneath the surface of her words. The cat toying with the mouse.
God, she frightened me sometimes.
“Really?” I said in a light tone. “How so?”
My sister stretched and lit a fresh cigarette, exhaling a plume of smoke at the ceiling. “As much as I wish to see Mr. Moran behind bars, it would be a shame for him to die pointlessly. There’s really no other criminal of his caliber in the city. Perhaps the entire country. I fully intend to mount his head on my trophy wall, but until that day arrives, I’d be quite put out if something happened to him.”
She gave me a bland smile and returned her attention to the papers.
I carried the plates downstairs to the kitchen, my head spinning. At what point had she figured it out? From the very beginning? Or maybe it was when Moran climbed in my window, the fool. She could have overheard us.
I suppressed a grin. Did Myrtle also realize her nemesis had become her protector? As clever as she was, I thought not.
She would have been much angrier.
It was all oddly heartwarming.
I washed the dishes and took a bath, combing the snarls from my hair and donning a clean dress and stockings without holes. I even put shoes on and dabbed a bit of powder on my freckles. I was just brewing a fresh pot of coffee when John arrived. I knew his knock as well as his voice.
“Hello, Harry,” he said, eyes widening a fraction. “You look. . . .” He cleared his throat.
“Clean?”
“No! I mean, you looked fine before. I wasn’t implying—”
I laughed and dragged him inside. “How did the examination go?”
“Grueling, but I think I passed.” John wore the scarf I’d given him for Christmas last year and his cheeks were flushed from the cold. Unlike Moran, his brown hair was messy and his hand-me-down coat bore traces of dog hair from the Westons’ bull pup. “Where is everyone?”
“Mrs. Rivers is shopping for supper,” I replied in a loud voice. “We just had some Mormons stop by, but they’re gone now. Won’t you have a slice of plum cake?”
I shot John a dire look and he understood immediately. We crept into the kitchen and I shut the door behind us.
“Myrtle knows,” I whispered. “Not everything but most of it, I think.”
He frowned in mock confusion. “And yet she hasn’t shot you.”
“No.” I smirked. “Because Myrtle doesn’t want Moran dead. She wants him alive so she can match wits with him. I think she actually approves of what we did.”
John let out a low chuckle. “Of course she does.” He leaned back against the cold stove. “They deserve each other, don’t they, Harry?”
I studied his face for a moment. His honest, kind, laughing face. Then I got up on my toes and kissed him on the mouth as brazenly as Moran had done in the music room. John looked startled for a moment but recovered quickly, kissing me back with ardent enthusiasm.
“Yes,” I whispered against his warm lips. “They definitely do.”
Book #6: Balthazar’s Bane
The next book in the Gaslamp Gothic series is now available for preorder!
A bungled murder.
A ridiculous quest.
And a hero with extremely dodgy credentials.
Christmas 1889. Count Balthazar Jozsef Habsburg-Koháry tries to lead a simple life.
Oh, he enjoys a few hobbies.
Collecting ancient Egyptian artifacts. Hunting necromancers with a wire garrote. Impersonating dead Hungarian nobility. Seducing an endless string of women who never suspect the price of the count’s attentions.
But considering what Balthazar used to be like, these pursuits are harmless. And surely he deserves a reward for assassinating the elusive necromancer John Mortlake in the middle of Cairo’s teeming bazaar. What could be better than a holiday cruise up the Nile with his secretary Lucas Devereaux?
There’s just one thing that might ruin his mood.
If, for example, someone stole the talisman that’s kept him alive for two thousand years.
That would really suck.
Unfortunately for Balthazar, he just killed the wrong necromancer – one with a vengeful daughter and huge debts to some very shady djinn. To get his mojo back, he and Lucas must find a legendary sword and liberate a desert kingdom of magical misfits. For centuries, the people of Al Miraj have sought a valiant champion willing to face the wrath of the arch demon Fulad-zereh!
What they get is Balthazar.
But the gods always did like a good joke.
Acknowledgments
I grew up on Twenty-First
Street in Chelsea (Hannah Ferber’s exact block) when everything west of Tenth Avenue was given over to rampant vice in the same spirit as the old Tenderloin, so my first debt is to New York City. Some of the street names are different, and apartments that were once tenements in terrifyingly bad neighborhoods now rent for breathtaking sums of money, but the basic character of the place and its denizens has actually changed very little in the last century.
As Owen Davis wrote for the Police Gazette in the 1890s:
It may be that you — whoever you are or wherever you are — don’t know what it means to go “down the line”. But in New York — in order that we may start right — “The Line” means that part of Broadway where at night the lights burn brightest, and where the mob — swell and otherwise — move back and forth like the ebb and flow of the tide —hunting, hunting, ever on the hunt.
From Twenty-third street to Forty-second, and back again, and you have gone down The Line. Sometimes it costs you nothing for this innocent little amusement; this feast of the eyes; and then again it is liable to cost you a great deal.
It all depends on who you are, and what you are and how easy you are.
And there you are.
Any research errors are my own, but I relied on a number of books and anyone interested in New York’s Gilded Age should check them out for further reading. Luc Sante’s Low Life was indispensable (and highly entertaining). Also Manhattan Moves Uptown, King’s Handbook of New York City 1892, Eighty Days, How the Other Half Lives, Lights and Shadows of New York, and 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement.
Special thanks as always to Jessica Therrien and Holly Kammier at Acorn Publishing, Laura Pilli, Christa Yelich-Koth, Wayne Copperthwaite (who let me borrow his name), and Mom, always.
About the Author
Kat Ross worked as a journalist at the United Nations for ten years before happily falling back into what she likes best: making stuff up. She's the author of the Lingua Magika, Fourth Element and Fourth Talisman fantasy series, the Gaslamp Gothic mysteries, and the dystopian thriller Some Fine Day. She loves myths, monsters and doomsday scenarios. Check out Kat’s Pinterest page for the people, places and things that inspire her books.
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www.katrossbooks.com
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Also by Kat Ross
Gaslamp Gothic
The Daemoniac
The Thirteenth Gate
A Bad Breed
The Necromancer’s Bride
Dead Ringer
Balthazar’s Bane
The Fourth Element Trilogy
The Midnight Sea
Blood of the Prophet
Queen of Chaos
The Fourth Talisman Series
Nocturne
Solis
Monstrum
Nemesis
Inferno
Some Fine Day