by Lisa Maxwell
“Security is this here building,” Abel told her, lifting his eyes as though he could see through the ceiling above him, to the first floor where they lived, to the second floor the Brown family rented, clear up to the attic, which held a row of cots they leased out to down-on-their-luck single men in the dead of winter. “Security is what our parents gave us when they left us this.”
He wasn’t wrong. Their house had been bought and paid for with their father’s hard work. It meant that no one could turn them away or raise their rent because of the color of their skin. More, it was a testament every day that their mother’s choice in their father had been a good one, no matter what her mother’s family had believed.
The woman moaned again, her breath rattling like Death himself was pulling the air from her chest. The sound had such a forlorn helplessness to it that Cela couldn’t help but crouch over her.
“Cela, are you even hearing me?” Abel asked.
Somehow, the woman’s skin was even more colorless. Her eyes were dull, lifeless. Cela reached out tentatively and touched the woman’s cool hand, taking it in hers. The fingertips beneath the nails were already blue. “She’s dying, Abe. This is her time, and whatever mistakes I might have made in bringing her here, I’m not leaving a dying woman alone, no matter what she is or what she isn’t.” Cela looked up at her brother. “Are you?”
His expression was creased in frustration, but a moment later his eyes closed and his shoulders sank. “No, Rabbit,” he said softly, using her childhood nickname. “I suppose not.” He opened his eyes again. “How long do you think she has?”
Cela frowned, staring at the fragile woman. She wasn’t exactly sure. When their mother had passed on from consumption five years before, Cela had been barely twelve years old. Her father had kept her from the sickroom until the very last moments, trying to protect her. He’d always been trying to protect all of them.
“Can’t you hear the death rattle? She’s got hours . . . maybe minutes. I don’t know. Not long, though.” Because the rattle in the old woman’s throat was the one thing she did remember of watching her mother pass on. That sickly, paper-thin rattle that sounded nothing like her sunshine-and-laughter mother. “She’ll be gone before this night is through.”
Together they waited silently for the moment when the woman’s chest would cease to rise or fall.
“What are we going to do when she finally dies?” Abel asked after they’d watched for a long while. “We can’t exactly call someone.”
“When she passes, we’ll wait for the dead of night, and then we’ll take her to St. John’s over on Christopher Street,” Cela said, not really understanding where the impulse came from. But the moment the words were out, she felt sure they were right. “They can care for her there.”
Abel was shaking his head, but he didn’t argue. She could tell he was trying to think of a better option when a loud pounding sounded from the floor above.
Abel’s dark eyes met hers in the flickering lamplight. It was well past ten, too late for a social call. “Someone’s here,” he said, as though Cela couldn’t have figured that out on her own. But his voice held the same worry she felt.
“Maybe just a boarder needing a bed for the night,” she told him.
“Weather’s too nice for that,” he said almost to himself as he stared up at the ceiling. The pounding came again, harder and more urgent than before.
“Just let it be,” she told him. “They’ll go away eventually.”
But Abel shook his head. His eyes were tight. “You wait here, and I’ll see what they want.”
“Abe—”
He never did listen, she thought as he disappeared into the darkness of the staircase that led up to their apartment above. At least he’d left her the lamp.
Cela waited as Abe’s footsteps crossed the floor above her. The pounding stopped, and she could just barely hear the low voices of men.
Then the voices grew into shouts.
The sudden sound of a scuffle had Cela on her feet. But before she could take even a step, the crack of a gun split the silence of the night and the thud of a body hitting the floor pressed the air from her lungs.
No.
There were more footsteps above now. Heavy footsteps made by heavy boots. There were men in their house. In her house.
Abel.
She started to go toward the steps, desperate to get to her brother, but something within her clicked, some primal urge that she could not understand and she could not fight. It was as though her feet had grown roots.
She had to get to her brother. But she could not move.
The papers had been filled with news of the patrols that were combing the city, ransacking private homes and burning them to the ground. The fires had been contained in the immigrant quarters close to the Bowery. The blocks west of Greenwich Village, where her father had bought the building they lived in, had been safe. But Cela knew enough about how quickly things could change that she understood last week’s safety didn’t mean anything today.
There were men in her house.
She could hear their voices, could feel their footfalls vibrating through her as they spread out like they were searching the rooms above. Robbing us? Looking for something?
Abe.
Cela didn’t particularly care. She only needed to make sure Abel was okay. She needed to be upstairs, but her will no longer seemed to be her own.
Without knowing why she did it or what drove her, she turned from the steps that led up into the house her parents had bought ten years before with their hard-earned money and went to the white lady, now clearly lifeless. With the pads of her fingers, Cela closed the newly dead woman’s eyes, saying a short prayer for both of their souls, and then she was climbing the short ramp to the coal chute.
Cela pushed open the doors and climbed out into the cool freshness of the night. Her feet were moving before she could make herself stop, before she could think Abe or No or any of the things that she should have been thinking. She couldn’t have stopped herself from running if she tried, so she was already around the corner and out of sight when the flames started to lick from the windows of the only home she had ever known.
THE BOWERY AFIRE
1902—New York
By the time Jianyu Lee made it from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Bowery, his mind had turned to murder. Ironic that he was set on killing to avenge the man who had once saved him from a life of violence. Jianyu supposed that Dolph Saunders would have been amused by the turn of events. But Dolph was dead. The leader of the Devil’s Own and the one sāi yàn who had never looked at Jianyu with the suspicion that shimmered in the eyes of so many others had been shot in the back by one of his own—by someone he had trusted. Someone they all had trusted.
Nibsy Lorcan.
For Jianyu, it did not matter whether Esta and Harte made it through the Brink, as they planned. If their wild scheme to get through its devastating power worked, he doubted they would ever return. Why should they, if they found freedom on the other side? If he were able to escape from this trap of a city, he would certainly never look back. He would find the first ship heading to the East, to the home he never should have left.
He would see the land that had borne him once again.
He would breathe the clean air of the village where his family lived in Sānnìng and forget his ambitions.
Once he had been so young. So innocent in his headstrong confidence. After his parents had died, his older brother, Siu-Kao, had raised him. Siu-Kao was nearly a decade older and had a wife who, though beautiful, was cunning as a fox. She had married his brother as much for the magic that ran in their family as for the benefit of the family’s farmlands. But when their first child seemed not to have any affinity at all, she began to make clear that Jianyu was no longer welcome in her house. By the time he started to sprout hair beneath his arms, he was so angry at his place in his older brother’s home, so desperate to strike out on his own, that he had decided to leave.
Then, he could not have gone back to face his brother. He refused.
Then, he had believed that leaving his homeland and starting anew was his only recourse.
He had not realized that there were places in the world where magic was caged. Now, he knew too well. There was a safety in fealty that he had failed to understand and freedom in the constraints of family duty that he had not appreciated as a boy.
Once, he had thought that, given the chance, he would repent and live the life that had been demanded of him, a life he had once run from. He would not make the same mistakes again.
Why else would he have given his loyalty to Dolph Saunders if not for the promise that one day the Brink would be brought down? Why else would he have kept the queue so many others had already discarded, if not for the hope that one day he would find a way to return to his homeland? Certainly, it would have been easier to cut the long braid that drew curious glances and wary stares—many of his countrymen already had. But cutting his hair would mean a final admission that he would never return.
From what Esta had told him, though, going back to Sānnìng would be pointless if the danger she foresaw ever came to pass. If Nibsy Lorcan managed to obtain the Ars Arcana, the Book that contained the very source of magic, or if he retrieved the Order’s five artifacts—ancient stones that the Order had used to create the Brink and maintain their power—the boy would be unstoppable. No land, no people—Mageus or Sundren—would be safe from the power Nibsy would wield. He would subjugate the Sundren, and he would use his control over Mageus to do so.
Jianyu saw it as his duty now to make sure that future could never be realized. If he could not return to his homeland, he would protect it from Nibsy Lorcan and his like.
Darrigan had left him with very specific instructions: Jianyu must protect the first of the Order’s artifacts—and the woman who carried it. But he did not have much time. Soon the boy Esta had warned them about would arrive—a boy with the power to find lost objects and with knowledge of the future to come. A boy who was loyal to Nibsy. That boy could not be allowed to reach Nibsy, especially not so long as somewhere in the city, one of the Order’s stones lay waiting to be found.
Jianyu would rather risk dying on foreign shores, his bones far from his ancestors, than allow Nibsy Lorcan to win. He would find the artifact and stop this “Logan.” And then Jianyu would kill Nibsy and avenge his murdered friend. Or he would die trying.
As Jianyu made his way through the Bowery, toward his destination in the Village, the scent of ash and soot was heavy in the air. For the last week—ever since Dolph Saunders’ team had robbed the Order of its most powerful artifacts and Khafre Hall had burned to the ground—much of the Lower East Side had been shrouded with smoke. In retaliation for the theft, one fire after another had erupted through the most impoverished neighborhoods of the city. The Order, after all, had a point to make.
Where Hester Street met the wide boulevard that was the Bowery, Jianyu passed the burned-out remains of a tenement. The sidewalk was heaped with the detritus of destroyed lives. The building had once housed Mageus, people who had lived under Dolph’s care. Jianyu wondered where they had gone and who they would depend upon now that Dolph was dead.
As Jianyu walked, he noticed a clutch of dark shadows lurking just beyond the circle of lamplight across from the remains of the building. Paul Kelly’s men. Sundren, all of them, the Five Pointers had nothing to fear from the Order.
Once, the Five Pointers wouldn’t have dared cross Elizabeth Street or come within four blocks of the Bella Strega, Dolph’s saloon. But now they walked the streets Dolph had once protected, their presence a declaration of their intent to occupy. To conquer.
It wasn’t unexpected. As news of Dolph’s death spread, the other gangs would begin to take the territory the Devil’s Own once held. It was no more surprising to see the Five Pointers in the neighborhood than it would be to see Eastman’s gang or any of the rest. If Jianyu had to guess, he suspected that even Tom Lee, the leader of the most powerful tong in Chinatown, would try to take what territory he could.
The Five Pointers were different, though. More dangerous. More ruthless.
They were a newer faction in the Bowery, and because of that they fought like they had something to prove. But unlike the other gangs, Kelly’s boys had managed to procure the protection of Tammany Hall. The year before, the Five Pointers had broken heads and flooded polling places to elect a Tammany puppet to the city council, and ever since, the police overlooked whatever crimes the Five Pointers committed.
It had been bad enough that Kelly had been working in league with the corrupt bosses at Tammany, but during the days preceding Dolph’s death, they had grown more brazen than ever. It had been an unmistakable sign that something was afoot. Everyone in the Strega had known that unrest was stirring in the Bowery, but it was a sign read too poorly and too late.
Feeling exposed, Jianyu drew on his affinity and opened the threads of light cast by the streetlamps. He bent them around himself like a cloak so that the Five Pointers wouldn’t see him pass. Invisible to their predatory vigilance, he allowed himself to relax into the comfort of his magic, the certainty of it when everything else was so uncertain. Then he picked up his pace.
A few blocks later, the familiar golden-eyed witch on the Bella Strega’s sign came into view. To the average person looking for warmth from the chill of the night or a glass of something to numb the pain of a life lived at the margins, the crowd of the Bella Strega might not have seemed any different from the other saloons and beer halls scattered throughout the city. Legal or illegal, those darkened rooms were a way for the city’s poor to escape the disappointment and trials of their lives. But the Strega was different.
Or it had been.
Mageus of all types felt safe enough to gather within its walls without fear and without need to hide what they were, because Dolph Saunders had refused to appease the narrow-mindedness bred from fear and ignorance or to tolerate the usual divisions between the denizens of the Bowery. Going to the Strega meant the promise of welcome—of safety—in a dangerous city, even for one such as Jianyu. On any single night, the barroom would be filled with a mixture of languages and people, their common bond the old magic that flowed in their veins.
That was before a single bullet had put Dolph into a cold grave, Jianyu reminded himself as he passed under the witch’s watchful gaze. Now that Nibsy Lorcan had control of the Devil’s Own, there would be no guarantee of safety within those walls. Especially not for Jianyu.
According to Esta, Nibsy had the uncanny ability to see connections between events and to predict outcomes. Since Jianyu was determined to end Nibsy’s reign, and his life, he couldn’t risk returning to the Strega.
Still, Nibsy had not managed to predict how Dolph had changed the plans at Khafre Hall, nor how Jianyu had intended to help Harte Darrigan fake his own death on the bridge just hours before. Perhaps the boy wasn’t as powerful as Esta believed, or perhaps his affinity simply had limitations, as all affinities did. Finishing Nibsy might be difficult, but it would not be impossible. Especially since Viola could kill a man without touching him.
That would have to wait for another day, though. Jianyu still had to find Viola and tell her everything. She likely still believed that he had not been on the bridge and that Harte Darrigan had betrayed them all.
The Strega behind him, Jianyu continued on. He could have taken a streetcar or one of the elevated trains
, but he preferred to walk so that he could think and plan. Gaining Cela’s trust would be a delicate procedure, since Cela Johnson wouldn’t be expecting him and few in the city trusted his countrymen. Protecting her and the stone might be even more difficult, since she was Sundren and had no idea what danger the ring posed. But he had promised Darrigan, and he understood all that was at stake. He would not fail.
By the time he reached the South Village, Jianyu detected smoke in the air. As he drew closer to Minetta Lane, where Miss Johnson lived, the scent grew stronger, filling his nostrils with its warning and his stomach with dread.
Jianyu knew somehow, before he was even in sight of the building, that it would be Cela Johnson’s home that he found ablaze. Flames licked from windows, and the entire structure glowed from the fire within it. Even from across the street, the heat prickled his skin, making the wool coat he was wearing feel overwarm for the early spring night.
Nearby, the building’s tenants watched as their home was devoured by the flames. Huddled together, they tried to protect the meager piles of belongings they’d been able to salvage, while a fire brigade’s wagon stood by. The horses pawed at the ground, displaying their unease about the flickering light of the fire and the growing crowd. But the firemen did nothing.
It wasn’t surprising.
Jianyu knew the fire brigade’s current inaction was intentional. The brigades were mostly Irish, but being at least a generation removed from the boats and famine that had brought them to this land, they considered themselves natives. They looked with distaste on the newer waves of immigrants, from places to the east and the south, and on anyone whose skin wasn’t as white as theirs, no matter how long their families had been in this land. When those homes burned, the brigades often moved slower and took fewer risks. Sometimes, if it suited their purposes, they ignored the flames altogether.