by Lisa Maxwell
When he stepped from the boat onto the solidness of the New Jersey soil, he tested himself to make sure that the power within him was still quiet, pushed down deep. It was a new state, but for Harte, who had been trapped on the island of Manhattan his entire life, it might as well have been a new continent.
Around him, people bustled onward, gathering their bags and their children as they moved toward the terminal entrance. He joined them, keeping his cap low, his eyes down, allowing himself to be caught up in the current. He sensed the excitement of some heading off toward new places and the weariness of others making the same trip they’d made countless times before. All of them were oblivious to the miracle it was that they could choose to purchase a ticket, step onto a train, and arrive somewhere else. For Harte, that miracle was one he would never take for granted, however much time he had left.
As he was carried along by the crowd, he almost felt as though the world could be his. Perhaps their mission might actually work and a different future could be possible. But then he heard a whispering begin to grow louder in the recesses of his mind. The dark choir merged into a single voice, one that was speaking in a language he should not have recognized but understood nonetheless. A single word that held untold meaning.
Soon.
THE SIREN
1902—New York
The sun was already climbing into the sky as the streetcar rumbled north through the city. Jianyu kept himself tucked back into a corner, careful not to touch anyone and reveal his presence, until they reached the stop at Broadway, close to Wallack’s Theatre, where Harte Darrigan had once performed. Cela’s neighbors believed she’d fled from the house because she was guilty of the fire, but Jianyu suspected otherwise. He was not sure where she would go, but he hoped she would eventually return here, to the theater where she worked.
Keeping the light around him was easier now, with the morning sun providing ample threads for him to grasp and open around him. When he reached Wallack’s, Jianyu looked up to find familiar eyes watching him from above.
It was only a painting, a large multistoried advertisement for the variety acts to be found inside, but Harte Darrigan’s gaze seemed to be steady on Jianyu—though whether it felt like a warning or encouragement, he could not have said.
Still concealed by his affinity, Jianyu surveyed the theater from across the street. He could wait and watch for Cela to arrive, but he decided that inside there might be some hint of where else she would go. Keeping his affinity close, he crossed the street to the stage door. After picking the lock, he slipped into the darkened theater and began searching for some sign of Cela in the area backstage.
Inside, the theater waited, dark and silent. Jianyu had never set foot in Wallack’s before, or any of the Broadway houses that advertised their shows on bright electric marquees. He had taken in a show at the Bowery Theatre once, when he had first arrived in the city, but it had been a noisy, raucous affair in a house tattered and broken by the usual crowd. Wallack’s was different. It looked like a palace, and Jianyu had a feeling that it would still feel like one, even when the house was full.
He followed the narrow halls back, deeper into the theater, passing dressing room after dressing room. But Cela was not a performer. She would not be given her name on a door. No . . . she would be somewhere else, somewhere quieter. He continued on in the darkness until he came to steps that led down into the belly of the building.
The cellar smelled of dust and mold, of freshly cut wood and the sharpness of paint. It was darker there, but darkness was rarely without some strands of light within it. He took out the bronze mirror disks that helped him focus his affinity and used them to open the meager strands of light, keeping himself concealed as he moved through the cellar.
Jianyu saw the light that flickered behind him before he heard the voice that accompanied it. “Can I help you?”
He turned to find a woman with hair as bright as luck itself staring in his direction.
She cannot possibly see me. . . .
“I know you’re there,” she said, her eyes steady. Her face was pale as a ghost in the darkness. “I can feel you. You might as well show yourself before I call for someone.”
Jianyu stayed still and quiet, barely allowing himself a breath as he considered his options.
“Just so you know, this staircase is the only way out.” Her expression never shifted. “I know what you are,” she told him, her eyes still not quite finding him. “I can feel you.”
Without any warning, he felt the tendrils of warmth—of magic—brushing against him. She was Mageus, like him. He could try to escape as he was, but if she had magic, who knew what she was capable of? Better to face her now than to find himself trapped. Perhaps they might even be allies.
He released his hold on the light and watched as her eyes found him in the darkness of the basement.
“There. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” she asked with a smile.
“I meant no harm,” he told her, keeping his chin tipped down so that the brim of his hat would keep his features shadowed.
“You’re here awful early,” she said. Her magic was still brushing at him, like warm fingers running down the length of his neck, caressing his cheek and making his blood burn with something that felt suspiciously like desire.
“I am looking for someone,” he said, trying to block the temptation of those warm tendrils.
“Well, it looks like you found someone,” she said with a too-welcoming smile as she came the rest of the way down the stairs toward him.
He swallowed. Hard. “I am looking for a Miss Johnson . . . a Miss Cela Johnson,” he said, fighting the urge to go to the woman. From the looks of it, she was wearing nothing more than a silken robe, and each movement she made threatened to expose more of the creamy flesh beneath.
“Who is it that’s looking?” she asked, taking another step toward him.
The warm tendrils of magic were growing stronger now, and in the back of his mind Jianyu registered their danger. “She would not know me,” he said, fighting the pull of the woman. “But we have a mutual friend.”
The woman took another step toward him, her eyes glittering and her dark lips quirking with something that looked like amusement. He imagined it was the same sort of expression a mouse saw just before a cat pounced. “Does this mutual friend have a name?” she asked, taking yet another step. She was on the same level as he was now.
“I would prefer to keep that between Miss Johnson and myself,” he said as she continued to walk toward him.
“Would you?” The woman tsked at him. “Well, that’s a crying shame, seeing as there isn’t any Cela Johnson here.”
“I see. . . .” It was a lie. He could see it clear as day on the woman’s pale face. In another two steps, she would be close enough to touch him, and he knew somehow that he could not let that happen. “Then I suppose I should take my leave—”
She lunged for him, but he pulled the mirrors from his pockets and, in a fluid motion, raised them as he spun away from her. The weak light wrapped around him and he ran, leaving the red-haired woman trying to catch herself as she tumbled to the floor.
If Cela Johnson was not there, the red-haired woman knew something about where she had gone, he thought as he took the steps two by two and sprinted for the theater’s exit. He would retreat for the moment, but he would not leave until he searched the theater again. And he would not give up until he found her.
A BRUSH OF MAGIC
1902—New Jersey
Inside the train terminal, the noise of chattering voices was almost deafening under the canopy of glass and steel, but Esta barely noticed the racket. She was too busy bracing herself to do what needed to be done.
Though she had never been out of the city before, the New Jersey train station felt almost familiar. In her own time, she had often gone to Grand Central with Professor Lachlan as part of her training. Together they had studied the passengers as he instructed Esta about human nature. The tourists, ov
erwhelmed by the speed and size of the city, would clutch their bags to them as though the devil himself would try to take their ratty luggage, but the locals had become accustomed to the rush and the noise, and the dangers no longer registered. He’d taught her how to case the commuters, too busy checking their phones to notice a thief watching their every move.
The schedule was displayed on a huge chalkboard over the far wall of the terminal’s main hall. There was a train to Chicago departing at half past the hour from platform seven, but she still had to find two tickets. They had decided that buying tickets this close to the city, where they might be recognized, was too risky. The Order was most likely still looking for them—especially for her—and she didn’t doubt they would have alerted all the transportation centers. Instead of buying two tickets, she’d have to steal them.
Before, Esta wouldn’t have hesitated to pull time slow and slip unseen through the spaces between the seconds as she searched for a mark. But after what had happened on the bridge—after the blackness had bloomed in her vision and the way time felt as though it were dissolving around her—she felt unsure of herself . . . and she felt unsure of her affinity.
It was not a comfortable feeling.
But that darkness . . . Even the memory of it left her shaken. She didn’t want to admit to herself that she was afraid—afraid of what that darkness meant and afraid that if she reached for her affinity now, she might find it missing or mangled in some way by the Brink’s power.
So she did what anyone would do in that situation—she didn’t admit it to herself or to anyone else. Instead, she relied on her bone-deep knowledge that she was a good enough thief to lift a couple of tickets from unsuspecting marks without any magic at all. Even if her legs felt unsteady beneath her.
She was still deciding on the best place to watch for a mark when she felt a shock of energy brush against her, warm and welcoming—the sign of the old magic. Frowning to herself, she searched the crowd for Harte. They had agreed to meet on the platform, but it would be just like him not to follow the plan. She couldn’t afford for him to show up and get her caught, but as she scoured the crowd, she didn’t find any sign of him. And, though she waited, she didn’t feel the warmth of the magic again.
Maybe she’d been wrong. . . .
“There isn’t time for breakfast. The train leaves in less than ten minutes, and we still have to find platform seven.” The low male voice pulled Esta’s attention back to the room around her. Platform seven . . . the train to Chicago.
Esta let go of her questions and searched for the source of the voice. Nearby, three men dressed in sharply tailored suits were examining their tickets. One was squinting up at the board, confirming the platform they needed, while another tucked his ticket into the outer pocket of his polished leather satchel. She listened a moment longer, and when she heard one of them say the number of their platform again, she began to walk.
It wouldn’t do to follow them—that would be far too obvious. But there seemed to be only one entrance from the main terminal into the train shed. She could cut them off there. At least one ticket would be easy to lift. A second shouldn’t be too much harder.
Feeling more like herself with every step, Esta pulled a cloak of confidence around her that was nearly as effective as Jianyu’s invisibility. She kept the three men in her peripheral vision as she headed toward the entrance to the platforms. When she was about ten feet ahead of the men, she paused and pretended to read a poster advertising a variety show that had just arrived in town. She kept her expression calm and mildly interested in the sign in front of her, even as she kept her focus on the men. When they passed her, she waited one moment longer before turning to follow them. It would be easier to lift the tickets in the tunnel leading to the trains, where the flow of passengers was naturally constricted and where they wouldn’t notice—or think anything of—her proximity to them. Or of being jostled by a fellow traveler.
They were just ahead of her, and she could still see the ticket peeking from the satchel. Easy.
As they approached the entrance to the platforms, she picked up her pace. A few steps more and she’d be able to sweep past them. Maybe she could trip and pretend to fall. One of them would probably be polite enough to stop and help her, giving her the opportunity to lift a second ticket. Then she’d be on to the platform and then the train—with Harte—before they even discovered their fare was missing.
Esta was nearly at their heels now—but out of nowhere, she felt another brush of warm energy that made her stumble. She caught herself before she fell and then had to scurry to keep up with the three men, scanning the narrowing passageway as she walked. No sign of Harte. And the men were almost to the place where the passage opened onto the platforms. She moved until she was barely an arm’s reach away. Closer still . . . She was almost next to them, nearly close enough to slip the first of the tickets out of the satchel, when someone called her name.
“Esta?”
It wasn’t the unexpectedness of hearing her name that made her pause, but the familiarity of the voice. Her first thought was Harte, but the moment she turned, she realized her error. It was a stupid move, a rookie mistake that she never would have made if she had been more on her game that morning.
Before she could completely register who had spoken, Jack Grew had her by the arm.
THE NEW BRIGHTON
1902—New York
Viola kept quiet as she walked with her mother the seven blocks to the small athletic club where her brother spent most of his days. The midmorning air was heavy with the threat of rain, and the smell of ash and soot mixed with the usual smells of the neighborhood—the overripe fruit and trash that lined the gutter and the baking of bread and the thick scent of garlic and spices that wafted from doorways. When they passed a still-smoldering building, Viola knew implicitly who was at fault for the tragedy.
She was.
Because she had let the magician outsmart her, she had failed Dolph. She had failed her kind, and she had failed herself. The Order should have been destroyed, but instead they had grown more oppressive than ever, taking revenge on the entire city for the deeds of a few.
She would kill them all if she could. But she needed to stay alive long enough to do it, and Paolo was her means to that end. First she had to survive whatever penance Paul had in store for her, and that would be trial enough, considering how she had betrayed the family by leaving them for the Devil’s Own. Because for all intents and purposes, Paul was the family.
After their father died and the responsibility for the family had fallen on his shoulders, Paolo had supported them all as a bare-knuckle boxer. He’d anglicized his name to Paul Kelly because he thought it would pay better, and it had. But her dear brother hadn’t stayed a boxer. Leading the Five Pointers had turned out to be far more lucrative than getting his teeth knocked in every night. Because he was smart enough to grease the right palms at Tammany Hall, the police looked the other way.
Paul’s deals with Tammany ensured the success of his athletic club, which was only a front for less legal activities. Come nightfall, the club hosted bare-knuckle matches, where beer flowed and bets were made—all with Paul taking his cut from the top, of course. Because Paul hid the truth of his work from their mother, she never knew what activities truly put bread on their table.
Unlike The Devil’s Own, the boxing club Dolph had run, Paul’s place didn’t pulse with the warmth of magic. Paul, like their mother, was Sundren, without an affinity, and his gang was populated mostly by neighborhood boys whose childhood roughness had grown into a willing brutality. Viola was the black sheep of the family, an unexpected anomaly when her affinity appeared after generations of nothing. Her parents had seen it as a waste, bestowed as it was on a girl, but her brother had seen Viola’s power as an opportunity—one that he felt he had every right to exploit.
Viola, of course, saw things differently, not that it had mattered to Paul or her mother at the time.
It was still to
o early in the day for Paul’s usual crowd, so when her mother knocked at the unremarkable wooden door of the club, it was a boy about Viola’s own age who answered and let them pass with barely a word. The main room of the club was mostly empty. A well-muscled man in the far corner pummeled a heavy bag that swung from the ceiling. He was bare-chested, and his left shoulder blade carried the angry red mark of the Five Pointers, an angular brand that was also a map of the neighborhood that gave her brother’s gang its name. Another duo of men was sparring in the center of the floor, the heat and sweat from their bodies making the room feel too warm, too close. An older man smoked a thin cigar as he watched nearby.
As Viola and her mother entered, the man with the cigar glanced up, his face flashing with surprise to see her mother and then going flinty when he noticed Viola at her side. His hand went for the gun Viola knew would be hidden beneath his vest. The two men sparring and the other, larger man in the back of the room all paused to see what the interruption was.
“Get my son,” her mother said, not paying any mind to the unease filtering through the room.
At first the older man didn’t make any move to do as Viola’s mother ordered. “What’s she doing here?” he asked, nodding toward Viola.
Like Viola herself, Pasqualina Vaccarelli was not more than five feet tall. She might have been a broad, sturdy-looking woman, but her size should have put her at an immediate disadvantage. Viola’s mother didn’t so much as flinch, though. She gave the man the same look she’d given Viola and every one of her siblings—including Paolo—any time they were truly in trouble, the look that was usually accompanied by the sting of her wooden spoon. “Why do you think that is any of your business?”
The man’s nostrils flared, but he waved off the two fighters, dismissing them, and then took himself off into the back room to find Paul. Viola’s mother took the man’s seat. Viola didn’t join her. She would meet Paul on her feet.