by Lisa Maxwell
“Cela?” he called softly into the emptiness. “Cela Johnson? Are you there?”
He listened, knowing that silence would be the only answer, before he tried once more. “My name is Jianyu Lee, and I’ve come to help you.” He paused again, weighing the risks of divulging too much if someone else were listening, and then he decided to take the chance. “Harte Darrigan sent me to protect you.”
He stood for a long time, his ears open and his focus sharp for any sign of life, any indication that Cela was still there. In the corner, he heard a rustling. . . .
But when he lifted his disk, the glowing light revealed the tail of some rodent just before it scurried away.
Cela Johnson had been there not long before. Jianyu was sure of it. But she wasn’t there any longer. Only one question loomed larger than all the others—had she left this place of her own free will, or had someone else gotten to her first?
A HEARTFUL OF TROUBLE
1902—New York
Cela hated the darkness. She’d hated it ever since she’d been a little girl and Abel had locked her down in Old Man Robertson’s coal cellar to punish her for eating the last of his peppermints. By the time he finally let her out, she’d cried so hard that snot was dripping out of her nose, her face was blotchy, and her voice was ragged. Trying to settle her down, he’d given her an awkward hug, the only kind that on-the-verge-of-manhood boys knew how to give, and he promised her he’d never do it again.
He’d kept that promise for as long as he could.
But Abel is gone.
Again, grief twisted around her heart so tightly that she thought it might stop altogether. She had to pause for a second just to force herself to breathe. But she couldn’t stay there. It was up to Cela herself to make do, darkness or not.
She heard the man’s voice calling her name again, and then she heard him say that Harte Darrigan had sent him. To protect her, of all things. Well, considering that Harte Darrigan had sent her nothing but a heartful of trouble, whoever was out there could just keep his help. She certainly didn’t want anyone else’s protection, either. She already had two lives on her conscience who had tried to protect her, and she’d carry those two souls with her for the rest of her days.
Even after she thought he was gone, she waited, just to be sure, before she unlatched the panel of the wall she’d been hiding behind and came out. She’d built herself the little hidey-hole to keep her sewing things safe when she needed to. Didn’t matter that everyone at Wallack’s got the costumes they needed. One person or another always had sticky fingers, wanting the best bits for themselves.
She’d never intended to hide herself there, but it worked just as well.
Her eyes were already used to the darkness, so she didn’t have much trouble navigating the small area of her workroom. She was pleased when she discovered that her visitor had left the door open for her.
Cela didn’t bother to gather anything with her but a scrap of fabric to use as a wrap. She closed the door to her workshop and locked that part of her life up behind her—she wasn’t coming back. Not ever. Then on quick, sure feet, she followed the soft padding of the man’s footsteps, up the steps, through the back halls to the stage door, and out into the night.
EMPTY STREETS
1902—New York
After his failure to find Cela at the theater, Jianyu had reached an impasse. He had no idea where to look for her next, but if the woman at the theater had her—or if someone else did—he would require help. He had to find Viola, which meant that he had to return to the Bowery.
The Bowery, he knew, was in chaos. And with Nibsy Lorcan in control of the Devil’s Own, the streets around the Strega would no longer be safe for him, as they once had been.
There was one place in the city where Jianyu’s countrymen were welcomed without hesitation—the blocks close to Mott Street known as the Chinese quarter. He might go there, but Jianyu had worn out his welcome more than two years before, when he’d broken his oath of loyalty to Tom Lee and the On Leong Tong by defecting to the Devil’s Own.
If Jianyu was caught by the On Leongs now, he would be made to pay for his transgressions. The question was what the price would be. Tom Lee might use simple violence, or he might do more. Jianyu was Lee’s nephew only on paper, after all. While Dolph was alive, the secrets he had collected had assured Jianyu’s safety from Tom Lee, but the power of those secrets had died with Dolph. If Lee chose, he could alert the authorities to Jianyu’s precarious position in the city—and to the falseness of his documents. If Jianyu were deported, it would be tantamount to a death sentence, because being removed from the city would mean passing through the Brink.
It did not seem worth the risk to attempt navigating those dangers in the dead of night, when it would be harder to pull on his affinity for concealment. Instead, he ventured east to Twenty-Fourth Street, just a few blocks from where the newest skyscraper was nearly complete. There, a friend from Jianyu’s first days in the city had a small laundry he ran with his wife, a sturdy Irish girl with kind eyes and ruddy cheeks. Since it had been years, Ho Lai Ying was surprised to see him, but understood the reach of the tongs. Though he did not wake his wife or family, Lai Ying gave Jianyu a bowl of the family’s leftover meal and a warm place to rest for the night. But Jianyu barely slept, and he was gone before daybreak, so as not to put his old friend in any danger.
As the morning began to warm, Jianyu’s path finally brought him to the Bowery. He needed to speak with Viola, but he also needed to find Cela without rousing the interest of anyone else who might be hunting for her or the stone. He was so deep in thought considering his options that he failed to notice the pair of men who had started following him not long after he had crossed Houston. By the time he felt their presence, it was too late to open the light around himself—not without revealing what he was.
Picking up his pace, Jianyu headed down one of the busier thoroughfares. Perhaps they would be less likely to do anything to him if there were enough witnesses. It was a feeble, naive hope. The streets were nearly empty at that early hour, and even if they had been filled, witnesses were more likely to become part of an attack than to prevent one.
In an instant, the men were flanking him, and Jianyu knew that he had little choice. He turned, his hands up, ready for a fight, but the two men only looked at each other and laughed. They were dressed in the familiar uniform of Bowery toughs—brightly colored shirts and waistcoats in stripes or plaids, trim pants, and the ubiquitous bowler hats that they wore cocked over one eye. Their pale, pasty skin looked wan and sickly contrasted against their garish clothes.
“Whaddaya think you’re gonna do?” the one said, laughing to the other. “I’ve seen how they fight . . . like chickens flapping their wings after you chop off their heads.” He stepped forward, his narrow-set eyes so heavily hooded, they made him appear half-asleep. “Come on. Gimme the best you got. . . . Go ahead. Your first flap is free.”
Jianyu kept his attention split evenly between the two of them as they circled him.
“Come on, you dirty bastard,” the other taunted, laughing darkly all the while.
They were expecting something else from him, perhaps. Or maybe their mouths were smarter than they were, but Jianyu took their offer and launched himself at them. The larger of the two was too slow to ward off Jianyu’s first blow. He went down easily, splayed in the dirt of the street and groaning with the damage Jianyu’s fist had done to his face.
The other goggled for a moment, looking at his friend with a kind of horrified shock that gratified Jianyu to the very marrow of his bones. But Jianyu had spent too much time at The Devil’s Own training with the rest of Dolph’s crew to miss taking further advantage of the pair’s surprise. He whipped around and drove his fist into the other boy’s stomach, knocking the air from him, before the boy realized what was happening.
The first was climbing to his feet, his nose dripping with blood and his eyes filled with rage, but a strange calm had settled over J
ianyu. With a slow, mocking smile, he raised his hand and motioned for the boy to come closer. He and the boy circled each other, dodging and ducking each other’s fists as the second boy came to his feet. Without warning, the second boy ran at Jianyu, tackling him to the ground.
Jianyu’s head cracked against the edge of the sidewalk, and for a moment his vision went white. That moment was enough for the two to take advantage. One was on him in an instant, and before Jianyu could protect himself, he felt a fist plow into his side. He lashed out, landing a glancing blow or two, but the other had already made it to his feet again and had joined in.
A vicious kick landed in Jianyu’s back, sending a near-blinding pain through his body.
“That’ll teach you,” one of the boys growled as his fists plowed into Jianyu’s stomach again. “Damn dirty—”
Jianyu did not need to hear the rest to know what the boy said. That word—or words like it—had followed him ever since he had stepped off the boat in Mexico. He had heard them as he had ridden the train in silence for days, first crossing the border and then a country that he knew could never be his. Those slurs had been his companion in the dead of night as their ferryman smuggled him into Manhattan. And once he had arrived, he had heard the slur—or some version of the same—every day in the city’s streets, tossed about by filthy beggars who were not man enough to look him in the eye when they said it.
He struggled to his knees, but another vicious kick landed in his stomach, and he went over hard again, tasting the coppery blood in his mouth. His ears were ringing. He had to get up, had to get to his feet somehow if he wanted any chance to survive this.
“. . . damned dirty . . .”
They had him by the hair. One of them was holding on to the long queue he wore braided down his back. There was a roaring in his ears, but he could not tell whether it was from their punches or from the fact that he knew what they were about to do even before he heard the snick of the switchblade opening. His head was pounding, and the sound of a thousand winds howled in his ears. He wanted to scream at them, but his mouth was filled with his own blood.
When it went off, Jianyu felt the gunshot as much as he heard it. It was so close that the echo of it rang through his head and rattled his bones, even though the bullet never touched him.
It took him a moment to realize he was still alive—to realize that he had not been struck by the bullet. He lay with his face pressed to the grime of the street, the sourness of his blood thick in his mouth, but he was still breathing. There was pain in his head, yes, but he was still breathing.
Footsteps came closer until he was looking at the scuffed toes of two brown boots.
“You are lucky I came along when I did,” the voice said in the familiar tones of his own language. “They would have killed you once they were done scalping you.”
Scalping . . . He knew without reaching for his hair that it was gone, and without it, returning to his own country would be impossible. Without it, the one feeble dream he had carried secretly in his heart for so long crumbled to ash.
“You should have let them kill me,” he answered, the words a comfort on his tongue even though his lips were bloodied and swollen so much that they sounded garbled even to him.
“Now, why would I do a thing like that?” the voice said. “I’ve been waiting so long to talk to you.”
IT COULD BE WORSE
New Jersey
Harte came to sprawled on the floor of the moving train car, but the officers were gone. So was Jack.
When he pulled himself up, his head spun so much that he was barely conscious of the soft pile of material he was sitting on or the legs that moved beneath it, but once he was upright, his stomach revolted. Lurching to his feet, he ran toward the door at the back of the train car, barely making it out onto the platform in time to empty his stomach over the railing to the tracks below.
He hung there with his mouth tasting sour, and the warm breeze blew across his clammy skin as the earth sped by beneath him. When the door of the train car slid open behind him not long after, he knew without looking that it was Esta. There was something about the way the air changed whenever she was around him. It had always been like that, but now the voice inside of him whispered yes every time she was close. Soon.
Harte shoved the voice away, and with what strength he had left, he locked it down tight. The effort it took made his head swim again.
“Are you okay?” Esta asked, coming to stand next to him at the railing.
He nodded, still feeling sick and too warm.
Because the weather is too warm.
The sky no longer had the gray heaviness of earlier that morning, and the crisp spring air had been transformed into the balmy heat of a summer’s day. “What just happened?” he asked, closing his eyes against the motion of the train.
“You said to get us out. . . .”
Harte turned to her, comprehension already dawning on him, but before he could say anything, the door behind them opened and a uniformed conductor came out.
The man eyed Harte as he clung to the railing, but otherwise he gave no indication that anything was amiss. “Tickets, please.”
They didn’t have any tickets, but if he could just pull his head together and stay upright long enough to let go of the railing, he could fix this. One touch was all it would take. . . .
But Esta was speaking before he could manage. “I’m so sorry,” she said, pulling a dark wallet from within the traveling cloak she wore. “We were in such a rush, and we didn’t have time to purchase the tickets before we boarded. Can we pay now?”
“Sure, sure,” the man said, pulling out a small booklet and punching two of the tickets with a small silver clamp. “End of the line . . . That’ll be three fifty for each.”
Harte should have been curious about where the stack of money had come from. He should have been interested to watch this new ritual, the purchasing of a ticket—the validation of his freedom. But it was all he could do to keep his stomach from revolting again and his mind from focusing too much on the reality of what Esta had done.
“Is a Pullman car available?” Esta asked the conductor, taking a couple of bills from the wallet and handing them over. Her voice was light and easy, but Harte could hear the edge in it. “My husband isn’t feeling well. I think it might be best if he rested.”
“No Pullman,” the man said, raising a brow in their direction. “This train’s only going as far as Baltimore. You can get a transfer to a Pullman at the next stop, if you’re traveling farther.”
“Of course. How silly of me,” she said with a strained laugh. “Thank you anyway.” She’d made her voice into something breathy and light, but she couldn’t quite manage to keep a tremor of nervousness out of it.
Harte waited until the man had continued on through the next car before he let himself slide to the floor. His head was still spinning as he leaned back against the railing, and the way the train swayed made his already fragile stomach turn over again. He forced all of that aside too and focused on Esta. “The train on platform seven wasn’t going to Baltimore.”
She wasn’t paying attention to him. Instead, she was trying to reach up her sleeve. Her mouth was a flat line of concentration—or was that pain?
“Esta—”
“Hold on,” she said through gritted teeth, and a moment later she pulled the cuff from her arm with a hissing intake of breath. “There . . .” She held it delicately between her fingers, frowning as she examined it.
The cuff itself was a delicate piece of burnished silver, but the metal was less important than what it held—Ishtar’s Key. It was one of the artifacts that gave the Order its power, but this particular stone was special because it allowed Esta to travel through time.
Through time . . .
Harte’s empty stomach felt as though he’d swallowed a hot stone. “What did you do, Esta? This train was supposed to be going to Chicago.”
“You told me to get us out of there, so I did,” sh
e told him, but her attention was on the stone in her hand—not on him.
“But this isn’t the train we were on, is it?” he asked.
“Of course it is.” She finally looked up from her examination of the cuff. “This is the same train—the exact same car. . . .” She hesitated, frowning a little. “It’s just slightly ahead of when we were before.”
“How slightly?” he asked, his stomach churning from the motion of the train and the idea of what she’d just done.
“I don’t know. A day or two, nothing much mo—” But her words fell away as she glanced at the tickets the conductor had handed her.
“What is it?” he asked, swallowing down another round of nausea that had very little to do with the motion of the train.
She cursed as her face all but drained of color.
He had a very bad feeling that he was not going to like the answer to the question he had to ask: “How far ahead are we?”
“I was just trying to get us away from Jack and the police,” she told him, never taking her eyes from the tickets.
“How far, Esta?”
She was practically chewing a hole into her lip. “I was looking for a day or two ahead. I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t—”
“Esta.” He cut her off and took a deep breath—both to calm himself and so he wouldn’t be sick again. It could be worse. They could be in police custody right now. They could be at the mercy of Jack and the Order. “How bad is it?”
Silently, she handed him the tickets.
His eyes were still having trouble focusing from the strangely violent push-pulling sensation he’d experienced just moments before. It had felt like the world was collapsing in on him, twisting him about. It had felt awful—wrong. As he stared at the ticket, that feeling worsened, because there was no mistaking the date printed there.