The Devil's Thief

by Lisa Maxwell

  “That’s what they want us to do, isn’t it, though?” She was pacing now. “You don’t see what Tammany is doing, offering black saloons their protection so long as we vote their way? They’re not helping us. They’re using us, same as politicians have ever done. You’re fighting for better wages, aren’t you? But who are you fighting? Who owns the railroads?” she asked, but she didn’t give him time to answer. “I’ll tell you who—they’re all in the Order.”

  Her brother was considering her words, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at Jianyu like he was trying to make up his mind.

  “You don’t think that there are Mageus who look like us?” she asked. “Don’t you remember the stories Daddy used to tell us? There were Africans who could fly, Abel.”

  “Those were just tales.”

  “Were they?” she asked softly. “Because he told those tales like they were the truth.”

  “Cela—”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head before he could use that condescending older-brother tone with her. “When I thought you were dead, when I was alone this last week, it changed me. I can’t go back now. Maybe this isn’t your fight, but Jianyu’s my friend, so it’s become my fight.”

  Jianyu was watching them, his expression unreadable. “You do not have to take on my fight,” he told her. “You never should have been brought into this. Darrigan never should have involved you.”

  “But he did,” she told him. Then she looked back at Abe. “If he goes, I go with him. I can’t just hide forever, Abel. Not when I know that Evelyn has the stone, and not when I know how powerful it is. If the wrong people get that ring, who do you think they’ll come after next? We won’t be safe just because we don’t have any magic.”

  Abel looked like he wanted to argue, but he was just silent for a long, heavy minute. When she saw his mouth hitch upward, she knew she’d won.

  “You’re worse than Mama, you know that?”

  She smiled full-on then, her eyes damp with tears that she’d been holding back. “Why, Abel Johnson, that may be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  “Don’t let it go to your head, Rabbit.” Then her brother’s expression faltered. “What do we do with the other one?”

  Cela glanced over to where the white boy had been lying. Her stomach sank. “Well, we’d have to find him before we can do anything with him,” she said. Because the white boy was gone.

  NIGHT WALKING

  1904—St. Louis

  The room Ruth had assigned to Esta was still draped in darkness when she finally gave up trying to sleep. Too much had happened—the missing necklace, being taken in by the Antistasi, and the choice she’d made in that warehouse. Her thoughts felt like birds taking flight, but she couldn’t tell if they were flying toward some new freedom or away from some unseen danger.

  When Esta had dropped the package at the warehouse, she’d been acting out of anger and desperation. Lipscomb’s words had stroked that part of her that still hurt from everything she’d lost and that craved retribution. But the moment she’d heard the explosion, she’d realized how far she’d gone. It was only when news had come of what the bomb really was—what the Antistasi had truly done—that she felt as though she could breathe again.

  Ruth had awakened magic in Sundren. The idea was almost too fantastical to be true.

  Except that it made a certain sense. Hadn’t Professor Lachlan revealed to her how the Order had once been Mageus? Rich men, they had come to a new land, hiding what they were in plain sight and hoping to start anew, without the threat of the Disenchantment and the fear of who they were. As their magic began to fade over time, they worried that the newer arrivals would be stronger and more powerful, so they’d built the Brink to protect their own power. But they’d made a mistake—the Brink had become a trap instead of a shield, and as their magic continued to fade through the following generations, the Order themselves had eventually forgotten who they once were. Or maybe they simply refused to remember.

  It was logical to think that those lost affinities could still be there, waiting below the surface to be awoken. And if that was possible, it meant that a different future was possible as well—one without the threat of divisions or the death of magic. In the version of the future that Esta had grown up in, a hundred years to come, most people believed magic was a fiction and Mageus were all but extinct. But if the Antistasi could resuscitate magic for everyone now, the future could be different. Maybe even better.

  Clearly, Harte hadn’t felt the same promise that Esta had at hearing the news. It wasn’t long after he made his opinion known that North had escorted him from the room. Esta hadn’t been able to go after him—not without losing the ground she’d gained with Ruth—but she needed to see him. Something had happened to him in the Nile, and she had a feeling it had something to do with the way he’d acted in Ruth’s office.

  She wasn’t surprised to find the door to the room they’d put her in locked, especially after Harte’s little display. She didn’t blame Ruth and the rest of the Antistasi for not trusting her, despite what she’d done for them—she probably would have done the same. But a locked door had never been a problem for her, so she pulled her affinity around her and made quick work of picking the lock. She stepped over the Antistasi who’d fallen asleep at his post in the hall outside and started her search for where they’d put Harte.

  She found him on the floor below, and she slipped inside the small, closet-like room before releasing her hold on time. There was a canister on the floor like the one from the wagon, probably used to make sure that he didn’t cause any trouble.

  Harte was sleeping on a narrow pallet, his breathing soft and even. She knelt next to him and pushed his hair back from his forehead as she whispered his name. When he didn’t respond, she gave him a gentle shake until his eyes opened.

  He blinked and turned toward her, finding her in the darkness of the room. “Esta?” he whispered, her name soft with sleep on his lips. His hands lifted to cup her face, his thumb brushing across her cheek and sending jolts of warmth through her.

  “Are you okay?” she whispered, keeping her voice low so they wouldn’t alert the guard outside his room.

  He nodded as he pulled her toward him, slow and tentative, testing the moment. Lifting his head, he touched his lips against hers, so softly that her throat went tight. She felt another jolt of heat against her skin and an answering desire, and she didn’t pull away. For the first time since that night they’d kissed at the boardinghouse, she felt like she could finally breathe.

  Esta barely had time to register that the warmth she felt against her mouth wasn’t brought on by the heat in their kiss. Just as she realized that it was the power inside Harte seeping into her, his entire body went suddenly rigid, as though all his muscles were contracting, and he jerked away from her. Scrambling upright, he retreated.

  “You’ve come,” Harte said, but it wasn’t his voice she heard. There was something else to it, some other power layered over it. Impossible colors flashed in the depths of his eyes, and it wasn’t completely Harte she saw looking out at her.

  “What—” Her voice broke in a combination of fear and betrayal.

  “I knew you would,” the voice that was not Harte purred. The colors in his eyes faded, and the darkness that replaced them was pure in its emptiness, devastatingly cold and impossibly ancient. “You see the world as it is, fractured and terrible, and you have come to me, just as I predicted. I feel your anger, the rage that pulses clean and true. I can be the blade that lets you cleave the world in two.”

  Harte gasped, a horrible clutching sound, and then doubled over.

  “Harte?” She wanted to reach for him and to back away all at the same time.

  “Stay there,” he rasped, breathing heavily. His jaw clenched as he fought whatever was inside of him.

  She couldn’t do anything more than watch and wait until, eventually, his breathing slowed and his body relaxed. When he looked at her again,
it was only Harte she saw.

  “What were you thinking?” he asked. “You can’t just sneak up on me like that.”

  The sharpness in his voice cut straight through the already frayed leash that was holding her temper at bay. “What the hell, Harte? Were you there for any of that?” she asked, afraid to know the answer.

  “You mean, do I remember kissing you?” he asked shakily. He raked his hand through his hair and looked miserable enough that she could almost forgive him for snapping at her. “I thought I was dreaming, and by the time I realized I wasn’t, she’d already taken hold.”

  Her instincts prickled. “She?”

  He let out an exhausted-sounding breath. “This thing inside me. I think it’s a she.” Then he told her everything that he’d seen when he’d lost it in the Nile—about the woman and the Book, about Thoth and the circle of stones. “Her name’s Seshat. I think she’s some kind of demon or something. Thoth was trying to stop her, but he didn’t. And she didn’t die. Part of her was trapped in the Book.”

  “You saw all of that?” she asked.

  “More like I felt it. Like I was there, experiencing what she experienced,” he said, shuddering a little at the memory. “She had stones—not the ones that the Order had, but ones like them. When Thoth destroyed them, it damaged her. I think it’s what we need to do to contain her again. If we can connect the stones, we could trap that power again. We just have to figure out how to connect them.”

  But Esta already knew the answer to that. She could connect them. It was what Professor Lachlan had tried to do to her, and it was what she’d already known she would have to do if she wanted to end this madness once and for all. “We have to connect the stones through the Aether,” she told him. “We’ll need the Book, but once we have that, I can do it.”

  She reminded Harte about what had happened when she’d returned to her own time, and now she saw the moment when he realized what she meant. “No.” He was shaking his head. “Absolutely not.”

  “It’s the only way,” she told him.

  “I refuse to believe that,” he said. “We will find another way. We’ll get the Book back and there will be another way.”

  He looked so horrified and determined and ridiculously stubborn that she just nodded. “Sure,” she said. Because what was the use of arguing? She wasn’t there to save her own life. She was there to make sure that Nibsy couldn’t win, to make sure that the Order and others like them couldn’t destroy even one more future. And maybe, even to make sure that Harte could someday be free, like he’d dreamed.

  “We need to go,” he said, pulling himself to his feet. “We’ve already lost time, but if we can get back to Julien, we can figure out what the Society did with the necklace and get out of this town, just like we planned.”

  She was already shaking her head as he spoke. “We can’t.”

  “We can,” he told her, his eyes shadowed.

  “The Antistasi—”

  “The Antistasi aren’t our problem,” he said, dismissing her words before he even heard them. “The sooner we can find the Book, the sooner we can find a solution to how to control whatever this is inside me, and the sooner we can go back and stop Nibsy.”

  She was still shaking her head. “They have Ishtar’s Key.”

  A CHOICE IN THE MATTER

  1904—St. Louis

  Harte went very still. “They have your cuff?”

  Esta nodded, her expression tight. “I think they took it while we were unconscious in the wagon.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?” he asked, feeling a bolt of panic. Without the cuff, they were stuck in 1904. Without the cuff, they couldn’t control the Book, and if it got into the wrong hands . . .

  “When was I supposed to tell you—while I was unconscious, or in the middle of the room while everyone was listening?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at him.

  She was right. Between being captured and being separated while the Antistasi forced her to run their errands, there hadn’t been any time to talk. “It’s fine,” he said, but he felt like he was trying to convince himself as much as her. “We’ll get it back.”

  At first she only frowned, as though she were considering another option.

  “You can steal it back,” he insisted, because that much should have been readily apparent.

  “I don’t know if we should,” she told him. “Not yet, at least.”

  “Of course we should. You’re a thief, and a damn good one at that,” he said, trying to figure out what she was thinking. “Why wouldn’t you want to take it back?”

  “I do,” she insisted. “I’m just thinking . . . maybe we should wait. Hear me out,” she protested, before he could argue. “We don’t know where the necklace is right now.”

  “Julien can get that information,” he reminded her. But they couldn’t get to Julien as long as they were stuck here with the Antistasi.

  “Sure. But what if we need more than the two of us to get it? Ruth and the Antistasi want the necklace, right? Why not use them like they’re using us?”

  He gave her a doubtful look. “They don’t exactly seem like easy marks.”

  “Neither was Dolph,” she argued. “But that didn’t stop you from trying. Why not keep them as allies? Once they get the necklace, I can take both, and we can be gone.”

  Harte shook his head. “This plan of theirs—to infect people with magic—I don’t like it. People should have a choice in the matter. Besides, it’s dangerous, and if we get caught up in their mess, we might not get the opportunity to find the other stones.”

  But Esta brushed off his concern. “We won’t have to get caught if we help them,” she said.

  “They’re attacking people, Esta.”

  “They’re giving them magic,” she argued. “They’re trying to make a difference.”

  Harte shook his head. How can she not see it? “Those people in the meeting didn’t do anything to deserve what happened to them. What if they didn’t want magic? What if they were happy with their lives as they were?”

  Esta crossed her arms. “You heard what Ruth said about them—”

  “Yeah,” he told her before she could go on. “I heard what Ruth said. But we don’t know those people. We don’t know anything about who they are or what they’ve done. You’re taking her word for it, when she’s basically kidnapped us?”

  Even in the dim light, he could see the determination in her expression, and at the sight of it, the power inside of him lurched with excitement.

  “I heard the socialists talking,” Esta told him. “I heard what they said about us.”

  Harte let out a breath. “You don’t think that Ruth’s attack might have just proven them right?”

  Esta lifted her chin, her eyes blazing. “Maybe it was worth it if it changes things,” she said.

  “Esta—”

  “No, Harte. Listen, we don’t know where Jack or the Book are. We don’t have any of the artifacts at this point. We are worse off than when we started,” she pointed out. “The only way we know of to stop the power inside you from taking over is if I use my affinity. If it takes over—”

  “It won’t,” he said, his voice hard. He would not allow her to sacrifice herself for him.

  “If that happens,” she repeated, “I won’t be able to take you back. You’ll be stuck here in 1904. If that’s the case, the Antistasi might be the only chance we have left to fix the things we’ve changed. If their plan works, if they can really restore magic, you’ll have a future. Every Mageus will. And neither Nibsy nor the Order will be in control of that future.”

  He shook his head, refusing to agree. “I can’t believe that is our only option.”

  “Maybe it’s not, but we have to at least consider that it might be.”

  “No—”

  “Let’s just give it a day or two,” she pleaded. “We still don’t know where the necklace is, and until we figure that out, we don’t know if we’ll need the Antistasi to get it. There’s no sense
burning bridges. Not until we have to.”

  He didn’t like it. He didn’t like this Mother Ruth or her Antistasi. And he didn’t like how the power purred at seeing Esta so set on this path. There was something about its approval that told him this path wasn’t the right choice.

  But he knew Esta, and he knew that with her jaw set as stubbornly as it was now, there was no sense in arguing any further with her. Not at that moment, at least.

  “Fine,” Harte told her. “But at the first sign of a problem, at the first indication that things are going too far or spinning out of control, we are gone. We leave and we don’t look back. Promise me that much, at least.”

  But before she could, the door to his closet-like room swung open, and North stood eyeing the two of them, his expression like flint. He stared at them for a moment, suspicion clear on his face.

  How much did he overhear?

  “Come on,” North said, his voice as cool and flat as a penny. “The both of you.”

  Every one of his instincts told Harte that they should run. Now. Take the cuff and get the hell out before they were any more entangled with these Antistasi. Their fight wasn’t his fight. The future they saw wasn’t one he needed. But Esta gave him a pleading look, and he found himself unable to refuse.

  THE AFTERMATH

  1904—St. Louis

  Esta glanced back to make sure that Harte was coming with her as she followed North. Somewhere deeper in the building, she heard a noise that she couldn’t place until they came to a large, brightly lit room. Inside, Maggie and a couple of other women were trying to settle nearly a dozen children, most of whom were crying inconsolably.

  “Thank god for more hands,” Maggie said, handing the baby she was holding to Esta, who was too shocked by the whole situation to refuse the armful of squalling infant. Her arms tightened around the squirming baby, which only made the thing scream more, but at least she didn’t drop it.

  “Where did they all come from?” Esta asked as Maggie walked over to a toddler huddled in the corner and crouched down to brush the small girl’s hair from her eyes.