Witch in the White City: A Dark Historical Fantasy/Mystery (Neva Freeman Book 1)

by Nick Wisseman

  “It’s the soldiers you should be worrying about,” Brin retorted. “They’re here—or will be shortly. In earnest this time. The city’s become a battlefield.”

  As if on cue, rifle shots crackled to the north.

  “Let Mabel go,” Neva said to Quill, her jaw so taut the words came out clipped.

  “Your ‘Second Great Fire’ is here,” Wherrit added. “You don’t need her to stoke it.”

  Quill frowned, then glanced back at Kam, who remained supine and still.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Brin muttered. A second later, a shower of coins splashed into the Rose Garden.

  Neva turned to see Brin reach into her purse, withdraw a second handful of money, and hurl it at Quill’s tattered band. “Time to choose,” the Irishwoman said. “Coin or cause. But not the girl: let her loose.”

  Quill’s men needed no further persuading; almost as one, they knelt to root through the roses—the sorriest set of would-be revolutionaries Neva had ever seen.

  “Sellouts!” hissed Quill before shoving Mabel at Wherrit and dashing toward the bushes. “Cowards and crayfish, every one of you!”

  “Leave him,” Wherrit ordered Hal when the Destitute Duke took a step forward. “We need to get everyone else to shelter.” The Hobo King passed Mabel to Neva and gestured to the north, where the gunshots were becoming more regular. “Quill was right about one thing: there will be fire tonight.”

  Neva looked Mabel over. “Are you all right?”

  Before she could respond, Dob flew into his aunt almost as hard as he had into Quill. Mabel wrapped her arms around him and nodded, relief and love flooding her delicate face. “I will be. Thank you.”

  Neva considered scolding the boy for tailing her and Derek—rather than going to Manufactures and Liberal Arts as directed—and tackling a full-grown man with a knife. But Dob was sobbing hysterically. “I’m not sure where your other boys are,” she said instead.

  “I told them to stay in the Egyptian Theatre,” Wherrit noted as he hurried past. “We’ll take you to them.”

  Hal offered his arm to Mabel. She took it gladly, murmured another “Thank you” to Neva, and rushed off with him and Dob to the nearest westerly bridge.

  Brin came up behind Neva. “Bad as this was, it’s worse in the city.”

  “That’s why you came—to warn us?”

  The Irishwoman wrinkled her nose. “Mobs of thousands rampaging through the Stockyards, soldiers answering with cavalry charges ... It’s a war zone, plain and simple.”

  Neva studied her. “Not what you wanted.”

  “Never.”

  Her eyes flitted to Brin’s purse.

  She threw up her hands in exaggerated fashion. “All right, Lady Inquisitor, I’ll come clean—I pinched a few paintings.”

  Neva snorted in disbelief. “From the Fair?”

  “The Palace of Fine Arts. The day everything went to shite with the Wheel.”

  “Chicago Day ...” And suddenly Brin’s actions clicked into place. “That’s why you left them? Why Pieter got caught?”

  She nodded, her smile a crooked study in agony and self-loathing. “The plan seemed doomed to failure—even if it came off. And I thought, why not get something for myself instead? Something I can sell to help my da put bread on the table. Proper radical I am, I know. Traitor more like it ... It wasn’t all spur of the moment, either. I’d been mulling it for weeks. Even took the day before off to plan. Rotten from the start, I guess.”

  “No,” Neva decided. “You’re giving what you can away, and you were right not to dynamite the Wheel. That’s not rotten.”

  “If you say so.” Brin pointed at a patch of foliage to their left. “What was that flash that hit Kam?”

  Neva clapped her hand to her mouth. Derek—she’d forgotten about Derek. Without answering, she raced into the underbrush, ignoring the lingering pain in her stomach as she searched for her brother.

  She found the necklace first, hanging from a branch a few feet from where she’d left him. As she lifted the cord off the branch, one of the shells broke off, its threading hole having sprouted a crack that snapped the near edge. Neva snatched up the shell and put it in her pocket along with the rest of the necklace.

  She saw Derek a second later, lying in a bush a full ten paces away and squeezing his eyes shut. As she approached, one of his arms twitched, then the other. Then both legs. “Derek?” she asked softly.

  “I think I changed that man,” he mused after a moment. “Wherrit, was it? On the Ferris Wheel ... I think I made him braver.”

  “You changed him for the better, then. Oh, Derek, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not as bad as it was ... Mabel?”

  “Safe. Thanks to you.”

  Brin caught up and eyed the bush. “What’s this?” she asked as more gunshots—closer now—further assaulted the night’s quiet.

  “Help me get him to Machinery.” Neva reached down to grasp her brother beneath his arms. “Can you get his feet?”

  “Sure, but why Machinery? Something more out of the way might be better if the fighting spreads here.”

  “Pieter left his medical kit there. And there’s something I want you to see.”

  AS IT TURNED OUT, AFTER they made the trek to Machinery and ducked inside the storage room, someone was waiting to see them.

  Augie.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  THEY’D LAID DEREK OUT in the front, doing their best to make him comfortable. He didn’t have any obvious injuries—just what he thought were “the usual symptoms from electrocuting yourself like a great honking idiot.” Pieter’s kit didn’t have anything directly applicable. But its flask still held a shot or two of whiskey, which Derek had accepted gladly. Then Brin had lit another lantern and followed Neva to the back of the storage room.

  She hadn’t expected to find her other brother, however. Especially not fully constituted, in record time.

  “Augie?” she breathed.

  But he’d flinched at the sight of her, and her question made him flinch again, huddling further into himself. He didn’t remember.

  Brin recognized his name, though. “This is your brother?”

  He looked from one woman to the other while Neva slipped off his gag, his eyes gradually growing larger as he adjusted to the lantern. “I’m sorry, but who are you?”

  The words were painful to hear, excruciating. But his voice—his voice was everything. How many times had Neva imagined hearing it again, just once more, even if only for a moment? And to see him again ... It almost made the last nine months bearable. Justifiable.

  Worthwhile.

  “Your name is Augustine Freeman,” she said softly. “And I’m you’re sister, Neva.”

  He blinked, but it didn’t seem to clear anything up. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember you; I don’t remember anything.” He turned to Brin. “Am I supposed to know you too?”

  The Irishwoman clucked her tongue. “We’ve never met, not until now. I’m Brin. A friend of Neva’s.”

  “I see.” Augie raised his hands to tug at his hair—in what would have been an achingly familiar motion had his wrists not been bound. “I don’t suppose you could untie me? Or,” he added after a moment, “if you were the ones to tie me, could you at least tell me why you did so?”

  Brin glanced at Neva, but she was too busy studying Augie to provide guidance just yet, pouring over every detail of his face. Her brother—her real brother—had carried a small scar on his left cheek since childhood, the legacy of a rock-throwing contest with a friend. Yet the face of the man in front of her was perfectly smooth.

  All the guises’ skin had been that way, as if they’d come into the world just now, birthed as fully formed adults in Mr. DeBell’s tweed suit, fresh of body even if they were addled in mind. This wasn’t her brother—Neva had to remember that, hold onto it. This wasn’t Augie.

  But it was so close.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked. The other guises had been ravenous; understanda
bly so, even though the core aspect didn’t seem to need much to sustain itself.

  “Yes,” Augie—the Augie-guise—said immediately.

  “I’ve an apple,” Brin volunteered, producing it from her pouch. After Neva nodded, the Irishwoman tossed the fruit to him.

  He caught it deftly, the rope around his wrists proving no obstacle. He’d always been a gifted juggler. And a voracious eater; his first two bites of the apple were enormous.

  “You don’t remember the Cold Storage Building?” asked Neva. “Or the Moving Sidewalk? Or the ...” She started to say, “Civil War veteran,” but changed her mind. “Or the Anthropology Building?”

  Augie’s brow creased, but there was no recollection in its lines, no pain.

  No guilt.

  “You mean the World’s Fair?” he said eventually. “I remember the Sidewalk carrying me along the Pier and touring the Anthropology Building. And while I have no memory of visiting the Cold Storage Building, I heard its ice-skating rink was well done ...” He seemed set to say something further—perhaps to ask if the Fair had any bearing on his being tied up in a windowless room—but the apple proved too enticing, and he returned to it with a third, monstrous bite.

  “Why is he tied?” asked Brin as Augie finished the apple’s flesh and moved on to its core.

  Neva studied him again, searching her brother—her brother’s guise; it would always be her brother’s guise—for any hints of falsehood, any signs that the plan she’d settled on months ago wouldn’t work. But there was only Augie.

  An imitation, to be sure, a likeness that in many ways went—quite literally—no further than skin-deep, veiling a sleeping darkness she would have to be careful never to rouse. Still: it was as close as she would come to getting her brother back.

  “I think those knots can be loosened,” Neva said. She knelt next to him and unsheathed her knife. But instead of taking it to Augie’s throat, as she’d done with the sixteen guises before him, she set her blade against the rope between his wrists and sawed with slow, steady strokes.

  “Thank you,” he murmured.

  “Of course. You’re my brother.”

  But when Derek stumbled into the back area, he ruined the moment in more ways than one. “Augie?”

  Neva looked up from the almost-severed rope in time to see Augie’s eyes narrow. Not widen, as if in surprise, or fear, or anything suggesting uncertainty—he knew Derek.

  Knew and hated.

  “Brother,” he spat.

  And as insects boiled out from every miserable cranny in the storage room—oh God, how had she missed that the insects had remained at bay, when they should have returned the moment the new guise woke?—the Augie-guise whistled.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  THE PARALYSIS WAS INSTANTANEOUS.

  The Mr. DeBell-guise had been proficient enough with the whistling—more than proficient. But the Augie-guise was a virtuoso, an artist whose tune arrested Neva so completely she could barely think, much less move, as if his notes had taken physical, invisible form, their flags hooking into her body and their stems snaking into all-entangling webs. The lack of reaction from Derek and Brin suggested the skinchanger had caught them just as completely.

  As before, there was no physical pain. But watching the Augie-guise effortlessly shape his wrists and ankles out of the ropes Neva had tied so tightly—was it really possible to be this horrified? This angry? This foolish? She’d been so careful, for so long, only to rush things at the last moment. And now she might have gotten herself killed, and Derek and Brin along with her.

  The Augie-guise was in no hurry, however. He took his time adjusting his clothing, stretching luxuriously, cracking his knuckles and neck. Finally, after what seemed like hours, he added a new note to his whistling, and Derek took two involuntary steps forward, knelt, and braced his hands against the floor, raising his back until it was perfectly, unnaturally flat.

  His expression more smile than snarl now, the Augie-guise sat heavily on the literal manmade chair he’d created. In normal circumstances, Derek would have dipped with the impact, or at least grunted. Yet his back remained rigid and no sound passed his lips, even when insects twined up his arms—insects whose backs pulsed with adjoined, gleaming crescents.

  “Petty, I know,” the Augie-guise said, breaking his voice in two so that the whistling continued without missing a beat while his words seemed to come from all around the room. “But now that the charade is over, I see no point in pretending to be other than I am.”

  “Take my brother’s face off,” Neva said—apparently the Augie-guise hadn’t restricted her voice. “Take any other form. Just not his.”

  He smiled again, but this time it was less self-indulgent, more tinged with ... regret? “My dear Neva, still believing until the end. Still determined to see only an idealized version of her brother, despite all evidence to the contrary.”

  “Take another form,” she repeated, tears stealing over her top lip and onto her tongue. “Take another form.”

  “Oh, I could. I could take this form ...” He shut his eyes, and his body folded in on itself, ingesting the tweed suit and replacing it with a blue dress—shaped from the same cloth? Or was it skin?—while altering his appearance to that of a rail-thin white woman.

  The woman who’d screamed in shock when Augie disappeared on the Midway moments after Neva had been bitten.

  “Or I could take this one,” the woman said in a feminine drawl before her aspect and clothing changed to that of a bearded colored man wearing a World’s Fair cap and uniform—the porter who’d pushed and then killed the Civil War veteran.

  “Or this one,” the porter said in a masculine bass as he morphed into a white girl in a green frock. Neva didn’t recognize her but felt as if she should. There was something oddly familiar about the girl. Face, height, posture—all of it.

  The skinchanger was already on to another guise, though: Augie’s again, but in a more-contemporary jacket and trousers. “But the truth is I’m tired of lying, tired of pretending. And this is the real me.” He tapped his forehead. “This is me, Neva.” He tapped his chest. “Augie. Always has been.”

  “You’re lying,” she insisted, swimming upstream against the wrenching current of her emotions.

  The tenderness in his eyes hurt more than all the rest. “I’m sorry,” he said, near-whispering. “I’ve always been sorry. Please believe that.”

  She bit her lip, too close to drowning to speak.

  He glanced neutrally at Brin, then disdainfully at Derek, whose lower limbs now swarmed with insects. But as if compelled by a sense of obligation, the Augie-guise turned back to Neva. “Did you know we had a sister?” he asked after a terrible moment filled only by the chittering of his little minions.

  She refused to answer this either. It had to be another lie.

  “When DeBell confessed our parentage to me—that you, Derek, and I were all his bastards ... But I see you know that already?”

  Neva grit her teeth.

  The Augie-guise nodded. “DeBell said there were four of us at birth: quadruplets. A colored boy, a colored girl, a white boy, and a white girl—matching sets. A pair of aristocrats and a pair of servants.” His rage was like an iceberg: barely visible above the surface, yet suggestive of how much more lay beneath. “But the white girl, the last to leave our mother’s womb, was stillborn. Sad enough on its own, of course. Yet there was something else, something beyond the oddity of our unmixed hues. The stillborn girl was riddled with puncture marks.”

  Leaning back, a motion which caused Derek’s coat of insects to ripple, the Augie-guise gazed at the ceiling. “I see her in my dreams sometimes.” His form changed to that of the white girl in the green dress again. “I think this is what she might have looked like—had she lived.”

  Now Neva saw it: the girl had Augie’s eyes, but her own nose, chin, and ears.

  Augie’s aspect resurfaced and he lowered his head. “Those are the good dreams. In the bad ones, I’m sha
peless, unformed—tiny. But I’m trying to be more, and I’m latching on to another little non-shape, and it’s not you, but it feels like you, and I’m not trying to hurt it, but I am ... And then it’s gone.” He squeezed his eyes shut again. “Then it’s gone.”

  Even the insects seemed to grow quieter.

  Until a gunshot sounded from somewhere outside—had the city’s chaos already spread to the Fair?—and the Augie-guise reopened his eyes, at which point the bugs grew rapidly more animated. “My first sin,” he said after another long pause. “Committed before I was conscious, before I was really alive. I knew it for true the moment DeBell mentioned her death. Understood what I’d always been, what I was destined to be ... That was when I stopped trying to fight it.”

  A patch of the insects swarming Derek’s neck had gained a red sheen; they must be biting him. Could he not call out? Were he and Brin gagged as well as bound? Neva wet her lips. For their sake, it was probably best if she played along and seemed to buy into the skinchanger’s hideous falsehoods. “And that’s why you killed Mr. DeBell?”

  The Augie-guise scowled. “No, I went back to the Yards because I was furious—doubly so when I found DeBell tipping a letter down the mail chute. He tried to hide it, but I saw the top of the address before the envelope disappeared: ‘To my beloved son.’ Not me, you understand: only his acknowledged bastard merited that type of regard.”

  He shifted on Derek again, setting off another shimmer of legs, antennae, and carapaces. “All my life, I’ve wondered what our parents looked like. There were no pictures, of course, and Hatty was the only servant who remembered them. Her description of our mother was vivid: round cheeks, a warm smile, pretty as a sunflower. I could almost see her. But Hatty’s description of our father was ... vague. Unsatisfying.

  “So I made my own.” The Augie-guise held up a finger and doodled in the air. “I tried to draw him—you remember? Sketches in the dirt? Faces on scraps of stolen paper?”