by Lisa Maxwell
Mock Duck, they called him, and everyone in the city had read about what he was capable of. The papers had been covering the war between the tongs on Mott Street and Pell Street the same way they covered the gossip of the people who lived in the mansions on Fifth Avenue—like it was some kind of sport. But while the people in the fancy mansions wore the wrong hats or went out dancing with people who might not be their own wives, the violence stirred up by Mock Duck and his highbinders killed innocent people.
Cela had almost left then, because she’d figured the guy she’d been following must’ve been one of Mock Duck’s highbinders himself. They’d take care of their own, even if they wouldn’t be able to put his hair back onto his head. But it was clear soon enough that Mock Duck wasn’t saving him so much as taking him prisoner.
A smarter woman would have called it quits right then and there, maybe. A woman with some brains in her head wouldn’t have followed them deeper into the Bowery. But she was a woman without much more to lose. Jianyu Lee had claimed that Darrigan had sent him to protect her. Her brother had already died doing that—just as her father had—and she would carry that knowledge with her all her days. She wasn’t about to add another life to her load.
Out of the frying pan, she thought as she pulled the scrap of fabric she’d taken up over her head. She kept her distance as she followed them to some saloon on the Bowery. And then, when she needed a distraction to get Jianyu on his own, she made one.
She was in the fire now—literally, if they didn’t get out of there, and fast. But from the way Jianyu was moving, it didn’t seem like fast was an option.
They were nearly to the ground floor, nearly free, when they heard voices—angry voices—coming their way.
She looked back up at Jianyu, who was standing on the step above her, to see if he’d heard them. From the expression on his face, it was clear that he had. Maybe they could go back up. . . . But if the fire was still burning—she didn’t think it would be, but if it was—she wasn’t ready to die quite yet.
The boy didn’t look half as concerned as Cela felt. With a smooth, practiced motion, he withdrew two dark disks from the inside pocket of his tunic.
“Step up here and hold on to me,” he told her.
“Hold on to you?” she repeated, sure she must have misheard him.
“You’re right. It would be better if you climbed onto my back.” He maneuvered past her and then stooped slightly, waiting.
“I’m not climbing up onto you. I don’t know you from Adam,” she said, thinking that maybe she should take her chances with the fire. “You can barely walk as it is.”
“I’m fine,” he said, clipping out the words through clenched teeth.
She saw the way he was masking the hurt with the fire in his eyes. She’d done the same thing many times herself.
“It’s nothing personal. I just—”
“Unless you would like to explain to the men coming up the steps who you are and what you’re doing here, you would be wise to do as I say and climb onto my back.”
The voices were getting closer.
“Fine,” she said, hoping with every bit of her being that her mother wasn’t watching from the hereafter as she used his shoulders to pull herself up and wrapped her legs around him.
The first thing she thought, and it was maybe the least sensible thing she could have picked to think, was that the guy beneath her was all muscle. He looked half-dead from the beating he’d gotten, but with her legs secure around his midsection and her arms around his neck, she could feel the strength beneath his loose clothes.
The second thing she thought, once she got over the idiotic first thought, was that the papers were wrong. But then, she should have known that the papers would be wrong. Weren’t they usually when it came to anyone who wasn’t white? She’d read all sorts of things about the Chinese men who made their home in the city—about their strange habits and the filthy conditions in which they lived, refusing to become good, solid Americans like everyone else. But this boy smelled like the earth, like something green and pleasant.
She was still thinking the second thought when Jianyu made a subtle movement of his hands, and she felt the world tilt.
“Hold on,” he said, and started down the steps.
When they reached the landing below, he paused, listening. She could feel his labored breathing. “Stay still and be quiet,” he commanded, as though he had some right to command her when she was the one who was doing the rescuing. But seeing how she was the one who’d climbed up onto him, however unwillingly, maybe he wasn’t too far off the mark.
Men were coming up the steps—the same swarthy-skinned Italians who’d been standing around at the saloon. They were dressed in dark pants and coats and there was a meanness to the air around them, but the guy carrying her didn’t do more than pull back against the wall.
And just like that, those men walked past them like they weren’t even standing there. Like she wasn’t nothing but a haint walking in the world.
The men were still too close and Cela was too unnerved to ask what had happened. She decided instead to take the blessings as they came and to hope that their luck held.
As the men continued up, Jianyu began to descend again, and a moment later they were out the back of the building and into the busy traffic of Elizabeth Street.
“Don’t let go,” he told her just as she started to release his neck.
She probably shouldn’t have listened, but there was something about the way he said it—more desperate than commanding—that made her comply.
“They can’t see us,” he whispered, answering her unspoken question.
“None of them?”
“Not as long as you stay where you are,” he said, hitching her up higher on his back and walking away from the building she’d rescued him from.
She understood then. “You’re one of them,” she said. But though his jaw went tight, he didn’t answer.
He didn’t put her down until they were two blocks away. In the distance, she could hear the clanging of a fire brigade’s wagons as he released her. His face was turned, solemn and serious, toward the direction of the sound.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Dolph built the Strega from nothing. To see it burn . . .” His voice fell away.
“The bar, you mean? It won’t burn,” she assured him. “I only set a small fire in a waste can—one that would make a lot of smoke and look worse than it is. Besides,” she said, pausing to listen to the approaching sirens, “it sounds like someone there has friends in high places if the brigades are already coming.”
He turned to her. “Thank you for rescuing me, Miss Johnson.” His straight, dark hair was hanging lank and uneven around his face from where it had been so unceremoniously chopped. It should have looked a mess, but instead it served to accent the sharp angles of him—his razor-blade cheekbones and sharp chin, the wide, strong nose, and the finely knit brows over too-knowing eyes.
“You might as well call me Cela. Everyone else does.”
“Cela,” he repeated, swaying a bit on his feet.
“Whoa, there,” she said, catching him up under the arm before he toppled over. “They messed you up good, didn’t they?”
“I’m fine,” Jianyu said, grimacing even as he said it.
“Sure you are.” She helped him over to a shuttered doorway, where he could lean and rest.
“Come,” he said. “We’re still too close.”
He led the way to a streetcar stop another block over, and he didn’t speak again until they were heading uptown and away from the Bowery. “Is there somewhere you can go?” he asked her, still clutching his stomach as the car rattled along, like he was trying to hold it in. “Somewhere you would feel safe?”
“Safe?” Cela wanted to laugh from the sheer absurdity of the idea. “I’m not sure what safe even is anymore.”
BEWARE THE DEVIL’S THIEF
1904—St. Louis
Harte Darrigan was probabl
y more likely to put on a dress himself than ever admit to Esta that her decision to wear the clothing she’d found in the hotel room was a good idea, even if the ballroom below was filled with nothing but men. For one thing, admitting that she had been right would only embolden her, but more important, maybe, it was taking everything he had not to be distracted by the shape of her legs in the trousers she was wearing. So he shot her a dark look instead and focused on the problem at hand—getting them out of the hotel before they were found.
“The kitchen entrance must be there,” Harte said, ignoring her remark as he pointed toward the far end of the room, where a door periodically swung open as white-coated servers came and went at regular intervals. “There are steps in the corner there, by the stage. Then we’ll keep to the edge of the room until we have to cut across. Stick close, but not too close,” he said, “and try not to sway your hips so much.”
“I do not sway my hips.” She glared at him.
“You do,” he told her flatly. He should know, since he’d just followed her down a hallway. She opened her mouth as if to argue, but he cut her off. “You walk like a woman.” He took a moment to look her over for any other flaw that might give her away. “Pull your hat down lower,” he told her as she stared at him. “Your eyes—they’re too soft. Christ,” he swore, his stomach twisting. There was no way she was going to make it through a room full of men without them noticing what she really was. She might as well have worn just the corset. “We’re dead.”
“We’ll be fine,” she told him. “I’ve been around men my whole life.”
“Yeah, well, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve actually been one,” he grumbled.
“It would have been kind of hard for me to miss.” Her mouth twitched, and he thought he saw something warmer than mere amusement flicker in her whiskey-colored eyes. At the sight of it, the power inside of him flared with anticipation. He was too busy pushing it back down to return her banter, and she let out a tired breath at his silence. “Oh, come on, Harte. Most of the people in here are drunk. They’re not going to notice me.”
“Let’s hope not.” But he didn’t have a lot of confidence.
Once they’d descended to the main ballroom, the sounds of glasses clinking and the rumble of men amused at their own jokes surrounded them. As they skirted the edges of the ballroom, something in Harte’s periphery drew his attention, and he glanced up to see that there were now a few men standing at the edge of the mezzanine, searching the crowd below. They were wearing the same dark coats and white armbands as the Guard outside the theater.
“Don’t look up,” he told Esta. He nodded to a bleary-eyed old man as he lifted a bowl of champagne from a passing tray.
“What—”
“I said, don’t look,” he said through clenched teeth as he raised the glass to his lips. He didn’t drink, but instead used the motion to cover his survey of the room. “There are two men up on the mezzanine now—maybe more.”
“Police?” she asked.
“The Guard.” His gaze slid to her. “We’re running out of time if they’re already looking for us here.”
“For me,” Esta corrected. “They’re looking for the Devil’s Thief.” Her eyes were steady and her jaw tight.
“Well, they’re not going to find her.” Harte glanced at Esta over the rim of the glass. “You could get us out of here right now.”
She shook her head. “You saw what happened in the hallway. I could barely hold on to the seconds. We don’t know what the Guard is capable of. And if they can track magic . . .”
She was probably right. If the Brink or the power of the Book inside of him had done something to her magic—or to his—it was better not to chance it until they knew more. “Let’s go.”
They left behind the relative safety of the mezzanine’s overhang to cut a line across the ballroom floor. Directly across the room, the double doors to the kitchens swung loosely on their hinges every time a waiter appeared with another tray of champagne or canapés. Behind the doors, the light of the service hallway was a beacon, urging them on.
If Harte could have made a beeline to those doors, he would have, but too fast or too direct and it might draw the attention of the men watching from above. As much as everything in him was screaming to Run. Go. Get out, he forced himself to keep the interminable pace as he meandered through the crowded floor, stopping at random intervals to pretend to watch the orchestra or take one of the hors d’oeuvres from the white-coated servers circulating through the crowd.
It felt like they would never reach the other side . . . and then, all at once, they were there, nearly to the edges of the ballroom. Only a few feet more and they could duck into the safety of the back of the house. But just before they could slip through the doors, the orchestra abruptly went silent. All around them, there was a delayed reaction, a ripple of awareness that filtered through the crowd as the men in the room, drunk as they might have been, realized something had happened.
Harte turned too, just long enough to see that one of the plainclothes officers had taken the stage and was lifting his hands, telling the crowd to be patient as the lights on the chandeliers suddenly grew brighter.
“If I could have your attention, gentlemen,” the officer shouted. “I’m Detective Sheehan of the St. Louis Police, and I’m sorry to interrupt your evening, but there’s a wanted criminal on the loose. She was spotted entering the hotel a few minutes ago, and we believe she may still be in the building.”
The rustling around them increased as the men craned their necks, searching for a woman among them. Next to him, Esta pulled the hat lower over her brow.
The officer continued. “We just need a moment of your time as my men secure the room and do a quick sweep.”
“I’m here, Officer,” a voice called over the din of the crowd.
Esta—and everyone else in the room—turned to look up at the balcony, where a figure stood dressed in a crimson gown. Her face was half covered by a red porcelain mask tipped with horns, and she stood on the edge of the railing with her arms lifted, as though she were about to dive into the crowd. The Guardsmen started charging around the mezzanine to where she stood. With a swirl of her arms, she took a sweeping bow, and in a sudden plume of scarlet smoke, the figure was gone.
“You’ll have to be quicker than that if you want to catch me,” another voice called from the other side of the ballroom. Again the heads in the room swiveled to find the source of the sound. This figure was wearing the same devilish mask, but she was dressed in a gown of midnight, and standing on the railing above, she looked like a shadow against the gilded walls.
“Or me,” a voice bellowed. This one was dressed in ghostly white, her face masked as well.
“Or me.” Another voice, again from a different corner of the mezzanine.
“Or me.” The woman in red was back.
Their voices echoed off the walls as the sound of thunder rumbled through the ballroom, and the air seemed suddenly charged and electric. A strange, impossible wind began to swirl through the room, eliciting more nervous rustling from the men who’d been having fun only a moment before. A single word circulated through the ballroom, as quickly as a wildfire fed by the air: Antistasi.
The men in the ballroom were already running toward the door, but the police had blocked the exits.
“Who are they?” Esta whispered, her hand on Harte’s arm.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking up at the women. Each was balanced precipitously on the balcony. “From the sound of it, we’ve found the Antistasi that Julien told us about.”
“Beware the Devil’s Thief,” they chanted in unison as more smoke billowed from beneath them. “Her enemies, beware her wrath.” With a flash of light, the figures were gone, but the trailing smoke was still moving steadily toward the ballroom floor, like something alive.
“They’re incredible,” Esta whispered, her voice filled with something like wonder.
But Harte didn’t feel the awe that was c
lear in Esta’s expression. There was something eerie about the apparitions. Something more than unsettling. And it didn’t help that the masked women were using that damned name, the one the papers had pinned on Esta, which could only mean trouble for them as long as they stayed in this town.
Then Harte felt the icy heat of magic in the air and knew it had something to do with the fog of smoke hanging over their heads. He wasn’t about to wait and see what that fog contained. “Let’s go.” He took Esta’s hand and moved in the opposite direction of the rest of the now-panicking crowd.
He didn’t bother to check if anyone noticed them crossing the final few feet toward the service doors. Once they were in the hallway beyond, they began to run.
“This way.” Esta pointed at a narrow staircase that led down toward the first floor.
They took the steps at a sprint, and at the bottom they found themselves in another hall of linoleum floors and cream-colored walls. Harte could already hear noise coming from the stairs behind them. To the right, other voices seemed to be drawing closer. He didn’t know whether it was more police or just the kitchen staff, but they couldn’t stay to find out.
Harte tugged Esta down the hall in the opposite direction and through a doorway.
“It’s a dead end,” she said, looking around for some other exit.
It was a storage room. One wall was lined with gleaming silver serving ware, soup tureens, and domed platters. In the corner, two large wheeled carts were filled with clean linens.
From just outside the door came the sound of voices, and Harte went to lean against it, cracking it open so he could listen. “There’s someone out there,” he told her as he tried to make out what they were saying. “I think they’re looking for whoever those women in the ballroom were. We need to get out of here.”
