The Devil's Thief

by Lisa Maxwell

  The night felt sultry against his skin, but Julien’s veins had turned to ice. “I’m not sure what you’re referring to.” He considered his options, but he doubted outrunning a horse was one of the better ones.

  “I think you do,” the man told him. “So I’m going to give you a choice—you can get into this carriage, and tell me everything you know about the Society’s plans for the necklace on the night of the parade. If you do, I can protect you. I can make sure the Order never knows about your connection to Harte Darrigan or the theft of their most precious treasures. Or you can keep walking and count me as one of your enemies.”

  The man wasn’t old, but he was soft, bloated from too much drinking and too little exercise. In a ring, Julien could flatten him, but life wasn’t a boxing ring. Life was more of a chess game, and Julien was not about to find himself in check because of Harte Darrigan. “You know,” Julien said, trying to keep his tone easy, “I think I could use a ride after all.”

  DISILLUSIONED

  1902—New York

  Viola didn’t even know where she was walking. She was blocks away, nearly to the edge of the island, when her feet finally slowed and the haze that she was blindly walking through lifted. Suddenly exhausted, she stepped into the safe cover of a recessed doorway and sank to the ground, her legs collapsing beneath her. Realizing that the bullet was still in her hand, she tossed it away in disgust.

  Then she took the package that Nibsy had given her from the pocket of her skirt. Viola paused a moment to allow the comforting weight to rest in her hands before she began to open the wrappings. Finally, she felt balanced. Grounded. Ready.

  To hell with all her plans. Why should she wait for some future retribution? Why should she allow the Order to destroy Nibsy Lorcan when she could have the honor herself? She would carve him from the world, and then she would go for her brother. And when she had finished with them, she would go for the Order. The silvery blade flashed as soon as she tore the paper away, and she held it up, examining it. Reveling in its power.

  She pulled herself up, letting the wrapping fall to the ground, but the markings on the paper caught her eye as it fell. Leaning over, she picked it up and examined the clear, familiar hand. She knew that writing, the way the letters slanted precisely to the right and the bold, confident stroke of the pen.

  Dolph.

  Her chest ached at the memory of her friend and at the loss of him, but as she let her eyes scan over the lines of writing, the ache turned into something else. Disbelief. Denial.

  It can’t be. Dolph wouldn’t have written these words. He couldn’t have harmed Leena this way. But there, stark as the letters on the page, was every step he’d taken and every intention he’d had—to take her power, to use her. The woman he’d claimed to love.

  It must be a trick, she thought. Another of Nibsy’s deceptions, because if it wasn’t, everything she had known about Dolph Saunders had been a lie.

  THE RIVER

  1904—St. Louis

  With the brewery in ashes, the Antistasi moved farther out the day after the fire, to a small camp on the banks of the Mississippi just south of town. Without really talking it over or deciding, Esta had gone with them. Harte had followed, but he wouldn’t even look at her. He was keeping his distance and making excuses to be anywhere that she wasn’t. Not that she completely blamed him, after the way she’d attacked him. Even now, while everyone else was trying to help the newly woken focus on their affinities, Harte was sitting on the bank of the river, his back to her and the rest.

  Fine, then. He could sulk all he wanted to. When he got over himself, maybe he would realize that she’d had to at least attempt to get her cuff back. She tried not to think about what it meant that she hadn’t found it.

  Had she simply missed it? Or did Ruth still have it?

  But letting her thoughts wander while she tried to help the new Mageus wasn’t the safest thing to do, so she forced herself to forget about Harte’s clear disapproval and to focus on the task in front of her. Most of the people from the hospital were still processing the reality of their new lives. Born Mageus learned how to use their connection to the old magic as children, and by the time they were grown, it was second nature. But Ruth’s attack had been on adults. Learning how to focus their affinities—discovering what power they actually held—was proving to be challenging and frustrating for them.

  It wasn’t much more comfortable for Esta. The whole thing reminded her of her own childhood—the days she’d spent training with Professor Lachlan. She hated him. She needed to hate him, for all the ways he’d betrayed her. But helping the newly woken, she wondered if she didn’t also owe him. He’d taught her how to find the spaces between the seconds and had coached her until she could pull them slow with hardly any effort at all. He’d given her Ishtar’s Key and the secrets of slipping through time, a fact she didn’t want to admit—even to herself. It was as he’d said—he’d made her.

  Of course, she reminded herself, the man she’d known as the Professor wouldn’t have had to do any of that if the boy she’d known as Nibsy hadn’t stolen her entire life. Who would she have been if Nibsy Lorcan hadn’t killed her parents?

  Shaking off the questions of the past, she tried to focus on the man in front of her. Arnie was middle-aged, with a patch of hair on each side of his head and a ragged mustache tinged yellow on the edges. He kept losing focus, and when that happened, flames would burst from his fingertips, startling him and causing him to flail about until he found the pail of water to squelch the fire. If he wasn’t fast enough—and he often wasn’t—Esta would call one of the bottlers who worked at the brewery, and who was also a healer, to help with the burns.

  “Think of it as a connection,” Esta tried to explain as he soaked his hands in a bucket of water for the tenth time. “The whole world and everything in it is connected. Magic lives in the spaces between those connections. When you use your affinity, you’re pressing at the spaces—reshaping them and manipulating them.”

  He frowned at her. “How does that help me with the fire? It’s just hot.”

  Honestly, she didn’t know. Using her affinity, even when she was younger, had always felt intuitive, never dangerous.

  “I barely blink and the flames erupt,” he complained. “There’s no spaces. It just hurts.”

  “Maybe stop thinking of the fire as outside yourself?” she suggested. Fire, since it was a chemical reaction, was aligned with the inert, but time was different. It was Aether. It was everything.

  She was a miserable teacher.

  “I know you,” a soft voice said from behind her.

  Esta turned to see the girl from the warehouse staring at her. She looked younger now that she wasn’t wearing the stiff, high-necked gray. Her nose was smattered with freckles, and her eyes held an accusation. “No,” Esta lied, turning away from her. “You must be mistaken.”

  But the girl didn’t give up. “John. Your name is John,” she insisted. “You were there that night.”

  “No,” Esta said, turning back in time to see the moment the girl’s understanding clicked.

  “You’re one of them, and you were there that night,” the girl said, her eyes widening. “I saw you. I talked to you.”

  The day was clear and sunny, warm with the heat of summer, but suddenly, there was a burst of icy air, like a blast of winter sweeping through. The tree above them shook with the force of it, and Esta looked up to find the green faces of the leaves crawling with frost.

  “You did this to us,” the girl said, stepping toward Esta. “I knew it was you. I knew it all along.”

  “No,” Esta said, backing away. But she didn’t have the nerve to lie to this girl who looked so scared and broken and angry. “I just—” How could she answer the hate in the girl’s eyes? It didn’t seem enough to explain that she was just a tool. That she hadn’t intended anything, because the truth was that she had. She’d entered the warehouse that night knowing that others might be hurt. She’d chosen Harte
and their mission to get the necklace over these people’s lives, and it was a choice she would make again.

  At least, she thought she would.

  “Greta, that’s enough.” It was Ruth, who’d come up behind the girl.

  “But he’s the one—”

  “I said enough. You’re one of us now,” Ruth admonished. “Calm yourself.”

  The icy wind died off, replaced by the normal warmth of the day. Above, frost turned liquid dripped from the leaves, but their faces had gone brown from the cold.

  “Come with me,” Ruth said to Esta.

  Glad to be away from Greta and her accusations, Esta followed Ruth. “She hates us.”

  “She doesn’t yet understand the gift she’s been given,” Ruth said. “She will.”

  “What if she doesn’t?” Esta asked before she thought better of it.

  Ruth tilted her head and gave her the sort of look that Esta imagined only a mother would be able to give. “Would you give up your own affinity?”

  “No, but I was born with it,” Esta told her. “It’s who I am. Greta didn’t have any choice in the matter,” she said, thinking of Harte’s objections.

  “Neither did you. Your affinity was bestowed upon you by fate, and yet you’ve come to see it as essential. In time, Greta will too. They all will,” Ruth said.

  It was clear that Ruth believed what she said, and her voice was so sure, so filled with emotion, that Esta could almost believe it too. Maybe she had just been a tool, but in the end, no one had forced her to attack Lipscomb and the warehouse full of people. She could have tried to find a better way, but she hadn’t. She’d heard Lipscomb talk and she’d judged his life to be worth less than Harte’s.

  Maybe his life had been worth less than Harte’s. But watching these newly woken Mageus struggle and seeing the fear in their eyes every time their affinities burst forth uncontrolled, she wasn’t sure that she’d had any right to make that decision.

  Taking a deep breath, Esta shoved away her doubts. “Did you want something?”

  “You’ve acquitted yourself admirably this past night,” Ruth said. “What you did for Maggie and the children during the fire, and here, with the newly woken.”

  “We told you that we weren’t your enemy,” Esta pointed out, trying to keep any trace of smugness from her voice.

  “Yes, well . . .” Ruth paused, her nostrils flaring slightly, as though admitting as much had been an effort. “With all that’s happened, it seems that I must count you as an ally after all,” she said, not sounding all that happy about the situation. “With the damage to the brewery and the responsibility here with the newly woken, I need your help.”

  The words settled something inside of her. This is it. “What’s your plan?”

  “The Society,” Ruth said. “I want to make them pay for what they’ve done to us. I want them to crawl.”

  “The feeling is definitely mutual,” Esta told her. Whatever her doubts, that was one sentiment she could get behind one hundred percent.

  “But crawling isn’t enough. We need to be sure that they have no recourse left,” Ruth said, glancing at Esta from the side of her eye. “The Society cannot be allowed to keep the necklace. I need a thief.”

  “Then you’re in luck. Because I happen to be a damn good one.” She gave a little bow. “But I have one condition. If I help you with this, I want what you took from me. I want my cuff.”

  Ruth was silent for a long moment. “If I don’t agree?”

  “I’ll take it anyway,” she said. “I could take the necklace too, before you even get close to touching it. But I’d prefer to work with you. I hope that the fact that I’ve stayed this long shows you that I’d rather help you than fight you.” As she spoke, she realized that she wasn’t sure how much of what she said was a lie—and how much was the truth.

  “Fine,” Ruth said, her jaw tight. “You help us destroy the Society and get me the necklace and the cuff is yours.”

  But then what? Would she simply steal the necklace too and leave Ruth and the Antistasi behind, as though she hadn’t been part of this at all? Or was there a different way forward, a way where she and Harte didn’t have to fight alone? The more Ruth talked and explained the Antistasi’s plan, the more Esta wondered.

  UNTIL THE END

  1904—St. Louis

  Harte saw Esta coming toward him too late to avoid her. It had been the better part of a day, and as far as he could tell, the power inside of him had settled itself down to a low rumble of discontent, but he didn’t trust it. He’d kept his distance, all while keeping her in sight, because he didn’t trust the Antistasi, either.

  There was no doubt that Ruth was charismatic. She believed in the righteousness of what she was doing. But in Harte’s experience, the line between belief and zealotry was often a fragile one, indistinct and prone to crumble when examined too closely. Her idea to give Sundren magic might have been noble had her victims been given any choice in the matter. But Ruth had forced it upon them, had infected them with a power that they neither wanted nor had any ability to control.

  He couldn’t quite see how that was much different from what the Sundren did by forcing Mageus to hide their affinities. Both sides were driven by desperation and fear, and they seemed to him two halves of the same coin.

  As Esta sat next to him, he made sure to focus on locking down the power and was ready in case it decided to lurch toward the surface. It seemed quiet, but that could be just another of its tricks.

  She didn’t speak to him at first. Instead, Esta picked up a rock and lobbed it into the murky water beyond. The sun glinted off the surface, illuminating the ripples as they grew. For a second he could almost imagine that they were in another place, another situation. His whole life, he’d wanted only to be free from the city. But now that he was, he’d been so consumed with everything else, he’d barely had time to breathe.

  “It’s bigger than I imagined it would be,” he said softly.

  He felt her eyes on him. “The river?”

  “All of it.” He turned to her. “I knew it would be big, but I didn’t realize.”

  She worried her lip with her teeth as she let out a tired breath. “I know what you mean. Bigger and . . . different than I thought.” She paused, letting their mutual appreciation for the place they’d found themselves in stretch between them. “I’m sorry about flattening you,” she told him. “I was just desperate to find the—”

  “It’s fine,” he said, meaning it.

  Esta gave him a small nod and turned to look back at the river.

  “Ruth asked for our help,” she said, finally breaking the heavy silence between them. “She wants to destroy the Society, and to do that, she needs to make sure they don’t have the necklace.”

  Her voice was so hopeful, so determined, but something about it made the power inside of him feel like it was starting to wake again.

  “We’re not here to destroy the Society, Esta,” he told her, his voice coming out more clipped than he’d intended because his attention was focused on Seshat, in case the demon decided to make another play for Esta. “We’re here to get the necklace and get out, remember? The rest of this isn’t our fight.”

  “Why isn’t it?” she pressed. “We can do something here to help people.”

  “Or we could just make everything worse,” he told her. At her agitation, the power seemed to pulse with excitement, swelling and growing. “Look what happened after Ruth attacked that meeting. Look at the people we rescued from the hospital.”

  “She gave them their power back,” Esta said, remembering what Ruth had told her. “She helped them.”

  “She attacked them. Look at them,” he said, turning her back to face the group of ragged-looking victims from the Antistasi’s attack. Half were still dressed only in what they’d worn in the hospital. “Really look at them. Do any of those people look happy right now?”

  She shrugged away from him. “They will be. Aren’t you?”

  He la
ughed. “Happy?” Shaking his head, he tried to figure out how to make her understand. His affinity had driven his father away and destroyed his mother. It gave him power over people, true, but it had also kept him apart. He was always wary, always afraid of getting too close or letting anyone know too much about him. “Nothing about my affinity has made me happy, Esta.”

  She frowned at him. “That can’t be true.”

  “Let’s just go,” he said. “Please. We still have Julien. He can help us figure out where the necklace is, and then we can get it and get out of this town. We don’t need the Antistasi or their grand schemes.”

  Esta gestured to her arm. “Ruth still has Ishtar’s Key, remember? We can’t leave without it.”

  He ran his hands through his hair, trying to keep his frustration in check, so that he could keep the demon inside of him locked away. “She doesn’t exactly have a safe nearby, does she? We’re in the middle of nowhere. How hard could it be to steal it from her and go? We don’t need the rest of this. We don’t need to attack the Society—”

  “You would just walk away?” Her expression was unreadable, and when she spoke again, her voice came out as barely a whisper. “Even though they burned the brewery?” She met his eyes. “They could have killed children, Harte. The Guard knew there were children inside, and they didn’t care. They wanted them to die. Because they’re Mageus. Because one less Mageus is fine with the Society and the Guard, no matter how old or young.”

  He couldn’t argue with anything she’d said. The fire was nothing short of evil, but the Society was no different from the Order. Now that he was outside the confines of the Brink, it was clearer than ever how pointless it was to think that they would ever defeat them. Crush one roach or one hundred, and there were still a thousand more you never saw, ready to swarm as soon as the lights went out.

  Sure, they could help the Antistasi, and then what? The risks were too great, and the good that they might do? He wasn’t sure if it was enough to make up for the damage they could cause in the process. “We can’t,” Harte said finally.