THE RISK OF MAGIC
1904—St. Louis
In the dim light of the elevator shaft, Esta felt Harte’s fear as clearly as the vibrations of the machine beneath their feet, but she didn’t have time to explain.
As the car next to them descended, it created a rush of air warm with the scent of dust and axle grease that rustled the silk of her skirts and whipped at the hair coming loose around her face. Harte’s hand was gripping hers tightly enough that she could feel the sizzle of energy between them creeping against her skin.
Not for the first time, she had the feeling that it wasn’t him she was sensing. The energy wasn’t the same brush of warmth she’d felt from him when he’d manipulated her in the theater weeks ago or tried to read her thoughts in the carriage on the way to Khafre Hall. This energy felt different. More potent. More compelling, which was a sure sign of danger if she ever felt one.
She didn’t have time to worry too much about it at that moment, though. She would have one shot at this, one chance to get it right. And she might be making a huge mistake.
The moment the two elevator cars drew even with each other, Esta focused on her affinity and pulled time still. The vibrations beneath her feet stopped, and the noise in the shaft went silent. At the same time, she pulled Harte forward onto the roof of the next car and let go of her hold on time.
The elevators lurched back into motion as she released Harte’s hand.
Relief flooded through her as Harte grabbed for the cable to steady himself. It worked. She hadn’t known for sure what would happen when she used her affinity. She hadn’t known if she’d even be able to. She’d thought about taking the jump without slowing the elevators, but the risk of using her magic for the briefest moment seemed preferable to falling to their deaths.
Her gamble had paid off. Together they watched the elevator they had just been on continue to rise above them as the car they now were on top of descended. She’d used her affinity and nothing odd had happened. It had worked, just as it always had worked—easy. Right. But it wasn’t enough. They couldn’t keep standing there, because every second brought them closer to the ground floor, where more police waited.
When the car they were riding on lurched to a stop at the fourth floor, Harte seemed to gather his wits about him. “We can’t stay here,” he said, echoing her thoughts.
She listened for the sound of the doors opening and felt the slight bounce as people entered the elevator. “We’re not going to,” she told him. “We’re getting off.”
“Esta, there are too many people in there.” He gestured to the car below their feet.
The sound of the doors closing told her that they were about to move again. “We aren’t leaving that way. Hold on,” she said, just before the cables lurched back into motion.
Harte frowned at her, shadows thrown by the dim light of the shaft flickering across his face. “What’s the plan?”
“The doors to the shaft,” she said, pointing to the fourth-floor opening they were descending away from. “When we get to the second floor, I’m going to slow things down again long enough for us to open them. If anyone’s watching in the lobby, the elevator won’t look like it stopped.”
“You really think you can?” he asked.
“It worked a minute ago. We’ll just have to hope our luck holds.” The second floor was quickly approaching, and any moment now, the police who were probably waiting for them on the seventh floor would discover the empty elevator car. “Give me your hand,” she commanded, and this time he didn’t argue.
When the car was halfway past the third floor’s ornate brass grate, she focused on the seconds around her. Against her skin, she could feel the stirrings of the power simmering within Harte, but she ignored it and focused instead on the way time hung in the spaces around them, as real and as material as the cables that held the cars and the dust that tickled her nose. It would take longer than a few seconds to climb out of the elevator, and she wasn’t completely sure what would happen—not with Harte and the Book’s power making her own affinity feel so unstable again. But she didn’t have any other ideas.
She found the spaces between the seconds, those moments that held within them reality and its opposite, and she pulled them apart until the elevator slowed and the world around her went silent. But with the heat of the Book’s power prodding at her, it wasn’t easy to keep her hold on time.
“Help me,” she told him, grasping the metal grates with her free hand.
Understanding, Harte took the other side, and together they began to pull the doors apart. Once they were wide enough, Esta checked to make sure the way was clear. Standing a few feet away, at the opening to the stairs, was a man who could only be one of the plainclothes officers. He stood, staring sightlessly in their direction.
“Can you hold it?” Harte asked.
The tendrils of heat and power that had vibrated against her skin when she took Harte’s hand were climbing her arm. The more they twisted themselves around her, the more slippery the spaces between the seconds felt. A moment ago those spaces had felt solid and real, but with every passing heartbeat, her hold on time—her hold on magic itself—grew murky, indistinct. As though neither the seconds nor her magic really even existed.
“Not much longer,” she told him through gritted teeth as she fought to keep hold of her affinity.
“Then we’d better hurry.” Harte climbed down from the roof of the elevator and into the hallway and then turned to help her.
Esta’s feet had no sooner touched the ground than she realized the darkness of the elevator shaft had followed her into the well-lit hallway. It hung in the edges of her vision, threatening.
From inside the shaft, she heard a groaning of cables, a sound starkly out of place in the silent hush of the timeless moment. “Did you hear that?”
Harte frowned. “What?”
The groaning came again, louder this time. “That,” she told him. There shouldn’t have been any sound, not now when she had slowed the seconds to a near stop and the rest of the world had gone still and silent. Fear pooling within her, Esta tried to pull away from Harte, but he held her tight. “I can’t . . .”
“Esta?” He tightened his grip on her, his eyes stormy with confusion.
There were people in those elevators, people who had nothing to do with the officers chasing her. People who might die if the cables broke and the elevator plummeted to the ground below, just as people had died on the train. She didn’t understand what was happening, but she knew she had to stop it.
Esta wrenched herself away from Harte, away from the unsettling energy that felt like it was trying to claim her, and allowed time to slam back into motion. Suddenly, the gears of the elevator began to churn and she could hear music coming from somewhere nearby.
“What—” Harte started, but before he could question her any further, the man at the stairway shouted.
“Hey!” He pointed at them, his eyes wide with disbelief that he hadn’t noticed them standing there before. Lifting a whistle to his mouth, he reached for the golden medallion he wore on his lapel, but before he could touch it, Harte attacked, tackling the man and then knocking him out before he could do anything else.
“We have to get out of this hallway,” he told her as he rubbed at the knuckles of his right hand. “Before someone comes.”
Esta had already realized they’d need a hiding place. By the time Harte had pulled himself to his feet, she had one of the nearby rooms unlocked. “Bring him in here,” she said, stepping aside. “If we leave him out there, they’ll know.”
The room was exactly like the one she had checked into earlier that day. The walls were papered in the same elegant chintz, the bed had been covered in the same fine linens, and the furniture had the same burnished wood and brass fixtures as hers. This room, though, clearly belonged to a man. There were trousers and socks strewn about the floor, and even with the window open, the smell of stale smoke and old sweat hung in the air.
“What are we supposed to do with him?” Harte asked as he locked the door behind him.
“Take him into the bathroom,” Esta told him as she propped her leg up on the bed and hitched up her skirts.
Instead of moving, Harte was looking at her exposed leg.
She ignored the heated look he was giving her—and the answering warmth she felt stirring inside of her—as she unfastened the silk stocking she was wearing and pulled it down her leg. “Snap out of it, would you? Here,” she said, tossing the stocking to Harte, who still looked stunned as he caught the scrap of fabric. “Tie him up with that.” She rolled off the other stocking and tossed it to him as well.
If they weren’t in such a bind, the way his ears went pink as he caught the bit of silk might almost have been adorable, but they needed to get out of the room and the hotel as fast as they could. The longer it took, the more likely they’d be caught. After all, it was only a matter of time before the police figured out what she and Harte had done and started searching rooms.
While Harte was in the bathroom tying up the watchman, Esta began stripping out of the gown she was wearing. The second she had slipped it on at the department store, she’d known it was perfect. She’d never been one to care all that much for clothes, but she’d loved the dress, despite knowing that she was in no position to be admiring silly, pretty things. She sighed a little as it tumbled to the floor in a puddle of silk the color of quicksilver. The exact color of Harte’s eyes.
Esta shoved that unwanted thought aside as she stepped out of the pile of fabric and balled the gown up, the physical action reinforcing how unimportant the garment was. She kicked it under the bed.
“What are you doing?”
Esta turned to find Harte, his eyes wide and his cheeks pink.
“Getting rid of the dress,” she told him.
“I see that,” he said, and she didn’t miss the way his hand clenched into a fist or the tightness in his voice. “But why are you getting rid of the dress?”
“It’s too noticeable,” she said, frowning. “And I’m too noticeable in it.”
“You don’t think this is going to be even more noticeable?” he asked as he gestured stiffly toward her, standing as she was in nothing more than a corset and a pair of drawers.
In her own time she saw people wearing less than this on the city streets. Not that Harte would understand. So often, she forgot how different they were—how much a product of his own time he was. Moments like this reminded her . . . but he was just going to have to get over it.
“I wasn’t planning on going out there like this,” she said, heading to the wardrobe. “There has to be something in here,” she told him.
She gathered some of the men’s clothing that was hanging clean and freshly pressed inside the wardrobe. When she saw the doubt in his expression, she ignored it.
“That is never going to work,” he muttered, more to himself than to her.
“Look at how easily Julien recognized me, and he wasn’t even looking for me—I’m too tall not to stand out,” she told him. “At least for a woman.”
He looked unconvinced. “You really think you look anything like a man?”
“I think people usually only see what they expect to see,” she said as she slipped a stiffly pressed shirt on. It smelled of fresh linen and starch, scents that brought to mind memories of Professor Lachlan, of a childhood spent trying to please him, the days she’d spent studying next to him in the library that took up the top floor of the building.
But now the memory of that library brought with it a different image. Dakari. And the smell of linen and starch only served to remind her that lies often hid behind the faces you trusted.
Pushing aside the past, she buttoned the shirt, but not before she loosened the ties of her corset a little, so it didn’t press her into such an hourglass shape. Finally able to breathe, she finished fastening the buttons.
“Let’s hope they’re all blind,” Harte muttered. “Every single one of them.” But he left her to finish getting dressed while he went and checked on the man in the bathroom one last time.
She tried not to be too pleased with his response as she found a top hat in the wardrobe and, smoothing out the stray strands around her face as best she could, tucked her hair up into it. Frowning at herself in the ornately beveled mirror, she wondered if Harte was right. Her face was still too soft looking, and she didn’t have time to do much more than try to rub away the powder she’d put on earlier that night.
It will work. She’d dressed like a man before—when she’d helped Dolph Saunders rob Morgan’s exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few weeks back. She’d walked into a room filled with members of the Order—including J. P. Morgan himself—and no one had noticed that she was a woman. Of course, it might have only worked then because people never pay any attention to the servants.
“Ready?” she asked, giving her lapels one final tug to cover what evidence there was of the shape of her corset beneath the suit.
Harte turned and gave her a good long, appraising look. “We should just use your affinity and slip out without all”—he gestured toward her new outfit—“this.”
“Didn’t you see what happened in the hallway?” she asked, shuddering a little at the memory of the darkness. There was something about it that felt both empty and all-consuming at the same time, like if she stared at it straight on, she might lose herself in it. And then there were the sounds of the cables groaning. She didn’t trust her affinity right now—at least not when it was linked to Harte.
“If you’re still feeling weak, we can go in small spurts. You don’t have to hold time for so long.” The desire she’d seen in his eyes earlier was gone now. Instead, Harte was looking at her with the soft pity that made her skin crawl.
“I feel fine,” she told him. It was a lie—she felt shaken and unsure of her affinity, but the darkness wasn’t her fault . . . or was it? Had she brought something through the Brink—something dangerous and unexpected? She didn’t know, and they didn’t have time to figure it out. All she knew for sure was that she hated the worried emotion in his eyes. “There’s no reason to push our luck. Let’s just do this my way, okay?”
She didn’t leave him much choice; she was in the hallway before he could argue.
Once again the sounds of an orchestra and the distant murmuring of a party came to them through the quiet. “If we can get to the ballroom, we can use the crowd to hide,” Esta said, pointing in the direction of the music. “If there’s a ballroom, there has to be a way to get to the kitchen—a service hall or something. From there maybe we can find a delivery entrance for the hotel.”
“They’ll be watching those doors too,” Harte said, checking behind them as they continued onward down the hall.
“Probably.” They paused only a moment before crossing in front of the stairwell the man in the bathroom had been guarding. “But if I have to chance using my magic, I’d rather wait until then,” she said.
“If we get that far,” he muttered under his breath.
She shot him a hard look. “They’ll have discovered the empty elevator by now, and if they figure out that the guard on this floor is missing . . .”
“I’m not planning on standing here, waiting for them to find us,” Harte finished, sweeping his arm to indicate that she should lead the way.
They followed the sound of the music to the mezzanine entrance of the ballroom, a narrow balcony that ringed the dance floor below on three sides. Inside, the glittering chandeliers were dimly lit, giving the ballroom a soft glow. On one end, a stage held a small orchestra that was playing a waltz, but no one on the dance floor below was dancing. Probably, Esta realized, because the room was filled with men. Even the servers, all dressed in white jackets and dark pants, were men. There wasn’t a woman in sight.
Esta leaned close to Harte so she could speak in a low voice. “Feel free to admit I was right any time you’d like.”