It used to be hard to look at the girl without seeing Leena looking back at him, judging him for the choices he’d made and the path he’d chosen. It had gotten easier, in time, to see past Leena’s features—the golden eyes, the wide mouth that the girl would someday grow into—to the child beneath them. The promise in her.
Once he had thought that he could save her from Leena’s faults. Dolph’s partner, his wife, really, in everything but name, had been too soft when she should have been steel, too generous when she should have kept her cards close to her chest. It had been a surprise—a delightful one, but a surprise nonetheless—when Leena had decided to hide the child from Dolph. But in the end it had been her undoing.
He had hoped to mold the girl, to use her for his own bidding. Now James knew that in the end it would never work. He was raising a viper who would one day threaten everything he’d built, everything he was destined to become.
He could kill the girl now, but time was a funny thing, tangled as a knot and woven into a pattern that even he could not yet see. If he killed her, what might that change? What might he lose that her appearance had helped him to gain?
He couldn’t kill her. Not yet. But he could use her to send a message.
He took Viola’s blade from his jacket.
“Come, Carina, we’re going to play a little game.” He would send Esta a message through time and space and the impossible world. He would tell her he was waiting.
Using the blade named for the goddess of funerals, he began to cut.
THE DROP
1904—St. Louis
The carriage rattled onward through the night, carrying Esta toward some unknown destination. On the bench across from her, sprawled with a lazy confidence, North took up too much room. He had a revolver in his hand, a clear threat that she shouldn’t try anything.
“Best not jostle that too much,” he said, when she shifted the notebook that was resting on her lap. It looked like an average-size leather-bound notebook that anyone might carry with them, but it weighed more than an ordinary book should. Whatever was between the pages was dense and heavy—and dangerous. “We don’t want it going off before you deliver it.”
His warning made her sit a little straighter. “Where are we going, anyway?”
“You’ll see,” North said.
“I think I have a right to know who I’m going to kill,” she told him, trying to affect a bored indifference. In reality, her hands were damp with nervous sweat as she tried to keep the book as still as she could while the carriage bumped along. Considering the roughness of the roads that led from the edges of town, where the brewery was, into the center of St. Louis, it had been a challenge.
“Who said anything about killing anyone?” North asked. His eyes were shadowed by the brim of his hat, but his thin mouth hitched up in the moonlight that shone through the carriage’s window.
“It’s a bomb, isn’t it?” she asked, not yet allowing herself to feel any relief.
North’s lips flattened, a thin scar at the edge of them flashing white with his annoyance. “Bombs are for Sundren. They’re messy and sloppy. Nobody’s gonna die tonight,” he told her. “Except maybe you, if that package doesn’t get to where it needs to be. And definitely your friend, back at Mother Ruth’s, if you do anything to cause a problem.”
Esta frowned, ignoring his bluster. If the Antistasi wanted her and Harte dead, they would have already tried to kill them. “If it’s not a bomb, what is it?”
“It’s a gift,” he told her. Then he turned to watch out the window, signaling the end of the conversation.
A gift? Like hell.
The woman she’d heard the others call Mother Ruth had made it clear that whatever was in the parcel was dangerous. None of the Antistasi wanted to be anywhere near it when she handed it over to Esta with the warning not to open it until she was ready to make the drop. Ruth’s instructions had been simple: Don’t leave it anywhere but the center of the building, as close to the target as she could. And don’t do anything to betray the mission, or Harte will die.
If Esta got caught? Well, that wasn’t Ruth’s problem. The people she was delivering the book to wouldn’t take kindly to an intruder. Esta would be on her own and at their mercy, but no one had told her who the target was.
“At least tell me who I’m up against,” she said, trying to draw North’s attention back to her. The open road had given way to the stacked buildings of the outskirts of town, the factories and warehouses that lined the river.
“Does it matter?” he asked with a mocking smile. “You’re the Devil’s Thief, aren’t you?”
“I like to be prepared,” she said with a shrug in her tone. “And I like to be the one who decides whether the risk to my life is really worth the cost of theirs.”
North looked at her, his odd, uneven-colored eyes piercing her unease. “Who are you to make that judgment?” he said softly. “This isn’t the first deed done in your name, and it certainly won’t be the last. Now’s not exactly the time to be getting all high and mighty about things.”
His words rattled something inside of her. He was right. The Antistasi had used her name who knew how many times before. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t been the one to perpetrate any of the attacks; a choice she had made had set all of this into motion.
“That’s what I thought.” North turned to the window, scratching at the scruff on his jawline as he watched the passing city. Eventually, the carriage rumbled to a stop and North checked the window to see where they were. “We’re here.” He pushed his hat back so he could look her dead in the eye. “Unless you’ve changed your mind?”
Esta considered the options before her. She didn’t doubt that the notebook she was carrying, whatever North said, was something dangerous. She could still say no. She could drop the notebook here, pull time around her, and run.
But then what?
Mother Ruth and the rest of the Antistasi back at the brewery still had Harte. They’d taken him away not long after he’d opened his big mouth, and Esta had no idea where they’d put him. By the time she figured it out, he might already be dead—she couldn’t hold on to time that long, especially lately.
And even if she found Harte before they hurt him, she had no idea what they’d done with Ishtar’s Key. She hadn’t asked, because she didn’t want to alert them to its importance if they hadn’t already realized. But if they had already realized what kind of power the stone had . . .
She couldn’t worry about that. For now she had a job to do. And if her choice was between Harte and the person this delivery was set for, there wasn’t really a choice. Dakari, Dolph . . . Esta had lost too many people to lose another.
But there was one other thing, a point that kept niggling at her like an itch she couldn’t reach. She knew she was being used. Esta’s name had been thrown around for nearly two years now without her ever knowing, and if Ruth had her way, the Antistasi would continue to use it. But she’d had enough of being a pawn in someone else’s game. She’d been led like a marionette on a string her entire life by Professor Lachlan. She wasn’t about to allow Ruth the same power over her now.