North considered the question, his eyes unfocused for a second. “The east wing of the building is mostly maintenance and workers, but on the west side, there are some rooms for offices and meetings. They’ll want privacy, so I expect that they’ll set up for the Prophet there.”
With a nod, North pulled them into a broom closet barely big enough to hold them. “The ball starts at ten, when the parade arrives, so we’ll need to be a little early to get into position.” He adjusted the dial of his watch, moving the minute hand ahead so that it dragged the hours along with it. Then he looked up at them, meeting each of their eyes in turn. “Ready?”
They each took hold of his arm, and once again, the world flashed white.
HUNGRY
1904—St. Louis
If Harte never again had to feel the creeping sense of unease he got when North used that magical watch of his, it would be too soon. He’d thought it was bad when Esta had pulled him through the years, but North’s magic was worse. When the world went white, he felt like it disappeared completely and like a shard of ice had stabbed him in the chest. Even once he got his vision back, the cold ache in his chest was still there, like the shard was still melting in the center of his heart.
The voice inside of him didn’t like it any better than he did. He could hear it screeching in the hollows of his head, blocking out everything for a moment and reminding him of the vision he’d had of the woman—the demon—in the temple.
But he pushed that voice down until it was a low, constant rumble in the back of his mind and shook off the lingering discomfort of the ice in his chest as he tried to focus.
“We’ll need clothes,” North was telling them. “Uniforms or something. We don’t want anyone to notice us, if we can help it.”
“We just need to get Julien and cause a big enough disturbance to get everyone out,” Harte argued. “The faster we do this the better.”
“We can create a disturbance,” Maggie said, taking North’s hands.
“Are you sure?” Esta asked her.
Maggie patted the pockets of her dress. “I’ve got some things with me. Nothing that will do any real harm. Just some smoke and flares to put on a little show, but everyone’s already going to be on edge after the attack on the parade. It shouldn’t be a problem to clear the ballroom before they get into it. You two get that friend of yours.”
North opened the door, and the sounds of the evening came through the crack—the murmuring of voices, the clattering of plates and silver being set, and farther off in the distance, the music of an orchestra. “We’ll meet back at the wagon,” North told them. “Good luck.”
Once they were gone, Harte was alone in the narrow space with Esta. If it had been a challenge before to keep the power inside of him in check, it felt impossible now. Beneath the scent of dust and the sharp bite of some cleaning solvent, he could smell her—the soft scent of sweat, clean and pure on her skin, and the power she carried within.
The thought startled him. It wasn’t he who could smell her power. Magic didn’t have a smell . . . did it?
Her eyes found his in the gloom of the closet, and the power surged again.
“We need to get going,” he said, his voice sounding almost unhinged. She heard it too. Her brows bunched over her whiskey-colored eyes.
“Are you okay, Harte?”
He wanted to shake his head. He wanted to tell her to run. But he could only stare numbly at her for a moment, his voice silenced by the effort of keeping the power inside of him in check.
North was right. “We’ll need clothes,” he said finally, choking the words out like a man drowning. “Something that doesn’t stand out.”
She studied him a moment longer, a question in her eyes. But she didn’t ask it. “Leave it to me,” she said.
He didn’t argue for once. He didn’t want her to go alone, but he needed to get away from her to get the power inside of him back under his control. But a moment was all that he had. She was no sooner out the door than she was coming back, her arms filled with two sets of dark suits and crisp white shirts.
“Do I even want to know?” he asked, trying to make light of the moment. But his voice was too tight, and the words came out as a reprimand he didn’t intend.
She cut him a sharp look. “It’s not half as exciting as you’re thinking. They have a rack of uniforms for the waitstaff tonight.” She gave him a shrug as she started unbuttoning the rough-spun shirt she’d been wearing. Beneath, her breasts were bound with wide strips of linen that contrasted with the expanse of tawny skin that was the color of the desert sand at twilight.
He shuddered, knowing exactly where that image had come from. Seshat was hungry. She was tired of his hesitation and his refusal to take what he wanted.
What she wanted.
It was easier to turn away from her, to not watch her long, lithe arms disappear beneath the cover of the new clothing. But he could still feel her. Every particle of his being was attuned to her—to the warm magic that was wound into the very center of her being.
Soon, the voice hummed. So very, very soon.
They finished dressing, and when he turned back to her, she was wearing a look of determination so quintessentially Esta that he could barely breathe. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to pull her to him and press his lips against hers, but he knew that he’d grown too weak beneath the constant onslaught of the power that dwelled inside of him. If he touched her now, he would not be able to stop, and they would both be done.
“Esta—” Her name came from his lips like a plea, and he could not tell if he was warning her or calling for her or simply girding himself against the power inside with the talisman of her name.
“Not now,” she said, her eyes dark with understanding. “Not until we’re out of here.”
They left the safety of the broom closet and followed the hallway back to where the guests were already gathered in the rotunda. The orchestra was still playing its soft melody from the loft where the enormous organ loomed above them. On the far side of the room, a group of people had crowded around a mustached man with a pair of pince-nez perched on his nose. Roosevelt. The dark-suited men near him must have been part of his security detail.
Everywhere Harte looked, he saw the life he would never have. The silks and the jewels, the tinkling laughter. The champagne and the stiff upper lips and the freedom these men had to walk through the world as though they owned it.
He could not even bring himself to hate them for it, because he didn’t know, if the tables were turned, that he would be any better. They were, all of them, only what life had carved them out to be.
“I don’t think the parade has arrived yet,” he told Esta.
“We should figure out which doors they’ll use,” she said.
“Not those main ones.” He nodded to where they had come in earlier and where a steady stream of elegantly clothed people was arriving.
“Maybe in that maintenance hall?” she asked. “There’s got to be some kind of delivery door, where they brought all of this in earlier.”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
He straightened his shoulders to match the posture of the other servers, and then the two of them started across the center of the rotunda. At the edge of his vision, movement caught his eye, and he glanced up to see Maggie on the catwalk high above them. At least that much will work.