He was standing apart from them, unsure of how he got there or what he was supposed to do now that he was outside. He wasn’t onstage, so the gown he was wearing and the weight of the wig felt uncomfortable and out of place. Part of him thought that he was supposed to stay, to make sure that Darrigan and Esta were okay, but there was a deeper impulse to slink off into the night. He began to back toward the darkened fairgrounds, out of sight from anyone who might be looking for someone to blame, when an earsplitting scream erupted from the center of the crowd.
It was the debutante he’d met just moments before, the one who’d been selected as the Queen of Love and Beauty. They’d taken the decoy necklace from him and had given it to her, but now a thick, dark cloud of smoke was pouring from where the necklace still perched around her neck. She was tearing at it, trying to get it off, but it was clearly stuck.
I did this, he thought, horrified. He’d only wanted to clear his name, to get Darrigan out of town before anyone knew, and instead, he’d helped them create this monstrous chaos.
People were backing away from the poor girl, terrified of the darkness blooming from the jeweled collar, but Julien found himself walking toward her—toward the danger.
He was there before he could fully think through the consequences. Taking hold of the necklace, he wrenched his arms apart and broke it in two. The girl ran, probably back into the arms of her mother, and Julien hurled the necklace as far as he could, to spew its poison far, far away from the crowd.
But not before he’d breathed in some of the dark fog himself.
NEVER ENOUGH
1904—St. Louis
Margaret Jane Feltz had done quite a lot of things in her life that she wasn’t proud of at the moment. Most of those she’d done because she’d believed at the time it was the right thing to do, because Ruth had told her that it was, and because she’d wanted Ruth’s warm approval more than she wanted the discomfort of standing against her sister.
Maggie might have had an uncanny knack for mixing chemicals and powders—a gift of the kitchen magic that seemed to run in her family—but she hated it just the same. Still, she was grateful for the one incendiary she’d held back just in case. When she saw Ben grab Esta by the throat, she felt the air in the rotunda go electric, hot and bright like she’d never in her life felt it. She pulled the small canister from her satchel and activated the fuse before she rolled it toward them, placing it between the angry blond man in the tuxedo and the two she’d come to think of as friends.
It popped with a violent burst of light, throwing Ben from Esta and knocking him unconscious to the floor.
She ran to where Esta was lying, prone and still on the polished marble floor, and a moment later North was there. They gathered the two of them, and then with a click of North’s watch, they were gone.
Between the crowds from the parade and the news that was beginning to spread about the attack on the ball, the streets were in chaos. All of the Antistasi’s planning, and for what? The Mageus would now be even worse off than before. Ruth had been wrong—about everything. Maggie had suspected all along, but now she understood.
As they made their way through town to reach the train station, Maggie tried not to think about the fact that she was leaving behind her sister and the Antistasi, who had become her family. But she knew that she’d done all she could here, and now there was somewhere else she was needed more.
She’d tried so hard to do one small bit of good. But it hadn’t been enough. It wasn’t ever enough. This time, she vowed, it would be.
THE DAGGER
1904—St. Louis
Jack woke sometime in the depths of the night with only a hazy memory of everything that had happened at the ball. Darrigan and Esta had managed to get away. They’d taken the necklace, but they had not been able to retrieve the Book. Instead, they’d exposed themselves, and now the entire country knew about their evil intent. Those mistakes would only help him in the future.
After he’d returned to his room, he’d pored over the Book, looking for some answer, but he didn’t recall the words he’d read or how the pages had begun to glow or how he had reached through them, knowing that they would open for him, knowing that his fingers would be able to sink through the paper itself to find the object he’d placed there some months before.
He turned to the vial of morphine and instead found something more. On the table next to the bedside was an ancient artifact—the same one he had hidden inside the pages of the Book for safekeeping so many months ago. He picked it up and turned it in the light, marveling at its appearance as he reveled in the weight of the stone it contained, a sign of the power held within it.
Jack had obtained the artifact itself ages ago—not long after he’d taken the Book from Darrigan. After the Conclave, he’d begun to worry that someone might find it. He’d used one of the spells in the Book to conceal the object within its pages, turning the Book itself into a container for the artifact so that he could carry both with him at all times.
But once concealed, the Book had not willingly given the artifact back. For more than a year now, he’d nearly driven himself mad with the work of trying to force the Book to reveal its contents, all to no avail.
Now, it seemed, his luck had turned. It was as though the Book understood the crossroads he was at, as though it knew that he would need all the power he could harness in the days and weeks to come, and it had given up its contents like an offering. A benediction for the journey ahead—a journey that he was well aware would be difficult but that was his very destiny to fulfill.
SLEEPWALKING
1904—St. Louis
Esta didn’t know how they got away from the fair. She remembered pain and a chilling burst of power, and then, little by little, she surfaced from the fog of what had happened. Seshat. Thoth. And the dangerous reality of her own affinity. By then North had taken them forward in time, to long after the fair had cleared out and everyone had gone back to the safety of their own homes.
She moved like a sleepwalker, barely seeing or hearing as Maggie and North led them through the fairgrounds back to the waiting wagon. She almost didn’t remember to retrieve her stones—the cuff and the necklace—but Maggie helped with that. Then it was a dash to the station, and before she could process everything, she found herself in a Pullman car, resting next to Harte on the narrow bottom bunk.
Even with everything that had happened, even with her world feeling like it had fallen apart, the sun still managed to come up the next day. It warmed Esta’s face through the window of the train, waking her. There was a moment just as she came out of sleep when she forgot where she was—what she was. In that moment between sleep and waking, she did not yet remember the night before. She did not think of the mistakes she’d made or the lives those mistakes had taken. She did not yet remember the terrible truths that had been revealed and the heartbreaking reality of what lay before her. Instead, she thought that she heard a woman’s voice singing to her, and she thought she could almost remember the words of the song. It must have been a memory from somewhere long ago, when she was nothing but a child with no guilt, only innocence. With the world in front of her, wide and open as a promise.