Ada lifted her violin and began to play. At first the song matched the intensity of the illusion, buffeting against the rocks and spiraling upward with the howling wind. Ada’s bow flew so fast against the strings that Corinne thought for sure she would lose control of the song, but each note landed with fierce precision. Corinne could feel the pain and anger finding new life as the music filled her. Her illusion responded to her rising torment. The storm hurled dagger-sharp rain against them, and the wind shrieked and spiraled, threatening to tear the world apart.
Then the music began to shift, guiding Corinne down from the terrible height. She shook her head and closed herself off to the emotions that Ada offered. She didn’t want to leave behind the fury of her grief. Johnny Dervish had found her when she was broken and scared. He had given her a place to call home. Now he was dead, and it didn’t seem fair that they had to go on. It didn’t seem fair that without him, they might not be able to.
“What if we never find out who killed him?” Corinne asked. Her voice seemed too soft to carry over the punishing storm, but she knew Ada could hear her. “What if we can’t save the Cast Iron?”
It wasn’t a fear she could entrust to anyone but Ada. It wasn’t even something she had admitted to herself until this moment. She was supposed to be the fearless one, the one with no qualms and no limits. Yet somehow she always ended up right here, trying to break into pieces while Ada calmly refused to let her.
Ada set down her violin, but Corinne’s illusion remained, unyielding in its furor.
“Do you remember the first fight we had?” Ada asked.
“You mean five minutes after I moved in?”
“You asked me if I was in charge of the laundry.”
“In my defense,” Corinne said, “I was a complete and utter bonehead back then.”
“Just back then?”
Corinne tried to kick her, but she couldn’t disentangle her legs from the blankets. At some point—Corinne couldn’t remember exactly when—she had dropped the illusion, and the comforting familiarity of their cluttered bedroom surrounded them again. The petty provocations during their first few months together seemed almost like a dream now. They hadn’t hated each other exactly, but Ada would practice her violin late into the night, and Corinne would say ignorant, unfeeling things almost every time she opened her mouth, and it hadn’t seemed possible for them to do anything but coexist.
Corinne couldn’t pinpoint the moment they had become an inseparable, unstoppable force. She did remember the day of her grandfather’s funeral, when she had wept alone on this same bed for almost two straight days, and instead of leaving her to break apart, Ada had played a song so beautiful on her violin that Corinne had felt for the first time that she might be able to go on.
“Despite your appalling first impression, we’ve been at this for years,” Ada said. “We’ve never come across anything we can’t crack.”
“What about the HPA?” Corinne asked. Her grief was muted for now, but the fear still remained. “We can’t hide from them forever.”
Ada plucked at one of the violin strings, her expression tense with thought. Then she dug through the blankets until she found Corinne’s hand. She gripped it tightly and looked her in the eye.
“This is you and me we’re talking about, remember?” she said. “If we’re in this together, then they don’t stand a chance.”
CHAPTER NINE
The Red Cat was in a nicer part of town than the Cast Iron, surrounded by hotels and banks and ritzy restaurants with cloth napkins and French waiters. Luke Carson liked things big, bold, and gilded. The front entrance had a uniformed doorman and a sign encircled by buzzing electric lights. Inside there were gold chandeliers, champagne, and tablecloths the color of blood.
Ada, Corinne, and Gabriel went to the back entrance, which was considerably less classy but much more private. Corinne had wanted it to just be her and Ada, since they had both performed at the Red Cat before and might be able to talk their way in. Saint hadn’t argued about being left behind, but Gabriel had flatly refused. In the end, it had seemed like less trouble to bring him along.
Corinne knocked on the back door until a man cracked it open. He narrowed his eyes at them in recognition but shook his head.
“Your lot ain’t coming in here tonight. Carson’s orders.” He spat a wad of tobacco toward their feet.
“We don’t want to come in,” Ada told him.
“We don’t?” Corinne asked.
“Fetch Charlie Lewis,” Ada said. “He asked me to meet him here.”
“He did?” Corinne asked. Gabriel nudged her.
The man was staring at Ada hard, as if trying to find a reason to call her a liar.
“If you don’t get him, and he finds out I had to stand out here in the cold all night, you’re going to be in a heap of trouble,” Ada told him.
From what Corinne knew about Charlie, she couldn’t imagine him causing trouble for anyone, but she dutifully kept her mouth shut. The man was obviously at war with himself, but after a few seconds he told her to wait a minute, then slammed the door shut and locked it.
“Well, that was easier than I expected,” Corinne said.
“I figured if we waited on you to sweet-talk him, we’d be out here all night,” Ada replied.