Relief flooded through her like quicksilver. It was almost too easy to slip past the man’s massive body. She caught the laugh bubbling up in her chest at the confusion in his eyes as she slipped out of the alcove, beyond his grasp. The second she let go of time, the world slammed back to life, and the man stumbled heavily to the floor with a groan.
In her relief, she didn’t realize how alert he actually was. Before she could get away completely, he caught her by the ankle.
“Let me go!” Esta growled under her breath. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, not here in the middle of this overcrowded room. She had to get away and find Bridget. She needed to get back to what was important—the Book, the stone. The job she had been sent to do.
But the man seemed to be enjoying himself. “That how it’s to be, is it?” He laughed, tugging on her with his ironlike grip, and hauled her along the floorboards, back toward the alcove.
In that moment, what she wouldn’t have given to be able to do anything else—to be able to call up a wind or send a jolting shock. But all she could do was manipulate the present. A powerful-enough affinity when she was nicking a diamond stickpin, it was useless if someone had ahold of her, unless she wanted to slow time for them as well.
“I’m not here for you,” she hissed at him again, trying to pull away.
“You were waiting for me,” the man said, his eyes bright with the chase.
“Corey, whoever he is, didn’t send me.” She gave him a few sharp kicks as she tried to get her ankle free.
The man simply laughed and dug his fingers into her ankle. His eyes were alert and more clear than they had been seconds ago, and before she could brace herself, he gave a sharp, unexpected jerk that brought her to the floor. Nearby, a group of people glanced over their shoulders at her struggle and then promptly averted their eyes.
The man laughed and kept tugging, causing Esta’s skirts to climb higher as he dragged her, exposing her legs as she fought against him. But it was no use. He had one ankle and was reaching his sausagelike fingers up her skirts, pinching her bare thigh above her petticoats, up farther. . . .
Not caring who saw her now, she let out a vicious kick that caught the man directly in the face. She felt the crunch of bone collapsing through the thin sole of her boot, and then blood spurted from the man’s broken nose. He roared like an injured bear but still didn’t let go of her ankle. His fingers tightened as he twisted her leg painfully, his eyes bright with some lurid excitement, and she felt her own bones ache under the pressure.
Desperate, she kicked him again. And again. Exactly like Dakari had taught her. Until the heels of her button-up boots were coated with the man’s blood. Finally, his fingers released their grip, and he slumped unconscious to the floor.
Esta scurried away from him, vaguely aware of the group of people who had surrounded her. The man’s face was a broken mess as he lay sprawled on the floor, but he was still breathing. For now, at least.
The group around her had grown silent. She met the eyes of one girl with too-pink cheeks whose skin had gone an ashy gray beneath the paint.
“I didn’t mean . . . ,” Esta started, but her words died as the girl let out a ragged scream at the same time that two men from the crowd took a step toward Esta.
She could tell by their expressions that pleading would get her nowhere.
Esta stood on shaking legs. She would try to find Bridget later. For now she needed to get as far away from the crowded hall and the snub-nosed bouncers as she could. But suddenly she couldn’t breathe. Her lungs seized, her chest went tight, like the oxygen had drained from the room. In a panic, she searched the still life around her for some sign of an attack, but her vision was already going fuzzy around the edges. Desperately, she struggled to pull in air that seemed to be missing from the room.
Before she could even begin to focus on the seconds ticking past her, before she could find the spaces between them to escape, a sharp pain erupted across the back of her head. And then everything went black.
THE APPROACH
Jack glanced up at the commotion in the balcony, but he dismissed it without another look. Harte, though, had felt the spike of magic, the telltale energy jolting through the room that only someone who had an affinity to the old magic would recognize. He wondered what the source of it had been, and whether the girl had been the unlucky recipient of the attention from Corey’s security.
If so, it was partially his fault for chasing her away. He should never have kissed her. He should have found a different way. His stomach tightened with guilt, but there wasn’t anything he could do for her now.
He turned his attention back to Jack, who was taking two glasses of whiskey from a waiter girl’s tray. The prodigal nephew of J. P. Morgan, Jack Grew was one of the sons of the city. His family was deep into the political machine and were known members of the Order of Ortus Aurea, so no one was more surprised than Harte when Jack had shown up at his dressing room after a show months ago, wildly excited about the act and desperate to know everything about Harte’s skills.
Harte had kept Jack at arm’s length . . . until the night Dolph Saunders summoned him to propose that suicide mission of a job. After that, Harte saw Jack in a different light and had started cultivating a careful friendship with him, all the while figuring out how he could best use him. And how he could keep Jack away from Dolph.
“It’s been a few weeks since I’ve seen you,” Harte said, accepting one of the glasses. “I was surprised to get your message earlier.”
“Sorry about that.” Jack grimaced. “I haven’t had time to do anything lately,” he said before taking a long swallow of his drink. “My uncle’s been on my case all week to help with a reception for an exhibition he’s planning at the Metropolitan. Opens Friday, though, so at least it’ll be over with at the end of the week.”
“Oh? I hadn’t heard about it. . . .” Harte let his voice trail off, as though his not hearing was some mark against the reception itself.
“Some big fund-raiser,” Jack said sourly into his nearly empty glass. “It’s a waste of everyone’s time.”
Harte gave him a wry smile. “Kind of you to help with it.”
Jack snorted at the joke. “Kindness has nothing to do with it. I would have found a way to get out of it, but there are a couple of things I wanted the chance to examine.”
“Oh?” Harte asked, his voice breezy and his expression disinterested, because he’d learned over the past few months that it was the easiest way to egg Jack on. At first Jack had been careful and closed off in their conversations when it came to his family or the Order, but Harte knew how to work an audience. It wasn’t long before Jack was willingly handing over information in an attempt to prove his own importance and win Harte over.
“He’s got quite the collection of art from the Ottoman Empire, but some of these pieces are fairly unique. He tends to keep his most valuable and rare pieces to himself, but with the Conclave at the end of the year, he couldn’t resist showing off.”