They walked on down Park Row, past the towering double turrets of a castlelike building looming above them, and then on past a lonely-looking cemetery, its tombstones like broken teeth sticking out from the remaining snow. When they rounded the corner, Esta found herself staring up at the brownish-gray exterior of St. Paul’s.
“This is as far as I go,” Viola said, coming to a stop near the deep covered portico of the chapel. “They know me there, but you keep walking, three, maybe four blocks thataway, and you’ll find the bankers. Should be easy to make your quota if you’re half as good as you claim. If you don’t come back . . .” She shrugged. “You’ll find your way, or we won’t have to worry about you no more.”
AS ABOVE, SO BELOW
Viola was right. South of Fulton Street, the city’s financial district was heaven for a thief. Bankers and lawyers with fat wallets and jeweled pins. Women with purses filled with coins. Easy pickings.
And a complete waste of time.
Even without using her affinity, it didn’t take her long to get her quota and then some. Less than an hour later, she’d found her way back to a streetcar heading north and was on her way uptown.
She still wore the empty silver cuff under the sleeve of her gown, a reminder of what was at stake, of what she had to do. All night, she’d tossed and turned in the narrow, musty-smelling bed—if you could even call it that—thinking about her missing stone. Planning her next move.
Professor Lachlan had warned her it was too much of a risk to change anything about the heist, but he hadn’t known—or hadn’t warned her—that Ishtar’s Key would basically incinerate. She hadn’t planned on being trapped in the past.
She was already working blind when it came to Dolph Saunders. She needed more information, more options in case things didn’t go as planned, because nothing could stop her from getting Ishtar’s Key. Not when the future held Dakari, shot and possibly dying. No one would come looking for him, not until he didn’t return and it was too late.
According to the clipping she’d lifted from Professor Lachlan’s notebook, Khafre Hall was located on Park Avenue. In her own time, that part of Park Avenue was an elevated road leading into Grand Central, but in 1902, the gleaming white facade of the terminal didn’t exist. If the world of lower Manhattan felt eerily familiar earlier that morning, the streets of Midtown looked like a completely different world. ?The soaring skyscrapers that would one day box in the sky weren’t even a dream yet. Instead, the avenue was lined by shorter, ornately decorated buildings—stately homes and large hotels, and just north of Forty-First Street, the enormous edifice that was Khafre Hall.
The Order’s headquarters might have been named for one of the great pyramids, but with its four stories of white marble, it looked more like a transplanted villa from the Italian Renaissance. Esta didn’t have any doubt she’d found the right place, though. High atop the roof, gold statues of various gods glinted beneath the winter’s sun. Above the building’s main entrance, the cornice was carved with the words AS ABOVE, SO BELOW, a phrase supposedly coined by Hermes Trismegistus, the mythic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian Toth that the Order saw as its precursor. The heavy bronze doors were inscribed with a symbol Esta recognized easily as the Philosopher’s Hand—an alchemical recipe depicting the secrets of unlocking occult powers.
Professor Lachlan had taught her all this as part of her training. He’d shown her the different representations of the hand to teach her about the theories of alchemy, to explain how the Order misunderstood and perverted the very notion of magic by trying to divide existence into neat parts in their efforts to control it.
The building was impressive, a declaration of the Order’s beliefs and a demonstration of their power in this city. ?The fact that they never rebuilt after the theft of the artifacts was evidence of how much they’d been weakened. But the building as it was now served as a reminder of all she would have to face. Of all she still had left to lose. Even from her vantage point across the street, it looked impenetrable.
The street was quiet, so she took the clipping from its hidden pocket to look over it again for some clue of what had happened. But when she unfolded the delicate paper, the once-clear type looked blurred, smudged. The individual letters seemed to wriggle and writhe on the page, like they were trying to transform themselves into other letters, to rearrange themselves into other words.
Esta blinked hard and rubbed at her tired eyes, sure that she must be seeing things, but when she looked back, the words remained stubbornly unreadable. It was as though the future that had once been an established fact was no longer clear or determined. The heist was no longer an established fact.
“No,” she whispered to herself as she brought the paper closer to her eyes. Like she didn’t have perfect eyesight. Like getting closer would do something to stop the words from swirling and shifting on the page.
She hadn’t done anything wrong . . . had she?
“You!” The voice came from so close that she barely had time to turn before the man from the night before had ahold of her wrist. His face was blackened and bruised from her brutal attempt to escape, but now a hideously gleeful expression lit his features. “I thought that was you.”
She tried to jerk away, using her erratic motions as a cover for the way she crumpled the clipping and slipped it into her sleeve. “Let me go,” she demanded, struggling against him. “I don’t want to hurt you again.” And the last thing she wanted was to draw attention from anyone inside Khafre Hall.
Charlie Murphy only laughed and started tugging her across the street. “You won’t have the chance to hurt me again, not when I’m through with you.” He laughed again, and his grip on her wrist tightened as he wrenched her arm painfully, pulling her close enough that she could smell the sourness of his breath.
“Let me go,” she said, refusing to plead.
“I know what you are. I recognized what you did at the Haymarket,” he said with an almost unholy anticipation lighting his face. “I’d planned to hunt for you. I was looking forward to seeing the fear in your eyes when we found you.”
“So sorry to disappoint,” she snarled, grabbing the arm he held her wrist with. Calling on every one of the techniques Dakari had taught her, she twisted violently. ?The move caught him by surprise, as she’d intended, and he released her with a yelp of pain.
But it only slowed him for a moment. The look of anticipation he’d worn moments ago was now transformed to seething hate. She needed to get away, but before she could pull time to a slow, Murphy’s eyes went wide. He went completely rigid before collapsing hard and motionless to the ground.
The way his body had jerked and then fallen had jarred her enough that she’d lost her hold on time, and before she could regain it, her arms were pinned to her sides and she was surrounded by an earthy, spicy scent that reminded her of patchouli. A soft, disembodied voice whispered in her ear to be still, and Esta realized that maybe Dolph hadn’t let her go off alone after all.
THE CURRENCY OF SECRETS