Her mouth went tight, and for a moment he thought she would continue to lie to him. Finally, she spoke. “He’s my father.” Her eyes were steady, even as her voice shook. “Or, rather, he’s as close to a father as I ever had. He raised me. ?Trained me to pick locks and lift wallets. He made me who I am.”
He studied her, searching for a sign of the lie, but all he found was a sharp pain in her expression that he recognized too well. “Where is he now?”
“He’s dead,” she told him, her voice hitching. “Gone.”
Even through the haze Evelyn had left behind, he felt like a veritable ass. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Her mouth went tight. “Some affinity you have, isn’t it?”
Harte ignored the insult. “If he’s dead, why did you still come to find the Magician?”
Esta licked her lips. “Because he told me to. He could see things. He had an affinity for knowing about things that would happen.”
“And why did you need to find me?”
She took a breath, still wrestling with herself, but then she met his eyes. “He said that you were going to disappear with the Book that Dolph’s after. And if you do that, the Book will never be recovered. You’re going to destroy any chance we ever have of defeating the Order.”
“And you believed him?” Harte said, suddenly cold.
“He’d never led me wrong before,” she said. And that much, at least, sounded like the honest truth.
“For what it’s worth, I don’t have any plans to destroy the Book.”
“For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t let you.” She shook her head and let herself out.
The room felt strangely empty once Esta was gone, as though she’d taken something vital with her. He looked at his reflection again, the smudges under his eyes, the stain of red that left his lips looking bloodied.
Who knew how far Evelyn would have taken things if Esta hadn’t interrupted? He owed her for that, even if she’d only done it because Dolph needed him. But he didn’t know how he’d ever pay her back with anything but betrayal.
THE GLASS CASKET
Harte was still avoiding her. He always came back to the apartment late, long after she was asleep, and he would be gone before she awoke every morning. After she’d given everything away in his dressing room, maybe that was safer. She’d been cornered, and she’d acted on instinct. Too bad her instincts tended to get her in trouble. Like what happened with Logan.
But with every day that passed, the news clipping remained stubborn in its insistence that Dolph Saunders was going to die.
Enough was enough. She had a job to do—she needed that book and she needed Ishtar’s Key. And Dolph was sure they couldn’t do anything without Harte, which meant she needed him, too. He couldn’t avoid her forever.
After breakfast, she set off for the theater to confront him, but it wasn’t Harte she found when she arrived. The first person she ran into was the red-haired harpy.
“You’re back,” Evelyn said, sounding like she meant, Go away.
“Of course. I’ll be around quite a lot from now on,” Esta said in her falsely accented voice as she headed toward Harte’s dressing room.
“He isn’t there,” the woman called, a mocking note in her voice. “He’s down below.”
Straightening her spine, Esta gave Evelyn a cold smile before she turned and made her way through the maze of the backstage hallways and then down a staircase to a damp-smelling room beneath the theater. She thought she heard water and wondered if the theater wasn’t built over one of the hidden rivers in the city. Just ahead, there was a light, and as she moved toward it, she heard a familiar voice letting out a string of curses.
“Harte?” she called, navigating through the cluttered storage area until she came to where he was working.
The Magician had pulled a vanishing act, because the boy before her could have been any factory worker, any laborer in the city. He was dressed in worn brown pants held up only by a pair of suspenders. They sagged low on his narrow hips, and his shoulders and arms were bare beneath his sleeveless shirt, which was damp with sweat. He looked more unbuttoned and human than she’d ever seen him.
Then he flipped the visor up on the welding mask and ruined the effect.
“Get in,” he said, pointing to the table where the strange, coffinlike tank he’d been working on was sitting. His eyes were a little wild.
She took a step back.
“I mean it. Get in. I need to see if this will fit you.”
“Why?” she asked suspiciously. “Looking for new and inventive ways to dispose of my body?”
“The thought did cross my mind once or twice,” he said dryly.
She bit back a laugh. “Nice of you to spring for a glass coffin. Wood is so 1899.”
He glared at her, scratching his chin. “It’s not a coffin. It’s a—wait. Maybe you’re right.”
“I usually am.”
However hard his eyes were, Esta sensed that he was too excited to really be mad. “We could go with the defying-death angle. The Glass Casket has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”
Esta eyed him. “What do you mean, we?”
“You and me. If I’m stuck with you, I’m going to make use of the situation.”
“I thought you’d decided on avoiding me,” she said, crossing her arms.
“Didn’t you say we had to get to work?” he said, frowning at her. “I’ve been getting things ready.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, not trusting the excitement in his expression. “Ready for what?”
“We’re going to run the lost heir on Jack.”
“Am I supposed to know what that means?”
He frowned. “It’s a con game. If it works, Jack’s going to believe that we have something he’d do anything to get. You’re going to be the lost heir.”
“What, exactly, am I the heir of??” she asked, walking over to run the tips of her gloved fingers against the smooth glass.
“You, sweetheart, just happen to be the long-lost illegitimate daughter of Baron Franz von Filosik, who was rumored to have found the secret to the transmutation of basic elements before his untimely death.”
“Is that an actual person?”
“Of course it is.” He paused. “Wasn’t that all part of Dolph’s plan? I figured that’s why you introduced yourself to Evelyn with that name.”
She glanced up from the glass box, trying to hide her surprise. After all, she’d been improvising about who she was that day in the dressing room. She’d given her own name, not one Dolph had invented. Not that Harte needed to know that.
“Of course it was the plan,” she said, trying to stay in control of the situation. “Who was he, this Baron von Filosik? What did he do?”
“Dolph didn’t explain it?”
“He just gave me the name,” she lied.
Harte gave her a knowing look. “Yeah, that sounds exactly like something he’d do.”
Esta relaxed a little with his acceptance of her story, but she couldn’t help but wonder if the Professor had known somehow that the name he’d picked after he found her in the park would come in handy one day.