The Serpent's Curse by Lisa Maxwell (read an ebook week .TXT) 📕

gangplank, and once they’d reached the dock, she kept close to the group, hoping that anyone who saw her would assume she was one of them. Once she was past the men with the medallions, she could get herself into a better position. They wouldn’t wait at the docks forever, and when they left, she could follow them.

She was nearly past the men when a small boy appeared seemingly out of nowhere to tug on her jacket. She looked down at him, imagining him at first to be some kind of urchin trying to con travelers out of a few coins. His eyes were wide with an expression that looked strangely like surprise, considering he was the one who had approached her. There was something familiar about him, but she didn’t have time to figure out what it was.

“I don’t have anything,” she said, pulling away. But the words were no sooner out of her mouth than Esta’s vision blurred, and the boy flickered. He was there and then he wasn’t. It happened so quickly that she might have dismissed it as a trick of her tired eyes, except that she knew it wasn’t really the boy flickering. It was happening. Again.

Esta drew in an uneasy breath and held it, as though if she remained still for long enough, time would forget her debt. But her pulse was already racing, her skin clammy and damp with a cold sweat, and she felt the same panic she’d felt when she was chased by the sand serpent in her dreams, trying to outrun the impossible.

The world steadied a second later, but Esta didn’t lie to herself about what had just happened. She understood and accepted the warning for what it was, and she knew she couldn’t predict when time might open its jaws—like the serpent in her dream—and pull her under. She had the unmistakable premonition that there would be no waking from that if it happened again.

The boy was tugging at her again, but she jerked away once more and tried to push through the crowd to escape him.

“Miss Esta?” His small, high voice carried over the din of the crowded docks, but Esta didn’t allow herself to turn back, not even when it registered what he had called her.

The scene in front of her flickered again. She saw the docks all around her and the shoreline beyond, cluttered with haphazard shack-like structures and teeming with people, and then they were gone. The city around it—past, present, and future—glimmered and flickered like a double-exposed image, unsteady and unmoored from her own moment in time.

Vaguely Esta was aware of someone shouting her name as the scene solidified again into the San Francisco of 1904. She turned, feeling like she was stuck in a dream as she watched the men with the medallions grab the boy. He was writhing and kicking as he tried to get away from them, and he was still shouting for her.

She didn’t know how he knew her name, and she didn’t care to wait around to figure it out. The men hadn’t seen her yet. They were too busy wrestling the kid, and Esta knew that she should use the distraction to her advantage. She turned to go, but the second she turned away from the men and the boy, the world flickered again. And she knew—the boy was important. She didn’t know who he was or how that could be, but she reached for her affinity anyway, pulling the seconds slow as she turned back. With each step she took toward him, her vision became clearer. The world became more stable and steady.

When she touched the boy and brought him into her net of time, he gasped and tried to pull away. Esta held tightly to his wrist as she dragged him away from the men and toward the mess of the city that lay beyond the docks. She didn’t stop until they’d traveled far past the ramshackle buildings near the water and were well into the city proper. It was the San Francisco from before the earthquake that would level it. With the stink of the sewers and the trash heaped in the streets, it felt like an untamed outpost of humanity, and it made even Old New York seem practically clean and modern by comparison.

Finally, when Esta thought they were far enough away, she released her hold on the seconds. This time the boy didn’t try to pull away again, but looked up at her, his eyes wide with something that might have been wonder. Or maybe it was fear, which would have made him smarter. He couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. He had a tousled head of dark-blond hair, and beneath his button nose, his mouth was pressed in a flat line. But there was no fear in his expression.

“Who sent you?” she asked, trying to decide if the boy was a threat.

He simply stared at her, not answering. Perhaps he didn’t know English?

“How did you know my name?” she demanded.

The child didn’t move, but Esta knew he understood. Keen intelligence sparked in his eyes, but it looked like he was trying to figure out a difficult puzzle.

“How did you know who I was?” she pressed. After all, she was dressed in men’s clothing. She didn’t look like a “Miss” at all.

Again she had the thought that there was something about him that seemed familiar. Something that made her pause. “Did Harte send you?”

The boy’s eyes widened as he nodded, and that was when Esta realized that his eyes were the same perfectly stormy gray as Harte’s.

“Where is he?” she asked, her stomach turning at the shadow that crossed the boy’s expression. “What’s happened to him?”

But the child only shook his head. “You have to come with me.”

TRUE POWER

1902—New York

When James Lorcan received yet another summons from Paul Kelly on a random Wednesday afternoon, he took his time about answering it. He knew that