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

Seshat had abandoned him. She, too, had pulled inward, far beneath his surface, as though she had started to understand that her time was growing as short as his own. Trapped as she was inside of him, there was at least some consolation in the fact that Seshat’s danger would pass when he did.

Harte only hoped that someone would remember him after he was gone. That someone could tell Esta what had become of him.

Esta.

In the darkness behind his eyes he could see her—the tilt of her full mouth when she smirked at him. The cut of her chin, sharp as her words. Her eyes, the color of whiskey and sunlight. The feel of her skin, softer than anything he’d ever held. And the scent of her. Clean and unsullied, like hope itself. From the very beginning, the very moment he’d seen her so many weeks ago in the Haymarket’s ballroom, she’d called to him like a beacon. And he’d walked away. Again and again, he’d tossed her aside. Because he was too weak to trust. Too scared to stay.

If he concentrated, Harte could almost hear her voice. The deep, rough timbre. The irritation that colored it. Calling him.

He opened his eyes and could almost see her there, a dark vision above him, surrounded by brightness—Esta. Like some saving, avenging angel.

No. Not an angel. Esta couldn’t be dead, and Harte’s life certainly hadn’t been pure enough for heaven.

But she seemed so real.

It was nothing but the delirium brought on by the pain and the fever. Or maybe he was dead already, and hell was nothing more and nothing less than this, being inches away from the girl he loved—

He loved? How ridiculous to discover that now, when it was far too late. When he would never be able to tell her. How painfully appropriate to fade away taunted by his greatest regret.

Harte tried to lift his hand, because maybe if he could only touch the angel looming above, it would be enough to pull him through to the other side and end this misery. But lifting his arm felt like trying to push through leaden waves. Still, the apparition floated above him, and he had the sense that if he could reach her, then maybe Esta would know how sorry he was for everything. If he could just touch her once more…

JAGGED HOPE

1904—San Francisco

When Patience Lowe opened the trapdoor in the floor, the smell from below rose in a noxious wave, sick and stagnant and strong enough to make Esta gag. Below, a figure lay curled on his side.

At first Esta couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Harte Darrigan, with his meticulous cleanliness. Harte, who hated to be dirty in any way. It was unthinkable that the wretch curled below could really be him. But it was. The space where he was lying was nothing more than a hole that had been clawed out of the earth, like the burrow of a rat beneath the city streets. It made Esta’s chest hurt to see his skin slick with feverish sweat and his ragged clothes crusted over with his own sickness.

She couldn’t tell at first if he was even breathing, but then Harte’s eyes cracked open and his head turned toward the light. He seemed to be seeking out something other than the darkness he’d been buried in. His skin was sallow and grayish, and there were dark hollows beneath his eyes. His lips were cracked and scabbed over from bleeding, and the smell that wafted up to her carried with it the unmistakable reek of infection and death.

It was clear he wasn’t seeing her. Not really. The whites of Harte’s eyes were yellow and tinged with a feverish pink as he stared up, not quite focusing. His mouth was moving, like he wanted to speak, but all that came out was an indecipherable rattling. He tried to raise his hand like he was reaching for her, but the motion seemed labored, and he allowed his arm to fall back to rest on his abdomen again, his eyes closing from the effort.

“He needs help,” she told Patience. “A doctor or—”

“No,” the woman said, shaking her head. “There’s no medicine that can help him now. The fever is too great. All we can do is wait.”

Esta’s temper spiked as the woman stood by. “How could you just leave him like this? It’s like you put him in a grave to die.”

“What else could I do?” Patience asked. “If I called for a doctor, they would have reported his illness to the Vigilance Committee, which is where he’d escaped from. Surely the Committee would have realized who he was. They would have taken everything I had left—my home, my child—and they would have used his illness as an excuse. They would have made an example of me, as they are making an example of the Chinese people in this city. My neighbors excuse the Committee’s tactics—their patrols and their quarantine barricades—because it’s happening to Chinatown and not to them. Because they already hate the Chinese people who live there. But most fool themselves into believing sickness can be held back with barbed wire. They are so terrified of the plague escaping those confines, they’ll excuse any cruelty the Committee commits. Especially with my husband gone, there would have been no one to protect us.”

“Plague?” Esta asked in disbelief. As in, the plague? Patience had to be overstating things.

“There has been news of cases in town recently,” the boy’s mother confirmed. “Because people fear catching the sickness, no one will speak against the Committee, no matter how terrible their tactics. What would you have had me do? The Committee has ruled this town with an iron fist, using the threat of magic to establish their power, for years now. How would you have me fight that power?”

Esta wasn’t sure. It should have been enough that this woman had taken Harte in, had cared for him as much