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

“His fever grows worse,” Patience told her. “It will not be long now.”

“I won’t stand here and watch him die,” Esta said. “People don’t die of fevers—”

Except that they did. She knew that. In 1904, before modern medicine had given the world the miracle of antibiotics, a person could die from so much less than Harte was suffering from. It was astounding that he’d held on so long, considering the state he was in. In another time, he wouldn’t have suffered so needlessly. In another age, he didn’t need to die.

He doesn’t need to die.… Not if she could get him to that other time.

Esta pulled the edge of her jacket up over her face, to ward off the smell, before she lowered herself down to where Harte lay. His skin felt like fire, and his limbs felt almost delicate as she moved them, checking for some sign of her cuff.

“Did he have anything with him?” Esta asked the woman. “A package or… anything?”

Patience shook her head. “He didn’t have anything with him when he arrived.”

Harte’s hair was a tangled mess, and his clothes were filthy. Esta touched him, trying to wake him so she could speak to him, but he didn’t stir. His breathing worried her even more than his lack of consciousness. The breaths he took were shallow and ragged, and there was a wet-sounding rattle in his chest. Esta had heard a sound like that before—back in New York, when she stood vigil with Viola and Dolph as Tilly took her final breaths.

No. She refused—refused—to accept this.

“It has to be here,” she said, more to herself than to anyone else.

Harte knew what Ishtar’s Key meant to her—to both of them. There was no way he would have taken her cuff and then lost it. The Harte she knew might be heavy-handed. He might be stupid and stubborn and predictably pigheaded, but he wasn’t careless. She ignored the stench of him as well as the way he moaned as she tried to move him onto his side, to search beneath him.

But she didn’t find anything. No cuff, no necklace. Nothing.

I’m still here, she reminded herself. If the Key were gone, she would be as well.

When Esta looked up again, Patience was shaking her head, and there was something that made Esta wonder if she knew more than she was saying.

“He should have had a silver cuff with him,” Esta explained, making a circular motion around her own arm, where the cuff had once sat. “A bracelet that held a dark stone, and he should have been carrying a necklace as well. A beautiful necklace, with a bright-blue stone that looks like stars are trapped within it. But the cuff is what’s really important. If I have the cuff, I can help him. I can take him away from here, and you and your son would no longer be in danger from someone discovering him.”

The woman’s eyes had widened slightly. She looked suddenly unsure, maybe even guilty.

“Please,” Esta pleaded. “If you know what I’m talking about at all, if you saw anything like the pieces I described, you have to help me. I can pay you for them. I can give you whatever you want. I can save him if I have that cuff.”

The woman didn’t respond or react.

“If you do have the pieces I’m talking about, you can’t keep them. There are people looking for them—dangerous people,” Esta told her, trying another approach. “If you’re worried about this Committee, they’re nothing compared to the people who will be coming for you.”

Patience hesitated a moment longer. When she finally spoke again, she made her voice no more than a whisper, like she was afraid the walls themselves might overhear. “My husband brought home pieces like you describe some days ago. But they’re gone. I gave them to satisfy my husband’s debts when his creditors came demanding payment,” she said. “What could I do?”

Esta’s stomach sank. “Tell me you didn’t give away the cuff. Tell me.”

“I didn’t have a choice,” Patience explained, her voice filled with remorse. Then the woman’s expression shifted. “You can’t imagine what it is to live my life. Do you know that my father lost me in a card game? To be rid of his responsibility, he forced me to marry a man I would never have chosen. Now all I have is my child and this house. Our only chance to survive is to keep my husband’s shop. Unlike you, I cannot pull on trousers and jaunt off and leave my responsibilities—my son—behind.”

“I know,” Esta told her softly. “You’re right. I don’t have a child to protect or a husband to find.”

“I don’t want to find my husband,” she told Esta. “If he never returns, our lives will be hard, but in the end, they’ll be better. A man like that can’t be saved from himself. A man like that leaves only destruction in his wake.”

“I’m sorry,” Esta said, speaking truly. She had a feeling that the woman was on the cusp of some revelation, and she needed the right combination to unlock her willingness. “But this man, the one you were so good to tend to and comfort, even when it could have put you in danger? He is an honorable man. You must know something more.”

Patience knew something about the artifacts, there was no question of that fact. Without her help, Harte would die. But even with the cuff, even if she could take him forward to a time where medicine might save him, Esta knew that it still might not be enough.

“Please,” she said. She had never begged before. She had never felt desperate enough to beg, not even when she’d been tied to a chair at the mercy of a madman. “Please,” Esta repeated.

Because she could not imagine a world where Harte Darrigan didn’t exist.

The woman’s mouth pressed into a tight line, and Esta knew that everything was lost—Harte, the artifacts, herself.…

But then Patience relented.

“When