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

so awful that the friction was almost painful, and Seshat’s power still rustled softly, somewhere down in the depths. Perhaps he should have pulled away, but Seshat still felt very far off and every bit as weak as he was, and Esta was touching him—and she wasn’t even strangling him.

“It’s not exactly satisfying to kill someone who’s already half-dead,” Esta told him. A small smile curved at the corner of her full mouth, but her golden eyes still seemed far too sad. “I’ve decided to wait a while, until you’re a little stronger. I want to make sure it’s really worth the effort.”

It wasn’t the reaction Harte had expected, and he wondered if this was another dream—a feverish delusion brought on by desire and hope and desperation. “I’ll deserve whatever you have planned for me.”

He meant every word.

A noise from the hallway had Esta sitting up a little straighter.

“Someone’s coming.” She pulled her hand away from his, leaving the spot she’d been touching cold. “There’s so much I haven’t explained to you.… Don’t tell them anything you don’t need to. In fact, it might be easier if you pretend you can’t remember what happened. I’ll be back once they’re gone.”

Esta was gone before he could stop her—not that he actually could have stopped her. He wasn’t exactly moving that quickly. Or at all.

A moment later, the curtain around his bed drew back to reveal a clean-shaven man in a white overcoat wearing thick, dark-rimmed spectacles. He was flanked by another man in a dark-green suit coat and a woman dressed in a light-blue gown with a white apron and a white, winged cap on the crown of her head. Her attire reminded him a little of something a nurse might wear, but he didn’t think that could possibly be right, considering that her skirts were nearly up to her knees.

“I see you’ve decided to return to the living, Mr. Jones,” the man in the white coat said in a kind of jocular tone. “I’m Dr. Calderone, and this is Mr. Fisk and Nurse Bagley. She’s taken good care of you these past few weeks. Mr. Fisk here is a government man, but I suppose we won’t hold that against him, will we?”

Harte wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say to that, so he didn’t respond.

The doctor looked over a clipboard that held a stack of papers, conferring with the other man as he flipped through them, while the nurse busied herself by tending to Harte. He tried to shoo her away, but he’d grown so weak that there wasn’t much he could do besides suffer the indignity of having himself lifted and rolled as the sheets were changed out beneath him.

After a few long minutes, the doctor peered at Harte through his thick lenses. “You’re a lucky man to still be here, you know.”

“I can’t say I feel particularly lucky,” Harte grumbled, wishing the doctor would leave so that he could figure out where Esta had disappeared to. She promised to come back, he reminded himself. Seshat had not taken her, and he hadn’t lost her. That thought alone would have to get him through the next few minutes.

“I suspect you feel like something dragged out of the bay,” the doctor told him with a smile that didn’t match the sentiment of his words. “Considering how close you were to death, I’d say that’s to be expected. For a while there, I had my doubts you’d pull through. The whole thing was a crapshoot, trying to figure out how to treat you. Of course we read about certain diseases in medical school, but I’m not ashamed to admit that you’re the first case of plague I’ve ever treated. Actually, I believe yours is the first case we’ve seen in the city for decades.”

“Forty-six years,” specified Mr. Fisk. “The Committee eradicated that particular disease in 1906.”

Forty-six years.

Harte had to have misheard.…

Since he’d opened his eyes, his thoughts had been so focused on Esta and on the pain that he felt that he hadn’t noticed his surroundings. Now the strangeness of everything started to sink in—the cut of the man’s suit, the transparent tubes that hung around him, and the steady whirring of some electric machine next to his bed that looked like one of the futuristic exhibits at the world’s fair.

The doctor was still prattling on about something, but Harte couldn’t hear anything the man was saying. His mind was racing, an urgent jumbled mess of memories tumbling through it as he tried to remember, but the one thought that came to him again and again was What did Esta do?

BLOOD IN THE VEIN

1902—New York

After the unsettling discovery of her own craven weaknesses, Viola remained quiet for the rest of the day. She sat and she listened, but she didn’t interject much as the others planned for the few remaining days ahead. What was there to say that could make anything better? They would get the ring because they had to. It would be harder without the help of Abel’s friends, but if they positioned themselves just right, it might still be possible to sidestep Nibsy, and Paolo as well. To win.

It was late—far too late—by the time Viola realized how many hours had passed. The streets were already mostly empty of carriages and people, and night was beginning to fall. If she didn’t hurry, her brother would miss her. He might have questions that she couldn’t answer without ruining the tenuous grasp they had on the possibility of victory.

“I have to go,” she told the others, gathering herself to leave.

“I’ll take you,” Theo said, also standing.

“No,” she told him. “Stay. You should finish things here. You’re needed.”

“Take my carriage at least?”

Viola didn’t want to. Every time she stepped into the soft interior of Theo’s carriage, she thought of Ruby, and for now—while things were still so fragile—she couldn’t be distracted. Still… without the carriage, she would certainly be late. “Thank you,” she