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

When Maggie turned to him, her eyes were wide and her face had drained of color. “I didn’t think—it wasn’t supposed to explode yet. Not until it was farther down the track. Do you think Esta made it off before—” Maggie’s voice broke. Her expression was so pained that his heart nearly cracked in two.

In the distance, fingers of fire reached high into the sky, and behind them, the oil fields looked like hell come to earth as another of the towers went up in flames. North and Maggie were stuck in the middle, lost in a thick haze that burned North’s eyes and throat.

“I’m sure Esta’s fine,” he told Maggie, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt.

The riders had already gotten their horses under control. Half were stuck on the far side of the chasm, and some had tumbled into the split in the earth, but the remainder began to gallop toward the wreckage.

“Come on.” North pulled Maggie gently along. “We need to get moving if we want to get to the meeting place on time.”

“What if she doesn’t show up, Jericho?” Maggie asked. “What if she got off the train too late? What if you were right to worry about her affinity and she’s—”

“Esta Filosik has more lives than a cat,” North said, even as his own stomach churned. “If she doesn’t show up where she’s supposed to, we can always go back and get her.” His thumb rubbed across the worn metal cover of his pocket watch. Because, for Jericho Northwood, there was no such thing as too late.

PART

II

ON DAWSON PLACE

1904—San Francisco

Harte Darrigan pulled back into the empty doorway of a closed shop, out of view from the eagle-eyed guards at the barricade’s entrance across the street. He wasn’t sure what the men were looking for or why they were blocking the intersection. On the train, he’d read about the raids that were happening all over the country in retaliation for the Antistasi’s attack in St. Louis. The barricade could be related to those actions.

Whatever the case, the address Harte was looking for was somewhere beyond that fencing. He supposed he could go around, but the barbed wire wasn’t just across the one intersection. Blocks in either direction were cordoned off from the rest of the city. It was already growing late, and he didn’t want to waste time on a detour, especially when there was no telling how far the blockade stretched.

As Harte tried to figure out how he could get past the guards without being seen or recognized, a pair of men approached the entrance. They were laughing and talking, their pale cheeks already bright pink from a night of drinking. After they spoke briefly with the guards, the gate was pulled back to allow them to pass.

So there was a way through.

After a few minutes more, it became clear who the guards were letting pass—men. That wasn’t a surprise, though. Harte hadn’t seen many women out on the streets since he’d arrived. San Francisco seemed like a city populated almost entirely by men. From the looks of it, the police were admitting a steady stream, mostly made up of white day laborers and sailors. If only he knew for sure what the sentries were looking for.

Harte noticed a driver leaning against a horse cart about halfway down the block. The man was smoking a thin cigar and reading a rumpled newspaper as he waited for his next fare. As Harte approached, the driver glanced up over the newsprint.

“You need a ride?” the man asked, as if to determine whether Harte was worth his time.

Harte shook his head. “Not at the moment. I have a question you might be able to answer.”

The driver frowned and returned to reading with an annoyed snap of his paper. “That depends on what you want to know.”

“What’s going on over there?” Harte asked, tilting his head toward the barricade.

“Quarantine.” A single, gruffly spoken word that didn’t explain anything. “They have all of Chinatown cordoned off.”

“Quarantine?” Harte repeated, relieved that it didn’t have anything to do with Mageus or the Antistasi. “Why is there a quarantine?”

The man glanced up. “Plague, if you can believe that,” he said with a grunt. “We haven’t had a case of it in this town for three years, and now the Committee’s saying they found multiple cases just this week.”

“The Committee?” Harte asked.

“Vigilance Committee,” the driver said, looking vaguely annoyed at the stream of questions. “Used to be the mayor who would determine quarantine, but now the Committee’s got the bigger say. So maybe it’s the plague, or maybe they’re trying to root out some of the maggots that make trouble from time to time. What with the recent events, I’d expect it to be the latter.” The man glanced up over his paper briefly. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you. No use taking any chances. If you ask me, the Committee’d be smarter to burn the whole damn Chinese quarter down.”

Harte watched another man approach the checkpoint and then get ushered through. “People are still going in,” he observed, an unspoken question in his tone.

“Quarantine don’t stop people from their own stupidity.” The driver turned the page without looking up. “If sailors who’ve been stuck on a boat for months don’t care about their manhood falling off from some pox or another, a little thing like the plague ain’t gonna scare them off either.”

The idea that the actual plague was here seemed to be a bit far-fetched, but Harte knew how people could be, especially when it came to Chinese immigrants. He’d seen how they’d been treated in New York, and he couldn’t imagine things were any better here in California. Not that he was going to risk pointing this fact out to the driver.

The man glanced up, clearly at the end of his patience. “Look, do you need a ride or not?”

“No,” Harte