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

burned to the ground by men from the railroad who’d wanted Abel to stop his organizing. But Cela couldn’t hear the others from where she was in an upstairs bedroom. It might as well have been only her and Jianyu in that big old house, all alone.

Taking another blanket from the shelf, Cela layered it over Jianyu, knowing full well it wouldn’t do a thing for the way his fingers had been growing colder. Still, if he was in there, she hoped that this bit of comfort might help.

“Just hold on a little longer, now,” she murmured, tucking the blanket around his too-still body. “You said this friend of yours can help, and she’s on her way.”

Or she’d better be. Still, Cela couldn’t help but think that they should’ve already been back.

A few minutes later, she felt her nerves unwind a bit at the sound of the door opening in the hallway below. The familiar rhythm of Abel’s steps sounded on the stairs, and Cela turned from her vigil to see her brother standing in the doorway. Standing behind him was the white girl from the gala—the one who’d tried to kill her and who had created all this trouble in the first place. She wasn’t overly tall, and Cela supposed there were those who might consider her pretty, but the uneven stitching of her hem and the rough material of her shirt made it clear she was as poor as everyone else.

Abel had been against getting mixed up with Jianyu from the start. Nothing good could come of messing with magic, he’d said, and he’d been right, like he usually was. But after all Cela had been through, she also knew that trouble had a way of following you just as soon as you tried to walk away from it.

“Is he—” Abel’s voice was soft, and Cela could hear the worry in it. For all his blustering, he cared what happened to Jianyu as much as she did.

“He’s still with us, but only just,” Cela whispered, not quite stepping aside even as she could see the girl—Viola, Jianyu had called her—try to peer around her. From her deep olive skin and thick dark-brown hair, she looked to be one of the Italians who’d been filling the area around Mulberry Street since a few years before Cela was born.

Cela shifted her gaze to study the girl. At the gala, Cela had only seen a lady dressed in silken finery, but she’d known even then from the cut of the ready-made gown that the girl wasn’t one of the Order’s women. Now, Viola was dressed in a simple, serviceable navy skirt, her hair pulled back from a heart-shaped face. Her eyes were a strange shade of violet, but they were sharp, and a certain intelligence lurked behind them. If she attacked again, Cela was certain Jianyu wouldn’t survive it.

“Even after what you did, he told us to send for you.”

“We’re friends,” the girl said, her voice carrying the cadence of another land.

Cela only frowned, crossing her arms.

“Or we were once.” The girl stepped forward, her face dappled in the shadows thrown by the lamp in the corner. “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

“No,” Cela said, still feeling a kind of prickly coolness. “You meant to hurt me.”

Viola shook her head, but to Cela’s surprise, it wasn’t a denial that came out of her mouth. “I didn’t know you were with him. I was trying to save the ring. I thought you were trying to steal it.”

“Of course you did. You took one look at me and thought theft was the only possibility, but I can’t steal something that belonged to me in the first place,” Cela said, her words tart. When Viola’s expression flashed with the disbelief and judgment Cela recognized too well, she gave Viola a cold smile in return. “Harte Darrigan gave that ring to me as payment for taking care of his mother. Not that I should have to explain myself to you.”

“Darrigan?” The girl’s eyes flashed. “You knew the magician?”

“I worked in the theater with Darrigan,” Cela said. “Though I should have known better than to agree to help him, or to take anything he offered.”

“That ring wasn’t his to give,” Viola said, her voice suddenly turning dangerous, and Cela was reminded that this girl was no innocent. At the gala, she’d let her knife fly, straight and true, with an intent to kill and an aim deadly enough to make good.

But Cela Johnson wouldn’t let Viola see her nerves. “What Darrigan did or didn’t have any right to doesn’t matter now,” Cela said, changing the subject. “Jianyu doesn’t have much longer, and that’s because of you. Can you help him or not?”

Viola’s jaw went tight, like she was getting ready to argue, but when Cela stepped to the side, revealing Jianyu in the bed behind her, the girl’s expression went slack with something that looked too similar to Cela’s own grief. The way Viola took a halting step toward the bed, she could have been sleepwalking.

“Can you help him?” Cela repeated, placing herself between Jianyu and Viola. Her arms were crossed over her chest, but she was ready—to do what, she didn’t know. But ready just the same. “Because I won’t let you hurt him again.”

Cela wasn’t exactly sure where the nerve to speak so forcefully to a white girl had come from… but then Viola Vaccarelli wasn’t really a white girl, was she? Maybe out in the wide world, Viola could pull on the protection of whiteness if she was standing next to Cela herself. But alone on the streets? She was a lowly immigrant. Not even a citizen. And here? In Mr. Fortune’s house? Viola was only as important as what she could do for Jianyu.

“Cela,” Abel warned gently from the doorway. He’d told her about what had happened earlier, the way his chest had ached like it was on fire and he’d thought his heart would explode. Viola had made it clear that