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

serum was a mistake, and you left because you had to. But that doesn’t mean you hate Ruth. It doesn’t mean you can’t forgive her.”

“No,” Maggie said, meaning it. “I could never hate her.” Ruth had been like a mother to her. Whatever mistakes Ruth might have made, she was family, and Maggie would do almost anything to protect her—had done almost anything. Now she worried about the choices she’d made, because Maggie understood that choosing to protect Ruth might very well cost her Jericho in the end.

THE OUROBOROS

1902—New York

It was early afternoon, and the barroom two floors below James Lorcan’s flat was probably already filling with those who needed something to make their day easier. A glass of Nitewein to blunt the edge of unused magic. A few moments of quiet solitude among their own, surrounded by the familiar warmth of power. No doubt the boy, Logan, was waiting uneasily for him to appear, but for now James craved solitude. The Aether had been trembling, anxious and unsteady, ever since Paul Kelly had revealed that the Order had retrieved the ring, but James hadn’t been able to find the solution that would make it stop.

Unlike the saloon, the apartment was quiet. It had once been Dolph Saunders’, and with its damask chaise and lace curtains, the rooms still held the mark of Leena’s more feminine touch, which made it comfortable as well. But the apartment was so much more than a place to lay his head or calm his nerves—it was also the key to his eventual victory. The shelves lining the wall contained all of Dolph’s research—all of his secrets.

It had been those books that had originally drawn James to Dolph a few years before. On the surface, the gang leader had seemed like any of the other players on the deadly game board that was the Bowery, but when James had seen that shelf of books—real books, bound in leather and smelling of the wisdom of centuries—he’d known immediately that Saunders was something different. Perhaps even something useful.

Compared to James’ own father, Dolph Saunders was nothing, of course. A common criminal at best. Yet, unlike Niall Lorcan, Saunders had somehow managed to amass an entire shelf of books. The unfairness of it had almost been too much to bear.

When James was younger, his family had only one book—not the Bible, as so many of his countrymen might have owned, but a well-used volume of Le Morte d’Arthur. Ragged though it was, the volume was a prized enough possession to warrant a spot in his family’s meager luggage when they came to this terrible new world. It was a story of heroes and traitors, of magic and those who would discount its power.

His father had believed in Arthur, the boy king who could unite a country and lead a people, just as he believed in a better world for his family and for all Mageus. Niall Lorcan had brought his family to America so that he could help build such a world. James, on the other hand, had always felt a certain secret kinship with Merlin, the sorcerer who could prophesy the future. Merlin, who should have been the hero all along.

James had been a child when his father had crossed the wrong ward boss. In retaliation, they’d arrested his father and burned his family’s home—his mother and sisters still inside—leaving James orphaned and alone in a city that didn’t care if he ended up dead.

Perhaps if James hadn’t been so tired from his endless hours on the factory floor, his concentration only on the danger the machine press posed to his small fingers, he might have sensed the reason that the Aether had rippled and bunched that day. If he’d been paying more attention, James might have understood the danger that was approaching. Perhaps he would have fought the foreman, who’d held him over that extra hour, and he too would have been in the family’s apartment when it caught fire.

They told James later that the wooden tenement where his family had lived in two cramped rooms had burned like a torch, too hot and too fast for anyone to escape. To his neighbors, it was simply another random tragedy, too common perhaps, but unavoidable in a city that cared little for the lives of the poor. James had known differently, though. With the combination of affinities his family had been keeping secret, they should have been able to get out of the burning building. To die like they had? They must have been trapped somehow, locked in or blocked from escaping. James couldn’t help but think that it would have taken more than locks to hold his family back—possibly even magic.

Not that anyone cared to listen to him. Instead, every one of his neighbors turned away—Mageus and Sundren alike—afraid to see the truth of what was happening all around them. Afraid to disturb the fragile equilibrium that kept their own families safe.

In the end, he’d been left alone to watch the building smolder for days, and as the charred beams turned to ash, James Lorcan had transformed as well. He’d vowed to himself that he would never again be taken off guard. He would never allow himself to be as weak as his father had been, believing in fairy tales and heroes and the lie of righteousness. When he’d walked away from the ashes of his former life, James had promised himself that he would determine his own fate. He’d decided there and then that he would change the world. And he would never again be at someone else’s mercy—neither Mageus nor Sundren.

James had been patient. He’d carefully plotted and planned, and now the shelf of leather and vellum—and all of the wisdom contained in Dolph’s volumes—was his. He ran his fingers over the spines, caressing them with the reverence a lesser man might reserve for gemstones or gold. James understood exactly how precious those books were and what