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“Safe from what?”
“A big storm that’s coming.”
“Hmph. That what she said?”
“Uncle Bill, how come you don’t like Sister Walker?”
“I got my reasons,” Bill said. “Listen, don’t you worry none. You keep telling old Bill everything that happens with Sister Walker, and I promise I won’t let nothing bad happen to you. We got us a deal?”
“Deal.”
“And you don’t hafta tell Memphis one word ’bout our deal, neither. He don’t need to know.”
The boy leaned into Bill as if he were his father. Bill wrapped his long arm around the boy and held him tigh
t like the son he might’ve had, the son he never would have thanks to people like Margaret Andrews Walker. This time he’d beat her at whatever game she was playing.
Bill let the power trickle down from his shoulder to his fingers and into Isaiah, connecting them. The warm coin taste was strong on the back of Bill’s tongue as he sucked energy from the boy. Just enough to bring on one of the boy’s fits. Already, he could feel the faint traces of Memphis’s week-old healing power flowing into him and thinning the gray cloud of his vision as Isaiah convulsed on the family sofa. To see a little better for a day or three was worth it. Wasn’t it? And anyway, it wasn’t Bill’s fault. This was Memphis’s doing. The boy had lied to him all this time, said he still couldn’t heal when Bill knew for a fact he’d gone and healed that old, no-good drunk. And if he could do that, there was no reason he couldn’t heal Bill’s blindness.
What a man couldn’t get through asking, he would take in whatever fashion he needed.
“There, there,” Bill said, turning Isaiah on his side as the boy’s fit subsided. “It’s all gonna be all right.”
Bill shuffled to the door, which he could see as a faint outline now that the fumes of Memphis’s healing flowed through him. He stuck his head out and shouted up the stairs, “Brother Julius! Brother Julius! Come quick! The boy had another one a’ his fits! You better run for Memphis now. Hurry!”
Then Bill sat on the couch, the fallen Isaiah in his arms, and waited.
Jericho opened a desk drawer and shoved in the stacks of letters from the tax office informing Will that the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult needed to pay its back taxes or the entire place would be shut down for good in a little over two months, and a brand-new apartment building put up in its place. Jericho looked around with affection at the odd collections of occult ephemera. There would be so much to pack up when the taxman came for the place. Ever since the day Will Fitzgerald had marched into the hospital and adopted Jericho as his ward, making him an assistant curator, the museum had been Jericho’s only true home.
He hadn’t always believed in ghosts, of course. Not until the Pentacle Murders. Not until the night he and Evie had been trapped in John Hobbes’s haunted house and barely survived. Now he knew the truth: Everything in this museum was real. Evil was not an abstract idea; it was real, too. And no matter what Will and Sister Walker thought, Jericho knew that they were all just ordinary people when it came down to it, the Diviners included. How could ordinary people possibly stop such a threat? He hoped Will and Sister Walker knew what they were doing.
From his coat pocket, Jericho retrieved a small leather pouch. MARLOWE INDUSTRIES was stamped across the front. Inside was a vial of blue serum. That serum, developed by the great Jake Marlowe himself, kept the tubes and wires connected to Jericho’s damaged heart and lungs functioning. It kept him alive. For that, Jericho should’ve been grateful to Marlowe.
But now Marlowe had issued an ultimatum: Jericho should leave the museum—his home—and go to stay with Marlowe so that the great man could parade Jericho at his Future of America Exhibition. After all, Jericho was Marlowe’s greatest invention, and no one knew. No doubt that galled Marlowe. He liked all of his victories out in front. So far, Jericho had resisted. But what choice did he have? And why now, just when it seemed that Jericho might finally have a chance with Evie?
Jericho held one of the vials up to the light. Marlowe’s secret compound. Would Marlowe really cut Jericho off from his supply of lifesaving serum?
It was possible that Marlowe was bluffing and Jericho didn’t need his “vitamin tonic” at all. Still. That was a big chance to take. He’d seen what had happened to all the others in the Daedalus program. Jericho was the only one who’d survived. But why?
That, apparently, was what Marlowe wanted to know so desperately.
Jericho curled his fingers into a fist. Piece of cake. He was fine.
But without Marlowe, for how much longer?
Henry left the taxi idling by the curb outside the Tea House on Doyers Street. Steam clouded the front windows of the Chan family’s popular restaurant. Delicious smells wafted into the street, making Henry’s stomach gurgle.
“You could come in. My mother would plotz to feed you,” Ling said.
Henry laughed. “Plotz—did Sam teach you that word?”
“No. Mr. Gerstein up the block. Sam isn’t the only person who knows Yiddish.”
“Don’t tell Sam that,” Henry joked. “Another time. I’m late for the show.”
“You’re always late.”
“Well, at least I’m consistent.” Henry handed over his watch. “Don’t lose it.”
