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“Bolt it,” Juliette said.
Roma returned to reality. He eyed the thin steel door and slammed it shut, turning the lock. He warily eyed Juliette too, then the four walls they had found themselves within. They were at the base of a stairwell, one that ascended so steeply that Roma couldn’t identify what awaited at the end.
“We have five minutes at most before they break through this flimsy thing,” Roma estimated. The banging against the door from the outside was already starting.
“Five minutes should be plenty,” Juliette said. She jabbed a thumb in the direction of the door. “My worry is we’ll have even less because of this noise.”
She took the stairs up two at a time, the pistol in her hand disappearing out of sight. Despite having his eyes pinned on her the entire time, Roma wasn’t sure where it had gone. Her coat had one shallow pocket. Her dress inside was only a long slip of fabric with a multitude of beads. How is she concealing all her weapons?
At the second to last step, the smell of incense wafted under Roma’s nose. He supposed he wasn’t entirely surprised when he arrived at the landing and took in the scene. It reminded him of the storybooks Lady Montagova had read to him when he was young, about Arabian nights and djinn in the deserts. Colorful silk curtains fluttered with the breeze that Roma and Juliette’s commotion was stirring up, revealing the crumbling windowsills underneath, edging dangerously close to the candles burning on the ground. Plush, woven rugs were splayed on both the floors and walls, humming with warmth and giving off a unique old sort of odor. There wasn’t a single chair to be seen, only a maelstrom of pillows and cushions, each “seat” occupied by the many under the Larkspur’s thumb.
In the center of it all, a low table was situated between a woman with a needle and a man with his arm out. They both sat on pillows too.
“Mon Dieu,” the man at the table cried out. Juliette’s pistol had returned. It was pointed at the woman with the needle.
“Are you the Larkspur?” she asked in English.
Roma scanned the twenty odd other occupants in the room. He couldn’t quite decipher who was under the employment of the Larkspur and who was here for the vaccine. Half had sat up straighter, signaling their involvement in the scheme, but it didn’t look like they were about to interfere. Their elbows trembled; their necks sank into their shoulders. These were all people like Paul Dexter, who had called on the White Flowers once or twice too now. They thought themselves powerful and prized, but ultimately, they were gutless. They would hardly even dare speak about seeing Roma and Juliette working together, in case they could not produce proof.
The woman did not respond immediately. She withdrew the needle and cleaned the tip, opening a small case beside her. On one side, a row of five red vials glistened under the firelight. On the other side, a row of four blue ones sat waiting.
With the longer the woman drew out her answer, the more likely it seemed that she had to be the Larkspur and the masculine pronouns everybody was using were simply an assumption.
Until the woman looked up suddenly—her kohl-dark eyes and thick eyelashes glaring at the muzzle of Juliette’s pistol—and said, “No, I am not.”
She had an uncommon accent, leaning into French but not quite. The Frenchman sitting opposite her was completely frozen. Perhaps he thought if he didn’t move, he wouldn’t be registered in Juliette’s sight.
“What is in those injections?” Juliette asked.
Her other hand, the one that wasn’t clutching a pistol, was jerking around by her side as she spoke. Roma didn’t understand what she was doing for a long moment, until it clicked that she was pointing at the vials. She wanted him to grab one.
“Now, if I told you,” the woman said, “we would go out of business.”
While Roma inched closer and closer to the vials, there was nothing Juliette wanted to do more than to pull the trigger. A long time ago, one of her tutors had said that being terribly hot-headed was her fatal flaw. She couldn’t remember which tutor it was now—Chinese literature? French? Etiquette? Whatever subject it was, it didn’t matter; she had lashed out in indignation because of the comment and directly proved her tutor correct.
She would breathe deeply now. Smile, she told herself. Before meeting every stranger in New York, she went through the same routine: smile, shoulders back, eyes heavy. She was light and bubbly and the epitome of the flapper girl, working ten times as hard to maintain the perception she wanted just because of the skin she wore.
“Answer this, then,” Juliette said. Her grin forced its way out, as if she found this impossibly entertaining, as if the pistol in her hand weren’t level with the woman’s eyes. “What does the Larkspur know of the madness? Why would he have the cure when no one else does?”
Roma had bent into a crouch while Juliette handled the talking. He clapped a hand over the Frenchman’s neck in an attempt to intimidate him, giving him instructions in French to get up and get out of his sight. While Roma spoke, he was leaning closer, pretending to get a kick out of looming over the man. The reality was that he was leaning so he could take up as much of the table as possible, until his arm hovered right above the case of injection vials, and with a flick of his finger, he had slid a blue vial down his sleeve.
Meanwhile, oblivious to what was going on right under her nose, the woman shrugged, infuriatingly calm. Her aloofness spilled gasoline upon the tension already brewing thick in the room, one spark away from explosion.
“You will have to ask the Larkspur yourself,” the woman replied, “but I am afraid nobody knows where—or who—he is.”
Juliette almost pulled the trigger then and there. She didn’t want the woman dead; nor did she enjoy killing people for fun. But if they got in her way, they needed to be moved. It wasn’t a kill she wanted, but action. Her people were dropping like flies to some madness she couldn’t control, her city was shaking in fear at the thought of some monster she couldn’t confront, and she was so sick of doing nothing.
Anything would be better than standing motionless. When Juliette wanted to blow up in frustration, the only solution was blowing something else up.
Roma straightened up from his crouch and touched her elbow.
“I have it,” he muttered softly in Russian, and Juliette—with her teeth gritted so hard that she sent sour pains spiriting up and down her jaw—lowered her gun.
Juliette cleared her throat. “Very well. Keep your secrets. Do you have a window we could jump from?”
* * *
“Is it time to go home yet?”
