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Clem looked around the tent, his expression suddenly anxious. “What attack?”
“The maggots got away,” Jack sneered, pulling himself up to his feet. The world still swam every time he moved, and his balls felt like they’d been pushed up inside his body, but the quick-acting morphine had cut through some of the sharpest pain. “Tell your men to block every exit. No one gets off these grounds until I find the Antistasi bastards who are responsible.”
The girl they’d found tied to the tent post had been cackling the whole time, a strange, unhinged laugh that sounded like something inside her was broken. Now she laughed harder.
“What is so goddamn funny?” Jack demanded, his temper finally fraying beyond any hope of control.
The girl went silent, pressing her lips together as hysterical mania lit her eyes. “You’ll never catch them,” she said before she cackled again. “The Antistasi will get to the Thief long before you do.”
Jack glared at her, measuring her words. “You know Esta, don’t you?” he asked. “You’re one of them.”
She only smiled at him, the wild smile of a woman gone mad.
He felt the weight of the Book and the dagger anchoring him.
“Who is this?” he asked Clem.
“Cordelia Smith,” Clem told him. “She’s our sharpshooter in the show.”
“Did you know she’s Mageus?” Jack asked.
Clem Curtis blustered and made excuses, but Jack’s focus was on the sharpshooter, an ordinary-looking girl no one would miss.
“You are Mageus, aren’t you, Cordelia? Feral magic runs in your veins,” Jack said, feeling suddenly better about the situation. “Antistasi, too, from the sound of it.”
The girl spat at him, but he was far enough away that she didn’t even come close to hitting his shoes.
“I’ll take her with me for questioning,” Jack said, disgusted. “Perhaps with the right incentives, she can give us what we need to stop this plague of violence.”
“I’ll give you nothing.” She bared her teeth like a feral cat.
“I think you’ll find I can be quite persuasive,” Jack told her, ignoring the hysterics. There was something about her that appealed to him—not her looks or her body, of course. But something inside of her that made him take notice.
Now that the Book had returned the Pharaoh’s Heart, Jack had everything he needed to follow the instructions that Newton himself had left in the pages of the Book. With the ritual, he could create another artifact—a stone finally worthy of powering the machine he’d long dreamed of building. All he needed was a maggot with enough power worth harvesting.
Jack took the girl by the chin and couldn’t help smiling when she jerked away and then tried to bite him. Cordelia Smith had a strength within her that might one day be useful.
“It doesn’t matter what you do to me,” Cordelia told him. “The Antistasi cannot be stopped. We are endless as a snake devouring its own tail. Infinite as time itself.”
Jack only smiled. “Perhaps we should see how infinite you are?”
A RESCUE
1904—Denver
Once again, Esta felt herself returning long before she fully became a part of the world around her. First came the feel of the ground beneath her, the uneven and hard-packed earth that served as a floor for the tent. Then came the scent of smoke, which burned her throat and her nose until finally she could feel her body, her self, as something real and whole.
She pushed herself up from the ground, trying to make sense of the scene around her as she coughed. A moment ago she’d been certain of her victory, but now she remembered—Jack had been there. Thoth as well, and he’d told her about the Book before time had unmade her.
Time will take what it’s owed, Thoth had told Esta. He’d called her an abomination, and now she wondered if there was any merit to his words. Maybe the two lives she led—the young girl back in New York and the girl she was now—couldn’t coexist any more than copies of the stones could. Or maybe the reason time had tried to pull her apart again was even worse. Hadn’t Jack told her that Harte had been captured in California? If that was true, maybe something had happened to Ishtar’s Key. If Harte had lost the cuff, she wouldn’t be able to take it back to the girl. It might explain the previous episodes—if Ishtar’s Key was gone, her very present couldn’t exist.
But she hadn’t disappeared completely, which meant that there must still be a chance to retrieve Ishtar’s Key—and with it, a chance to save Harte. There might well come a day when time would not release her from its grip. A day when the darkness would win, and she would be unmade. But that day had not yet arrived.
Esta pulled herself upright. She didn’t know how long she’d been gone this time. Seconds or minutes… or more? However long it had been, she didn’t need to search the tent to know that Jack was gone, and with him, the Book. But she thought of Harte and what might be happening to him on the other side of the continent, and it was enough to shake her from her self-pity and to focus.
She pulled herself the rest of the way to her feet and staggered out of the tent into the cooler air of the summer night. At first she couldn’t understand what she was seeing. All around her, the grounds of the Curtis Brothers’ Wild West Show had devolved into confusion. She barely had time to jump out of the way of a trio of horses as they thundered by, nearly trampling her in the process. Another cowboy on horseback followed, already swinging a rope.
A pair of strong hands caught her from behind, and she turned to find the older man who’d helped them earlier. “This way, and keep your head down,” George ordered as he pulled her through the chaos by the hand. “We gotta get you out of here.”
