AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It was nothing but the delirium brought on by the pain and the fever. Or maybe he was dead already, and hell was nothing more and nothing less than this, being inches away from the girl he loved—
He loved? How ridiculous to discover that now, when it was far too late. When he would never be able to tell her. How painfully appropriate to fade away taunted by his greatest regret.
Harte tried to lift his hand, because maybe if he could only touch the angel looming above, it would be enough to pull him through to the other side and end this misery. But lifting his arm felt like trying to push through leaden waves. Still, the apparition floated above him, and he had the sense that if he could reach her, then maybe Esta would know how sorry he was for everything. If he could just touch her once more…
JAGGED HOPE
1904—San Francisco
When Patience Lowe opened the trapdoor in the floor, the smell from below rose in a noxious wave, sick and stagnant and strong enough to make Esta gag. Below, a figure lay curled on his side.
At first Esta couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Harte Darrigan, with his meticulous cleanliness. Harte, who hated to be dirty in any way. It was unthinkable that the wretch curled below could really be him. But it was. The space where he was lying was nothing more than a hole that had been clawed out of the earth, like the burrow of a rat beneath the city streets. It made Esta’s chest hurt to see his skin slick with feverish sweat and his ragged clothes crusted over with his own sickness.
She couldn’t tell at first if he was even breathing, but then Harte’s eyes cracked open and his head turned toward the light. He seemed to be seeking out something other than the darkness he’d been buried in. His skin was sallow and grayish, and there were dark hollows beneath his eyes. His lips were cracked and scabbed over from bleeding, and the smell that wafted up to her carried with it the unmistakable reek of infection and death.
It was clear he wasn’t seeing her. Not really. The whites of Harte’s eyes were yellow and tinged with a feverish pink as he stared up, not quite focusing. His mouth was moving, like he wanted to speak, but all that came out was an indecipherable rattling. He tried to raise his hand like he was reaching for her, but the motion seemed labored, and he allowed his arm to fall back to rest on his abdomen again, his eyes closing from the effort.
“He needs help,” she told Patience. “A doctor or—”
“No,” the woman said, shaking her head. “There’s no medicine that can help him now. The fever is too great. All we can do is wait.”
Esta’s temper spiked as the woman stood by. “How could you just leave him like this? It’s like you put him in a grave to die.”
“What else could I do?” Patience asked. “If I called for a doctor, they would have reported his illness to the Vigilance Committee, which is where he’d escaped from. Surely the Committee would have realized who he was. They would have taken everything I had left—my home, my child—and they would have used his illness as an excuse. They would have made an example of me, as they are making an example of the Chinese people in this city. My neighbors excuse the Committee’s tactics—their patrols and their quarantine barricades—because it’s happening to Chinatown and not to them. Because they already hate the Chinese people who live there. But most fool themselves into believing sickness can be held back with barbed wire. They are so terrified of the plague escaping those confines, they’ll excuse any cruelty the Committee commits. Especially with my husband gone, there would have been no one to protect us.”
“Plague?” Esta asked in disbelief. As in, the plague? Patience had to be overstating things.
“There has been news of cases in town recently,” the boy’s mother confirmed. “Because people fear catching the sickness, no one will speak against the Committee, no matter how terrible their tactics. What would you have had me do? The Committee has ruled this town with an iron fist, using the threat of magic to establish their power, for years now. How would you have me fight that power?”
Esta wasn’t sure. It should have been enough that this woman had taken Harte in, had cared for him as much as she could, despite the apparent risk.
“His fever grows worse,” Patience told her. “It will not be long now.”
“I won’t stand here and watch him die,” Esta said. “People don’t die of fevers—”
Except that they did. She knew that. In 1904, before modern medicine had given the world the miracle of antibiotics, a person could die from so much less than Harte was suffering from. It was astounding that he’d held on so long, considering the state he was in. In another time, he wouldn’t have suffered so needlessly. In another age, he didn’t need to die.
He doesn’t need to die.… Not if she could get him to that other time.
Esta pulled the edge of her jacket up over her face, to ward off the smell, before she lowered herself down to where Harte lay. His skin felt like fire, and his limbs felt almost delicate as she moved them, checking for some sign of her cuff.
“Did he have anything with him?” Esta asked the woman. “A package or… anything?”
Patience shook her head. “He didn’t have anything with him when he arrived.”
Harte’s hair was a tangled mess, and his clothes were filthy. Esta touched him, trying to wake him so she could speak to him, but he didn’t stir. His breathing worried her even more than his lack of consciousness. The breaths he took were shallow and ragged, and there was a wet-sounding rattle in his chest. Esta had heard a sound like that before—back in New York, when she stood vigil with Viola and Dolph as Tilly took her final breaths.
No. She refused—refused—to accept this.
“It has to be here,” she said, more to herself than to anyone else.
Harte knew what Ishtar’s Key meant to her—to both of them. There was no way he would have taken her cuff and then lost it. The Harte she knew might be heavy-handed. He might be stupid and stubborn and predictably pigheaded, but he wasn’t careless. She ignored the stench of him as well as the way he moaned as she tried to move him onto his side, to search beneath him.
But she didn’t find anything. No cuff, no necklace. Nothing.
I’m still here, she reminded herself. If the Key were gone, she would be as well.
When Esta looked up again, Patience was shaking her head, and there was something that made Esta wonder if she knew more than she was saying.
