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Esta arrived in Colorado with Maggie and North two days after the mess in Texas. She’d taken dose after dose of the Quellant, but she still wasn’t used to the gnawing emptiness where her connection to the old magic should have been. She doubted she ever would be. As unpleasant as the constant ache from her missing affinity was, at least nothing else had happened. The train had remained steady on its tracks, and no shadows had threatened the edges of her vision. And if Esta wanted to crawl out of her own skin from being so separated from such an essential part of herself?? It was a small price to pay for the assurance that Seshat could not touch her.
Before they’d boarded a train for Denver, Esta had checked the headlines and found that the ruse in Texas seemed to have worked. The Devil’s Thief was presumed dead, but any relief Esta might have felt was quickly erased by the sight of Julian Eltinge’s picture looking up at her from the second page. Julian was among those who were already showing strange symptoms from being exposed to the serum in St. Louis. Esta knew what would eventually happen to those poor souls. First a connection to the old magic would awaken, and then a few days later they would die. They would not have easy deaths.
Esta tried not to think about Julian, with his whip-smart humor and sharp intelligence, suffering like that. He’d been nothing short of heroic at the parade, despite being cornered into a terrible situation, and the idea that he’d been doused with the serum gnawed at her. She couldn’t stop herself from wondering what terrible affinity the serum might awaken in him, or whether he would have anyone at all to comfort him at the end. And as the train climbed into the mountains, she discovered the bitter taste of true regret.
When they finally arrived in Denver, Esta was completely on edge, but the sky that greeted them was wide and blue, and the mountain air didn’t have the heavy blanket of humidity that had made Texas feel so oppressive. The Colorado air was thin, but she forced herself to focus on what lay ahead instead of the path of destruction she’d left behind.
The three of them had spent their time aboard the train planning, and as soon as they arrived, they headed directly for the edge of town, where the Curtis Brothers’ Wild West Show—and with any luck, the Pharaoh’s Heart—waited.
Even without her affinity, Esta was confident that she could retrieve the dagger quickly, but when they crested the hill and saw the Curtis Brothers’ Wild West Show sprawling in the fields below, some of her confidence waned. This wasn’t a simple rodeo. Instead, the grounds stretched over multiple acres, with an enormous tent of billowing white canvas holding court at the center and a large encampment of other tents sprawled around it.
“How will we ever find the dagger in all that?” Maggie asked, voicing Esta’s own worry as they looked out over the grounds.
“One of those will belong to Bill Pickett,” Esta said, pointing to the village of smaller tents clustered beyond the big top. “Once I figure out who he is, finding the dagger should be easy enough.”
“You mean, once we figure it out,” North corrected, eyeing her. He was still suspicious, and rightly so.
“Of course,” she said easily. “But it will go faster if we split up.”
“Like hell,” North told her.
“It’ll be safer, too,” she added. “There’s less chance of anyone recognizing us if we’re not together. In case they’re still looking for us.”
“The Thief is dead,” Maggie reminded her. “The headlines all said so.”
“Just because the authorities say the Thief died in the crash doesn’t mean the Order or any of the Brotherhoods have stopped looking,” Esta argued. “The faster we get the dagger and the less we’re seen together, the better.”
“I don’t like this,” North grumbled. “You going off on your own is exactly the sort of thing you’d want to do if you were fixing to run.”
Esta’s patience was fraying. “I’ve taken the Quellant, haven’t I? Besides, you have your watch. I can’t outrun that.”
It was a problem Esta had been considering, especially since her own affinity was out of reach at the moment. She didn’t want to take the watch from North—it had been a gift from his late father—but she couldn’t see any way around it. When the time was right, when she had the dagger in hand, she’d make sure they couldn’t stop her from leaving.
North’s eyes narrowed at her, like he could almost sense the path of her thoughts.
Esta let out a frustrated breath when she realized North was set on digging in his heels. They were wasting time arguing. “Look, you’re welcome to come along with me. I’m sure Maggie can handle herself down there without you.”
Her words had the desired effect. North might have hated to let Esta out of his sight, but he wasn’t about to leave Maggie unprotected.
They split up, approaching the grounds of the show from opposite directions. Esta cut through a field that held horse-drawn wagons waiting for their drivers. It was peppered by the occasional motorcar, the past and future colliding. A little farther on, she passed corrals that held cattle and horses. There were people everywhere. Families and groups watched the ranch hands work. Couples wandered arm in arm, taking in the sights. Small children draped themselves over the fences to watch horses graze with a kind of bright-eyed excitement that Esta herself had never felt about much of anything, except maybe lifting a fat wallet or a diamond stickpin.
Or besting Harte.
Esta’s chest felt suddenly tight at the thought. She almost wished she hadn’t been so impulsive on the train and that the string of beads was still on her wrist. Surrounded by so many people, she felt strangely apart from them. The lies and omissions even kept her at arm’s length from North and Maggie. It might have been nice to have Harte’s voice in her ear right then, a sign that she wasn’t truly alone.
A breeze kicked up, and Esta’s nose wrinkled at the strange combination of fried food and popped corn and sawdust that assaulted her. But it was the scent of the animals that swept away all thoughts of Harte as another memory rose unexpectedly, as stark and clear as the sky above. The grief it brought with it nearly made her stumble.
Esta had grown up in the shadows of skyscrapers and spent her childhood navigating narrow canyons of brick and glass, breathing air laden with exhaust and the other smells of city life. But the scent of horses brought her back to the days when Dakari had taken her to see the tired-looking ponies that waited to cart tourists around Central Park. She would wander along, looking at the horses, while Dakari visited with old friends from when he was one of the drivers—back when he’d first come to the city, before the Professor had found him.
She’d been young then—no more than seven or eight—but the memory was so clear, it might as well have happened last week. Esta had never thanked Dakari properly for those trips. She’d never really thanked him for anything, she realized. Now it was too late.
The memory of the last time she’d seen him rose then, replacing that other, happier memory of those days near Central Park. When Esta had returned to her own time, when she’d discovered the truth about everything, she’d tried to fight. But Professor Lachlan had called Dakari into the library, and Dakari had come, unaware that he was about to be killed to teach Esta a lesson—another sacrificed pawn in Nibsy’s deadly game. She drew in another deep breath, willing the scent of the horses to shove away the bloody image of Dakari’s last moments. She refused to let that serve as her memory of the man who had been her trainer and healer, and also her friend.
The horses in the field nearby were nothing like the ponies from her youth, though. These beasts were tall and athletic, with well-muscled flanks and coats that gleamed in the midday sun. The horses of her childhood had always looked tired as they’d waited on the side of the busy street, silently resigned to their fates, chewing on grain from dirty plastic buckets amid the blaring traffic and noise. They didn’t run or buck. With the blinders they wore, they couldn’t even see much of the world around them. They simply followed the path set for them, driven on by the person who provided them food and water and a safe place to sleep. Maybe even then she had known that those horses’ lives weren’t so very different from her own, Esta thought ruefully, shoving the memory aside.
As she moved with the crowd toward the big top, she put her thoughts of the past behind her, right where they belonged. She needed to focus on the task at hand—finding the dagger and then figuring out a way to untangle herself from the two Antistasi, so she could get to Harte.
If she had hoped that getting the dagger from Pickett would be easy, that hope died at the sight of the two men standing on either side of the entrance to the big top. Each wore a serious expression on his face and the silver star of the US marshals pinned to his chest. They could be looking for anyone.… But Esta pulled the brim of her hat down anyway. Picking up her pace, she joined the tail end of a group entering the big top and made sure to keep her eyes ahead of her as she passed.
