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“I’ll take this one,” the first man said, closer now.
North was already extending his other hand to Esta as his thumb moved the dial of the watch. She reached for his hand without argument, but before she could take hold, an explosion sounded nearby. Both of them jumped, North nearly dropping his watch.
Outside the tent, the men started shouting as another explosion echoed. And then they were gone, off to deal with whatever had just happened.
Esta and North exchanged silent, uneasy looks, as though speaking might chase away this bit of luck that had managed to find them. In the distance, an alarm started to sound, the heavy metallic noise calling out its warning. Then the tent flap rustled, and Esta tensed again, but it was Maggie who’d stepped through the split in the canvas, her cheeks flushed pink.
“Mags?” North stepped toward Maggie. “What are you doing here? I told you to wait back outside the gate.”
“You’re lucky I didn’t listen,” Maggie said. “If I had, those men—”
Realization struck. “Tell me that explosion wasn’t you,” Esta said. “Tell me it wasn’t an incendiary like back in Texas.”
“It was a Flash and Bang,” Maggie admitted, not quite meeting her eyes. “What else was I supposed to do? Let them find you in here?”
“You did fine,” North told her, the new tremor in his voice betraying the truth. “But Esta’s right. They’re going to realize that wasn’t any regular explosion soon enough. We have to get out of here. Now. And we’re taking that with us.” North grabbed the box before Esta could stop him. “We need to be gone before they really start looking for us. This way,” North said, leading them toward the back side of the fairgrounds—away from the explosion Maggie had caused.
They made it past two more tents and were rounding the edge of a third, nearly to the back border of the encampment, when a woman stepped out, blocking their path. It was the sharpshooter Esta had seen in the show earlier.
“Y’all are an awful long way from the big top,” the woman said, her voice carrying with it the cadence of the South.
This close, Esta realized that the woman wasn’t as old as she’d seemed in the arena—she was maybe twenty, if that. Her plain dark hair was cut into a heavy fringe that framed her plain round face, and her nose was freckled beneath tight-set eyes of a cloudy blue. The sharpshooter wasn’t exactly pretty and she wasn’t exactly tall, but she certainly moved with an easy confidence that Esta might have admired if she hadn’t been standing in the way of their escape.
“We must have taken a wrong turn when we were leaving the show,” North said, stepping to shield Maggie.
“A wrong turn isn’t all y’all seem to have taken.” The woman’s eyes were sharp on the box in North’s hands. “That there don’t look like it belongs to you.”
A SERPENT MADE OF BONE
1904—Denver
North moved to block the woman’s view of Maggie and Esta as he placed his hand in his pocket, ready to use his watch. It wouldn’t take much to avoid this whole situation. A minute or two and they could miss the woman completely and slip out the back of the grounds.
The sharpshooter drew out one of her pistols and leveled it in his direction. “Keep your hands where I can see them. I don’t want to shoot you,” the woman said when North didn’t immediately comply. “But I will. You should know right now that I never miss.”
In the distance, an alarm was being sounded again, and North could smell smoke heavy in the air. Reluctantly, he took his hand from his pocket. He hadn’t even managed to get the cover of the watch opened, and the body of the timepiece felt suddenly heavy, a useless weight in his pocket.
“Give it here,” the woman said, holding out her free hand for the box.
North didn’t make any move to comply. If the dagger was inside, he couldn’t give it up. They’d already lost the necklace because he’d been stupid enough to fall asleep when he should have been keeping watch. He wouldn’t be the cause of another powerful artifact slipping right out of the Antistasi’s hands.
The woman raised the gun again, pulling back the hammer this time. “Whatever’s in there ain’t nothing to die over. Hand it over, and I’ll let you go on your way. We can pretend all this never happened.”
“You expect me to believe you’re going to let us go?” North asked with a huff of disbelief.
“Don’t do it, Jericho,” Maggie said as she came up next to him. He tried to move back in front of her, but Maggie was too focused on the box in his hand.
“Y’all don’t have much of a choice in the matter.” Then the sharpshooter shifted the gun, aiming it at Maggie. “Like I said… I never miss.”
North sensed Esta behind him, but he couldn’t tell what she was doing—and he didn’t dare take his eyes off this new danger to look. All he knew was that she’d been quiet so far, and he hoped she’d stay quiet and not do anything stupid. The last thing they needed was for someone to recognize her.
“You can’t give it to her, Jericho,” Maggie pleaded again. “She’s not really going to shoot me.”
“You willin’ to bet your life on that?” the sharpshooter asked, her voice easy as the summer breeze.
North glanced between the gun and Maggie, who was shaking her head. Silently pleading for him not to hand it over. But he knew that the woman wasn’t making an empty threat. “Mags, we don’t have a choice.”
He sensed Esta moving as he started to slowly offer the box, but he ignored her and Maggie both as he eased the box toward the woman’s outstretched hands. The second he saw victory flash in the sharpshooter’s eyes, North made his move, flinging the box toward her head with a violent shove. She did exactly what he’d hoped and lowered her gun in an attempt to catch the unwieldy package before it hit her flat in the face.
