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THE INFINITE NOW
As the carriage carrying them toward the Conclave rattled on through the city, Esta could not help but think of a night not so long ago when she’d sat in another carriage next to Harte. That night, she’d planned to betray him. It hadn’t mattered that she’d felt a connection to him like she’d never felt with anyone else. That night she’d forced herself to see him only as the Magician, as her opponent and enemy. Because she’d believed that the future of magic had been riding on her choices.
She hadn’t exactly been wrong. Everything had been riding on that night. But Esta hadn’t understood anything. Because she believed the Professor, because she’d trusted him to guide her—because she wanted to be worthy of his approval—she’d made the wrong decision.
Tonight would be different. The world, again, was hanging in the balance, but this time she knew who she was fighting for. She knew who she was fighting with. Tonight she and Harte would stand together against the Order, against Nibsy as well. And with any luck, together, they would change the course of time.
“Do you remember the night we took the artifacts from Khafre Hall?” Harte asked as though reading the direction of her thoughts.
“We?” She turned toward him all mock offense. “If memory serves, you were the one who took them. And you left me sitting onstage in a room full of people who would have cheerfully murdered me if they had the chance.” There was no anger in her tone, though. Only distant amusement. She nestled into him more. “Or am I thinking of someone else?”
“Definitely someone else,” Harte agreed, all false innocence. “I would never—”
“You would,” she corrected, slipping her arm through his. She tilted her face up to his. Their lips were inches apart, and she could smell the mint on his breath, the soft scent of his skin, clean and warm, and that indefinable scent that was only Harte. “You definitely would. Apparently I go for that sort of thing.”
“Thank god for that,” he said, his stormy eyes dancing.
Her smile slipped from her face. “It was raining that night.”
“Better than this insidious cold,” Harte told her, rubbing his hands to warm them. “In the middle of the summer’s heat, I always think I want winter to come, until it actually arrives.”
“I didn’t want to leave,” she said, still remembering that night. “I didn’t want to betray you or to leave you behind.”
She’d gone back through time to stop the Magician, but instead she’d found a home. She’d hated every second of the drive to Khafre Hall, because she had known what was coming. Once she had her cuff—along with the Book—she had known she had to betray him. And she’d believed that there was no coming back. By then she’d come to love the city as it had been and the people she’d met there. If she were honest, by then she’d come to love Harte.
But then, maybe she’d loved him from the beginning, just as she’d always loved the city.
In all its seasons. Through all its years and ages, she’d never wanted to live anywhere else. While Harte had always wanted to escape, this island of Manhattan had been Esta’s only home, and even when she’d been able to leave, nowhere else had ever quite fit her the way these streets did. Nothing except for Harte had felt as right to her as choosing to come back.
“I never should have chosen anyone but you,” she told him.
He lifted their interlocked hands to his mouth and placed a soft kiss on the back of hers. His stormy eyes never left hers. “You never have to choose again. Tonight it’s both of us together. Or it’s nothing at all.”
But she wasn’t sure he was right.
She hadn’t told Harte about all the things she’d seen as she fell through time to find him. At first, it had been hard enough to remember or to know whether any of it was real. But in the past weeks, those memories had grown more certain, more insistent. The more she’d thought about what she’d seen when she was caught in time, the more she’d started to wonder if those visions held the answer to the final, unthinkable fate that Nibsy’s diary had revealed.
They were nearly there. Outside the carriage window, Esta could see the blade of the Flatiron Building. At its base, Madison Square Park was lit by hundreds of glowing luminaries, and beyond that the enormous structure of the Garden was lit like a temple.
In her own time, Madison Square Garden was in a completely different location. It had been moved in the 1920s and then rebuilt again in the 1960s. The Garden she’d grown up with was the longest-standing and perhaps the most iconic. But the enormous, round arena that stood atop Penn Station wasn’t nearly as beautiful or striking as the ornate building that stood on the corner of Thirty-Sixth Street and Madison Avenue in 1902. This version of the Garden was barely a decade old, and it would be a few years still before its famed architect would be murdered on the rooftop he’d designed by the jealous husband of a showgirl he’d been sleeping with. It had the look of a Moorish palace, with its roof lined with towers that looked like minarets.
The tallest of the towers soared over the park, rising like a finger pointing toward the heavens. It was only barely smaller than the Flatiron Building itself. At the top of the tower, Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Diana glistened in gold, her naked body caught in an elegant arabesque as she held her bow aloft, ready for the hunt.
Esta could see why the Order had chosen this location for their Conclave. The beauty and size of the building, and the grandeur of it as well, lent an immediate air of power and importance. The Flatiron Building nearby was a statement of the city’s innovation, a preview of the modern era to come. The entire area around Madison Square was awash with light. Electric bulbs had been strung along the walkways of the parks, and enormous columns of light shot up from the rooftops of nearby buildings. The roof of the Garden was perhaps the brightest spot of all.
That was where it would happen. Thanks to Ruby, they knew for sure that the final ritual would be held on the rooftop of the Garden. There, with the grid of the city visible below, the Order would use an electrical current to replicate the power of the stones and the Book. If Jack was to attack, he would do it there high above the city streets, at the apex of the Conclave, during that final, essential ritual. If they wanted to stop him, if they wanted to take back the Book and eliminate Thoth, they had to do it before that final ritual.
The cold energy coming from the silvery disks Esta carried beneath her cloak gave her a chill that had nothing to do with the wintery night air. Their plan could work. If they found Jack in time, they could corner him and use the sigils to trap him—to contain Thoth so that she could destroy the creature he’d become. Once that was done, they could stop whatever attack he intended.
It was a simple enough plan, but so much could go wrong. If the words in Nibsy’s diary had any truth to them, a lot likely would.
As traffic inched along, bringing them ever closer to the building and their awaiting fate, Esta turned to Harte. “There’s something I need you to promise me.”
“Anything,” he told her without any hesitation. But there was a question in his storm-colored eyes.
“There’s a distinct possibility this won’t end well,” she told him.
“Esta—”
