AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I can probably manage that,” she said.
But he reached for the sewing kit and got to work.
The needle repeatedly piercing her skin hurt, but compared to the knife, the poking was almost bearable. By the time Harte had finished a row of six surprisingly neat stitches, the alcohol she’d gulped down had truly taken hold. The whole world felt softer, despite the throbbing pain in her arm.
“Not bad,” she said, glancing up at him. “Who knew you were an expert tailor?”
He ran a hand through his hair and let out a ragged breath. “I couldn’t afford a seamstress when I first started my act,” he told her. “I had to figure things out until I could hire Cela.”
Hidden depths. Sometimes she forgot how solitary he’d been for so long, living alone in the city with only his wits and charm and magic to get by. Not alone anymore, though. Not ever again.
After he dabbed ointment onto the stitches and wrapped her arm in gauze, Harte glanced up at her, his stormy eyes fringed with dark lashes. They’d been through so much together, but she suddenly understood what it must have been like for him back in San Francisco to be so helpless and dependent on her.
But his eyes on her—the serious way he was studying her, the care he had taken with her—made her skin feel warm. It made her everything feel warm. They were in a gorgeous hotel room, and now that the danger of the bullet had been taken care of, they were maybe even safe. At least for the time being. It didn’t matter that her arm ached and that her side still needed to be tended to. Harte was standing there, shirtless and determined, and she couldn’t stop her thoughts from turning to that moment in the tunnels, when he’d touched her. She couldn’t stop thinking about how she wanted him to touch her again.
“I wonder what happened to Cela,” Esta said, trying to distract herself from the direction of her thoughts.
She’d met the seamstress from Wallack’s during those weeks when she’d been working as Harte’s assistant at the theater, back when she had been trying to con him for Dolph. Cela had been more than happy to make a costume to help Esta get back at Harte for his heavy-handedness. She’d been so brilliant with a needle and thread that Esta had barely been able to believe how stunning the finished piece had been.
Harte frowned as he secured the end of the gauze. “What do you mean?”
“Nibsy shouldn’t have had the Delphi’s Tear, Harte. I didn’t steal that ring for him until well into the twenty-first century. I was thirteen when I took it from a party in the 1960s. But that other girl—the version of me that died—she never had Ishtar’s Key. She wouldn’t have been able to slip through time. Which means that Nibsy shouldn’t have had the ring.”
“You think he got to Cela,” Harte said.
“I think it’s possible,” she admitted. “Something certainly changed.”
“Maybe Nibsy got the ring later. We sent Jianyu to protect her.…”
“Maybe Jianyu wasn’t enough.” Esta pulled her robe back up around herself. The gash in her side still needed to be taken care of, but she could deal with that on her own.
Esta’s mind was spinning furiously, trying to pull the pieces together. The answer was there; she could nearly see it. And then she did. “The diary.”
“What diary?”
She ignored the question until she’d located the small notebook in the pile of papers they’d taken from the library on Orchard Street, the same one that the scrap of the Book had fallen out of earlier. The one that showed their fate. She curled her leg beneath her as she sat on the bed and opened the diary.
“What is that?” Harte asked, tilting his head to get a better view of the indecipherable writing. “And why can’t we read it?”
“I think this is a record of Nibsy’s life,” she told him. “But for some reason, those events aren’t certain anymore.” Flipping through a few of the pages, she watched as the words morphed into new letters, new arrangements, bubbling up and then disappearing back into the page in a never-ending dance. “I’ve seen this before, or something like it. When I first came back, I brought a news clipping with me, and when I changed the events, the print did this. I used it to keep myself on track.”
“You’re thinking that Nibsy had access to this in the past?” His gaze shifted from the diary to her. “That he used it to find Cela?”
“I think we have to consider the possibility. The Nibsy you knew—the one I met back in 1902—wouldn’t have known how to actually use the Book or the artifacts,” she told him. “The Professor that I grew up with would have had to send his younger self something so he’d know what his older version knew. It makes sense that he’d send himself everything. He’d want to give himself every opportunity to avoid any possible pitfall and ensure his victory.”
Harte took the diary and thumbed through it, his brows bunched together the whole time. “So at some point, something happened to change the course of his life.”
“Or he changed something,” Esta told him. “Like getting the ring from Cela.”
“We can’t know that for sure,” he argued. “It’s completely unreadable.”
“But we don’t know when it became unreadable,” she said. “We don’t know how long Nibsy might have had clear knowledge of his own future.”
“If that’s true, he would have known everything that happened,” Harte realized. “Every victory. He could have avoided every past failure. He could have used this to change fate.”
She took the diary from him. “I think that’s exactly what he did,” she said, flipping to the entry for December 21, 1902—the night of the Conclave. She handed it back to him and waited as he read. She knew when he’d reached the relevant part.
He looked up at her and then turned back to the page as though reading it again would change the words. “That can’t be right,” he told her, adamant. “I refuse to believe that this is what happens.”
