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She understood his reaction. Hers had been similar, and the shock of it had nearly cost her everything. “When I first found the diary, it was only Viola and Jianyu, but the second I thought about going back to save them, it changed to that.”
“No,” he said, adamant. “It’s wrong. Or it’s another of Nibsy’s tricks. Now that we know—now that I know—how can that still be the future when we know to stop it?” He closed the diary and tossed it onto the bed. “I don’t believe it,” he told her. “I refuse to believe that’s just it. We have to be able to change it.”
“There has to be a way to,” she told him. “With the newspaper clipping, I changed things—or I changed the possibility of things. Nothing else about the past has been set in stone. Why should this be?”
“Or maybe we don’t go back,” Harte told her.
“That isn’t an option,” she reminded him. “We have to set things right. For North and Everett and Sammy. For everyone. And Ishtar’s Key has to go back. Even if there were a way to keep time from unraveling, look what happens if I don’t send the girl I was forward. You saw the girl I might have been. To Nibsy, she was nothing more than a sacrifice waiting to be made. Can you even imagine what her life must have been like to have been kept endlessly ageless, all for the sake of catching me? Despite what he did to her, she believed in him enough to risk everything for him. He broke her somehow, worse than he ever broke me.”
“He never broke you, Esta,” Harte told her, his voice dark with emotion. There was a rawness in his stormy eyes that made Esta feel strangely vulnerable—more exposed than she’d felt just a few minutes before when she’d been basically bared to him.
She thought at first that he might reach for her. The seconds stretched, and time felt as though it was holding its breath. She waited, wanting something she couldn’t define. Needing him to touch her again.
But Harte stepped back instead.
“I’m going to wash up,” he told her, his posture suddenly distant and his voice stiff.
He was avoiding her and avoiding the question of their future as well, but she let him go. She waited until she heard the bathroom door close, and when she heard the muffled sound of the water running, she finally let out a breath, wincing a little at the ache in her side, a reminder that she needed to get it bandaged.
Everything was a mess. They were stuck in a time line where Thoth hadn’t been destroyed and Jack Grew had become a saint. They had an entire city hunting them—their faces were in every newspaper, on every news report. They could take a few hours to rest and regroup, but they couldn’t stay in the soft, quiet luxury of that room indefinitely. Outside, the world waited. In the past, their likely deaths waited as well. Time held its breath, watching for what would come.
ENEMIES AND ALLIANCES
1902—The Bowery
The church smelled of incense. Once, the cloying sweetness of frankincense and myrrh had been a comfort to Viola. Now it reminded her of a tomb. On the altar, the priest murmured in Latin, his low voice rolling through familiar litanies as the people dotting the hard wooden pews mumbled their responses.
Viola’s mother was among them. Pasqualina Vaccarelli sat in her usual position on the left side of the aisle, where she could face the Blessed Mother. Like the other women in attendance, her head was covered by a heavy mantle, and Viola knew that wooden beads turned dark by age would be spilling through her mother’s fingers as Pasqualina moved silently through the prayers of the rosary. The beads had been her grandmother’s, carried like a treasure across the ocean. Now they would never be Viola’s.
From her own pew at the back of the church, Viola kept her veil pulled close around her face and her head bowed. She lifted her eyes only enough to take stock of the situation. There were at least three of her brother’s men stationed at various points around the nave. The Five Pointers were familiar enough with the mass that they were virtually indistinguishable from the other worshippers as they stood and knelt, their hands clasped in prayer as they sang the appropriate responses to the priest’s call. But the early weekday mass was populated mostly by women or those too old to work. Young and hardened by the streets as they were, Paul Kelly’s men stood out.
Not Paolo’s, Viola reminded herself. They were Torrio’s now.
Mass ended, and the worshippers began stirring to leave. If her mother knew the men were there, she did not show it. Despite the stifling heat of the church, Pasqualina pulled her shawl around her as she left the pew, genuflected to the altar, and then turned to go. She passed Viola without seeing her.
The men began to stir, preparing to follow the older woman.
Viola allowed her magic to unfurl, but only a little. Her soul might be forever marked, but there were certain lines she would never cross. Killing here in the presence of god himself was one of those. She slowed their blood just a little, enough to have the men sinking back into their pews. Enough so she could follow her mother into the vestibule without them seeing.
“Mamma?” Viola whispered, catching her attention before Pasqualina could leave the church.
Her mother turned, dark eyes wide and a look of shock—of fear—on her wrinkled face. But the expression quickly softened to something more like confusion. “What are you doing here?” she asked in the Sicilian of her childhood. The language wrapped around her, but the harshness in her mother’s tone grated against Viola’s already frayed nerves.
“We have to go, Mamma,” she urged. She took her mother gently by the arm and started to lead her toward the open door. Outside, the streets bustled, and freedom waited.
Her mother frowned and pulled away. “What are you talking about?”
“We need to go. Away from here,” she said. “You’re not safe, not without Paolo.”
At her brother’s name, Viola’s mother’s face turned hard. “You speak his name to me after what you have done?”
Unease skittered through Viola. “What I’ve done?”
“It’s your fault that my Paolo, that my boy, is in that terrible place,” her mother said. “Mr. Torrio, he told me everything. He told me how you betrayed your brother.”
Viola took a step back. “Torrio is the one who betrayed Paolo, Mamma. Not me.”
Pasqualina glared at her. “You think I believe this? After so little care you have for your own blood?”
