Witch in the White City: A Dark Historical Fantasy/Mystery (Neva Freeman Book 1) by Nick Wisseman (popular books to read .TXT) 📗

“It’s the soldiers you should be worrying about,” Brin retorted. “They’re here—or will be shortly. In earnest this time. The city’s become a battlefield.”

As if on cue, rifle shots crackled to the north.

“Let Mabel go,” Neva said to Quill, her jaw so taut the words came out clipped.

“Your ‘Second Great Fire’ is here,” Wherrit added. “You don’t need her to stoke it.”

Quill frowned, then glanced back at Kam, who remained supine and still.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Brin muttered. A second later, a shower of coins splashed into the Rose Garden.

Neva turned to see Brin reach into her purse, withdraw a second handful of money, and hurl it at Quill’s tattered band. “Time to choose,” the Irishwoman said. “Coin or cause. But not the girl: let her loose.”

Quill’s men needed no further persuading; almost as one, they knelt to root through the roses—the sorriest set of would-be revolutionaries Neva had ever seen.

“Sellouts!” hissed Quill before shoving Mabel at Wherrit and dashing toward the bushes. “Cowards and crayfish, every one of you!”

“Leave him,” Wherrit ordered Hal when the Destitute Duke took a step forward. “We need to get everyone else to shelter.” The Hobo King passed Mabel to Neva and gestured to the north, where the gunshots were becoming more regular. “Quill was right about one thing: there will be fire tonight.”

Neva looked Mabel over. “Are you all right?”

Before she could respond, Dob flew into his aunt almost as hard as he had into Quill. Mabel wrapped her arms around him and nodded, relief and love flooding her delicate face. “I will be. Thank you.”

Neva considered scolding the boy for tailing her and Derek—rather than going to Manufactures and Liberal Arts as directed—and tackling a full-grown man with a knife. But Dob was sobbing hysterically. “I’m not sure where your other boys are,” she said instead.

“I told them to stay in the Egyptian Theatre,” Wherrit noted as he hurried past. “We’ll take you to them.”

Hal offered his arm to Mabel. She took it gladly, murmured another “Thank you” to Neva, and rushed off with him and Dob to the nearest westerly bridge.

Brin came up behind Neva. “Bad as this was, it’s worse in the city.”

“That’s why you came—to warn us?”

The Irishwoman wrinkled her nose. “Mobs of thousands rampaging through the Stockyards, soldiers answering with cavalry charges ... It’s a war zone, plain and simple.”

Neva studied her. “Not what you wanted.”

“Never.”

Her eyes flitted to Brin’s purse.

She threw up her hands in exaggerated fashion. “All right, Lady Inquisitor, I’ll come clean—I pinched a few paintings.”

Neva snorted in disbelief. “From the Fair?”

“The Palace of Fine Arts. The day everything went to shite with the Wheel.”

“Chicago Day ...” And suddenly Brin’s actions clicked into place. “That’s why you left them? Why Pieter got caught?”

She nodded, her smile a crooked study in agony and self-loathing. “The plan seemed doomed to failure—even if it came off. And I thought, why not get something for myself instead? Something I can sell to help my da put bread on the table. Proper radical I am, I know. Traitor more like it ... It wasn’t all spur of the moment, either. I’d been mulling it for weeks. Even took the day before off to plan. Rotten from the start, I guess.”

“No,” Neva decided. “You’re giving what you can away, and you were right not to dynamite the Wheel. That’s not rotten.”

“If you say so.” Brin pointed at a patch of foliage to their left. “What was that flash that hit Kam?”

Neva clapped her hand to her mouth. Derek—she’d forgotten about Derek. Without answering, she raced into the underbrush, ignoring the lingering pain in her stomach as she searched for her brother.

She found the necklace first, hanging from a branch a few feet from where she’d left him. As she lifted the cord off the branch, one of the shells broke off, its threading hole having sprouted a crack that snapped the near edge. Neva snatched up the shell and put it in her pocket along with the rest of the necklace.

She saw Derek a second later, lying in a bush a full ten paces away and squeezing his eyes shut. As she approached, one of his arms twitched, then the other. Then both legs. “Derek?” she asked softly.

“I think I changed that man,” he mused after a moment. “Wherrit, was it? On the Ferris Wheel ... I think I made him braver.”

“You changed him for the better, then. Oh, Derek, I’m sorry.”

“It’s not as bad as it was ... Mabel?”

“Safe. Thanks to you.”

Brin caught up and eyed the bush. “What’s this?” she asked as more gunshots—closer now—further assaulted the night’s quiet.

“Help me get him to Machinery.” Neva reached down to grasp her brother beneath his arms. “Can you get his feet?”

“Sure, but why Machinery? Something more out of the way might be better if the fighting spreads here.”

“Pieter left his medical kit there. And there’s something I want you to see.”

AS IT TURNED OUT, AFTER they made the trek to Machinery and ducked inside the storage room, someone was waiting to see them.

Augie.

Chapter Thirty-One

THEY’D LAID DEREK OUT in the front, doing their best to make him comfortable. He didn’t have any obvious injuries—just what he thought were “the usual symptoms from electrocuting yourself like a great honking idiot.” Pieter’s kit didn’t have anything directly applicable. But its flask still held a shot or two of whiskey, which Derek had accepted gladly. Then Brin had lit another lantern and followed Neva to the back of the storage room.

She hadn’t expected to find her other brother, however. Especially not fully constituted, in record time.

“Augie?” she breathed.

But he’d flinched at the sight of her, and her question made him flinch again, huddling further into himself. He didn’t remember.

Brin recognized his name, though. “This is your brother?”

He looked from one woman to the other while Neva slipped off his gag, his eyes gradually growing larger as he adjusted to the lantern. “I’m sorry, but who