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

but she was already standing, contorting the bones of her face into the same demonic visage she’d resorted to in the White Chapel Club.

The guard was down, though.

Quill stood over him, holding a second rifle like a club and bleeding from at least three places. Behind him, the west exit’s door shuddered on its hinges.

“Quill!” she called, turning away long enough to reform her facial structure, unstop her ears, and signal to Brin and Derek that they could rise. “Is he ...?”

“No.” Quill didn’t seem surprised to see them. And really, what would their presence signify when set against everything else? “I don’t shoot unless I can help it. These boys are just cogs in the machine like the rest of us.”

“Like Mabel was?” Derek, leaning on Brin, had unstuffed his ears too. She was doing the same.

“I wouldn’t have cut her.”

“You shouldn’t have touched her at all,” Brin noted.

“No.” Quill sounded genuinely pained. “It was a bad bluff. But it had to be made.” Something shattered elsewhere in the Machine Shop, and he nodded in the noise’s direction. “This had to happen.”

“Did it?” asked Neva.

“It’s the only way.”

Brin looked set to argue, but for the second time in as many minutes, a bullet nearly took off her nose, this shot coming from the other direction: the Annex. They scrambled to Quill’s side of the half-dismantled boiler and took cover again.

“On three,” he murmured, hunched over but ready to charge.

Neva shook her head. “We’re not part of the fight—we just need to get to the Midway.”

He shrugged and spat to the side.

She saw red in his spittle. “You’re hurt.”

“It’s nothing.” He pointed to the west exit. “I’ll draw the attention of whoever’s come from the Annex. You get outside.”

“Quill ...”

He tightened his grip on the rifle. “Let me do this much. Go.” And as if he’d said the last word for himself, he was off, leaping over the boiler and shouting a challenge.

Brin didn’t hesitate either, grabbing Derek and running low for the exit. When she passed the fallen soldier, she reached down and plucked up his gun.

Neva glanced back at Quill—he’d downed a second soldier, but at the cost of a vicious headwound. Wobbling badly, her former teacher stumbled into the Annex.

“Good luck, you damn idiot,” she whispered before fleeing through the opposite door.

Neva, Derek, and Brin emerged behind the Terminal Station in time to see Copeland lead a flood of shouting Pinkertons into the Court of Honor, clearing the way to Transportation. Once inside its ruins, the three of them restored their respective earplugs.

Brin inspected the rifle she’d scavenged. “One shot,” she said, holding up her left index finger.

It wasn’t much, but in the process of navigating the Choral Building, Horticulture, and the Children’s Building, they found no other serviceable arms. And when they finally made it to the Midway, they’d been shot at twice more and the target of four thrown objects. They’d also witnessed a half-dozen deaths and maimings and seen fires bloom in several locations, including on the Wooded Island, which seemed to be playing host to some of the fiercest fighting.

As they caught their breath in the back alley of Irish Industries, Neva said a prayer that Dob and his cousins were safe with Mabel—said it silently because she was even more winded than Derek. She couldn’t push herself like this much longer. Maybe not at all. Her stomach had started hurting again.

“Where now?” Derek panted.

“Let’s stay in the alley,” Brin suggested.

Neva had been thinking along similar lines—the Midway wasn’t likely to be much better than the Court of Honor. Gritting her teeth, she propped up Derek, as did Brin, and the three of them hurried west, from the back of one building to the next.

It was an odd thing to navigate the Fair without noise.

Neva had noticed its absence during the rush to the Midway. But as they moved behind the Natatorium, she remembered the din that used to welcome visitors to the Exposition. Exotic music, industrial clangs, roaring animals, shouting salesmen: all gone, even when she retracted her bone plugs. Instead, she knew without listening that the sounds beyond the silence were of conflict—men killing and dying.

What a difference a year could make.

At least the fighting on the Midway seemed restricted to the main thoroughfare; they didn’t meet anyone in the alley as they made their way to the Moorish Palace. From there, after edging out behind the palace’s rear wall, Neva could see the Ferris Wheel.

At first, she thought she’d guessed wrong—all the carriages that hadn’t been disassembled looked empty, even the lower ones that didn’t need climbing to reach. But a bit of movement on the near side caught her eye, in the fifth carriage from the ground: a man kicking his feet up, propping them on the seat in front of him as he reclined to watch the struggle below.

Augie.

Not on the outside: the man’s skin was white, his beard red, and his clothing that of a hobo’s. But Neva was almost certain he was her brother.

How to be sure, though? Augie wouldn’t admit his identity—not if she believed what he’d said about leaving him alone. He’d stay in his current form, with no way to get him out of it short of taking a knife to him. And if she were wrong ...

On the other hand, if forcing the issue caused Augie to reveal himself, could she hope to overcome him? Who knew how many talents he’d acquired over the years? He’d just collected Brin’s, and he’d already had Derek’s.

He’d already had Derek’s.

The memory of Augie gloving his hand in sparks slammed into Neva as if the sparks had merged into another lightning bolt. He had Derek’s talent because they’d shared their mother’s womb, swapping bits of themselves as her nurturing fluids circulated between them. Augie had acquired his brother’s ability—and doubtless his form—before they were born ... Just as he must have collected his sisters’.

He’d said he wasn’t sure what he’d taken from their stillborn sibling. But