At the moment he wasn’t looking at her at all, though. As the boat churned onward, Harte’s eyes were trained on the receding horizon and on the city that had been their prison for so long. Every lie he told, every con he ran, and every betrayal he’d committed had been to escape that island, yet there was no victory in his expression now that freedom was his. Instead, Harte’s jaw was taut, his mouth pulled flat and hard, and his posture was rigid, as though waiting for the next attack.
Without warning, the somber note of the ferry broke the early morning calm, drowning out the noise of the rattling engines and the soft, steadily churning water. Esta flinched at the sound, and she couldn’t stop herself from shivering a bit from the brisk wind—or from the memory of that darkness bleeding into the world, obliterating the light. Obliterating everything.
“You okay?” Harte asked, turning toward her with worry shadowing his features. His eyes searched over her, as though he was waiting for the moment he would need to catch her again when she collapsed.
But she wouldn’t collapse. She wouldn’t allow herself to be that weak. And she hated his hovering. “I’m just a little jumpy.”
She thought Harte was about to reach for her. Before he could, she straightened and pulled back a little. If they were to be partners, they would be equals. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—allow her current weakness to be a liability.
Harte frowned and kept his hands at his sides, but Esta didn’t miss the way his fingers curled into fists. Skilled liar that he was, he couldn’t hide the hurt that flashed across his features any more than he could completely mask the worry etched into his expression every time he glanced at her.
Esta forced herself to ignore that, too, and focused on staying upright. On making herself appear stronger than she felt. Confident.
Harte gave her another long look before finally turning back to watch the land recede into the distance. She did the same, but her concentration was on what waited for them when the ship finally docked.
They had an impossible task ahead of them: to find four stones now scattered across a continent, thanks to Harte. Like Ishtar’s Key—the stone Esta wore in a cuff around her upper arm—the stones had once been in the possession of the Order. The Dragon’s Eye, the Djinni’s Star, the Delphi’s Tear, and the Pharaoh’s Heart. They had been created when Isaac Newton imbued five ancient artifacts with the power of Mageus whose affinities happened to align with the elements. He’d been trying to control the power in the Book that was currently tucked into Esta’s skirt, but he hadn’t been able to. After Newton had suffered a nervous breakdown, he’d entrusted the artifacts and the Book to the Order, who later had used them to create the Brink and establish their power in the city—and to keep Mageus trapped on the island and subjugated under the Order’s control. But Dolph Saunders and his gang had changed that.
Still, even if she and Harte managed to navigate the far-flung world, to find the stones and retrieve them, they still had to figure out how to use them to get the Book’s power out of Harte and to free the Mageus of the city without destroying the Brink. Because, in the greatest of ironies, the Brink also kept the magic it took. If they destroyed the Brink, they risked destroying magic itself—and all Mageus along with it.
Esta was jarred from her thoughts when the boat lurched as it came up against the dock. Another blast of the horn, and the engines went silent. The few passengers around them began making their way toward the stairs.
“Ready?” Harte asked, his voice too soft, his eyes too concerned.
That worry sealed it for her. She took another moment to look at the skyline in the distance before turning to him. “I was thinking—”
“A dangerous proposition,” he drawled. But his eyes weren’t smiling. Not like they should have been. He was still too worried about her, and she knew enough to know that fear like that was a luxury they couldn’t afford. Especially with all that was on the line.
“I think we should split up,” Esta said.
“Split up?” he asked, surprised.
“I can’t get us tickets to Chicago with you in the way. You keep looking at me like I’m about to fall over. People will notice.”
“Maybe I keep looking at you like that because you look like you’re having trouble staying upright.”
“I’m fine,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes.
“You think I don’t know that you’ve been leaning on that railing like it’s some kind of crutch?”
She ignored the truth—and the irritation—in his statement. “I can’t lift a couple of tickets with you following me around.”
Harte opened his mouth to argue, but she beat him to it.
“Besides, you’re supposed to be dead,” she reminded him. “The one thing we have going for us is that the Order isn’t looking for you. We can’t afford for someone to recognize either one of us in there, and that’s more likely to happen if we’re together.”
He studied her for a moment. “You’re probably right—”
“I usually am.”
“—but I have one condition.”
“What’s that?” she asked, not at all liking the crafty expression in his eyes.
He held out his hand. “Give me the Book.”
“What?” She pulled back. The Book was the reason he’d planned to double-cross Dolph’s gang in the first place, and for a moment she wondered if she’d been stupid to think there was something between them.
“You want to split up, fine. We’ll split up. But I get to carry the Book.”
“You don’t trust me,” she said, ignoring the flicker of hurt. After all she’d risked for him . . . But what had she expected? He was a con man, a liar. It was part of what she admired in him, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t have wanted him to be anything else.
“I trust you as much as you trust me,” he told her, a non-answer if ever there was one.
“After all I did for you . . .” She pretended to be more irritated than she felt. In truth, she couldn’t blame him. She would have done the exact same thing. And there was something comforting in falling back into their old roles, that well-worn distrust that had kept them from falling too easily into each other.
“You have the cuff with the first stone,” he told her. “If I’m holding the Book, we’ll be even. Plus, if either one of us runs into trouble, we won’t be putting both of the things we have at risk.”
She could argue. She probably should. But Esta understood implicitly that agreeing to his demand would be a step toward solidifying their partnership. Whatever she might feel for Harte paled in comparison to all that they had left to do. Or so she told herself. Besides, if he already had the power of the Book inside of him, he didn’t really need the Book itself, did he? What he needed was the stone she wore in the cuff beneath her sleeve, and he wasn’t asking for that.
“Fine.” She brushed off her disappointment as she slipped the Book from where she’d kept it within her cloak and held it out to him.
A small tome of dark, cracked leather, the Ars Arcana didn’t look like much. Even with the strange geometric markings on the cover, there was nothing overtly remarkable about it. Maybe that was because the power of it was no longer held within its pages. Or maybe that was just the way of things—maybe power didn’t always appear the way you expected it to.