“You don’t need to worry about it,” Cela told him, crossing her arms. Maybe it was a stupid decision to help out the magician, but it had been her decision. As much as Abe thought it was his duty to take up where their father left off, Cela wasn’t a child anymore. She didn’t need her older brother to approve every little thing she did, especially when five days of seven he wasn’t even around.
“I don’t need to worry about it?” Abe asked, incredulous. “There’s a white woman unconscious in my cellar, and I don’t need to worry about it? What have you gotten yourself into this time?”
“It’s our cellar,” she told him, emphasizing the word. Left to them both by their parents. “And I haven’t gotten myself into anything. I’m helping a friend,” she answered, her shoulders squared.
“She your friend?” Abe’s face shadowed with disbelief.
“No. I promised a friend I’d keep her comfortable, until she . . .” But it seemed wrong, somehow, to speak Death’s name when he was sitting in the room with them. “It’s not like she’s got much time left.”
“That doesn’t help anything, Cela. Do you know what could happen to us if someone found out she was here?” Abel asked. “How are we supposed to explain a white woman dying in our cellar? We could lose this building. We could lose everything.”
“Nobody knows she’s here,” Cela said, even as her insides squirmed. Why had she agreed to do this? She wished she could go back and slap herself to the other side of tomorrow for even considering to help Harte. “You and I, we’re the only ones with keys to the cellar. None of the tenants upstairs know anything about this. They don’t need to know anything. She’ll be gone before the night is over, and then you won’t have to worry about it. You weren’t even supposed to be home,” she told him, as though that made any difference at all.
“So you were going behind my back?”
“It’s my house too,” Cela said, squaring her shoulders. “And I’m not a complete idiot. I got compensated for my trouble.”
“You got compensated.” Abe’s voice was hollow.
She told him about the ring she had stitched into her skirts. The setting held an enormous clear stone, probably worth a fortune.
Abel was shaking his head. “You’re just gonna walk up to some fancy East Side jeweler and sell it, are you?”
Cela’s stomach sank. He was right. How did I not think of that? There was no way to sell the ring without raising suspicion. Not that she was going to admit it to him at that particular moment. “It’s security. That’s all.”
“Security is this here building,” Abel told her, lifting his eyes as though he could see through the ceiling above him, to the first floor where they lived, to the second floor the Brown family rented, clear up to the attic, which held a row of cots they leased out to down-on-their-luck single men in the dead of winter. “Security is what our parents gave us when they left us this.”
He wasn’t wrong. Their house had been bought and paid for with their father’s hard work. It meant that no one could turn them away or raise their rent because of the color of their skin. More, it was a testament every day that their mother’s choice in their father had been a good one, no matter what her mother’s family had believed.
The woman moaned again, her breath rattling like Death himself was pulling the air from her chest. The sound had such a forlorn helplessness to it that Cela couldn’t help but crouch over her.
“Cela, are you even hearing me?” Abel asked.
Somehow, the woman’s skin was even more colorless. Her eyes were dull, lifeless. Cela reached out tentatively and touched the woman’s cool hand, taking it in hers. The fingertips beneath the nails were already blue. “She’s dying, Abe. This is her time, and whatever mistakes I might have made in bringing her here, I’m not leaving a dying woman alone, no matter what she is or what she isn’t.” Cela looked up at her brother. “Are you?”
His expression was creased in frustration, but a moment later his eyes closed and his shoulders sank. “No, Rabbit,” he said softly, using her childhood nickname. “I suppose not.” He opened his eyes again. “How long do you think she has?”
Cela frowned, staring at the fragile woman. She wasn’t exactly sure. When their mother had passed on from consumption five years before, Cela had been barely twelve years old. Her father had kept her from the sickroom until the very last moments, trying to protect her. He’d always been trying to protect all of them.
“Can’t you hear the death rattle? She’s got hours . . . maybe minutes. I don’t know. Not long, though.” Because the rattle in the old woman’s throat was the one thing she did remember of watching her mother pass on. That sickly, paper-thin rattle that sounded nothing like her sunshine-and-laughter mother. “She’ll be gone before this night is through.”
Together they waited silently for the moment when the woman’s chest would cease to rise or fall.
“What are we going to do when she finally dies?” Abel asked after they’d watched for a long while. “We can’t exactly call someone.”
“When she passes, we’ll wait for the dead of night, and then we’ll take her to St. John’s over on Christopher Street,” Cela said, not really understanding where the impulse came from. But the moment the words were out, she felt sure they were right. “They can care for her there.”
Abel was shaking his head, but he didn’t argue. She could tell he was trying to think of a better option when a loud pounding sounded from the floor above.
Abel’s dark eyes met hers in the flickering lamplight. It was well past ten, too late for a social call. “Someone’s here,” he said, as though Cela couldn’t have figured that out on her own. But his voice held the same worry she felt.
“Maybe just a boarder needing a bed for the night,” she told him.
“Weather’s too nice for that,” he said almost to himself as he stared up at the ceiling. The pounding came again, harder and more urgent than before.
“Just let it be,” she told him. “They’ll go away eventually.”
But Abel shook his head. His eyes were tight. “You wait here, and I’ll see what they want.”
“Abe—”
He never did listen, she thought as he disappeared into the darkness of the staircase that led up to their apartment above. At least he’d left her the lamp.
Cela waited as Abe’s footsteps crossed the floor above her. The pounding stopped, and she could just barely hear the low voices of men.
Then the voices grew into shouts.
The sudden sound of a scuffle had Cela on her feet. But before she could take even a step, the crack of a gun split the silence of the night and the thud of a body hitting the floor pressed the air from her lungs.
No.
There were more footsteps above now. Heavy footsteps made by heavy boots. There were men in their house. In her house.
Abel.
She started to go toward the steps, desperate to get to her brother, but something within her clicked, some primal urge that she could not understand and she could not fight. It was as though her feet had grown roots.