The Serpent's Curse, Lisa Maxwell [new reading .TXT] 📗

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For Sarah, whose fingerprints are on every page. Thank you for making this story immeasurably better.

THE SERPENT

1902—New York

The Serpent waited, concealed in the shadows of the city. His attention was focused on the bunching and shifting of the Aether around him… and on the estate just across Fifth Avenue from where he stood. The mansion, like its neighbors, glowed with electric light, an island of impossible luxury in the midst of a city that teemed with poverty and violence. But it was no safe haven, not even for the powerful men inside.

Despite all that had happened, the leaders of the Order still believed themselves to be inviolable. It did not matter that Khafre Hall was now a pile of ashes or that their artifacts and the Book of Mysteries had been taken from them. The Order of Ortus Aurea had continued on as though their greatest humiliation and defeat had been nothing more than a temporary embarrassment.

Let them parade around in their silken finery, the Serpent thought. Let them put on their airs and believe in the illusion of their superiority. No amount of wealth would protect them from what was coming—a new world, where those with the old magic would no longer be held back and beaten down. A world where true magic would be the key to power and where he would wield more than anyone.

As the Serpent waited, the Aether shifted around him again. Invisible to most, the Aether was the very quintessence of existence. To the Serpent, the world had a pulse. Soon his plans would begin to coalesce, and then he would be the one to make it race. To make it dance like a puppet on a string.

Certain as his victory seemed, though, the Serpent tempered his anticipation. After all, nearly two years before, he’d stood in that very place, expecting a victory that had never arrived.

The Aether lurched like an electric charge had sped through it, and the Serpent knew that the game was changing. If all went well, soon the cane he leaned against would be more than a crutch. Soon he would have the ring, and the cane would become a true weapon, just as it had once been for another. Once the power contained within the gorgon’s head was fully unlocked, those who wore the mark would be his to command, and with them under his control, he would begin to rebuild the world anew.

By the time the door to the mansion opened to release a flood of people, the vibrations of the Aether had been whipped into a frenzy, and with it, the Serpent’s certainty grew. Dressed in silks and satins and the dark wool of fine tuxedos and top hats, the rich poured screaming from the mansion like rats from a sinking ship.

The Serpent wasn’t surprised. Humans were basically animals, stupid and instinctual. Easily led with the right incentives. No amount of money changed that. Let them scurry and flee—it would do them no good in the end. He had already made his plans, had already positioned his pieces on the board, and now he had only to wait. Soon one of the Order’s artifacts would belong to him, and with it, true control over the Devil’s Own… and then so much more.

THE GIRL WITH THE KNIFE

1902—New York

J. P. Morgan’s ballroom was a riot of noise and violence. Viola Vaccarelli watched as the people around her erupted into panic. Jack Grew had tried to set a trap for her brother, but the moment Jack had given the word for the police to arrest him, Paolo’s Five Pointers had revealed themselves and started to attack. As gunfire erupted in the ballroom, the members of the Order, along with their wives and rich friends, seemed suddenly to realize that their gala had turned deadly and that no amount of money would stop their blood from spilling. Tuxedoed men and silk-clad women toppled chairs and one another as they fled, but Viola cared for none of it. All she could see was the blood on her blade.

Jianyu’s blood.

She had not been aiming for him. There had been a girl—one of Morgan’s maids—with skin dark as any of the Turkish peddlers her father used to complain about back in the old country. The girl had been going for the ring. Viola had been sure of it.

Viola had not stopped to consider who the girl might be or whether she even understood the artifact’s true value. She had simply pulled Libitina from its hidden sheath in a practiced fluid motion, as she’d done a hundred times before. Drawing back her arm, Viola had sent the knife flying. Then, out of nothing and nowhere, Jianyu had appeared, directly in the path between the girl and the blade.

She had named the knife for the goddess of funerals because it never missed. Because her blade always struck deadly and true. The ballroom had continued to roar around her, but Viola’s eyes were fixed on Jianyu’s shoulder, where Libitina was sheathed to the hilt in the flesh and muscle and bone of a man she had once considered a friend.

The brown-skinned girl had gone ashen with the sight, but Jianyu had paid her no attention. His eyes had been steady on Viola, despite the pain that had shadowed them. His mouth had formed careful words, but Viola