Witch in the White City: A Dark Historical Fantasy/Mystery (Neva Freeman Book 1), Nick Wisseman [best novels for students .TXT] 📗

fire and smoke, he strode to the top of the ladder Wiley had almost finished scaling, braced himself against the cupola, and shoved, bursting the topmost bolts in another display of superhuman strength.

As the crowd screamed, a rifle shot rang out, and the porter grabbed his stomach. But the marksman on the main roof had fired too late: after a moment of frozen, eerie stasis, the ladder swung from the tower, arcing Wiley into space.

He let go of the rung he’d been clinging to and spread his arms, perhaps aiming to snag one of the ropes the upper team of guards had looped around the first landing’s pillars. Yet it was Neva who saved him: the third ladder had been attached to the north side of the tower, and after scrambling around the corner again, she leaned out, extended her right arm an extra six inches—until it was nearly the length of a chimp’s—and caught Wiley’s forearm.

Stopping his momentum jolted her terribly. But she’d anchored herself by molding her left fingers into the tower like roots into a mountainside and braced for the strain by visualizing her skeleton as a spiderweb: elastic enough to give as the load hit, yet strong enough to hold firm after.

Even so, she nearly dropped him.

Neva couldn’t bend her right hand’s fingers fast enough—all the fracturing and reforming was taking its toll, and the pincher-like grip she’d intended didn’t quite materialize. Fortunately, Wiley clasped her forearm before he slipped. The crowd went berserk, hollering their approval and slapping each other on the back. They cheered louder still when the upper team of guards hauled a hose to the first landing and began spraying water past the second landing and onto the third, which was now engulfed in riotous flames.

“How?” asked Wiley as Neva pulled him against the tower.

She leaned forward to hide the contraction of her right arm. “I’m stronger than I look. Do you see the porter?”

He glanced up, but steam created by the hoses—two more spurted at the third landing now—had filled in the few spaces smoke hadn’t already obscured. “No.” He shook his head, looking more than a little dazed. “You’re not even tied in ... Thank you.”

“Come on.” She began climbing again, but he risked his new purchase to grab her ankle.

“Down. We need to go down—not up.”

“You need to go down. I’m a better climber.”

“Then don’t make me come after you.” Wiley squeezed her ankle. “Please: he’s as good as dead.”

She resisted the impulse to kick away his hand. “I saved you.”

“And he’s worth saving too? Let him burn.”

“He can burn after he tells me where Augie is.”

The guards raised another hose to the first landing and targeted the third. More steam resulted.

“Neva ...” Wiley paused and pressed his face to the tower. “Do you feel that?”

“I feel your hand still on my foot.”

“No, the wood—it’s getting hotter.”

“Because there’s a fire.”

“Above us; not here.”

The first landing’s window gave the lie to Wiley’s words by belching smoke. A second later, flames erupted beneath the upper guards’ feet and shot out of every opening, setting two men alight.

“Dear God,” Wiley murmured as the crowd hushed and Neva cringed.

The rest of the upper guards tried to extinguish the burning men’s clothing, but the smoke was everywhere, and one of them stumbled unseeing off the landing. He hit the main roof—seventy feet below—without uttering so much as a curse.

The other man wasn’t as quiet.

He started screaming the moment the first man went over the edge. Nothing the other guards did could stop the second man’s wailing; his clothing stayed lit, then his hair caught, then his skin. It was almost a relief when he broke away from his brothers and leapt into space.

“Flaming hell,” Wiley muttered while the guards on the main roof called frantically for ladders to be raised from the ground. “The gap at the top of the stack—it must have allowed embers to fall between it and the tower’s wall.”

“Wiley ...” Neva tried to ease her ankle from his grasp.

“Those doff, dog-bolted, mumblecrusted architects! The stack should have been left bare, ‘White-City aesthetics’ be damned! This is on their heads. Those men’s deaths are on THEIR—”

“Wiley, let go! They’re throwing us a rope.”

He looked down: a guard on the first landing had coiled enough cord to toss a fair distance. Wiley released Neva’s ankle and began climbing into range.

“I’ll get it,” she said, scurrying past him.

She beat him to a likely line of windows by several seconds. “Throw it,” she called to the guard below. He shrugged and whipped the ball of rope overhand like a pitcher, its loose end trailing behind in the increasingly sooty air. Catching the rope required another temporary extension of her arm, but she drowned the pain in adrenaline. And by the time Wiley reached her, she’d tied the rope to one of the small pillars that separated each window.

“You’re like a damn squirrel on this tower,” he noted before succumbing to a coughing fit.

She shrugged, squinting against the smoke. “I used to do a highwire act in Barnum & Bailey’s.”

“The circus?”

“Before the Fair. I’ll take your jacket now.” She pointed to the first landing, where the upper team’s surviving members had fastened the other ropes and some of the hoses to the tower. The guards on the main roof—still yelling for ladders—had secured the opposite ends of each line as far from the fire as possible. Many of them had lit anyway, but that didn’t stop several guards from preparing to slide down, wrapping belts and coats tight around their chosen cables.

Wiley darted inside the nearest smoking window for a moment. “Take this,” he said upon reemerging, handing her his belt. “It’s stronger. I’ll use my coat.”

Neva shook her head. “Just hold on to me. I can bear us both.”

He gave her the oddest look. “I almost believe you could. But I won’t let you risk it. Go now, while the line’s still clear. I’ll be right behind you.”

Judging that there’d be no convincing him—and