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

Kezzie was already in the sled, about to strap in. And then they were just ... there. Boiling out of the ground, swarming over both of us and biting everywhere. But only for an instant—they were gone before we had time to scream.”

“And then the rashes came?”

“And the fever.” Brin gripped the napkin for a moment before letting it fall. It landed on her plate unspoiled, still in the crown shape she’d fashioned it into. “Not right away: it didn’t hit until after I’d made her go to the hospital to see about the marks. But when we got back to the Levee ...”

Neva inhaled audibly. She thought she knew where this story was going, and she didn’t like it. “You fought.”

Brin contemplated the crown for a beat before unmaking it and starting a swan. “Harder than you and I did. It was fresh on both of us—that’s when it’s worst.”

Neva plucked at her own napkin. She didn’t mold it into anything; whatever sad form she managed would look twice as wretched next to Brin’s rapidly morphing cloth art. But letting her fingers twitch gave her something to do while she waited for the Irishwoman to continue.

“We both walked away,” Brin said eventually. “Bloody and furious, but we faced down the madness—Kezzie more than me.” She finished the swan and moved on to a flower. “Not the next time, though.”

The waiter returned before Neva could reply. He raised his eyebrows when he saw Brin’s napkin. “Hell, Briney, you should be working here instead of as a guide.”

She smiled again, but there was still no truth in it.

He didn’t notice. “Here’s everything you ordered,” he said to Neva. “Must have quite a hunger.”

She chose to overlook the fact that he’d addressed most of the other women in the restaurant—all the white women except Brin, in fact—as Ma’am. “I do. Thank you.” Yet after the waiter set the plates down and left, Neva didn’t touch the food. “What happened?”

Brin transitioned her flower into a frog. “A few days later, I went to Kezzie’s room in the Levee to make amends. But the fever ... It was bad in her. It had lessened in me, but she was wild with it. Now I was the one trying to lead us back. Except she got hold of my knife, and when I reclaimed it ...”

Neva resisted the impulse to reach across the table and put her hands on Brin’s. Her own fever had begun to simmer dangerously, and making contact with the Irishwoman might cause it to boil up at what would be the worst possible moment. Words were a poor substitute for touch, but she tried them anyway: “You didn’t have a choice. You only did—”

“I didn’t do anything!” Brin yanked the frog into a shapeless sheet and swept it off the table. “She threw herself on my knife!”

Neva rocked back in her chair: that hadn’t been the ending she’d expected. “She killed herself?”

The energy went out of Brin as suddenly as it had come, and she looked down at the floor. “She did—to save me from having to do it. She’d gotten enough of herself back to lose it all for me. I saw it in her eyes. Damned if I don’t still see it when I close mine ... Jaysus, but I need a drink. Did you order anything stiff?”

“I will.” It would clear her out, but Neva flagged the waiter down anyway, and then she and Brin staved off further conversation by eating.

“I didn’t ‘consume’ her,” Brin said after a while. “If that’s what you’re wondering. I know the papers made a story out of it, but that wasn’t me.” She held a piece of steak aloft on her fork for a moment and shuddered.

Neva nodded, remembering how, while in the fever’s grip, she’d wanted to bite Brin and the man from the Levee—and how little she wanted to admit it.

“I left her,” Brin went on in a near-whisper. “That’s the worst of it. I left her there in her room. I was too angry, too scared, to stay and do right by her. To give her a proper burial ... So she was alone when someone came in after me.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“That’s decent of you to say, but I know different.” Brin set the piece of steak back on her plate and pushed it away. “You seem to have a better handle on it—I thought you’d be leaping over the table at me by now.”

Neva squashed the urge to do just that. “How long have you been able to ... bend metal?”

“Since I was a babe. How long have you been able to bend yourself? Don’t be shy. I saw what you did when you tried to get loose last night. And you must have done some of the same to get out of the storage room in Machinery.”

Neva pursed her lips, then shrugged. “Since I was a babe. Do you think that’s why the insects are targeting us?”

“I expect so. Kezzie could lay hands on people. Not like Christ; she couldn’t restore sight to the blind or reverse the course of death. But she could ease pain, close small wounds and speed the mending of larger ones. She couldn’t cure the bites, though ... What could your brother do?”

“Voices. He could mimic them and throw them so well you’d never know it was him. Sometimes he made it sound like I was saying things I’d never say—horribly crude things that offended old ladies.”

“He sounds grand.”

“He was.”

Brin watched Neva take another bite. “Did you ever meet someone else like us?”

“Only a few. But Augie and I never told anyone. I bet it’s the same with others: there are probably more of us than we’d guess.”

“I imagine some don’t even know they’re one of ‘us.’ I met a man once who could eat anything, no matter how poisonous—and I’m talking the most noxious mushrooms you can imagine—and be fine. He thought he just had a strong stomach.”

“Or he might