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

the exhibits,” Neva went on. “The fixation on profit while so much of the country descends into ruin—the Fair is a distraction. A glorious distraction, but a distraction nonetheless. A veil of fantasy that blinds the world to the day’s true issues.”

“She sounds like you,” Brin noted to Quill.

“Then there’s the fact that the Fair killed my brother.”

No one made any reply to this.

Neva balled her fists. “I won’t deny wanting to return the favor. On his birthday, no less: Chicago Day—October 9th—will be 22 years to the day after Augie and I were born. An explosion to commemorate his life and death would be about perfect.”

Quill nodded. “And we won’t deny wanting to humiliate Bonfield in recompense for those he killed at and after Haymarket. Vengeance isn’t the worst of inspirations.”

“Except when it is.”

Brin wrinkled her nose. “Come again?”

Neva bit her lip and stood. “You say no one will be hurt, but dynamite isn’t exactly a precise instrument. And you say you want to avenge fallen comrades, but blasting the Wheel won’t bring them back. Or Augie. All you’ll do is harden the country’s attitude against labor activists and social change.”

“Now she sounds like Wiley,” Pieter said, half-amused.

“Because she’s being rational,” Wiley countered.

Roland snorted. “Told you a colored girl wouldn’t be good for anything but servin’.”

It was one slight too many. “And what do you know about any of this?” hissed Neva, suddenly feeling the accumulated weight of all the slurs, the looks, the passing-overs. “A white man like yourself, claiming to fight one form of oppression while championing another? Have you read The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition? Can you even read?”

Roland smirked. “Can but didn’t. Knew from the title it was scut: I see a ‘Colored American’ right here.”

“Obviously there are Negroes at the Fair,” Quill interjected. “Wells, Douglass, and the other contributors wrote about why they aren’t represented in the exhibits—because of the legacy of slavery, and laws that perpetuate much of its hardships. But that’s beside the point.”

“Is it?” challenged Neva.

He shrugged. “Maybe not. But the most pertinent question is what you’ll do now.”

She glared at him. Her former teacher looked damnably calm, detached and academic about what could easily amount to a life-and-death subject, while she seethed with rage and pain and—

Fever.

God help her. It was the insect’s damn venom again. She’d been angry on her own, but her emotion had summoned the fever, and now her rashes were warming and pulsing like living warpaint.

“Neva?” prompted Wiley.

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I need some air.” Rising abruptly, she stumbled towards the door, causing Roland to curse and Pieter to jerk his bulky frame out of her way.

“Let her go,” Brin called when Wiley would have stopped her from opening the door.

Brin. The Irishwoman had the same venom in her veins. Venom that could be released by slashing those veins open. Neva only had to turn around, harden her hands into bone blades, and—

No. She had to get outside. Had to hurry through Machinery and out of its clatter, escape into the Court of Honor, which would be lamplit, beautiful, and soothing ...

Yet not enough.

When Neva emerged into the Fair’s centerpiece, no immediate relief awaited her. Just new noise to replace the old, and an outdoor-bigness instead of Machinery’s indoor-closeness. Should she dip herself in the South Canal’s ice waters again? Brin might not come to pull her out this time, but surely someone else would. It was only a little past ten; there were still acres of people about.

And whistling.

Neva heard the first windy notes as she staggered towards the Basin. Initially, the whistling didn’t seem anything out of the ordinary. By this point in the evening, new fairgoers had usually overcome their awe of the Court of Honor and transitioned to a state of festive carousing. But as she brushed against a near-skipping elderly white man, the warbling tune clarified in her ears, growing in volume and allure.

Still, Neva didn’t understand how taken she was with the melody until she stopped a few feet short of the South Canal and changed direction.

The whistling was coming from beyond the Obelisk—no, beyond the Stock Pavilion. Further, even: following the wordless song took her past the outdoor agricultural exhibits and into the Stock Exhibit itself, a maze of aisles and stalls, mostly empty now except for the animal inhabitants and their odors. As she passed a set of prize steers, Neva wondered why no one else chased the music with her. She couldn’t be the only one to find it so enchanting. So simple, so lovely, so ...

Bewitching.

She’d been bewitched. Her fever receded for a moment as the realization struck. She’d been called like a dog, summoned by a sound no one else could hear and led to this vacant stall at the east—or was it west?—end of the Stock Exhibit. But why?

Her answer emerged from the stall as she drew close to it: a hooded figure in a long coat, face shadowed except for his pursed, whistling lips.

Leather Apron, piping her to her doom.

Chapter Twenty

IT WASN’T ACTUALLY Jack the Ripper—it couldn’t be. Even if he was the spitting image of the mannequin Neva had seen presiding over the White Chapel Club, cloaked as much in darkness and foreboding as he was cloth.

But whoever the stranger was, he had far more control over her than any man had a right to.

She didn’t have the strength to turn her steps away from the stall, or the ability to keep from walking inside and lowering her head next to the halter lashed to the far wall. Even when the stranger strapped her in, leisurely shortening the crownpiece and tightening the throatlatch, Neva didn’t resist. She couldn’t: he kept whistling, kept filling her with his languorous, anesthetizing music as a tendril of crescent-backed insects erupted from the floor and scrambled up her leg.

Then he drew a knife.

The blade glided out of a sheath hidden inside his jacket—God help her, maybe