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

the pain of this final admission, he sobbed uncontrollably until Neva pulled his head down to her lap and stroked his hair, calming him the only way she knew how: not with electrical stimuli, but with love.

ONCE DEREK COLLECTED himself, Neva had half a mind to tell him more of the man who’d violated her after a performance at Barnum & Bailey. She’d been barely seventeen, too young to know how to handle the brute who’d been enflamed by her routine and cornered her in the changing tent. If he’d been slower to use force, she would have been able to bend away from him, contorting in a way he wouldn’t find so attractive. But he’d started by slamming her head against the tent’s central post, and she’d been too woozy to do more than struggle ineffectually.

Augie had been in full control when he came in and saw what was underway, however.

He’d pitched his voice into the most fearsome sound imaginable, as if Terror itself had been given a tongue. The brute had flown off her in surprise. Yet Augie was faster: he’d darted forward and smashed the man’s head against the post, just above where he’d knocked her head moments earlier.

The brute crumpled to the ground without a sound, his head flopping at an impossible angle. After her brother had felt for a pulse and found none, he’d hugged her close, shuddered, and whispered, “I’ll take care of this.” She’d never asked where he took the man’s body, but she imagined the circus’s dancing bear ate well that night.

And yet, it wasn’t fair to hold this up for Derek to consider. Not when he’d confessed a wrong he’d committed; speaking of her other brother’s finest hour would feel like a rebuke in comparison. So Neva told a more recent tale instead: of her foolishness in following an eerie whistling to its source.

“It’s time to leave,” Derek said when she’d finished summarizing her run-in with Leather Apron (or his lookalike). “I may not like the man,” her living brother added, gesturing at Wiley, who stood some thirty feet away, gazing in any direction but theirs. “But he’s right. You’d be safer in Pullman Town.”

“Except now we know someone else—another killer; maybe the killer—is still out there.”

“Precisely my point. Neva, I won’t lose you too.”

She looked at Derek for a long moment, at his grief, his exhaustion, his pain ... and felt it all herself. “Or I you,” she said at last. “I’ll come tonight, after I speak to Brin. I owe her a warning.”

He shook his head. “Send a note. That man nearly killed you.”

“He could have, but he didn’t. And I’ll be careful.”

“Then I’m staying with you.”

“Derek ...”

“No. I left you last night—against my better judgment—and you nearly died. I’m not letting you walk around alone again.”

She squeezed his shoulder. “I appreciate that, but you should go. I’ll let Wiley escort me. Don’t lose your job over this.”

“To hell with my job! You’re my sister!”

Neva glanced at Wiley—amazingly, he seemed not to have heard Derek’s outburst. “And you’re my brother; I don’t want you risking yourself any more than you already have. Please go to Pullman Town. I’ll meet you there tonight. That’s a promise.”

He gave her a long, penetrating look. “See that you keep it,” he said at last. Standing abruptly, he rubbed his cheeks dry and took a step southward, in the direction of the Terminal Station. “God’s wounds, Neva, are you sure you’re not the one who can tinker with people’s minds?” He took the bite out of his words by giving her a beartrap of a hug, then told her how to find his house and walked toward the bridge at the other end of the Island.

Neva watched him until the path turned and he disappeared behind a grove of shingle oaks. It had hurt to tell him to leave—cutting her to her core and out the other side—but it felt right to get him to safety.

Now for herself.

“I’m leaving the Fair,” she said to Wiley as she approached him. “Like you wanted.”

He hid his surprise—and dismay?—almost perfectly; the emotions only played across his face for a moment. “Probably for the best. When will you go?”

“After the meeting. I’d like to say my goodbyes in person.”

“Right ... Where will you go?”

“Pullman Town.”

Wiley grimaced and shot a look in the direction Derek had gone. “With him?”

Neva grimaced in turn. She certainly wasn’t going to explain all of that relationship—not when Derek, as an ostensibly white man, had more to lose than she did. “He’s like a brother to me. I’ll stay with him for a few days while I figure out what’s next.”

“I see. Well, should you need any assistance ...”

“I know. Thank you.”

They fell quiet as the Lagoon’s waters lapped against the Island and a gondola slipped past on its way to the Court of Honor.

“What would you like to do this afternoon?” asked Wiley after an enthusiastic bunch of fairgoers traipsed by.

“The Palace of Fine Arts,” she decided eventually. If she could speak to Brin now, there’d be no need to stick around until evening; the other anarchists wouldn’t miss her.

But the Irishwoman was nowhere to be found.

“Called off sick,” the waiter who’d served them two nights ago explained after Neva found him in the Palace’s restaurant. “First day she’s missed the whole Fair.”

Once the waiter had moved to another table, Neva turned to Wiley. “Is she all right?”

He put his menu down. “I haven’t heard different. We can ask her tonight—if she can walk, she’ll be there.”

It was an ominous form of reassurance. Neva nearly told Wiley not to say such things but held her tongue.

THE AFTERNOON AND EVENING passed in a haze of nostalgia and anxiety.

The nostalgia derived from revisiting some of her favorite exhibits, including the seventy-foot “Modern Women” mural at the Women’s Building. She also lingered in the room she’d shared with Augie in the Algerian and Tunisian Village, staying long past the few minutes it