Page 165

“Let’s get that thing off his arm,” Esta said, and she stepped across the boundary and into the circle.

QUESTIONS OF AETHER

Bella Strega

James Lorcan didn’t know how much time had passed between when Darrigan had managed to escape and when Logan found him unconscious and bloody on his own living room floor. He immediately noticed what was missing: the portfolio from Morgan’s mansion and the cane.

“Did the boys take care of the problem in the Strega?” James asked as he sat himself upright. He gingerly dabbed his battered nose, wincing at the slight pressure. Then he tilted his head back, so the blood could run down his throat instead of all over his rug. He’d have to find another healer to fix it, and soon. Preferably before he showed himself in the saloon.

“I don’t know,” Logan told him, looking distinctly more uneasy than usual. “I didn’t stick around to find out.”

“You didn’t stay?” James glared at him.

“The others were leaving,” Logan said, feeling suddenly uneasy. “If your own people aren’t going to fight, I’m not getting my head busted in for some stupid saloon.”

“Who left?” James asked.

“I didn’t take down their names,” Logan told him. The boy was jangling with nervous energy, coward that he was. “But Marcus and Arnie for sure.”

James frowned. Marcus and Arnie were old blood. They wore the mark, but they hadn’t stood and fought for the Strega?

The Aether shuddered around him. That stupid, constant droning seemed louder now, more perverse in its insistence that something was coming and more determined to hide it from his view.

He shoved over the small table, shattering the glass that had been sitting atop it and splattering Nitewein on the Persian carpet. The way it marred the ornate pattern in the weave, like drops of blood on fabric, settled something in him. Any time he chipped away at the perfection of Dolph’s life gave him a thrill of satisfaction.

“Come,” he ordered, and without waiting to see if Logan would follow—of course he would—James took the steps down to the bottom floor and entered the barroom.

It was a disaster. Chairs lay broken in heaps and glass littered the floor. There were a handful of his people there, looking morose and dejected as they stared at the mess. But Logan had been right. The majority of the Devil’s Own were nowhere to be found. They’d fled like rats from a sinking ship. Not even the fear of the marks had been enough to have them stand and fight for the place that served as their home.

The few who remained stood when he entered, but they didn’t make any move to explain.

He called over Murphy, one of the new boys he’d recruited in the weeks after the Flatiron, when the heat of a city summer stirred tempers and made men volatile. Murphy, like other new faces that had come to call the Strega their own, had gladly accepted the mark. He, like so many others, had yearned to be part of something. James’ possession of the ring, along with his new alliance with the Five Pointers, had been enough to convince them that this was what they were willing to die for.

Unlike those who had followed Dolph, the new boys never asked inconvenient questions, never pressed. The newer ones, like Murphy, were easier to control without their inconvenient memories and misplaced loyalty to Saunders and with the freshly inked snakes entwined on their skin.

“Find the others,” he told them. Then he turned to the bar to see if any of the whiskey had survived.

When John Torrio and Razor Riley had entered the Strega a few hours earlier, no one had paid them any attention. Maybe it was because the two had become regulars since Torrio had made the alliance with the Devil’s Own as payment for the help James had given him to wrestle control of the Five Pointers from Paul Kelly. Or maybe there was another reason why none of the Devil’s Own noticed the pistols carried by the two as they stalked through the crowded bar toward the table where James usually held court. Not until Torrio had it pointed directly at James’ head.

It seemed that the stupid dago was tired of waiting. He wanted the territory he’d been promised, and he wanted it immediately.

James had managed to talk him down, but who knows what might have happened if Mock Duck hadn’t arrived a few minutes later, shoving into the Strega like he and his highbinders belonged there.

But it wasn’t a coincidence that his two newest allies had both shown up that day at the same time, both primed for a fight and ready to brawl.

“The attack was a distraction,” he said.

Logan blinked at him.

“Esta’s back,” he told Logan, cataloging the guilt he saw flash through the other boy’s eyes. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

At least Logan had the good sense to look away. “I tried to stop her, but… I don’t know what happened, James. One second I was blocking their way, and the next…” He looked more than a little unsettled by it. “I woke up on the floor, and they were already gone.”

“Viola, if I had to guess,” James said. Though it could have just as easily been Logan’s own incompetence or cowardice. “But it doesn’t matter. If Esta’s back, it means the Book is back as well. She wouldn’t come without it.”

Logan frowned, his brows drawing together in confusion. “I didn’t sense it.”

The Aether lurched uneasily.