Winterspell (55 page)

“Ah. Clara. There you are.”

The voice was unmistakable, the anger within it palpable, but Clara
noticed as she turned to face it that she was not afraid. Not after what she had seen, and not with Godfather's last words lingering in her mind.

She smiled meekly. “Mrs. Plum. How good of you to call.”

Through the ballroom doors, their fringed drapes askew, glided Patricia Plum, hair pinned up with jewels glittering as coldly as her eyes. She wore a silk gown, a smart coat of deep burgundy, and a shawl trimmed with ermine. Dr. Victor, lean and tall in his dark coat and hat, was right on her heels. Snow dusted their shoulders.

Clara curtsied. She did not have to delve far to find the remnants of fear from Christmas Eve, when Dr. Victor had gripped her so cruelly on the dance floor. She hoped it showed on her face.

“You don't fool me with that demure facade, Clara,” Patricia Plum hissed, and when Dr. Victor grabbed Clara by the elbow, she let it happen, let her body go limp and allowed tears into her eyes.

“You're hurting me.” She trembled for good measure.

“It's nothing compared to what I will do to you tonight,” Dr. Victor whispered, his cold lips at her ear. George and Mrs. Hancock had hurried out. Clara was alone.

“Where have you been?” As Clara struggled in Dr. Victor's grip, Plum's face was impassive but her eyes were furious. “Clara dear, you nearly missed our deadline.”

“Yes, Mrs. Plum,” Clara said, “but we're back now. Father, too. He's upstairs with Felicity, eating breakfast and preparing for the ceremony tonight. You can see him for yourself.”

Plum jerked her head at Dr. Victor, who released Clara to hurry upstairs. The Concordia glove glinted on his left hand; it had left indentations in Clara's skin.

Once they were alone, Plum floated closer. “Let's try this again. Tell me, Clara, where have you been this past week?”

“Father was afraid.” Clara looked up, biting her lip, wringing her hands. It occurred to her that no one in Cane would believe this timid front for an instant. The thought cheered her. “He knew how terribly
angry at him you were. He ran off, went into hiding. But I know him well. I know all his little hideouts.”

Plum smirked. “The coward.”

Clara ignored her. “I found him, told him that he had a responsibility to his city, to me and Felicity. He couldn't hide and hope his troubles went away. It was easy to guilt him. He was so horribly drunk.”

Plum relaxed; Clara could practically feel the woman accepting her story, reveling in the sense of it.

Dr. Victor returned, his expression sour. “She's right. He's back, with the girl. When I walked in, I thought he would piss himself.”

“Please, Dr. Victor, such crude language,” Plum reproved. She considered Clara carefully for a moment, and then gave a delicate shrug. “I suppose, then, we're finished here and should leave you to prepare.”

Dr. Victor seized Clara's wrists and yanked her back against him. She cried out piteously, though inside she longed to scream, to free herself from his grasp and attack him. Were it not for what she intended to carry out tonight, she would have.

She no longer feared his brutish hands, his stinking medicinal breath.

Patricia Plum tilted up her chin. “We'll see you tonight, Clara. And don't forget our bargain, at least for Felicity's sake, hmm?”

Behind Clara, Dr. Victor chuckled; Clara felt his wet breath on her neck.

She nodded, the tears in her eyes entirely genuine. She was furious.

Plum smiled. “Very well. Happy New Year.”

George hurried to her once they had gone, his face pale. “Oh, Miss Stole. Are you quite all right?”

Clara hardly heard him. She was staring at the front doors, which Dr. Victor had left open. Snow swirled in, frosting the parquet floor. She wiped her cheeks dry and smiled.

“Yes,” she said, “I'm fine.”

And soon, with Godfather's help, they all would be.

A
t eleven o'clock that evening John Stole exited his carriage at Wall Street and Broadway to ring in the New Year.

Clara stepped out behind him, Felicity firmly in hand.

In her other hand, tucked inside her fur-lined glove with the cunning satin ribbons, was a small vial, chilled against her skin.

Their carriage was lit with lamps and strewn with holly garlands. The stamping horses wore bells at their necks, and red ribbons at their tails. John Stole was resplendent in his top hat and smart silk shirt, his red vest and scarf, his dark overcoat. He raised his hands to greet the crowds, and a searchlight on a rolling cart illuminated him, turning the snowfall into a glowing curtain.

Overhead, the spires of Trinity Church stretched into the cold black night, and bells rang joyously. Throughout the crowd citizens in patched coats and frock coats, in leather gloves and frayed knitted ones, shouted and cheered, giddy with the night, giddy with drink, their cheeks red and their voices hoarse. From the trees boys threw wads of confetti that mixed with the snow and turned it colored. The air was thick with noisemakers and whistles, clapper bells and toy horns.

A tremendous clock had been wheeled to the wooden stage,
constructed especially for this event. Clara remembered when it had been commissioned, years ago. She had sat on Godfather's lap, his fingers over hers as, together, they'd molded the faces of the clay figurines that would encircle the clock face.

When the Stole family had finally worked their way through the crowd, where her father shook as many hands as he could and Leo Wiley forced him to answer a few questions from shivering reporters—centering primarily around his recent rumored disappearance and reports that the old toymaker Drosselmeyer had gone mad on Christmas Eve and ransacked the mayor's mansion—they climbed up the stairs and onto the stage.

Clara was jittery with anticipation. She ran her gloved fingers along the clock's rim, down the curve of a serpent's tail, up the wing of a nightbird, and thought of home.

She started. Home? But home was here, in New York.

Or perhaps,
she thought,
it is both.
New York and Cane. Human and mage. A child of two worlds, and of two bloods.

The thought filled her with a comfort that slid from her head to her toes, strengthening her. She passed Felicity on to Mr. Wiley, who patted her absently on the head. Felicity glared back at Clara from beneath the brim of her ribboned felt hat, but Clara shooed her along. Patricia Plum was coming up the stairs at the other end of the stage, in a dark gown and coat trimmed with lace and pale fur and glittering white jewels. The crowd quieted a bit at her appearance. Dr. Victor appeared behind her, his bowler hat rimmed with snow.

“Clara,” Felicity whispered, indignantly edging away from Mr. Wiley, but Clara shook her head.

Believe me, dear sister,
Clara thought, watching Plum with what she hoped was an appropriate amount of resigned grief,
you want none of this.

She glanced at the clock. It was eleven forty-five. Time for her father's speech, and nearly time for his death—at least, as far as Patricia
Plum knew. Clara met the smug blue eyes across the stage and let her face constrict, let her eyes fall.

Mr. Wiley bustled forward and muttered into her father's ear. John Stole nodded and raised his hands to the crowd.

“To the good people of New York City,” he called out into the snowy night, “welcome to the first night of a new beginning.”

Clara stared at her father, nonplussed. So too, she noticed, did Leo Wiley, who glanced at the planned speech in his hands before coughing loudly and waving it about with no small amount of nervous bluster.

That, Clara knew, was not how the speech began. She had rehearsed it with her father that afternoon.

Across from her, Dr. Victor shifted, his hands in his coat pockets and his eyes on the crowd. Clara followed his gaze and saw a hard-looking man with greased hair and a pockmarked face, muffled to his nose in a dark scarf.

His right arm was stiff, his hand obscured.

The gunman.

Clara clasped her hands at her waist and bowed her head, as though pensively listening to her father's words. She pulled out the vial from her glove.

It was filled with silver. Her recently bandaged palm stung to look at it.

“. . . it has been a hard few years for us,” her father was saying, “and for some more than for others. There has been injustice in our city, a great number of injustices that have left many hardworking citizens poor and cold and hungry, while others luxuriate by their fires. Crime runs rampant, the economy is poor, the courts are corrupt and full of greed, and as your mayor . . . I must assume responsibility for this. For your hunger, for your cold and your weariness, your anger and fear.”

The crowd was silent, shifting, but their eyes were on John Stole, whose image burned brilliantly in the snowy light. They stared at him—uncertain and angry, yes, but hopeful most of all.

“My wife,” he continued, “was a woman of great integrity who believed in fairness and generosity, both of bread and of spirit. She worked tirelessly for you, for every one of us, and I think she would be . . .” His voice broke; he had to pause. The wide-eyed crowd swayed closer. “She would be ashamed of what I have let happen since her death. Of how I have behaved. I have not done right by her. I have not done right by my daughters, who remind me of her whenever I see their faces.”

He turned to Felicity, who looked caught between mortification and delight at the attention, her cheeks glowing bright pink. She put a hand to her mouth and bobbed a perfect curtsy. Then John Stole looked to Clara, and their eyes met. In that moment, with the memory of her mother surrounding them, Clara realized with a shock that perhaps he remembered more of what had happened in Cane than he'd let on. His eyes upon her were too knowing.

“They have taught me more than I ever thought possible,” he continued, “especially you, Clara.” He blew her a soft kiss. “Your mother would have been so proud of you.”

For a moment, as the crowd murmured approvingly, Clara was thunderstruck. But then she saw how Patricia Plum fumed, how Dr. Victor's eyes were intent on the gunman.

Clara nodded at the crowd, smiled, and uncapped the vial, spilled two drops of her own wintry blood onto the skin of her wrist.

Perhaps she could not access her magic so easily, now that she was not in Cane, but it was still in her blood. Godfather had used his last breath to tell her that with a small tithe—a spot of pain to create focus and bring her blood out into the open—she would still be able to use her power. That had been his own solution, the awful night he'd cast his own special breed of mechaniks across the ballroom, doused in silver.

So Clara focused on that spot at her wrist, on the pain of her stinging palm, and used the pain as an amplifier to extend herself outward,
awareness flooding her. The sky was a darker black, the snow colder and brighter, and somewhere, so distant she thought it might be a trick of her mind, she felt the line of another's blood, coursing thin but steady within her own. It pulled her ineffably toward a world unseen.

As if he were there beside her, Clara could hear Nicholas's voice say, with that easy confidence,
Well, go on. You know what you have to do.

She pointed her attention at the gunman, who was moving forward in the crowd, readying his arm . . .

“. . . so it is with solemnity, humility, and most important of all, a promise, that I ask you to help me ring in this new year, this new century, dare I say this new
age
 . . .”

Across the stage Dr. Victor had begun to sweat; Clara could see it on his brow. Patricia Plum, however, was unflappable, her cold eyes trained on John Stole's profile.

Clara readied herself, her magic poised, with the anchor of her blood—
Cane's
blood—steadying it. She drew a picture in her mind of what would happen next, and held it there.

“. . . with a resolve to better ourselves, better each other, and better our city.”

The crowd began to applaud. Dr. Victor jerked his head. The gunman pushed his way forward to the front row and lifted his arm.

Clara raised a finger, sent a wave of magic out from her core through the blood on her wrist. It gathered power from the frigid air, happy to be released in this strange new environment, and raced toward the gunman with a tiny white flash too fleeting for anyone to understand.

It burrowed into the gunman's pistol and ignited.

There was a brief, sharp explosion, the acrid smell of gunpowder.

The gunman screamed, falling to his knees. His hand was a bloody stub, the gun a smoking metal tangle at his feet. The crowd nearest him leapt away, shouting. Two police officers dove from their positions at the stage stairs to throw John Stole to the ground and cover him. Others grabbed Felicity, Leo Wiley, Clara herself.

She hardly noticed. The crowd was a sea of chaos, and across the way, Patricia Plum's eyes flashed blue fury. Chief Greeley tried to hurry her away, but she slapped him.

“Leave me be, you fool,” Clara heard her say.

Behind Plum, Dr. Victor was rustling in his long dark coat. A flash of silver glinted in his hand, and it was not the Concordia glove.

Clara shoved at the police officers. They grabbed for her. Her skin felt tight with fear, but she did not falter as she spilled what remained in the vial onto her wrist, thrust her fingers at Dr. Victor from the safety of her coat, and let her magic fly sharp and true.

In that instant, as a sharp white light cracked open the stage and the crowd screamed, Clara's breath caught. Would it be enough?

A shot was fired. Everyone ducked. But in the swarm of black uniforms and frosted police caps, scarves and snow-soaked skirts and holly berry brooches, one figure did not move.

Patricia Plum lay on the stage floor, limbs askew. Darkness pooled from a wound on her belly, and her eyes stared, unmoving, at the stars.