“What if your uncle’s right?” Ling asked.
“Sure. Why don’t you just give up dream walking?” Evie shot back. Anger pooled in her gut. “Will never lets himself think he might be wrong. It’s a swell magic trick if you can manage it. Oh, don’t worry—I’ll help you. But I’m not giving up my show. Nothin’ doing. Same old Uncle Will. Only looking out for himself.”
“You’re one to talk, kid,” Sam snapped.
“Says the thief,” Jericho said.
Sam smirked. “Pal, I’ve never pretended I wasn’t looking out for myself. And anyway, you should be happy now that the coast is clear.” He jerked his head in Evie’s direction. Too late, he caught Mabel’s pained expression. Nice going, Lloyd. Great work. “Applesauce,” he muttered, feeling like a real heel.
Everyone began talking at once until Sister Walker’s strong voice rose above the squabbling. “‘The skies alight with strange fire. The eternal door is opened,’” she read aloud from Liberty Anne’s prophecies. “‘The Diviners must stand, or all shall fall.’” She shut the book. “Tomorrow. Five o’clock. I’ll see you then.”
Henry whistled. “And that, in the theater, is what we call an exit line.”
Evie bounded up to Mabel, hoping she wasn’t too upset by Sam’s thoughtless remark. “Hiya, Pie Face,” she said with extra please don’t hate me brightness. “Say, do you want to come to the show with me tonight? There’s a pos-i-tute-ly darb party I know about on Beekman Place afterward, and I have the most scandalous story to tell you!”
“I can’t. I have a meeting,” Mabel said, fighting with her coat. She was still smarting from Sam’s comment. It wasn’t so much that he’d said it as that he was right: Jericho liked Evie, not Mabel. Everyone knew it. It wasn’t anybody’s fault—people got disappointed all the time. Mabel only wished she could stop liking him.
“Mabesie…” Evie started.
“Please, Evie.” Mabel sighed and blinked up at the ceiling. “I forgive you. All right? Honestly, I do have a meeting. I’ll phone you later.”
As the others gathered their coats, Memphis followed Theta into an anteroom off the library. He shut the door, and Theta ran over and wrapped her arms around his neck, kissing him until they both had to break for a breath.
“Pretty spooky stuff in there, huh, Poet?” Theta said, laying her head in the crook of his neck. Memphis could smell her perfume.
“Mm-hmm. Fortunately, I got a cure for that.”
Theta raised her face to his, and his breath caught anew at how much space one person could take up inside him. When he looked into her eyes, he saw home. He saw hope. “Yeah?” Theta teased. “Is that a power you’re gonna work on with them?”
“Nah. Just you.” Memphis kissed Theta then, and for a minute, there were no ghosts or bad prophecies. There was only the world of them.
“Meet me at the Hotsy Totsy after the show tonight?” Memphis asked, touching his forehead to hers.
Theta kissed him once more, long and sweet. “Try and keep me away.”
Memphis let Theta leave first. He counted to fifty, and then he walked out, too. Sister Walker was waiting for him when he came into the library again. “Thank you for coming, Memphis. I wasn’t sure you would.”
“To tell the truth, Sister, I wasn’t sure I would, either. But if you can help Isaiah…” Memphis trailed off.
“What do you mean?”
Memphis glanced over at Isaiah, who was happily measuring himself against the giant stuffed grizzly bear whose paws served as a furred coatrack most of the time. “He’s still having seizures.”
“How often?” Sister Walker asked, concern in her voice.
“Once, sometimes twice a week. It wears him out. Octavia’s had her whole prayer circle on it. It’s just that…” Memphis cleared his throat and looked down at his hands. “I’ve been healing him up each time. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Besides Theta, Isaiah was Memphis’s world. He needed Isaiah to get better.
Sister Walker placed a hand on Memphis’s shoulder. “You did good. I’m confident that if we can strengthen Isaiah’s powers, the seizures will stop.”
Memphis wanted to believe she was right.
SECRETS
Sam was waiting for Evie on the front steps. He leaned against the railing, arms crossed, that familiar smirk in place. “Well, if it isn’t the former future Mrs. Sam Lloyd.”
“Don’t start with me, Sam,” Evie said tersely. “Oh, and I see the Herald ran with your story last week.” With one gloved hand, Evie blocked out an imaginary headline in the air. “‘Wedding Not in the Cards for Sweetheart Seer and Hero-Diviner Sam Lloyd.’ Hero-Diviner.” Evie rolled her eyes. “And how come you got a first and a last name?”
Sam spread his arms in what was supposed to be an apology but most definitely was not. “What can I say? I lead a charmed life. Look, that’s all water under the bridge. We’ve got bigger fish to fry. Bigger than you and me. Can we agree on that?”
“That depends,” Evie said, striding toward the sidewalk, Sam on her heels. “Will you be speaking in clichés on the primrose path of our glorious future?”
“Evie.”
“Yes. Fine,” she answered with a sigh. “Say, why didn’t you needle Uncle Will and Sister Walker for more answers about Project Buffalo? They know more than they’re telling us.”
“Exactly! You play much poker?”
“Not really.”
“I can tell. We got us a poker game here. You see how they dodged the question? Like career politicians. They keep playing coy, we don’t volunteer what we know.”
Evie thought it over. “I hate to say it, Sam, but you’re making sense. I still think it’s odd that I couldn’t read those coded punch cards we found. It’s almost as if somebody wanted to make sure a Diviner couldn’t do it. I know that sounds funny, but that was the feeling I got. Have you had any luck finding that card-reading machine?”
“Not yet. I keep throwing chum on the water, but everybody’s spooked. Remember my informant on Project Buffalo?”
“Your creepy man?”
“The same. Fella named Ben Arnold. This was sent to me at the museum, no return address.”
Sam handed Evie a small, back-pages newspaper mention of a mysterious death. “He was found dead on an ash heap in Queens. He’d been strangled with piano wire.”
Exasperated, Evie handed the article back. “There’s no need for me to read it if you’re just going to narrate the whole thing, Sam.”
Evie shoved her hands into her coat pockets and charged down Sixty-eighth Street toward Broadway. Sam kept pace beside her.
“Okay. We gonna have this fight now?” he asked.
Evie kept her eyes straight ahead. “What fight? I’m not fighting.”
“You’re the one who wanted that meshuga phony romance for publicity,” Sam reminded her. “I’m just the fella who had the decency to end it.”
Evie stopped so fast Sam had to back up.