Iron Cast (25 page)

The shop had wall-to-floor windows, mostly obscured by artfully displayed bolts of cloth. Ada and Corinne huddled behind a violently magenta drapery and peered through the window. Once the man had finished his cigarette, he stayed where he was. He did open the car door at one point, but he only stuck his head in for a moment, then straightened back up.

“It's one of the agents from the club,” Corinne whispered. “His partner must be in the car.”

They were definitely waiting for someone, Ada realized. She could see it in the casual sweeps of his gaze up and down the street. They were waiting for
her.
If she had come by her usual route from the Cast Iron, she would have turned the corner and walked right into them.

“What are you doing in here?”

Ada and Corinne turned to face the clerk, a pale woman with a pinched face. Her hands were balled into tight fists at her sides.

“Good morning, ma'am,” Corinne said, with all the genteel manners her aborted boarding-school education afforded her. “We were just—”

“You're not welcome in here,” the clerk said, but she was looking directly at Ada. “Get out.”

Ada's cheeks burned. It was a shame that never really got easier, burred as it was with anger and sorrow. The shop clerk's hostility was the least of her worries, though. If she went back onto the sidewalk, the agents might see her.

“Please,” Ada began.

“Go on, before I call the cops.”

Ada thought about the Haversham Asylum, about the basement, about the screaming inmate who had never returned. She wasn't going back there.

She glanced at Corinne, who nodded once.

Ada started to hum, gently at first so that the melody wrapped around the woman and held her fast before she even realized what was happening. The clerk trembled, trying to fight it, but her face was already slackening. Ada eased smoothly into a song, a lullaby her mother used to sing. The words didn't matter as much as the melody and the way her voice shaped and sharpened it.

The disdain was gone from the woman's eyes, replaced with a doleful weariness. Ada's song guided her to the corner, where she sank to the floor and rested her head against the wall, half concealed by a cabinet of gaudy buttons and spools of thread. She looked for all the world like a child, curled up for a nap in the midst of a trying day.

“Let's go,” Corinne said once the clerk had started to snore.

Ada followed her through the door behind the counter. The corridor in the back had only three doors. The first was a closet, the second was locked, and the third let out into an alley. The cold air tasted heavenly. They ran down the alley in the direction they had come, slipping and sliding on the accumulating ice. Corinne was laughing breathlessly.

“That was the fastest you've ever managed it,” she cried. “Soon you'll only need a few bars before they're out like a light.”

Ada didn't reply. The woman's hate, the fright from their narrow escape, and her own guilt roiled in her chest. Every time she used her talent on an unsuspecting reg, she told herself that she
didn't have a choice. Or that they deserved it. But it never seemed enough, somehow. She couldn't get her mother's words out of her head.

I love you so much, but this is not how things were meant to be.

Ada had always thought it was the justice system's fault, for taking her father away from them. But what if Ada had been the one to ruin everything? What if the day she shook hands with Johnny Dervish was the day that the lives they wanted had been irrevocably lost?

They ran all the way back to the Cast Iron, constantly searching for signs of the agents or their car, but the road and sidewalks remained empty. The snow had stopped, leaving the air peculiarly sharp and dry. The sky overhead was a blinding sheet of white. Other than the snow crunching beneath their feet, all of Boston felt like a silent, cavernous tomb.

When they were a block away, Ada slowed down, pulling Corinne's arm.

“What?” Corinne asked, looking around anxiously.

“Can we even go back to the club?” Ada asked, her own breath coming in ragged gasps. “What if it's not safe?”

“The Cast Iron is always safe,” Corinne said.

“They won't sit outside my mother's house forever,” Ada said, sidestepping to avoid a slick pool of ice. “They'll try the Cast Iron next. The lock on the door isn't going to keep them out, and eventually they'll find the entrance to the basement.”

“They wouldn't dare,” Corinne said.

“Why not? The rest of the crew is gone. Johnny's gone. Any protection the Cast Iron had is probably dead with him.”

Ada could see how her words affected Corinne. She hadn't wanted to say them, but there was no use ignoring it any longer.
With Johnny gone, there was no one on their side. Corinne's pace slowed further. Then she stopped. She turned to face Ada. Her hair was wet and matted, and there was a high color in her cheeks. Her brown eyes were harder than usual.

“Where else is there to go?” Corinne asked. “The Red Cat? Down Street? All we have is the Cast Iron. It's
ours.
”

Ada had the urge to hug her, to comfort her, because she knew that Corinne's ferocity was the only way she knew how to be brave. But Ada was thinking about Haversham. It was always waiting in her thoughts. In the snow it would be deceptively beautiful, the window ledges lined with white, the iron gates bold against the pale sky. Maybe all they were doing was delaying the inevitable.

“You're right,” Ada said. “There's nowhere else that's safe for us.”

Corinne was either relieved or triumphant. She turned before Ada could tell. They walked the rest of the way back to the Cast Iron without speaking.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Gabriel arrived at the Cast Iron at five o'clock on the nose, lugging a garment bag with a rented tuxedo. Ada was the only one in the common room to greet him, as Saint still had not returned from the Mythic and Corinne had just decided only a few minutes earlier that maybe she should start getting dressed. He went to Johnny's office to change. When he reemerged, Ada was surprised at how well the rental fit him. With the clean black lines and starched tails, Ada could almost believe that Gabriel was the sort of person who would be invited to a Wells party. The rental had even included a pair of shoes, polished so that the toes each reflected a pinpoint of light.

Gabriel was pulling at the sleeves, his eyes downcast, and Ada realized with some amusement that he was self-conscious.

“You look perfect,” she told him, though she wasn't sure if that would make it better or worse. “Well, almost.”

He had knotted the necktie with a four-in-hand, which Ada knew Corinne wouldn't stand for, even though Corinne had never once managed to tie any kind of proper knot. Ada climbed off the couch and gestured wordlessly for permission. Gabriel shrugged, closer to helpless than Ada had seen him before. She loosened the tie nimbly.

She had learned the skill from her mother when she was a little girl. Every morning Nyah had tied her husband's tie, teasing him with the names of the knots, stealing kisses. Eventually Ada took
over, standing on the edge of the bed, trying to sing along with her father in Portuguese. Sometimes her mother would sit beside her. She would hum and watch them both with her soft brown eyes, and Ada would wonder if she was studying them in the way she studied recipes, parceling out all the individual ingredients and trying to see how they made the whole.

Ada tied a Windsor and straightened it with a touch of pride. She was feeling a strange sense of camaraderie with Gabriel tonight, maybe because of his assistance with Charlie earlier, or maybe because he was so blessedly stoic in the face of Corinne's peculiar brand of temerity. Corinne didn't tend to keep friends long, which meant that Ada didn't either. She didn't mind usually, but it was nice to know there were other people in the world who were, if not a match, then at least a challenge for her best friend.

“I'll bet your mother would have liked to see you in this,” Ada said, brushing off his shoulders.

Gabriel's lips wrinkled in a rueful smile. “I doubt it. She would say that my father and my father's father were workingmen, and that was always good enough for them, so why isn't it good enough for me?” He hooked two fingers under the collar and tugged absently. “She'd probably also ask why I felt the need to dress like a penguin.”

Gabriel handed her two cuff links, and she palmed them, admiring the flourishes etched into the silver.

“My mother thinks tuxedos are dashing,” she said while she pinned the cuff links in place. “She won't admit it, though.”

Gabriel smiled in return, a small, unfamiliar action. Corinne was making a racket in the bedroom, but there were no cries for help or breaking glass, so Ada assumed she was all right. She moved to perch on the arm of the sofa and cast an appraising eye over Gabriel.

“Can I ask you something?”

Gabriel said nothing, which as far as Ada could tell was as close to assent as he ever gave.

“Why are you helping us? Why do you care?”

It had been gnawing at her since the night they had found out about Johnny, when everyone else had left. Corinne took it for granted that Gabriel had remained, because the Cast Iron was everything to her and she couldn't imagine that the same wouldn't be true for everyone who passed under its roof. But Ada knew that few people loved this place like Corinne did, with her impossible, unquestioning tenacity. Sometimes Ada thought that even Johnny couldn't be as devoted. For Corinne, it was something deep-rooted, stretching far beyond the Cast Iron's role as safe haven, farther than its history in Boston, when the city's artists—hemopath and reg alike—would gather around crackling fires upstairs and speak of Titian and Mozart and Kant, spinning ideas like golden thread, tearing down kings and sparking revolutions. For Corinne the Cast Iron was an unbreakable fact. Something that had always existed and always would.

Sometimes Ada felt the same way. And sometimes she felt like the Cast Iron was her second choice, except she had never really been given a chance at her first.

Gabriel didn't seem caught off guard by her question, though he took a long time answering it. For a few moments he considered the couch, but maybe the impeccable press of his suit dissuaded him, because he didn't sit down.

“I didn't know him for very long, but Johnny didn't deserve to die. Especially not like that.”

“Justice, then? That's why you're staying?”

He did look caught off guard by that. Perhaps he'd thought that
she would be satisfied with his initial answer. Ada wasn't, though. It wasn't a reason, just a statement of fact.

Gabriel crossed his arms and uncrossed them. He was so uncomfortable in the tuxedo that Ada almost felt bad for hounding him. He ran his hands through his dark hair, leaving it disheveled and in stark contrast to the rest of his person.

“My father died when I was seven,” he said at last. “He was killed right in the middle of the day, and my mother found out from our busybody neighbor, who she hated. I don't think she ever forgave him for that.”

His musing tone belied the weight of his words. He finally dropped onto the couch, heedless of his attire for the first time since putting it on.

“I don't even remember how I found out—whether I overheard the conversation or my mother told me herself. I just remember her kissing my forehead and telling me that I was safe, because she loved me, and we must always protect what we love.”

Ada was so still that she could hear the sizzling of the furnace, the thrumming of her own pulse. Gabriel's brow was furrowed and his lips were slightly apart. His eyes focused by slow degrees as his mind skipped forward across the years, until he blinked and was present again. He looked at Ada.

“Johnny never did anything but try to protect what he loved,” he said. “I don't think I can just leave, not when you're all still here, not when I can help.”

His hands squeezed into fists, only briefly, and Ada got the feeling that only moments earlier they had been trembling. He jumped to his feet without warning.

Ada followed his gaze to where Corinne stood, leaning in the doorway of the bedroom. In her gauzy evening gown, with her hair
curled and her lips yet undone, she looked just like her mother. Not that Ada would dare tell her that.

From Corinne's expression, Ada could tell exactly how long she had been standing there. Corinne didn't say anything, though. She just straightened and touched her gloved hand to the back of her head, as if she were afraid her curls had escaped.

Gabriel coughed. “You look—” But he seemed to have lost whatever words he had in mind. “Are you ready to go?”

“Almost.” Corinne must have been having trouble with words too, because her mouth wavered for several seconds, her eyes still on Gabriel. “Ada, can you help me with my necklace? It took me forever to get these gloves on, and I'm not about to take them off.”