Iron Cast (21 page)

“I'm going to the morgue,” Corinne said.

“Brilliant idea,” Madeline said. “And what exactly do you think is going to happen when the daughter of Perry and Constance Wells shows up at the morgue at one in the morning and demands to see the body of a dead gangster?”

“What do you suggest, Maddy?” Corinne had cried. “Why are you even here? You and James have been hiding away in the Mythic for years. You aren't one of us, not really.”

The look that crossed Madeline's face promised a nasty retort, but she stopped herself. “I'm just trying to help” was all she said, dropping her eyes.

“Johnny's
not
—”

“Cor,” Ada said, her voice cutting through Corinne's fury instantly. “Cor, sit down. He's gone.”

The rest of the hours before dawn dragged on. There were drinks and speculations and plans made just to be discarded a few minutes later. No one mentioned sleep. Around six they had started making phone calls. Even though she was exhausted, Corinne had preferred the movement to sitting still. As long as she was busy, she wasn't thinking about Johnny on a slab with four bullet holes in his chest.

Now that it was just the six of them again, Corinne had run out of tasks. She sat with her head in her hands, thinking about Johnny behind his desk, smiling at her latest idea for a con. Or Johnny at his regular table in the club, raising his glass to the stage. Or Johnny at Billings Academy when she was twelve years old, offering her the chance of a lifetime.

When her mind strayed again to the morgue and four bullet holes, she stood up. “We're going to the Red Cat tonight,” she announced.

Everyone roused slowly from their own thoughts.

“The Red Cat?” Gabriel echoed. “Why?”

“Carson knows something about this,” Corinne said. “And if he doesn't, then we'll go to the Witcher brothers at Down Street. We'll tear Boston apart if we have to. Someone's going to pay.”

“We can't just walk into the Red Cat and accuse Luke Carson of murder,” Ada said. Her voice was so soft that Corinne could barely hear her.

“I just have to talk to him,” Corinne insisted. “If he's behind it, I'll know.”

“I'm sure you will,” Gabriel said, “because he'll probably try to kill you too.”

“This is a terrible idea,” Saint said, halting his pacing.

“I've had worse,” Corinne said. “There's a show tonight at the Red Cat. Carson won't try anything while his club is full of guests.”

“So he'll drag you outside before he shoots you,” Gabriel said. “Saint's right. It's a terrible idea.”

“I won't let the Cast Iron fall apart.” Corinne whirled on Gabriel, her voice nearing a shout. “If someone is trying to destroy the club, then I'm going to find out who it is, and I'm going to find a way to stop them.”

“We might have bigger problems to worry about,” Ada said. Her voice was low and steady, a perfect contrast to Corinne's. “HPA agents were at my mother's apartment yesterday morning.”

Everyone's attention swiveled to her.

“What?” Corinne asked. “Why didn't you say anything?”

Ada frowned down at her hands.

“I haven't exactly had a chance,” she said. “They told my mother they knew where to find me, but that they wanted the whole set.”

“What does that mean?” Saint asked.

“It means they want to throw us all into Haversham,” Corinne said.

Madeline exchanged a glance with James. “Maybe that's our cue to go,” she said, rising to her feet.

“No one expects you to stay,” Corinne said. There was no anger in her tone, but there was no kindness either.

Madeline pulled James by his wrist toward the back door.

“Wait—you're just going to leave?” Saint asked. He was staring at them, a wrinkle in his pale brow.

“Corinne is right,” James said, ostensibly to the group, but he was looking at Saint. “We're not one of you. It's not our fight.”

“You mean it's not your problem,” Saint said.

James looked like he wanted to reply, but Madeline tugged him through to the storage room. When the door shut behind them, a heaviness settled over the room. Corinne turned to Gabriel, who was still leaning against the bar, his arms crossed.

“What about you?” she asked. “It's not your problem either. You won't be getting a paycheck anytime soon.”

His eyes on her were cool and inscrutable.

“Do I look like I'm going anywhere?” he asked.

When the afternoon settled into evening, Corinne was curled up on her bed, under every blanket she could find, staring hard at a crack in the wall. Ada had slept for a few hours that morning and left. She came back in occasionally, pretending to busy herself, but Corinne knew she was just checking on her. Corinne ignored her each time. She was too exhausted to move, too miserable to sleep. Her grandfather's watch was loose between her fingers, but it gave her no comfort. Instead of the sweet memories
of her grandfather in his study, telling her of Alice the adventurer or Alice the enchantress, her head was fogged with a rainy spring day four years ago, with her grandfather sitting behind his desk, running his fingers over and over the engraving while tears streamed down his pocked cheeks.
She was someone I couldn't save,
he had told Corinne in a moment of such pure vulnerability that she hadn't known how to respond. And when he had pressed the beloved watch into her hands and told her that Alice would have wanted her to have it, Corinne hadn't felt anything but a sadness that she couldn't understand.

Less than a month later, her grandfather was dead.

Corinne pulled her knees tighter to her chest, unable in that moment to separate the loss of Johnny from the loss of her grandfather, and she couldn't separate either from the aching certainty in her chest that nothing could ever be the same. That everything beautiful they had built here was gone.

This time when the door opened, Ada stood in the doorway for a long time. Then she rustled around on her side of the room for a few minutes before sitting cross-legged at the foot of Corinne's bed.

“Let's play a round,” she said.

Corinne turned her head just enough to see that Ada was holding her violin. She pulled the covers over her head.

“No,” she mumbled into the blankets.

“It'll make you feel better.”

“I don't want to feel better.”

Ada tugged at the blankets until Corinne was exposed again to the chilly air.

“One round, then I'll leave you alone,” she said.

“Fine,” Corinne snapped, jerking upright.

“Break, break, break

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me.”

Instantly they were back on the towering cliffs by the raging, boiling sea. The sky was a maelstrom of blood-red clouds, scarred with lightning. Normally when Corinne tried to create an all-encompassing illusion, it took immense concentration to maintain every detail, to hold each piece together. But this one seemed to erupt from deep inside her, feeding on her grief and fury. Corinne couldn't see her own illusions the way others could. They existed only as images in her mind to be sculpted and offered into the world.

This landscape, shaped as it was by her own turmoil, felt more real than anything she'd ever created before.

Ada lifted her violin and began to play. At first the song matched the intensity of the illusion, buffeting against the rocks and spiraling upward with the howling wind. Ada's bow flew so fast against the strings that Corinne thought for sure she would lose control of the song, but each note landed with fierce precision. Corinne could feel the pain and anger finding new life as the music filled her. Her illusion responded to her rising torment. The storm hurled dagger-sharp rain against them, and the wind shrieked and spiraled, threatening to tear the world apart.

Then the music began to shift, guiding Corinne down from the terrible height. She shook her head and closed herself off to the emotions that Ada offered. She didn't want to leave behind the fury
of her grief. Johnny Dervish had found her when she was broken and scared. He had given her a place to call home. Now he was dead, and it didn't seem fair that they had to go on. It didn't seem fair that without him, they might not be able to.

“What if we never find out who killed him?” Corinne asked. Her voice seemed too soft to carry over the punishing storm, but she knew Ada could hear her. “What if we can't save the Cast Iron?”

It wasn't a fear she could entrust to anyone but Ada. It wasn't even something she had admitted to herself until this moment. She was supposed to be the fearless one, the one with no qualms and no limits. Yet somehow she always ended up right here, trying to break into pieces while Ada calmly refused to let her.

Ada set down her violin, but Corinne's illusion remained, unyielding in its furor.

“Do you remember the first fight we had?” Ada asked.

“You mean five minutes after I moved in?”

“You asked me if I was in charge of the laundry.”

“In my defense,” Corinne said, “I was a complete and utter bonehead back then.”

“Just back then?”

Corinne tried to kick her, but she couldn't disentangle her legs from the blankets. At some point—Corinne couldn't remember exactly when—she had dropped the illusion, and the comforting familiarity of their cluttered bedroom surrounded them again. The petty provocations during their first few months together seemed almost like a dream now. They hadn't hated each other exactly, but Ada would practice her violin late into the night, and Corinne would say ignorant, unfeeling things almost every time she opened her mouth, and it hadn't seemed possible for them to do anything but coexist.

Corinne couldn't pinpoint the moment they had become an inseparable, unstoppable force. She did remember the day of her grandfather's funeral, when she had wept alone on this same bed for almost two straight days, and instead of leaving her to break apart, Ada had played a song so beautiful on her violin that Corinne had felt for the first time that she might be able to go on.

“Despite your appalling first impression, we've been at this for years,” Ada said. “We've never come across anything we can't crack.”

“What about the HPA?” Corinne asked. Her grief was muted for now, but the fear still remained. “We can't hide from them forever.”

Ada plucked at one of the violin strings, her expression tense with thought. Then she dug through the blankets until she found Corinne's hand. She gripped it tightly and looked her in the eye.

“This is you and me we're talking about, remember?” she said. “If we're in this together, then they don't stand a chance.”

CHAPTER NINE

The Red Cat was in a nicer part of town than the Cast Iron, surrounded by hotels and banks and ritzy restaurants with cloth napkins and French waiters. Luke Carson liked things big, bold, and gilded. The front entrance had a uniformed doorman and a sign encircled by buzzing electric lights. Inside there were gold chandeliers, champagne, and tablecloths the color of blood.

Ada, Corinne, and Gabriel went to the back entrance, which was considerably less classy but much more private. Corinne had wanted it to just be her and Ada, since they had both performed at the Red Cat before and might be able to talk their way in. Saint hadn't argued about being left behind, but Gabriel had flatly refused. In the end, it had seemed like less trouble to bring him along.

Corinne knocked on the back door until a man cracked it open. He narrowed his eyes at them in recognition but shook his head.

“Your lot ain't coming in here tonight. Carson's orders.” He spat a wad of tobacco toward their feet.

“We don't want to come in,” Ada told him.

“We don't?” Corinne asked.

“Fetch Charlie Lewis,” Ada said. “He asked me to meet him here.”

“He did?” Corinne asked. Gabriel nudged her.

The man was staring at Ada hard, as if trying to find a reason to call her a liar.

“If you don't get him, and he finds out I had to stand out here in the cold all night, you're going to be in a heap of trouble,” Ada told him.

From what Corinne knew about Charlie, she couldn't imagine him causing trouble for anyone, but she dutifully kept her mouth shut. The man was obviously at war with himself, but after a few seconds he told her to wait a minute, then slammed the door shut and locked it.

“Well, that was easier than I expected,” Corinne said.

“I figured if we waited on you to sweet-talk him, we'd be out here all night,” Ada replied.

Corinne jabbed her with an elbow, and Ada ignored her with the long-suffering air of a mother whose toddler was misbehaving. After a few minutes the door creaked open again, and Charlie slipped into the alley with them, hollering over his shoulder at the man to stop being such a dictator.