Jack

Seattle, WA—Evangeline’s Workshop

Saturday, July 24, 1909

LUCIA STOOD IN front of an elaborate wooden box, leaning on her cane and smiling as if the fate of the world depended on it.

“I call it The Phoenix,” she said, finishing her presentation with a flourish, and then took a bow.

I probably should’ve waited for Evangeline to speak first, but I’d been holding it in for the last ten minutes, and I couldn’t stay silent one second more. “You want to set me on fire?!”

Lucia brushed off my concern. “You wouldn’t be in any real danger.”

“I’d be on fire.”

“Only a little bit,” Lucia said. “Mostly you’ll just look like you’re on fire. And you’ll be wearing clothes treated with a chemical that will protect you. It’s all perfectly safe.”

I’d allowed Lucia to put me into a lot of dangerous situations because I believed in her intelligence and trusted that she knew what she was doing, but there was no way I was climbing into the illusion she’d just shown me and Evangeline. Not for all the money in Seattle.

But Lucia didn’t care what I thought. The only person whose opinion mattered was still standing with her hands clasped in front of her.

Evangeline stepped forward and walked slowly around the wooden box. The lacquered front reflected the sunlight streaming in through the windows, and the designs etched into it looked vaguely like Egyptian hieroglyphs. When Evangeline completed her inspection, she stopped and looked down at Lucia.

Lucia shone with pride in her design, and if I weren’t the one she had proposed stuffing into the box and setting on fire, I would’ve loved the illusion. It was like nothing I had ever seen before; it was like nothing anyone in the world had seen or even attempted. It was the kind of magic trick that could cement a magician’s legacy. No, I didn’t want to be the one to get inside that potential deathtrap, but Lucia had created something brilliant, and she deserved recognition for it. Sadly, I had a strong feeling she wasn’t going to get it.

“This is what you’ve been wasting your time on?” Evangeline motioned at the box with a dismissive wave. “You are meant to be the smart one, Lucia. I fill Jack’s hours with mindless tasks because we both know he’d fall to ruin without structure—”

“Hey!” I said, but Evangeline ignored me.

“But I’ve given you freedom because I hoped you would take the initiative to do something great. Instead, you’ve frittered it away on a third-rate trick that I wouldn’t perform at a county fair.”

The joy that had filled Lucia evaporated as Evangeline spoke. Each word was a lash that stripped Lucia of her smile, her happiness, her hope, leaving her with nothing but the tattered remains of her dignity, and barely even that.

“My dear girl, you are a talented engineer, but you must learn to leave the creation of magic to those of us better suited to it.” Evangeline caressed Lucia’s cheek and smiled as if she had just done her a favor.

“Speaking of better illusions,” Evangeline said, “I must prepare for tonight. After we perform The Drowned Duet, no one will dare utter Laszlo’s name in the same breath as the Enchantress again.” With a flourish, Evangeline marched out of the workshop, leaving me alone with Lucia.

The moment the door shut, I turned to Lucia. “Don’t listen to her. It’s a fine illusion, one of the best I’ve ever seen.” I felt bad about my earlier reaction. I still had no intention of letting Lucia set me on fire, but I should’ve supported her in front of Evangeline, as she would have done for me if our positions had been reversed. “Besides, you created The Drowned Duet, and Evangeline’s right. Once folks here see it, they won’t talk about anything else.”

The thing I’d come to know about Lucia was that she didn’t often express her emotions openly. She was the type who took her feelings, bunched them up, and shoved them into the soles of her shoes, and then used them to fuel her work. I expected Lucia would sulk for a couple of days, and then figure out a way to convince Evangeline that The Phoenix deserved to be part of the show.

“I hate her,” Lucia whispered.

“Lu—”

“I hate her!” Lucia looked at me with wild fury in her eyes. “She takes and she takes, and she never gives anything in return. All I’ve ever wanted was to prove to her that I was good enough, for her to tell me she’s proud of me. Just one damn time! But no, she can’t do it. She won’t!”

I’d heard Lucia cuss, usually in Italian so that she could do it to someone’s face without them knowing, but I’d never seen her lose her temper so badly before. I tried to put my arm around her shoulders, but she whacked me in the knee with her cane, and I hopped away.

“How can you stand her, Jack? You’re not a son to her, and you never will be. If anything, you’re a trained dog she trots out when she wants you to sit or fetch or roll over.”

I understood that Lucia was hurting, but she’d gone too far. “Hey, that’s not fair.”

“What’s not fair,” Lucia countered, “is the way she treats us. I can’t take it anymore, Jack. I won’t!” She swung her cane at the box, hitting the side, but it didn’t do any damage that I could see. It was built too well. That didn’t stop her from hitting it again. Lucia beat the box over and over, screaming louder with every swing, until her cane snapped in the middle. The end spun across the room. Lucia overbalanced and fell, smacking the floor hard.

I rushed to help her, but she glared daggers at me until I sat on the floor beside her instead.

“I hate her, Jack.”

“I know, Lu.”

“Leave her,” she said. “We can build our own show around The Phoenix.”

The idea was ludicrous, but I indulged Lucia anyway. “With you as the magician and me as the assistant?”

Lucia shook her head. “We would both be magicians. La Strega and the Prophet.”

“The Prophet?”

“We can change it,” she said. “We can do anything we want.”

The idea was appealing in its way.

“Think about it,” Lucia went on, painting a picture for me. “We wouldn’t be run out of every town because we stole another magician’s idea or conned another man out of his money. We could go anywhere and do anything. No one would ever force you to sleep on a cot in a workshop.”

“I don’t really mind the cons so much,” I mumbled.

“Then we’ll pull off jobs the likes of which no one has ever seen before.” Her eyes were manic as she spoke. “I’ve even been thinking of ways to steal the gold from the Alaska Building—”

“You have?!”

Lucia rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to do it, but I think I could if I wanted to.”

It shouldn’t have surprised me. I’d put a problem before Lucia, and she couldn’t help but try to solve it. She truly was a genius. Together, Lucia and I would’ve been a force to be reckoned with. And there were worse futures I could imagine. Spending my life working with Lucia certainly wouldn’t have been dull.

“What about Evangeline?” I asked.

“What about her?”

“Do we just abandon her? We owe her.”

Lucia scoffed. “She rescued us, took us in. I get it. But we’ve repaid that debt to her a hundred times over. Don’t you think she’d leave us if she decided we were no longer useful?”

“I don’t think—”

“What about her Russian suitor?” Lucia asked. “If he asks her to marry him, and it seems inevitable at this point, do you honestly believe there will be a place for us in that arrangement?”

“Evangeline is only after his money.” I could have told Lucia that it didn’t matter, since Fyodor Bashirov wasn’t real—he was Laszlo in disguise—but I wasn’t ready to share that information yet. “She’s not going to leave us.”

“This time, but what about the next?”

“Lu—”

“I’ve been in contact with Mr. Gleeson, and he said he could arrange bookings for us.”

“Wait,” I said. “What? You wrote to Mr. Gleeson behind Evangeline’s back?”

Lucia nodded. “All you have to do is say yes, Jack, and we’re free of her.”

“We’re not prisoners, Lucia.” Wil was a prisoner. Compared to his life, Lucia and I lived like royalty, and she was suggesting we walk away from it.

“Yes or no, Jack?”

This was too much. I was still working to free Wilhelm, I couldn’t leave Ruth. Honestly, I didn’t even know if I wanted to be a stage magician for the rest of my life. Ruth wanted to be a doctor, she’d told me that Jessamy Valentine wanted to write fiction or be a detective or maybe a journalist—it depended on her mood—and during one of our conversations, Wilhelm had shared his desire to be a teacher, though he doubted he’d ever get the chance. I had no such dreams. Not even fanciful ones. This life with Evangeline was all I’d ever really known. It was familiar and comfortable. If I were going to leave it, I wanted it to be for something I felt as strongly about as Ruth felt about medicine.

There were so many choices and consequences to consider, but I couldn’t do it sitting on the floor with Lucia staring at me. “Can I take some time to think about it?”

Lucia’s shoulders sagged and she used the box to help her rise to her feet. She stood over me, looking down. “If you need to think about it, then you’ve already decided.”

“Lucia, come on,” I said. “Sleep on it, all right?”

“Sure, Jack.”

“You’ll feel differently tomorrow. And I’ll talk to Evangeline about The Phoenix. We’ll make this work, you’ll see.”

Lucia nodded, but she had a far-off look in her eyes. “Okay, Jack. Tomorrow. Whatever you say.”