A Dawn Most Wicked

I peeled my eyelids back. “You’ll . . . lose,” I rasped.

For a moment he stood frozen before the door. Then it clicked softly shut, and his boots stomped back to me. Next thing I knew, Cochran was crouched beside me, his face in mine. “What did you say?”

“You’ll lose . . . the race.” I sputtered a cough and gulped in fresh air. “Murry and Schultz . . . can’t work as fast as me. . . . You need me . . . sir.”

His lips curled back, but I could see in the way his eyes darted that he was considering my words. “Fine,” he hissed at last. “You can stay until after the race and then you’re off.”

“But there’s no reason for me to win now—”

Hands grabbed my shirt and yanked. The world spun in spurts, moving in time to my pulse . . . until suddenly I was back on my feet, Cochran’s breath rolling over my face and his grip tight.

“Do not play games with me, Striker. The bounty on your head says nothing about you being alive.” He pulled me even closer, his eyes boring into mine. “But if you want incentive, then I’ll give it to you.” Gripping my head, he twisted it to one side and whispered directly into my ear. “If you stay until the race and if you win, I won’t turn you over to Clay Wilcox.”

“Or I could just run,” I croaked out. “Hop off the ship right now—” My words broke off as fingers laced around my neck. Pushed into my windpipe.

“You try running, Striker.” He squeezed. Stars speckled across my vision. “See how long it takes me to find you. I may have lost my fortune, thanks to these goddamned ghosts, but I still have more money and more connections than you. I will hunt you down and destroy you. But if you stay . . .”

He released me. I doubled over, gagging, and grabbed at the anvil to stay upright.

You should’ve stayed quiet, I thought. And then a deeper, sadder part of me said, And this is why you’ll never be good enough for Cass. No matter how much I wished for a different past, there was no changing what I was.

I was a fugitive.

And I was a murderer.

“I’ll . . . stay,” I said, forcing my head to tip up. Forcing my eyes to stay open and meet his. “I’ll stay until the race, and then I’m gone.”

“Good.” A slow, easy smile spread over his lips. “And in the meantime you keep away from my daughter. If I see you anywhere near her, then—race or not—you will die, and I will collect that bounty. I have plans for Cassidy, and they sure as hell don’t include a piece of crap like you.”

CHAPTER TWO

I’m in my bed—the one I share with my ma. She won’t come to our room for another hour. Mrs. Roper is always at her most demanding before bed.

I can’t sleep. There’s an owl outside that won’t stop its hollering. Ma always said it’s good luck to hear that owl, but tonight . . . it doesn’t sound like the same kind of owl. And it sure doesn’t sound lucky.

This owl sounds scared.

It screeches into the night. The Roper house is on a big plot of land south of Chicago, and there ain’t no one but me, my ma, and the Ropers to hear this owl’s cries.

I twist in the sheets, covering my ears with my hands. I try to think of happy things. Ma says she’s got a surprise for my birthday. “You’ll be five,” she said at supper. “That’s an important occasion, Danny, and I got somethin’ special for you.”

The owl screeches again. I burrow farther beneath the blanket.

Maybe she’ll give me a rocking horse. The Ropers have one in their nursery—a big red one with real hair coming out its tail. I snuck in once to play with it. Ma boxed my ears when she found me. I still don’t see why she was so mad—the Roper boys’re all grown-up now.

The owl screams again. And again.

No.

I shoot up in bed, the wool blanket falling off me. That wasn’t an owl. That was a human scream. A woman’s scream.

My mother’s.

I jolted upright, the dregs of sleep threatening to pull me back under if I didn’t. . . .

“Wake up,” I muttered to myself. “It was just a dream.” After a few panting breaths I managed to get my heart to slow.

Just a dream. The words repeated in my brain, like they did every night when the ghosts of the Sadie Queen flickered through and haunted my sleep.

I swung my legs left and felt the cool planks beneath my feet. A sliver of light peeked under the door.

We were in New Orleans now. A week had passed since Cass had told me about the race, since Cochran had beat me to shit. My ribs and back still shrieked with pain—and my face was still speckled with bruises and cuts.

But those aches didn’t hold a candle to the agony from a nightmare.

Just a dream, I told myself again, pushing onto my feet. I staggered to my window, careful to avoid the boots and uniform I knew lay on the floor. As I flung open the red curtain, the lamplights of New Orleans seared into my eyes. I reckoned it was near ten o’clock, and the streets were crawling with people. Tourists, merrymakers, and more than a few gamblers out to decide between the Abby Adams or the Sadie Queen.

“Just a dream,” I whispered one more time, digging the heels of my hands in my eyes. It was the same routine every night—the same cold sweat and exhaustion to hold me close; the same failed attempts to clear away the nightmares’ claws.

But no matter how often I reminded myself they weren’t real, the dreams still left me shaking in my bunk. Still left my mother’s screams blasting in my ears and rattling in my lungs. That had been our last night in the Ropers’ house. The last night we had a roof over our heads and the first night we lived on the run.

I didn’t want to think about it—so I did what I normally did to forget. I crossed to my bureau, to the only neat part in my room, where boxes of organized, unfinished tinkerings lay. And where A School Compendium of Natural and Experimental Philosophy sat wrapped in twine. I picked it up, careful about unwrapping the string now that the cover had fully disintegrated. I’d worn it out from all the reading and skimming and tracing. This book was the reason I had taught myself to read—all those diagrams of machines had downright demanded I learn my letters.

But just as I leaned against the window and held my favorite page to the light—page 258, “An Introduction to Electricity”—cold licked over my cheeks and grabbed at my neck.

I wrenched my gaze left just as a misty ghost floated through my cabin door. The blistered, scorched mess that was his face glowed a soft blue and lit up my room.

“Blood,” he whispered, a sound that pierced my ears. Pierced my lungs. “Blood everywhere.”

I eased out a shaking breath. I knew that voice . . . a voice from my past. The ghosts did that—spoke in voices that weren’t their own. Sometimes they were the voices of the dead . . . and sometimes they were the voices of the living.

This voice belonged to the dead.

To the man I had killed.

The ghost’s mouth sagged open. “Murderer,” it moaned. “You’ll hang for this.”

Fear spiked my gut—brief and insistent. I had almost hanged for it, and if Cochran didn’t keep his word, if he told Clay Wilcox about me . . .

“Oh, stop being a Nancy-boy,” I growled at myself. “That ghost is harmless and Clay Wilcox is a thousand miles away.” I let my voice rise over the ghost’s hissing, and then—to prove to myself I wasn’t a coward—I made a