Sisters' Fate (20 page)

“Course not. I’ve got a brother at home,” Mei insists. “It’s only—”

I follow my instincts, stepping closer to the petite nurse. “Do you really want to help people? As many people as possible?” We are alone outside the doors to the female contagious ward.

Mrs. Jarrell nods. “That’s my job, isn’t it?”

I pull a crumpled leaflet out of my pocket and press it into her hands. “Then how do you reconcile yourself to this? Keeping medicine from the people who need it most?”

She scans the leaflets, then glances up at us. Her eyes linger on Finn. “This is nothing but nonsense. If a cure like that existed—right here in the hospital—I would know about it.”

Finn shakes his tousled head. “The Brothers have kept it secret because they don’t know when the next shipment will come in from Britain. You know how the fever’s been spreading. If four men come down with it, the entire National Council will fall like a stack of dominoes. They’re hoarding it all somewhere in the hospital, and Brother Kenneally is doling it out to those with the right connections.”

“If that were true”—Mrs. Jarrell shoves her hands in the pockets of her white apron, scowling—“it would be a crime. But I don’t understand. Why are
you
telling me this?”

Finn looks only too pleased to shatter his reputation as a devout Brother. “Because I think it’s criminal, too, and I want to do something about it. So do Mei and Cate. That’s why—” He freezes, realizing what he’s said.

Mrs. Jarrell’s brown eyes go wide. “Sister Cate?” She takes a step backward, and I wince, hoping my instincts were correct, that I won’t have to compel her not to run, not to raise a warning. I
like
this feisty little woman. “That’s you? You’re the—the witch they’ve all been talking about?”

“She’s the same girl who’s been here all week, working right alongside me,” Mei says.

“But she attacked the Head Council!”

“No.” I raise my chin. “I’ve never hurt anyone when I could help it, I swear. I don’t mean you any harm. We just want to get the medicine and give it to the people who need it.”

Mrs. Jarrell glances between Mei and me. “You knew what she was all along, didn’t you? Because you—you’re
both
witches. It makes sense now. The ones who recovered faster than the others—you haven’t been nursing my patients; you’ve been healing them!”

“Don’t tell anyone. Please,” Mei begs, her dark eyes pleading.

Mrs. Jarrell straightens her slim shoulders. “I’ll do better than that. Come along. If this cure exists, I’ll bet you anything it’s in the fourth-floor storeroom.”

She leads us upstairs, passing harried nurses and orderlies and the occasional doctor. They all nod at her respectfully, and she sings out cheery greetings, and no one gives us a second glance. We follow her down a warren of twisting white hallways. She stops outside a door with an enormous red-haired chap standing guard outside.

Mrs. Jarrell is nonplussed. “Hello, Willy. Increased security, I see? I suppose it’s because of this garbage?” She waves Merriweather’s leaflet at him.

“That’s it, all right.” Willy snorts. “I ain’t never heard anything so foolish in all my life. Da’s sick, you know. I’d hardly be standing out
here
if there was a cure sitting right in there.”

Mrs. Jarrell clucks sympathetically. “I’m awfully sorry to hear about your father. I hope he’ll be back on his feet soon.” She reaches for the doorknob, but Willy steps in front of her.

“Sorry, ma’am. Got my orders from Brother Kenneally himself not to let anyone in without his say-so.”

“Of course.” I turn to Finn. “Give him the note.”

Finn stares at me blankly. “The note?”

“The note from Brother Kenneally. You put it in your pocket,” I remind him.

“That’s right.” He pulls the leaflet the sergeant gave him from his pocket, and I hide a smile as he reads it. I’ve glamoured it to look like instructions from Kenneally, counting on the fact that Willy isn’t familiar with his handwriting.

Willy squints at the signature at the bottom, flushing, and it occurs to me that the poor man probably can’t read. “All right then,” he agrees, stepping aside.

The storeroom is a jumble of boxes and bottles and medical equipment.

“What’s this?” Mei crows. In the back of the room stands a tall, padlocked metal cabinet. She puts her hand over the lock and it clicks open.

We crowd around her as she removes the lock and opens the door. Inside sit hundreds of small vials of medicine. Each bottle is perhaps three inches tall, stoppered shut with a cork, and looks to contain a few ounces of the same clear liquid.

“Marvelous,” I declare.

“Why, those rats!” Mrs. Jarrell mutters. Then she crosses herself, looking worriedly at Finn. “Forgive me, Brother.”

“They
are
rats.” Finn opens his satchel and begins to stack bottles in it, wrapping them carefully in the linens we borrowed from Alice’s house. When he’s finished, Mei and I take turns filling our empty bags. Mrs. Jarrell counts each bottle as it’s packed.

“Three hundred,” she declares as we finish.

I hover with my hand over the zipper. “Do you want to keep a few for your girls?”

“No, dearie.” She shakes her head. “They’re all good, sturdy girls. Likely they’ll be fine. And they know the risks of what we do.”

“You’re angels, all of you,” I proclaim. I remember how powerless I was to help Zara and Brenna and my mother, and imagine facing that with good cheer day after day. “If you ever fall ill yourself, you send for us straightaway.”

“That I will.” She gives me a quick hug, then flushes, straightening her white cap and apron. “It’s a shame you can’t work your magic openly. You could save so many lives.”

Mrs. Jarrell takes her leave of us on the second floor, grasping my hand and then Mei’s in turn. “Bless you, girls,” she says, before bustling back to her work.

Downstairs, we peer out the front window at the mob. Its numbers have grown exponentially while we’ve been inside. People are shouting and pressing against the makeshift wooden barricade the guards have erected. The soldiers look a trifle panicked to be so outnumbered. Though they have guns, they do not seem to be firing them into the crowd. Yet.

Truth be told, it is the guns that worry me most.

Mei will be next to me the whole time. She can heal me if I’m injured.

Not, of course, if I’m shot somewhere crucial. I know all too well that some injuries are stronger than our magic.

“I’d go out the back, sir,” the guard says to Finn.

Finn squares his jaw. “I’m not afraid of these people.”

The guard shrugs and unbars the door. “It’s your funeral.”

The crowd turns hateful at the sight of Finn in his black cloak, handsome and strong and healthy. They curse him and surge toward the blockade, and the guards beat them back with truncheons.

“Why should he get medicine when my husband can’t? What makes you any better than us?” an old woman shrieks.

“I’m not.” Finn pulls off his cloak. He’s abandoned his jacket, and his shirtsleeves are rolled up, exposing the freckles on his forearms. He pushes past the astonished guards and vaults over the barricade, then turns to me, looking like the boy who worked in our garden again. “Coming?”

I clamber after him, and he sets me down gently on the other side. Mei hands us our satchels before Finn helps her down.

“What the devil are you doing?” one of the guards yelps. “They’ll kill you!”

Finn shoulders his way through the crowd. People throw elbows and tramp on my feet. Someone steps on the back of my cloak and I trip forward, falling into a woman who shoves me back and curses me. I clutch Mei’s hand and pull her along after me. Finn turns when we’ve made it to the middle of the street. His spectacles are crooked and his lip is bleeding where someone hit him, but he’s grinning. “Ready?”

“Ready.” My heart is racing. When I was up on the barricade, I spotted Sachi, Rory, and Alice at the back of the crowd, ready to help at a moment’s notice. Sachi will do an animation spell to keep the front doors of the hospital shut, to prevent the guards inside from coming to the aid of the soldiers outside. But it wouldn’t take more than a moment for this crowd to shove me down and trample me. What if my desire to help results in nothing but a passel of broken limbs—or worse?

“The Brothers are lying to you!” Finn shouts, but only the people directly around us can hear over the noise of the mob. He gives me a worried look, wiping the blood from his chin.

“Try again,” I urge, and this time I use my magic to amplify his voice so his words boom through the crowd:

“The Brothers are lying to you! The medicine
does
exist. We’ve seen it, and we think you have a right to it.”

That
gets the mob’s attention. I glance over my shoulder. I can’t see most of the guards through the press of people, but one is climbing up on the barricade—presumably to try and hear Finn, or to find out why the crowd is suddenly hushing.

“The Brotherhood is your enemy. Not the witches. Everything the
Sentinel
is saying about Cate Cahill is a lie. She didn’t attack the Head Council. She was only saving innocent girls from being locked up in Harwood. Most of those girls weren’t even witches, just unlucky. Girls like Prudencia Merriweather, whose only crime was that she didn’t give up her brother,” Finn says.

“What’s this got to do with us?” a bony old woman shouts.

“What about the medicine?” a short Chinese man yells.

“We’ve got the medicine here. Hundreds of doses of it.” Finn raises his satchel, and the crowd presses toward him, pushing, shoving one another, hands grasping at the handle and trying to tear it away from him. Finn spins around, trying to defend himself from every side.

My magic twitches through my fingers at the threat to his safety. I didn’t want him putting himself at risk, but he refused to let me do this alone. And—tiresome as it is—I had to admit people would be more willing to listen to a man.

A fat man with a thick walrus mustache grabs Mei’s elbow and yanks her toward him, just as I feel a painful grip on my own wrist.

“Let go of me!” Mei cries, and I narrow my eyes at the mustached man and
heave.
My magic pushes everyone around us backward as though they’re skating on a frozen pond. They windmill their arms, trying to catch their balance, and fall into each other. It leaves Finn, Mei, and me standing with a foot of empty space around us.

“Don’t put your hands on us.” I’ve dropped my illusion, and I am myself: tall, blond, skinny, sharp-jawed. Undeniably the girl whose picture is splashed all over the morning’s headlines.

The crowd is gasping, murmuring my name, and then one of the guards fires into the air. One of our friends freezes him like a black-and-gold statue atop the barricade.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” I warn. “If you’ll queue up, we’ll hand out the medicine. If you push and shove, no one will get any.”

“How do we know this ain’t a trick? That it ain’t poison?” a man asks as I fumble to open my satchel.

Mei already has a vial in her hand. She pops open the cork. “If it were poison, I wouldn’t drink it myself, would I?” she retorts, tilting the bottle to her lips. She makes a ghastly face. “Tastes awful, though. It’s better if you put a few drops in your tea.”

Mei and I stand back to back, handing out the medicine. Finn hovers a few inches from my elbow. The people reach out gingerly, staring at me as though I’m a two-headed troll, mumbling their thanks and fleeing with vials clutched tightly in their fists. No one violates the barrier of space I’ve created around us.

I glance up at the barricade. Three guards now stand frozen. Some of the others, including the sergeant, have vaulted over the barricade and are tussling with the crowd.

A woman carrying a roly-poly baby girl in a pink knitted hat is the next person in my line. The baby’s chubby cheeks are flushed pink and she squirms restlessly in her mother’s arms, trying to escape her blankets, but she doesn’t cry. Her blue eyes stare listlessly at the crowd, her breath coming in unhealthy rasps.

“Bless you, miss.” The woman cringes as the baby lets out a wet, wheezing cough. “I been at my wits’ end with Susannah so sick.”

I hesitate. Who knows whether the medicine—made for grown men—is safe for a child that size?

“I could heal her completely. With my magic,” I murmur. “If you’ll let me touch her?”

The woman hesitates for a moment before moving closer and nodding. I reach out one finger, and the baby curls her fist around it, the way Tess used to do when she was small. Blocking out the sounds of the crowd, I focus on the baby’s tortured breath. I can feel the congestion in her tiny lungs, and I push against it. Gradually, her breath eases. Her hot skin cools. I sway on my feet.

“That’s enough, Cate,” Mei says, voice sharp.

I pull my hand from the baby’s grip. She kicks her feet as her mother stares down at her—at the bright curiosity in her eyes, at her plump creamy cheeks—and presses a kiss to her forehead.

The woman presses the vial back into my hands. “Thank you.”

I can hear the rasp of her lungs, too. “Keep it for yourself, in case you have need of it next.”

“Cate!” Finn shoves me, hard, and I fall backward into Mei, almost toppling us into the crowd. He crouches low and I’m confused, my stomach spinning from the healing, my head pounding, until he draws the pistol from his boot and fires. A guard shouts and drops his rifle, clutching his left shoulder. The guard next to him, swinging a truncheon to clear their way, freezes as a blond man snatches up the rifle and points it at him. Another man pulls the truncheon from the soldier’s hands.

“We’ve got to go. It’s not safe anymore.” Mei tosses a few more bottles at the crowd and then hands her entire satchel to a skinny woman nearby.

Alice has obviously come to the same conclusion, because as I rise, I notice a strand of black hair falling over my shoulder. My cloak goes blue. I leave my satchel behind.

This time, there’s no need to push. The crowd parts to make way for us.

• • •

“That was too close,” Finn says, pacing Alice’s foyer. “He wasn’t going to fire into the air. He was going to shoot you!”