Iron Cast(21)

“It’s not Saint’s fault,” she whispered.

The look Ada gave her was pure and righteous fury. “The bastard flipped on me,” she said.

In the quiet room, her words carried. Johnny had come out of his office during the racket and was leaning in his doorway, watching them in silence.

“What do you mean?” Corinne asked.

“I mean that they didn’t have enough to arrest either of us, and he let the bulls scare him into confessing. They promised him if he told them everything, he could walk.”

Corinne couldn’t find any words.

“Ada,” said Saint. “Ada, please, you don’t understand.”

“You don’t understand,” Ada shouted, pushing past Corinne and shoving him backward. “Two weeks I rotted in that hole, all because you couldn’t take the heat.”

“I didn’t know what else to do,” he said, pleading. “You have to understand—”

“You should go, Saint,” said Corinne.

He looked at her, his gray eyes begging her to intervene.

“Go,” Corinne repeated.

He left, and Corinne laid her hand on Ada’s arm, but she shook her off.

“I didn’t know,” Corinne said. “You should have told me.”

She thought of the painting Saint had given her and the wildflowers, both shoved unceremoniously under Ada’s bed. She realized that Ada had told her, and she just hadn’t been paying attention.

“I didn’t think it mattered,” Ada said. “I didn’t think the little snake would ever show his face here again.”

“Ada.” It was Johnny, still standing in the doorway of his office. “Come in here for a minute.”

Corinne pulled the cash from her coat pocket and started to join her, but Johnny shook his head.

“Just Ada.”

Ada and Corinne exchanged a glance. Then Ada took the money from Corinne and followed Johnny into his office. Corinne sat down on the couch and massaged her temples. She had the beginnings of an awful headache. She needed a drink.

“Who was that?” Gabriel asked.

“Sebastian Temple,” Corinne said. “We all call him Saint. He’s lived here about five years, but he’s known Johnny for longer than that.”

“I gather he was with Ada when she got arrested.”

“I haven’t seen him since that night. Johnny said he was lying low.” Corinne glanced toward the closed office door. “I wonder if Johnny knew the whole story.”

She drummed her fingers on her knee, thinking. Then she shook her head and jumped up. “I’ll be right back,” she said.

She went to Saint’s door and entered without knocking. The pungent smell of oil paint greeted her. Saint’s room, though not any bigger than hers, doubled as his studio. Every inch of wall was covered with a canvas, and every inch of floor space held an easel or a can of paint or a bucket of brushes. There was only the slenderest of paths from the door to the cot. Saint was sitting there, slouched with his back against the wall.

Corinne toed her way through the chaos and sat down on the foot of the bed. Leaning against the wall, stacked against several other paintings, was one of the larger canvases she’d seen Saint work on. It was only broad strokes right now, but she could already see that it was the Mythic Theatre, which was odd. Saint usually spent time only on paintings he could pull an object from.

A reg looking around the room would assume the brass candlestick in the corner was the model for the painting above it, but Corinne had been there the day he pulled the candlestick from the canvas. It was one of his first successful pulls, and she could remember Johnny slapping him on the back. She remembered how happy Saint had looked.

Tucked among the painting supplies was evidence of other practice pulls. A milk can, a vase of wilting flowers, even a bowl of eggs. Johnny had been pressuring him in the last year to paint items of value that they could sell, but no matter how much time Saint spent on the painting, the objects he pulled were never quite perfect. Precious gems were declared worthless by jewelers. Gold bars were little more than gilded lead. Even the candlestick, which was brass by all appearances, was pliable to the touch, like modeling clay.

Johnny never said much to Saint about these attempts, but somehow that only made the failures more cutting. Corinne knew their talents had always been intertwined with their duty to the Cast Iron, but the stakes hadn’t always been so high. She remembered a night, years ago, not long after she and Ada had moved to the club.

The three of them had sat on the floor of Saint’s room, legs crossed, breath bated, while he pulled out a plate of steaming cookies from a fresh painting. The treats hadn’t tasted quite right, but that didn’t stop them from devouring the lot until their stomachs ached.

“I’m sorry about Ada,” Saint said suddenly, not looking at her. “That’s all I can say, all right?”

His soft eyes and the freckles across his pale face always made him look much younger than seventeen. Normally that was something Corinne teased him about, but now it just made her feel worse. She drove her fingernails into her palms until they stung. She knew she owed it to Ada to say what needed to be said.

“You’ve always been a good friend to me,” she said at last.

“But?”

“But Ada is much more than that, and I saw where she spent the past two weeks.”