A Dawn Most Wicked Read Online Free

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.
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    I jolted upright, the dregs of sleep threatening to pull me back under if I didn’t. . . .
    â€œWake 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 .
    â€œJust 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.
    â€œBlood,” 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