Free The Diviners by Libba Bray

Ruby Bates.”
    “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Bates. My name is Mr. Hobbes.” He tipped his hat. “But my friends call me John.”
    “Thanks, Mr. Hobbes,” Ruta answered. She swooned slightly from exhaustion.
    “I have smelling salts, which might aid you now.” The man doused his handkerchief and held it out for her. Ruta inhaled. The scent was pungent and made her nose burn a little. But she did feel peppier. The stranger offered his arm again, and this time she took it. From the outside, he seemed a big man, but his arm was thin as a matchstick beneath his heavy coat. Something about that arm made Ruta cold inside, and she withdrew her own quickly.
    “I’m good now. Them salts helped. I’ll take you up on that cuppa Joe, though.”
    He gave her a courtly little bow. “As you wish.”
    They walked, the stranger’s silver-tipped stick thudding a hollow rhythm against the cobblestones. He hummed a tune she didn’t recognize.
    “What’s that song? I ain’t heard it on the radio before.”
    “No. I expect you haven’t,” the stranger answered.
    With his left arm, he gestured to the broken-down Bowery, with its Christian missions and flophouses, fleabag hotels and tattoo parlors, restaurant-supply stores and rinky-dink manufacturers.
    “ ‘Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city.’ ”
    He pointed to where a couple of drunks slept on the stoop of a flophouse. “Terrible. Someone should clean up this sort of riffraff, turn them back at the borders. They’re not like you and me, Miss Bates. Clean. Good citizens. People with ambitions. Contributors to this shining city on the hill.”
    Ruta hadn’t ever thought about it before, but she found herself nodding. She looked at those men with a new disgust. They
were
different from her family.
Foreign.
    “Not our kind.” The stranger shook his head. “Once upon atime, the Bowery was home to the most stupendous restaurants and theaters. The Bowery Theatre—that great American theater, which was a sock in the eye to the elitist European theaters. The great thespian J. B. Booth, father of John Wilkes Booth, trod its boards. Are you a patron of the arts, Miss Bates?”
    “Yeah. I mean, yes. I am. I’m an actress.” For some reason, Ruta felt a little giddy. The streets had a pretty glow to them.
    “But of course! Pretty girl such as you. There’s something quite special about you, isn’t there, Miss Bates? I can tell that you have a very important destiny to fulfill, indeed. ‘And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet and decked with gold and precious stones….’ ”
    The stranger smiled. In spite of the late hour, the strangeness of the circumstances, and the aching in her legs, Ruta smiled, too. The stranger—no, he wasn’t a stranger at all, was he? He was Mr. Hobbes. Such a nice man. Such a smart man—classy, too. Mr. Hobbes thought she was special. He could see what no one else could. It was what her grandmother would call a
wróz.ba
, an omen. She wanted to cry with gratitude.
    “Thank you,” she said softly.
    “ ‘And upon her forehead was written a name of mystery,’ ” the stranger said, and his face was alight with a strange fire.
    “You a preacher or something?”
    “I’m sure you must be eager to call your family,” Mr. Hobbes said in answer. “No doubt they’ll be worried?”
    Ruta thought of her family’s cramped apartment in Greenpoint and tried not to laugh. Her father would be awake next to her mother, coughing off the damp and the cigarettes and the factory dust in his lungs. Her four brothers and sisters would be crammed together in the next room, snoring. She wouldn’t be missed. And she wasn’t in a hurry to return.
    “I don’t wanna wake ’em,” she said, and Mr. Hobbes smiled.
    They walked a dizzying number of side streets, until Ruta felt quite lost. The Manhattan Bridge loomed in the distance like the gate to an underworld. A light drizzle fell. “Hey—hey, Mr. Hobbes, is it gonna be