Either that or get a bullet to the head. And Iris didn’t want another one of those.
With that, Adam stood. “Well, Iris. Will you come with me?”
Simmering in their locked eyes was a battle of wills. The challenge in his grin. Her hands squeezed into fists on her lap.
“Iris?” Jinn stood quickly along with her, but she put a hand on his wrist to assure him.
“It’s fine,” Iris said, though she wasn’t quite sure how true that was. Reluctantly, she turned to Adam. “Lead the way.”
Adam placed a hand on Jinn’s shoulder. “Loosen up a little. She’s in good hands.”
The scowl on Jinn’s face was a loud enough response.
Iris looked at her two teammates behind her before leaving the room.
* * *
Iris never thought she would see a garden indoors. What the rich wouldn’t pay for. The room had a stream of wide windows. If not for the gray clouds, bits of sunlight would have been showering the plants and flowers on tables and hanging in pots on walls. On opposite sides of the room were framed portraits of two men: Carl Anderson, a portly, long-nosed, bearded man in a fine suit. Deceased August 24, 1884. And to Iris’s left, Neville Bradford, his blond hair graying around the edges. Deceased October 1, 1884: less than a month ago.
“Esteemed members of our club,” Adam told her when she asked about them. “Mr. Anderson was a member of Parliament. Mr. Bradford was formerly the Colonial Secretary heading the Colonial Office.”
“Both men of empire.” A breath of disdain escaped Iris’s lips.
“Both men of power,” Adam corrected. “Using whatever means in their control to gain it. Alas, both met with unfortunate accidents that took them from us far too soon.”
Iris raised an eyebrow. “Unfortunate accidents?”
Adam’s back remained to her as he approached the center table. “Their donations to Club Uriel will always be remembered, at least. Right this way.”
Adam led her outside. It was even chillier than before, but she relished the outside air. As dirty and polluted as it was in this city, at least the breeze was refreshing.
“Some conversations are better held in private,” Adam told her after shutting the glass double doors behind them.
“Then will you answer me now?” Iris said. “About those men and women who watched a man die in front of them and barely blinked?”
“Ah. Club Uriel.” Adam placed his arms behind his back and walked over to the balcony’s railing. “As my grandfather once told me as a child, joining associations and clubs is a way for men of means to gather resources and connections. Club Uriel is a secret society with access to knowledge most in the world could only dream of. But the Enlightenment Committee is even more exclusive, operating from within the club. The members of the club may know our identities, but they don’t know how we came to be, the extent of our power, or our true aims. Not until a member dies is a new one chosen from among the club. There are men who would kill to be among our ranks. Or die trying.”
Adam seemed to be speaking from experience. His eyes told too many bloody stories.
“Some are helping to fund our little tournament,” Adam continued. “Many have already cast their bets.”
“So they’re the audience. How fun for them.” Iris felt sick to her stomach.
“You are what you’ve been for many years, Iris,” Adam said. “A performer. I simply want you to perform. Do you have any other questions?”
The breeze blew Iris’s hair as she stared out over the skyline. She could see the bridge in the distance, steam rising from ships. Donkeys pulling wheelbarrows and horses drawing carriages down the lanes. Men and women in bleak attire sitting in wooden chairs on the street corners in front of their shops. Children laughing and playing through the roads. Normal life. She wondered what that felt like.
“How many know of us?” Iris asked. “Us Fanciful Freaks?”
“Rumors are becoming more rampant, though some are trying to keep it under control,” answered Adam. “With our funding, independent research is being conducted across the country to learn more about the abilities of those changed ten years ago in South Kensington. Meanwhile, the Crown is conducting their own studies here in London.”
Iris frowned. “What… kind of studies?”
“All I’ll say is that the Committee only use corpses for their experiments,” said Adam. “The same can’t be said of the Crown.”
Live subjects. Iris shivered. And yet the thought of corpses being exhumed and trifled with in the name of science made the hairs on Iris’s arms stand on end as well. That desperate man, newly dead. Was that his fate?
“So I perform.” Iris walked over to the balcony, gripping the ledge. “I participate in this game under your banner.”
“Find my father along with that and you’ll get what you’ve been wanting. And more.”
Iris let go of the railing and turned to him. “But how?”
“Instinct,” Adam answered. In two strides, he was closer than he should have been, but she was fixed to the spot nonetheless. “You use your uncanny instincts, Iris.”
Iris touched her chest, feeling her heartbeat. “There was one time I found an old friend. Agnus, if you recall.” Iris thought of Granny’s childhood photo in the British Museum. “I felt her. Her life. Her soul. That day at the fair, I tracked her all the way to Coolie’s. It was as if her blood was pumping through my veins.”
“Has it happened again since?”
“Sometimes.” But only through some fluke, when she was quiet and still. And there were times she could sense Jinn even when he was off camp. She’d never dared speak of it.
Adam nodded. “You’re feeling the vitality, the life force of someone close to you. If you learn to hone that ability, you can use it to track someone from yards, miles, even countries away. Those are your abilities, Iris, waiting to be wielded like a sword.”
A sword. Iris flinched a little at the word, watching as Adam pulled out his coin, flicked it into the air, and caught it again. Soon, he began turning his coin across his knuckles.
“This was my father’s coin. Watch it carefully,” he told her. “Hone your concentration.”
She watched the coin tumble over his knuckles, soar into the air, and land in his palm. An endless cycle until Adam snapped his hand shut, enclosing the coin inside.
“Now close your eyes.”
Iris broke out of her trance and stared at him in disbelief. “I think not.”
Adam’s expression seemed to make him younger. Like a boy admiring the pluck of a friend. “I promise not to do anything you wouldn’t approve of.”
Pursing her lips, Iris folded her arms over her chest. “You’d better not if you want to keep your fingers.”
Once she closed her eyes, she heard his voice.
“Agnus Marlow,” he said. “You felt her presence. Her life. Her soul. If you can feel one living thing, you can feel another. Take these plants, for example.”
She heard his footsteps retreat from her and then the soft opening of the double doors.
“Can you feel them?” Adam said from the doors.
It was humiliating, but she tried anyway. For a long moment, she felt nothing, but then… something warm slipped up to the tip of her fingers. Something calling to her. Life.
“Breathe and let it consume you.”
A kind of peace washed over her. The same sense of oneness she felt whenever Jinn tossed her up into the air during one of their routines. Up in the sky among the birds and butterflies flying free. Nature. Beings with a vitality detached from the industrial world. It was faint, but she could feel them.
“This world has many secrets, and there are many who’ve tried to discover them,” said Adam, and she could feel his arm brush against hers as he leaned against the railing next to her. “Some anatomists, geologists, and paleontologists believed that different cataclysmic events cleared the stage for new forms of life. They looked at patterns of extinction throughout
history, fossil records, faunal successions. But what about a grand cataclysma? One that can destroy civilizations—humanity—as a whole? Robert Jameson was a scientist who tried to prove the divine nature of Cuvier’s earlier theories. And my grandfather, a member of the Committee, built upon his work. His conclusion was that, indeed, this world has experienced a history of total planetary annihilation occurring periodically and without fail. But different in nature to what others in the scientific community believed. Gods and demigods once walked the earth. Then extinction. Then rebirth. A cycle like the coming of spring. That is what the Committee believes. In fact, that is what we know to be true.”
“And your cult thinks that a new dawn is upon us?” Iris scoffed.
“Yes. But my father had a theory. What if this cycle isn’t caused by different events?” He looked at her. “Not by flood one time or fire another. What if the grand cataclysma is the same event over and over again? If the world is to end, then how will it end? And what will end it? The Committee ordered my father’s assassination for withholding key information from them. Information in that precious journal of his.”
“They tried to kill him?”
“Before he could share his secrets with other entities. Imperial rivals. The government.”
“The British government is the Committee’s enemy?” Iris thought of the portraits in the room. Carl Anderson and Neville Bradford. Men of the Crown.
“As is any entity with power,” Adam said. “Knowledge and power are dangerous commodities when one monopolizes them. The Committee believes he’s dead and gone. I know he’s not. But those secrets are precious, Iris. They are the key to understanding what comes next… the cataclysm awaiting us. That’s why I need you to find him. You could say I’m a little like my father: I don’t want those secrets falling into the wrong hands either.”
“Even the Committee’s?”
“The Committee is nothing more than a macabre birthright,” Adam answered flatly. “And a means to an end.”
But before Iris could fully digest Adam’s words, he plucked open the top buttons on his white shirt, grabbed her hand, and placed it firmly upon his chest. There, as her body warmed, as her cheeks flushed, she could sense his heart pulsing steadily beneath his skin.
“Now feel me, Iris,” he whispered. “Concentrate on the beating of my heart. The blood pumping through my veins. My father’s blood.”
As Iris’s blood pumped, it was hard to concentrate on much else other than his thin hair prickling her palm.
“Try, Iris.” He wrapped his arm, gentle but firm, around her waist and drew her to him to finally close the distance between them. His body was hard, his grip steady. He wouldn’t let her go. “Concentrate. Get a feel for me to get a feel for him.”
Like a bloodhound sniffing a bloody rag to pick up the trail of a killer. It wasn’t a comparison she liked. But truly, she could feel Adam beyond his body.
Madame, tell me… are you… a goddess?
Adam’s voice as a child, despite his awe, was just as discreetly ravenous as it was now. Feeling him like this drew her back into that memory… a memory of flesh latching to bone.
Her heart jumped into her throat. She pushed him and ran to the balcony doors, turning her back to the glass, holding the knob behind her.
“Don’t look at me like that, Iris,” he said in almost a whisper as her pulse raced. “This is just part of what you’ll need to face to get your memories back. I told you it wouldn’t be easy. But I also told you that I’m on your side. I meant that. I still do.”
The breeze ruffled their clothes, their hair, marring the silence of the moment.
Iris turned and faced the door, her eyes on the plants. “I’ll hold you to that.”
“We’ll practice again soon,” she heard him say behind her. “Sometime during the tournament, when we can be alone.”
Iris snorted. “You seem confident the other tournament champions won’t get rid of me.”
“They couldn’t even if they tried,” said Adam. “You know that. You know you’ll survive. Soon, you’ll come to understand the full extent of what you can do. You who feels the thread of life so powerfully, you can’t die even if you desired it.”
Without looking back at him, Iris fled.
19
THIS IS OUR ROOM?”
Iris stared wide-eyed at her team’s lodgings. Room 308 was an odd combination of a mini-parlor and a bedroom with nothing to separate the two except the thick green curtains that slid on a hinge around a large four-poster bed—the biggest and most lavish of the three beds in the room. Max had already claimed that one.
“No, he hasn’t.” Jinn grabbed him by the collar and threw him off. “That’s Iris’s bed.”
After landing rather badly on the checkered rug, Max rubbed his back. “Who says? I say we cast lots. It’s only fair.” He looked back with a cheeky grin. “Right, Iris? Or I’d also be willing to share with you.”
Iris leaned against the door. The chairs around the table to her left arched to a point, with Gothic carvings in the dark wood. Mirrors hung upon the walls above the cabinets with standing lamps strewn about for lighting. The long sofa in the corner was adorned with ornamentation. Shades of pink were used for the wallpaper to contrast with the floor’s dark woodwork, and floor-length brocade draperies were tied back to let the light stream in from the window behind the three beds.
As for the beds, Iris could understand Max’s slight frustration. There were two very plain ones with white cotton sheets pushed up against the far right side of the wall. They looked like hospital beds. The other was as extravagant as you’d find in a noblewoman’s bedroom: a four-poster bed frame, a large headboard and footboard without a single crack in them, and thick, lavish bedsheets of violet and soft blue.
Iris felt a prick of annoyance at the sight of those sheets—again with the iris theme?
“The three of us are sharing this room… together?” Heat rose to her face when she saw the washstand and towel rail next to her. Staying in Max’s apartment was an awkward arrangement she didn’t want to see repeated.
“Makes sense. We’re a team, aren’t we?” Max seemed rather chipper as he jumped up to his feet. “This place is expensive. I wonder if there’s anything here I can steal.”
“She’s back?” cried a chipmunk from behind the door. “Lemme at her!”
The door burst open; Iris had to stumble out of the way to avoid being flung across the room. Cherice’s small face was red with fire as she stomped into the room.
“You see? What’s that, then? Look at that bed!” She pointed at the lavishly decorated four-poster on the right wall. “It’s clearly meant to be hers!”
“Meant to be hers,” Jinn repeated with a shrug while Max rolled his eyes in response.
But Cherice was talking to Jacob and Hawkins, each taking one side of the doorframe.
“Meanwhile, our beds look like the kind you put corpses on!” A huff from Cherice’s lips blew up her apricot hair.
“It all depends on how much our Patrons are willing to spend on us, I suppose.” Jacob pointed at the plaque to the left, hanging on the wall close to the sofa. A plaque with a ram carved into the wood. “It’s your team’s symbol,” he explained. “If Adam Temple’s your Patron as you say he is, then—”
“Then he must fancy the hell out of you.” Cherice laughed as Iris’s face flushed with heat. “He in love with you or somethin’?”
“No!” Iris couldn’t have screamed it louder. She turned quickly toward Jinn, ready to explain, not knowing why she had to explain, feeling it was ridiculous to explain in the first place. Except Jinn had taken one of the books from the shelf next to the window and was already flipping through the pages while lying on the cotton sheets of the bed he’d chosen for himself. Now she was silently furious and couldn’t explain it.
“Do you love him?” said Jacob as Hawkins giggled behind his hand next to him. “It’s okay if you do.”
Iris whipped around and pr
actically bared her teeth. “What business is that of yours? Okay, so what about you? Who do you love, Jacob?”
That shut him up fast. Hawkins noticed Jacob’s sudden change in demeanor and, after an awkward shuffle of his feet, played off his own slight blush with a frustrated sigh. “Well, this suddenly stopped being amusing,” the blond boy said before pushing off the doorframe. “I’ll leave you to sort it out, then.”
Jacob swallowed, his throat dry. “U-uh, L-Lawrence, wait!” And he closed the door after them. Cherice didn’t seem to care. She was still glaring at Iris, hands on narrow hips.
“So are you in love with Max, then?” Cherice asked.
“Yes!” Max answered, hopping onto the extravagant bed once more.
“No!” Iris answered at the same time. This had to be some kind of humiliation ritual.
“As her professional partner, I can tell you she’s more likely to be in love with herself,” Jinn answered flatly, flipping a page of his book. “And pretty things. Jewelry, hats.”
“Excuse me?”
“Didn’t you ask me for a hat?”
Iris had half a mind to pick up the vase on the table and throw it at his head. There was that childishness she saw in Granny’s tent the day she ran from the circus, rearing its ugly head.
“What about you?” She pointed at Cherice with a little bit of childishness of her own.
“Me?” With a smile, Cherice skipped over to the lavish bed, jumped onto the covers, and after landing on her knees, threw her arms around Max. “Maxey’s the only guy for me.”
She said this so confidently, so openly, that it shocked Iris into a timid silence.
Max, however, returned Cherice’s affections with an awkward laugh and a smooth removal of her arm. “She’s kidding,” he explained to Iris, shaking his head. “She was always the youngest in our group when we were kids, so she’s turned into a bit of a brat. Don’t pay her any mind.”
But Cherice certainly didn’t look like she was kidding. The stiff expression when Max patted her on the back said otherwise.
The Bones of Ruin Page 20