Inside, across the red carpet were rows of tables with little nets set up.
“Looks like there’s two floors,” Max said. Which meant two floors of tables, smoking rooms, closets. “We should split up. Scream if you find anything—or anyone.”
Iris and Jinn stayed on the first floor, searching underneath every table to see if there was a card stuck in a corner or pinned to the floor by a leg.
“Tedious,” she heard Jinn complain from inside one of the washrooms.
“Rather have another go in the zoo?”
“I’m looking for a tarot card inside a washstand.”
“No, then.” She almost giggled thinking of Jinn, with his worn-out sack carrying his bolero blades strapped to his back, checking the plumbing. Using the table for support, Iris stood from the floor when she heard Max’s voice above them. “What’s that?” It wasn’t a scream. It didn’t sound as if he was in danger. But she couldn’t make out what he was saying.
“Stay here,” Jinn told her, leaving the washroom and making for the wooden steps by the side of the wall. “Keep searching.”
But the moment Jinn was out of sight, she saw a shadow behind the front door just before it closed. When was it ever open?
Iris investigated, running out into the street, checking each direction until the flutter of a dress caught the corner of her eye. Iris gritted her teeth. If they were enemies, it just confirmed that this was the right location. In that case, it would be better to get rid of them quickly while Jinn and Max searched. Clenching her fists, Iris slipped into the alleyway.
The two figures there were cast in shadow. It was a woman she’d never seen before that walked out of the darkness first—a handsome young woman with sun-kissed skin, short, dark brown hair curling luxuriously around her high cheekbones, eyes like coals glittering devilishly.
“Are you lost?” Iris asked her. She looked high society enough in her beautiful dress and that unopened, black-dotted parasol. Either she’d come to play a game a little too late, or—
Out of sheer instinct, Iris raised her fists, her narrowed eyes peering at the woman suspiciously. “Who are you?” she asked more forcibly, uneasy as the woman began to giggle behind her hand.
“Iris!” Suddenly a window opened from the second floor and Iris could see Max’s frantic expression as he poked his head out of it. “Don’t come back inside! It’s rigged!”
“What—”
Quick as a flash the woman ran and smashed into Iris with her elbow, sending her flying.
“Who am I?” said the woman as Iris’s body crashed onto the pavement hard. “I can be anyone I want to be.”
She had an American accent, definitely from one of the Northern States. But there was something else bothering Iris as she stumbled to sit up. She’d heard that voice somewhere…
At the zoo. When it was trying and failing to pretend to be an old English lady. Lucille.
“What do you want?” Iris demanded, gripping her throbbing forehead where the woman’s elbow had hit.
“Oh, we’ve got what we want,” Lucille said.
Out of shadows came the second figure: a strawberry-blond girl with one long French braid tied in little blue ribbons.
“Mary. What’s going on here?”
“What’s going on,” said Lucille, “is that you’ve been tricked.”
32
IRIS STEPPED BACK, CAREFUL NOT to trip over her dress. “What does my teammate mean by ‘It’s rigged’?” she demanded, glaring at the two of them.
“Miss Lucille,” said the shy, nervous girl, her hands behind her back. “You shouldn’t have gone back to peek inside.”
“Oh, stop fretting, Mary; this is much more fun.” Lucille turned to Iris. “The trap is the card, my dear—held in the hands of a tiny little Whittle’s teddy bear rigged to explode at the wrong touch. Your boys try to remove it and—” Like one of the bad actors at Wilton’s, Lucille made a gesture of slitting her own throat. Subtle.
In her long, tightly fitted bodice and draped bustle, all eggshell white, this Lucille, if it was even the real Lucille, strutted toward Iris, swinging her parasol. She walked as if she didn’t have a care in the world—no, as if she owned it. As if she had such an unmeasurable kind of freedom at her fingers that, should she fail at this deadly game, she needed only to hop on a steamship and go back to the States to marry a Vanderbilt.
Iris stepped back. “Why would you destroy the card? How did you even know so quickly that it was here?” But she had a feeling she knew the answer to that last one. The Patrons. As expected, it wasn’t just Adam sending hints.
“Even if you take the card, you can still have it stolen from you in the end. Might as well blow it up!” Lucille laughed. “Then nobody gets to have it.”
Use the card to get rid of the competition. But didn’t Fool say to bring it back undamaged? Something wasn’t adding up.
“Unknit those brows, Miss Iris.” Lucille pressed a violet-gloved hand against her cheek in amusement. “Such a serious girl.”
“Iris!” Max called from above. “Sit tight. We’re going to try to take the card!”
“No!” Iris answered quickly. “Don’t bother, it’s not worth it!”
Why wouldn’t Lucille’s team have just taken the card and run?
You shouldn’t have gone back….
Iris lowered her head, grinning darkly, because once again little Mary had given something away. If not by her words, then by the way her arms trembled behind her back.
“This is a gamble for you too, though, isn’t it?” said Iris as Lucille approached with her parasol. “Damaging one of the cards? You were at Wilton’s; you heard the rules. Going against them? Well, who knows what kind of agonizing punishment awaits you back at Club Uriel?”
But it wasn’t Lucille who Iris was looking at. It was Mary. The girl twitched particularly hard at “agonizing.”
“Miss Lucille…,” Mary started.
“Quiet, sweetie,” Lucille said without a hint of malice, her eyes still on Iris. “Yes, I was at Wilton’s. Wasn’t that play fun? Some of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung with a little history thrown in; goodness, this whole tournament business is far more interesting than I could have ever imagined!”
She was close now, her parasol at her side, her chin raised as she sized Iris up as if examining a worthy foe. Iris had her fists ready, but the worried tears in Mary’s eyes were the last bit of confidence she needed to go for the jugular.
“What’s that behind your back, Mary?”
“Mary, run!” Lucille ordered just as Mary jumped and dropped the tarot card in her hands. The Sun. But before Iris could move, Lucille grabbed her wrist. Iris braced for a swing, but it wasn’t a fist that met her face.
It was a deep, long kiss.
Iris was so shocked, she forgot where she was. The heat from Lucille’s body made her dizzy. Lucille ravaged her lips until suddenly Iris felt Mary’s dress flitting past her.
“What—” Iris blinked, still in a daze. “You…!”
“You?” Lucille repeated in a mocking tone, still holding Iris tightly by the small of her back. “Over the many years, all the women I’ve held in my loving embrace have had a good deal more to say than that after one of my kisses.” She smirked. “There’s a particularly lovelorn redhead I left in New York who’d kill to be where you are now, you know.”
Mary has the card, Iris reminded herself. Lucille’s kiss had indeed left her with a pleasant tingling feeling, but Iris couldn’t let herself be beaten by a distraction. She clumsily turned to chase after Mary when Lucille pulled her back, readying a fist this time. With one swift movement, Iris blocked the woman’s swing, causing Lucille to jump back.
“Fighting doesn’t suit me, you know. All the blood and the hair everywhere.” Lucille lifted her parasol, clicking a button that made the metal tip jut out, sharp and battle-ready. “Doesn’t mean I won’t.”
“The card’s a decoy!” Iris managed to yell to Max and Jinn, earning Lucill
e’s grin as the woman charged.
“We have Henry to thank for our trinkets—including the fake card he drew just before setting out. Quite the artist. Grandpa Whittle would be so proud.” She wielded her parasol like a fencer, nearly too fast for Iris to keep up.
Apparently, she was a fencer. “Turns out, I was taught by one of the greats in France.”
And in the next second, the woman tripped slightly before regaining her footing. Apparently, not even the best fencer could overcome a bustle.
“Iris!” Jinn. “We’re coming down. Don’t fight her unarmed!”
Iris looked up, and a sword came flying down from the window above. One of Jinn’s bolero blades. Iris caught it handily and swung it around, pointing it at Lucille.
“Did I mention I was an opera singer in Italy?” Lifting her skirt, Lucille lunged again, but this time Iris was ready. Familiar with this weapon, she battled for real as if she were on her tightrope, the steel of her blade clashing with Lucille’s parasol.
“Before I did a stint as a highwayman,” Lucille added, nicking Iris’s neck.
“Like telling tall tales, do you?” Iris’s heel caught her dress, and she stumbled back against the wall, ducking just in time for the point of Lucille’s parasol to lodge in the brick.
“What I like is being able to be anything.” Lucille began swinging her parasol again. “To change. To pass. It’s fun. You can do anything you want. It’s freedom incarnate.”
“Alas, not all of us have such a privilege,” Iris said, and caught the parasol with both hands, ripped it from Lucille’s grip, and smashed the curved handle into the woman’s forehead.
Lucille must have known her time was up. Yanking the handle back from Iris’s grip and tripping Iris with a swift move, she ran toward the open street. “We must do this again! Oh—” she added, and pointed toward Iris’s hair. “There’s something on your bow.”
A red beetle hair clip that wasn’t there before. When had Lucille—?
Panic gripped Iris. She didn’t have time to think. Ripping it off her bow, she threw it toward the walled end of the alleyway. It exploded the moment it hit the ground. A sizable charge, not big enough to destroy the building, but big enough to freeze Iris to the spot. A quick salute and Lucille dashed into the street, barreling through Jinn and Max just as they appeared.
Her teammates ran toward her as the smoke from the flames rose into the sky. Iris stared down at the hole in the ground that could have been her head, and by the time Iris looked up again, Lucille was gone.
* * *
“If the tennis club was a trap, then Hawkins would have gotten them out of there,” Max said as they ran through the streets as fast as they could. “Back to the club. We’ll regroup with them there.”
But once they turned a corner into Pall Mall Street, Iris realized fast that Lucille’s team wasn’t the only one that considered hunting other teams as important as hunting for cards. Iris had wondered who’d been responsible for the clue slipped underneath their door. It might have been the pompous-looking man now in the middle of the empty street in front of them, his finely combed brown hair tucked neatly underneath a gray bowler hat. One of Benini’s men. So was it Kyle Leakes or Freddy Frasier? Iris had spied both in the club a couple of times, their long legs climbing the stairs completely in sync.
“Mr. Frasier and I split up,” said Leakes when Iris asked, waving a gentlemanly hand and speaking as if he’d gone to finishing school. In his other hand was a gleaming cane. Iris could barely see his brown eye behind his right monocle. “He must have already done away with your friends at the tennis club by now. An alliance—how quaint.”
And Mr. Leakes wasted no time dispersing mist from his body.
Iris, Jinn, and Max closed ranks, standing back-to-back as the mist surrounded them. Jinn and Iris readied their bolero blades and Max his fists as the mist took shape into monstrous forms. Gargoyles. How medieval.
“One doesn’t need an alliance when you can create your own army,” said Leakes, and his monsters immediately began attacking. Though made of smoke, their teeth and claws were somehow hard as metal. Iris and Jinn fought blade for blade. Max managed to blink behind two of the monsters. They burst into smoke the moment his hand chopped their necks, only for the smoke to gather and take shape once again.
“There’s no end to them,” Max said, ducking the claws of another. “Gotta get Leakes!”
“Easier said than done.” Iris gritted her teeth. They were fast, overwhelming, never-ending. She didn’t have time to even look for the man behind the beasts.
“Iris,” Jinn called, holding out his hand and giving it a flick. With just that she knew. She ran at Jinn. She and Jinn once practiced for weeks to get that one-handed flip right. Though she was light, for that show in Birmingham, Jinn had to work on his upper-arm strength like never before. As Jinn flipped her up into the air now, Iris once again felt that peace, that calm as she became one with the sky. It also gave her the perspective she needed.
Leakes. He was apart from his army, sneaking up on Jinn like a coward.
“Jinn, behind you!”
Just as Iris threw her blade down at the gargoyle rushing to stop him, just as it dispersed into smoke, Jinn flipped back. After a full twist, his boots found Leakes’s shoulders and smashed him against the pavement, knocking him out. The gargoyles disappeared.
Picking up her blade, Iris wiped the sweat off her forehead. “You probably didn’t need to do a whole back full,” she teased with a grin. “A regular jump would have sufficed.”
Jinn smirked. “Quiet,” he said before checking the champion’s pockets. No card.
“Come on,” Max said, rubbing his bruised knuckles. “I don’t believe for one second the rest didn’t escape. Not with what Hawkins can do. They’re probably inside the club right now.”
When Iris ran through the door first, she didn’t expect Rin waiting for her by the front of the steps inside—without her veil, no less. “Rin?”
Jinn and Max must have reacted defensively, because Rin put her hand up in peace.
“It’s okay,” Iris told her teammates. “She’s not here to fight.” She smiled at Rin, making the girl blush. “Besides, this place is a neutral zone, isn’t it?”
Now that Rin was on her own, Iris had hoped she was ready for some kind of alliance. What Rin had to tell her instead was not what she expected.
“You asked me to tell you if I found any information on the white crystal,” she said, causing Iris to intake a sharp breath. “If you want to know the truth, today just might be your last day to do it. Give up the hunt for the cards, Isoke, before your true treasure slips away forever.”
33
W HILE RIN WAS PLAYING THE part of guard and champion, she was secretly taking advantage of Bellerose’s connections. One of them had told her an interesting rumor about the West African envoys discussed in the newspapers—the ones who’d come to England to talk to the queen about their mining dispute with the National African Company, owned by the Crown. The papers had said the dispute was over the mining of salt. Far from it. The mineral both groups were after was an ore kept secret from the public—one that shone blinding white like a pearl.
The white crystal.
Iris and Rin spoke alone.
“Isoke, from what the legends say, you were kidnapped by the Dahomey in a village near that mining site all those years ago,” Rin whispered in the lobby just beneath the stairs.
Iris rubbed her arm, deep in thought as she considered the implications. “And I had a crystal with me when I arrived in the kingdom?”
“The one now in my chest.” Rin placed her hand there.
“I have to know more,” said Iris quickly. “If I can just meet with the envoys—”
“They’ve been in England for weeks,” Rin said. “They’re meant to leave at sunrise.”
Which meant Iris had to move quickly.
“But one cannot simply speak to those of such high political importance. I’m
sure they’ll be well guarded by both their own people and this country’s government. You’ll have to find your own method to get to them.”
Her own method? “Wait!” Iris called as Rin began to walk out the door. “You mean, you’re not going to help me?”
“Since one of the Patrons died, I’ve been ordered to work with another partner. If I don’t find him at our agreed meeting place, he’ll be suspicious. Not to mention, Bellerose is hosting a party at her residence tomorrow evening. She said before it starts that there’s something she needs me to do no matter what.”
Iris frowned. “Still doing that vile woman’s bidding?”
“It was just supposed to be until I found you and returned you to the king,” answered Rin. Iris gulped as Rin pushed opened the door and turned her head slightly. “But right now I am a little interested in the mystery of the white crystal—the stone that connects us, Isoke. I’ll support your efforts, even if it’s from afar. And even if it means staying in this country longer than I expected to. Besides,” she added, “finding the truth is your mission.”
“And what’s yours, then?” said Iris, remembering the girl’s viciousness when they first met. That deadliness was still there, but the drive… the drive had waned. Iris could tell. Taking her back to the Dahomey… Was it still her goal?
Rin fell silent, lowering her head. “I’m not so sure anymore.”
She left.
Iris didn’t have much time.
* * *
Max was right to believe in Team Hawkins. They were already inside Team Iris’s room, waiting for them. Apparently Frasier had loose lips. Before defeating him, Team Hawkins learned that the professor knight mentioned in the riddle was Sir Isaac Newton. He was the one who’d inspired Immanuel Kant. So the card was in the abode he once lived in. None of them knew where that was.
And Iris used it to her advantage.
Iris hated herself for lying to them. But the truth was why she was in this tournament to begin with, and she just didn’t have the time to explain it all or to convince them to go along with her plan. So Iris lied and told them that Rin was given a clue by Bellerose as to the location of the next card: Marlborough House, Sir Isaac Newton’s “abode.” They didn’t have time to look through books and corroborate it.
The Bones of Ruin Page 32