by Zekas, Kelly
I pressed my cheek to Rose’s, my hands down over her heart, refusing to let go. For God’s sake, why won’t it start beating?
But wait. My healing always took a few minutes to take effect. This was perfectly natural. Sebastian was far enough away now. This was how it worked with Miss Lodge. Patience and faith: That’s all I needed. The minutes rolled by slowly, achingly, as I endeavored to pour my own life into Rose. Whatever would keep her alive, I had to give to her. All of it. I shut my eyes tight and prepared to be pleasantly surprised when I opened them. Rose would be alive and well and smiling that reassuring grin.
Nothing happened. Everything was still except for the faint rustling of her golden hair and the stray ashes settling on her face. She refused to stir. It was no longer Rose, just an abandoned body.
“Come back,” I whimpered, shaking her slightly, then harder and harder, a strange hollow pain settling through my body. “Please. You can’t leave. Rose. Rose. Rose, please, I need you to come back.”
But all that came was the storm. Torrents mercilessly poured down, extinguishing the fire, depositing rivulets of chemicals into the dirt, and washing everything else into the gutter. The rain made no exceptions, sweeping away every lingering remnant of hope, and I was left alone.
THEY TOOK ROSE away.
The police always took her away in my dreams. No matter how much I pleaded with them, they wouldn’t listen. Even after I’d explain I only needed ten minutes more, that serious illnesses and injuries always required more time, they’d pry my fingers, my arms, my entire body off, load her in the police carriage, and take her to a cold, white room somewhere to be declared dead.
But this time, this dream, as they were carrying her away, something finally stopped them.
She woke up.
Like an angel, she rose from the stretcher and seemed to float past everyone, their faces frozen in awe. The storm left her untouched, and sunlight spilled through the clouds as if the heavens were parting solely for her. She stopped in front of my mud-covered person and her warm voice drifted through the rain shower.
“Oh, Ev, don’t look so surprised,” she said with a smile. “Isn’t this what you were waiting for?”
In a daze, I climbed to my feet on the unsteady ground. It was true. I’d been waiting for this for weeks, and now that she stood before me, there was so much to say that barely anything made it out.
“I’m sorry.”
She shook her head, refusing my apology. “You musn’t keep doing this.”
“Doing what?”
She raised her eyebrows and gave me that look reserved for my most ridiculous comments. “Trying to bring me back as you sleep. The constant dreaming.”
The rain only fell harder. She stood mere inches away from me. I dared not hug her or touch her or even move for that matter, afraid of making her vanish. I struggled to keep my words coherent, my voice steady. “Then . . . what should I be doing?”
Her eyes practically glowed, excited by the possibilities. It was as if we were back in our library. “If I were you, I’d be running around London healing everyone, whether they liked it or not.”
“Oh, so now I have to take on your responsibility of healing all of England, then?”
“To start, yes,” she said with a giggle.
“They’d all just eventually fall sick from something else.”
Her eyes narrowed. “And I would have died eventually, so what does it matter that it happened here?”
The question hung in the air with the ash and the dust. Of course it mattered. Most days, it felt like the only thing that ever mattered.
“How can you expect me to even go back to . . . anything?” I asked, numb and useless. “Without it feeling wrong?”
She cocked her head. “And locking yourself away from the world will give you more reasons to come back?”
“Where would I go?”
“Where do you want to go?”
It was unsettling and familiar, the way she answered my questions with more questions. It reminded me of my childhood . . . and suddenly, it was very clear and very infuriating: This was not my sister. Not even in my dream.
“Get out! Miss Grey, get out.”
In a blink, my governess had taken my sister’s place, and my stomach lurched as if I were losing Rose all over again.
“Would she have said anything different?” Miss Grey asked after a moment.
“It doesn’t matter. You have no right to enter my dreams and do that!”
“It’s the only way I can contact you when you refuse all visitors. I’ve been worried,” she said. “But I am sorry.”
I fumed in silence, and she waited. She could always outwait me. Behind her, the fire that had consumed Dr. Beck’s house was all smoke. The noxious stench of chemicals filled the air.
“So, is that everything you came to say?” I finally asked.
“No . . . I hoped you might meet me in Bloomsbury Square in an hour.”
“You can’t tell me here?”
“It requires your healing, so I’m afraid you’ll have to wake up.”
I did. Jolting awake in a tangle of blankets and bedsheets, I nearly knocked over the empty laudanum bottles and wine decanters that filled my bedside table. Enough to kill a normal person, yet unable to grant me more than five minutes of sleep before my power washed the effects away. Useless.
I lay prone for a long while, in a sort of limbo, barely registering my dim surroundings. The Lodges’ guest room still felt strange, despite Mae’s insistence that I make myself at home here. But I didn’t exactly want to make myself at home anywhere. Strange seemed more bearable. Even when my parents tried to take me back to Bramhurst after the funeral, I’d refused and they didn’t press me. Mae must have made some strong arguments against the constant reminders of Rose. She knew that pain all too well herself.
But nothing could be done about that vexing worry for Miss Grey. It forced me up and into the hallway, where Cushing froze in surprise at seeing me outside the bedroom. He then proceeded to do an admirable job of masking his disbelief when I asked him for a maid to help me dress and a hansom to take me to Bloomsbury Square.
The weather outside was cool. A brisk chill cut through the streets and offered unpleasant confirmation you were still alive, able to feel shivers on your skin or the warm pulse in your arm. The city flowed like it always had, the indifferent traffic and pedestrians carrying on with their business. I couldn’t help but take it as an insult, as if London had forgotten Rose and simply filled in the empty space she’d left.
Miss Grey was already waiting at a bench by the time I alighted from the cab. Like me, she cared not for the attention from mourning dress and wore a plain blue frock instead. She looked far better rested than the last time we had seen each other, but she still had that air of fragility about her.
“Thank you for coming, Evelyn,” she said. “I know this is difficult.”
I frowned doubtfully. “I did not have much choice. Where are you injured?”
She tilted her head, then nodded in understanding. “Oh no, it isn’t me. There’s a poor boy with several broken bones at the hospital nearby,” she said, gesturing down the street.
“A boy you know?”
“He revealed himself in one of my dreams.”
Another one of us. “What sort of ability does he have?”
“That is what I hoped to discover today.”
“And you’ve come to explain everything to him?”
“In part,” she said, turning to lead the way at a fast clip, pointedly looking nowhere but straight ahead. “But it’s also because I’ve found myself rather afraid lately.”
“Afraid of what?” I asked, trying to keep up.
“The disturbing way Mr. Hale talked about that Society of Aberrations. We don’t know why they supported Dr. Beck’s research. We don’t know what others might do to continue his work. And we don’t know anything about them, which terrifies me most of all. Part of me wants to run away li
ke—”
She stopped herself before saying Sebastian’s name, but it didn’t matter. In fact, it felt more appropriate that it was missing. He’d barely given any indication of where he was going when he ran away. Just a letter delivered to Mae the next day, apologizing for another abrupt departure with the excuse that he needed to take control of some of his family’s land.
I sucked in a breath of bracing air before asking the question I both had and hadn’t wanted to ask for weeks. “Have you seen Mr. Braddock in your dreams?”
“Once,” she said, tightly. “He seemed to be traveling through France, but I couldn’t learn his destination.”
“Was he—how was he?”
“He—he had his health,” Miss Grey said, grasping at straws and her purse. “And he seemed to be very much alone.”
“A consequence of running away,” I said evenly, choosing bitterness over anything else that was potentially embarrassing for the London streets. It was safer than wondering if that day had driven him to isolate himself from the rest of the world. Or if he thought I blamed him for Rose. Or whether he knew that I often found myself on the verge of hysterics when I saw that Lord Byron book in the bedroom.
“What about Mr. Kent? Have you heard from him?” She ushered me past a flower seller, trying hard to be cheerful.
“Yes, he’s well . . . and that’s why I can’t involve him.” After I’d helped heal his injuries, Mr. Kent had sent flowers and letters, but I was in no state to respond to them, and he was in no position to receive replies. Any further contact would only cause more trouble within his difficult family.
Miss Grey nodded firmly and surveyed the street as we rounded a corner. “All the more reason why you and I cannot sit idle. I think there is a particular role we must each play. A purpose. Our abilities are too unique and too specific to have emerged entirely by chance, as the saltation theory suggests. I believe I am the one meant to find others like us. I ignored it for long enough, and I . . . I wonder how things might be different had I taken up the responsibility earlier.”
“But what are you supposed to do when you find others?” I asked.
“Gather and connect us all, teach them what we are, offer protection. Anything to keep what happened with Dr. Beck from happening again. As far as we know, I am the only one who can locate other extraordinary individuals, and it feels as if it would be a waste of a gift to not use it.”
We found ourselves on Great Ormond Street, standing before the hospital entrance. An unhelpful fairy that sounded very much like Rose seemed to whisper in my ear, nudging me to answer my own unspoken question: Would it be a waste if I didn’t try to heal every sick and injured person in the world?
As we entered the three-story building and claimed to be visitors on behalf of some fictitious Christian children’s rescue society, I couldn’t help but wish someone would see through the lie and send me back to my bed, away from Miss Grey and her ideas of responsibility and purpose. Could I not sleep away the rest of my life? Could I not let others hold the world on their back?
But the busy woman at the front waved us in when Miss Grey pulled out her Bible as irrefutable proof, and I found my feet following her. A nurse asked us the patient’s name and led us down a clean, gaslit hallway, passing room after room until she veered into a boy’s ward at the end. About twenty beds filled the room, all occupied by ill and injured boys between the ages of five and fourteen. Some of them had a doting mother or father by their side, some had a concerned nurse, and a few had only a book or a toy to keep them company. One of those few, in the far corner of the room, was Oliver Myles, though it seemed like a mistake. Such a young boy couldn’t have a power yet.
But after the nurse made the introductions and left to help another patient, I saw from closer inspection of his thin face that he was probably fourteen years old—just sadly undersized from malnourishment. We found two chairs and took our places at his bedside.
“I ain’t working in a factory,” the boy said defensively, eyes dull and determined, hidden beneath his fair hair. It sounded as if he’d had this conversation before.
“Don’t worry. We aren’t that sort of rescue society,” Miss Grey said soothingly. “We haven’t come to force you into a job.”
She looked to me, but I glared back. This was her insane idea. She should handle it. With thinned lips, Miss Grey continued. “We just want to help you if you need it. Is any of your family here?”
He frowned, looking suspicious. “I’ve got friends who’ll take care of me till I’m on my feet again.”
“But do your friends know about your extraordinary gift?” she asked, leaning in confidentially.
His eyes widened, and he suddenly sank and vanished into his sheets. A thud and a yelp of pain came from below, and I found him on the floor underneath the bed, wincing and holding his leg. Some of the boys around us noticed the commotion as Miss Grey and I scrambled to lift him back up to his bed. Fortunately, the nurses were too busy to notice.
“Here, this will help,” I said, relenting and grasping the knee of his injured leg. “Just don’t slip away again.”
“I can’t help it,” he said. “Sometimes I lose my hold and fall through walls or floors.”
“Is that how you got these injuries?” Miss Grey asked.
He nodded. “It was the stairs that time. But no one believes me. When I try and prove it, it don’t work. How did you two know about me?” He lowered his voice and raised his head closer. “Can you do it, too?”
Miss Grey shook her head. “We have our own gifts. When I sleep, I can dream of anyone else with a special gift—that is how we found you. And Miss Wyndham here can heal others. With her hand on your leg, in a few minutes, it’ll be as if you never got hurt.”
He looked at my hand in disbelief, then back up to me. “Will you visit me every time I get hurt?”
My lips twitched against my will, and in a room with a healer, a dreamer, and a ghost, this moment of happiness felt like the strangest thing there. I tried to stifle it back, waging a silent war within myself between the manageable numbness and the overwhelming pain, thinking the choice was obvious. But I watched as Miss Grey told Oliver all about the powers, teaching him with the same comforting authority I remembered as a girl. I watched as Oliver gasped in wonder and excitement, the world finally making a little more sense. And I watched as Oliver’s broken arm and leg were restored to full health, a miracle I could never imagine feeling commonplace. There were countless others out there who needed the same help, but strangely, now it didn’t feel quite so daunting and futile. It felt almost comforting, the fact that there would always be more. For the first time in a while, I had that excited rush of a new idea, a new plan unfurling in my head.
“Instead of a visit every time you are hurt, how would you like to accompany us and rescue some new friends?” I asked.
Oliver’s eyes danced with excitement. “Really?”
I nodded. “Miss Grey, where did you say that asylum was?”
Her head snapped up at that, though I could not tell if it was in excitement, trepidation, or both. “B-Belgium. In the south.”
Well, I had always wanted to see the Continent. I turned to Miss Grey and Oliver. The muscles of my mouth contorted to a smile for the first time in a month.
“All right. I have no other plans. Let’s go save a life.”
FIRST AND FOREMOST: to the Swoon Reads team, thank you. This process has been a dream, and we are still pinching ourselves to make sure it’s . . . not a dream, actually. Jean, thank you for believing in us. Lauren, thank you for all your cheerleading, late hours, and answers to our silliest questions. Emily, you’re such a delight and we know this book wouldn’t be what it is without you. Rich and KB, thank you for our cover. It’s better than we could have ever imagined. And finally, Holly: What would we do without you? Thank you so much for picking up These Vicious Masks and for the handholding and hours of editing since. We are a little in awe of you, and eternally grateful. To the re
st of the stunning Swoon Reads team, thank you so much for all your efforts on our behalf. We appreciate it more than we can say here.
But before our manuscript ever reached the Swoon Reads site, we had many wonderful readers and cheerleaders. First, Laura Gillis who spent hours championing us and helping us rewrite. Thank you, Laura, for all your time and support. Kyra Nelson, thank you for your notes and advice and for being Mr. Braddock’s earliest fan. Elliot Handler, thank you for answering our endless medical questions and for being the first person to read that messy first draft, making us believe it really could someday be a book. To our other friends and family who read this book at various stages and gave us hope, ideas, and enthusiasm when we were lagging: Beth Latz, Peter Richman, Alex Ricciardi, Zelda Knapp, Eric Messinger, Calaine Schafer, Frederika and Isabella Reinhardt, Vanessa Santos, Erin Keskeny, the Floe family, Dayle Towarnicky, Cayla O’Connell, Katie Owen and, surely more. We love you guys a lot.
To the creative, hungry, funny, and kind people we have met on Swoon Reads, we are so thankful for your feedback and comments and ratings. It’s been an absolute pleasure to be a part of this community and 100 percent impossible to do this without you. Thank you.
To Lee Jackson, Judith Flanders, and the person at Google Books who scanned all the nineteenth-century texts, thank you for creating amazing and accessible Victorian resources. We don’t know how we could have dealt with the historical research if you didn’t exist.
To Jude Morgan, Kelly would be an entirely different person if it weren’t for your writing. Thank you for inspiring her with every book you write.
Finally, to our ever-patient, ever-supportive, and number one fans: our parents. Thank you. We love you. Having a writer for a child must be deeply nerve-wracking, but thank you for never giving up on us—or letting us give up on ourselves.
For anyone we forgot, it’s because we hate you.
No, no—kidding! We’re saving you for book two. Hope you understand.