These Vicious Masks: A Swoon Novel (35 page)

Police whistles rang from the streets, onlookers yelled, and carriages bustled, rushing to the building to help or crowd or simply gawk at something much greater than them. I hauled my sister
into my arms and peered at Dr. Beck’s laboratory, overcome with rage. It was him. He did this, not Sebastian. He deserved to burn forever. My sister was supposed to be alive, smiling and
relieved to go home. We were supposed to laugh about our adventure, go on walks, heal the sick, and figure out our lives. She wasn’t supposed to be lying here, withered in my arms.

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.

T
HEY TOOK
R
OSE
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 like—”

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.”