The Heartless City
Read The Heartless City Online
Authors: Andrea Berthot
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© 2015
Andrea Berthot
http://andreaberthot.blogspot.com
Cover Art by Amalia Chitulescu
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ISBN 978-1-62007-958-4 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-62007-959-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-62007-960-7 (hardcover)
To Matt and Max, who have the biggest hearts I know
London, 1890
irginia shivered but didn’t dare reach up to gather her damp, wool cloak around her throat. She didn’t dare breathe, though she doubted the sound would be heard over the heavy rain pelting the canvas above her, or the churning waters of the wide and mighty Thames. When she’d first arrived in London five years ago, it had also been raining, but the circumstances couldn’t have possibly been more different. Instead of a wooden crate on a narrow and shadowy riverboat, she’d arrived in a bright steam engine after an ocean liner brought her from New York to Southampton, and her heart had been filled with pride and ambition, not gnawing guilt and fear.
She’d been the first woman from Atwood, Kansas to earn a college degree, and once she’d completed her graduate work in biology at Cornell, she was offered the once-in-a-lifetime chance to study in London. Her parents had bragged to the whole town that she would spend the next four years studying abroad, working with the most renowned and respected doctor in London. Some had simply scoffed at the news; others had warned that pursuing a man’s profession would be her undoing. Then, when she’d returned to her parents’ farm after only a year, all of them got to smirk, sneer, and boast that they’d been right. The whispers spread through the farms, the church, the tavern, and dry goods store:
The Carroll girl was ruined in London.
They had no idea.
The boat dipped, and she swallowed and tightened her arm around her daughter, who was curled up next to her on the single trunk they’d brought from home. There was so much Virginia regretted, so much she desperately wished she could change, but nothing more than tearing her daughter away from their family farm. Even after both of her parents died of scarlet fever, and those who hadn’t already shunned her in Atwood turned their backs, Virginia had remained determined to raise her daughter there. She’d managed to keep the land and gotten a job as a nurse in town, and eventually, even convinced herself that she’d never left Kansas at all, that everything that had happened in London had only been a dream.
But then, three weeks ago, she received a letter from Lady Cullum, who had been not only the benefactress of her mentoring doctor but the closest thing she’d had to family while living in London. The letter confirmed the rumors that had only just reached The States, stories of a crisis that was crippling the city.
And you’re bringing your daughter here
, she thought, guilt slicing her like a knife.
You’re bringing your three-year-old daughter into a lethal, quarantined city.
She closed her eyes, reminding herself that she didn’t have a choice. Her parents were gone, and she had become a pariah back in Atwood; even if someone
had
been willing to take her daughter in, they certainly wouldn’t have given the girl the love and care she needed. And she’d had to return to London and do what she could to save the city, not only because Lady Cullum, who had never begged for anything in her life, had implored her to, but because she knew what Lady Cullum didn’t.
That, in a way, the crisis was all Virginia’s fault.
The boat rocked and then stilled, and her heart leapt into her throat. This was it; they had finally reached the heavily guarded border. She heard the booming voice of their oarsman―a burly Scotsman who’d introduced himself as simply “Beck”―but couldn’t make his words out over the rush of pounding rain. He hadn’t told her what lie he planned to give to the border guards, who would surely be baffled by anyone wanting
inside
the quarantined city. Virginia could only imagine how much money Lady Cullum had promised him to smuggle her in, because once they made it inside, he wasn’t getting out again. For a moment, she almost hoped the guards would turn their boat away, but then she felt a jerk as the oars dug back into the water, and she knew they were gliding past the border and into the city limits.
She waited for her veins to flood with relief, but instead, her lungs began to tighten and her throat began to close.
London. God in heaven, she was actually back in London.
Her heart sped up, pounding against her chest, and she clutched her daughter’s hand, pulling the little girl closer and inhaling the scent of her hair.
He’s dead
,
he’s dead
, she told herself.
He can’t hurt you now. He’s dead.
It was madness, she knew, to fear a single man when they’d just entered a quarantined city filled with monsters, but she couldn’t fight her terror of his memory any more than she’d been able to fight her adoration for him five years ago. He hadn’t just been her mentoring doctor. He had been the epitome of all she wanted to be―brilliant, passionate, well respected―and though it made her sick to think it now, beautiful, too. His eyes had been the color of honey―a fierce, burning amber ringed with a band of vivid gold. But one night in his lab, she’d watched those beautiful eyes go black, and the man she’d come to worship as a god had become the devil.
She tightened her grip on her daughter and dug her free hand into her pocket, clutching the leather-bound notebook she’d been clinging to for three weeks. It was his journal, which Lady Cullum had found just after his death and mailed to Virginia along with the letter, hoping she’d be able to find some clues or solutions inside. At first, the sight of his coiled, familiar writing had turned her stomach, but she soon discovered that, strangely, touching the pages made her feel strong. There was something incredibly powerful about clasping the words he’d written with his hands in the palm of her own, as if it restored the power he had taken from her that night, when those hands―suddenly smooth, strong, and ethereally pale―had ripped the seams of her lab coat and severed the fabric of her life.
The journal made her feel safe as well, because having it in her hands was further proof that he was dead, as he never would have let it out of his study otherwise. The story the pages told was common knowledge in London now, not because of the journal but due to one of the doctor’s friends, who spilled the truth to authorities before both of them were killed.
According to his journal, the doctor’s intentions had been noble; he’d wanted to find a way to extract the evil from human nature, but what he’d produced instead was a serum that did the opposite. The drug not only stripped him of conscience, sympathy, and compassion, it made him impossibly strong and terrifyingly beautiful, like the indefatigable offspring of an angel and a demon, with pale, glowing skin and deep and ravenous ebony eyes. The effects only lasted a couple of hours, but it was enough to change his mind and noble intentions forever. Soon, he began ingesting the potion nearly every weekend, prowling through the streets of London and taking and breaking its people and things like a child might batter its toys. Because he only took the drug while slumming in London’s East End, where minor spikes in violent crime were likely to go unnoticed, he managed to keep his secret under wraps for the next three years, but all that changed when he shared his creation with some of his wealthy friends.
The boat slowed and Virginia knew they must have been nearing the shore. Her suspicions were confirmed a moment later when the boat rocked back and she felt Beck leaping out and then dragging them up onto solid ground. She’d begun to smell a difference in the river soon after the border, but when he climbed inside again and peeled the canvas back from her crate, the stench of sewage, filth, and rotting death swept in like a wave.