The Heartless City (17 page)

“Where are you taking her?” Milo called, his voice shrill and unsteady.

Elliot answered without looking back. “I don’t know.”

He didn’t. All he knew was he wanted her somewhere peaceful and quiet. With numb arms, he carried her through a side door and into a hallway. Halfway through the cramped passage, he passed a room of garden supplies, including a wicker settee with a dusty but unstained cushion. He stepped inside and gently laid her down on the settee, but when he did, the numbness dissolved and the pain behind it rushed back, breaking over his body like a wave and flooding his lungs. Tears erupted from deep in his throat, and he crumbled to his knees, curling one fist against the settee and jamming the other against his teeth so hard he tasted blood.

“Elliot? Elliot! What in God’s name are you doing?”

He knew it was his father’s voice, that Milo had probably gone to him the moment they got back, but he couldn’t stop sobbing or pry his knees from the freezing concrete floor.

“Have you lost your mind?” his father cried, barreling toward him, his panic remote and inconsequential. “You brought a body
here
?”

“She’s not a body!” Elliot cried again.

His father misunderstood. He moved around him and bent over Iris, checking the pulse in her wrist and throat and pressing his ear to her chest.

“She’s not in
rigor mortis
yet, but Elliot, she’s dead. What is wrong with you? Why on earth did you bring her here?”

Elliot couldn’t raise his head. Hearing the word “dead” on his father’s lips was the final blow.

“I’m going to get a footman to help Milo take her back to the carriage,” his father said, his voice stern, but his fear as sharp as a knife. “Pull yourself together.”

His footsteps faded away, and Elliot sucked in a rattling breath, pressing the base of his palms against his eyes to clear the blur. Milo might have been easy to fight, but he didn’t stand a chance against his father and the footmen. He rose up onto his knees and looked down at Iris’s face, which was still smeared with dirt from the unpaved alley where Milo found her. His chest cracking, he reached out and wiped the streaks away, clenching his jaw as his fingertips brushed her soft, cloudlike skin.

He thought of the first time they met, how the beauty of her spirit had stolen his breath before he saw her. The absence of that spirit was more than painful―it was a tragedy. There wasn’t just a gaping hole in his heart, but in the world. He lifted her hand and pressed his moistened lips against her palm, feeling so much that his excess emotion seemed to flow into her, leaving his body for one that would never feel anything again. His brain screamed for him to get up, that his father would be back soon, but he closed his eyes and gripped her hand tighter, sliding her palm to his cheek. Her smooth, pale wrist was resting just beneath his lips.

And then, in the tomblike silence, he felt something jump beneath them.

He opened his eyes and raised his lips with a single thought:
a pulse
. But that wasn’t possible; his own father had just examined and pronounced her dead. He leaned forward and stared at her face, but it looked exactly the same―until a frantic gasp tore through the air.

And she sat up.

Elliot scrambled backward along the floor, his heart in his throat. He’d lost his mind―his grief had caused his brain to detach from reality. She opened her mouth and another desperate inhale shattered the silence, and then her golden eyes flew open and darted about the room. Wild confusion erupted from her chest as she looked around, checking her body, her clothes, and the settee she was sitting on. She shook her head, as if to clear it, and then caught sight of Elliot, and the two of them stared at each other through the dusty beams of sunlight.

“Elliot,” she breathed, and then she coughed, her voice rusty and raw. “What is going on? How did I get here? Where am I?”

Elliot shook his head. “No. This isn’t real. You’re dead.”

Her eyes widened as fear―and strangely, guilt―washed through her veins. “Oh God, you must have found me. You found me unconscious in Somers Town.”

“No,” he cried, still shaking his head. “Not unconscious―
dead
.”

“I wasn’t dead,” she insisted, raising her hands and swinging her legs to the floor. “I know I seemed that way, but I was alive, and I can explain.” She sucked in a breath and rubbed the palms of her hands against her eyes. “Oh God. I let it go too far. I went out for too long.”

Her words didn’t make any sense, but Elliot didn’t really hear them. The only sound that existed was the beat of his own heart, which pulsed with the same two words again and again:
She’s alive, she’s alive.

She lowered her hands and exhaled. “What time is it now? Where did you bring me?”

Alive, alive, alive, alive.

“Elliot, where are we?”

He blinked and swallowed, his brain on fire. “I brought you to the palace.”

Her lips parted, and Elliot felt her lungs freeze.

“I’m in Buckingham Palace?”

“Yes,” he said, chilled by her sudden fear. “Iris, what’s wrong?”

“I―I can’t be here. I thought―before, I used to want―but now―” She clutched her skirt, her chest filling with panic. “What if she’s right?”

“What do you mean? What if who’s right?”

“I have to go. It might not be safe―”

“Holy mother of God.”

Iris raised her head, the whites of her eyes expanding with terror, and Elliot leapt to his feet and turned around to see his father. He was standing in the doorway with a footman just behind him, his eyes wide, and his face as pale as a corpse.

“It’s not possible.”

Elliot opened his mouth and tried to think of what to say, but before he had the chance, Iris bolted from the settee. She flew past him and charged through the doorway, nearly knocking his father and the footman off their feet. Once she was gone, what was left of Elliot’s reason dissolved, and he dashed through the doorway as well and tore after her down the hall.

“Iris, wait. You don’t know where you’re going!” he called.

But she didn’t stop. She turned and ran down the corridor that would have led to the garden, but instead of turning left she turned right and into the palace proper. Elliot scrambled after her and into the Marble Hall, which was not only filled with priceless statues and art but busy servants. They stumbled against the walls and screamed in fright as Iris shot past them, but no amount of shouting or barriers could slow her down. Not until she reached the archway that led to the Grand Hall, where a sleepy, oblivious Cam strolled out and walked into her path.

The collision knocked them both off their feet and onto the marble floor, creating a thunderous
crash
that nearly stopped Elliot in his tracks. Cam sat up and gripped his head, releasing a string of expletives, but the words died in his throat when he saw Iris sprawled before him.

“Iris! Are you hurt? What are you doing―” he began, but she crawled back onto her feet and darted past him without a word.

“Cam!” Elliot yelled as he neared him. “She’s trying to get out! But she’s going the wrong way! We have to help her―”

“Stop that girl!”

Elliot turned around to see his father and the footman running through the Marble Hall. He and Cam looked at each other, and then the two of them dashed after Iris beneath the Grand Hall archway, screaming for her to stop and turn down a different corridor. But she didn’t listen and didn’t stop, and soon she was headed straight toward the palace’s Grand Staircase, which led to the second floor and even fewer places to flee. Elliot’s father was only a few steps behind him. In desperation, he shouted over his shoulder, “Let her go! She means no harm!”

“Elliot, that girl just
rose from the dead
!” his father cried.

Then everything stopped, because Iris collided with someone at the foot of the stairs. She stumbled backward and fell to the ground, just as she had with Cam, but this time, when she looked up, she remained frozen where she sat. Standing above her was Andrew and, beside him, the Lord Mayor, whose burning gaze roamed over her as if she were made of gold.

“What is this I hear about a girl who can rise from the dead?”

he private space closest to the Grand Staircase was the Green Drawing Room. It was as much gold as it was green, with gilt mirrors and picture frames and buttery yellow fringe lining the silken emerald curtains. The furniture was also green with delicate gold accents, and Iris was curled in one of the chairs against the southern wall. The Lord Mayor had ordered a maid to fetch her a warm blanket. She didn’t look cold, as usual, but it seemed the proper thing to do for a girl in a dirt-stained dress, and the thick, blue flannel was currently wrapped around her shoulders. The blanket made her look like a weary guest being comforted, but everything else about the scene made her seem more like a criminal being watched and interrogated.

She was the only person sitting. Elliot’s father and the Lord Mayor were standing a few feet in front of her, the Lord Mayor leaning back against the fireplace mantle. Cam and Andrew were standing beside a desk to the Lord Mayor’s left, Andrew with his secretarial quill and notebook ready. Elliot hung back away from everyone, near the room’s closed door, watching Iris and trying to slow the breathing her fear had quickened.

“Now,” the Lord Mayor said, straightening up from his place at the mantel, concealing his excitement with a cool and even tone. “Who would like to begin? How did this girl come to be here today?”

Elliot swallowed and looked at his father, who glanced at the Lord Mayor.

“Elliot was helping me with a job for the hospital,” he said. “He and Milo went out this morning to look for potential cadavers.”

Cam and Andrew raised their heads and stared at Elliot, and even Iris’s frightened gaze flitted in his direction.

“You were out… looking for bodies?” Cam asked, not bothering to mask his horror.

Elliot’s throat grew dry as he searched for what to say.

“Yes,” his father said calmly. “Just for today. As a favor to me.”

Elliot looked at his father, gratitude swelling inside his chest, but then he remembered the reason he was lying for him now. He didn’t want the Lord Mayor to know the mistake his son had made, what a weak, repulsive creature he’d become as a result.

“He and Milo found this girl,” he continued to the Lord Mayor. “But instead of taking her to St. Thomas’s, they brought her here. Because…”

He glanced over at Elliot and then quickly looked away. Back in the garden supply room, Elliot had been too distraught to wonder what his father thought of his actions and his tears. Now, however, he felt the knife twisting inside his heart. He didn’t know Iris, but he knew she meant something to Elliot―that he’d brought her there in the madness of grief he understood himself. Grief he’d been trying to hide, deny, and forget for the last five years.

“I suppose he wasn’t certain she was dead,” he quickly recovered. “So he brought her here to me, and I examined her myself.” He turned back to Iris, a resurgence of disbelief transcending his pain. “She had no breath and no pulse, Harlan. I swear on my life she was dead.”

“I wasn’t dead.”