These Vengeful Souls

by Tarun Shanker

  “Emily, can you grab Captain Goode?” I asked.

  “No, Miss Kane, please don’t do that,” Mr. Kent said, setting his hand down on Emily’s. “Miss Wyndham, we aren’t at all prepared to deal with that.”

  “But he’s right there,” I urged. “We have to do something—Miss Chen.”

  She gave me a sidelong look. “Tell me you’ve a better plan than lifting Captain Goode up, bringing him close enough to shut down our power, and then dying painfully when the rest of the Society catches up.”

  “We’d run,” I said.

  “Right. Run then die, and painfully. Sorry, but no.”

  Gunshots drew our attention back to the fight. Without his powers, the impostor Sebastian pulled out a pistol and fired several shots at the escaping Queen. With Captain Goode and the nearby guards shielding her with their bodies, she remained unscathed. Not that it mattered, as the bullets were imaginary, apparently.

  “Miss Fahlstrom, now!” Captain Goode shouted.

  His mysterious blond companion fired electric sparks at impostor Sebastian’s hand from behind, knocking his gun away. She fired more shots that he managed to dodge as he floated back into the air and waved dramatically in the direction of the precarious abbey tower. He waited for a moment, and when it did not come crashing down as intended, he turned to discover that it was now secure again. Miss Quinn had frozen it in place.

  The impostor gave an almost inhuman roar as he made his escape. “I will have my revenge, Goode!”

  “I’ll be waiting!” Captain Goode shouted back.

  Mr. Kent bared his teeth, speaking tightly through them. “I believe I owe the Whitechapel penny theater a formal retraction and an apology. This is by far the worst acting in the entire city.”

  “Apparently the rest of this audience doesn’t think so,” Miss Chen replied somberly.

  The ridiculous crowd roared as Captain Goode and his companions escorted the Queen back down the pathway toward us. Some even took up a chant of his name.

  So this was what he meant by “enlightening the public.” A shiver went down my spine as I took in the sheer number of people around us who believed Captain Goode to be the hero. And Sebastian the villain.

  I could not let this stand. I had to do something.

  I watched as the Queen, Captain Goode, and his companions made their way back toward the royal carriage, feeling ineffectual and desperate.

  “This is bad; this is very bad,” I said, tightening my hold on Sebastian’s hand. “We need to go now.”

  There was no argument. Sebastian and the rest of our group followed close behind as I squeezed through the crowd and more bodies surged in to take our perfect viewing location. I burst through the stairway door and flew down one floor, two—

  “It’s that … way,” Sebastian said, sounding a bit unsure of himself as I pulled him into the second-floor corridor.

  “Come on,” I replied, forcing him to the other end of the building. “We have to get to a window.”

  We burst into a crowded parlor, at which point I simply started shoving through people with all my strength. Ladies yelped and gentleman harrumphed as I slipped through gaps and made ones where there were none. Poor Sebastian was trying to keep up while simultaneously apologizing to the people I left in my wake.

  “What are you doing?” Sebastian called. “Evelyn.”

  I pulled out of Sebastian’s hold, feeling him leave my veins as I made it to the open window. One last solid push through a couple and the clear view of the abbey was there, welcoming me. I leaned out as far as I dared and found the Queen’s carriage waiting two floors below. Captain Goode, his companions, and the Queen were crossing the street to their escape, heads together as Captain Goode spoke rapidly.

  I reached into my coat for Mr. Kent’s pistol, the metal wondrously heavy in my hand. I pointed it out the window and closed one eye, taking aim down the tiny barrel, holding my breath, ignoring the gasps behind me. One good shot and I would end this nightmare right now.

  “Evelyn, no!”

  Sebastian’s sensation shocked me like a splash of cold water. He grabbed me from behind and reached out, his tight grip digging into my arm. The crowd around us screamed as I pulled the trigger and watched a useless hole appear in the side of the carriage, one foot to the right of Captain Goode’s heart. Then I fell to the ground, the gun was twisted out of my hand, and the room was in chaos.

  Most likely because Sebastian was standing above me, his beard and mustache torn off in the struggle, the gun he ripped from me fully visible in his hand, in a room full of people who’d already watched him attack the Queen once.

  “He’s here! It’s Sebastian Braddock!” a voice cried.

  “Stop him! He’s tryna’ shoot the Queen!”

  I grabbed the gun from him and tried to reason with them. “No! It was me, not him!”

  No one was listening. And there wasn’t time nor space to run. The crowd converged quickly upon us, a sea of elbows, knees, fists, striking Sebastian and me all over. We landed hard and couldn’t get back up. Legs knocked us off balance. Arms dragged us down. The weight of bodies kept us from moving. I tried to scream but someone was pressing on my chest. I reached out for support, for Sebastian, for anything to find my bearings.

  A gunshot went off. And then another. Gasps and cries and strange clunking sounds came from above me, and finally I could breathe again.

  Clunk.

  “My apologies!”

  Clunk.

  “Sorry! You punched me first.”

  Clunk.

  “And you looked like you were going to punch me. Ah, there you are. Hold on tight.”

  Mr. Kent was there, grabbing my hand with his ordinary one and Sebastian with his metal one, shouting for Emily’s assistance. Immediately, he rose into the air, lifting Sebastian and me along with him. I felt a weight on my leg, someone from the crowd latching onto me, trying to drag me down, and then there was a loud rip and they fell away with the bottom part of my coat. We floated up to the ceiling, and I could see the astonished and terrified faces staring up at us.

  “Stop them! They’re the ones!”

  “Monsters!”

  “He’s not the one who attacked the Queen!” Mr. Kent shouted back. “He just looks exactly like him. It’s complicate—ow! For God’s sake, he stabbed me in the ankle! Who stabs a man in the ankle?”

  A window broke apart, and a hole opened up wide enough for us to float outside, two stories above the street. Gazes and fingers and shouts were aimed up at us before our trio was dropped on the crowded roof of a neighboring building. More onlookers shifted their attention from the abbey to us. More kindling on the verge of being ignited.

  “We need … to meet … the others,” Mr. Kent gasped as I helped him up. He winced as he took his first step. “Dammit! The ankle is now my fourth-least favorite place to be stabbed!”

  “It’s Braddock!” a man shouted from the building we had left. “The villain is escaping!”

  And that was enough to set the crowd ablaze. One man sprang forward, then another, and in one surreal second, the rest of the roof was charging at us in service of the Queen.

  “I’m not going to say go on without me,” Mr. Kent said as we stumbled backward. “I’d honestly prefer we all just died together.”

  “I’d rather make us even,” Sebastian said, then he picked up Mr. Kent in his arms and began to run, trusting me to stay close.

  “Wait, no, I’ve decided I would prefer to die,” Mr. Kent argued, looking extremely baffled as to how he came to be carried in Sebastian’s arms.

  “We can sort it out after,” I yelled, keeping my hand on Sebastian’s back, pushing him forward.

  We hurried across the roof with every last bit of energy we had left, our breaths heavy and our footsteps heavier. Behind us, the shouting intensified, and the growing rumble of pursuers shook my bones. We flew by smoky chimneys and stone balustrades and hopped over roof hatches and skylights. The city skyline ahead of
us melted into the smog and seemed to stretch out forever, but it was clear to see we were quickly running out of roof.

  The balustrade ahead of us broke down, and I saw Miss Chen and Emily waiting on an empty roof across the street.

  “Keep going, keep going,” I told Sebastian and myself as we neared the edge. I sucked in a breath and forced myself forward, no matter how much my stomach turned. The last time I’d tried this alone, it did not go well, but I lifted my skirts as we reached the ledge and prayed and leaped. The street and the carriages and the horses and the crowd hummed below me. My stomach dropped for one horrible moment, and then Emily was there to catch us and carry us the rest of the way.

  “Thank you, Emily,” I said, squeezing her hand when I touched the ground.

  “It’s better not to jump off buildings,” she said seriously.

  “I will keep that in mind.”

  “Also better not to shoot in the direction of queens,” Sebastian added, not bothering to hide the edge in his voice.

  “I had a clear shot,” I snapped.

  “And we had a clear plan,” he replied, looking very sulky as Mr. Kent lolled in his arms, trying valiantly to look as though this was a normal and commonplace pose for him.

  I returned my hand to Sebastian’s back. He seemed to bristle at my touch, but with Mr. Kent in his arms, neither of us had a choice. Emily floated us from rooftop to rooftop in silence as we made our way southwest, watching the streets get a little calmer the farther away we got from the assassination attempt.

  When we were far enough away, Miss Chen broke open a hatch that dropped us into a thankfully empty stairwell landing outside a barrister’s office. We stumbled down to the ground floor, opening the door to a small lane, where Miss Chen left us while she went to fetch a carriage. Sebastian finally set Mr. Kent down so he could lean against a building for support.

  Sebastian pulled a handkerchief out of his coat and held it over his face, as if the smog or the stench of the streets was bothering him. But as his eyes watched every person that passed us on the street, fearing another frenzied mob, the permanence of what happened started to really sink in.

  The Belgrave Ball could have been covered up as a poisoning. Only a few witnesses saw our fight on the train. But there was no going back from this. Thousands of people saw the illusions and hundreds more saw our escape. Captain Goode had once warned us of the dangers of our powers going public, and now he’d gone and revealed them himself in such an indisputable display.

  A carriage finally rattled to a stop in front of us and Miss Chen threw open the door, but I barely felt any relief from our escape. It was only a matter of time before word of the powers would spread. It was only a matter of time before people would know what happened today.

  And it was only a matter of time before Sebastian Braddock would be the most hated man in the city.

  Chapter Seven

  IT TOOK APPROXIMATELY eighteen hours for the city to go completely mad.

  By the next morning, the more opportunistic businessmen were on the streets hawking charms that supposedly kept you safe from Sebastian Braddock’s “demonic energies.” A gossipy fashion column announced that black cloaks were the newest daring style for men. Newspapers splashed exclusive interviews with the city’s hero, Captain Goode, who reassured the public that there were people using their extraordinary talents for good (of course, he included himself in this number) and they outnumbered the ones who had darker intentions. But he warned the public to watch for those with our specific powers—the one who killed with a touch, the one who extracted your deepest secrets with a question, the one who only healed other villains.

  Which, of course, led to droves of people coming forward to say that they, too, had powers.

  “He said he could read minds, which, really, if you are going to claim a power, I don’t know why you’d claim one so entirely disprovable.” Mr. Kent had joined the rest of us at breakfast, fresh from an errand to gather newspapers, gossip, and the general tenor of the city.

  So far, he had told of us a woman who swore she could hear rocks speak, another who seemed to believe she was Nostradamus come back to life, and a man who claimed an ability to multiply the number of sheep in any given room—not outside, but the amount of sheep inside a room.

  “But it’s the rumors about Mr. Braddock that are the most absurd—that he’s a spy or a demon or … French. I mean, really, even I think that’s going a bit too far, and I barely like you.”

  “I saved your life.” Sebastian sounded more affronted than I would have expected, and I saw Mr. Kent quickly hide a smile. If I didn’t know better, I would think he had taken up my own strategy of needling Sebastian into talking and participating through sheer annoyance.

  “You saved my ankle,” Mr. Kent corrected Sebastian, whipping an embroidered napkin onto his lap and reaching for another scone. “And while I am partial to my ankle, I think we can all agree that a man’s ankle is not the same as say, a lady’s ankle. Not that I would turn down a man with a good set of ankles. It’s all about anticipation, really. Oh, do you want to hear my Grand Ankle Theory?”

  No one did.

  Miss Chen tossed her napkin across the table at Mr. Kent, who caught it and wrapped it around his scone as he rose from his seat. “Fine. Remain unenlightened. Mr. Adeoti, are you ready to go?”

  Mr. Adeoti was already standing, a notebook in hand, an eager smile on his face. “Yes, of course.”

  “Ready for what?” I asked, perhaps a bit too demandingly.

  “We’re going back to Westminster Abbey for clues,” Mr. Kent said. “If Captain Goode or anyone from the Society dropped or touched something, we might see what they have planned.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said, standing up. “Who’s coming?”

  Mr. Kent shook his head. “It’ll be too conspicuous with a bigger group.”

  “Especially with someone who keeps firing a gun,” Catherine put in tartly.

  “I shot once,” I said. “And it would have ended everything.”

  “Yes, it would have gotten you killed, and then they would have found us, too,” Catherine said.

  She gave a worried glance at Rose and glared back at me. I sat down; no way to argue that. She really was getting protective of Rose.

  “Well, enjoy … sitting in uncomfortable silence for the rest of the day. We’re off,” Mr. Kent said, giving a nod to Mr. Adeoti. “Now tell me, is it possible that someone’s power could be the ability to be extraordinarily handsome?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps. Anything is possible!” Mr. Adeoti answered.

  “So is it possible for someone, let’s say me, for example, to have two powers?”

  Their voices drifted away down the hall, and a moment later we heard the front door close. The silence was so thick that I could have sliced it and spread it on my scone. And what could we do for the rest of the day? Ahead of us were hours of nothing but drinking tea and waiting here for Mr. Kent, while Captain Goode was out there turning more and more of London against us.

  The only noise for a few minutes was the shuffling of paper, the clinking of silverware, and the whispers of Emily and Laura as they fussed with a piece of fabric.

  Sebastian let out a breath as he flipped through article after article vilifying his name. I patted his shoulder, and he gave me a grumpy glare. Which I deserved, considering how I’d implicated him further. But still, I would accept a grumpy glare over a vacant stare any day.

  Catherine and Rose were at the far end of the table, Rose staring at her tea and Catherine frowning as she rubbed at her spectacles. She fumbled on the table for her napkin but couldn’t locate it without the glasses, until Rose reached over and pressed it gently into her hand. Catherine sent her a warm, happy look, and Rose cracked a real smile for a moment before her face fell and she turned back to her tea, seeming to shrink a little.

  Next to them, Miss Chen had closed her eyes as she chewed her breakfast. At first, it seemed like she was relishi
ng her scone with far more appreciation than I’d ever seen someone have for one. But then the image reminded me of the time I saw her at the Society. When Oliver and I had interrupted her in the middle of her training.

  I banged my cup down a little more forcefully than I had intended and got up, pushing my chair away from the table with a screech that made everyone turn to me. “I think we have to train,” I said.

  As soon as I spoke the words, it felt like the key to everything. To Sebastian and Rose overcoming their worries about their powers. To getting us close enough to Captain Goode without feeling helpless.

  “Train what?” Rose asked, looking a bit perplexed.

  “Our powers,” I said. “Miss Chen, I believe you have some measure of control over yours. Is that correct?”

  She nodded reluctantly. “Yes. Somewhat.”

  Rose’s eyes grew wide in the same way they did whenever she’d read about some fascinating new treatment. Sebastian was slowly lifting his head, blinking as if he were just coming back to us.

  Seeing their reactions, Miss Chen grew a bit self-conscious. “But I don’t know what kind of teacher I would be, either. I barely understand the idea behind it myself. I only had a little instruction—”

  “I would be very glad of anything you could teach me,” Rose said, looking at her intently. “Perhaps if we were all learning, someone might stumble upon a new discovery.”

  Miss Chen considered that and gave a shrug. “Right. Well, nothing else to do.…” She surveyed the room for a moment, considering. “Don’t suppose Mrs. T would let us use the parlor?”

  “Yes, let’s try not to break anything,” I said, gesturing everyone to the door.

  Emily slung an arm around Laura’s shoulder and rubbed her back a little, promising that later they could find Soot the cat and see if he wanted to fly around with them.