These Vengeful Souls

by Tarun Shanker

  He bit his lip. “Are you certain?”

  “Yes.”

  He took a breath. “What did you think about when Captain Goode gave you that choice?”

  “I thought about myself and how I couldn’t lose Rose again,” I said. “I made that awful choice for myself, and it got everyone killed. And I’m not going to do that again.”

  There it was: the truth. No one could deny it. I marched away from the circle of stunned silence and out of the house. I felt nauseated even thinking about Sebastian and how he must have looked at me, knowing what I’d done to Mae. I couldn’t bear it. I never wanted to face that again. And for better or for worse, I could finally say that I truly understood what was going on in Sebastian Braddock’s mind all those times he ran away.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I WALKED.

  I walked far, weaving through alleys, crossing thoroughfares, not really certain of my destination.

  I needed to think.

  I needed time away from everyone who knew the decision I had made at the ball.

  Unfortunately, I could not run away from myself.

  Miss Rao’s words swarmed inside my head, the truth in them stinging me over and over. She was right. It didn’t matter what I said I would do. If you asked me in advance, I’d always pick the noble decision, the right one you’re supposed to make. But the Belgrave Ball was proof that I’d be selfish when it came time to actually make the decision. And if there was even the slightest chance I’d do the same thing when it came to Captain Goode, then I was putting everyone at risk.

  Even this damn walk was selfish. My friends would be worried about me. I took to touching street poles as I passed, so Mr. Adeoti might be able to track my wanderings. I tried to convey that I wanted to be alone, to come find me only if there was a real need.

  It was growing darker. The sounds of laughter brought me down a narrow street, where a young man in a striking red suit drew eager crowds into a penny theater shop. He tempted them with exhibitions centered around these horrifying and extraordinary powers: photographs of curiosities from all over the world, waxwork statues of every known powered person, “authentic” items from the Belgrave Ball, including pieces of the ballroom and Sebastian’s bloody gloves.

  There was even a long line forming for a play premiering in an hour, recounting Captain Goode’s heroic defense of the Queen against the dastardly Sebastian Braddock and his gang of villains. Of course, a poster listed all the powers to make special appearances, including the harlot healer.

  I turned away and sighed. How had it come to this? I was the only living healer, the one meant to save lives against all odds, not put them in danger. It was absolutely ridiculous that I’d had these powers for four months and I’d saved, at best, ten lives—half of which I’d lost at the ball. Heavens, I didn’t deserve these powers. I was fairly certain if I asked Mr. Adeoti about other healers in the past, he’d probably say they saved more lives in a single day.

  Soon I hit the Thames. Through the smog and fog I could see the dark reds and purples of the sunset melting into the night. I wound through streets aimlessly, hoping I might be able to lose myself down a cobblestoned alley.

  But as I turned down an empty one, I felt my body freeze midstep. I couldn’t go forward; I couldn’t turn around; my limbs couldn’t even flail in panic. I floated upward, my eyes searching for who or what was doing this to me. Had Captain Goode found me?

  “Evelyn! We found you!” a voice very unlike Captain Goode’s said.

  As I was set down on a roof, my body was finally adjusted so I could see my captors. Laura and Emily were both frowning and ready to argue.

  “How did you find me? You two shouldn’t be out here,” I said, struggling as Emily held me in place.

  “We followed you! From the rooftops!” Laura grinned, clearly enjoying her adventure. “And we’re not going back until you are.”

  I stared at their stubborn gazes. “Even after what I said? It’s my fault your parents are gone.”

  “No, it’s not,” Laura said. “It’s Captain Goode’s.”

  “But I should have—could have saved them. I have this amazing power, and it’s still not helping anyone.”

  “So help them,” Laura said rather bluntly, pointing to the building behind me across the street.

  It was long and massive. Its tall gate seemed to stretch down the road forever, disappearing into the fog. St. Thomas’ Hospital. Rose had told me about this over the years, saving every little mention from our father’s newspapers. It was still being built, and it was already ten times larger than the hospital Miss Grey and I had visited to find Oliver.

  I stared for a long while. Months before, I’d thought about walking into a hospital and healing everyone, though Captain Goode had discouraged me from doing it, on the grounds that it would draw too much attention to the Society. The entire city would be talking about the miracle.

  Which made it such a simple, perfect idea now. They already knew about miracles.

  “That is a … brilliant notion,” I said. “Emily, will you bring me back down?”

  “Only if you let us come with you,” she said.

  “You should go home, both of you.”

  “It’s not a home if everyone leaves,” Emily said stubbornly. There was a note in her voice of deep sadness, and I looked at her more fully. Emily was constantly trying to keep us together, keep everyone safe and happy. So unlike her own family that had abandoned her to a wretched asylum.

  “We will stay up here all night.” Laura sat down to demonstrate, reaching into her overly large coat and pulling out a handkerchief-wrapped bundle that turned out to be a muffin.

  I sighed, wished for a muffin as well, then decided it would not hurt to take them into a hospital.

  “If you promise to be very quiet,” I began.

  “Evelyn! When have I ever let you down?” Laura’s tiny hands were on her hips and her eyes were blazing, and I loved her irrepressible heart so much in that moment.

  “Never,” I conceded and pulled her in for a hug.

  Emily floated us down gently into a dark, empty alley below. We crossed the street toward the hospital, and I touched a gaslight to let Mr. Adeoti and Mr. Kent know that we were all safe if they were to track us this far.

  After my thoughts were imprinted on the cool metal, Emily proceeded to toss us one by one over the iron gate into the foggy courtyard. We crept quietly, staying in the shadows until we reached a ground-floor window to one of the hospital wards. It took Emily a moment to peer inside and unlatch the window, which brought us into a dim room full of twenty sleeping patients.

  “Emily, can you keep watch by the door?” I whispered. “Warn us quietly if a nurse or an orderly is coming.”

  “I can put them all on a roof,” she offered.

  Not ideal. “I don’t want to alarm them. We’re doing this so the newspapers won’t keep treating us like the villains. We need to hide.”

  “Fine,” Emily said, looking a bit disappointed.

  “And Laura, remember, we have to—”

  “Hello,” Laura cheerily greeted a pale patient.

  “Stay quiet,” I finished for no one in particular.

  “Water,” the patient rasped. He was an older man—thin, graying hair, a thick beard. I crept over to them while Laura poured a glass of water and gave it to the man. He sipped it slowly as I glanced at his chart, wondering what ailed him.

  “Thank you, nurse,” he told Laura.

  “Oh, we aren’t nurses,” Laura proudly declared. “We are here to cure you.”

  The man coughed and hacked loudly at that, answering my question about his condition. Consumption.

  When he finally finished coughing, he took a deep breath and fell back onto his pillow. “You’ll cure that?” he asked skeptically.

  “Of course. Evelyn can cure anything. She has one of those powers you might have heard of…”

  As Laura regaled the patient with everything there was to know abou
t the powers, and some things that were embellished, I took a seat between his bed and the patient to his left, took a breath, and took both their arms.

  I held on for a few minutes. The man had a coughing fit in the first minute, and once I was certain that would be his last, I let go. “There, all cured,” I said.

  The man chuckled, like we were silly little children. “You two are funnier than the other nurses.”

  “Thank you,” I said, not particularly wanting to correct him. Not with so many others to heal. He’d figure it out on his own sooner or later. Or at least a doctor would.

  I proceeded to the next two beds along the line and took the hands of both sleeping patients, while Laura struck up a conversation with another one nearby.

  “I should like to get a puppy.” Somehow, Laura’s whisper was still carried halfway across the room. “I would let him do whatever he wanted. No rules. He would be the happiest pup in the whole—”

  A loud bell interrupted Laura and rang through the hospital nine times. Perhaps that was time for the nurses’ rounds.

  Sure enough, after about ten minutes, I felt myself lifted a couple of inches off the ground and shaken silently as Emily’s warning.

  “Out the window,” I whispered.

  As Laura and I climbed out, Emily held the door to the ward closed tightly against the nurse’s best efforts. The moment we were out of sight, Emily let go, and the nurse burst in, out of breath and perplexed about her strength and the door’s.

  With the nurse checking the patients in that ward, we crept over to the next one free of nurses.

  “I like this,” Laura whispered louder than most people shouted.

  And despite the fact that we were creeping through bushes in the middle of the night like criminals, I had to agree. “Me too.”

  We should have done it sooner. There was something simple and uncomplicated about it all. No worries about whether I could trust someone. No doubt about whether I was doing the right thing. Just helping people through a painful night so they could return to their lives in the morning.

  We slipped into the next ward, a children’s one, which only seemed to be half-filled. I checked one boy’s chart to make sure a nurse had already been in here, and then I proceeded to take his hand, along with the swollen hand of the boy on the other side of me, and started healing.

  Laura made several turns about the room, looking for those in the most pain and unable to sleep, keeping them company until I could move on to them.

  We improved the routine smoothly over the course of the night as we realized how many patients the hospital held. Eventually, Emily started floating beds closer to me, while Laura would maneuver the patients’ hands so I could make physical contact with four or five people at once and heal a ward within thirty minutes. We slowly worked our way through, slipping out the windows when the clocks rang out and the nurses did their rounds and circling back when they were done. We tried to find the most severe wards first—the ones with terminally ill or contagious patients. Then we floated up to the first and second floors, finding the wards with patients recovering from surgery and non-life-threatening ailments.

  A silent trance soon settled between the three of us as we worked through the small hours. Both Emily and Laura looked exhausted by the time the clock struck four, but they were harder, more determined workers than I ever expected, continuing without complaint.

  As dawn broke, we started to hear fragments of hushed commotion in the hospital corridors. Patients were waking up perfectly healed and attempting to leave the hospital despite the protests of the bewildered nurses. Soon, the number of healed patients outnumbered the staff, and they were demanding the hospital send for their families. This helped keep the nurses distracted as we moved down to the last and busiest ward: the emergency ward.

  There was no avoiding the nurses in here, which is why we saved it for last. But there were only a few of them, all busy helping a doctor perform surgery on a patient in the corner. No one noticed us enter, so we simply proceeded to close the curtains around patients and heal two at a time without causing a scene with floating bodies.

  It worked surprisingly well as we made our way around the room without being caught. I started to feel a giddiness and excitement until we reached a bed with a young, incredibly skinny boy with a broken leg. I couldn’t help but feel transported back to a few months ago when we found Oliver. My stomach turned as I took his hand, wondering if I was healing another innocent just so he could meet an awful fate.

  But there was really no alternative. I couldn’t leave this boy to suffer. I couldn’t leave any of these people to suffer. And I couldn’t leave Oliver’s friends to suffer under Captain Goode for the rest of their lives, as I hadn’t been able to leave Oliver ignorant of his power, to continually get hurt. I had needed to save him.

  No, he would have hated that word. He hadn’t needed saving. Just the power to make his own choices.

  And as it started to dawn on me how wrong my approach to Captain Goode had been, a nurse slid open the curtain to find three strange and suspicious girls gathered around her patient.

  “Miss! Ladies, you can’t be in here,” she announced.

  “We’ll be finished in a moment,” I said.

  I set the boy’s hand down and brushed past the nurse toward the last patient I needed to heal: The man currently undergoing surgery. He was covered in bruises and cuts and had broken a number of bones. It looked like he’d fallen from some high-up place multiple times.

  I squeezed in between the doctor and a nurse and took the man’s hand.

  The doctor stared at me, aghast. “Miss, what are you—you can’t be here. Nurse! Fetch an orderly! What is going on in this damned pla—argh!”

  Emily lifted him and the three other nurses into the air. Her breathing was heavy with exhaustion, and she held them only an inch above the ground. But that was still enough to keep them from running.

  “I’m sorry. We’ll let you down in a moment,” I said, trying to soothe the doctor. I didn’t want this to turn into another crime story. “My name is Evelyn Wyndham. You may have heard of me in the news. I have the power to heal others, but I have been named a villain. I am here to prove that wrong. The entire hospital has been healed. We only want to save lives. When the newspapers come to ask you about this, do you think you can deliver a message for us?”

  The doctor nodded reluctantly, fearing the worst. “W-what message?”

  “That members of the Society of Aberrations are being kept against their will through threats and blackmail. We want to help them escape. And if they want help, they are to take the stairs down into Paddington Station, take off their gloves, hold on to the rail, and think about who they are and how they are being threatened. Can you remember to say that?”

  They all looked rather confused, but collectively they managed to repeat the message back to me.

  “Thank you,” I said, then turned to Emily. “It’s all right now, Emily.”

  She set them down with a sigh as I let go of the now-healed man. The doctor stared at him and then us with a glazed look in his eyes.

  “Please, deliver this message,” I implored the nurses. “They go into Paddington Station, hold a staircase railing with bare hands, and only need to think about their situation. If you do this, then I may be able to come back and help again.”

  “Yes, miss,” one of them managed.

  They stared at us as Laura and I took each of Emily’s arms and helped walk her out of the ward, out of the crowded lobby, and out of the hospital gates behind a wave of healed patients and their astonished loved ones.

  Outside, the air felt warmer. I could swear that it smelled a little cleaner. The girls’ energy was infectious as they giggled about grand plans for healing all of London. It was enough to make me think maybe we had found the right track, the way to cast doubts against Captain Goode and help the Society members without anyone else getting hurt.

  And help me make amends.

  At
the front gate, we found Mr. Kent and Rose waiting for us. From atop an idling carriage on the street, Tuffins gave us a nod and Mr. Adeoti gave us a wide smile as they watched our approach.

  “Here you are with your selfish behavior again, Miss Wyndham,” Mr. Kent said with a smile. He put his arm around Laura, clearly relieved she was well. “And dragging my sister down to such depths. Shame.”

  “I’m sorry. I promise to take her to a brothel next time,” I told him.

  “It’s the least you could do,” he replied, leading Laura and Emily to the carriage.

  Rose gave me a hug. “This will be a nice change in the papers.”

  “It’s what I’m hoping,” I replied. “I left a message for the newspapers to relay to the Society of Aberrations members being held against their will. I told them to go to Paddington Station and hold on to a stairway railing, telling us who they are. Mr. Adeoti can check at the end of every day and find out who wishes to leave. And Captain Goode can’t spare enough people to watch every stairway of the whole station at all times.”

  Rose’s nose wrinkled a little. “That’s quite brilliant of you.”

  “I needed to do … something, after everything that happened.”

  “No one blamed you.” She had her serious voice on.

  “I couldn’t even look at Sebastian. He knows now that I am the reason Mae died.…”

  “Stop. Look at me.” Her eyes gleamed in the dawn light, and she did not flinch. She stayed steadily with me. “Darling. No one thinks Captain Goode would have stopped if you had chosen to let me go. As awful as everything is, there is not a soul in this house who thinks that night was your fault. Or Sebastian’s. Or even mine, though they probably should.”

  “Don’t say that—”

  “I know. I know Captain Goode did this to us. It’s the most insidious part. He thinks his power entitles him to everyone else’s. Yet we’re the ones who feel responsible when he uses us. And I believe he would have found a way to cause as much terror and death without me. Or you. It was about him, not us.”

  I touched her cheek and tried to smile, her words either breaking or healing my heart a little; I couldn’t say which right now.