IF I CAN’T KILL HIVA, WHAT if I can use Hiva? Get him to only kill the ones who deserve to be killed? Like that bastard Temple?
That was what Max had thought as he’d returned, defeated, to London through Hawkins’s portal. If they couldn’t find a way to stop Hiva, then at least they could make use of him. It could be an opportunity. After all, from all Max had seen in his short life, only one thing was certain to him: that some people in this sick world shouldn’t be alive.
It had been another plan cooked up out of desperation. But like his assassination attempt in New York, it had failed. Miserably.
The ones who deserved to be killed? And who had made him the arbiter of justice?
With a crack of thunder, the clouds showered the earth. In the dark alleyway where they’d planned to meet, Max rounded on the black-haired woman the moment she turned the bricked corner. The moment he gripped her slender shoulders, she gasped and dropped the baby in her arms. The toy was well made—of course it was. It was a Whittle creation. Its jaw flew open like a nutcracker’s, and from the inside, the sounds of a baby’s cry whined in the night fog, but there was no damage done to its sandy-brown wooden body. Henry was quite the toymaker.
“It didn’t work,” Max told the woman who’d cried bloody murder on Vesta Tilley’s stage. “I saw that rat escape with his Parliament stooges.”
“Well, that’s not my fault, is it? I did as we agreed.” Mary White whipped off her black wig to reveal her long strawberry-blond hair, done up today in a tight bun. “I told you where Adam would be and when. I thought you said Hiva would do it. You said you’d convince him to do it. I thought you’d finally get rid of that madman!”
Adam. As Mary gulped back tears, Max thought of their chance meeting in the Devil’s Acre near Westminster Abbey. Hiva’s anger from Max’s assassination attempt in New York had curiously dissipated. Curiouser still, after they’d returned to England, he’d sent Max to the slums to find them a “home.”
“We will become closer, you and I,” Hiva had told him. “To erase all misconceptions.”
Max couldn’t fathom what Hiva was thinking. Sometimes Hiva reminded him of that Roman god Janus: the god with two faces, Chadwick had once told him. A god who didn’t seem to know whether he was coming or going.
Max could only do as he was told. That was when he had found Mary, cold, alone, and crying. A fellow freak from the tournament who was being held captive with her teammates, given a sliver more freedom than the others for reasons even she couldn’t fathom. How useful would their powers be in the fight against Hiva? He’d just needed to get them away from that prat Adam….
Another crack of thunder. Rain drenched the alleyway.
“All those people in the music hall.” Max had never seen so much ash in his life. “All dead.”
“Because of Adam,” Mary said. “Think about what he’s done to us.” As the downpour drenched her hair and clothes, Mary squeezed her wet wig in both hands, peering up at Max with pleading blue eyes. “Think about all the horrible things he’s made us do. The war in Europe—”
“I know.” Max gritted his teeth, relieving his grip a little. Adam had manipulated the three into kick-starting a continental war. And now with this stunt, he’d all but ensured that Britain would join the mayhem. Adam was insane. He needed to die. That was what Max had told Hiva last night in their new “home.”
“Adam Temple is evil. If there’s anyone who deserves judgment, it’s him,” Max had said, and shuddered a little when Hiva stared at him with a kind of earnest, hopeful gaze.
“You seek my judgment? You acknowledge my worth?”
“O-of course!” Max slapped on the fakest, cheesiest grin he could muster. “Didn’t I tell you? You’re not such a bad guy!”
“You tried to kill me.”
“What’s a little squabble between mates?”
After Max saw Hiva fall silent in contemplation, he decided then that he would lie as much as he needed to. Adam Temple was wicked. And Hiva was all about punishing the wicked.
Hiva had just laid waste to an entire music hall instead. More blood on Max’s hands.
How much more could he stand before he broke?
Max hung his head, breathing heavily to calm himself, bits of rain slipping through his lips and into his nostrils. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Adam had been right there in the upper box. With one thought from Hiva’s twisted mind, he could have been gone.
And it would have been one more devil done with.
Thunder rumbled beneath the dark clouds. In the alleyway, Max looked up at the London sky. It seemed to be weeping for the lives just lost—as well as the lives that would soon come to ruin.
“What do we do now?” Mary asked, her mousy voice breaking. “Adam has Van der Ven under constant watch from Fool. I can’t even be sure he’s not watching us now!”
And with jerky movements, she began whipping her head around, watching the rooftops for a top hat, a harlequin mask, or even the flit of a cape. Max understood too well. Hiva had a system. If any one of them was gone from his sight for more than thirty minutes, he would kill the rest. It was how he kept them by his side.
Both teams were hostages.
Mary shook her head. “There’s no telling what Adam will have us do next. Starting a war. Causing people to die. All for what? To draw out Iris?”
“If that’s what he wants, then he’s in for a shock.” Max flashed a wry, self-hating grin and let his arms drop to his sides. “Because she’s dead. For good.”
Taking a shaky step back, Mary clutched her hands to her chest, her brows furrowed in utter disbelief. “Wh… what?”
“She’s dead. Completely dead.” Saying the words hollowed out Max from the inside. His body felt heavy as rain soaked his vest and trousers. “She’s dead and gone. I saw it with my own eyes. I—”
I killed her. Max swallowed the words, his gaze unable to meet Mary’s.
Mary was silent for too long, shaking her head. “But then… but then Adam…”
“If Adam were to find out, he’d either put a stop to his rampage or go on an even bigger one,” Max told her, his expression venomous as he thought about that rich prat’s smug grin. He couldn’t even take pleasure in shoving Iris’s death in his face, because Adam was too much of a loose cannon to guarantee that whatever tantrum he’d throw in response could be contained.
Mary bit her lip, squeezing droplets of rainwater from her wig. “What… what do I do?”
“The question of the year, isn’t it?” Humanity’s last year, that was.
“At the very least, please promise you’ll help us.” Mary brushed waterlogged blond strands from her face as she pleaded, as if to reveal the desperation in her eyes. “Get us away from Adam. We can’t do anything to help if we’re still trapped in that house like dogs.”
Max watched the rain spattering the pavement. “I don’t know if I can—”
“No, you must!” Mary pressed up against him so suddenly, he moved back. “You must help! Promise me!”
“And then what?” Max gave her a gentle shove to widen the gap between them. “What are you, the shape-shifter, and the toymaker going to do in all this?”
Mary didn’t answer. But how could Max expect her to answer a question that eluded him as well? No matter how many days passed and how many plans formed and crumbled, he simply didn’t know where to go next. Once again he was lost at sea, drifting and aimless.
The story of his life.
“Maybe we should all just let Hiva kill us.”
Mary’s deep frown creased her pretty, cherubic face. “Max… do you really think that?” And when Max didn’t respond, she shook her head. “Henry—I mean, Mr. Whittle—is a cynical brat, really, just terrible. As rude as they come—”
She caught herself. The sight of her sheepish expression made Max genuinely laugh for the first time in what felt like forever.
“Don’t let me stop you,” he said, giving her a cheeky smile. “Don’t worry, this stays between us.”
Mary blushed. “Well, what I mean is… as bad as things are, even he won’t give up. Same with Lucille. We’re all…” She paused and looked up at the thundering night sky. “We’re all trying to find a way to survive this.”
“Well. You all have a lot more faith than I do.” Scoffing, Max rubbed the back of his head before a sudden realization seized him. “It’s almost been half an hour. I have to get back to the others. Take care of yourself, Mary. Give my regards to Henry and Lucille.”
The rain was so heavy, he almost didn’t hear Mary calling to him after he started down the alleyway. When he turned around, the soaked girl looked even smaller standing alone in the night. He could see she hadn’t been eating. Her once rosy cheeks were dull and sunken. And the moment he wondered if she were sick, he thought of Berta, his little sister, still somewhere in West Africa with plans of her own, as the countdown toward humanity’s end ticked.
“We can’t give up,” Mary told him in a weak voice as rain poured down her face. “We have to do something. Whether it’s the war or Hiva. We have to do something. I…” She pursed her lips together, and even with the streams of water, Max could tell she was crying. “I don’t want to die.”
But do I? Max asked himself. Despite the cold, his hands still somehow felt warm. The wetness reminded him of Iris’s blood.
No. He shook his head. Even though he so badly wanted to, he couldn’t give up now. Not with Berta’s life on the line.
There was one more card he could play. One card. It’d been on his mind since the day they had returned to England from New York. Since the day that at Hiva’s command—at Hiva’s request—they’d begun searching for their new “home.”
Wandering through London’s worst slums was part of Hiva’s “journey of discovery.” Part of the process of validating his own destruction of humanity. He’d read about it in Household Words, a weekly magazine slipped in between the pages of Crime and Punishment. Hiva wanted to learn everything about this world. He wanted to see with his own eyes how “the most lordly streets are frequently but a mask for the squalid districts which lie behind them.”
“ ‘There is no district in London more filthy and disgusting,’ ” Hiva had read by candlelight, “ ‘more steeped in villainy and guilt, than that on which every morning’s sun casts the somber shadows of the Abbey, mingled, as they soon will be, with those of the gorgeous towers of the new “Palace at Westminster.”’ ”
Hiva had read the words many times before setting the magazine down on the wooden table and asking Max a simple, pointed question: “In every civilization, in every world I destroy, the poor live, suffer, and die in the shadows of the wealthy. It never changes. Why?”
Hiva didn’t ask Cherice, Hawkins, or Jacob. Not even that twitchy oaf Fables. He often let them rest during the night but forced Max to stay awake as he read until morning. It was only Max whose opinions he sought. Was it because Max was the one who had finally put an end to his “sister”? Or because of his nice hair and pretty face? Max didn’t want to know.
But Hiva asked him his questions nonetheless. Especially after New York, he’d asked him questions Max couldn’t answer.
“My life has been one mess after another since I was a child. I haven’t had any time to think about such things.” It was all Max could seem to tell him at the time. Max, Cherice, Jacob, and Hawkins. Squalor and hardship had simply been the lives that they knew. The tournament was to have been their escape, and escape they had—into another nightmare.
“I’m sorry,” Hiva had responded with a curious sincerity before going back to his reading.
Hiva’s curiosity had forced Max to think about the complexities of life and death in ways he would rather not have to. Beating up a few drunken jerks in an underground ring for a bit of cash was easier than having to sit and think about why he’d had to in the first place. Max hated Hiva for that. But Max wasn’t so much of a fool that he hadn’t noticed Hiva’s confusing behavior, and he wasn’t so kind as to not use it against him.
“Mary… I need you, Henry, and Lucille to do something for me,” Max had told her. “But it won’t be easy. And it sure as hell won’t be pretty. Even still… are you with me?”
As Mary had responded with a slow nod, Max had sucked in a steadying breath. Even in those old stories, the ancient myths, it wasn’t as if gods and monsters were infallible. They all had weaknesses. Max was confident he already knew Hiva’s.
He thought of the bone sword in Hiva’s hand. The one made from Iris’s body.
Hiva was on alert at all times around Max and the others, even more so now than ever, after their failed murder attempt in New York. He wasn’t about to give them a limb, and Max doubted he had any skeletons conveniently lying around in a museum nearby, as Iris had had.
But there were some “Fanciful Freaks” Hiva didn’t know about. That meant they had the element of surprise on their side.
It wouldn’t be easy. They had one shot. They just had to take it.