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Let him believe he has found my weakness, make him believe taking Olive has placed a leash around my throat. He has misunderstood entirely. Olive is not the leash, she is the blade and he has just put her in my hand. I step onto the forest road.
“We bring her home,” I say.
Alcott falls in along one side of me. Lazarus on the other. Three monsters in the fog, and somewhere in the dark, the Collector has my heart in his carriage. I hope he enjoys the weight of it, because when I find him, I am going to carve his vile hands out from around it piece by piece.
36. Until The Dark Gives Her Back - Lazarus
The Drain
Two days. Forty-eight hours. Two thousand eight hundred and eighty minutes in which Olive has existed somewhere beyond my reach in goddamned England. I have counted all of them. This is not poetic bullshit, it is not useful, it is simply what madness does when grief has taken hold. The first day, we searched like men possessed. The second, we became worse. By the time the sun sinks behind Lockham’s rooftops, Edward, Alcott, and I have broken into The Collector’s office.
These are not ordinary circumstances. The Collector’s office is empty. Not merely unattended. Empty.
No ledgers, no correspondence, no smug little calling card left upon the desk. No bloodstained ribbon from Olive’s hair, no letter addressed to Edward in that oily, cheerful hand. No message boasting of victory, no threat, no demand. Nothing. That is what unravels Edward most. The nothing.
“He would have sent something,” Edward says for perhaps the hundredth time.
We stand inside the dark office while rain taps against the windows and Alcott searches the fireplace brick by brick.
Edward paces, he has not stopped pacing since we arrived. “He would have sent a card. A note. A finger. A lock of hair, just something.”
“Edward,” Alcott says quietly.
“No.” Edward turns sharply, his right hand is bandaged from where he broke it against the cobblestone. Blood has seeped through the linen twice today and he refuses to let anyone rewrap it. “You do not understand. He enjoys performance, he enjoys control. If he took her to break me, he would make certain he knew exactly how well it was working.”
I say nothing, because Edward is right. That is the part I hate. The Collector’s silence does not feel like mercy, it feels like an occupied grave waiting for a name. Alcott removes a loose brick from the fireplace, reaches inside, then withdraws an empty hand. “Nothing.”
Edward laughs once, a terrible sound. “Of course there is nothing.”
He turns and sweeps his arm across the desk. The few items left behind crash to the floor, an inkstand shatters, a paperweight rolls into the shadows. “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing!”
I step forward. “Edward.”
He rounds on me. “Do not say my name like I am about to come apart.”
He is already apart. We all are. Alcott stands slowly, his face is hollow beneath the soot smudged along one cheek. He looks as though he has not blinked in several minutes.
“We need to leave,” he says.
“No,” Edward refuses.
“Edward.”
“No.”
“If someone sees us here, we lose what little advantage we have,” I state.
Edward’s mouth twists. “Advantage?” The word is almost a snarl. “What advantage? He has Olive. His office is empty. His men have vanished, somehow his informants know nothing. His warehouses are cold and the ledgers are gone. He has stripped the entire city bare and left us chasing dust.”
The rain grows louder or perhaps the room has simply gone quieter and I rub a hand over my mouth. “There is one thing.”
Edward’s eyes snap to mine. “What?”
“The boy at the docks.”
Alcott looks over as I continue carefully. “The one who runs messages for men who do not want to be seen sending them. He said The Collector left the country.”
Edward stares at me, then his expression fractures.
