Autorentext
Sarah Raughley is a Nigerian-Canadian novelist and a member of the Royal Society of Canada: the national council of distinguished Canadian scholars, scientists, and artists. She's best known for her YA books: The Effigies Series, The Bones of Ruin Trilogy, and The Queen's Spade duology. Raughley is also an English professor and public intellectual who has written for journals such as The Washington Post and CBC. You can find out more about her work at SarahRaughley.com.

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Penny Dreadful meets The Gilded Wolves in this captivating young adult historical fantasy sequel to the “bloodily spectacular” (Chloe Gong, #1 New York Times bestselling author of These Violent Delights) The Bones of Ruin that follows immortal Iris as she desperately tries to thwart her destructive destiny.

Iris Marlow can’t die. For years, she was tormented by her missing memories and desperate to learn her real identity. So when the mysterious Adam Temple offered to reveal the truth of who she was in exchange for her joining his team in the Tournament of Freaks, a gruesome magical competition, it was an offer she couldn’t refuse. But the truth would have been better left buried.

Because Adam is a member of the Enlightenment Committee, an elite secret society built upon one fundamental idea: that the apocalypse known as Hiva had destroyed the world before and would do it again, and soon. But what the Committee—and Iris—never guessed is that Hiva is not an event. Hiva is a person…Iris.

Now, no matter how hard Iris fights for a normal life, the newly awakened power inside her keeps drawing her toward the path of global annihilation. Adam, perversely obsessed with Iris, will stop at nothing to force her to unlock her true potential, while a terrifying newcomer with ties to Hiva’s past is on the hunt for Iris.

All Iris wants is the freedom to choose her own future, but the cost might be everything Iris holds dear—including the world itself.

Leseprobe
Chapter 1

1

November 23, 1884

On the other side of the world…

TWO HOURS PAST MIDNIGHT, A woman with too many names broke into the British Museum while the streets of London burned.

In her grip was the collar of the museum’s director, still in his white nightshirt because she’d kidnapped him from his bed.

“You! You…” The director devolved into whimpers as he stumbled over his ankle-length shirt and struggled to keep his nightcap on.

The woman grimaced. She had become used to calling herself “Iris,” but she’d collected too many aliases during her immortal life to be satisfied with “you.”

This hidden hall below the basement of the museum was one of the secrets she’d wrangled out of the eccentric Riccardo Benini. The hall existed solely to lead the Enlightenment Committee, of which Benini was a member, to a secluded room tucked away from the prying eyes of visitors.

The Library of Rule. The secret room was home to a mysterious collection of artifacts curated out of the remains of the civilization she’d annihilated millennia ago.

It was why she needed the director and his key. It was why there were guards standing by in their silver-buttoned black jackets and pants, ready to bash in the heads of intruders. And here the intruders were. The guards’ custodian helmets lifted a little as they began attacking with batons.

Iris didn’t need to lift a finger.

“Wha’s ’at?” cried one guard, pointing in terror. “Wha’s ’at?”

He was referring to the white crystal sword emerging out of the chest of the young warrior trailing her. A girl with brown skin not quite as dark as Iris’s and a damaged right eye. Olarinde. The frills of her yellow dress billowed behind her as she leaped out from behind Iris.

“Hold fast, boys, she’s one of those freaks we’ve been told about. Bloody—”

The guard could not even finish his sentence before Rin sliced his lifted baton in half. There had to have been more than a dozen guards in this darkly lit hallway. Rin took them down one by one, clearing a path for Iris.

“L-let me go, you beast!” the director demanded to Iris in terror.

Beast. That was not one of her names.

Sweat dripped down his snow-white beard as she dragged him along behind her.

Men like him had given her names before. Isoke: She Who Does Not Fall. Given by the king of Dahomey, who’d forced her to fight as one of his warriors fifty years ago.

Iris Marlow. Given by the slave trader who’d kidnapped her and taken her to England. The name that the people she loved knew. If not for that, she would have thrown it away.

The Nubian Princess. Given by her old circus boss, George Coolie, before he’d tried to auction her off on the black market.

The cataclysm known as the Hiva. It was the first name she’d ever been given, long ago when the One who’d created her first molded her inside the earth. She didn’t remember those days. Not clearly. They were too far away.

She knew that she was Hiva. She knew that every few millennia, the One would call her into existence to cause the fall of a wicked civilization. Only after she fulfilled her purpose would the One allow her to return to the earth.

But each life cycle she’d lived since her first was a blank page—no, a red page. Because pools of blood in ash were all that was left from those memories. Maybe something inside her wouldn’t let her remember anything else.

“Don’t engage!” said the director as Rin slammed another guard against the wall. “Go to Club Uriel! Check on the patrons—”

Iris yanked his collar to silence him, but then, as her shoulder grazed the purple ribbon by her ear that tied her braids in a beautiful bow, she thought of Jinn with a pang of guilt. She, Rin, and Jinn had escaped Club Uriel by the skin of their teeth only because Iris had knocked out her old circus partner. His fire was already spreading across Pall Mall Street. If she hadn’t tied him up and kept him in a safe house, he’d still be fighting that ghoul Gram now. They didn’t have time for that. They were to escape London tonight. But there was something Iris needed to do first.

One man smashed into another, hats and clubs flying into the air. Another crashed against the ground with a quick, feeble gasp. Blood from the tallest guard’s mouth spurted across the lamps fixed to the mahogany walls. Iris expected nothing less from Rin, the sixteen-year-old warrior once prized as the youngest talent among the Dahomey military’s Reaper Regiment.

“Rin, don’t kill them,” Iris reminded her, even though she had far more blood on her hands—lifetimes’ worth. Iris spoke in the newfound authoritative voice she hadn’t had back when she was just an amnesiac tightrope dancer searching for the truth behind why she couldn’t die. Back in those simpler days, before she realized she wasn’t an eighteen-year-old West African girl, despite how she appeared to the world—despite her youthful round face, full red lips, big brown eyes, and skin dark and shining as coal.

Iris had lived for eons. And this room, the Library of Rule, opened by the terrified director’s little silver key, confirmed it.

A ghostly chill touched Iris so subtly that she almost lost her grip on the director’s collar. Rin closed the door behind them and guarded it with her sword as Iris threw the museum director onto the floor, taking away his key. There were no windows in this room. The only source of light was from…