Clockwork Pandora (Heart of Bronze Book 2) Page 4

  Kevin leaned in closer to his wife’s ear. “She gave us food, Mags.”

  Maggie responded a bit too loud and forced her voice down with every other word as her husband winced and glanced to the dark haired woman several feet away. “I don’ care if she be givin’ us the golden keys to the Taj Mahal. She’s a witch, Kevin Tarnish, sure as I’m standin’ ‘ere.”

  “You don’t know she’s a witch. She—”

  “She ain’t no angel. She ain’t not’in like our dear—”

  “You don’t know that,” Kevin whispered back harshly. He placed his hands, now neither one of them carrying the burden of sore limbs and a busted-up arm, on Maggie’s shoulders and looked intently into her eyes. He longed for her understanding and patience, and the tolerance he knew she was capable of. He tried to convey all of that in a look. “Why would a witch want to mess with the likes of us? Why would she patch us up and give us food?”

  “Ya can’t eat this stuff, Kevin. It was conjured. You got no idea how poisonous magic-made food can be now.”

  Kevin opened his mouth to retort, but Pandora raised her voice and called out, “That ain’t how it works, Kitty.”

  The couple looked to the woman who raised both brows and nodded. “Yeah. I can hear ya. I can hear ya, smell ya, listen to yer heartbeats from all the way over yonder.” She raised her arms out from her sides and let them drop. “I’m lost too, and yeah, I’m a witch, but big deal.”

  Maggie raised her chin to speak, releasing her words even as Kevin gave her a gentle pull to silence her. “We’re not eatin’ this food!”

  Pandora shrugged a shoulder. “Suit y’self, Kitty, but for your information, it ain’t conjured outta nothin’. That ain’t how it works.” The witch popped the last of her pilfered orange into her mouth and cast the peels into tall grass next to the path.

  “Then where’d it come from? Kevin asked, genuinely perplexed by all things magical. They rubbed against the sensibilities of his M.D. and his Ph.D., and reason.

  “Elsewheres,” the witch said.

  “Meanin’ ya stole ‘em!” Maggie shot back.

  Pandora, who had been standing well back from the couple while they discussed her like they were trying to decide on a horse, stepped closer. She approached with all the caution of someone stepping up to a hunter upon whose land she’d wandered, hands held out, palms down, feet stepping one before the other. “Look, Kitty. Doc. I ain’t the bad guy here. In fact, I don’t have a damnation-to-daisies clue why I dumped where I did. I tranced out of where I was and ended up here. I guess in that second my mind wandered.”

  Kevin’s eyes were wide with curiosity. “You mean you can go wherever you want at will?”

  Pandora shrugged at him, now relaxing her arms and shoulders. “I can lock in on a person or place I been to, but it’s really hard. It taxes a body.” She yawned as if on cue. “Further I go, the more weather changes twix’d here n’ there, how much concentration I’m givin’…” She shrugged again. “Affects where and when I end up and if I survive.”

  “When?” Kevin asked. “You can travel time?”

  Before Pandora could answer, Maggie tugged her husband’s arm. “She can take us back t’ ‘fore the pirates took us!”

  Pandora looked pointedly at Kevin. “Can you shut her up?” Then to Maggie. “It ain’t like that, either. Can’t go back, only forwards, and not on purpose.” Pandora raised and lowered her arms again, glanced around as she became frustrated at not having her bearings.

  Maggie was still glaring at her, clutching the magic-pilfered sack of food to her bosom.

  “Where did you come from, if you don’t mind me asking?” Kevin ventured.

  “Under the Atlantic Ocean,” Pandora replied, her dark eyes seeming to look into his mind as she told him. “There’s a battle goin’ on out there—or there was—over a piece o’ waterlogged shit. I was…” She frowned and glanced away. “I was busy handlin’ somethin’.”

  Pandora’s mind was a complex container of honeycombs constructed out of cobwebs. Each whisper of a container held a memory, a thought, and not all of them were her own. While she was magicking the minds of Kevin and Maggie Tarnish to make sure they were good folk, she was venturing to the general store twenty miles away to where she’d nabbed the food—to make sure it wouldn’t really be missed. She also pondered the chilly memories of the battle… the death of her nemesis, the condition of her friend Bryce Landry, and… her father.

  She knew he was dead. She felt the pit in her soul, and in her mind. It was a painful, raw feeling of emptiness that blew down the walls of cobweb containers in her brain. Then she realized how she ended up here with these two. This site must not be far from where his plane was destroyed. Pandora knew he was gone, and doubted she’d find anything of his body to bury. The explanation for her materialization in this patch of Confederate countryside gave her some relief, but it also weighed like led in her chest.

  Kevin picked up on her dark change. “Miss Pandora? You all right?”

  “Step back from ‘er, Kev. She be conjurin’ up sometin’!” Maggie took her husband’s arm and pulled him back.

  Pandora blinked and looked at her. She sighed. “For Trinity sakes, Calm down.” She looked between the two and smirked. “I don’t know how I got here,” she lied. “But it’s obvious to me you two don’t know what the hell yer doin’.”

  Kevin nodded past the witch toward the barely-visible column of thin smoke on their horizon. “Like we said, we were trying to make our way to the wreck of the Mystic Lady there before we lost the trail, then work toward rebuilding what we’d lost aboard her.”

  Pandora narrowed an eye at each of them. “Mystic Lady’s a pirate ship. Everybody knows that.”

  Maggie opened her mouth to speak, but pinched her lips shut and glanced up to her husband.

  Kevin said, “We didn’t. Our wagon was snatched.”

  “Victims,” Pandora smirked. She looked the couple over and nodded, her head bobbing as her smirk deepened. “Figures.”

  “Let us pass,” Maggie said, lifting her chin.

  Pandora held up a hand and glanced over her shoulder. “Whoa. Don’t get your tail in a twitch there, Kitty. Why didn’tcha say that’s where ya needed to go? I can git ya there in a flash.”

  Kevin quickly protested. “No. No, no. We’ll walk. We thank you for mending us, Miss Pandora, and for the food, but… I-I think we’re keen to walk.” He moved to sidestep around the witch, pulling Maggie to his side, but Pandora quickly blocked their path again.

  “Ah-ah.” Pandora angled her head down, narrowing an eye at Kevin. “I got some questions first.”

  Chapter 5, Red Roach

  I looked up at the men who hauled me out of the hole and dropped me in the street. There were two of them, the second approaching with his Colt drawn. The one I knew by name as Willem, or “Will,” was lanky and dirty with a poorly kept handlebar mustache and a rumpled top hat. The other I had only seen in passing, a medium-built fellow with fire red hair down to his shoulders and a scar down his cheek under an eye milky white from some old injury.

  Will waved the pistol in my direction. “On yer feet, Ol’ Crab.”

  I crawled towards my scattered bag, but the redhead stepped in front of me, his boot crushing what was left of the glass lamp chimney. I squinted up at the man as he spat down on me, forcing me to turn my gaze back to the cobblestones. I wiped his spittle from the bridge of my nose with a trembling hand. “Please,” I said, “Those are for your Master.”

  “Na-ah,” Will corrected. “They’s ours. We caught ya fair n’ square.”

  “B-But—”

  “Pick ‘im up, Roach.”

  Will said, “See, we knew you was comin’ back this way t’ go back to yer hole, so we waited on ya.”

  “Yeah,” said Roach as he stepped up to me. “We were fishin’.”

  The fire-headed pirate, who went by the apt name of a skittering insect, gripped me by the back of my shirt collar and belt and h
auled me to my feet in one sweeping motion. Either the skinny pirates under The Scorpion’s command were all far more strong than I gave them credit.

  Once I had my footing, Roach pushed me toward Will who pointed the pistol at my eye and cocked the hammer back. “Pick it up.”

  I turned, nodding like an obedient slave, and quickly gathered up the spill, and re-loaded my day bag, muttering my apologies and promises of haste as I did so.

  Roach stepped to Will’s side and the two exchanged whispers. I didn’t know what about, but I knew they wouldn’t harm me. Unless, of course, they were plotting to dispose of me in such a way they could pin the blame on one of their dimmer mates.

  In their distraction, I hastily pocketed the ballerina figurine because it was small enough to stash in a trouser pocket, and I had the suspicion these two were going to leave me empty handed. I turned to face them, bowing respectfully, though in my mind the bow was a mockery.

  Will nodded, satisfied, and tucked his Colt back into his holster. “Bring ‘im.”

  Roach stepped next to me, his hand surprisingly gentle on the back of my neck, and pushed me into step behind his cohort. Will led the way where I expected, straight to the door of my home, tucked into the base of a stone quarry office building. He pushed open my door—which could never be latched and locked by order of The Scorpion himself—and waved for Roach to bring me.

  Will twisted the electric switch next to the door once all three of us were inside and a dim bulb crackled and hummed to life in the fixture over the bathroom door next to the kitchen area. “Light some lamps.”

  Roach gave me a gentle shove, but quickly reached around and snatched the bag from my hands before letting me go. “Light ‘em,” he echoed.

  I fumbled the way around my dim home, hands shaking as I lit the oil lamp at the top of the steps descending into the main living area. I turned up the wick, then used that lamp to guide me to the one next to my sofa, then to my desk. Behind my desk was the night black view through the glass of an enormous clock face that used to look down on the old stone quarry workers, for a quarry that filled with water when the city broke apart and rose into the air. I had gathered my home was once the elaborate office of the quarry owner, the clock face designed so that the workers would have to look up to the boss to see when it was quitting time. As I lit the lantern on my desk, the increased light revealed more of my own reflection and the reflection of the two pirates invading my home as they bent over my small round dining table, poking at the contents of the bag.

  “This it?” Will called.

  “Sorry, yes,” I muttered. “There’s not much left since the—”

  Roach laughed. “Yer Master’s not gonna be too thrilled with this, old man.”

  I muttered under my breath, “Not after you rob what little I have.”

  “Whassat?”

  “Nothing,” I said, and made my way around a pile of books toward the lantern on the far shelf.

  “That’s enough,” Roach called out. I froze in my tracks and slowly turned toward them.

  I watched as they pawed through the bag, bringing out each item and setting it on the table in order of whatever worth they deemed it had. While they were distracted, I reached into my pocket, wrapped my fingers around the ballerina, and placed her on the bookshelf nearby. I managed to snap my hands back to my side just as Will looked up at me. “Pictures and books?”

  I offered a weak shrug. “A-As I said, there’s not much—”

  “Shut up,” Roach commanded. His grin became greasy as his eyes appraised me. I suddenly became very uncomfortable in that gaze and quickly looked down to the scuffed toes of my old shoes. I glanced back a moment later to see Will pocket my tin of sardines. That made my stomach rumble. With the sardines gone, and the chowder lost down a grate, I had nothing to eat tonight—and I had neglected to eat more than a handful of stale crackers when I started my sojourn that morning.

  I watched as Will studied the image of Elizabeth in the small silver frame. “Perty girl.” He nudged his companion. “Roach? Nice, huh?”

  The tall redhead squinted at the picture, then looked back at me. “Yeah, but she’s just a pitcher.”

  “Elizabeth,” I blurted, as if saying her name would give her some power over their leers, some mystical ability to retain her postmortem dignity.

  “Lizzy,” Will sneered. He plucked out what was left of the glass, then tore the photo from its frame. He kissed the picture before folding it and tucking it into a shirt pocket. “She’s mine now.”

  My face burned with a brief flame of anger. I wanted to tell him where her corpse was, to put an image to the lustful thought obviously playing out in his mind, to sour his thoughts with a glimpse of reality, but I was too afraid. My thoughts were centered around surviving their visit and nothing more. I would worry about things like Elizabeth’s memory, and food, after they were gone.

  Will removed his rumpled top hat and replaced it with the copper bow. He tossed the remains of the broken lamp toward my sink counter. It fell short and crashed to the floor, the last part of its broken chimney shattering to dust. He held up the book. “Don’t you have enough?” He waved the volume around my humble apartment, which in my mind was made more humble by the thousands of books occupying every shelf and corner. It was the home of a man who made his escape through pages, a man who kept to himself, a man of simple means.

  It was my fortune in this existence that The Scorpion’s men were all illiterate pirates who found no wealth or beauty in the simple wonder of books. Will dropped it back on the table and only made a face at the other framed photo, the one containing poor Elizabeth and her family.

  They looked at me. Will said, “Not much ‘ere for us to celebrate, eh, Roach?”

  Roach chewed his lower lip and started toward me slowly. “Oh, I don’t know ‘bout that. Yer forgettin’ the biggest prize of all.”

  Will rolled his eyes as he replaced the copper bowl with his old hat. He dropped the bowl on the family photo. He said, “You’re an idiot.”

  Roach was now merely a step from me, his long arm reaching out toward my neck. “Why’d you say that, Will?”

  Will stepped around my table and stood at the top of the steps to my living space with his arms folded over his chest. “Because, dullard, this old coot is the Cap’ns property—and I do mean Property, capital P.”

  “So?” Roach clamped his hand down on the base of my neck. I winced, forced to hunch my shoulders and cower against the grip.

  “So, the Cap’ll ‘ave our heads if he finds a bruise on his little old man.”

  Roach’s smile was dark and soulless. I knew what the answer was going to be before he even said, “I can think of somethin’ that won’t leave a bruise… Jus’ a bad taste in his mouth.” And with that proclamation, the redhead’s grip twisted and tightened as he forced me to my knees. I yelped in pain as my old knees hit the hard wood with a thump. Then the hand released my neck and made a fist in my hair at the top of my head. “No, please,” I whimpered.

  Will said, “You’re disgustin’.”

  Roach’s voice nearly cracked as the desire took his breath and dried his mouth. “Do you know ‘ow long it’s been since I ‘ad somethin’ nice ‘n wet ‘round my snake?”

  A new voice, young, warm and refined, said, “Do you know how long it’s been since I killed a man for abusing my property?”

  My eyes snapped open at the music that was the voice of The Scorpion. I couldn’t see around the front of Roach’s bulging trousers, but the pirate quickly let go of me and stepped aside.

  The Scorpion couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old, give or take, with a wisping curtain of bright blond hair over blue eyes, and a narrow, soft face. He was boyish save for the vile looking black tattoo of a scorpion on his cheek, the knobbly tail of which connected with the corner of his smirking mouth, a deadly venom-dripping stinger that tickled the point where his hard lips twisted. He wore a navy blue brocade tailcoat trimmed in gold with a
matching gold ascot, navy riding trousers and tall black boots that shone like the dark waters far below us. Thin lady-like brass goggles hung around his neck, and white gloves covered hands half hidden by a puff of sleeves from his silk shirt. Low on his hip was a da Vinci pistol, festooned with pearl and gold inlays along its long iron barrel, gear box and brass scope. I’d never known him to actually use the da Vinci. Like everything else about him, it was an adornment.

  The Scorpion asked, “Are you all right, Scribbler?”

  I remained on my knees, my hands joining them on the floor as Roach let me go. I could only manage a nod, my voice stolen by the thankfulness at the captain’s intrusion.

  “Good. Good.” Then his smile became the frown of a parent to an errant child.

  Roach’s mouth stammered silently for a moment, then he laughed. “I-It was only games, Cap’n. I wouldn’t—”

  “No, no. I understand.” The Scorpion smiled his gentle conniving smile as he hooked his fingers around his waistcoat. He flashed his grin next at Will who visibly trembled at the glance. The Scorpion motioned at my table and made a face before addressing me as though his men weren’t in the room. “This is all you brought me?”

  “Th-The frame and bowl are good metal, Master.”

  “For what? Smelting?”

  Will chuckled, but The Scorpion continued ignoring him.

  “Sorry, master. The wastes are just that. Wastes.”

  “Mm.” The pirate captain disinterestedly fiddled his fingers over my meager catch before motioning his men toward him. I was sure they were going to leave, but my hopes were soon crushed. The Scorpion looked pointedly at Roach as the tall redhead approached him. “What were you planning to do with my property?”

  “I—”

  “Did you want him to blow you?”

  Roach made a face as though the idea—a great one just a moment ago—was now something embarrassing and distasteful.

  The captain looked at me. “Scribbler? Do you want to?”

  I blinked and quickly shook my head.

  “You mean you don’t want him to use your mouth like the lips of a French whore?”