The Girl in the Clockwork Collar

  Sam appeared at his side. “That’s nice, leaving me on my own to suffer,” he hissed in Griffin’s ear.

  Griff smiled as his gaze skimmed over a series of mechanical inventions spread out on a bench. Tesla’s intelligence was astonishing. Most of these inventions were new, or a reconstruction of items lost in a fire of his 5th Avenue laboratory in ’95. How painful it must have been to lose all that research and work. That was why he had Emily lock all of her plans and diagrams in a fireproof cabinet in her laboratory beneath his London mansion. All of her prototypes were kept there, as well. Not only did it keep everything safe from fire, but also from thieves, though they had plenty of security in place for those occasions, too.

  As his gaze fell upon a strange device that looked something like a candelabra with connected glass coils instead of candles, Griffin frowned. One of the coils ran into a rudimentary automaton hand that held a pencil in thin brass fingers, its lead poised above sheaves of paper.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Griffin saw Sam flex his own hand—the one that had metal inside of bone. Would his friend ever accept the fact that he was part machine?

  It wasn’t a question he wanted to ponder, so Griffin turned his attention back to the mechanism, which seemed to call out to him. Slowly, he reached out his hand.

  His fingers touched cool metal, and then he felt it—the Aether. Heat flowed gently through his hand, tingling in his veins as the energy assaulted him. The glass tubes on the device began to glow—where the fluorescence came from he had no idea. A soft scratching noise, almost like whispering, came from the machine, growing louder. The mechanical hand had begun to move, the pencil lead marking the paper.

  It was writing.

  Suddenly, Tesla and Emily were there at his other side. “How did you do that?” the tall, slender man asked in his accented English.

  Griffin glanced at him but didn’t remove his hand. “I touched it. It’s an Aetheric transference device, isn’t it?”

  Dark brows furrowed as Tesla nodded. “It has only worked sporadically until now and never like this.” He gestured toward the hand that was busily scribbling all over the paper. “This is astounding.”

  Smiling, Griffin gave a small shrug. “The Aether and I have always had a strange affinity for one another.” He removed his hand from the machine, and it stopped immediately. Before he could remove the paper to see what was written there, an odd clunking noise rose from behind him.

  They all turned. There, in the far corner of the room, on a pedestal table, sat a small device that had begun to hum and whir, the frequency of both sounds steadily increasing.

  “Griffin?” Emily shot him a glance out of the corner of her eye. “Are you doing this?”

  He shook his head. “No.” But when he allowed himself to “slip” into the Aetheric plane, he could see energy crawling all over the device. It made sense—the Aether was power, just like electrical current, and could be channeled as such. Still, he didn’t know where this burst had come from, because the flow was not emanating from himself. So what ... ?

  He whipped his head around as something flashed in his peripheral vision. What was that? A shadow? Whatever it was, it was gone now. Maybe he had imagined it.

  “Mr. Tesla, what is that thing?” It was Sam who had the presence of mind to ask. Sam, who had a distrust of all things mechanical.

  The inventor looked confounded. “It is part of my Directed Energy Amplification mechanism.”

  Griffin watched as Emily’s face became even paler beneath her freckles. “Which part?” she asked.

  Tesla turned to her, his worried expression mirroring hers. “The part that amplifies and emits the energy flow.”

  A fellow didn’t have to be a genius to figure that one out. Griffin ran a hand through his hair. “Basically, a weapon that could obliterate us all, then?”

  The older man nodded. Fascination mixed with the concern in his eyes. “Perhaps the entire building. The entire city block, if it overloads, that is. And it sounds like it is about to do just that.”

  “We’d better shut it down, then, eh?” Griffin forced himself to be calm as he turned to Emily and Tesla. “How do we do that?”

  He look absolutely flabbergasted—not the sort of expression Griffin found overly comforting. “It should not even work. It is not connected to its Aether engine. I have no idea why it is working.”

  Griffin began to see why this was such a strange and terrible thing. Somehow something had given power to an otherwise inoperable machine—one that could kill them all—and its maker had no idea how to turn it off.

  Had he done this? Had his toying with the transference device somehow caused a spike in the Aether? He’d never had anything like that happen before—it couldn’t have happened now. When he peered beyond the physical world into the Aetheric, he couldn’t see any connection between himself and the machine. This was not his doing. But if not his, whose?

  Now was not the time to stand around thinking. He had to act. The thing was practically whining now, it was operating at such a high frequency. It wasn’t going to hold together for much longer. It could detonate at any moment and reduce the four of them—and possibly the entire building, perhaps the entire block—to ash.

  “Can I crush it?” Sam asked.

  “Don’t you touch it!” Emily exclaimed, cheeks red. “It will kill you, you great oaf.”

  Sam scowled, but didn’t do anything. They all knew Emily only called him “oaf ” when she was worried about him. “It’s going to kill us, anyway.” Then he surprised both his friends by asking, “Can you tell it to stop?”

  Cautiously, Emily reached out her fingers toward the vibrating device, obviously trusting her affinity for machines to keep her safe. The moment she made contact her ginger eyebrows snapped together. “I can’t understand it. It’s like it’s screaming, and I can’t make out the words. Ow!” She jerked her hand away, her face a mix of astonishment and hurt. “It shocked me!”

  “I’ll stop it,” Griffin informed them—sounding much more confident than he felt. Obviously this was a lesson in being careful what he wished for, because he had wanted to feel useful, and now if he couldn’t be useful enough, people would die. He would die.

  He looked at Sam, who watched him with a grim expression, and then moved toward the machine. The Aetheric energy that swarmed around it wasn’t right. Normally, the Aether was filled with the brightness of organic auras or soft and gray with ghosts, but this energy was dark and sooty. It looked like a smear of something viscose—dirty automaton grease on a clean white glove.

  And it seemed to be watching him, but that wasn’t possible. Unless ... unless it was a ghost, but there was no form to it. Just a feeling of darkness.

  He didn’t know what touching it, letting it into him, might do, but he had no choice.

  It slithered toward him as he held out his hand, black tendrils curling around his fingers. It felt almost slippery, like the tentacles of an octopus. And sharp. His fingers began to bleed where it touched him. What the hell?

  “Griffin?” It was Emily who called out. She’d seen the blood, no doubt. To her, it would look as though his hand had suddenly begun to bleed for no reason. He gritted his teeth and extended his hand even farther, until he touched the device, which was now shaking so violently, it was certain to explode at any second.

  The moment his fingers touched the hot metal—so hot— the machine began to quiet. Griffin clenched his jaw even tighter against the double onslaught of pain and placed as much of his hand as he could over the shivering heat. Tendrils wrapped farther up his arm, cutting into his exposed forearm. Blood dripped to the carpet as what felt like a dozen razors slashed at his flesh, and his palm burned.

  Once most of the dark energy had gathered around him, he drew a deep breath, pushed past the pain and focused all of his will at the curling black. He drew it toward him, into him.

  He was not prepared for the assault. He thought it would put up a fight, that it would take a
great force of his power to overcome it.

  He was wrong.

  The swirling black tendrils drew back. For a second, they seemed to come together, arching upward to form a mistshaped cobra that undulated before him.

  The blackness struck before he could think to defend himself.

  It was like shards of glass exploding in his chest. Pain screamed through his body, slamming him to his knees, bringing the taste of blood to his mouth. He opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out. It felt as though his vocal chords had been cut in half.

  And then there was nothing. The vice of agony that gripped him let go as suddenly as it had attacked, sending him sprawling face-first onto the floor, gasping for breath. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to think.

  He heard someone call his name from a great distance. He tried but couldn’t answer. His eyes rolled back into their sockets as darkness swamped his mind. He was either going to pass out or die—either was preferable to the pain. He coughed, tasted blood in his mouth.

  Finley’s face swam in his mind. If he could hold on to the thought of her, he just might live. She just might keep death away.

  And then she was yanked away, and there was nothing.

  Finley was in a bad mood.

  The fight in Bandit’s Roost had been just the start of her current glower. She didn’t like being injured, and she liked it even less when she didn’t have any of Emily’s beasties to help heal. It didn’t matter that she would heal faster than a “normal” person; she wanted to be healed now.

  The insult added to that injury had occurred once they’d returned to Dalton’s abode. Her Personal Telegraph had gotten broken in the fight, so she couldn’t contact Emily, and then Dalton had absconded with the mechanical piece Jasper had given him, without a comment to either about their well-being.

  She was beginning to think that for all the criminal’s charm and good looks, he was a top-class arse.

  Then Mei appeared and fussed over Jasper like a mother hen, glaring at Finley, as though it was her fault Jasper had gotten hurt and not the other way around. It was obvious the girl didn’t like her, was jealous of her. Well, if Mei would like to take her place the next time there was a fight, she was more than welcome to it. The girl was a proper cow.

  Yes, it was so tempting just to reach out and give that collar a tap.

  Instead, she went to the kitchen and helped herself to some bread and roast chicken. Fighting always made her hungry, and food seemed to help her natural healing process.

  Never mind that she needed something to do so she wouldn’t actually backhand Mei. She shouldn’t let it get to her when other girls treated her like dog excrement on their shoes, but she had to admit—and only to herself—that it hurt almost as much as it pissed her off.

  She ate her food while sitting on the sideboard and washed it down with iced tea. It didn’t taste as bad as she’d thought it would. In fact, it was pretty good, despite being just plain wrong. Everyone knew tea was meant to be served hot.

  Afterward, she was on her way to her room—a black cloud lingering over her head—when she heard a knock at the door. One of Dalton’s men answered it. A girl spoke—asking for her. She recognized the voice as Emily’s. What was she doing there?

  Finley turned toward the door. Dalton’s henchman blocked her view, but she heard him clear enough. “Get lost, pikey.”

  Finley stiffened at the derogatory term. No one called her Emily such an awful name. She walked up behind the man, grabbed him by the arm and slammed him face-first into the wall, twisting in a manner that popped his shoulder out of joint. He screamed and dropped to the ground.

  She crouched over him. “I’ll put it back in when you apologize,” she told him in a low voice.

  He swore at her, but she merely smiled. “Uh-uh. That sort of attitude just makes me want to hurt you more.”

  “Finley.”

  Her head jerked up, and she saw the fear in Emily’s eyes. This was real fear—not disgust at Finley’s behavior but real terror. Something had happened. Something had happened to Griffin.

  It was as though someone took a rag and wiped away all her anger—all her emotions. She was numb as she snapped the bounder’s shoulder into place. She stepped over his prone body and joined her friend.

  “Is he dead?” she asked, her voice surprisingly strong.

  Emily shook her head as her wide eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know. He was alive when I left to get you.”

  She swallowed against the lump in her throat. Griffin could not be dead. He had survived a knife wound when they fought The Machinist and rallied. He would simply have to survive this, as well.

  “Take me to him.” She didn’t care if leaving meant Jasper would be on his own. She didn’t care if her absence destroyed whatever fragile trust Dalton held for her. Dalton could go to hell.

  The door slammed behind her as she walked out into the bright afternoon sunlight. She barely felt the heat. At the bottom of the steps sat Emily’s big metal cat. There were bars sticking out of the side of its head. Emily straddled its back and gripped the bars.

  “Get on,” she said.

  Finley didn’t ask any questions—she knew better. And to be honest, she really didn’t care. She sat on the cat’s back and wrapped her arms around her friend’s waist. A moment later they were tearing through the streets, northbound toward the Waldorf-Astoria. The cat ran so fast the wind stung Finley’s eyes, or that’s what she told herself, because she was not crying.

  At the hotel, she took the stairs rather than the lift because she could take them two at a time and a lot faster than most people. She reached Griffin’s room a full two minutes before Emily did. She opened the door to find him on the bed. Sam sat in a chair beside him.

  Finley barely glanced at Sam, who stood up as soon as she came in. Her gaze was for Griffin alone as she approached the bed.

  His face was cut in several places, and there was dried blood at the corners of his mouth. His hands, resting on the blankets, had been bandaged, and there was a large square of bloodstained linen over his bare chest.

  “What happened?” she rasped, her throat so tight it hurt to breathe.

  To her surprise, Sam put one of his big hands on her shoulder and gently squeezed. “We don’t know. There was a machine at Tesla’s that malfunctioned. Something to do with the Aether. Griff shut it down, and this is the result.”

  Finley looked up and noticed the slim older man with dark hair and moustache sitting in a chair in the corner. He had to be Mr. Tesla—no one else could possibly look so guilty.

  She wanted to blame him for this. Wanted to pound his fine-boned face until it split beneath her fists, but she didn’t. She hadn’t been there, where she should have been, to help Griffin. She’d been off scrapping in a dirty lane with Jasper to help a girl who didn’t even like her.

  She hadn’t been where she belonged. Look what happened to him when she wasn’t there. Something always happened to him when she wasn’t around.

  “The device shouldn’t have worked,” Tesla informed her. His accent was strange to her ears. “I do not know how this happened.”

  The genuine regret in his accented voice diminished much of the turmoil inside Finley’s chest. He wasn’t to blame any more than she was or Emily and Sam. Griffin was like a white knight, rushing in to save the day with little thought for his own safety—the gorgeous idiot.

  “I treated his wounds.” This came from Emily, who now stood with Sam. He had his arm around her shoulders. For the first time, Finley noticed the blood on her sleeves and vest. Griffin’s blood. “The Organites will do their job. All we can do is wait.”

  Wait and see if the Organites worked fast enough, she meant. If they would heal him before he died.

  “Would the three of you give me a moment with him?” Finley asked, glancing around the room.

  No one said a word; they simply filed out the door and closed it behind them.

  Finley didn’t bother to sit on the chair S
am had used. She sat on the edge of the bed instead, careful not to disturb Griffin for fear of hurting him.

  She couldn’t even take his hand, so she wrapped her fingers around his naked biceps—where his arm wasn’t cut. His flesh was cool beneath hers and hard with muscle.

  “Why is it I only get to see you with your shirt off when you’re hurt?” she asked in a desperate attempt at humor. A sob caught in her throat. “Don’t you dare die. You have to live so I can curse you up and down for scaring me like this.”

  He didn’t respond. She reached up and smoothed his hair back from his face. A tiny cut on his forehead was already healing thanks to the Organites and their magic. To think just a short while ago she was angry because she had to suffer through her natural healing, and now here was Griffin, fighting just to survive.

  “Don’t leave me,” she whispered, blinking furiously against the tears that dripped down her face to plop onto his skin. And then, because she didn’t know if she’d ever get another opportunity, she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his. She kissed his forehead, as well, before finally raising her hands to her eyes to wipe away the wetness there.

  “Finley?” His voice was weak, but there was no mistaking it.

  “Griffin?” Joy skipped in her chest. “You’re awake.”

  His forehead wrinkled, and his eyelashes fluttered. “Are you crying? My face is wet.”

  “Of course not,” she lied. “Sam was here before me. It must have been him.” Gently, she used her thumb to brush the drops from his cheeks.

  One corner of his mouth lifted slightly. “Liar.” Then his eyes opened a fraction. When the stormy blue of his gaze locked with her own, it was as though her heart fell over.

  “You are crying,” he whispered. “You didn’t think I’d actually die and leave you without anyone to boss you around?”

  A huff of laughter escaped her like a hiccup, her throat was so tight. “That wouldn’t do, would it?”

  His smile faded. “I think I need to sleep for a bit.”