Stormbringer

  Ginger Jack kept throwing punches, but Rowen’s arms were too long, his reach too great.

  The smaller man strained with effort, but each time his balled fists stayed inches from the tip of Rowen’s chin.

  So Ginger opened his fist and, drawing back … landed his fingertips on Rowen’s chin.

  Rowen snorted and Ginger Jack tried again. And again got the same results.

  Rowen laughed.

  Ginger Jack groaned, and tried once more.

  The same effect was achieved. Nothing more, nothing less, unless one counted the increase in Rowen’s amusement.

  Because, bruised and battered as he was, he was laughing now.

  And suddenly, so was Ginger Jack.

  The spider just hung nearby, watching.

  They sat there a moment, laughing at the absurdity of it all. Rowen rose to his feet, straddling Jack, and extended a hand for the other man to take.

  Jack grunted and accepted the favor, heaving himself to his feet and looking at Rowen a bit differently now—as one might when glimpsing potential instead of problems. Jack’s mouth slid from one side of his face to the other. He scrubbed a hand across his chin and finally announced, “Well, lad. You are surely not what I expected, and far from what I’d hoped for, but I think you’ll do well enough with some instruction.”

  Rowen shrugged. “You certainly aren’t what I was hoping for either.”

  “Oh, aye? And just what were you hoping was behind that door?”

  “A beautiful girl I’m determined to rescue,” he admitted with a wry wink.

  “Well, then I am quite the disappointment. I apologize for dashing your hopes,” he said with a chuckle. “Perhaps I’ll equip you, show you around, and you can entertain me with tales of this ravishing damsel you’re seeking to save.” Jack leaned into a mess of interwoven wires and slender, wandering tubes and withdrew a set of gloves and goggles. “Try these on. I daresay they might require some adjustment, you being a walking tree trunk and all, but it’s better than losing an eye or slicing the hell out of your hands.”

  Rowen adjusted the goggles’ band and tugged it over his head, settling the strange lenses over his eyes, before he snapped the gloves on.

  “Good, good,” Jack said with a clear look of approval. “Let’s get started.”

  Chapter Eight

  Great is truth. Fire cannot burn, nor water drown it.

  —ALEXANDRE DUMAS THE ELDER

  Aboard the Artemesia

  The middle of the day had come and gone and things were no easier between the Wandering Wallace and Miyakitsu than at the beginning of the day. It was like this sometimes. The questions, the shyness, the doubt. “You know why I do it, do you not?”

  She tucked her chin against her chest, ebony hair cascading across her face and obscuring it. She muttered something noncommittal and scooted across his lap.

  His heart sped in response and he leaned into her, the tip of his nose tickled by the edge of her satiny hair. “It’s not just for the Witches, you know. It’s not just because of the African slaves. Or the Indian slaves. Or the ones like you—Wildkin. It is because of you. It’s always been because of you. Because of the place and the way I found you.”

  She tilted her head back, the black wave of her long hair dividing to show the softly sloping planes of her face and exposing the curve of her narrow neck. “You rescue me.”

  “Yes,” he said, the breath catching in his throat. “I rescued you.” He examined her features, the dramatic slanting eyes fringed with lashes as luxurious as her fox pelt’s fur. The low bridge of her nose that only emphasized the dramatic sweep of her black eyebrows, the eyes so dark brown they defied terms like “coffee” or “chocolate” and went straight to making him think in terms of midnight’s starless heart.

  She was the most magickal thing he owned.

  He blinked, realizing the truth of the statement. He owned her. Like the trunk painted with odd symbols and stars in secret patterns. Like the clothes on both their backs—he owned her. The idea was at once repulsive and invigorating because, by him owning her, no one else had any claim.

  “You remember now?” he asked, the question clutching his heart the way it did daily. One day he would fail her. One day they would find themselves at this hour, at this most magical moment in their oddly repetitive daily lives, and she would say, “No.”

  It was bound to happen. He fought a daily and losing battle with time—a battle he saw lost in seconds—precious seconds—every single day.

  “Yes. I remember. You come to my land. You find me in house with other girls that English love.”

  His lips pressed into a thin line remembering the house with its wood-and-paper walls that slid to reveal rooms where beautiful girls—geisha and maiko, they claimed—were kept for the entertainment of men. Then he was named “Hood” because of the sleek fabric mask he wore to do the work only he could easily perform, and he was encouraged to spend time with a girl of his choosing as reward. Uncertain and uninterested, he looked for the one least likely to interact with him.

  Quiet, her eyes downcast whenever they did not flit wildly about the room; her demeanor was distant, her body as poised and still as an animal having spotted its hunter. Graceful as a deer, small and lithe as a cat, and feral as a fox, she immediately entranced him.

  He chose her from all the girls in short silk robes who stood against the rice paper wall, their pale and perfect legs exposed to nearly the knee even as a coworker of his whispered, “This is no true geisha house…”

  He was warned against his choice by the house’s mother. A recent acquisition to the household with a unique past, she had not yet acquired the appropriate temperament. She had bitten a patron just the other day, the older woman mentioned.

  One of Hood’s companions stepped forward then, saying he liked his girls feisty.

  But Hood stayed true to his decision. There was something about her as odd as his own nature. He knew he must at least keep her from being put in a position where she felt threatened. Regardless of his type of employment, he still understood what construed gentlemanly behavior.

  “You say: She is beautiful,” Miyakitsu whispered, stretching to accentuate her languid form. “Then you say: I choose her. Her time is mine. My money is hers.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, wrapping his arms around her slender waist. He had told her the tale many times. Every day since the day they’d met. And every night, the moment she finally fell asleep beside him, his arm wrapped round her, her memory was wiped clean of his very existence.

  Tabula rasa was what educated people called it. Blank slate.

  “You come to my room. I am scared. We sit and watch each other. I remember. I offer tea.” She smiled at him, small white teeth perfect between pink lips. Not even the size or sharpness of her canines gave a clue to her more animal nature to most people. Sitting beside him she was utterly human, her human skin a most elaborate and convincing camouflage.

  “Yes,” he again agreed. “You shook as you poured it.” He added with a smile, “You nearly spilled it.”

  She barked out a laugh. “You nearly bathe with tea!”

  “Yes.” He touched the tip of her nose with a finger. “And then?”

  “Then, you talk. About many things and nothing,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

  This is how he knew she truly remembered nothing beyond what he’d told her, starting every morning. That simple and damning phrase “about many things and nothing.” It was how he summarized that first day they spent together, because the reality of it was much harder to repeat, and ever so much harder to hear.

  That first day, before he understood the damage done to her, he explained his every hope and dream to the beautiful foreign girl who nodded politely, listened intently, and forgot every moment that night after he’d left her.

  “Then,” she concludes, “you leave me, with not so much as a kiss.”

  “True.”

  “You come again and again.”

/>   He did. She ensnared him that first day. When he returned the next and she acted as if she did not know him, instead of taking it as a rebuff he saw it as a challenge to make her admit recognizing him. When that failed, he fought to make himself more memorable—to be worthy of remembering. Every day he burned his pay whiling away the evening’s hours with her.

  Every day, as soon as work concluded, he returned to what was little more than a house of ill repute thinly veiled as something far more beautiful, and began their relationship again, determined to not be forgotten.

  She was equally willing to try and just as unable to grant him that—his most singularly important wish.

  One early evening, his frustration at its peak, Hood sought out the house’s Madame and paid for information.

  “We know little. Ainu bring her, leave her. Say she work with shaman, magician, traveled. Knows many tricks and skills, but now? They want her no more. Ainu say crazy thing about her being daughter of the night and so she change. Old, crazy Ainu story.” She dismissed it with a wave of her hand.

  “Tell it true,” he urged.

  She peered down her broad nose at him. “My time valuable.”

  He produced more coins, buying more time. “Tell it true.”

  “Some say Earth and Sky are mother and father of all people as Day and Night are mother and father of all animals. Crazy. But Night,” she dragged the word out, lengthening the single syllable and giving him a knowing look, “she share same space as Sky and you know when space is shared … more than space is shared.” She laughed. “She and he make many children, sons and daughters of Night. They fall from Night Sky, always dark, always damaged. Live different life than people. Know different things. Cannot know other things.”

  He sat back, watching her expression, and waiting for her to explain it all away as some strange joke she played on men recently in port.

  “You try and make her remember you, yes?”

  He only blinked, but even so subtle a movement told her what she wanted to know.

  “She cannot. Maybe she does not want to. Maybe she does. No matter. She is Night’s damaged daughter. Every night she shakes off her skin and travels to her parents’ realm. Every day she is born anew at dawn. Fresh and clean, no new memory.”

  “She cannot…”

  The woman lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Cannot.”

  He heaved out a sigh, sinking deeper into both the chair and his own dark thoughts. She would never remember him. No matter how he tried. Hood, so memorable to his other companions, would never be remembered by the most beautiful woman he’d ever met—not after she fell asleep.

  “Night always takes her children back. They are special. Like what your people call beastmen…”

  He bolted upright in his seat, his hands curled around the ends of the carved armrests. “She’s Wildkin?”

  She laughed at him again. “Yes. You not see it in her? Wild. Dangerous. Crafty.”

  “No,” he admitted. “I had no idea.”

  “Men. You see only what you want, want most what you fear. Leave her. Find other girl. Less bitey.”

  The next day he returned and tried to choose a different girl, but still he found himself irreparably drawn to the damaged daughter of the night.

  Her voice brought him back to the present. “I am your special girl. And—”

  They say the words together in unison, every day at nearly this same hour, “—I love you.”

  Never had he spoken truer words.

  Romance never his forte, the first time she fell into her other form they were both surprised. He didn’t shrink away and she didn’t slink into a corner. Or bite.

  Never before had he beheld such beauty as in the pure black fox with large golden eyes. It was as if she were a song that had just been rewritten. The rhythm—the time signature—remained the same, but the melody twisted, became more sensuous and dangerous, equally foreign and intimate in the shape of its wildly elegant design.

  Standing there facing down the very image of the wilderness, he understood then that this was what he’d wanted—the magick and mystery this woman embodied.

  His paltry illusions paled before magick made fur, flesh, bone, and bitey teeth. He waited out her transformation, patient as a man courting a proper lady should be while waiting for her to be appropriately dressed. When she slid from her fox’s pelt, regaining her kimono, he lowered his eyes for modesty’s sake.

  But his consistent attentions were not overlooked by his peers.

  “Other man come for me…” It was here that she always faltered, no matter how many times he told it the same way. Something about it lingered in the back of her mind—or her soul—if she had one—if he had one—that made him think she remembered brutality.

  The thought gave him as much pain as it gave hope.

  He remembered this part of the tale as if they lived it moments ago. The way his coworker—the one who liked women feisty—pointed out that there must really be something amazing about the girl Hood visited so regularly. That she must be tremendously talented. The words were no compliment—fear crept along Hood’s gut. The words hinted at intention.

  So Hood stretched his legs until they burned in an effort to outwalk the other man, to make it to the house before he did—and stake his claim and protect his interests in the foxgirl.

  But it was not enough because, even in Japan, commercialism and capitalism had rapidly become the way of things, edging out older values. And in capitalism there was but one god (a strange contrast to the Shinto ways) and that god was money.

  They stood in the same room, two men with different desires, different goals, seeing the small wild woman on the same path they wished to tread. Money was produced by each.

  Then more.

  The foxgirl shrank back, seeing who had the most, and Hood knew this was a battle beyond his winning. Unless he went all in.

  He made the offer that changed his world forever. “She is difficult and dangerous,” he said to the older woman looking on, her eyes focused on the money. Only then had Hood truly seen how readily she peddled flesh in her greed. It sickened him knowing he had supported her. “Damaged,” he announced, looking at the woman with flint-hard eyes. “She is a liability to your establishment.”

  The woman hissed at him, her eyes narrow and bright.

  “I will take her away from here so that your business prospers.”

  The woman’s eyes did not change, remaining distrustful, dangerous. “What you offer? Make her wife?” She laughed out the rudest, most disgusting noise he had ever heard exuded from any body orifice.

  He could not make her his wife, so the woman’s words bore little sting. There was too much to accomplish before taking a bride and he came from a modest background. A whore he might take, but a wife of questionable origin? Worse yet, a Wildkin whore?

  “I will buy her.”

  “Buy her?!” The woman snorted and cackled, bending in half as laughter wracked her body. “You cannot even beat his price for one night! How you buy her with no money?”

  “Name your price and I will make good on it.”

  Her laughter stopped so abruptly she sputtered and choked.

  He was serious.

  Miyakitsu again narrated, saying, “Name your price, Madame, name your challenge.”

  He nodded; the breath caught in his throat at the way light shone in the unbelievably dark gems of her eyes.

  “She names impossible task. A quest no man succeed at.”

  He nodded, remembering well the dangerous journey he embarked on to save her from enslavement.

  “You promise to remind me of adventure?”

  “Yes,” he whispered, jaw clenched. “Tomorrow.” His was the whitest of lies.

  She smiled, ready to hold him to the promise made today … Tomorrow.

  That, he believed, was the greatest of mercies: that she did not know what she could not know.

  The only part of the story he can never be certain is true or not, p
ained him in the guessing.

  “While you adventure to save me,” Miyakitsu said, “I am well kept, untouched.”

  He told her that every time, hoping that if he heard it enough, perhaps he, too, would believe it. For to know he left her—with no memory to tell her otherwise—where she might have been ill-used in his absence was too much for a man to bear.

  “Madame takes her payment. I am yours. Then real adventure begins!” She snuggles against him, her body fitting into his own, a living perfection.

  This was what he waited for every day—what he worked for with unerring consistency and hope—the moment she trusted him again. The moment she knew deep in her shifting bones she could trust him.

  These were the magic hours. The brief time remaining before she dozed off and all the progress he’d made slid away in an avalanche.

  He had just enough friends to know no other man would do all that he did so regularly, so readily.

  He felt sorry for them, realizing, because it proved they had not found true love. For that reason, he hugged her tight and knew that something found could again be lost if one wasn’t careful.

  Aboard the Tempest

  It was as Ginger Jack and Rowen slithered through tunnel after tunnel in the belly of the Tempest wearing insulated suits against the heat that Rowen fogged up his mask talking about Jordan. “Is that all you have to talk about?” Jack asked. “This girl? Hammer.”

  Rowen handed him a hammer. “You started it. You were talking about Elizabeth…”

  “In a completely respectful and professional way!”

  Rowen laughed. “Talking about the shape of a woman’s body is somehow tied to the profession of engineer, is it?”

  “We have a keen eye for good structure and Evie’s built just right,” he added with a laugh of his own.

  “Jordan is proportioned … differently?” Rowen said, thinking back.

  “Jordan is a girl, Evie is a full-fledged woman,” Jack said. “Therein lies the difference.”

  “But, if one were to compare them, bit by bit…” And so Rowen began to, naming off each attribute in a way so clearly comparative Jack might’ve drawn a chart. It was as Rowen worked on his own and still rambled on about Jordan that things began to go badly.