Thief of Hearts (Elders and Welders Chronicles Book 3) (15 page)

“Very fine work, Miss Bartholomew. I’ve not seen true craftsmanship like this in centuries.”

She grit her teeth as he stroked the fine metalwork and only barely refrained from taking one of his fingers and squeezing it until it broke. She was fairly certain she could have done so before his attack dogs could react, but she doubted she’d like the punishment that would follow.

“Centuries?” she bit out dubiously.

He just continued to smirk at her. “You know, I
did
ask you nicely,” he said a few moments later, releasing her hands and stepping away from her. “A simple trip out to the desert and back. Hardly outside your usual purview, and certainly easier money than you could ever make through your petty smuggling.”

Hex’s jaw tightened. She didn’t know how Netherfield had found out about her extracurriculars, but she didn’t like it. She had been so careful since she’d come to Egypt.

“Something must have truly scared you out there,” he mused. Well, some
one
. “A greedy little opportunist like you wouldn’t turn down the small fortune I offered without a good reason. I so wish you’d share it with me.”

“Go to hell,” Hex bit out.

Netherfield’s brow quirked with amusement. “You are…plucky, I’ll give you that.”

He snapped his fingers, and the two…whatever they were…came up on either side of her and grabbed her by her arms. She was just glad Theodora had postponed ripping her throat out for another occasion.

They dragged her behind the display cases into a dim alcove at the rear of the room that hid a narrow door. She nearly gagged as the cloying odor of rot overcame all of her senses, growing ever stronger the closer they got to the door.

She was used to the myriad unpleasant smells that pervaded Cairo: rotted food in the gutters of the souk, human waste clogging narrow streets, and the smell of the Nile just outside the slaughterhouse docks on a hot day. But this…

She’d not smelled this particular foulness before—or if she had, not in such singularity. She could only guess what it was…

And what she guessed was not good. Not good at all.

Theodora and Vasily pushed her inside a small, narrow chamber on the other side of the hidden door. The smell was so potent now that her eyes watered.

Netherfield hovered in the doorway, a handkerchief over his nose. “I’m so sorry for the inconvenience”—he wasn’t—“but I must insist that you remain at my disposal. I wouldn’t have had to importune you at all in order to discover the tomb’s location, Miss Bartholomew, but unfortunately our only other option proved tragically uncooperative.”

He gestured behind her into the shadows of the small room, and she nearly lost the contents of her stomach at what she saw. It was Omar. Or what was left of him. His eyes were glazed over in death, his mouth set in a rictus of terror. The rest of him…

She wasn’t sure what had happened to the rest of him. There was too much carnage to tell. It looked as if someone had done a very thorough job of prying him open and scooping out what was inside. She covered her nose and mouth with her hand, trying not to breathe too deeply, understanding at last what she’d been smelling. Death.

And she’d naively thought things couldn’t get any worse once the fangs had come out.

“Mr. Aziz was very detailed, if somewhat fanciful, in his description of your expedition,” Netherfield continued, “but he was unable to articulate the precise coordinates of the tomb. Perhaps in time he could have managed to lead us to the tomb, but he refused quite violently to return there. So violently, in fact, that my colleagues lost their temper with him.”

Theodora and Vasily’s snack.

“Some temper,” she managed despite the rising bile in her throat.

“Tomorrow at dawn, we will start our journey,” Netherfield said. “I’m sure the
Amun Ra
is sky-worthy enough, despite your claims otherwise.”

“Fuck you,” Hex gagged out, trying to keep her breathing shallow.

Netherfield’s smile tightened. “How delightfully coarse. Let me phrase this in a way you will understand: if you do
not
cooperate and take us back to that tomb, not only will you die, but so will your sister. Helen, I believe? Frail little thing, isn’t she? I have heard that the nuns at St. Mina’s take good care of her.”

Hex’s heart sank to her toes. “How could you
possibly
know about Helen? Who told you?”

Netherfield’s smirk grew, and he cocked his eyebrow, as if it were obvious who’d told him.

Hex glanced at Omar’s remains out of the corner of her eye and groaned. Damn it. Obvious indeed.

The poor man had been over his head from the moment he’d fallen into Hubert’s orbit. There was no telling what he’d told Netherfield and his lackeys by the end of things. But it was hard to be angry with the man. No one deserved such a horrible fate. She could only hope hers would not be so…gruesome.

“Sleep well, Miss Bartholomew,” Netherfield said, backing out of the room.

“You’re not going to shut me in here with a dead body!” she cried.

Netherfield paused and gave her another cold smirk. “Careful, my dear. Don’t bother trying to escape. Theodora and Vasily both shall be watching over you. And as you can plainly see from the state of Mr. Aziz, they become…messy when provoked.”

With that, he finished shutting the door, leaving her in the darkness and stench. She heard several locks slide into place, and the panic she’d been trying to fight finally overwhelmed her defenses. She decided to ignore Netherfield’s advice and threw herself against the door, beating it with her bound hands and crying out. It was a pointless exercise, however, and after a few minutes, she had to stop to catch her breath.

She fell to her knees and dry-heaved, overwhelmed by the pervasive smell. She tore off a strip from the hem of her shirt and wrapped it around her nose and mouth, sitting against the wall and contemplating her next move.

There was only one left to her.

Luckily for her, she still had Simon’s genius on her side. The watch had thankfully failed to rouse the suspicions of Netherfield and his minions. She managed to loosen her bonds just enough to reach her watch with her fingers—her Welding hands had
some
advantages.

She didn’t bother tapping out a message this time around, having given Simon her destination earlier. Instead, she flicked the small emergency switch camouflaged on the side of the watch face. Simon would know what to do. He owed her, after all, and if any favor could wipe the slate clean between them, it would be this one. Though he might hesitate at first, in the end he would follow her wishes, even if it meant leaving her behind.

Netherfield knew about Helen, and the best thing Simon could do for her was to see to Helen’s safety. Hex was as good as dead anyway. She just hoped she lived long enough for Simon to move Helen out of harm’s way.

Not that she planned to go down without a fight. Those creatures might be scary as hell, but Netherfield had shown his hand by revealing them to her. Hex had always adapted quickly, and this time would be no different.

She’d already had a month to come to terms with the idea that the world was not as…mundane as she’d once assumed. Her shock over the metal fangs and glowing eyes was already wearing off, and in its place was growing an angry resolve.

She might die by the end of this, but she damn well planned on taking a few of her captors with her.

ROWAN HAD QUICKLY
discovered that it would require more money than Miss Bartholomew had forced upon him—perhaps more money than he could make loading freight down at the air docks for a solid month—to buy enough alcohol for him to experience even the barest flickers of inebriation. He wondered if he could even get drunk at all.

He’d thought about crawling behind the bar of the Waterloo—a dockside den of iniquity populated primarily by ex-patriot Brits and Crimean refugees, most of them involved in some sort of criminal enterprise—and consuming as much of its stock of watered whiskey, bathtub gin, and piss-flavored ale as he could to see what would happen. He could do it if he wanted. Very few things, he’d discovered, could stop him, and that included the poor excuse for security the Waterloo employed.

He had a few vague memories of being intoxicated
before
, could remember the rush, the temporary release from reality, and the rollicking hangover that followed. But he wondered if these flickers of memory were real…and if they
were
real, whether they belonged to another person altogether. Whatever the case, these ghostly resonances were more torturous than anything else he’d endured so far since he’d regained consciousness in a sheikh’s tent.

As vague and innocuous as they were on the surface, they were half-memories of a human life, and hadn’t it been proven quite definitively that he was not human? He hadn’t even an Iron Necklace, unlike the rest of his generation who wouldn’t have survived the Great Fog without the filter. Bullets could do him no harm, and Simon had conclusively demonstrated that he didn’t even bleed red. And he’d quickly discovered, living on the streets of Cairo, that he could function for days without sleep or food or even water.

Though the shantytowns along the Nile were populated by as diverse and unlikely a collection of humanity as he could imagine, it didn’t seem prudent to draw attention to his otherness. With his height and damnable toff’s accent—not to mention the unnatural color of his eyes—he was already odd enough without people finding out that he was, apparently, impervious to death.
And
freakishly strong. He always forgot about that one.

Down at the docks, he’d quickly learned not to lift too much—just enough to make himself indispensible to his overseer, and just too little to avoid receiving the wrong kind of attention. He’d made that mistake his first day, when he’d picked up a crate bound for the hydraulic lift that had weighed well over a ton. He hadn’t understood the strange looks he’d received until he’d checked the weight of the parcel, for it had felt light enough to him.

He’d managed to play off that little misstep before too many had noticed, and aside from a few sidelong glances, the matter had soon been forgotten.

By everyone but him. Hex had been right to be scared of him, to distance herself.

He glared into the grimy tumbler of whiskey—or whatever foul concoction they tried to pass off as such. It was his third of the night, and while that amount of rotgut seemed to make even the most hardened drinkers at the Waterloo a bit squiffy, he felt nothing. But he refused to accept it.

He craved just one drunken night to forget he had no past. No home. No family—at least none he could remember. To forget he spent his days on the stinking docks of this alien place, hauling boxes filled with illicit goods, all of this done in the company of humanity’s dregs. To forget he spent most nights alongside the same sort of men, in loud, seedy pubs and taverns filled with angry drunks, prostitutes, and addicts. The War seemed to have displaced some of the worst European vices to the gutters of Cairo, along with its refugees.

His surroundings distressed him, but where else could he go? He didn’t know who he was, much less where he belonged. If he were British, as Miss Bartholomew had insisted, how had he ended up in Egypt, in a bloody tomb, and why? How could he even begin to understand what had happened to him if he couldn’t even remember his own surname? And was Rowan, a word plucked out of a dream, even really his first name?

He could do nothing until he remembered, and he had a feeling that wasn’t going to be any time soon.

He threw back his drink and grimaced at the burn—definitely not whiskey, probably not legal—and elbowed away the tangle of drunken, rowdy bodies thumping into him from behind.

One of those bodies turned to him and loudly took offense, as if Rowan were the one in error for sitting there minding his own bloody business. But when the man saw his reciprocal glare—saw it was Rowan—he immediately backed off, face a bit paler than it had been.

Rowan turned back to his drink with a huff. The last time someone had tried to start a fight with him, that man and five of his mates had ended up broken and bloodied in the alley outside. No one had tried to bother with him since.

He didn’t like the man he was becoming, but that just made him wish even more that he could remember who he had been.

Suddenly, someone tapped his shoulder, and he spun around with a growl, ready to deliver another death glare to the drunk who, it seemed, was eager to press his luck. He was caught off guard to find Simon, Miss Bartholomew’s strange tinker friend, hovering behind him, his lean, shrewd features unusually tense with worry.

He’d seen Simon around the docks a few times since leaving the
Amun Ra
. He’d even had a few silent, brooding drinks with the man. Like Rowan, Simon kept to himself, but everyone seemed to know who he was and treated him with what passed for deference in this hardened immigrant community. Rowan had noticed that Simon had never once paid for his drinks at the Waterloo, and he wondered what favors the owner—and everyone else—owed to the tinker.

Rowan also suspected his occasional meetings with Simon were less than coincidental. The man was keeping tabs on him, as if Rowan were one of his experiments…more likely
because
Rowan was one of his experiments.

Simon had been intensely curious about Rowan when they’d been aboard the
Amun Ra
. His unusual blood had apparently only whetted the man’s scientific appetite. Though they didn’t talk about it, Rowan didn’t think Simon liked Hex’s decision to cut him loose before the tinker’s curiosity had been thoroughly sated.

Though wary, Rowan was not as bothered by the man’s curiosity as he probably should have been, for Simon’s intensity of focus reminded Rowan of someone else, someone he’d probably known
before
. Every time he tried to recall who it was, however, his head started to ache.

His head always ached when he focused on those out-of-reach memories, but it ached more than usual right now. It had been a long day in the sun. The temperature was abnormally high, even for June in Cairo, and the most hardened among the dockworkers had been dropping like flies in the heat, forced to seek shade and water. He’d even heard of a few deaths from heat exhaustion occurring up and down the banks of the Nile.

He’d been forced to take up the slack to compensate for his colleagues, for while the high temperature was undeniably unpleasant and did nothing for his headache, he was not affected like everyone else around him—yet another example of how different he was. As if he’d needed another.

Ordinarily he didn’t mind the tinker’s company, but tonight he just wanted to be left alone. He was in a mood to wallow, and he didn’t want an audience.

“What do you want?” he demanded.

Simon slid onto the stool next to him after the last occupant vacated it with a mumbled greeting to the tinker—another man in Simon’s debt, apparently.

“It’s Hex. She’s in trouble,” Simon said without preamble.

Rowan firmly ignored the sick twinge in his gut. “Not my problem,” he muttered into his whiskey, not bothering to hide his acrimony.

Why did Simon think he would care about Miss Bartholomew’s problems? He hadn’t seen the woman in nearly a month, and she had certainly made it clear that she wanted nothing to do with him. He was not her problem, so she damn well wasn’t his.

He had understood and accepted her reasons for cutting him loose at the time and had done his best to ignore the irrational hurt and abandonment he’d felt. She couldn’t go and change the rules on him now by sending Simon to plead her case.

“You can tell her I said that.”

“No, I can’t, because she didn’t send me,” Simon said through gritted teeth.

“Right,” he mumbled.

Simon scowled at him and pointed down at the strange wristwatch that was a match to the one Hex had worn. “This is a communication device I designed. It’s like a tickertext, but more secure. It’s wired to send and receive signals to Hex’s device only, in code, without translation. It is how Hex and I were able to communicate in the desert.”

“So I have gathered,” Rowan said, signaling to the barkeep for another shot, trying valiantly not to care about anything Simon had to say.

Simon waited until the barkeep had poured another round and stepped away before continuing, as if afraid of being overheard. “She contacted me earlier telling me she was suspicious of a new client and might need my assistance.”

“She does that often, then? Gets into trouble and expects you to bail her out?” he murmured sullenly. “Why am I not surprised?”

Simon’s jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed. “What are you implying?”

Rowan shrugged. He wondered why he’d bothered to imply anything at all. Simon’s relationship with Miss Bartholomew shouldn’t bother him. Though it did.

“Hex is a friend,” Simon said evenly, clearly annoyed at having to defend himself.

“Again, none of my business.”

Simon studied him for a long, silent moment, and Rowan tried not to squirm. The man’s eyes were too sharp and far too intelligent. Once more they reminded him of someone else…someone he’d once known who’d also been too smart for his own good…someone…

Rowan rubbed his temples, chasing away the dull throb, and groaned.

When he recovered enough to open his eyes, he found Simon leaning in close to him, an angry furrow to his brow. “Look, I don’t have time to deal with your infatuation…”

Oh, for the love of… “I am
not
infatuated!”

“Please,” Simon scoffed. “You’re so obvious you might as well be holding a sign.”

“What!”

Simon’s expression clearly conveyed that he thought Rowan was an idiot. “I saw you kiss her at the kebap stand. And though I
am
one, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on.”

Oh, God, was Simon right?

“If I’ve stepped on any toes…” he began, deciding he might as well at least try to appear to be noble…or as noble as one could get in a place like the Waterloo, throwing back cheap whiskey and picking fights with the locals.

Simon groaned in frustration and ran his spidery hands through his over-long hair, as if at his wits’ end. “For God’s sake, I’m not bloody interested in the woman. I’ve known her since she was a child and consider her…” He broke off and scowled, as if he’d said far too much. “Look, we’re friends, and I owe her a debt. Which is why I need your help.”

“Then you’ll owe me too, won’t you?”

“Yes, damn it!” Simon hissed, pounding a fist against the bar top so hard Rowan’s glass lurched across the wood. “Anything!”

Rowan finally looked—
really
looked—at Simon. The tinker’s hair was standing up on its ends, as if he’d been running his hands through it for hours, and the perpetual furrow between his brows was indicative of more than just mere worry. His jaw was clenched tight enough to crush stone, and his body was held unusually stiffly, as if at any moment he might shatter. The man was past frantic.

Something was dreadfully wrong. And Rowan didn’t have it in him
not
to help.

Perhaps he was not so far-gone after all.

“What’s going on?” he demanded, straightening from his slouch over the bar and pushing his glass away.

“As I said, she sent me a code earlier asking for my help,” Simon said. “She wasn’t able to convey much, just her location and a few names, before she went silent. I was unable to contact her further, so she must have disabled her device so that no one would notice her receiving a return code. I was on my way to her, but about an hour ago, she sent me a distress signal.”

“Then why are you here? Why did you not just go to her, if she’s in so much trouble?” Rowan demanded, his stomach truly turning over this time. Bloody hell. It seemed he cared about Hex after all.

Simon just looked even more grim, his face pale beneath his desert tan. “When I gave her the watch, she made me swear an oath that if she ever used the distress signal I was to protect Helen.”

“And what of Hex?” he demanded.

There was something broken in Simon’s steely eyes that made Rowan’s stomach churn. “The only reason she’d ever use the signal was if she thought she was beyond saving.”

“You don’t entirely believe that!” Rowan cried.

The furrow in Simon’s brow deepened. “I don’t
want
to. But she’s in trouble, and she must believe Helen is as well. She’d sacrifice everything for her sister, even her own life. But I have to heed our agreement. I swore I would protect Helen if Hex were to…” He faltered and swallowed heavily, as if reluctant to finish the thought. “If anything were to happen to her. The debt I owe to her is great. I cannot let her down in this no matter how much I dislike it.”