Thief of Hearts (Elders and Welders Chronicles Book 3) (26 page)

How could he regret this intimacy? This one moment of peace in this awful nightmare? He’d do it again, he’d
have
her again, and he didn’t think he could ever choose any differently.

“Nothing,” he finally said roughly. “Your hands?”

“Right,” she said. “I was thirteen. Hubert and I were housebreaking in London. We started making a name for ourselves. Too much of a name. The authorities began to figure out our game, and it became more of a risk every time I broke into a house. I wanted to move on, but Hubert wouldn’t listen. We were making more money that we ever had, and he didn’t want to give it up. On my last job, the police were waiting on the rooftops for me.”

She huffed out a breath as if bracing herself for the rest of the story. “They chased me. One of them finally managed to clip me in the arm,” she said, pointing to an old scar. “I fell off the rooftop, broke some ribs, a leg, and nearly all the bones in both my hands. Or so Hubert told me.”

She stopped and drew a breath as if fortifying herself. “I don’t remember anything after the fall, but Hubert must have found me before the police could. When I woke up, my hands were…like this.”

Rowan’s blood ran cold, nausea sweeping through his stomach. “How?” he bit out.

“Hubert talked about enhancement long before the fall. Said he knew this Welder who could ‘fix’ my hands for a song. He said I’d climb higher and faster, be ten times as strong, and I always refused. But after the fall…well…” She shrugged. “I wasn’t capable of refusing, was I?”

Rowan wanted to hit something. Hard. “Be glad your father is in Scotland, Hex,” he said, “for I don’t think I could restrain myself should I see him again.”

Hex’s eyes looked desolate, but she laughed lightly. “I don’t think I would stop you.”

“And Simon?” He almost didn’t want to ask, for he liked the tinker despite all of his impossible words.

“Ah. Yes. Simon,” she said, suddenly sober.

“Please tell me he wasn’t the Welder,” he bit out.

She patted his arm consolingly. “He wasn’t the Welder.”

He exhaled in relief. He was glad he wouldn’t be throwing any genius tinkers overboard today.

“He was the Welder’s apprentice,” Hex continued.

Rowan immediately changed his mind about throwing Simon overboard. Hex must have sensed his sudden intent, for she rolled until she was half on top of him and put a hand on either side of his face. She stared down at him sternly. “Don’t you even think about hurting him, Rowan.”

“He hurt you.”

She shook her head vehemently. “He didn’t. He had nothing to do with the operation. He wasn’t even there. He designed the hands, yes, but he did so with the intention of helping people who had true need of them. He had no idea his boss was using his work to perform back alley operations on the side. He was the one who helped me get away from my father afterward. He felt responsible for what happened, and he still does, even though it
wasn’t his fault
. So you won’t kill him?”

“I won’t kill him,” he agreed grudgingly. “But your
father
, Hex. How could he do that? How could anyone do that? What sort of world is this?”

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t despair of all of humanity on account of Hubert Bartholomew.”

He fixed her with a sour look. “For the past month, I’ve met nothing but thieves, murderers, and criminal masterminds.
And
vampires. I am hardly filled with optimism.”

She looked surprisingly dissatisfied with his answer. “Can you not remember anything different? Anything better?”

“Better? No. I can’t remember, and I can’t imagine it. Why would I want to imagine a life without you in it?”

Her eyes widened and her lips parted, as if she would have said something had she been able to speak. It hadn’t been his intention to strike her dumb, but the words had just slipped out of him before he could think them through.

She turned her head away, her cheeks blooming with color, her eyes suspiciously damp. “You should write poetry, you know.”

“Maybe I will,” he countered, smiling gently at her blushes even as his heart ached for her. He doubted anyone had ever bothered to treat Hex so tenderly in her short, difficult life. It made him want to keep on doing so for an eternity. “But only if
you
like poetry. I’d do anything to make you happy, Hex.”

She laughed lightly and punched him in the shoulder, her face now a truly impressive scarlet. Then, all of a sudden, she turned back to him and threw her arms around his neck, pressing her body as close to his as possible and placing teasing kisses all over his face.

He hugged her back and gladly endured her assault, his heart light for the first time in what felt like centuries.

“That’s nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” she murmured.

“It’s the truth,” he said firmly, swallowing past the damnable lump in his throat that just wouldn’t go away.

“For now, maybe…”

“Always,” he whispered. He lifted her chin with his fingertips so that he could look her in the eyes. She was still flushed, her blue eyes luminous with what looked very much like hope. He’d never seen it in her eyes before, and it made his heart soar even higher. “It will always be the truth. No matter what happens next.”

Her expression clouded a little at that, and he wished he could take back his last words. He didn’t want reminders of the world outside these four walls any more than she did.

He cradled the curve of her face in his palms. “Hex, I think I lo…”

“Don’t say it,” she interrupted, panic flitting over her features as she guessed his next words. “This already feels unreal enough.”

Her refusal to accept his confession stung, but he understood. “Too soon?” he murmured.

She smiled tremulously at him. “Much too soon,” she agreed. She wasn’t ready to hear the words. He wondered if she’d ever be.

He wondered with a sinking feeling if he’d ever get to find out.

After they’d made love again, he held her close to his chest as she drifted off to sleep. He stared at the shifting shadows on the ceiling of the cabin, his mood, so briefly buoyed by their intimacies, darkening by the minute. Hex had been right to guard her heart. He just wish he’d done the same.

THE AMUN RA
could go no farther. Nearly two days of flying blind through the sandstorm that had engulfed the Western Sahara had taken its toll on the ship, even at its high altitude. Sand and grit clogged the engine, the fragile membranes of the ballonets peppered with slow-leaking holes from the bullet-like momentum of the wind-blown sand. Two of the solar panels had been destroyed completely, rendering their energy reserves dangerously low, and all of the electricals were fried to high hell.

They had mere minutes left and only one chance to fly the dirigible low enough for Rowan to reach the desert floor by ladder.

Hex stared out into the gloom beyond the helm’s window with steadily mounting dread at what was about to happen. It was midday but looked like twilight, the sand so thick in the air it blocked out the sun. Even with her Iron Necklace, breathing was nearly impossible even behind the closed doors of the room, the dust so heavy it had settled over their bodies like another layer of skin.

“It is no more than a mile south of here,” Simon said to Rowan, who had bundled himself into long, white robes similar to the ones he’d first worn a month ago,
keffiyeh
wrapped around his head, a pair of pilot’s goggles strapped to his temples to protect his eyes from the excoriating winds. “Compasses are useless. You’ll have to use the sun to guide you.”

“What sun I can see,” Rowan muttered, pulling the leather strap of a water flask over his head and lining his pockets with steam flares.

Simon clapped him on the shoulder and gave him a half-hearted smile. “Just walk in a straight line. You’ll be fine.”

Hex highly doubted that. So did Simon, who cringed as soon as the words had left his mouth. He glanced apologetically at Hex and jerked his thumb toward the captain’s wheel.

“I’ll just…er, check our coordinates one more time before we touch down,” he said. He turned back to Rowan and regarded him with a sober expression and extended his hand. “Good luck.”

Rowan just nodded and shook the tinker’s hand, and Simon moved away to give them their privacy.

Finally, after a long, painful moment, Rowan turned and stared down at her with a singular focus, as if he would consume her if he could. He’d avoided meeting her eyes since they’d awakened this morning, but she couldn’t say she hadn’t done the same. It was hard to look at him even now, but she forced herself to, knowing it could very well be the last time.

No one could survive for very long in a storm like that—would Rowan really be any different? And even if he did…

Well. Who knew what fate awaited him in the tomb?

They’d said their silent goodbyes the night before, in the short respite she’d been able to take away from piloting the ship. He’d taken her against the wall of her cabin again, just like the first time, rough and passionate, though afterward they’d just held each other, naked, trembling, and desperate, for hours afterwards.

She could still feel his imprint on her, had made sure that she would have bruises on her neck, her hips and thighs, to remind her that he’d been real. That this had all not been some sort of fever dream.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” she whispered.

He took her hands in his own. “You must. How can I let people die when there’s a chance I can stop it? How can any of us?”

She shook her head in stubborn denial. “We don’t know for certain that you have anything to do...”

“I
know
, Hex. I don’t belong here.”

She was silent, unable to find a way around his words, and he smiled wryly, a bit sadly. “See, you can’t even deny it. We wouldn’t be here now if you didn’t believe it too.”

She wanted to scream in frustration, hit him,
something
, to assuage the violence of her emotions, but she knew he was right. As much as she wished differently, he
didn’t
belong here. Simon’s scientific gibberish had only confirmed what she’d already felt in her heart. Rowan moved through the world a little too bright, a little too sharp, as if he were a song written in D major while the rest of the world played in C.

Letting him go was breaking her heart, for she knew there would be no coming back from the heart of that storm, even for him. But fate had given them no other options. He would exit her life as inexplicably as he had come into it.

The way that Simon talked, the universe was at stake. She didn’t even try to understand what that meant, but she had seen for herself the devastation and chaos that followed Rowan around like a storm cloud. Rowan wouldn’t be the man she loved if he let that continue when he had a chance—no matter how small—to stop it.

Yet none of these things made it any easier.

“I don’t want to let you go,” she breathed, clutching at his collar with desperate strength, breathing in the springtime scent of him for the final time.

“I’ll find a way back to you, Hex,” he murmured.

She laughed mirthlessly into his neck. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“I intend to keep this one.”

She forced down the tears welling up in her eyes, refusing to show such abominable weakness, even though she knew that this was—and would always be, forever more—the worst moment of her life.

“Hex, I…” he began.

She stepped away from him and shook her head violently, wiping at her uncooperative eyes. She wouldn’t cry. She
wouldn’t
.

“Don’t you dare say it, damn you,” she bit out.

His shoulders slumped, and he let out a frustrated sigh. “Still too soon?” he quipped with a weak smile.

“Much too soon,” she murmured. Even if he meant every word, even if she’d been brave enough to say the words back, she couldn’t bear to hear them now.

She stood on her toes and wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him down for a kiss. It was messy and raw, all tongues and teeth and smashed noses, but it was perfect.

Only Simon’s warning that they were running out of time managed to snap them both out of it.

Rowan strode to the exit, and she forced herself to remain where she was. Otherwise she’d never let him go. He opened the heavy door, and the room was immediately engulfed by raging winds. She shielded her eyes against the biting sand, soaking in the sight of him for as long as she could.

He turned to her one last time. “I
am
coming back, Hex,” he said, as if he truly believed it.

“Of course,” she answered him, not believing it for a second.

“Wait for me,” he whispered.

She gave him a watery smile.
That
she could do for him.
That
she could believe in. “Always.”

And then he was gone.

IT TOOK HIM
but an hour to reach the edge of the storm, though it felt like much longer. Every step was a torture, dust stealing beneath the vulcanized rubber rim of the goggles, sand ripping against bits of exposed flesh so harshly that he bled his toxic blood.

Nothing human could have survived the trek, and he was beginning to doubt that even he would. He could hear the disquieting rasp in his lungs from the grit he was forced to inhale despite his protective shroud, could feel his legs grow more leaden with every step he took. He wasn’t even sure if he was walking in the right direction anymore, all of his senses muddled in the maelstrom.

But then the world shifted around him. One moment he was bracing himself against the choking, deafening winds, and the next he was stumbling into bright blue skies and calm desert sands, the whistle of a gentle breeze the only thing that broke the sudden, engulfing silence.

He fell to his knees and stared around him in awe. The storm still raged silently at his back, just a few feet away, buffeting itself angrily against an unseen wall that stretched in a giant circle around him. It was like a colossal, invisible cylinder, shoved down into the very epicenter of the storm.

His sense of impending disaster only increased in the eerie calm, for he suspected what he would find in that epicenter. He glanced ahead of him to the ominously still dune, sands melted in time, the sky above it split like light fracturing in water. The Tomb of Apophis. The place where he’d come into this world. He started toward it, even though everything in him wanted to run straight back to Hex.

He found the entrance to the tomb easily—someone was expecting him—and began his descent with the help of the steam flares Simon had given him. Even before he’d reached the bottom, however, he knew he was not alone. A thin light seeped up the tunnel, and a gentle hum of energy caused the ground beneath his hands and legs to vibrate. He came to the end of the shaft and dropped into the antechamber, his boots thudding against the ancient stone floor.

Steam lamps lined the walls, illuminating the graceful lines and faded blues and ochres of the ancient artwork. The giant stone Hex claimed he’d once thrown across the room was propped halfway across the burial chamber entrance, and beyond it a strange white light pulsed like a heartbeat. He could feel the heat of that light from where he stood at the other end of the room.

The sheikh sat against the wall near the burial chamber, wrapped in black robes, his knees tucked up against his chest. He raised his bowed head abruptly, as if startled awake by the sound of his approach, and blinked open his amber eyes.

He stood in greeting and pushed away his obscuring headdress. Underneath, his hair was pitch black and wavy, molded into disarray by the fabric. His face was pale and spare, his high cheekbones sharp as glass, his lips pulled into a tight, grim line. The man was definitely no Bedouin.

Rowan’s head began to throb, and he closed his eyes against it, a wave of dizziness momentarily throwing him off balance. He leaned against the wall behind him and struggled to regain his equilibrium. When he opened his eyes again, the man was walking toward him, unfastening a leather scabbard around his waist and casting it aside, then pulling apart the edges of his robe.

Rowan caught sight of a thick, silvery metal chain around the man’s neck that gleamed in the torchlight, a heavy, spherical pendant made of clockwork parts swinging from it as he moved. It looked…almost alive, somehow, the clockwork moving in a complicated rhythm, the center glowing with the same yellow-amber as their shared eyes.

When the man let his robes fall behind him and continued to advance upon Rowan in nothing but a very loose-fitting pair of trousers, miles of pale, naked flesh on display, Rowan squeezed his eyes shut once more and held up a hand to halt the man’s progress. It wasn’t that he was a prude. He just didn’t particularly care to see the sheikh in his altogether.

“What are you doing?” he choked out.

“I’m undressing,” explained the sheikh slowly, as if he were talking to an idiot.

“I can see that. Why?”

“To show you this,” the man said with obvious impatience.

Rowan opened his eyes reluctantly, prepared for the worst. Fortunately, the man’s disrobing had stopped before he reached his trousers. He’d been beginning to panic.

His attention immediately snagged upon the brilliantly colored tattoo that curved over the top of the sheikh’s broad shoulder and continued down his back. It was the Chinese dragon Rowan had dreamed about, the same one he’d seen on Netherfield’s ancient papyrus.

A sharp pain flared behind his eyelids, a surge of bright white light momentarily blinding him, as if it had seeped out of the burial chamber’s confines and straight into his head. A flood of disjointed images—memories—followed in the light’s wake, sending him staggering once more into the wall. The sheikh was in those hazy memories, as well as a beautiful girl with golden hair and emerald eyes.

His family.

He had no proof that the perception was accurate, but it
felt
right.

Yet he still could not reconcile this innate kinship he felt for the man before him with everything else he’d learned over the past month.

“Apophis?” he breathed.

The sheikh—or whoever he was—looked at him with a mixture of disgust and impatience that was so familiar Rowan’s heart ached at the sight. Oh, he
knew
this man. He
knew
he’d been on the receiving end of that very same look for ages.

“For the love of…not you too,” the sheikh muttered.

“You were in my dreams,” Rowan said defensively. “And on a four-thousand-year-old scroll. The Swede called you Apophis.”

The man arched an eyebrow at this. “The Swede?”

Rowan gestured toward their matching eyes. “One of us? Tall, Scandinavian, giant arsehole? Sound familiar?”

The man’s whole body froze at this description, and something in his expression hardened even further. He looked positively murderous. “She said nothing of…” he murmured cryptically.

“You know him, then?” Rowan demanded.

“Unfortunately. And so do you,” the man ground out.

Rowan was quite done with people telling him what he did and didn’t know. “If you know who I am and what the hell is going on, now would be a good time to tell me. It would have been an even better time a month ago.”

The man’s brow furrowed in frustration. “I couldn’t tell you then.”

“Why the hell not?”

The furrow grew deeper, as if the man were struggling to find just the right words. “Because I would have changed the future in a way that would have been…unacceptable.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

The man sighed as if
Rowan
were the one who was being incredibly obtuse.
Ha.
Well, Rowan rather thought it the other way around.

“Do you remember the story I told you about my brother?” the sheikh began.

“What about it?” he asked warily.

“That brother was you.
You
are my family, Rowan, and even though you may hate me when you have your memory back, just remember I gave you as much time as I could with Miss Bartholomew.”

The sheikh came forward, lifting the necklace over his head and offering it to Rowan. The closer the man got—the closer the necklace got—the more his skin crawled and his head ached. Rowan backed away instinctively.

“You’ve been manipulating me this whole time,” Rowan breathed, nearly on his knees from the ache in his head.

The man nodded tersely. “Yes. I won’t deny it.” He stopped short at Rowan’s obvious reluctance to go anywhere near the necklace and clenched his jaw in frustration. “I call it a damper,” he grit out. “The physics of the device are too complicated to explain right now, but it will restore your memories. Touching it should do the trick.”

Rowan eyed the strange clockwork amulet swinging on the chain skeptically, his stomach turning somersaults as the pain in his head intensified.

He should have been jumping at the chance to have his memories back, but he wasn’t even sure he wanted them anymore. From all he’d learned from the professor, the Swede, and even this familiar stranger, his memories were not going to be easy ones. Besides, what good would touching a
necklace
do him? The whole situation just seemed so absurd.

Yet how could he refuse the offer, even if it was absurd? What
hadn’t
been absurd in his life in the past month?

He glanced up at the sheikh, who just nodded his grudging encouragement.

Anything for this nightmare to be over
, he thought.
Anything that brings me closer to returning to Hex.

He reached out his hand and touched the device, and everything went blank inside his mind, as cold and bright and barren as snowfall in winter.

And then he remembered.

ROWAN HARKER, EARL
of Llewellyn, lived the past four hundred and twenty-two years all over again at breakneck speed. Time stretched, twisted, and curved in on itself, sinuous as a snake, as a parade of memories flashed through his mind, brighter and more vivid than the blinding light that had engulfed him the moment his fingers closed around the amulet.

He remembered a short, brutal childhood he thought he’d long forgotten, during the final years of the fifteenth century. A faceless mother who’d died alongside a stillborn sister before he was five. The callous hand of his father and older brothers.

He remembered cold winters in a drafty, filthy castle in the wilds of newly conquered Wales, where his father, a younger son, had been granted an earldom—and a native bride—for his decidedly ruthless service to the English Crown. The constant threat of war and disease against which even his rich, aristocratic family had no real protection.

He remembered escaping to Oxford at fourteen as a companion to his older cousin, Gabriel Harker, already the Duke of Brightlingsea. It had been an honor even his father couldn’t refuse, as Brightlingsea—rich, powerful, with the ear of the King—was a force to be reckoned with, even at eighteen.

Out from under the thumb of the earl, and in the company of a best friend who loved him as his own family never had, he’d thrown himself into his studies. He hadn’t the beautiful, frighteningly massive intellect of his cousin, but he’d loved the written word of the philosophers and poets in all the languages he could absorb.

He remembered his eventual summons back home. He’d lost his older brothers, one by one, to either battle, court intrigues, or illness, until he was the only one left standing, much to his father’s disappointment.

He remembered his marriage to Anne—arranged at first, but then fortified by mutual love. Then the ensuing stillbirths and infant deaths—common enough in those days, but no less heartbreaking to him. His father had always accused him of being too soft, and he’d not been wrong.

Only two of their children, Mary and Christian, had survived childhood. He’d buried six other tiny bodies alongside his parents, brothers, and sisters in the family crypt before he was twenty-five. Each visit had cost him a little piece of his soul, and after the sixth one he’d had enough. So had Anne, and the springtide promise of their marriage had quickly faded into an acrimonious winter.

Insane with grief, he’d fled to the Continent with Gabriel, unwilling to suffer another death, fearing that next time it would be Anne he was forced to mourn.

He remembered that those heartbreaking losses in Wales were why he’d eventually given into Gabriel’s mad scheme in Florence. It had all begun when Gabriel had met Leo, a man with a brain as massive—and at times as dark and unfathomable—as Gabriel’s. They had been a combustible combination and ultimately unstoppable in their pursuit of the impossible. Rowan’s initial reservations—ethical, moral, and all “tedious” in Gabriel’s opinion—soon fell to the wayside as he too was swept into the whirlwind.

How could he
not
be, especially when they’d discovered that their Heartsblood could heal and extend life? The gaudy allure of immortality, the seductive promise of never having to face death or bury another loved one—of living free of the crushing pain of loss forever: how could anyone human refuse such a temptation?

He remembered returning to his wife and children with renewed hope. He’d thought the pain of his transformation would be worth it in the end. He’d never have to bury another tiny body in frozen Welsh earth or see his beloved wife wither and die.

But when he’d revealed his secret to Anne, she’d turned away from him in fear and disgust. And when his children had come of age and learned the truth of what he was, they too had rejected him. To them all, he had become an abomination against God.

He wasn’t sure they were wrong.

After that, he remembered centuries of darkness and self-recrimination. He’d become increasingly disillusioned with the dangerous games the Elder Council had begun to play with human politics, and angry at himself and Gabriel for what they had wrought upon the world. Neither of them had fully appreciated the consequences.