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

When the chamber was finally completed, he could feel the static charge slowly gathering in the heavens above him, trapped in the rift, the result of an overload of conductive energy gathering in one spot. It wouldn’t be long until the electrical storm hit. Just one strike was all he needed to pry open the portal wide enough to send him home…or back to London anyway.

He wasn’t sure where home was these days, or even what that word meant. He hadn’t been sure for centuries.

Most of the workers had dispersed by then, their jobs done. Some ardent followers remained behind, performing their frankly disturbing rituals to Apophis, but he’d ordered them to stay a healthy distance away, far beyond the melted sand, where at least they wouldn’t be burned alive when the storm hit. They were the ones who would eventually seal up the tomb behind him and make sure it remained hidden and—hopefully—forgotten by time. He wouldn’t have need of it again for thousands of years.

He thought about waving goodbye to their distant figures but stopped short of making a complete fool of himself. There wasn’t really anyone to say goodbye to, even after forty-seven years. He didn’t have friends here. Not that he had many where he’d come from either, aside from Rowan. He’d been extremely careful to keep his distance, as much as possible, from the people around him. The risk of changing something crucial because of one careless gesture was just too high, though he’d probably already done significant damage as it was.

He just hoped London still existed. That
Rowan
still existed, and that it was not too late to save him—and the rest of the world—from his own hubris.

Again.

So he entered the chamber, sat down amid the gleaming walls in the robes that would soon burn from his body during the crossing, and closed his eyes, going over the calculations in his mind for the thousandth time, trying to discover where he’d gone wrong forty-seven years ago and four thousand years in the future.

Just as the lightning struck and time cracked open, he opened his eyes and gasped in surprise as the answer suddenly came to him.

A misplaced decimal point.

Damn.

Such a silly thing.

Western Sahara Desert, 1887

HEX BARTHOLOMEW TURNED
her face into the burning, unforgiving desert sun shining through the porthole window and tried to calm the chaos in her mind—at least for a few moments. She was at the ass-end of nowhere and knee-deep in trouble, and her odds of coming out alive were even longer than usual. Panicking would get her nothing but dead, a state she was determined to avoid at all costs.

The bright light seared away the worst of her anxiety until she was able to turn back to the task at hand with something resembling serenity. She reached beneath the captain’s table and retrieved the small, pearl handled pistol Janus’s men had failed to confiscate.

After checking to make sure it was fully loaded, she shoved the weapon into the discreet leather holster built into her right boot. Then she sent up a quick prayer to the heavens that she wouldn’t need to use it. She was a horrible shot.

With the way her luck had gone lately, however, she wasn’t holding her breath on that account. The use of firearms was fast becoming an inevitability.

She strode out of the captain’s roost into the raw desert sunlight and crossed the burnished deck of the
Amun Ra
. Simon was waiting for her on starboard side, his lean, sun-browned face set into grim lines behind brass-rimmed pilot’s goggles. He lifted the goggles off his head and handed them over to her, his gray eyes reflecting the same worry she’d been carrying around since Cairo. He didn’t like what was happening in the desert below any more than she did.

“Anything changed?” she asked, slipping the goggles on and adjusting the dials on the sides to bring the figures on the desert floor into focus.

Simon had rigged the goggles with a multitude of functions, including the binocular-like ability to spy on people from great distances. It was one of many useful devices the tinker had bestowed upon her over the years. It was also one of her favorites.

“Janus is growing more uneasy by the minute,” Simon replied in his lightly accented English.

Neither American nor British in origin, his accent was as much a mystery as his surname. But after all they’d been through together, he was welcome to his secrets. God knew she had enough of her own to sort through without prying into someone else’s. And she had a feeling his were even worse, considering how she’d first met him five years ago in London.

She zoomed in on the blunt-featured, mud-haired Irishman with the bad sunburn and chipped front tooth who’d plagued her life for the past few days. Harlan Janus—though she doubted that was his real name. A mercenary who gave a bad name to all other mercenaries. A man with no honor whatsoever, who sold his services to the highest bidder.

And this time, that bidder was the Souk, the consortium of smugglers, thugs, and general ne’er-do-wells who controlled Egyptian trade, legal and otherwise. In the nearly two years she’d spent in Egypt, she’d managed to steer clear of the Souk’s notice with a few well-placed bribes, a fast ship, and a hell of a lot of luck. But her luck had run out two days ago.

She shifted her focus to the cause of all of her recent trouble: her thrice-bedamned father. A ruddy-faced Scot, barrel-chested and as full of hot air as the
Amun Ra
, Hubert Bartholomew was hard to miss, even with the wisps of white that had begun to mute his fiery red curls. He stood wedged between a pair of Janus’s brutish subordinates, glancing uneasily between Janus and an envoy of Bedouin warriors. If thick-skinned Hubert was getting nervous, then things must truly be heading toward disaster.

Hex could feel the tension in the air, even from the deck of the
Amun Ra
. It had been growing thicker and thicker ever since they’d moored up late last night at their final destination only to discover a rather alarming number of Bedouins setting up camp in the same place.

Janus, bless his vile little Irish heart, had not expected or prepared for such an obstacle. His twenty-odd men might have a Western-styled arsenal at their disposal, but the Bedouins outnumbered them five to one and came packing a few guns of their own. Not even the most well armed mercenary relished his odds in combat with a Bedouin warrior, much less an army of them.

And Janus had to know that if push came to shove, he couldn’t count on Hex’s cooperation. Blackmail and coercion would only get him so far, even if he
were
backed by the Souk. If it came down to a fight with a third party, Hex planned on remaining as neutral as Switzerland. And getting the hell out of there as fast as the
Amun Ra
could fly.

If
it could fly after last night’s spectacular malfunction, that was. Whatever had happened out there in the desert had fried her ship’s navigational controls to hell.

Janus said something to Omar, and after a fraught moment—no doubt because whatever Janus had said was idiotic—Omar turned and translated Janus’s words to the Bedouin leader, a tall robed figure perched high on a festooned warhorse. He was certainly a unique sight, with an array of wicked-looking blades strapped over various parts of his body, an elaborately woven
keffiyeh
on his head, and a pair of blue-tinted sun spectacles covering his eyes.

Whatever Janus’s words had been, however, they obviously displeased the sheikh, who shouted something back that made Omar blanch and cower even lower.

Poor man. Omar was as unwilling a participant in this misadventure as she was. A “business associate” of her father’s, Omar had been in the wrong place at the wrong time—i.e. in the company of Hubert Bartholomew, which was
always
the wrong damn place to be—when Janus had come to collect on a debt Hubert owed the Souk.

He’d only managed to save his neck by offering his services as an interpreter. Even Janus, thick as he was, had seen the value in this, as none of his crew spoke anything other than English—and even
that
very badly indeed.

Despite Omar’s original dealings with Hubert, which were undoubtedly less than legitimate, the little opportunist had no business being caught up in this deadly tangle. He was yet another endangered life for which to damn her father if—
when
—things went tits up.

Janus answered the Bedouin’s shouts with shouts of his own and gestured vehemently at the dunes behind him. Hex shivered inwardly as she studied the seemingly innocuous bumps in the otherwise flat desert landscape. After last night’s storm, however, “innocuous” was the last word she’d use to describe them.

Covering the largest dune was a gleaming, glass-like mass in the shape of a gargantuan splatter of rain frozen in time. Simon had called it a fulgurite, a phenomenon caused by lightning melting the sand, but the sheer size of the site was troubling Simon’s analytical mind. He claimed that a lightning strike of the magnitude needed to create such a giant anomaly was a scientific impossibility.

It was certainly peculiar. No one, including the Bedouins, who’d spent generations roaming the Sahara, had ever seen or heard of anything like it. They too had been drawn to the area because of the inexplicable storm the evening before, and they seemed intent on remaining.

That had certainly put a spanner in Janus’s plans to pillage and plunder the secret tomb, which just happened to be located beneath the petrified dune. The Bedouins, however, were as determined to keep Janus out as Janus was determined to strong-arm his way in, and Hex could see no happy ending for either party.

“We could leave right now, you know,” Simon said softly. “Janus has forgotten us completely.”

Hex sighed and pushed back her goggles, glancing around the empty deck. Simon was right. All of Janus’s men were below and likely to be massacred by the Bedouins. And it would be no skin off her back if they were. She’d heard plenty about the atrocities Janus had committed in his long criminal career. Moreover, she’d had the dubious pleasure of his company for the past two days—two days spent fearing for her virtue, such as it was, as well as her life—so she hadn’t the slightest compunction about leaving him to his fate.

She knew what kind of men he and his associates were. She’d be performing an act of altruism for all of humanity by leaving them behind to desiccate. She certainly doubted Janus planned to let
her
live after her usefulness to him as a pilot had expired.

Yet there was Omar to consider…and her father. She glanced down at her gloved hands and flexed them at the knuckles, the click-clack of grinding metal cogs and wheels muted by the leather covering them. A familiar ball of angry resentment rose up inside of her, choking her conscience and whispering at her to heed Simon’s advice. But she stuffed that ball of poison back down as quickly as it had come.

She was not
that
callous, not yet anyway.

“Much as it pains me, I cannot leave him behind,” she said with no small amount of bitterness. She handed the goggles back to him. “I’m sorry you were caught up in this, Simon.”

Simon’s mouth flattened into a hard line, but he nodded in understanding. He, like Omar, had been the victim of rotten timing when Hubert had shown up at the
Amun Ra’s
berth with Janus and his men in tow, demanding to be ferried out into the desert. Simon had been doing her a favor that day by repairing one of the sun panels that fueled the dirigible. He’d hardly expected to be press-ganged into a smuggler’s service.

“I cannot leave him behind without at least trying to rescue him,” she continued grudgingly.

He sighed and ran his hand through his unkempt hair. “He doesn’t deserve you, Hex.”

She quirked her lips doubtfully. “I don’t know about that. Sometimes I think we
do
deserve each other. I’m no angel, as you well know.”

“Just watch yourself down there.”

She patted her well-stocked boot. “Don’t you worry. I’ve faced worse than Harlan Janus,” she said with more bravado than she felt, for while she
had
faced worse than Harlan Janus, every one of those encounters had ended damned unpleasantly for everyone involved.

Simon smiled at her wryly. “And twenty mercenaries. And a tribe of angry Bedouins.
And
your father.”

She rolled her eyes. Simon was even more of a cynic than she was. “Thanks for reminding me. But I can take care of myself.” Or so she hoped.

“I know you can. But it’s not the people I’m worried about so much as that storm last night. That dune wasn’t hit by mere lightning,” he said.

“What else could it be?”

Simon stared intently toward the glassy mound, and she could tell the gearwheels of his brilliant mind were churning feverishly. “Something new,” he murmured, unable to disguise the curiosity and awe from his voice.

That
did not sound good. She didn’t know what Simon could possibly be worried about, or why she too felt so unsettled. The lightning storm—or whatever those bright bursts of light had been on the horizon—had long passed before they’d even arrived at the site last night, and whatever lay buried in the secret tomb was four thousand years old and quite dead.

But despite the blue sky, a storm still lurked in the atmosphere, like some slumbering dragon. The smell of ozone lay heavy in the air, and static electricity had sparked and crackled all around them since they had dropped anchor last night. Her instincts told her that something was…off, and she’d long ago learned to trust those instincts.

There were other worrisome things that Simon couldn’t explain away, for her controls weren’t the only thing bollocksed up. The sun panel Simon had just repaired two days ago had malfunctioned yet again, further hobbling the
Amun Ra
. It was a coincidence Hex could have dismissed as unrelated to their present circumstances, had it not been for the inexplicable behavior of the ship’s compass and every timepiece on board, including the one around her wrist. Their dials had not stopped spinning in wild circles since they’d come within a mile of their present location, as if all the laws of physics had ceased to exist. It was just downright eerie.

“How much longer on repairing that panel?” she asked as she hoisted herself over the side of the dirigible and onto one of the collapsible emergency ladders Janus’s men had used earlier.

Simon tore his wandering mind from the dune and back to their most pressing concern. “At least a day.”

“Make it half a day, Simon. We won’t get far without it.”

“Aye-aye, Captain,” he said, gifting her with a mock salute.

She rolled her eyes at his friendly insolence, gripped the sides of the ladder, and began the fifty-foot climb down to the desert floor. When she had two booted feet firmly planted in the sand, Simon hoisted the ladder out of the reach of unwanted stowaways and saluted her again.

She gave Simon a final wave and trudged toward the drama unfolding in front of the dunes. Omar noticed her approach first and gave her a wide-eyed look of entreaty, as if
she
could somehow sort out this mess.

Well, he was in for a grave disappointment on that count. The most she could do was bide her time and wait for a moment when Janus’s men were distracted enough to forget about their hostages…preferably before any sort of bloodshed could commence.