Of Steel and Steam

by Pauline Creeden et al.

  Dmitri looked at his physician. “I… I don’t feel well…”

  “You’ll be right as rain as soon as I get you back to the shop.”

  “The shop?” Victoria asked, confused. “Don’t you do his treatments in hospital?”

  Dr. Klein looked affronted. “Certainly not. Do not concern yourself, Lady Victoria. All is in hand. We will simply need to make our exit here.”

  She held her horse’s reins as Dmitri gave her an apologetic smile and rode away with Dr. Klein in close proximity. The Russian’s movements seemed less sure than before, and she worried for him. Victoria watched them go, then decided that her concern for Dmitri was such that she needed to see this through. She followed them.

  The men rode not to a hospital or to Prince Orpov’s residence. Victoria was surprised to see them heading directly to her father’s workshop. They rode to the front of the building, where Dmitri all but fell from the saddle, his limbs stiffening and his movements jerky and unnatural. Dr. Klein helped him inside. Victoria rode to the front door, too, her concern causing her to throw caution to the wind. She dismounted and hurried inside.

  In the main workshop, Dmitri was being bound to a table by her father and Dr. Klein. His limbs, waist and chest were held in place by thick leather straps. His eyes were glassy, and he showed no movement. To Victoria’s eyes, he had even stopped breathing. She stopped short, horrified.

  Her father looked up in annoyed surprise. “Victoria! What in the world are you doing here?”

  “I came to see if I could help,” she said. She stepped closer. “Is he…?”

  “Get out of here, girl!” Prince Orpov came out of the office and strode to her, taking her elbow in his hand. “He doesn’t need your assistance. We can handle this.”

  “But…” She tried to pull away, but the Russian’s grip was inexorable. “What’s wrong with him? Is he dying?”

  “Not your concern,” Lord Charles told her harshly. “Get out!”

  “It is my concern,” she argued. “Papa, I love him.”

  He gaped at her, then returned to his business. Dr. Klein attached a circlet bristling with electrodes to Dmitri’s head, and Lord Charles busied himself cranking an electrical generator. Over his shoulder, he spat, “You’ve picked a fine time to decide to act like a silly typical female. I raised you to be smarter than that!”

  Prince Orpov pulled her away, and she fought against him. “No…”

  Dr. Klein shook his head. “You cannot love him, girl,” he said, adjusting the metal piece around Dmitri’s head. He donned rubber gloves to attach wires from the generator to the electrodes on the circlet.

  “Why not?”

  The German answered in a distracted tone. “Because he is no man.”

  “What a horrible thing to say!” she objected. “He may be injured, but that’s no reason to…”

  “Woman, stop your prattle!” Prince Orpov said. He wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted her from her feet, carrying her to the door. He deposited her on the street and hissed. “Go away!”

  She tried to look through the door into the warehouse, but Prince Orpov shut it in her face. The last thing she saw was Dmitri convulsing as electricity arced around him.

  It was long after dark, and Victoria was nearly ready for bed when there was a soft rap on her bedroom door. Ida went to see who it was, and she let Lord Charles into the room.

  “Ida,” he said softly, “leave us.”

  The automaton walked out into the hallway without a word, obedient to the end. Victoria stood and pulled her dressing gown closed more tightly.

  “Papa,” she greeted. “How is Mr. Orpov?”

  He sighed. “You embarrassed me today.”

  Her face flushed with shame. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

  “I know. But the fact remains that you barged into my workspace and argued with me in front of my colleagues. I have always tolerated your habit of speaking out of turn, but in that circumstance… unacceptable.”

  She looked down and repeated, “I’m sorry.”

  He sat heavily on her bed, and he looked tired. Not just weary from a long day, but bone-tired, as if the cares of his entire life had fallen upon him all at once. Victoria sat beside him.

  “Mr. Orpov has been returned to proper functioning, but we don’t know how much longer that will last. The interval between his treatments is shortening all the time, and it bodes ill for his continued survival.”

  She felt her chest tighten, and she looked down at her hands, which were twisting together in her lap. She forced the nervous motion to stop. “Oh… Then… he’s going to die?”

  Lord Charles laughed bitterly. “My dear child, that boy is already dead.”

  Victoria didn’t know what to say, so she stayed silent. Her father rose and started to pace.

  “We think it’s because the brain was injured in his fall. We’re working with a faulty biological component, and it’s not capable of maintaining the charges we give it. Now, if we were to start over with more planning, more time, we might be certain to obtain a brain that wasn’t damaged. I’ll wager - and Dr. Klein agrees with me - that the result would have been more favorable. But Prince Orpov is funding these experiments for the express purpose of bringing Dmitri back from the darkness.”

  A horrible thought began to prey upon her mind, and she felt a chill. “Papa… what have you done?”

  “Nothing so bad as you might think,” he answered, pacing more quickly. He took out his flask and downed a liberal swallow of whiskey. “Nothing so bad as what we’re planning.”

  She stood. “Papa, you’re frightening me.”

  He pointed to her with the hand holding the flask. “That shows you have good instincts, despite your performance today.” Lord Charles gestured toward the closed bedroom door. “I built Ida eighteen years ago. She is a reasonable facsimile of a human being, but imperfect. Flawed. Since then, I have worked to refine my designs, and I have come to realize that to make a human being, you need the thing that makes a human in the first place: the anatomical brain.”

  She felt ill. “Dmitri is a construct, isn’t he?”

  “And a brilliant one!” He drained his flask, looked for more, and put it back into his pocket with a disgusted sigh. “He’s the state of the art. The human brain is the thing I cannot replicate. It’s too complex, too varied. It’s the seat of memory, of emotion, of personality, perhaps even of the soul… I cannot build a brain as good as that which nature has provided.”

  Victoria took a step toward the door, but her father blocked her way. She stopped short, alarmed. There was a look in his eyes she hadn’t seen before, and it frightened her badly.

  “Papa, don’t.”

  “We could have used a derelict, found in the slums. Nobody would notice such a thing. But who knows what filth is in their bodies, and what kills them could be just as deleterious to the results as Dmitri’s head injury. And most of them are old and played-out. No, we need someone young, healthy… with an agile brain and mind.”

  He fixed his gaze on her, and she felt like a rat in a cage. She backed away from him, and he stalked her until the backs of her knees struck the mattress.

  “Please know, my dear, that this is the last thing that I want to do, but my work is so important, and before you’re wed, you’re, well… pardon me for saying so… expendable.”

  “Expendable?” she echoed in disbelief. “I can’t believe you’re saying this!”

  He pushed her shoulder, and she toppled back onto the mattress. He reached out for her, and she had no idea what exactly he had planned, but she was certain he had murder in mind. She kicked out with both feet, catching him in the stomach. He fell onto the floor with a loud outrushing of air, and she fled past him and into the corridor.

  Her flight was short-lived. Dr. Klein was waiting there, and Prince Orpov, whose red-rimmed eyes and alcoholic breath dismayed her. Dr. Klein was stone cold sober, however, and he grabbed her tightly while Orpov pressed a cloth
to her nose and mouth. She struggled against them, but she was overpowered, and soon the world went black.

  She woke in confusion, a million shattered images swimming through her mind. Victoria remembered the debutante soiree, and the dress she wore. She remembered dancing with her father. She remembered her aunt, disapproving as always, and Lady Susannah playing the belle of someone else’s ball. Her head hurt terribly, and it took a long time before she was willing to open her eyes.

  When she did, she was in her bed, and Ida’s familiar voice said, “Ah! There she is. Awake at last.” The automaton’s soothing touch smoothed her hair back from her sweat-sheened forehead. “Poor dove. You’ve been so ill.”

  Victoria shook her head. She felt as if she should have remembered something important, but the more she reached after it, the further it fluttered away. She sighed and looked up at her caretaker.

  “Hello, Ida.”

  “Hello, dear. You gave us quite a fright.”

  She put a hand to her aching head. “What happened?”

  Her father spoke from a chair near the bed. “The night of the party, you developed a high fever. You were very ill for quite a while. We were afraid we were going to lose you.”

  Victoria smiled weakly. “I’m not going anywhere, Papa.”

  “This I know.” He smiled and came into her field of vision. “You were so ill, and I was so worried, that I purchased a little something for you. I hope it will let me see you smile again.”

  She looked up at him. “Of course it will. What is it?”

  Lord Charles handed her a jewelry box, and she opened it carefully. A beautiful gold locket lay inside, covered in delicate engraving of ivy and roses.

  “Why, Papa! It’s beautiful.”

  “The best part is inside.”

  She opened it eagerly. The locket contained no photographs, which she might have expected. Instead, it held a delicate clockwork dragonfly.

  THE END

  Unwelcome Gifts

  A Ruby Silver Story

  Margo Bond Collins

  Unwelcome Gifts © 2020 Margo Bond Collins

  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Chapter 1

  I always liked spending Christmas in the mountains.

  When Trip and I got the message that there was some kind of bugaboo tearing it up in some tiny mining town in the Rockies, I was delighted for us to point the horses’ noses in that direction.

  We’d been in San Antonio together, dealing with an infestation of trolls under their newest bridge. But as much as I liked Mexican food and touring the Alamo, I was looking forward to some snow.

  We had to get up to Fort Worth before we could get tickets for the two of us, my horse Lakota, and Trip’s horse Bandito on a train headed toward the Rockies. As soon as we hit Fort Worth, I checked us in to spend the night in a real hotel, where I ordered a bath for the first time in weeks.

  When I’d traded in my demon-hunting rifle to join up with a monster-hunting agency, it hadn’t occurred to me how dirty that kind of hunting could be. Troll killing left behind the kind of stench that you simply could not scrub away at a washbasin with a single washcloth. For that matter, I’d had a couple of dips in the San Antonio River and even had the opportunity to dump more than one bucket of well water over my hair. It still hadn’t been enough to clear away the troll stink.

  But Fort Worth, for all that it was mostly a hub for cattle drives—or maybe because of that fact—had some of the best amenities to be found west of the Mississippi.

  Trip was kind enough to let me use the bathwater first.

  I sank into the hot, scented water up to my neck and stretched out my legs until my toes rested on the far side of the copper tub the hotel clerk had sent up to my room and had the hotel help fill.

  “Read the telegram to me again,” I instructed Trip.

  “Ruby, darling, I have read it to you repeatedly, despite knowing that you are quite capable of reading it to yourself.”

  “One more time?”

  He fished it out of the saddlebag hanging from the back of his chair. “FIRE DEMON IN LEADVILLE COLORADO STOP MEET IN HOTEL GLENWOOD DENVER SOONEST STOP CARTER CARLISLE, P.I. AGENT & GENERAL MANAGER.”

  “And that’s it?” I asked for what must have been the fifth time.

  “That’s all. Looks like this new outfit doesn’t give as much detail as the last one.”

  Trip and I had once worked for a nationwide agency that dealt with problems of the supernatural kind. Our severed contract didn’t allow us to advertise that fact, though. Or even tell people which one. Anyway, at that time, the old company hadn’t had much competition. But since then, a couple of others had sprung up. One of them, The Psychical Investigations Agency, had approached us while we were in San Antonio with such astounding employment offers that we simply could not turn them down, particularly once they agreed to allow us to remain a team.

  This would be the first case assigned to us by the new company.

  I was rather looking forward to meeting with the company representative. The representative in San Antonio had demonstrated to us several surprisingly advanced—and, I hoped, effective—weapons to take into our ongoing battle with the supernatural forces arrayed against us in this world.

  “Have you ever dealt with a fire demon before?” I asked Trip now, lazily running the soap up and down my arms, one after the other.

  “No.” Trip’s answer was perfunctory, his attention distracted by the motion of my hands on my body.

  “Do you think any of the weapons Mr. Johnson showed us would be especially helpful against one?” I ran my fingertips across my collarbone to test my emerging theory about his interest. His darkening gaze followed my hands.

  “Trip, darling, do you think perhaps there is room in this tub for two?” I hadn’t even finished my question before he was standing and peeling out of his riding clothes, leaving them in a pile on the floor.

  Dear Reader, there was, indeed, room for two.

  Barely.

  Chapter 2

  Although Mr. Carlisle had specified that he wanted us to make our way to Denver as quickly as possible, we spent a full day in Fort Worth rejoining the ranks of what passed for society in the Wild West of the 1880s. Primarily, that meant having our current clothes laundered and using some of the funds the P.I. Agency had advanced us to purchase new clothing suitable for a business meeting in a hotel in Denver.

  This season’s skirt, the dressmaker had assured me, was much narrower than last season’s, and complete with ruffles and flounces and more lace than I could bear to contemplate.

  Curses.

  “This will take some time,” I informed Trip, who had simply placed an order with a tailor he’d used before. “Perhaps you could return in an hour or so?”

  He grinned, his cheerful demeanor, as always, making me happy in return. “Of course. I’ll look in on our riding gear.”

  With a tip of his hat, he departed the dress shop to attend to having all our leathers examined and repaired.

  I turned to the dressmaker. “We should discuss the skirt first.”

  By the time Trip returned, I had thoroughly offended the dressmaker’s sensibilities, but given a large enough financial in
centive, she had sent one of her girls to fetch the local corsetière and her best seamstresses.

  “What is this?” Trip asked, picking up one of several sketches from a side table next to the upholstered chairs in the dressmaker’s front room. With one forefinger, he traced the loops and pockets I’d added.

  “That, my darling, is a tactical corset. I’ve just created it.”

  He frowned. “I thought you hated corsets.”

  “Yes. But I’m growing fond of the idea of being able to carry some of those P.I. gadgets Mr. Johnson demonstrated.”

  His gaze grew heated again as he leaned in close to whisper, “I look forward to assisting you as you remove it.”

  I gazed at the drawing, frowning. I had specifically designed it so as to be able to both dress and undress myself without assistance.

  It won’t do to announce that.

  “Shall I wrap myself in ribbons and bows for Christmas, as well?” I finally asked with a wicked smile.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Trip all but growled.

  Luckily for what remained of the dressmaker’s sensibilities, one of the seamstresses interrupted us at that moment. “Miz Elaine says to tell you she’ll have the dress delivered to your hotel by tomorrow morning.”

  “Thank you.” As the seamstress retreated again to the workroom in the back, I turned to Trip. “I do believe I feel the need for another bath.”

  “Bring you to a city and you turn into a pure hedonist.” His smile belied his words, though, and he practically raced me back to our room.

  Chapter 3

  Our new wardrobes were indeed delivered overnight, including a simple traveling dress—with a wider-than-was-fashionable skirt—I had ordered to wear on the train. It didn’t have much room for weapons, but I hoped I wouldn’t need to pull a gun on the train.