Félix kept his personal acquisitions down to three small suitcases and a large trunk. When Crawley insisted they’d make room for his valuables, Félix only tapped the side of his head. “This is my most precious cargo. I can make any tool I need. In any event, I intend to drink a lot of wine and flirt with pretty Italian ladies and tinker in the Milani family’s shed. I happily surrender grander pursuits to my apprentice.”
Once the upstairs was cleared, they dug into the first floor. Félix and Cornelius directed Crawley to the most valuable and versatile bits of clockwork and supplies, but once that was done, the goal was to make off with as much as the Farthing could carry before the secret police arrived. Master Félix, less nimble on a ladder if they needed to flee in a hurry, retired to the ship and made himself busy improving the engine to more efficiently haul so much weight. Cornelius stayed below, assisting in selection and warning Crawley off items not worth the burden. The captain loved, he soon discovered, anything that looked flashy, filled with gears and wires. He often paused to effuse over this or that bit of junk which Crawley insisted would look a treat on the side of the ship or on their hat, or sewn into their lapel.
The party ended, however, when there came a timid knock at the kitchen door. Crawley drew his pistol, but Cornelius held up a hand to stay them when he heard a familiar timid call through the wood.
“It’s Louise. Our maid. Félix said he let her go weeks ago. I wonder why she’s come back.”
Crawley glowered. “Could be a trap.”
Cornelius doubted it—Louise was such a sweet girl. But given how much of his life had been compromised, he supposed he had to consider she’d been brought here under duress. “I have to answer, to make certain she’s safe.”
“Very well. But take care.”
The captain hid behind the curtain to the pantry, pistol cocked and ready as Cornelius opened the door with the chain still in place. “Louise?”
“Oh! Master Cornelius.” Louise’s eyes filled with tears, and she pressed a gloved hand to the door, as if she could caress him through it. “I’ve been worried sick for you. Where have you been? Is Master Félix with you? He sent me away because of the soldiers, but I’ve been so afraid for him, for you both.”
Aching for her, Cornelius reached for the chain, but Crawley stuck his head out from the pantry and whispered before he could. “What’s a young woman like her doing out on such a night, with Heng and Olivia and Val making the fracas down the street? I smell fish, love.”
It was a bit odd, yes, but the very idea of Louise being part of anything nefarious… Cornelius pulled the door as wide open on the chain as he could. “We’re well, thank you, dear. But you should go home. It’s not safe on the street. Come back in the morning, won’t you, darling? We can catch up then.”
“I will, of course, but let me kiss your cheek first, yes, and give you a hug? I’ve been so afraid for you, and your pirate friend.”
Crawley had come fully out of the pantry now, shaking his head, clearly intending to shut the door. Cornelius cut a glance to him, wanting to tell him no, then realized that would give the captain away. “Tomorrow, please—hurry, Louise, I think I hear the police returning.”
Her sweet, tender expression froze, then morphed into cold calculation in the space of a breath before she raised a pistol and aimed it at the chain.
Conny barely had time to yelp before Crawley yanked him out of the way. The chain broke as the door banged open to reveal Louise and a herd of soldiers.
“Where is Félix?” she demanded as the men took aim at Conny and the captain. “And where is the heart?”
Cornelius only blinked at her. “Louise? Why are you doing this?”
Louise rolled her eyes and folded her arms over her chest. “Your mother is a spy, but you can’t see an agent when she’s directly under your nose? Good God, what a worthless slut you are, after all. Where is the heart?”
Crawley had backed them into the wall, but when he inched them toward the doorway leading to the stairs, the soldiers cocked their rifles. The captain smiled at Louise as Cornelius continued to gape. “He can’t spot a spy when she’s kissing him on the cheek, and you think he knows where the clockwork heart is?”
Conny recovered enough to speak. “It was stolen, Louise. You know this.”
“I know I searched high and low for it and came up empty.” She aimed her pistol at Crawley’s head. “I can’t shoot the bastard without upsetting the archduke, but you are expendable. Tell me where the heart is, or I shoot your friend, Cornelius, and let these men haul you off to your father, who will extract information from you one way or another.”
Cornelius blinked, frozen in terror. He had no idea what to do. He’d die before he gave Johann up to anyone, but he’d never considered letting someone else perish all because he wouldn’t speak. Crawley, who was so kind to him, who had helped so much.
“Ignore them.” Crawley had slipped behind Cornelius, pressing his front flush to Conny’s back. “They can’t shoot me without harming you.” He chuckled softly. “And to be honest, we don’t need to stall them much longer anyway.”
Louise stiffened at this, but before she could give an order, the windows of the kitchen shattered. When the soldiers turned, ready to fight, Olivia and Heng burst through the door, and Val came in from the stairs, wide-eyed and aiming pistols badly with trembling hands. While the pirates and soldiers fought, Crawley whisked Conny out of the room and up to the skylight, where the ladder to the Farthing dangled.
“I can’t believe Louise is a spy.” Conny’s hands shook as he tried to climb, and he glanced down at the shop, where shots and sounds of struggle echoed. “Will they be all right?”
“Your spy maid and her goons? No, I suspect most of them will be dead directly. Heng’s much more vicious than he looks. And Olivia is exactly as lethal as she presents herself to be.”
“Will our people make it back to the ship, I mean? Will Val accidentally shoot someone with those pistols?”
“I doubt Heng gave him anything loaded. But yes, we’ll collect them all on the other side of town, once things have cleared. Heng appointed a meeting place on the west end. We’ll wait for them there.”
Crawley whistled, and the Farthing took off into the night with the two of them still dangling from the ladder. Cornelius startled when shots rang out, whizzing through the air beside him, but Crawley only spurred him upward, helping him along until they were both aboard.
“Take her into the clouds,” he barked.
“Aye, Captain.” Molly, at the wheel on the main deck, lowered her goggles and flew the Farthing away.
Chapter Ten
When Johann woke, he was in a strange bed, though it smelled familiar. It reminded him of Cornelius’s bedroom at the tinker shop, and thinking of those days made his heart ache. That thought in turn reminded him he didn’t have a heart that could ache, not any longer.
Except it did ache. A tug of longing lodged firmly in the center of his chest. Perhaps that is my soul. A comforting thought, because it meant he still had one.
What had happened, though? How had he come to be here? Where was here? He went quiet, shutting his eyes again, and listened. He heard the gentle whir of airship engines. Was he on the Farthing? A different airship?
Had he been taken prisoner? He shifted in the bed but found he wasn’t chained down. He had all his clockwork on, and it seemed to have been well-oiled, possibly even improved in a few places. Though he tried to take all this as a good sign, he feared it meant he’d been impressed back into the Austrian Army, or worse, taken by the forces who’d tried to kidnap Cornelius. The only thing keeping him from panic was that smell.
Cornelius’s bedclothes, that was what he smelled.
Cornelius himself appeared, hovering over Johann. Touching his face. Looking concerned. Relieved. But also sad.
“You’re awake.” Cornelius
smoothed a hair away from Johann’s clockwork eye, then seemed to remember himself and withdrew. This time his smile was a bit strained. “I hope you’re feeling better.”
Johann didn’t remember feeling poorly. He flexed his hands, first his flesh one, then his clockwork one. “What happened? Where are we?”
“We’re on the Farthing, in the captain’s cabin. He lent it to you while you recover.”
Recover? “I feel fine.”
“That’s because I have you well-dosed with aether.” Cornelius settled on the edge of the bed, resting his hands in his lap. “Your clockwork heart required emergency surgery. We flew you to Calais, and Master Félix helped me with the repairs and the adjustments. Everything is working wonderfully now, and better yet, we know exactly how to keep you from having such difficulty in the future.” He looked down as he continued in a demure voice. “Master Félix is coming with us. We’re traveling to Italy, where he’ll be staying. I’ve arranged with Captain Crawley to buy out your contract by extending mine, if you’d like to remain with Félix. He’ll be able to see to your maintenance in my stead.”
That same aching place as before yearned again, this time in a much more pointed, hollow manner. “You wish me to leave you?”
“I don’t. But I understand if you wish to leave me.”
Johann didn’t wish to leave Cornelius, and he wasn’t certain why Conny would think that. He lay still, breathing quietly as he tried to remember what had happened, and once again he was overwhelmed by the smell of lavender and spice. Conny’s scent.
He frowned. “Why does Crawley’s bed smell like you?”
Cornelius’s blush stained high on his cheeks. “I…slept beside you last night.” His thumbs twiddled nervously, and his voice trembled. “I’m very sorry I didn’t tell you sooner about the heart. My excuse was you didn’t know enough French, but of course that’s faddle. I worried you’d be upset, which you were, when I had no choice but to confess. Briefly I feared you were a spy seeking the heart, though in hindsight that’s utterly ridiculous. The truth is, without the clockwork heart, you wouldn’t be alive. You would have died the night I found you on the barge. I worked like the devil to save you, and I nearly did, but then your heart gave out. I knew we had the mechanical one, sitting there going to waste, so I used it. I didn’t think, only acted, which I acknowledge is my worst flaw. But the heart is nothing to fear. It’s a machine. A pump made of metal, not flesh. No different than your leg or arm. I know everyone fancies the heart as the seat of the soul, but it truly isn’t. It’s nothing more than an organ, frail and mortal. I can’t control you with it. No one can.”
Johann remembered now why he’d been angry. He still was, a little, though lying there in the quiet, he admitted mostly he was scared. “You said the armies are after it.”
“Yes. They want to put it in soldiers, I assume. Make copies of it.”
“So they can control it?”
“No, they can’t control people with clockwork hearts. But they already control the soldiers’ minds, which is what would matter. If they resurrected corpses, it might be a different story, though such a thing isn’t possible. It would require electricity at the very least, a subject I don’t know much about.”
Johann didn’t know either. It made him feel slightly better, to hear no one could control him through the heart, though he admitted he should have figured that out on his own. His fear came from the army and what they might do to him, not from Cornelius. There was anger too, though, at how no matter what happened, he kept ending up someone’s pawn.
But not a pawn of Cornelius. He understood that now. Cornelius only wanted to help him.
His stroked the tinker’s knee timidly with his flesh hand. “I don’t wish to leave you. And I’m glad you slept beside me, though I’m sorry I wasn’t awake to notice.”
Tears in his eyes, Cornelius caught Johann’s hand, kissed the back of it and held the flesh to his lips. “I would never hurt you, darling. And I would never want you to stay with me if you didn’t want to be here. But I do want you to stay, if you wish that also.”
Johann rubbed his thumb along their joined hands. “I would like to kiss you again. And hold you.” His shyness tried to stop him there, but the aether plowed over it like an airship skidding over choppy waves into port. “I want to hold you without your clothes on.”
The shadows left Cornelius’s eyes. “Without your clothes too, I hope.”
Johann gestured derisively at himself. “I am all scars and fake parts. Too ugly.”
“Not at all.” Cornelius ran a hand down Johann’s chest, trailing fingers across the exposed clockwork of his left arm. His tone was silky, and his French-accented English sent shivers across Johann’s skin even as the light touch sparked thrills up the nerve endings attached to his clockwork. “Your scars give you character. Your flesh is firm and muscled from work.” He threaded his fingers through Johann’s clockwork ones, the tilt of his smile wicked. “Your clockwork is my finest art, but you wear it as no one else could. When I see it on you, I’m sometimes so aroused it’s everything in me to hold back from pouncing on you and licking you head to toe.”
Johann’s cock, which was not in the least bit clockwork, grew stiff and eager in his drawers. “Lick me?”
Cornelius drew the clockwork hand as well as Johann’s flesh one to his mouth, kissing each set of knuckles by turns. Then, his gaze locked with Johann’s, his eyes sparkling, he ran his tongue over the same places.
Johann might not have nerve endings on the clockwork knuckles, but by God, Conny licking him there sent shivers down his spine all the same.
“I want to make love to you, Johann.” Cornelius kissed his palm. “I want to bring you pleasure. Want to let you take pleasure with me.”
Johann wanted that too. Except… “I don’t know how.”
“I do.” Cornelius placed Johann’s arms above his head. “Lie back, darling, and let me give you a demonstration.”
Johann held still, his cock growing more rigid as Cornelius undid the buttons on his shirt and unlaced his drawers. His head spun too, a reminder he was under the influence of aether. “I will be embarrassing because of the aether. Too silly.”
“That wouldn’t bother me.” Cornelius paused with his fingers tangled in Johann’s chest hair, a wicked glint in his eye. “But…if you like, I could join you.”
Cornelius took the black aether mask and affixed it over his face. His appearance was terrifying, the rubber nose expanding, his pretty eyes blinking through the glass eyepieces. When he pulled it away, he grinned like a boy. A naughty boy. He looked, Johann realized, much as he had the night at The Alison. When he’d pulled Johann’s cock out of his pants in front of everyone.
Much as he was about to do again, now.
Johann pushed to his elbows as Cornelius undid his laces. Giggled with Conny when Johann’s member tangled in the strings.
“Ooh, it’s such a pretty cock.” Cornelius rubbed his cheek against it, which made Johann’s breath catch, but when Conny glanced up at him from down there, Johann caught the sheet in great fistfuls. Conny laughed. “I want to suck you, Johann.”
Suck his cock, he meant. Johann pushed said organ into Conny’s chin. “Yes. Do this. And speak more French. It makes me tingle.”
Conny waggled his eyebrows and ran his tongue up the side of Johann’s root. “Baise-moi. Prends-moi par derrière. Défonce-moi.” When Johann groaned, Cornelius laughed silkily. “Now you, Johann. Tell me to do it. To suck you. In German. All rough and rude, like you mean to make me do it for you if I didn’t want it.”
Johann didn’t want to be rude, but he wanted to feel Cornelius’s mouth on his organ more than he wanted anything in the world. “Lutsch meinen Schwanz.”
Conny purred. Then he lifted his head, made his mouth into an O and sucked the tip of Johann’s cock inside.
Johann collapsed o
nto the bed, eyes rolling back in his head despite his efforts to watch what Cornelius was doing to him between whispered entreaties in French. His blood was full of sweet fire, and it all rushed to his groin. He kept thinking he would spend, but when he came close, Cornelius would move away. Soon he cursed Cornelius in his native tongue, demanding release.
When Johann finally thought he would come no matter what, Cornelius pulled off with a loud pop and kissed his way up Johann’s trembling body. “I want to ride you, chéri. I want to feel your Schwanz deep inside me.”
It had been deep inside Cornelius—his mouth—and it had been grand. Johann was about to mention this when Cornelius climbed off the bed and disrobed. He was beautiful—slender, but not small. His cock was pink, peeking out of its hood like a sausage. Johann thought he might like to touch it. Perhaps take it in his mouth. Before he could ask if he could do this, however, Cornelius produced a small jar from the table beside the bed, took some jelly and reached around to his own backside.
Johann’s eyes went wide as he realized which inside Cornelius had meant. “It’s forbidden,” he whispered. It hurt too, he knew, because one of the other boys in the army had been caught by the older soldiers, and they used him there. He had cried, and it broke Johann’s heart. He would not do this to Cornelius.
“It is a wonderful feeling.” Cornelius straddled Johann’s hips with his knees, still reaching behind himself, occasionally shutting his eyes and gasping. In pleasure, not pain.
Johann was still unconvinced. “I will not hurt you.”
“No, darling. You’ll spear me and make me squeal so loudly they’ll hear us on the ground below.”
With no other warning, he took hold of Johann’s cock and sat down on it.
Clockwork Heart: Clockwork Love, Book 1 Page 13
