by J. K. Coi
“You are amazing.” He put her back on her feet and settled a hard kiss on her lips. “I can’t believe I doubted that you would get us out of here.”
She looked up at him in surprise. “You aren’t…appalled?”
“By what? Your bravery? Your strength? Of course not, don’t be ridiculous. You should know by now that everything about you is absolutely perfect, especially if it means you’re better protected and harder to kill. As much as I agreed that we would be partners working for the War Office, you might have noticed I continued to have some reservations,” he admitted. “But I was wrong to doubt you. I don’t want to hold you back. Despite my recent stubbornness and denial, it seems we’re stuck with this job, and I wouldn’t have anyone but you at my side.”
“I want a partner,” she warned, “not a governess.”
“So that’s what you’ll have, but I can’t promise I won’t be overprotective at times.” His heart was in his throat as he gazed into her eyes. “I won’t lose you, Callie. Nothing can make me go through that again.”
“I don’t want to lose you either. I suppose, then, the best way for both of us to make sure of staying alive is to work together.”
“Does that mean you believe me when I say I wasn’t kissing anyone on that train but you?”
“I’ve thought long and hard about that, replaying it in my mind until I thought I would go mad. Yes, I believe you, mostly because it just doesn’t make any sense.”
That didn’t say much for her belief in the strength of their love, her belief in him. He could shake her. They were supposed to have put the past behind them and moved on to something stronger, deeper. And yet, it was now obvious that his colossal failure was not only still between them, but would always be between them. Fighting this uphill battle for the time when she would trust him was becoming tiresome…and his guilt for feeling that way was as strong as his sorrow.
“I wonder now if whatever I did see became warped before the image was even translated by my brain,” Callie said. “It’s not the first time I’ve experienced it. Something similar occurred when we arrived here. What if it’s another symptom of whatever is happening to me?” She paused. “The doctor said I’m changing. That the nanites are busy twisting my body to their own purpose. This is only the beginning. What if they take over completely?”
“They won’t. They can’t. You’re stronger than they are. Don’t forget it.” He ran a shaking hand through his hair. “If you were worried, why didn’t you tell me? How long have you felt these symptoms?” He needed to know.
She didn’t respond.
“Damn it.” He couldn’t hide the bitterness in his tone. It felt like acid burning his tongue. Until General Black had shown up at their door, he’d believed they were making such progress. Had that been a lie too? “What else are you keeping from me?”
She frowned. “I can’t talk about it yet. Not here.”
“Callie—”
“Please,” she begged, her natural eye glistening with tears. “Don’t ask me yet.”
“Bloody hell.” How could she say that to him?
He swallowed his frustration as another rumble rocked the building, causing both of them to duck. Dust clouded the air, and the meager gaslight from the hallway outside their dungeon flickered. Callie coughed and waved a hand in front of her face.
She was right about one thing: they would have to wait to finish this.
“Come on.” He took her hand. “Let’s get through this trial before we worry about the next one.” He thought of all the weapons and explosives being stored in the old part of the factory. The chemicals the doctor kept in his laboratory. Too easy for a fire to start, and they’d been caught in enough of those to last a lifetime.
They ran back to the large, open area where the War Office’s death machines were being stored. Another reverberation rocked the foundations of the building.
The wall fell inward right on top of them and Callie screamed. He pulled her close and crouched, covering both their heads as best he could as they were showered with stone and jagged glass. A large chunk of something hit the small of his back. He recoiled with a hiss.
When the world stopped shaking, they shook off the debris, lifting their heads and blinking at one another. The one gas lamp had been extinguished and it was almost impossible to see.
Callie twisted out of his arms. “You’re bleeding.”
He squinted. She was covered in dust and looking down at his arm. There was a shallow gash in her forehead, but it didn’t look as though it was bleeding profusely and he couldn’t see any other injuries. “Are you hurt?”
“Don’t worry about me. You’re the one already dripping blood onto the floor.”
He turned his attention to his arm. A clean slice, but not the only injury. He could feel the digging pain of a thick sliver of glass sticking out of his shoulder as well. “It’s nothing.” He shrugged but the wound was actually fairly deep and, sure enough, blood trickled down his arm, the stain already soaking through his shirtsleeve.
“We need to stem the bleeding.” She quickly tore a strip of cloth from her skirt and tied it around his arm. When she was done with that, she ran her hands over his chest and arms before sliding up his back. He stiffened when she touched the shard in the top of his shoulder blade.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“And risk missing out on the pleasure of your hands running over my body?” He grinned in the dark before recalling that she’d believed the worst of him, lied to him and didn’t trust him. His smile fell away.
When she didn’t answer he remembered she could read his expression as easily as if it were midday. He hadn’t hidden his anguish because he’d thought the dark would protect him, but it seemed there would be no protecting either of them.
She slowly tugged the piece of glass from his flesh. “What if there are still small slivers in the wound?”
“We’ll worry about it later,” he said brusquely, shifting to put some room between them.
Her hands hovered a moment longer before clenching in the folds of her skirts. “What do we do now?”
He sighed and looked at what they were left with. The doorway he’d taken note of earlier was blocked. There didn’t seem to be a way directly out of the building from here. If he took them through to the corridor adjoining the laboratory, they might find another exit. “Let’s go,” he urged.
Windows rimmed the top of the one wall that remained substantially intact. They were located just beneath the ceiling, but still at least eighteen feet from the ground. Many of them had smashed with the force of the explosion, but there was no moon tonight and no light came in from outside. The glass that hadn’t broken was covered in dirt and soot from the stacks belching the stuff out into the atmosphere at all hours of the day.
“What are those?” she asked as they passed the cloth-covered sleeping giants.
“Titans capable of unmaking existence should we ever be so stupid as to unleash them on the world,” he muttered with an inward shudder as he thought of the destruction such machines were capable of. “We have to hurry and find Dunsmoor. I don’t know what he’s trying to blow up, but one more charge could bring the whole place down.” The buildings in this area were old. Old and dry. “And that might set the entire block on fire.”
Some light illuminated the room by way of a single remaining lamp on the wall. They headed for the only other doorway, in the direction of the doctor’s laboratory. He hurried them along, pulling her past it.
“Jasper, wait. We’ve got to take the doctor with us,” she insisted, digging in her feet until he stopped.
“Callie.”
“If he dies tonight, there’ll be no one to fix the problem of the nanites. As much as I hate him, it isn’t just about me, but Patrick too. And even Captain Dunsmoor.”
As far as he was concerned, she was the only one who mattered. If that meant making sure the damned doctor made it out alive, then bloody hell, the bastard was going t
o live.
“We’ll find the doctor,” he agreed. “But after all this, I don’t much care about Dunsmoor. He can fend for himself.”
“Whatever he did can be blamed on the organisms in his blood.”
He snorted. “Don’t be naive. They haven’t made him do anything. This is all motivated by hate, by his desire for revenge.”
Jasper understood hate and revenge. He’d felt it. He’d dealt it. But that didn’t mean he would allow it to touch Callie.
“Then Dr. Helmholtz and the War Office drove him to it,” she said.
A lot of people had suffered at the hands of Helmholtz and the War Office, but it hadn’t turned anyone else into a raving lunatic. “I don’t know that he can be saved, Callie. He’s gone too far this time. He didn’t come here to get help for his condition. He’s come to kill Helmholtz.”
“And I’m not giving up until I’ve succeeded.” Dunsmoor had come up behind them. They turned to find a Tesla gun trained on them. The man had changed his appearance yet again. This time, he had a larger nose and a more prominent brow, but Jasper had figured out the one thing that never changed. It was the eyes. He’d never be fooled again because he would always recognize those eyes.
“So you’ll kill us too, just for the fun of it?”
The former captain smiled, but the shadows in his face deepened. Jasper knew all too well how to interpret such shadows. Anger mixed with bleak hopelessness. “I didn’t think you’d make it off that airship, CC. But knowing you as well as I do, I should have expected it. Admittedly, you were never my main targets. It’s always been him. The doctor.” He sneered out the words. “But once we start down a path…” He gestured them through the door with a wave of his gun hand. “Now both of you, into the laboratory.”
Jasper was eager to move if it meant getting closer to a way out of this powder keg of a building. He guided Callie ahead of him, staying between her and Dunsmoor’s gun. He inched a little closer to her when they stopped in the center of the room and waited to find out what Dunsmoor was going to do. “We were friends once,” he said. “We don’t have to be enemies now.”
His laughter echoed. “You don’t expect me to swallow that, do you, CC? You were sent by General Black to bring me in. I’ve never known you to fail at anything and I can’t believe you would simply give up now. Well, I can’t give up either. I won’t be taken. What do you think they’re going to do with me if I allow that to happen?”
“You haven’t done anything irreversible yet,” Callie insisted. “There’s still time for us to walk out of here peacefully without anyone getting hurt.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, my lady. I passed the point of no return in this tragedy when I refused to tow the agency line and threatened to expose Helmholtz and the War Office for what they really are. Monsters who make monsters.”
Jasper took a small step forward and modulated his tone to appear soothing. “All you have to do is put the gun down. Jamie, it isn’t too late.”
“Jamie? There’s no one here by that name.” He laughed again. “You’ve been looking for a man who died a year ago. Or didn’t they tell you that you’re hunting a renegade spy for the French?”
“I know what they did to you,” Callie interrupted. “I know what they took from you.” She glanced quickly from Jasper to the exit before stepping forward, focused on Dunsmoor.
Like hell. He understood her message perfectly and it wasn’t going to happen. He reached for her hand instead, aware that Dunsmoor’s gaze locked onto the movement.
Callie sighed and continued. “You aren’t alone. I know how it feels to wake up and not recognize yourself, to look in the mirror every day and wonder if you’ve become a monster.”
Dunsmoor’s focus shifted back to her. “You still have your pretty face,” he insisted, gesturing to her with the barrel of his weapon. Jasper gritted his teeth but didn’t dare rush him when that thing was pointing anywhere near her. “The bastard doctor didn’t take that away from you and turn you into the enemy.” He sneered. “I’m so unrecognizable to my own family that my wife couldn’t bear to look at me, and my son had to be told his father is dead.”
Her expression showed true sorrow. “I’m sorry for your loss, Captain. But this isn’t going to make it any better.”
“No, nothing will. But I’m still going to make them all pay, especially Helmholtz.”
“How are you going to make Helmholtz pay, Jamie?” Damn it, they couldn’t afford this discussion, the whole place was crashing down around them. “By blowing up the building?” he shouted. “They’ll only set him up somewhere else and he’ll start all over.”
“He can’t do that if he’s dead and all his research destroyed, now can he?”
“I won’t let that happen.” The doctor’s voice rang out from above, an unmistakable ribbon of instability running through it.
A figure stood at the broken window of the foreman’s office. A few long, sharp pieces stuck out from the frame. Helmholtz pointed a gun, swinging it between all three of them. At least, it looked like a gun. Not any he’d ever seen before, though. It might have been pilfered from the secret stash of deadly weapons in storage.
Would it even fire? Was that a chance they could risk taking?
“Nothing will get in the way of my work again,” Helmholtz cried. “Not any of you, not the War Office, and certainly not Captain Dunsmoor’s bothersome pyrotechnics.”
“Jasper,” Callie whispered. “There’s something wrong with him.”
“Very wrong,” he agreed. “He’s mad.”
“No, it’s more than that. I think he’s—”
“I can hear you whispering,” he called in a sing-song voice. “I can even hear you breathing. And I can see every pore in your faces, the fear shining from your eyes.” Shrill laughter, marked by a sudden crash from somewhere close.
“My dear Lady Carlisle, I am sorry to say I will no longer require your assistance with my research. I’ve found another—much better—test subject.”
He and Callie both realized what the madman must have done at the same time.
“Jesus Christ.”
“He’s injected himself with the—”
“Yes, indeed I have,” he interrupted, sounding triumphant and manic at the same time. “After discovering the extent of my creations’ beautiful evolution, I took the next most logical step. It was only natural to combine my brilliance with their perfect, advanced intelligence. Together we shall form an invincible force.” The doctor motioned them closer with a negligent jerk of his weapon. Glass littered the floor at their feet.
“Be careful,” he murmured to Callie.
She nodded, gaze remaining locked on the doctor. He noticed then what she’d already observed. It was there in his eyes, like tiny black ribbon worms swimming through his corneas. More than madness. “What’s happened to him?”
“From what I can tell, our resident Dr. Frankenstein has more of his invisible little parasites running around in him than any human should contain, and no artificial body parts to keep them occupied,” Jamie said. “So they’ve started working away at whatever else they can find, including his brain. The brilliant doctor didn’t take that into consideration, did he?”
Holding an elevated position definitely gave Helmholtz the advantage, and Jamie stood at point-blank firing range, making it virtually impossible that he’d miss if he decided to shoot them too. But Jasper wasn’t giving up.
Bloody hell. Why did everyone have a weapon but him?
Another rumble and more debris fell. A large beam swung down from the ceiling. It must have been twelve or fourteen feet long. Callie screamed. It fell toward them like a lawn dart headed for the bull’s-eye. Jasper clasped her hand and yanked her back.
They stumbled to the side and the heavy iron beam missed them by mere inches. The crash echoed like a musket shot in a silo. It balanced on end for a moment before tipping over. The other end was headed right for the foreman’s lookout window. The doctor was too la
te to throw himself out of the way as it crashed through. His eyes widened just before it hit him square in the chest.
Jasper let her go and threw himself at Dunsmoor before the dust of the commotion could settle.
They wrestled for control of the gun. The two men were both powerful and experienced. She feared Dunsmoor was stronger, but Jasper was quicker and better able to anticipate Dunsmoor’s next move. He dodged when he could, advanced when there was an opening. Trying to help would only make things worse, but she watched carefully for any sign that Dunsmoor was taking the lead.
A movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention. Surprised to see Dr. Helmholtz’s strange-looking weapon trained on her, she froze to the spot.
Jasper dropped Dunsmoor. He called a warning and lunged for her, eyes wide with fear. At the sizzling sound coming from the barrel of Dr. Helmholtz’s gun, she pushed herself into motion, grabbed him instead and twisted them both out of the line of fire.
Another shot rang out, and she spun around to see Dunsmoor’s gun smoking.
Above them, all color leached from the doctor’s face. He stood there looking frozen and surprised, then suddenly he was falling forward through the open space where the window had been.
The thud of his landing in the broken glass was eclipsed only by a screech worthy of an enraged mama goose as Mrs. Campbell raced into the room.
“Nooo!” she keened. Her lips curled into a snarl, and she hurtled herself at Dunsmoor.
Callie stepped between them and tried to calm the woman down, but she was a cyclone of screaming fury, scratching and biting and thumping with meaty fists.
Finally, Callie pulled back and punched her. She was knocked out cold just like that and Callie was left with a heavy dose of guilt. She whispered an apology to the unconscious woman.
The clomp of many booted feet coming down the hall alerted them that Mrs. Campbell had been followed. They stopped just inside entrance to the laboratory.
Of course, General Black was leading the pack.
Chapter Nine
