Steampunk Hearts

by Jordan Reece

  “A fascinating study. I took a lone class in the subject of religion just before the Skirmish began and interrupted my education. The threads connecting one hand of Christ to another was a lecture of which I could have heard many times over and never tired.”

  “Tell me,” Nicoli said, and as one they went to the stairs.

  THE END

  Jordan Reece also writes M/M shifter romance as Octavia Zane:

  Love and Werewolves

  The Alpha’s Captive Omega

  Sample Chapters from The Alpha’s Captive Omega

  Chapter One

  “Bring them forward!”

  Shifting in his seat, Jayle watched as the dozens of captives were escorted to the front. Women. Children. Some were crying; all were thin and dirty. The Seeling pack had not been known for the kindness with which they treated their loved ones.

  His lip curled in distaste at the pathetic huddle. Fear sparked in their eyes from misreading his intent. It was their condition that affronted him, not them. “These are the ones from the war camp?” he barked.

  Ruvya, his second in command, nodded briskly. “All but a lone runaway, a male in his late teens who escaped in the melee. We’re in pursuit.”

  “And the guards of the camp?”

  “Dead. All of them. They fought to the last wolf.”

  Good. Precious few of the Seeling wolves had surrendered in previous battles, but those who had were now in the Seven Valleys under close watch. Jayle honored the old ways of allowing surrendered warriors to pay tribute for their lives through service, but it also seemed risky to him, akin to cuddling a venomous viper to one’s breast. Yet most of the surrendered weren’t even out of their teens, scared kids only doing what their superiors had ordered, and the others were so wounded that the threat they posed was hard to imagine. Let them tend gardens and make beds; forbidden to speak unless spoken to, forbidden to touch weapons, they had traded their honor for shame, their pack and history for none.

  Jayle would rather have died on the field.

  Encircling the clutch of captives from the war camp was a contingent of his Elite Guard. They kept their eyes trained upon the women and children for signs of trouble, but this was a beaten down, sorry group with their hands bound before them. The sorriest group that Jayle had ever had the misfortune to see. Some of the women were wearing stained aprons from slaving in the camp’s kitchen. The older boys and girls had been used to carry water from the river and their clothes smelled of mildew from the constant, sloshing saturation. At an age where they should have been running around in fields, going to school to learn their ABCs and 1-2-3s, they were silent and stoop-shouldered in exhaustion.

  It broke Jayle’s heart, though no one would be able to tell from his stony face. He had always wanted children of his own, but that dream was unlikely to come to pass now. Omegas in the Seven Valleys were rare, rare as hen’s teeth, and his, his, his betrothed, had been dead and gone for years. They were allowed to meet once as children, that day beside the river when Jayle felt like a phoenix rising from the ashes of his former self at the sight of the beautiful boy wading in the water.

  No. He didn’t want to remember Willow.

  Jayle got up from his chair and stepped off the royal dais. “Were any of them in the camp ours?” he asked as the captives trembled at his approach.

  “Two,” Ruvya confirmed. “Bettie Lake and Jessamine DeMarco. They’ve already been reunited with their families.” The smile never touched Ruvya’s lips, but Jayle felt its presence. Those two old women had been taken three years ago in the raid to spark the war, part of a group of fifty-four innocents that vanished into the night from a party. Jayle hadn’t been leading the Seven Valleys pack back then. He’d recovered thirty of them himself within weeks of their capture, but raids since that time claimed so many more. Each one to come home should have gladdened him, but he could only think of those who hadn’t. If the Seeling wolves were unkind to their mates and children, it was a pale shadow of the brutality they visited upon their captives. Some would never be coming home.

  A thin wail rose from a baby, who was quickly shushed by its terrified mother. They were Jayle’s now, all of these people. He could do with them as he pleased. Kill them here in his audience chambers, or give the women to his warriors as servants and disperse the children to adoptive homes, or strand all of them in the mountains and have his beta warriors run them down for grisly entertainment. Other alphas would have done so, had done so in the past. No law enforcement agency in the whole of the U.S.A. had jurisdiction here.

  And they knew it, knew what he could do. They were the dead walking.

  Corinder was practically slavering on the other side of the Elite circle. The beta’s eyes were sliding over the women in consideration, the strongest and fairest of the children. Already he was mentally outfitting his home, a personal lady’s maid for his mate, a nanny and youthful playmates for their child, gardeners and drivers and who knew what else. His appointment to the Elite had been an error of the previous alpha’s, one that Jayle could not rectify in wartime. Now that it was done, this problem was going to be remedied as soon as possible. The man might shift into a wolf, but his soul was that of a pig. Were Jayle to give the word, Corinder would be the first to dive into the captives and grab up as many as he could with all the greedy enthusiasm of a boy snatching up candy from a spilled piñata.

  Jayle had no intention of giving that word. “Put them back in the trucks.”

  Take them to the mountains and run them down. The mother of the baby sobbed; Corinder looked disappointed; two other Elite warriors were barely suppressing their excitement. That pair of fools had also been mistakes in appointments, made necessary by war to replace fallen troops, but those mistakes would be remedied in peace. If this was peace, after all; Jayle still had the Embers to contend with. But they were small potatoes compared to the Seeling.

  To his order, Ruvya had only nodded impassively.

  “Drive them to Nicoro and untie their hands,” Jayle said. “Give them precisely one hour to gather up their belongings from their homes, and then escort them down to Turncreek. Leave them there at the edge of town.” There was a bus station in Turncreek and forty-eight contiguous states. He didn’t care where they went, as long as it was far from here.

  Surprise rippled through the room at his command.

  Keeping his face blank and his voice strong, Jayle said, “If anyone thinks to hide out in Nicoro or flee, track them down at once and kill them. But I do not expect that to be an issue.” He searched his warriors for signs of dissent and then addressed the captives. “This will be the only grace I ever show you. Return to the mountains, come within fifty miles of these valleys, and your life is forfeit. Now go.” He stepped back, planning to retake his seat on the dais.

  “But sir!”

  The speaker was Corinder, made bold from shock. Jayle stared at him with such ferocity that the idiot swallowed his complaint and lowered his head. It was not an alpha’s job to fill a beta’s home with a glut of free servants.

  Some of the women were still weeping, but now it was from gratitude instead of fear. They had their lives, and their children’s lives. They had a little time to gather food, clothes, money, and necessities, and then they would be in the wind. A hiss came to his ears of Refuge in California, and several heads within the huddle nodded. Yes. Refuge! Excited whispers rippled through the crowd in a contagion. There was a women-led pack along the northern coast, founded long ago by survivors of another war and granted the gift of mercy from another alpha.

  Refuge troubled no one, and no one troubled Refuge. Nor did that pack turn any woman or child in need away. Jayle had not expected Seeling women to know of Refuge, but he was not privy to what had been whispered about at night in their oppressive pack over the generations. Most of them if not all were likely to go there, and there they would be cared for. That was the best that could be made of this situation.

  His warriors closed in around the captive
s to usher them out of the chambers, Corinder’s back stiff with rebuke. His orders for them to move were unnecessarily loud and harsh when they were already stepping fast in the right direction. Ruvya exchanged a glance with Jayle. Then she followed after the group. Once the captives were loaded up into the trucks, she’d reassign Corinder to some other duty so that he did not take it into his head to squirrel a woman or two away. That Jayle even had to contemplate the possibility of an Elite warrior’s defiance steeled his resolve to drop Corinder from the Elite altogether.

  Alone temporarily in the chambers, save the guard stationed at the open doors, he retook his chair and gazed around the room in dissatisfaction. The last alpha had favored tapestries and rugs and pointless figurines collecting dust over every square inch of the Star. Jayle hadn’t had time to change much since Kamden’s death, whether here in the audience chambers or in his living quarters on the second floor, so he was still surrounded by tapestries and rugs and pointless figurines collecting dust. Some of Kamden’s old clothing was still in Jayle’s closet, for heaven’s sake, shoved over to the side and hidden by his winter coats, but present.

  To come to power through war was not what he had expected. He was only twenty-three when he first sat in this chair, and was now just barely twenty-six. With hundreds upon hundreds of warriors jumping at his command, and tens of thousands in the community looking to him to lead them into peace.

  But he only knew how to be at war now. The last three years had done that to him.

  “Our merciful leader.”

  Jayle glared at Ruvya, who had returned to the chambers. “Don’t start with me. Are the trucks gone?”

  The blade-narrow woman laughed and went to the window to look out. She was in her late thirties, but never seemed to age. Once she had been his combat teacher, one of them, and one of the hardest opponents for Jayle as a boy to beat. “As slowly as they came out of those paddy-wagons when we arrived was as swiftly as they went into them to depart,” she said. “They’re gone, all babbling about Refuge. Did you know it’s a two-mile hike from the edge of town to the bus stop in Turncreek?”

  He knew. By the time the trucks got to the periphery of Turncreek, it would be almost dark. The walk was going to be cold and unpleasant with all of their belongings on their backs. The last bus was at eight, and they’d be hoofing it to get there in time.

  They would be on it, though. He wanted them to feel desperate about leaving, pressured to clear out, so their last memory of this place was steeped in anxiety. “And Corinder?” he asked.

  “Such a sniping toad, that one.” She hated him as much as Jayle did, but hid it better. “I told him to report to the armory and start polishing, and when he’s done with that, I’ll send him over to the hot springs to fold towels. We’re going to have trouble with him.”

  “We’re not. I’m filling out his dismissal papers from the Elite tonight. He can go back to the enlisted ranks, or kick off when his next reenrollment comes around.” To be questioned by one of his own warriors, and in public! The beta had pushed too far. “Dismissed with honor, so he can’t have a hissy fit, but not with commendation.”

  That would grate Adolphus Corinder to no end for the rest of his life. How could he complain about a lack of medals when the alpha deemed him honorable? Had he been complimented or insulted? The answer was both, but he saw in black and white. Chances weren’t high that Corinder accepted his demotion. He’d return to the community as a civilian in a snit.

  “The Embers have deserted their homes,” Ruvya said. “All of them. I received word this morning. We’re tailing the scent east.”

  Yes, the Embers pack would do that. They were only strong when they had the Seeling to hide behind. Now that they were exposed, they fled. Their alpha was such a mental weakling that it was a marvel he was an alpha at all. In a sea of pretty fools, as the Embers were, a man who didn’t even eke into a triple-digit IQ was king. Jayle simply nodded to the news of their departure.

  “The bodies from the Hollows have been sorted, and ours brought back for burial. The rest were dumped in a pit, Godwin’s included. We’ll have to talk to the committee about arranging a memorial.” Ruvya shook her head at her own reflection in the glass. “We’ve won, but it doesn’t feel like winning.”

  There was the dim sound of a vibration and she hooked on an earpiece that had been in her shirt pocket. “Ruvya.” Pause. “Good.” Pause. “I see.”

  “What is it?” Jayle asked after she unhooked the earpiece and put it away.

  “The runaway male has been caught. He’s being brought in now. There’s something wrong with him.”

  “Wounded?”

  “No, wrong in the head. Not all there. Jayle, he’s one of ours. They describe him as having shaggy black hair, and he’s nineteen or twenty years old. He can’t speak his name, or comprehend what they’re saying to him. He’s also dressed in a costume. The Seeling were using him for entertainment.”

  Jayle didn’t want to think about what Seeling warriors had considered entertainment. As to the kid’s identity, so many had gone missing . . . They’d disperse his photograph and hope someone recognized him. Until then, the hospital could find room for the kid somewhere. The Seeling had not been particularly discriminating about who they snatched, men or women or children, hale or sick or otherwise disabled. They needed labor, and any pair of hands sufficed.

  Speaking of the Seeling, one of the surrendered was entering the room. The balding man was dressed in an unadorned tunic for the aibla he now was, their term for servant from an enemy pack. His gait was unsteady from a twisted foot, not received in battle but from birth. Balanced upon his palm was a golden tray holding a pitcher of ice water and two goblets. Jayle waved him away before he attempted to serve. It wasn’t that Jayle had no thirst; he just didn’t want to accept a goblet from the likes of a former Seeling warrior. Even one who had obviously been yanked from the sidelines towards the end to flesh out the front line.

  The aibla bowed and backed away from the dais. Next he went to Ruvya, who was still at the window. Since he could not speak without permission, he waited for her to notice him there. She took her time about it. Then she poured a glass for herself and shooed him out of the room.

  “How many of them are in the Star?” Jayle asked in distaste. All of the aibla had been acquired from recent battles. “And where are the rest?”

  “Two will work in the Star from now on, the man in kitchen service, and a young woman down in laundry,” Ruvya said. “It’s been so long since aibla have set foot here that I was going off old documents and stories as to how best to deal with them.”

  “What was advised?”

  “In days of yore, fearful that aibla might team up and foment sabotage or insurrection, they were sent apart from each other. That was what I did. Two more are in the barracks but assigned to different duties that will not bring them often into contact with one another; the other six were given to the Clouharrow City Hall to use at their discretion, with the order to never have them work side by side. Roadwork, landscaping, maintenance, delivery, there are plenty of departments to absorb them. I was tempted to ship the lot of them out to Domasco and let them toil in the fields, but it’s too close to the eastern border and they won’t be as well supervised there.”

  “Where did you get those tunics?” The household staff wore livery of green and black and gold; the gray tunic was a smudge amongst those brilliant colors.

  “I found an old pattern and gave it to the seamstresses. That was also in the documents, to dress them differently so they stand out everywhere they go,” Ruvya replied.

  “And how often are you having them counted? Morning and night?”

  “Morning, noon, and night, they report in person to their supervisors, who then report to me. I additionally informed the supervisors to place them in crews so someone is always around them and watching. How long would you like the official counts to continue?”

  His voice was cold. “Until they die.”

>   “It will be done.” She sipped from her goblet and straightened at something outside. “They’re here with the runaway. What do you want to do with him?”

  “Bring him in.” Jayle was going to freeze this poor Seven Valleys kid’s face in his mind and add it to the mountain of reasons he loathed the Seeling. He would hate them to the grave. “Then notify the hospital and have him taken there until he can be identified.”

  Ruvya’s brow lowered and she set the goblet down on the windowsill with a click. “He’s struggling with the warriors out there! Good God, this boy doesn’t even understand he’s been brought home! He must have severe developmental delays.”

  Footsteps rang in the hallway. The guard at the doors stepped aside to admit two of the Elite. They had the boy in a tight grip between them, his arms hiked up behind his body as they propelled him into the chambers. Thrashing his head like a wild thing, the boy fought mindlessly and snarled. Spittle flew from his lips.

  Jayle stared in grim astonishment. What in the hell was this garment the boy had on? A green hula skirt was tied around his waist, the strands broken, tangled, and filthy. His shirt was not so much a shirt as strings of coins and fake jewels that gleamed dully in the light. There were large gaps between many of the strings, so his filthy chest was visible beneath. No shoes or sandals, or perhaps those were lost in his run; his feet were lacerated and coated in muck.

  They hadn’t left his face alone either. He was layered in makeup, rouge in garish circles on his cheeks, heavy black eyeliner and eyeshadow giving him raccoon eyes with clotted lashes. Either he had been crying or gotten wet somewhere along the way; there were runnels of eyeliner atop the rouge. His nose was grossly swollen, with dried blood under his left nostril. Someone had hit him.

  There were leaves tangled in his black, dried-out hair, which hung to just above his shoulders. It had a weird look, too shiny, too stringy and brittle, the hair of a cheap doll. Perfect stripes of henna tattoos began at the teen’s bare shoulders, vanished at the fists of the warriors, and continued below all the way down to his wrists. The tattoos were symbols, incomprehensible to Jayle, and some were stained with blood from small cuts on his arms.