Steampunk Hearts

by Jordan Reece

  He crossed the room to the opposite door, this one made of solid wood, and paused there to listen. The tapestry brushed against his forehead as he stood with his hand on the knob. Then, silently, he turned it and prayed it was not locked.

  The knob turned easily. Gathering up his courage, he cracked open the door to a hallway.

  No guard. No servants. No one at all.

  The discombobulation of decoration continued down the length of the hallway, which forked at the end. Willow crept down it, almost too scared to breathe as he stepped with bare feet by closed doors. He should have searched that room in which he had woken for shoes, pants, a proper shirt or a jacket, but it had not occurred to him until now, and he couldn’t bring himself to go back.

  He reached the fork. The left side terminated several feet away in a linen closet and bathroom. A servant had been up here cleaning at some point, but he or she was not here now. A mop and bucket were beside the sink, and various cleansers were lined up on the counter along with a fresh stack of folded rags.

  On the right side was a series of doors, closed and open, and no sign of anyone. Willow started down the long hallway, peeking into the open rooms and leaving the closed doors alone. A small parlor. A dining room with a dumbwaiter. Another bathroom. Then he came to a staircase and decided to follow it down.

  With his foot still descending to the first step, he heard a female voice from below. Willow scurried back to the hallway and into the dining room, where he concealed himself behind the door. The table was set up for six, yet a hint of dust on the settings told him that nobody had eaten in here in some time.

  There were now two female voices. The women were coming up the stairs, their burbling cadence turning to words. “-supposed to be quiet!”

  “I was mopping the floor in there and I wasn’t making any noise! She’s being unreasonable. Nobody said for me not to resume my duties up here. I’m just not supposed to go into the alpha’s room. For heaven’s sake, look around! This is shameful! Dust on everything and cobwebs in the corners!”

  “Well, let’s do the bathrooms first and then I’ll get the long-handled brush to knock down those cobwebs.”

  The pair of women passed the dining room at an unhurried pace. That was strange. The Seeling . . . they had taken him in all of his wedding guest finery, marched him away with the other guests in tuxedos and gowns, corsages in lapels, the women stumbling in heels and blood sprayed on Willow’s side from the fight . . . The Seeling made their servants rush from task to task under threat of punishment, so everything was done frantically and at a run. There were no idle hands to be found amongst their servants . . .

  Time was slipping away from him, and there were black spots in his vision blotting out some of the features of the dining room. Then the spots faded and he saw in full, but the women’s voices were gone.

  Had they walked out of range of his hearing? Or were they talking just outside the room yet he couldn’t hear them?

  There was only one way to know. He slunk around the door he was hidden behind and peeked out. Both of the women were now farther down the hallway, one removing towels from the linen closet and the second looking sulky as she pushed the mop in its bucket out of view. Once the other woman carried the towels into the bathroom, Willow practically leaped for the stairwell.

  His legs were feeling sturdier. As he descended the stairs, he heard a faint rumble of voices. A vacuum whined and a voice spoke out sharply in warning; the whine disappeared immediately in response. A spot returned in his left eye at the voice, reminding him of those faceless pursuers who had hair and necks but nothing in between.

  Then he was looking out into a large room of dubious purpose. It seemed to be a waystation to other areas in the house. The smells and sounds of a kitchen came from the far end, as did the voices. One voice neared the doorway and Willow shrank away, but the person didn’t emerge.

  A dark sea nibbled at his peripheral vision, swelling and receding, swelling higher and receding only a little. More black spots appeared directly ahead of him, spreading and evanescing to reappear elsewhere at varying sizes. Half-blinded, a quarter-blinded, almost fully-blinded, rising panic made him choke. He needed to be able to see!

  Stumbling out of the stairwell, he came across a door and pushed it open. His vision disappeared entirely in a wash of light. He clawed at his face in fright, rubbed his eyes furiously, and opened them to uniform blurriness.

  He was outside. There was a hazy tan walkway beneath his feet, the rock cool and smooth. At either side were flowers of many colors, yet the kinds were indistinct. Water pattered down from a blotch of a fountain, and a shape of black and gray and red moved toward Willow. Man or woman, he could not tell. But it was coming to him.

  Willow yelled and staggered through the flowers. Then he ran. This was a garden, and a thick gray line in the distance had to be a wall outlining it. Over it, he thought, he would climb over the wall and sprint . . . He’d sprint until Godwin got tired of chasing after him, though the omega knew in despair that this was never going to happen. The Seeling alpha had marked Willow as his, and Willow had no right to disagree.

  “It’s all right, sir! My lord! My lord, you don’t have to run away!”

  Scream after scream ripped from Willow’s throat as he fled the human shape coming after him. The words the shape were speaking made little sense, the syllables chopped up and distorted to relative meaninglessness. Through flowers and bushes and grass Willow ran in a stumbling, ungainly gait, that gray wall always tantalizingly at a distance.

  The boom of a baritone pierced through his animal screams. “Willow, stop! Haddan, don’t chase him!”

  Willow stopped, but only because it was too hard to run with his vision so skewed. Nor could his legs keep this up. Trembling, he stood there and prayed for the earth to swallow him whole.

  The shape coming up behind him had also stopped.

  “Now back away, Haddan. Slowly.” It was the baritone, which was issuing from nowhere.

  The shape of a man named Haddan blurred further as he retreated.

  All of the fear coursing through Willow turned to anger. He would not shrink before Godwin until he was beaten into submission, and that wasn’t yet! Though he was dressed in naught but a nightshirt, and his long hair was mussed and hanging everywhere, he stood up with the regal posture his childhood tutors had taught him. They did not wear crowns in the Seven Valleys, but the alpha and omega always held themselves up as if they did.

  “Willow, no one here will harm you.”

  This baritone did not belong to Godwin, who had a querulous pinch to his voice.

  “May I approach?”

  “No!” Willow commanded, swiveling in a circle as he searched for the source of the voice. “You will announce yourself, sir! I . . . I . . .” Why was he seeing in splotches and blurs? “I seem to be blind.”

  “You are not blind,” the voice reassured him. “Only ill. The doctors say you will recover.”

  Willow did not remember any doctors. “Where am I?”

  “You are in the northwest garden of the Star.”

  The Star. As his vision was uneven, so too were his thoughts. The Star. That was a very familiar term to him, almost as familiar as his own name. He had just been thinking about the Star, something to do with his childhood curriculum coming from there.

  “The Star is in the Seven Valleys, within the city of Clouharrow,” Willow heard himself say. “It has been the home of the ruling alpha for the last ten generations.”

  “It is the one and same,” the voice agreed.

  Willow pushed and pulled at his mind, kneading his brain for memories, for sense. “I am not in Nicoro.”

  “No, Willow. You were brought back to the Seven Valleys three days ago.”

  The Star! A mental image of it came to him, and all of his memories concerning it. How many times had he walked past the Star on family trips to Clouharrow as a boy? He was curious of the place where he was to spend his life upon marriage
, and resentful of it, too. That beautiful home behind the iron fence . . . shaped like a giant star and surrounded by lawns and gardens, it was where the current Seven Valleys alpha lived with the highest-ranking officers of the Elite. The alpha had the second floor and those officers were assigned to smaller quarters on the first, along with their families. The lower-ranking Elite and the enlisted warriors lived in barracks upon the same property.

  Willow was not truly blind. He was in the Star. “Where is Godwin?” he inquired.

  “He is dead.”

  No. No, he couldn’t be. “He was going to the Hollows to win.”

  “Instead he went to the Hollows and lost.” There was profound weariness in that baritone.

  “You’re saying he fell in battle, and I was brought back here.”

  “True.”

  Puzzled, Willow said, “I don’t remember it. Why can’t I remember that?”

  “Because you have been ill,” the voice said soothingly. “You will remember in time.”

  Angles and curves and edges appeared in the blur. Willow was standing on a bed of dirt, crushing flowers beneath his feet. The baritone was coming from his right. Willow squinted. There were chairs nearby, two chairs within a gazebo, and one of the chairs was occupied. A man was sitting in it. He had indistinct features.

  Willowmark Augustine! All of these guests have come to meet you, young man, so be polite!

  Willow had been told not to wander towards the water, but he had done it anyway. Sneaked away once all of the adult backs were turned, kicked off his shoes, let down his hair, rolled his trousers halfway up his calves and went wading. He had no interest in meeting all of these people, let alone the young alpha! Everyone always bragged to Willow about how smart the alpha boy was, how strong, how fast and handsome, how lucky Willow was to be destined for such a mate.

  It didn’t make Willow feel lucky. Rather than being the bully of his imagination, this Jayle Struth was the perfect kid, the perfect student and athlete, the perfect everything. Willow’s tutors would have been dazzled to teach this golden boy named Jayle, who never made a mistake. How was that possible, to never make a mistake? It just was. And Jayle would expect the perfect omega as a match, but Willow wasn’t perfect. He didn’t like to practice the piano. Learning the art of conversation and remembering his manners all the time was unbearably tedious. He loved his long hair, but hated the ribbons; he preferred to follow in dance, yet the performance of the delicate moue was demeaning. Willow was supposed to be the height of demure, gentlemanly behavior, to use his omega’s grace to soften his alpha’s hardness, to coax the alpha to laugh with sly jokes and witty remarks, to make him sweat in the night with sultry whispers.

  Willow knew the owner of the baritone in the gazebo now. It was that boy from the shore at the Promise celebration, the perfect boy who demanded Willow get out of the water before he slipped on the stones, and Willow refused to obey. With years of lessons screaming in his ears, with protocol to be followed, he still could not force his feet to comply. He was not a wind-up doll. He was not a robot or a gift wrapped up in pretty clothes! He could not be a garbage man or an Elite warrior, but he could not be this perfect omega either. After half an hour of shaking hands around the luncheon tables and lying about how excited he was to meet his betrothed rising alpha, he needed some time to be alone at the river and he wasn’t getting out of it for anyone!

  No! Leave me alone! I’ll get out of here to meet you when I’m damn well ready!

  It was the first time that Willow had ever said a swear word. He was sure that Jayle would jerk him out of the water by his arm, or shout at him. But he did neither of those things. Instead, he offered Willow a flower. I thought you might like this. It’s pretty, huh? I don’t know what kind it is. Do you?

  Willow didn’t. It was just a little flower when the rising alpha was supposed to come with heaps of glorious gifts, but that flower made Willow want to cry.

  His vision was almost clear. There Jayle was in the gazebo. He was a man now, his hair dark and curling halfway down his neck, his eyes as cool and gray as those stones in the river had been under Willow’s feet. A handsome face with strong features, his muscled frame was almost too big for the chair he was in.

  “I shouted at you after I took the flower,” Willow recalled. Both the Promise and the Star’s garden were equally real and vivid in his mind; he was unable to point to which one was the memory. “For not bringing me jewels or clothes or toys. I called you a cheapskate. I wasn’t sure what the word meant. I’d just overheard our cook saying it about her husband.”

  The garden at the Star was the real and present location; the Promise was the memory. Looking away from Willow with a smile, Jayle said, “And I called you a greedy little baby. All of your courting presents were on the gift table upon the lawn. I just thought you might like a flower from me. Something personal. All of those gifts had been selected and wrapped without much of my input.”

  The child Willow once was had liked it, and he’d hated Jayle for the flower, for making Willow like him a tiny bit. Willow was only ten years old, and unable to express his tangled emotions, and this tangled situation the two of them had found themselves in. The flower meant so much more than the gifts. Everyone gave a young omega lordling gifts.

  “Would you like to join me for lemonade?” Jayle asked, motioning to the table beside him where his own glass rested. Willow had not seen the table or glass until now, and then it was just there.

  There were other people in this garden, guards and a gardener. Though they were not coming any closer, Willow was acutely aware that he was standing outside in a nightshirt and no shoes. This was not seemly. “No, thank you. I should return inside.”

  “Would you like me to walk you there?”

  Willow hesitated.

  “Only to help,” Jayle said mildly. “Only if it is needed.”

  Willow’s vision was blurring again, Jayle receding into smears. He would not get back to that room on his own. Since he had refused the lemonade, it was unwise to also refuse this offer of assistance. Godwin wasn’t often kind.

  Jayle. It was Jayle. Godwin was dead.

  “Where am I?” Willow asked. Had he asked that before? If he had, the answer had slipped away.

  “You are in the northwest garden of the Star,” Jayle replied. His chair squeaked, and the blur of him rose. “There is nothing to fear. I will walk you to bed, and have the kitchen send food if you are hungry.”

  The colors faded, faded, faded until Willow was staring through an impenetrable white film. His arm was taken, and he startled. The faceless . . . This was Jayle. This was . . .

  “It’s all right, Willow. I’m just here to help.”

  It’s all right, Willow. I won’t get mad if you don’t like it.

  Willow had made to throw that flower in the water, but at the last second, he tucked it into his sleeve. Then, after the celebration was over and Jayle was gone, he pressed it between the pages of a book. He’d had no interest in the real presents from the gift table, but he smiled dutifully and opened them for his parents when they bid him to do so.

  Silver cuffs for his hair. A ruby bracelet and jade brooch. A wooden carving of a wolf with emeralds for eyes. A pile of books; a chemistry set; a letter opener of yellow and white gold to go with the Italian leather desk set. Willow saw himself holding them up, one after another as his parents complimented them, the boy’s mind dwelling on the flower upstairs in his room.

  Fully blind, he let himself be led. The dirt became grass, and the grass turned to stone, and in the disarray of his thoughts, he felt water sliding past his ankles.

  “We were married,” Willow blurted. The blotches in his mind eradicated parts of the past and present, returning them at the expense of wiping out something else. But he remembered the music being played at the wedding, flutes and drums entwined with catcalls.

  “Never,” the baritone responded. “You vanished months before our wedding was to occur.”

  B
ut Willow remembered a wedding. Sort of. Then it vanished, and took everything else with it.

  The stranger at his side guided him step by step until he was back in bed.

  END OF SAMPLE

  Read the rest of The Alpha’s Captive Omega