Jessie's War (Civil War Steam) (42 page)

When he was done, he nodded
to Jessie’s father. “It’s nice to see you again, Mr. White.”

She never heard his response,
because the voices in her head warned,
Run,
Jessie.

No,
she responded
wordlessly.

Luke placed the bundles
around the room. Her father’s desk, the device, which still hummed oddly, over
near the door. As he laid each one down, he bent the rod.

The dynamite was armed.

Luke finished his task and
turned to her and smiled, just as the hairs on her arms stood up and the voices
in her head howled.

She may have howled, too.

In the next instant, Luke’s
head shot up. He bellowed and leapt sideways as three shots rang out. Sparks
flew as the bullets ricocheted.

“Luke!” she screamed, before
she had even had the chance to process what had happened. He collapsed to the
floor, rolled to his back, and lay still.

Fontaine stood in the far
corner of the room, emerging from a door she hadn’t even seen.

“Well, isn’t this cozy?” His
cultured voice dripped with causal cruelty. “Miss White. So glad you could join
us. No need to jump out of an airship. I’d been planning on bringing you here
all along.”

Jessie drew her gun, but the
moment she pulled it up, it wavered under the sway of the magnets. Her hands
circled and bobbed, and she spent more energy fighting that than she did in
taking careful aim.

Her father put his hand on
her arm. “Don’t fire. Your lead could hit Luke.”

“Get her out of here,” Luke
rasped from his position on the floor. “Go.”

Her father clutched her arms,
and she struggled to wrench out of his grasp.

“No!” she cried. “I’m not
leaving without him!”

“Jessie.” The grip her father
had on her arms tightened to the point of pain. “Those bullets were meant for
you. Don’t waste it.”

Fontaine lifted his gun to
fire, but like Jessie’s, his weapon bobbed and weaved under the pull of the
device. “What’s the use? She can run, but I’ll find her like I did before. You
won’t be there to protect her.” He walked up to Luke. “I want these to be the
last words you hear, agent. When I do find her, I will break her. I’ll think of
you when I do.”

Luke said nothing, but he
never met Fontaine’s eyes. Instead, he watched Jessie’s father.

Fontaine came closer.

The device stuttered.

“Now, Luke!” Pop shouted.

Luke sat up, and spun a
weapon still attached to the device. Fired. Emptied the revolver.

Fontaine stood stock still,
and for one bitter, heart-rending moment, nothing happened. He lowered the hand
holding his weapon, and turned his eyes to Jessie, his face a mask of shock and
pain. His mouth opened as if he wanted to speak, but no sound came out.

And then, a bright stain
appeared on his shirt, blood seeped from the corners of his mouth and from his
nose. Before he fell, Jessie wrenched free from her father’s grasp and rushed
to Luke’s side.

“Get out, Jess,” Luke hissed.
“Place is gonna blow.”

“I’m not leaving without you.
You come with me or I’m staying.” Her voice never wavered.

Run,
Jessie
, the voices in her
head whispered.

For the first time in her
life, she answered them.
Not without him.

Pop appeared on Luke’s other
side, and with their help, Luke gained his feet. He draped his arms around their
shoulders and panted, and even though he leaned heavily on Jessie, Luke walked
under his own power. “Only got a few more minutes until the thermite… is
released and this place goes.” He paused. “Go on, Jess. Leave me.”

Tears stung her eyes, but she
refused to acknowledge them. “No. You come, too.”

His feet dragged, his
respirations labored. “Knew this was a chance. I took the risk. I can’t lose
you.”

“You’re going to be fine.”
The words were spat from between clenched teeth, and her grip on Luke’s wrist
tightened.

They pushed into the middle
corridor, and Luke’s labored respirations turned raspy, rattling in his throat,
but she refused to let him slump, refused to allow them to slow.

Luke would leave these
tunnels.

The silhouette of a man
appeared up ahead, bathing the tunnel in light from a gas lantern. “Bradshaw!”

Whitfield.

“Here!” Jessie called out.

Whitfield took one look at
Luke and handed the lantern to Pop. He took Luke’s arm and looped it around
him. “I got him. You get your father out.”

Jessie was exhausted. She
didn’t have much of a choice, and she’d taken Luke as far as she could. Still,
she paused.

“Luke.”

“Go, Jess,” Luke said.

“The thermite’s armed,” she
said to Whitfield.

Whitfield’s jaw was tight. “Go.”

With one last look at Luke,
she took her father’s arm and ran for the exit.

Jessie and her
father stumbled into cold, clean air of an eerily still night.

“Come on,
Missus. We’ve got to get you out of here.” Without so much as a blink, Parker
picked her up and put her on the back of a horse, and not the one she rode in
on. She sat there, trembling from a combination of fear and exhaustion, as he
assisted her father, and when he came back her way, her gaze met his.

“Luke’s been
shot.”

Parker’s
features tightened. “Whitfield has him. We’ll just get to the next rise and we’ll
see to his wounds.”

“We should wait
for Luke.”

“Not now,
Missus. We need to get out of here.”

She turned her
head to find her husband. Whitfield was helping him mount another horse, and
her throat constricted. She wanted to wait for him, but Parker grabbed the reins
of her horse and slapped its rump.

“Go!”

Her mount
followed Parker’s into the dark, and her horse spooked as a rolling rumble
built and broke into a cacophony of sound so loud she had to cover her ears.

Behind her,
dynamite exploded, and the mineshaft collapsed in a roar of dust and debris.

Luke.

She turned in
her saddle to find him, but couldn’t see him through the trees in the dust and
the dark.

Not more than
five minutes later, Whitfield shot past her at a full gallop. He stopped when
he got to Parker, and Parker dropped the reins of her horse as they moved away
to have a low conversation she couldn’t hear.

She whirled her
horse around and galloped back to Luke.

Something about
the way he sat in the saddle was wrong. His weary eyes meeting hers, he slumped
and began sliding from his saddle.

“Luke!” Jessie
leapt from her mount and moved beneath him to catch him.

He reached for
her, but she couldn’t support his weight, and he took her to the ground with
him. He rolled away and lay still.

With desperate
hands, she clawed her way toward him.

He turned
glassy eyes in her direction. “Wife.”

Jessie’s heart
tightened in her chest, and she rubbed her hand against the ache that had
settled there like a stone under great pressure.

It would crack
soon, and be forever changed. The marks he put on her heart would never
heal—they’d only widen, like water poured over a crevice in granite would
eventually cleave the rock in two.

“I’m not your
wife,” she reminded him gently. She unbuttoned his shirt with shaking fingers. “If
we don’t return to Grandfather, the handfast will expire. You’re going to get
better so you can remedy that. Make an honest woman out of me.”

One of the
corners of his mouth twitched up into the ghost of his lopsided smile.

Her heart
quaked, the eminent break threatening. She held it together by sheer force of
will.

Pulling her
eyes away from the smile that would forever haunt her, she looked down at his
wound. A gaping hole stared back. The blood was thick and black, the wound
itself puckering and already red.

The tremors in
her heart became stronger as a small voice whispered he could not survive such
a wound.

Jessie brutally
shut it off.

Luke.

Silently, she
tore his shirt to form a compress and pressed it to the wound. “You’re gonna be
fine.”

His eyelids
fluttered, and he covered her hand with his.

“C’mon Luke,
stay with me.” She fought to breathe around the grief that strangled her as
surely as any noose. Smiled at him, pretending her heart wasn’t on the verge of
breaking. Tried to force herself to believe that he’d escape from the jaws of
death this time, like he had before.

Luke could do
this. He’d be fine.

“Don’t,” he
said in a voice like gravel. “Be with me, Jess. Just be.”

Jessie blinked
against the resignation in his words, but a piece of her heart broke off all
the same. Shaking her head, she pressed her hands into his side, his blood
seeping through her compress and warming her hands. She fought to keep herself
from looking at it. It would break her if she saw what was true.

“Don’t say
that. You’re gonna be fine.”

Whitfield was
suddenly by her side, and he knelt down beside her and pried her hands away. “Let
me see, Jessie.” He lifted her makeshift compress from Luke’s wound and pressed
a fresh one to it. “Oh, Jessie.”

“He’s had
worse. Right?”

She looked at
Parker, silently begging him for confirmation. Of course Luke had had worse.
She’d seen the scars. He’d be fine.

Out of the
corner of her eyes, she saw Whitfield shake his head tightly at Parker. Her gut
twisted and she pretended not to notice.

Pop knelt on
Luke’s other side and took her hand in his.

“Jessie,” he
began.

She snatched
her hand away from him. “Shut up, Pop. Go make a fire. He’s gonna be fine.
You
were dead for months. So he’s gonna
be just fine. Right, Luke?”

Luke moved his
hand and she grabbed it, holding it to her chest. “Jess,” he whispered. “Just
be with me… Lay with me one last time.”

Her heart
shuddered and trembled and she tried to pull herself together the only way she
knew how. “No.”

“Dyin’, Jess.”

“No.” For a
moment, the only sound she heard was the heavy rushing of blood in her ears.

“Jessie, honey,”
Pop said, rubbing her back gently.

She ignored him
and the warning in his words. “No. You’re not dying, you hear me? You’re not. I
won’t let you.” She hoped someone would listen.

Luke. Her
father. Her ancestors. Her heart.

Jessie jerked a
long knife from Whitfield’s belt as he looked at her with startled eyes,
perhaps unable or maybe unwilling to stop her. Swinging her braids over her
shoulders, she sawed at the first one with a strength borne of desperation.

Once it was
free, she twisted the shorn hair around Luke’s hands. She sawed off the second
braid, joined that one with its twin, and ran the knife along her palm. Blood
seeped from the wound onto her hair, and she bound their hands together with
her hair and her blood.

Her father and
Parker began building the fire she requested as Whitfield held the compress to
Luke’s side. For a change, the normally chatty nobleman was a silent as stone,
his body stiff and his mouth little more than a thin slash across his face.

Jessie lay
beside Luke, her head pillowed on his chest, and listened to the faint, erratic
beating of his heart. “I bind you to me.
You
are mine
.”

She put
everything she had into those words. Her heart. Her body. The magic that
resided in the recesses of her soul, magic that had always been there, but she’d
denied her whole life.

That way lies death
, her grandfather’s voice warned.

“
He is mine
,” she countered.

A cold wind
blew across them, lifting her shorn hair from her neck, and she took it as a
warning from her ancestors not to trespass in their territory. Cursing them
silently, she swore they’d have to take her with them, because Luke wasn’t
leaving without her. She didn’t care what they did as punishment.

He shivered in
her arms.

She leaned up
to kiss the dark stubble of his jaw. Her heart and his intermingled and became
one, bound by an invisible tether as strong as iron. Where he went, she
followed, from now until eternity.

“You feel that,
Bradshaw? You’re bound to me. You’re not going anywhere.”

Out of the
darkness, shapes materialized from behind rocks, from behind trees where
nothing had been moments before, out of thin air. They walked toward her, pale
and ephemeral imitations of life, and she heard them chanting.