The Girl In The Clockwork Collar (16 page)

All Griffin could do was smile wearily in response. It wasn’t that he wasn’t impressed by Mr. Tesla—who in his right mind wouldn’t be? It was just that he was worried about Jasper and Finley and what every moment they spent in Dalton’s company might do to them. He already had Finley committing crimes against the upper classes. What was next? The two halves of her nature might have begun to come together, but she was still vulnerable to her darker half. What if she liked being part of Dalton’s gang?

What if she decided her life was going to be one of crime, rather than with Griffin?

Instead of helping his friends—a matter which appeared to be out of his hands—Griffin was forced to act the aristocrat and visit scientists who could benefit from his patronage. Granted, he had another motive for visiting Tesla: there was a slim chance Dalton might need the help of a genius with his machine—or that Tesla might at least hear of such requests if they were made. It was all Griffin could think to do.

He felt like a helpless idiot. It was not a feeling he bore well.

Griffin rose to his feet and began to snoop about a bit. He listened without paying much attention as Emily and the Serbian discussed the beneficial properties of having Aethertowers placed at regular intervals around the globe to make transmissions without the use of wires and cables easier. It would mean that the pocket telegraph machines would work at much farther distances than they did now. He should really pay attention, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it.

Sam appeared at his side. “That’s nice, leaving me on my own to suffer,” he hissed in Griffin’s ear.

Griff smiled as his gaze skimmed over a series of mechanical inventions spread out on a bench. Tesla’s intelligence was astonishing. Most of these inventions were new, or a reconstruction of items lost in a fire of his 5
^th
Avenue laboratory in ’95. How painful it must have been to lose all that research and work. That was why he had Emily lock all of her plans and diagrams in a fireproof cabinet in her laboratory beneath his London mansion. All of her prototypes were kept there, as well. Not only did it keep everything safe from fire, but also from thieves, though they had plenty of security in place for those occasions, too.

As his gaze fell upon a strange device that looked something like a candelabra with connected glass coils instead of candles, Griffin frowned. One of the coils ran into a rudimentary automaton hand that held a pencil in thin brass fingers, its lead poised above sheaves of paper.

Out of the corner of his eye, Griffin saw Sam flex his own hand—the one that had metal inside of bone. Would his friend ever accept the fact that he was part machine?

It wasn’t a question he wanted to ponder, so Griffin turned his attention back to the mechanism, which seemed to call out to him. Slowly, he reached out his hand.

His fingers touched cool metal, and then he felt it—the Aether. Heat flowed gently through his hand, tingling in his veins as the energy assaulted him. The glass tubes on the device began to glow—where the fluorescence came from he had no idea. A soft scratching noise, almost like whispering, came from the machine, growing louder. The mechanical hand had begun to move, the pencil lead marking the paper.

It was writing.

Suddenly, Tesla and Emily were there at his other side. “How did you do that?” the tall, slender man asked in his accented English.

Griffin glanced at him but didn’t remove his hand. “I touched it. It’s an Aetheric transference device, isn’t it?”

Dark brows furrowed as Tesla nodded. “It has only worked sporadically until now and never like
this.
” He gestured toward the hand that was busily scribbling all over the paper. “This is astounding.”

Smiling, Griffin gave a small shrug. “The Aether and I have always had a strange affinity for one another.” He removed his hand from the machine, and it stopped immediately. Before he could remove the paper to see what was written there, an odd clunking noise rose from behind him.

They all turned. There, in the far corner of the room, on a pedestal table, sat a small device that had begun to hum and whir, the frequency of both sounds steadily increasing.

“Griffin?” Emily shot him a glance out of the corner of her eye. “Are you doing this?”

He shook his head. “No.” But when he allowed himself to “slip” into the Aetheric plane, he could see energy crawling all over the device. It made sense—the Aether was power, just like electrical current, and could be channeled as such. Still, he didn’t know where this burst had come from, because the flow was not emanating from himself. So what … ?

He whipped his head around as something flashed in his peripheral vision. What was that? A shadow? Whatever it was, it was gone now. Maybe he had imagined it.

“Mr. Tesla, what is that thing?” It was Sam who had the presence of mind to ask. Sam, who had a distrust of all things mechanical.

The inventor looked confounded. “It is part of my Directed Energy Amplification mechanism.”

Griffin watched as Emily’s face became even paler beneath her freckles. “Which part?” she asked.

Tesla turned to her, his worried expression mirroring hers. “The part that amplifies and emits the energy flow.”

A fellow didn’t have to be a genius to figure that one out. Griffin ran a hand through his hair. “Basically, a weapon that could obliterate us all, then?”

The older man nodded. Fascination mixed with the concern in his eyes. “Perhaps the entire building. The entire city block, if it overloads, that is. And it sounds like it is about to do just that.”

“We’d better shut it down, then, eh?” Griffin forced himself to be calm as he turned to Emily and Tesla. “How do we do that?”

He look absolutely flabbergasted—not the sort of expression Griffin found overly comforting. “It should not even work. It is not connected to its Aether engine. I have no idea why it is working.”

Griffin began to see why this was such a strange and terrible thing. Somehow something had given power to an otherwise inoperable machine—one that could kill them all—and its maker had no idea how to turn it off.

Had he done this? Had his toying with the transference device somehow caused a spike in the Aether? He’d never had anything like that happen before—it couldn’t have happened now. When he peered beyond the physical world into the Aetheric, he couldn’t see any connection between himself and the machine. This was not his doing. But if not his, whose?

Now was not the time to stand around thinking. He had to act. The thing was practically whining now, it was operating at such a high frequency. It wasn’t going to hold together for much longer. It could detonate at any moment and reduce the four of them—and possibly the entire building, perhaps the entire block—to ash.

“Can I crush it?” Sam asked.

“Don’t you touch it!” Emily exclaimed, cheeks red. “It will kill you, you great oaf.”

Sam scowled, but didn’t do anything. They all knew Emily only called him “oaf ” when she was worried about him. “It’s going to kill us, anyway.” Then he surprised both his friends by asking, “Can you tell it to stop?”

Cautiously, Emily reached out her fingers toward the vibrating device, obviously trusting her affinity for machines to keep her safe. The moment she made contact her ginger eyebrows snapped together. “I can’t understand it. It’s like it’s screaming, and I can’t make out the words. Ow!” She jerked her hand away, her face a mix of astonishment and hurt. “It shocked me!”

“I’ll stop it,” Griffin informed them—sounding much more confident than he felt. Obviously this was a lesson in being careful what he wished for, because he had wanted to feel useful, and now if he couldn’t be useful enough, people would die. He would die.

He looked at Sam, who watched him with a grim expression, and then moved toward the machine. The Aetheric energy that swarmed around it wasn’t right. Normally, the Aether was filled with the brightness of organic auras or soft and gray with ghosts, but this energy was dark and sooty. It looked like a smear of something viscose—dirty automaton grease on a clean white glove.

And it seemed to be watching him, but that wasn’t possible. Unless … unless it was a ghost, but there was no form to it. Just a feeling of darkness.

He didn’t know what touching it, letting it into him, might do, but he had no choice.

It slithered toward him as he held out his hand, black tendrils curling around his fingers. It felt almost slippery, like the tentacles of an octopus. And sharp. His fingers began to bleed where it touched him. What the hell?

“Griffin?” It was Emily who called out. She’d seen the blood, no doubt. To her, it would look as though his hand had suddenly begun to bleed for no reason. He gritted his teeth and extended his hand even farther, until he touched the device, which was now shaking so violently, it was certain to explode at any second.

The moment his fingers touched the hot metal—so hot— the machine began to quiet. Griffin clenched his jaw even tighter against the double onslaught of pain and placed as much of his hand as he could over the shivering heat. Tendrils wrapped farther up his arm, cutting into his exposed forearm. Blood dripped to the carpet as what felt like a dozen razors slashed at his flesh, and his palm burned.

Once most of the dark energy had gathered around him, he drew a deep breath, pushed past the pain and focused all of his will at the curling black. He drew it toward him, into him.

He was not prepared for the assault. He thought it would put up a fight, that it would take a great force of his power to overcome it.

He was wrong.

The swirling black tendrils drew back. For a second, they seemed to come together, arching upward to form a mistshaped cobra that undulated before him.

The blackness struck before he could think to defend himself.

It was like shards of glass exploding in his chest. Pain screamed through his body, slamming him to his knees, bringing the taste of blood to his mouth. He opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out. It felt as though his vocal chords had been cut in half.

And then there was nothing. The vice of agony that gripped him let go as suddenly as it had attacked, sending him sprawling face-first onto the floor, gasping for breath. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to think.

He heard someone call his name from a great distance. He tried but couldn’t answer. His eyes rolled back into their sockets as darkness swamped his mind. He was either going to pass out or die—either was preferable to the pain. He coughed, tasted blood in his mouth.

Finley’s face swam in his mind. If he could hold on to the thought of her, he just might live. She just might keep death away.

And then she was yanked away, and there was nothing.

Finley was in a bad mood.

The fight in Bandit’s Roost had been just the start of her current glower. She didn’t like being injured, and she liked it even less when she didn’t have any of Emily’s beasties to help heal. It didn’t matter that she would heal faster than a “normal” person; she wanted to be healed
now.

The insult added to that injury had occurred once they’d returned to Dalton’s abode. Her Personal Telegraph had gotten broken in the fight, so she couldn’t contact Emily, and then Dalton had absconded with the mechanical piece Jasper had given him, without a comment to either about their well-being.

She was beginning to think that for all the criminal’s charm and good looks, he was a top-class arse.

Then Mei appeared and fussed over Jasper like a mother hen, glaring at Finley, as though it was her fault Jasper had gotten hurt and not the other way around. It was obvious the girl didn’t like her, was jealous of her. Well, if Mei would like to take her place the next time there was a fight, she was more than welcome to it. The girl was a proper cow.

Yes, it was so tempting just to reach out and give that collar a tap.

Instead, she went to the kitchen and helped herself to some bread and roast chicken. Fighting always made her hungry, and food seemed to help her natural healing process.

Never mind that she needed something to do so she wouldn’t actually backhand Mei. She shouldn’t let it get to her when other girls treated her like dog excrement on their shoes, but she had to admit—and only to herself—that it hurt almost as much as it pissed her off.

She ate her food while sitting on the sideboard and washed it down with iced tea. It didn’t taste as bad as she’d thought it would. In fact, it was pretty good, despite being just plain
wrong.
Everyone knew tea was meant to be served hot.

Afterward, she was on her way to her room—a black cloud lingering over her head—when she heard a knock at the door. One of Dalton’s men answered it. A girl spoke—asking for her. She recognized the voice as Emily’s. What was she doing there?

Finley turned toward the door. Dalton’s henchman blocked her view, but she heard him clear enough. “Get lost, pikey.”

Finley stiffened at the derogatory term. No one called her Emily such an awful name. She walked up behind the man, grabbed him by the arm and slammed him face-first into the wall, twisting in a manner that popped his shoulder out of joint. He screamed and dropped to the ground.

She crouched over him. “I’ll put it back in when you apologize,” she told him in a low voice.

He swore at her, but she merely smiled. “Uh-uh. That sort of attitude just makes me want to hurt you more.”

“Finley.”

Her head jerked up, and she saw the fear in Emily’s eyes. This was real fear—not disgust at Finley’s behavior but real terror. Something had happened. Something had happened to Griffin.

It was as though someone took a rag and wiped away all her anger—all her emotions. She was numb as she snapped the bounder’s shoulder into place. She stepped over his prone body and joined her friend.

“Is he dead?” she asked, her voice surprisingly strong.

Emily shook her head as her wide eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know. He was alive when I left to get you.”

She swallowed against the lump in her throat. Griffin could not be dead. He had survived a knife wound when they fought The Machinist and rallied. He would simply have to survive this, as well.