Zoe Archer - [Ether Chronicles 03] (23 page)

But Mayhew’s grief quickly shifted into a hard, wild urgency. He whirled to face both Kali and Fletcher in the doorway. “I remember the battle. This side of the ship hadn’t taken this damage when you ordered us to evacuate.”

“No,” Fletcher murmured, “it hadn’t. I recall how you wanted to return to your cabin to fetch something before the evacuation—and I had to get the master-at-arms to bodily throw you into the jollyboat. You disobeyed a direct order.”

Yet the lieutenant didn’t seem to care. He pointed at the gaping wall. “When did this happen?”

Kali’s brows rose. Now Mayhew had stopped calling Fletcher
sir
or
Captain
.

Fletcher seemed to have noticed the change, too. He folded his arms across his chest. “When I was looking for a place to set the
Persephone
down. Her hull dragged across some mountains. Not that far from here.” He squinted as he stared past Mayhew, contemplating the massive laceration in the side of his airship. “Then I saw this island, and that it had these moors. They’d make for a good landing spot. So I circled to get her into position. I saw some debris fall from the ship. Maybe something from your cabin.” He shook his head. “Wasn’t paying much attention to falling debris at that point. I just wanted to get her down without killing anyone on the ground.”

Anyone
,
except himself
, she thought. She and Fletcher had both faced death with eyes open, but he’d done so willingly.

“If any of those items managed to hit the ground on the island,” Mayhew said urgently, stepping closer, “where might they land?”

“There are some cliffs southwest of the ship,” he answered. “On the other side of the hills. That’s the most likely location.”

She turned to him with a frown. “You never took me there.”

“It’s a dangerous place. Didn’t want you hurt.”

“You’ve been there, though?” pressed Mayhew. “You must’ve seen something.”

“Nothing to hunt on that cliff, and it’s ready to fall into the sea at any minute. Somebody that weighs as much as I do could make the whole thing crumble away like rotten bread. Like l said, dangerous.”

“Take me there,” Mayhew demanded. At Fletcher’s stony silence, the lieutenant seemed to collect himself. “If you’d be so kind, sir, I need to go to that cliff. See if what I lost is there.” His gaze turned imploring. “You can understand that, Captain? Trying to recover what you miss?”

Fletcher glanced at her. A long moment passed. Then, “We’ll find what you’ve lost.”

T
his couldn’t have happened at a bloody worse moment.

The thought bored into Fletcher like a tetrol-powered drill as he led Mayhew, Kali, and Mayhew’s hired men toward the cliffs edging along the southwest of the island. He threw a quick glance over his shoulder. The terrain sloped sharply, but Kali kept pace, her strength and agility so vastly improved that no one would notice that she walked on an artificial leg. Not without looking up her skirts. And he’d plow his fist into the face of anyone who tried that.

She caught his gaze, and, like a ruddy coward, he turned away quickly, his eyes focusing on the incline instead of the unspoken words in her look.

Hell.
It wasn’t supposed to end this way. He didn’t know how he’d planned on it ending, in truth. Maybe he’d been naïve, thinking they could just go on as they’d been doing forever. His mouth quirked into a humorless smile.
Naïve
was never a word he’d imagined to describe himself. But when it came to Kali, he found himself more altered than when he’d been transformed into a Man O’ War.

And here was Mayhew, throwing another spanner in the works. Much as the lieutenant wanted . . . whatever it was he sought . . . he’d have to report finding Fletcher alive to the Admiralty. Fletcher’s grim smile remained firmly in place. Here he’d been angry with Kali for wanting to leave the island, and now he was the one who’d depart first. He hated the idea of her alone here, but he couldn’t force her to come with him, and it didn’t seem likely that she planned on returning to the world within the next few days.

He’d fix up her cottage before he left. She could always stay aboard the
Persephone
, but she wouldn’t want to. The cottage was
her
place. The wrecked airship wasn’t much of a home. It hadn’t been for him. Not until she’d lived there.

He had to push all those thoughts from his head. Just as he had to push away the ache that clutched at his chest when he thought about parting from her. And what he’d be forced to do when he returned to civilization.

Right now, he needed to concentrate on getting to the cliffs, and seeing if Mayhew’s precious possession could be found. The next voyage would come soon enough, whether he wanted it to or not.

The cliffs were located in a notch just behind the hills. They were too narrow to approach from the north, so he had to take them up the hills first, and then they’d need to carefully negotiate their way down. He didn’t want Kali anywhere near those cliffs, but she’d insisted on coming along, and he couldn’t forbid her from doing anything. It was one of the things he loved about her.

He almost stumbled.
Jesus, where’d
that
come from
? He shook his head. No. He was wrong. He cared about her. Respected her. Desired her. But . . . love? He didn’t know what
love
meant, only that it wasn’t meant for men—or Man O’ Wars—like him.

And Kali deserved to be loved—he knew that.

“How much farther?” Mayhew demanded, sounding breathless and agitated.

“Not much,” he threw over his shoulder. The lieutenant had been acting more and more odd since he’d first set foot on the deck of the crashed airship. It didn’t seem like him. Mayhew had been an even-tempered bloke, quick to obey an order, and generally liked by the crew. He did keep to himself, with his tinkering, yet was friendly enough. But maybe Liverpool had changed him. God knew Fletcher wasn’t the same since the battle.

They reached the top of one of the hills, and everyone stopped to look down. The other side of the hill sloped down precipitously about thirty feet to a narrow cliff top. Rocks and shrubbery dotted the ground.

“There, you see!” Mayhew cried, pointing. “I see a bit of metal in the scrub.” He hurried forward, sliding his way down the side of the hill.

“Easy, Lieutenant,” Fletcher snapped. “You go bounding around down there and the whole cliff’s likely to collapse beneath you.”

But Mayhew wasn’t listening. He staggered as he reached the rocky cliff top, then scurried toward a dull metallic gleam hidden within a shrub. But his face fell when he pulled out a wrench. “Damn and hell!” He threw the tool, and it went spinning, end over end, over the cliff’s edge. A long moment passed before Fletcher heard the wrench’s faint splash into the pounding waves below. The distance down had to be at least four hundred feet.

“It’s not here,” Mayhew snarled.

“Stand down, Lieutenant. I’ll help you search.”

“Me, too,” Kali said.

He placed a cautioning hand on her wrist. “It won’t hold all of our weight. Not for long. If the cliff did break, I’d survive the fall, but Mayhew wouldn’t. And neither would you.”

She looked as though she wanted to debate the subject, but she said nothing, only giving a small, clipped nod. “Be careful.”

“Man O’ Wars don’t need to be careful,” he answered.

“I don’t care if you’re a Man O’ War,” she replied, her voice tight. “Your safety—that’s all that matters to me.”

Her words sent a sweet pain knifing through him, and he wished to God that Mayhew’s two men weren’t standing nearby, looking bored, because he ached to kiss her. Having tasted that pleasure yesterday, each hour without it now was torment. One thing was certain: he’d kiss her again—and hopefully more—before he left the island. He needed her one last time. It wouldn’t be enough, but he’d take whatever he could.

“Likewise,” he answered. After giving her wrist a gentle squeeze, he made his way down to the cliff, moving with more caution than Mayhew had shown.

“What am I looking for?” he asked the lieutenant when he reached the top of the cliff.

“A steel strongbox, this big.” Mayhew held his hands twelve inches apart. Despite the chill wind whipping up the side of the cliff, sweat glossed his forehead and stained the collar of his shirt.

They searched through the scrub. The cliff itself was only about forty feet long, but the brush grew densely, and more had likely grown in since the
Persephone
circled overhead, losing debris like a leper losing flesh. Mayhew frantically tore through the shrubbery, cursing whenever he discovered something that wasn’t the object of his search.

It was like robbing someone’s grave. They pulled out framed photographs, some articles of clothing—now rotting from exposure—more tools. Fletcher’s consolation came in knowing that the men who’d owned these things had survived. Still, he couldn’t lose the cold that crept up his arms as he searched.

Fletcher had little hope they’d find the strongbox. He kept looking, however. Whatever it held, the box must contain something vitally important to Mayhew. Letters, perhaps, from someone no longer living. A family trust. A keepsake from a better time. The damned thing about time was that it moved forward whether one wanted it to or not.

He cast a glance up at Kali, who was watching him, her hands knotted into fists as they held her skirt in place from the gusting wind. Her face was tight and drawn, but her eyes were bright as she followed his progress.

He’d want some object—a token, the smallest scrap of anything at all—to remind him of her when he left and all that remained of their time on the island was memory. The idea of not having something of her with him struck him as a physical pain. So he understood Mayhew’s desperate, if fruitless, efforts.

As Fletcher continued to search through the brush, the ground beneath him shifted. It moved just a little, but enough to remind him how precarious the situation was. He’d have a long fall, and the landing wouldn’t be pleasant.

“I’m not finding anything, Lieutenant,” he said over his shoulder, “and this cliff won’t hold us much longer.”

Mayhew looked frenzied. “No! It
has
to be here.” He picked up an object, a dented case for a pocket watch. “This is mine. So whatever was in my cabin has to be here.”

“What
are
we looking for, Lieutenant? What’s in that strongbox?”

Mayhew was silent for a moment. “Something . . .” He glanced off toward the horizon. “Something that makes me a better man.”

Fletcher gazed up at Kali, watching them as they searched. “Then we keep looking.”

He decided to give the lieutenant ten more minutes. Then he’d drag Mayhew back up the hill and tell him it was over. The lieutenant wasn’t in uniform, but Fletcher still outranked him, and he wouldn’t let Mayhew survive the battle at Liverpool only to die here, on this tiny island in the Outer Hebrides, for sentiment.

Tokens and keepsakes were only things. What mattered was the heart’s own memory. If something truly mattered, it wouldn’t suffer the fate of decay or loss. He’d have Kali with him always, even if her presence was a sweet pain lodged between his ribs forever.

A gleam of metal, covered with mud and scrub, caught his eye. It lay very close to the edge, so he picked his way toward it. It’d be a sodding shame if he found the strongbox, only to have the rocks and earth crumble away beneath him and send them both tumbling into the sea. He’d live, but finding the box beneath the pounding waves would be impossible.

“What is it?” Mayhew demanded, as Fletcher sidled closer to the bit of metal. The lieutenant started toward him. “Is that—?”

“Reef your sails, Lieutenant,” Fletcher snapped, holding up his hand. “It’s unstable as blazes here. Whatever I find, I’ll bring to you.”

Mayhew snapped his mouth closed and seemed to vibrate in place. But he stayed where he was as Fletcher crouched down and tore at the scrub covering the metal.

Bits of shrubbery came up, and when that was cleared, he scraped away the dirt. As he did, he uncovered a flat metal surface. His heart began to pound. Was this really it? The odds were against them, but maybe, with everything else going to hell, there could be some bright spot.

He dug at the dried, brittle earth. At last, he exposed a twelve-inch long metal panel. Shoving his fingers into the soil, he felt more edges, like the shape of a box.

Ruddy hell.
This had to be it.

He tugged, more gently than if he’d used his full measure of strength to keep the cliff from breaking apart. Another tug, and then the buried object broke free. Fletcher held it up. The strongbox, complete with a lock on the front.

Kali let out a little cheer. Mayhew, however, said nothing. Despite Fletcher’s warnings, the lieutenant bounded forward, his eyes round and frenzied. Mayhew snatched the box from Fletcher’s hands, then stroked his own hands over it lovingly.

“I can break it open,” Fletcher offered.

But Mayhew tugged on a chain around his neck, at the end of which dangled a key. He quickly opened the strongbox. The lid blocked Fletcher’s view of the contents, but the moment the container was opened, something changed.

There was a new energy in the air, unseen, but crackling like electricity. Mayhew himself seemed to shift, as though his exterior was a mirage. A sudden power emanated from him. His mouth curved in a cruel grin. He reached into the strongbox and pulled out an object, then threw the strongbox aside. What he held wasn’t a photograph, or a stack of letters, or even a little trinket. No, what he held up was an intricate mechanical device, roughly the size of a man’s fist. Or a human heart.

“The hell?” Fletcher growled, a sentiment Kali echoed in different words from her place atop the hill.

Mayhew tore his gaze from the device and stared at Fletcher.
Jesus
. The lieutenant’s eyes burned with sudden madness.

“Always thought you were better than us normal men,” Mayhew spat, “didn’t you? Stronger, faster. Worth a hell of a lot more to the navy than us regular blokes. What did we matter? We cost them nothing. But
you
. You bloody Man O’ Wars. The prize of Her Majesty’s Aerial Navy,” he sneered. “There wouldn’t even
be
a damned aerial navy without you. Britain’s protectors. Heroes of the realm.”