Thief of Hearts (Elders and Welders Chronicles Book 3) (11 page)

Rowan must have felt her eyes on him, for he looked around at her and smiled openly. She felt that same guilty clench in her chest, and she struggled to keep her breath steady and her resolve firm. When she’d collected herself as much as she could, she strode over to the tête-à-tête
and pulled him away from Won Jin, murmuring a weak excuse to her friend.

“But Won Jin here has
tea
, Hex, and I’m gasping for a spot,” Rowan complained as she pulled him farther from the other man. She rolled her eyes. If she’d had any doubt he was British, his last sentence would have cleared that right up.

“It can wait,” she said, dragging him out of the berths and onto the dock proper, pushing her way through the crowd until she found a small, dingy pocket of space underneath the awning of the kebap tent.

She tried to give him her sternest look but was afraid she failed miserably. She did not relish what was about to come, even though she knew it was for the best. For her, anyway. “We need to talk.”

ROWAN DIDN’T LIKE
Cairo. It was too loud and too frenetic, and it smelled absolutely revolting. It was just too
much
.

Though he could understand some of the languages floating in the air around him, could provide names for the objects and smells that assaulted his senses, nothing was familiar. He
had
hoped, once they reached the city, that something would trigger his memory. He hated feeling so helpless, so…
raw
. It was as if he were a child experiencing the world for the first time, his mind glutted with sensory input and a mélange of emotions he had no idea how to control.

Along with everything else, the moment he’d set foot on the docks, a low throb of panic had taken up residence in his gut and refused to go away. In fact, it only grew worse as Hex packed her father off then tried to do the same to him. It did not abate at all when she dragged him through the crowded docks, away from the
Amun Ra
and the Joseon man and his offer of tea. She had that determined look in her eyes again and something more. Something hard and unyielding that she’d worn when she’d cast her father upon Thaddeus Fincastle’s tender mercies.

He knew what was coming. He’d known, really, since she’d told him they were bound for Cairo. She didn’t even have to speak.

“Look,” she began firmly, her eyes landing upon him with great reluctance. Something in his expression that he had yet to learn to hide made her flush and look away once more, however. “Damn it, don’t look at me like that,” she bit out angrily.

“Like what?” he asked, honestly curious. He was feeling…rather a lot of emotions at the moment, all of them perplexing and contradictory, and he wondered what she read on his face. He must have known how to control his expressions once, but it seemed that ability had vanished along with his memory.

“Like I’ve drowned a bag of kittens or…cancelled Christmas, for God’s sake,” she hissed.

He shrugged. “What do you care?” he asked her.

She looked a bit stricken at this, but only for a moment. Then her shields seemed to snap back into place with a vengeance. Her expression hardened and her shoulders set defensively. He sighed inwardly. He wouldn’t even bother to plead his case.

“Look, Rowan…” she began again.

“You want me to go away,” he said bluntly.

She flushed again and still wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Something like that,” she murmured. “I would have paid for you to go to London, since you said you might be from there, but you’d rather stay here. Which is fine. It’s none of my business.”

He nodded and drew himself up with as much dignity as he was able. He shouldn’t have felt so hurt by what she was doing. They were little better than strangers, thrown together under extremely unusual circumstances, and she had already done more for him than strictly necessary. He
had
saved her life, but the debt had been more than paid. He’d still be wandering in the desert if not for her.

“I know it isn’t,” he finally said.

“I have a sister,” she continued shrilly, as if he had argued with her. As if she
wanted
him to argue with her.

“I know, I met her,” he said evenly, his brow furrowing in bewilderment.

“I wanted you to meet her so you would understand this…this moment,” she said in an accusatory way, as if
he
were the one who was abandoning
her
.

Women
. Something told him that even before he’d lost his memories they’d been impenetrable to him.

He raised an eyebrow in question. “This moment?”

“Yes, this moment, where we part ways,” she ground out, as if he were being deliberately obtuse.

“Ah,” he said, since that seemed innocuous enough.

She looked suspicious of his mild response, but he had expected it. She was suspicious of everything.

“No chance you’re in need of my services, then?” he said wryly, covering up his hurt and resignation as best he could. “You could use a bodyguard.”

She rolled her eyes. Oh, she hadn’t liked
that
, hadn’t liked the notion that she was anything less than capable of looking after herself, all evidence to the contrary.

“That’s just it, Rowan,” she said. “You have been an…excellent bodyguard. You are an extraordinary man, and I wish…I wish I could help you figure out what has happened to you, but…but you
frighten
me.”

She finally met his eyes and allowed him past all of those walls she had so painstakingly constructed. He could see for himself the fear there, alongside the awe and the bafflement.

“You frighten me,” she repeated. “And I don’t have the room in my life for the sort of trouble you bring.”

“Helen needs you.”

“Yes,” she said, looking away once more and releasing a long, pent up breath. “So I want you to stay away from me. I wish you well, but just…let this be the end of things.” Her eyes looked suspiciously damp, but he’d never point it out to her.

Though something deep inside of him told him not to give up, to cleave to her, he couldn’t help but understand and accept her reasoning. He frightened
himself
, and he couldn’t blame her for wanting distance from him.

He nodded, and she sighed deeply, but he couldn’t tell if it was with relief or frustration. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small leather purse.

He bristled. “You don’t owe me anything,” he protested.

She rolled her eyes in exasperation, grabbed his hand, and thrust the purse into it.

“At least in this you are an ordinary, prideful man. Take it, if only to assuage my conscience. It already feels battered enough as it is. Allow me this one thing, despite your pride. Toss it in the Nile if you want, but take it now,” she finished through gritted teeth.

“Fine,” he said, tucking the purse into Simon’s too-tight trousers beneath the robe and refusing to meet her eyes.

She nodded at him, satisfied. She started to say something else, then stopped herself. “See you around,” she finally seemed to settle on. Such a New World thing to say.

“No you won’t,” he answered, refusing to make it easy on either of them.

Her mouth tightened at the edges. “You’re right,” she said. “Of course you’re right.” She turned away without any further painful platitudes, and he could feel his heart begin to sink in his chest.

On some mad impulse—he would later blame it on the last disastrous week of his life—he caught her by the arm, spun her close, and kissed her. He kissed her, hard and fierce, as he’d wanted to do since he’d first laid eyes on her in London…no, not London—the desert. Why was he thinking of London…?

He kissed her with tongue and lips and teeth until they were both breathless and he’d forgotten about London entirely. He kissed her until the fight had gone out of her and she was pushing her body closer to his instead, curling her hands around his neck and opening her mouth to his.

He had to have kissed people in the past, though he couldn’t recall much beyond the dimmest of remembered sensations. But even if he had all of his memories restored to him, he was rather certain that kissing Hex Bartholomew would have made all of those other memories dissolve into the ether once more. It was a splendid kiss, just as he’d dreamed it would be, and he catalogued every sensation for later delectation—soft lips, hot breath, warm, lush, leather-clad curves melted against his body, tangled in his robes. The scent of sand and sweat, coffee and patchouli and
Hex,
invading his head until he was dizzy on his feet.

He strung it out for as long as he could, until he could feel her finally coming back to her senses, tensing in his arms and shoving at him to be free. He broke the kiss and released her. She stumbled back, wiping at her mouth, her face cherry red and her eyes flashing with an unholy mix of arousal and fury.

“You…you utter…” she spat.

He just shrugged. He regretted nothing. “Couldn’t help myself,” he said through the grin he couldn’t quite hide.

“Again, just like a man!” she hissed, turning to take her leave.

“Oh, and Miss Bartholomew,” he said.

She froze and turned back to him, though her body language made it clear that she didn’t want to. “What,” she demanded flatly.

“I don’t blame you for this. I frighten myself.”

Some of the fury and embarrassment leeched from her expression, replaced by something that almost looked like pity.

The last thing he wanted from her.

“And,” he continued with a smirk, “you kissed me back.”

Her expression clouded over once more, and she looked torn between giving him a good slap and retreating.

She chose the latter, though he suspected it went against all of her instincts to do so.

He watched her disappear into the throng as his heart began to sink once more. He had absolutely no idea what he was going to do now, but he couldn’t help but feel that it would be all wrong without Hex by his side.

LONDON, 1897

THE HALF-FINISHED
blue and red tiled walls of the abandoned tube stop gleamed dully in the flickering light cast by the gargantuan gas lamps that had been smuggled down from the surface weeks ago by Ehrengard’s men. Large, reflective mirrors stood behind the lamps to intensify the illumination, channeling it toward the center of the broad platform. And in that artificial brilliance, Brightlingsea stalked among the various gadgets and unidentifiable paraphernalia of his makeshift laboratory, spanner in one hand and what looked like some sort of medieval torture device in the other.

Hex had faced many horrors in her twenty-eight years. She’d survived a childhood under the thumb of her father, always but a stride away from the hangman’s noose. She’d survived her thirteenth year, when she’d awoken with Welding hands after a simple tumble off a rooftop—perhaps the worst of her father’s betrayals. She’d survived a brief, unhappy marriage at only sixteen years of age to a man whose family would have just as soon seen her dead.

She’d survived years of hardship and danger in Egypt, and for the last decade, she’d managed to keep her family alive and relatively intact despite people constantly, inexplicably wanting to kill them. She’d even survived
vampires
, for God’s sake.

Not a lot scared her.

But the device in the center of the duke’s underground laboratory sure as hell did. The metal platform with its elegant arching rings and the wrought iron box set at its side seemed innocuous enough at the moment, but knowing just exactly what the devices were—what they were capable of—filled her with absolute dread.

She’d seen the platform when it was activated, those diamond-encrusted rings rotoring around each other so fast that they disappeared. A strange, eerie light had emanated from it, thick enough to touch and strong enough to suck one in if one got too close, as Rowan had done.

Had she not the proof of her own past to go by, she’d never have believed that throbbing sphere of light was a portal to another time. But
it was
, and the thought flat-out horrified her. It was not just because of the duke’s convoluted lecture on the theoretical dangers of traveling into the past—most of which had gone straight over her head. It was the fact that nothing
human
could have survived such a trip through time.

She’d been dealing with things that weren’t quite human from the moment Rowan had walked out of that tomb and into her life ten years ago. She’d known all along, of course, that Rowan was…something else. Something inexplicable.

To finally have the whole impossible truth laid bare, however, had been slightly overwhelming, to put it mildly. Da Vinci hearts, a cabal of Elders, Bonded companions and their vampiric off-shoots were one thing. But then she’d learned what had really happened during the Crimean War—and that Stieg Ehrengard was alive and well and apparently obsessed with her children…

Well, it had been a lot to take in.

She’d thought the time machine had been the last straw, but the black box—the only engine in the world strong enough to power the device—was just downright wrong. When the duke had explained that the coffin-like structure housed four Da Vinci hearts recently removed from their owners, she’d felt nauseated. When he’d further explained that those owners had to have been alive during such a procedure in order to preserve the heart, she’d very nearly cast up her accounts over the side of the tube platform.

Even now she could hear the box’s low, sonic hum, feel it reverberating in the pavement beneath her feet, and it made her stomach twist with nerves. She would almost have rather been back in Egypt smuggling spices and tea underneath the nose of the Souk than this. It was just too fantastic, too much.

Yet the chance of having Rowan back…

Well, she’d risk damn well near everything for that, no matter how terrified she was.

The moment she’d seen him again two weeks ago in his stuffy London drawing room after he’d caught her spying on Llewellyn House, she’d known there would be no turning back for her. She’d known she’d not be able to let him go this time, even though he’d had no idea who she was—who the children must be. Even though he’d looked at her—
through
her—as if she were a stranger. Even though he’d never met her—not yet, anyway.

He’d been the same man underneath all the expensive Bond Street tailoring and stodgy, British respectability: just as exasperatingly noble as he ever was, just as obsessed with tea, and just as lovely.

It had been a confusing few weeks, to say the least. She’d gone from thinking him a specter to suspecting he was merely pretending not to know her—and oh, how angry she’d been at that possibility. Had he survived Egypt after all and just never come back for her? Had he recovered his memories and returned to his comfortable life in London, writing off his short time spent with her as a trifling diversion?

Had the son of a bitch let her think he was dead for nearly a decade
on purpose
?

Simon had once posed the theory of time travel to her, but she hadn’t truly believed it, even after Rowan had disappeared. At that time, nothing had made sense to her. All she’d been able to understand through her grief was that the same force that had brought Rowan into her life had taken him away from her, and it was as incomprehensible as it was cruel. Yet it seemed Simon’s mad theory had been right after all. It explained everything that had happened ten years ago and everything that was happening now.

So if there was a chance…

How could she turn away from it?

“What the bloody hell is he doing?” Percival Parminter murmured next to her as the duke, apparently oblivious to their approach, took up an oversized mallet and began hammering something on top of a block of iron with such ferocity sparks flew everywhere.

Parminter was her only companion today. A “friend” of the inspector’s, the strange, secretive man was often to be found in the tunnel, watching the duke work, or lurking about Llewellyn House having covert conversations with Drexler and Romanov. He was all that was polite toward Hex, but she didn’t trust the foppish little man for a second.

She knew when a person had an ulterior motive, and she suspected Percival Parminter had several hidden behind those gold-framed spectacles, false smile, and ruthless silver-gray eyes. She thought her father had been a great confidence man, but Parminter put Hubert Bartholomew to shame.

At the moment, however, she could care less what the man’s motives were, as long as they didn’t interfere with bringing Rowan back.

“I have no idea,” she answered.

At the sound of their voices, the duke stopped his pounding abruptly and turned around, his eyes alighting upon them. He fished around on a workbench, located a timepiece attached to a long, white-gold chain, and checked it with a scowl. He seemed to be implying that they were late, though they had arrived ahead of the time he had given them.

She’d felt guilty leaving her sister and children at Llewellyn House after nearly losing all of them a fortnight ago, but she couldn’t stay away from the underground laboratory. Lady Christiana and the inspector, along with the Romanovs, seemed to provide ample protection for her family, however, so she was not worried for their safety.

The only one in any danger at Llewellyn House was Fyodor, the Abominable Soldier who had fought so valiantly against O’Connell’s horde of vampires. The poor man had never recovered from his wounds, and Romanov doubted that he ever would.

Since Fyodor had sustained those injuries on her family’s behalf, she felt horribly responsible. But she couldn’t help but feel relief as well at the outcome, since all of her family was safe for the first time in what felt like eons.

O’Connell—Janus—had been killed once and for all, his minions had crept back into the shadows, and Ehrengard was in the wind, having abandoned his interest in her children along with the time machine. At least for now. Moreover, Helen was nearly fully recovered from the stress of her Bonding, healthy and
healed
, and it was the one thing in this whole mess her father had caused that she could not regret.

“I am nearly ready,” the duke said, his eyes sliding over Hex to Parminter and lingering for a moment. His expression was inscrutable as always, but Hex had a feeling that the duke was not the type of man to appreciate or understand Parminter’s unique toilette of rose-colored waistcoat, brocaded silver jacket, and old-fashioned, lace-edged cravat.

Hex sure as hell didn’t.

Parminter just arched one delicate eyebrow at the duke, undaunted. The duke cleared his throat, turned away, and picked up a small jumble of electrical circuitry, which he then proceeded to either untangle or tangle up even more. Hex wasn’t quite sure which. She had a horrible suspicion that the duke didn’t either.

The duke had made Rowan’s retrieval sound so easy at first. After interrogating her relentlessly about the events of 1887—the tomb, Simon, Cairo, and Rowan’s eventual loss—he’d stepped through the portal just days after Rowan had been sucked into the light with the assurance that he’d return with his cousin in tow.

Hex should have known it had been too good to be true. The duke had come back through a week later, dazed and weary and
without Rowan
, had spoken incoherently of a miscalculation all the way back to Llewellyn House, and then had passed out for five days straight. He’d finally roused himself and, without answering a single useful question, went directly back to the abandoned station, immersing himself in arcane mathematical equations no one else had a hope of understanding.

In between calculations, he’d finally, grudgingly revealed what had gone wrong. A decimal point, apparently. He’d ended up four thousand years in the past with a broken damper—whatever the hell that was. His memory had been lost just like Rowan’s, and he’d been stuck there for forty-seven years.

That had
not
inspired much confidence. The man was a genius, obviously, but he seemed to have just about as much success with his tinkering as Simon did—which was very little indeed.

“How is your sister?” he asked abruptly, intent on adjusting some dial on top of the black box. He always asked after Helen, which she found invasive. But apparently, as the leader of the Elders, he claimed to have some sort of authority over the Bonded.

Well, she’d just have to see about
that
.

“Recovering,” she said shortly.

“Hector?”

And
he always asked after Hector. Never Hester. It was…unsettling.

“Why are you so damned interested in my children?” she demanded.
Why are you so damned interested in Hector?
was what she wanted to say, but she held that specificity back for now. She wasn’t certain she was prepared to hear his answer to that one quite yet.

He gave a casual shrug. “They are my blood as well.”

“Right.” Even more unnerving. Though it would explain where Hector had inherited his brains. Bartholomews were clever, but not
that
clever.

“And they are Elder children. They are rare,” he continued unexpectedly.

“So I have gathered,” she responded, trying to remain carefully neutral in her tone. They’d not exactly had the time to discuss the subject, what with all of this saving the universe business. But if he was bringing it up now, she’d better get all of the answers she could out of him, for she might not get another chance.

Perhaps he’d come to the same conclusion…which was worrisome. He didn’t seem to be putting much faith in the success of his endeavor.

She supposed a forty-seven year mistake would tend to have that effect.

“Why is that?” she probed after a moment.

“Elder children seem to come in multiples.” He waved his hand vaguely. “Some sort of genetic proclivity. Hence one of the reasons having children has been discouraged among Elders. The mother rarely survives the birth.”

Hex scowled at him but could not dispute the claim. She’d nearly died herself.

“The other reasons have to do with what happens to the children of such unions,” he continued.

Her heart sank.
Here it comes,
she thought grimly. “What happens?”

The duke’s eyes flickered over her in brief assessment. “They are born Bonded, like the Lady Christiana is Bonded to the earl, and now your sister. Rowan shared his Heartsblood with her, which has transformed her on a molecular level. The bond will extend her life, allow her to heal faster and strengthen her endurance. The Council requires a prospective Bonded’s consent, and no child can give that. So to bring a child into the world already Bonded is just not done.”

It wasn’t
bad
news, exactly. “So my children…” Hex began.

There was something she might call sympathy lurking in those fathomless depths, but she wouldn’t lay money on it. “I know of only two other cases, and I can but extrapolate from them. Romanov’s children are still infants, though, and the other pair of twins…”

He broke off suddenly, and what was unmistakably anguish flitted briefly over his features before being wrestled back behind his usual mask. Her heart sank even lower. Probably all the way to China.