Clockwork Looking Glass (Heart of Bronze Book 1)

by Michael Rigg

  I reached out and put a hand on her shoulder as her face twisted into a deep frown. She touched my hand there and held it as tears filled her eyes. "But maybe it's a sign. Maybe you're to lead us where we need to go, maybe to someplace we can settle down and then the Lord will bless us with a babe." Her chin quivered and her eyes watered more. I could tell from her expression that starting a family with her husband meant more to her than anything. It crushed me that I couldn't do anything to help. I moved my hand up to her cheek before pulling her toward me. I wrapped my arms around her and held her tight, wishing I really was an angel.

  Maggie sobbed into my shoulder, dampening the new blouse, and said, "If yer not an angel, love, you've got to be somethin'. Somethin' meant for us to find ya 'fore you were killed. Surely the Lord'll bless us for that kindness?" I eased her off my shoulder and studied her tear-streaked face. Her eyeliner made black smears in the corners of her eyes. She sniffed and studied my eyes as I looked into hers.

  She continued, "Alice, I'm sorry t' be unloadin' our baggage on ya. You were jus' as lost, weren't ya, and here we were hopin' against love that you'd be able to guide us..." She shrugged and wiped her eyes. She tried to laugh "I'm sorry, Alice. I am... But we'll find yer home in Chicago."

  I don't know where it came from, or where the resolve got its strength, but I shook my head no and glanced toward Kevin. In a clear, steady voice I said, "I don't want to go to Chicago. I don't live there anymore."

  Maggie blinked.

  I said, "Have you ever heard of the lost city of Atlantis?"

  Maggie stared at me, then she looked forward as Kevin dipped his head under the flap to see if he'd overheard correctly.

  "Atlantis? It's a tale, a fable." Maggie said. "Has that got somethin' to do with you?"

  I nodded and swallowed. "Take me to Philadelphia and I'll show you. I know someone who can help me, and maybe you too."

  CHAPTER 24, “The Clockwork Carpenters”

  Pandora spun on the ghoul as he entered the room. The last thing she saw before she could cross her fingers was his snarling smile and glowing red eyes. Then she flew backwards as if caught in a silent explosion. A blast of air pressure, thrown by Teivel Hearse's magics sent her spiraling backwards toward the shuttered windows. Her back impacted with the shutters and she felt them buckle out as the glass behind them burst.

  Reaching out as she twisted back through the air in a sloppy somersault, Pandora grasped at something, anything to keep herself from plummeting to the street far blow. Her arm caught an iron railing and she hooked it with her elbow as the broken glass cascaded around her. Her legs kicked out and her body thumped against the concrete and iron side of the Center of World Trade, but she held on. Gasping, her long braid coming loose and flapping in the high-altitude winds like a tattered rope, she reached up and grabbed the promenade railing with her other hand and held on.

  As she hung there more than ninety stories above the streets of New Yorke, Pandora crossed her fingers.

  ~~~~~~~

  Wilco waddled out into the street, glancing back over his shoulder repeatedly to see if his daughter was following.

  Then he got dizzy. His vision clouded. He tripped.

  In his mind, Wilco saw Teivel Hearse enter the conference room above. Through Pandora's eyes he saw the vile smirk of the ghoul in the black velvet suit as he glared at her and said, "I'll take that hand." He knew what it meant. It meant the King of the Ghouls knew Pandora's tell. And, if the words were literal, Hearse would take off his daughter's hands before killing her and—

  The vision mingled with the memory of Nigel Wolfe's last resting place, the large brown stain on the carpet, the bits of bone. The ghoul was going to do to Pandora what he'd done to the vice president of Thorne & Wolfe.

  But his own memory was then pushed aside by a forced thought. Again, through Pandora's eyes—her younger eyes—he saw Alice, the stranger, naked in the back room of the haberdashery in Philadelphia. Light from the rain-spattered window cast a red halo around her long hair, and the violin curves of her back were accented by the golden glow of the lantern in the haberdashery's bathroom as she pulled on underclothes and trousers. He saw what Pandora had seen that night, felt what she felt. While Wilco was shocked by the sudden vision of the beautiful stranger's curves, he felt only the curiosity his daughter had experienced then... drawn to a scar on her back.

  The vision zoomed in, concentrated, intensified in focus as Pandora's eye fell upon the mark.

  Three raised ring-shaped lumps joined by a line of scar over Alice's left hip. Pandora had recognized it immediately as a Sign of the Trinity, a mark placed by the gods to designate individuals who would change the course of history if they were made aware of their importance. She knew them as cursed souls, tools of the shadowy dream figures called the Clockwork Carpenters. Wilco recognized it as a scarred version of the key marker on the map of Atlantis's location. In his mind, the image of the map superimposed over Pandora's memory of the scar. The match was perfect.

  He immediately felt Alice to be exactly what she thought she was when they met her: a stranger from another time and place, an outcast, a lost soul.

  And, in the moment Pandora relayed the thoughts to him, he began to put it all together. Bringing Alice to Atlantis—at least in Pandora's mind—would end the world as they knew it. Everything would simply be erased as the Clockwork Carpenters carried out their legendary whims of fate manipulation. Pandora knew them as evil. Wilco remembered them from tales of his own father who claimed them to be agents of heaven who designated earthborn angels to walk among the mortals and guide their fates toward a greater good.

  Growing up, Wilco believed his father's stories, even bought his father's claim that the inventor of the Thinking Machines, Dr. Simcoe, was one of them. But, like Santa Claus and leprechauns, beliefs only go so far without proof, even with children. Yarns spun by parents to entertain children fade with maturity and experience. But now that his mind was filled with what Pandora had seen...

  Now that he had seen with his own eyes—through his daughter's eyes—and had actually met Alice, he felt himself blush inside with a burning fire of truth. They existed. A curdling warmth in his belly spread through his body, a tingling gripped him at the back of the neck with the awe-filled shock of the news. It was proof that they—whoever they truly were—either chose people, or created people, to walk among the mortals to change history. Alice's mark, and the appearance of the mark on a topographical map of the floor of the Atlantic Ocean meant one thing: The discovery of the real Atlantis would change reality. It also explained young Alice's memory loss and the peculiar way in which she was thrust upon reality—right into the hands of the one mortal who could stop (or help) her, Captain Bryce Landry.

  As the visions coalesced into a clear picture, Wilco felt Pandora's presence in his mind. She called out to him, "Pappa, run! Get to the Canary and get out of here! Don't let the ghoul find you!"

  No, he called back to his vision. Pandy, no!

  "Go! I need ya to tell Bryce what we know! Tell him 'bout Alice's mark! Warn him to keep 'er away from Atlantis! Away from New Yorke!"

  Pandy!

  "I can't speak to you, Daddy. He'll hear me! Just go! Find Bryce! Warn him about all this!"

  Wilco only hesitated for a second in his mind as he nodded internally. His last thought to his daughter was, I love you!

  He opened his eyes and pushed himself up off the grimy sidewalk just as a small triangle of glass exploded into crystalline dust a few feet in front of him. He rolled to his side and scrambled to his feet, huddling in a doorway as other street-level walkers ran to escape the falling shards of glass from the top of the tower. A man cried out as a large shard knocked off his top hat and exploded at his feet. Wilco saw blood stream down the man's hand and dribble onto the cobblestone pavement as the man staggered into the middle of the street and huddled under the awning of a cable car. Someone cried out, "A broken window!" A woman: "Call Emergency Services!" A disintereste
d cop said, "A bird must have flown into it. Happens all the time."

  Wilco knew what really happened. With Pandora's final wishes to him, he felt her hanging there on the ledge of the promenade. He didn't look up. He only closed his eyes, wincing back the tears and terrors and wished for God to take care of her, then he pulled up the collar of his flight jacket around the back of his neck and dashed out of the doorway and down the street.

  One block over he raised his hand and waved down an AeroCab. The car chittered up to him and the driver pulled a lever to open the door. "Where to, little man?"

  Wilco climbed into the back of the cab, ignoring the slur. "Thirtieth Street Heliport, and step on it!"

  The door to the cab barely closed behind him as the vehicle rolled forward and lifted into the air, a blast of hot steam trailing behind it as the driver gunned the engine.

  ~~~~~~~

  Bryce and Adeline burst into the greenhouse. Bryce held his father's chrome revolver in his hand, his face a scowl of worried determination. Adeline, behind him, wrung her hands with worry.

  "Lydia!" Bryce shouted as he dropped the pistol on a nearby workbench lined with gardening tools. He rushed over to where his fiancee huddled on the floor, her dress flared out in a wide ring like an inverted flower, his brother cradled in her lap. He could see a little blood on her dress from the back of Clayton's head.

  "Clay!" Adeline called out as she snatched the pistol from where Bryce had dropped it. She pointed the heavy weapon toward the floor and glanced over her shoulder as she followed her older brother, watching the open greenhouse doorway. She remembered the shots, the screams, imagined a Yankee intruder on their property or some kind of thief. "Where's Alice?"

  Ignoring Adeline, Lydia looked up at Bryce as he knelt down beside her. Bryce looked into his brother's bleary eyes as she spoke to him in a level tone laced with urgency. "Bryce, it was Alice. She attacked Clayton. Hit him with a spade."

  "Alice?" Bryce only glanced at her as he cupped his brother's face in his hands. "Clay? Clayton, can you hear me?"

  Clayton Landry groaned and blinked a couple of times, tried to focus.

  Adeline said, "We heard shots."

  Lydia nodded to the small silver Derringer on the floor of the greenhouse. "Mine, I'm afraid. After she attacked him, I fired a couple of warning shots to scare her away."

  Bryce suddenly stood, his brown eyes burning as he quickly turned toward the door.

  “She's long gone, Bryce!” Lydia called.

  Adeline put a hand up to block Bryce's exit, but looked past him, narrowing her eyes at Lydia McFerran, her gaze fierce in the green dim of the glass house. "Why would Alice want to hurt Clayton?"

  Bryce turned back to them, an eyebrow raised curiously to Adeline's question. He didn't say anything. He just looked between Clayton's groaning form and Lydia's knowing smirk. Again, he tried to push past Adeline, but she wasn't about to be left alone with those two. Clayton blinked again and began to focus, his groans almost forming words.

  Lydia glared back at Adeline. "You're askin' why a stranger brought to this house uninvited would attack someone? Does there need to be a reason, girl? Don't be a fool!"

  "Alice is a stranger, yes, but she's sweet, Lydia McFerran,” Adeline said, using the Lady's full name to press her own bitterness. She's the sweetest soul I ever did meet, and you—"

  "Shut up!" Bryce spat between the two of them. "Adel, put that damn gun down and git back to the house!"

  "No!"

  "Adel, damn it, go!"

  Adeline shifted her weight from foot to foot, her long dress swaying slightly behind the gun pointed between her feet. She glanced again over her shoulder. "No. Bryce, where's Alice? Ain't that what you should be askin' her?" She waved the gun loosely in Lydia's direction. Bryce moved to grab for it but Adeline quickly pulled it back. “Ask her!”

  Bryce, his face ruddy in the green light, snarled at his sister, "Adel, put the damn gun down and go make sure Daddy and Savannah don't come out here!"

  Adeline started to say something, but thought better of it as she caught on to her brother's wisdom. This was no scene for either Jefferson Landry's angry impetuousness or Savannah's innocence. Huffing impatiently, she put the pistol back on the bench and turned. Outside the greenhouse, as she ran through the gardens back toward the house, she called out, "Alice? Alice, where are you?"

  Bryce turned his attention to Lydia and knelt before her. He rested a cautious hand on his brother's chest as he searched her face, his expression softening slightly though his eyes still blazed. She looked back at him, her own expression softening as it melted into sadness. She lifted a hand to Bryce's cheek but he moved his head away. "Why would Alice attack Clayton?" he asked.

  Lydia glanced down at Clayton as he blinked blearily up into her eyes. She gently patted his shoulder before quickly answering Bryce. "I came in just as they were arguin'. She was goin' off somethin' fierce about Landry Holdings, Bryce. She confessed to be a plant for Thorne & Wolfe, demanded to know things."

  Bryce's face displayed the shock and horror Lydia expected. She did not expect the underlying expression that followed that accused her of lying.

  "It's true, Bryce. She's a spy," Lydia said, tilting her head and lowering her chin with a pout. "She attacked your brother when his back was turned, almost killed him in cold blood!" Then she quickly looked up and spoke to him with urgency as she brushed her fingers over his ear and through his hair. "Bryce, she's goin' to find a wireless! She's goin' to report back to Thorne & Wolfe! Your daddy was right about her! She was planted by the Yankees to keep you from Atlantis! And now the plans of your daddy to get back the contract you lost are goin' to be known by the enemy."

  "That's a lie," Bryce muttered bitterly. But his mind reeled with uncertainty as he glared at her. "That's a bold-faced lie, Lydia."

  Her expression turned hard, incredulous, but only for a second before melting back into her innocent Southern Belle facade. "Bryce Landry, I wouldn't lie to my future husband. The sake of your father's company is at hand here, and—if I'm understandin' this Atlantis thing—so is the sake of the entire Confed'racy."

  Lady McFerran's motivations were hidden by her tender touch and words, most of which were also aimed at the eldest Landry brother as he regained consciousness. The future McFerran-Landry merger in mind, her goal was to wipe Alice clean of this picture and get the Landrys back on track with the biggest acquisition the world had ever known.

  Clayton tried to speak. Lydia patted his arm and glanced down at him. She prattled quickly, "Clayton, it's all right. We can still fix this. We can make some calls, force a legal action against Thorne & Wolfe, freeze their assets. It's not your brother's fault, really. This all happened because he has a huge, caring heart. Thorne & Wolfe must know this and it makes the trap they set all the more understandable."

  She met Bryce's eyes. “You have to see, Bryce,” she said softly with pleading eyes. “You have to consider everything and realize this Alice of yours was no innocent girl. Lord Landry was right. She was a spy. Why else would this have happened?”

  The strength seemed to ebb out of him as his shoulders sank. "Good lord." Bryce slumped. He thought about Lucien Howard's warnings as they'd left New Yorke, thought about how easily he had been duped—if, indeed, what Lydia said was true. His mind raced. Alice was gone. She ran off. Why else would she attack Clayton and run off if not for the fact she really was a spy? Bryce's heart shattered. He couldn't believe how he'd been sucked in by such a complex but obvious ploy. He didn't want to believe it, but it made sense. No matter how he tried to package it, push it away, dissect it or ignore it, the truth in Lydia's words now shone through. He gritted his teeth so hard he could taste blood. The veins in his head bulged and throbbed. He could hear the rush of his heartbeat in his ears, a whining surge like a river heading for a waterfall. “I can't believe what a fool I'd been.”

  Lydia reached out as she smiled. She touched his jaw and spoke in a near-whisper. “It was a mistak
e, Bryce, that's all. We can correct this mess and get Atlantis back. We can exercise the Right of Waiver on the neighboring tariffs, which I believe are held by your father. Norfolk Locks, for one.”

  Bryce's gaze fell to the floor, caught by the bright silver of the Derringer. “I can't believe it.” He shook his head, thinking of Alice's face, her smile, the panic in her eyes as she looked at him upon awakening. It was all so real. How could it have been a trick? “Pandora said she wasn't a witch, but she certainly cast a spell on me.”

  Lydia's hand moved to his chin and lifted his eyes to meet hers. “My Captain, it's all right. This situation is easily repaired... Well, not easily, but it is repairable,” she blinked and smiled, satisfied that her reasoning had swayed him.

  Bryce nodded slightly. His head buzzed as his veins throbbed with an inner struggle as he tried to piece it all together, tried to imagine some way out of it, imagined that Alice—the woman with whom he shared Seven Orchards—really wasn't a spy. But Lydia's wisdom, and the facts of the attack against Clayton, were too much for him to ignore.

  He knew what he'd have to do. It was time to declare corporate war on Thorne & Wolfe. Lydia was right. He met her eyes with determination and nodded.

  She smiled back and blew him a kiss.

  Clayton's voice cracked. He cleared his throat. "It's a lie, Bryce."

  Lydia and Bryce both turned to Clayton, their eyes widening. Bryce leaned closer. "What?"

  "It's a lie," Clayton whispered. "Lydia... Was Lydia who hit me."

  Bryce glanced up at his fiancee and saw her jaw drop as she flushed as pale as a sheet in the green gloom. She shook her head quickly, an eyebrow quirking as her mouth started to make words of denial.

  Clayton struggled to sit up. Lydia held him down. He groaned, "Bryce... I... I attacked Alice. Lydia hit me to save her—"