Thunderstruck

by Shannon Delany

  The lights in the room dimmed, pulsed, and began to flicker. “Stop,” he whispered, his voice fierce. He thrashed against Rowen, but Rowen held his ground.

  Jack said, “Rowen … mayhaps he’s right. Mayhaps you’d best stop …”

  A few tubes and cables remained, connected to the sides of his ribs, and Rowen lifted the mildewed shirt and pulled them free as well.

  “Ro … wen,” Jack repeated, the word emerging slowly, the syllables so far apart it seemed they were two words instead of one.

  The glow of the lights pulsated again.

  The last cables ran in a line along the outside of the man’s arms, running from triceps to forearms. Rowen flung an arm around his waist and pulled the rest of the lines free.

  “No!” the Hub shrieked, falling out of the tangle of cords and to the wet floor with a slap. Shaking, his hands ran the length of his arms, feeling the flaps in his flesh where the cables had been inserted.

  The lights fluttered like the wings of a dying bird, and he screamed, “You do not understand the repercussions …

  “You will kill them all,” he gasped, staggering to his feet and reaching for the cords that hung, limp and lifeless, near him.

  “What, kill who … ?” Rowen hissed, grasping the wobbling man.

  His hand was slapped away, but Jack slipped onto his own knees beside him, throwing an arm under him for support. With a grunt, he hefted the Hub to his own knees.

  “Them,” the Hub hissed, pointing. “God, for the naïvety of youth and wealth,” he whispered, snatching at the cables before he collapsed again in Jack’s grip, cables slipping free from his trembling hands. “My legs, nothing works,” he whispered, terror in his voice.

  He was as useful as some child’s discarded rag doll, his skin resting on bone and veins, much of his muscle mass gone from hanging inert for so long. “You will be the death of them all,” he cried, stretching with one arm to sweep a hand toward the cables that remained dangling overhead. They were all out of his reach.

  Rowen followed his crooked and shaking finger to a group of mildewing newspaper pages hanging on the wall. Each featured a headline reading something like: “Girl Loses Hand in Steam Explosion” or “Baby Rushed to Hospital After Illegal Steam Power Experiment Goes Wrong.” But the largest article was about a child named Wally who was horribly burned—his face disfigured beyond recognition—while playing with a steam-powered toy cat.

  “They are hospitalized …” the Hub whispered, reaching out to Catrina for help. For compassion. “It is my power—my energy—that keeps them alive … Help me …”

  Catrina stepped back, jaw hanging slack. She shook her head, disgusted.

  “I would let you all rot in darkness,” the Hub spat. “Every one of you,” he admitted, “except for them. How can I wish children and babies dead?”

  Rowen stood frozen.

  Gerald rushed forward and joined Jack, bending awkwardly down to loop the Hub’s arm across his shoulders. With a groan, he looked to Jack, then Rowen, and he began to lift.

  The lights wavered again.

  “Hurry,” the Hub begged. “Reconnect me. Help me keep them alive.”

  “Rowen, goddammit. Help us here,” Jack snapped.

  Rowen blinked and rushed forward, taking the man’s weight so that the uncle could slip free. He stumbled along the room’s edge, looking for something. “Uh,” he muttered, grabbing the wooden crate and towing it back underneath where he needed to be suspended. “Up. Get up on this,” he instructed, grabbing one of the man’s legs and lifting.

  Together they hoisted him up, and the man reached out and snatched a cable, shoved back the fabric of his sleeve and tugged back the skin of his forearm with equal disinterest.

  Rowen looked away as the first of the multitude of cables was inserted. The Hub snared another, and another, Jack reaching up and out to help, watching and matching his actions, twisting each into the sockets cut in his flesh until the lights steadied and they were all connected once again.

  Rowen grabbed the final cable, hooking it into the Hub’s wrist.

  His hand flexed, curling closed and opening again.

  And yet, Rowen thought, it was not true movement. He would never truly move—never truly live again.

  Spread eagle once again, his limbs pulled wide and wires, cables, and tubes making up his wings, he leaned back in the nest of wires, threw back his head, and gave the most satisfied sigh Rowen had ever heard. The lights glowed on again, growing stronger and brighter with every breath the reconnected Witch took.

  There was a rattle behind the Hub and they drew back, slipping back the way they’d come as the front door opened and the guards stomped their way inside, growling out questions:

  “What the bloody ‘ell’s ‘appening back ‘ere?”

  “Damned lights flickered off and were out citywide for nary a full minute. That cannot stand …”

  “People’ll start to complain, they will, and blame us. Why’d you not fix the Hub when you reckoned there was a problem, they’ll ask.”

  They came to stand in front of him, not noticing Rowen and his crew standing so close in the shadows and trying so hard to keep their breath light and their presences concealed.

  “Fix ‘im,” one chuckled. “Aye, but we did,” he added, swinging a staff at the Hub’s groin. “Right when we knew there was a problem—a distraction, was she not?—fixed ‘im but good.”

  Rowen’s jaw went slack, realizing.

  The guard’s staff poked at the Hub’s groin again. “Make sure you do not again let the power or lights slip, you fool,” he warned.

  The Hub only pulled his head back up straight, regarding them with indifferent eyes.

  They began to leave, but the other guard paused, noticing the misplaced crate. “Damned rich kids,” he muttered, kicking the crate back to the wall again. “I think we’d best lock the back door now we know they’re getting so bold. It’s the rich ‘uns are willing to come in poking and prodding, what might happen if some crazy hears and gives it a go? Might try and kill him.”

  The other guard nodded. “Or free ‘im.”

  “Worse yet. I’ll go around and lock the stupid thing,” he said, jingling the ring of keys on his belt.

  They marched back toward the building’s front, the door closing behind them.

  Jack grabbed Rowen, tugging him toward the back door and escape.

  In a minute they’d be locked in.

  But Rowen went the other direction. Toward the Hub.

  “Rowen,” Jack growled.

  It was to no avail.

  Rowen addressed the Hub again. “Your distraction … you were part of a mated pair but …” he whispered, brow furrowing. “Their fix … And then the cables …” He shook his head.

  The Hub smiled at him, a pained, but honest smile. “Young lovers are the most difficult,” he whispered sadly. “And the most passionate and powerful.”

  Rowen raked a hand through his hair.

  Jack reached out and grabbed his elbow, yanking on him. “We must go now.”

  But the Hub’s words made them all pause once more. “Perhaps you will remember, after all. Perhaps this once you will remember.”

  They turned, running back the way they had first come, the Hub laughing behind them. Down the dark hall they went, Gerald leading, then Jack, Rowen, and Catrina, her heels clomping on the stone floor.

  Gerald pulled up short at the door, signaling them all to silence, and they skidded and bumped into each other. Gerald tried the door, but instead of a rush of cool night air greeting them as the door opened to freedom, the temperature seemed to rise, the compressed humidity making the hair on the back of Rowen’s neck sticky, and he watched as Gerald’s shoulders slumped. He turned back to the lot of them, his expression drawn.

  “My sincerest apologies, lads. It seems we’ve been locked in.”

  Jack smacked the heel of his hand into his forehead. “And now?” he asked Rowen. “Now we’ve tried to educate t
he lass, but it seems we’re about to be schooled. How do you suggest we make our escape?”

  Rowen ran his hands through his hair and groaned.

  “I’d suggest out the front, were I not in the company of a wanted criminal,” Gerald said, shooting a look at Rowen.

  Rowen just sighed. “You’re right. We can’t go out the front. Because they will surely notice me.”

  “Hush,” Catrina said, straightening and brushing off her cloak. She tugged the hood up onto her head so that its hem rested on the crown, the hood falling slack on either side of her face. “You may be highly noticeable, dear boy, but you are in the presence of far more memorable people now.” She glanced at Gerald. “Surely you and I can get the lot of us out by distracting two highly uninterested and overworked guards.”

  Gerald snorted, his eyebrows rising. “We are, most certainly, far more memorable than two shabbily dressed men who slouch more often than they stand up straight.”

  Rowen straightened so fast it was as if Gerald had spoken in his mother’s voice.

  Gerald’s mouth rolled up on one end, curling into an uneven smile. “Slouching is a good thing in this case,” he corrected Rowen. “Though, in consideration of your future posture, I would suggest that once we are safely in the carriage and safely away that you endeavor to never slouch again.” He turned back to address his niece. “So how shall we do this? Me, weaving and inebriated—”

  “—it is always best to act out what is your natural state,” Catrina said with a sniff as she smoothed the leather of her gloves.

  “So you will play a harping shrew?” Gerald asked without skipping a beat.

  Catrina’s lips puckered. “I will be the beautiful diva who is less than impressed by the social inadequacies of her family,” she corrected.

  Gerald sniggered. “Well said, child. Well said. What a pair we make.” He pushed past Catrina and led the way, waving a hand over his shoulder toward the rest of them. “Remember, lads, slouch and stay quiet and in the shadows.”

  Jack shoved Rowen. “Wonderful idea this was,” he muttered. “Wonderful way to teach someone a lesson. What lesson have you learned tonight, eh?” he prodded.

  “That you talk too much,” Rowen retorted, rolling his shoulders forward and slumping enough that he began to feel it in his lower back nearly immediately.

  Past the Hub they went again, slinking along the way the guards had gone. Down a hall studded with stormcell-lit pierced tin lanterns, their spotty glow dotting the trespassers and casting strange shadows on the opposite wall.

  They came to the building’s front, a pair of broad wood and ironwork doors marking the main egress. Gerald placed his hands on the door, looked over his shoulder, and whispered, “Here we go, lads—” and he shoved the doors open with the most hideously accurate caterwaul of drunken confusion Rowen could imagine. “Ohhhhh,” he cried, stumbling out of the doorway. Turning around to face Catrina, he flailed his arms wildly and nearly fell. “You thought it’d be a bloody good time seeing that hanging man and saying that I’ll—” he stuck a finger up in the air as if telling her to wait, and stretched his mouth wide to await a belch, but only a hiccup came out instead and he continued, “—damn, I thought that would be far more impressive …”

  “Is that not what that girl you’ve been courting says about most everything you do?” Catrina scoffed, pushing past him. She placed a hand on his shoulder and made a move as if to push him over, but the guards stepped forward.

  “Eh! You there! What are you doing inside the Hub?”

  Catrina’s face wrinkled in a clear show of disgust at being addressed by someone so obviously below her station, and Jack and Rowen slipped quietly by while Catrina and Gerald made enough noise for more than the four of them. “What were we doing? What do our kind do at the Hub? We come in the back, we snoop around, we joke, we poke the Witch, and then we go home. Back up the Hill.”

  Gerald was laughing so hard, he nearly toppled over. “Oh, lads, I daresay you’d best not tangle with a Fourth of the Nine! Not with Miss Catrina Hollindale! She will have your hides to make her new heeled boots!” he laughed.

  The guards exchanged a look.

  “Fourth of the Nine,” Catrina said with a snap of her gloved fingers.

  Standing in the shadows of the high hedgerow, Rowen thought hers was a move that would have made most men act like the dogs Catrina likely thought they were.

  The guards stepped back, one even politely closing the door behind the mismatched pair of wealthy guests and muttering, “Begging your pardon, milady.”

  The other was not so gentle. “Look here, you. You tell your little friends up on the Hill that the freak show at the Hub is now closed. None of your type need risk themselves in the Below to take a poke and a gander at the Hub. Tell them if they have questions about the things what happen here they best go ask their mum and dad—same as they would ‘bout the birds and the bees. No need to come snoopin’ no more. The fun is over.”

  Catrina pouted, tapping the toe of her shoe on the flagstone entryway.

  “Over,” the man repeated, rolling the word out with a menacing growl at its end. “Now get yerselves gone.” He waved a hand at them and Gerald broke into a rolling giggle that would surely make anyone in earshot think he was either completely skunked or insane.

  Catrina’s hand snapped out and snagged his arm, dragging him along. He took a few weaving steps, swatting at her to free himself. Straightening, he pulled at his coat (only dragging it further from straight) and tugged at his cravat, letting it flop loose.

  He stumbled after his niece, and the group of them disappeared beyond the boundary the high hedgerow marked and together they raced to the waiting carriage. Gerald bounded up to the driver’s seat, snatching the reins up as if he’d never done anything but drive a carriage.

  The rest of them barely seated inside, the door still hanging partly open, the carriage jolted forward and the horses pulled it toward the crest of the Hill.

  Rowen looked from Jack to Catrina and back again before he and Jack burst out laughing.

  Chapter Fourteen

  How glorious,

  and yet ofttimes how painful,

  it is to be an exception!

  —Alfred de Musset

  Philadelphia

  “You must admit,” Jack choked, “the Hub was correct. We will all most surely remember that experience—every bit of it!” He rolled back in the soft seat, laughing. “You,” he said to Catrina. “Brilliant. He may not like you, and I may not like what you did to Jordan, but that—that I liked.”

  Catrina smiled and tilted her head in a rare show of modesty. “And what did you think, Rowen? You who he says do not even like me?” she asked. “Are you glad that I saved you from capture and imprisonment—perhaps even death?”

  Rowen leaned back, stretching an arm across the back of his seat, and appraised her levelly. “Yes, I am glad—I am thankful that I am free. Because it means I can soon return to the Artemesia.”

  “And Jordan,” Catrina concluded.

  “Yes,” Rowen agreed. “And Jordan.”

  “And is Jack right?” she whispered, her eyes narrowing as she observed Rowen. “Do you truly not even like me?”

  But he refused to grant her an answer, instead turning his face to the window and, as they sped past in a blur of stormlights and vague memories, stared out at the spots of the city of Philadelphia he was far more familiar with than a young man of his rank should have been.

  Back at the Hollindale estate, the carriage and horses hidden, Rowen confronted Catrina one more time. “I will not stay here, Catrina. I do not love you. I … I love Jordan.”

  “You dumb ass,” she hissed. “You need not say that—do you think I do not know that now?”

  “Then you must let me go.”

  “I am as ready to do that as you are ready to let Jordan go,” she muttered.

  “That I will never do.”

  She stomped and screamed at the floor, throwing her a
rms into the air in a sudden fit. Catching her breath she smoothed back a few stray wisps of golden hair back into place and fixed her eyes again on Rowen. “Exactly. I will not give up on you either, Rowen. Do you know why?”

  He rolled his eyes. “It certainly is not because I have sent mixed signals regarding my intentions …”

  “Because I know people change, Rowen.”

  “I will not change.”

  “A couple is made of two people, Rowen. It only takes one of them to change their mind, changing things for both. Has Jordan not changed?”

  Jack jerked away, thrusting his thumbs into his belt and studying the house’s architecture with sudden fascination.

  Catrina’s eyes darted after him and she smiled what Rowen thought had to be the most wicked smile he had ever seen. “She has changed,” she whispered. “A great deal, I take it.”

  “Because of what you threw her into,” Rowen hissed, feeling the way his lips curled, pulling back from his teeth. It was surely an unattractive look, but he hoped it was equally threatening. “You threw her to the wolves, Catrina. You are what nearly killed her. You,” he stressed. “Without you she would have never been hauled away to Holgate. Without you the Maker would have never gotten to hit her, strike her, cut her.

  “Give her money back—I want no part of anything she has touched,” he said, glaring at the floor.

  Jack hesitated, the money still clutched in his hands, and Rowen slapped the pouches, sending them flying so they hit the floor and skid, spilling bills, coins rolling loose to wobble and roll in awkward circles before collapsing flat with a final rattle.