Science Fiction Romance: Biomechanical Hearts (Space Sci-Fi Love Triangle) (New Adult Paranormal Fantasy)

by Olivia Myers

  Towards the evening the snow began to slacken and it looked as though if it continued to do so, it might be possible to make it out to the castle the following day, provided they found snowshoes.

  “Or perhaps if we can find a sleigh you can rope yourself to me and I shall tow you along,” Pierre joked, although his attempts fell short.

  Celia had felt a new distance growing between them. His boyish gaiety had kept her armored and strong back when they went to the university together, and had even buoyed her during the first two days here in Nebelstatt. But something with Bly had destroyed his charm and now she felt cold toward Pierre.

  When he found the photo of the little girl in her pocket, he’d put it back quickly, not commenting on it. Did he suspect she didn’t trust him anymore? Maybe she didn’t. He wasn’t strong or hard enough for her. He wasn’t satisfying her. He’d brought her here, even, despite all of her questions, and the whole job was bizarre. None of it made any sense.

  A second freeze set in during the night. The snow wasn’t much thicker by morning, but it had an icy crust on it that held potential danger even for snowshoes, depending on how thick the crust was in certain parts.

  “If there is no freeze like last night again tonight, we should set off tomorrow morning,” Pierre said. He’d been successful in securing them both pairs of snowshoes and he kept hinting heavily that they should get back to the castle, where Bly was staying until they decided what would be done about the library.

  Celia had convinced Bly that there were valuables she’d seen there—books and old manuscripts—that might mean something to a collector, if not to Bly. She’d said at the dinner that most of her clients saved valuables in the form of books or manuscripts and that she’d hate it if something were lost that would be regretted later. Bly had agreed, to Pierre’s bafflement. He’d asked her about it later, and Celia had smiled.

  “Don’t be so surprised,” she said. “I can do a lot more than you give me credit for. I can keep secrets, too.”

  “When did you become so hard, so firm?” he asked.

  She’d just smiled at him in a pitying way.

  ***

  The third day was little better than the first but they decided with the snowshoes to venture out to the castle anyway. Bly would be gone the following day and the sooner they got done with the library the less they would see of the castle altogether. The world outside was grey, dry and morose.

  Although there were no icy ‘problem spots’ as Pierre called them, they spent an extra two hours hiking and got to the castle feeling as if they’d run a marathon.

  Bly was waiting in the library in front of the fireplace. Diane, rooting through one end of the bookshelf completely stuffed with old papers, was grouping stacks of letters together to bring to him. There was a process. Bly would shuffle through a handful of documents, some of which he’d consider intently. Others, he’d simply feed into the blaze. To Celia it looked like clockwork execution. Who knows what stories those letters might have told? Who knew what chapters of forgotten history were being summarily engulfed by Bly’s whim?

  They began at once according to Bly’s dictation. Books were to be taken down and grouped by date of publication. Letters and manuscripts and any interesting parcels were to be brought directly to him to meet judgment.

  They sorted in silence, with nothing but the crackling of the logs to provide any break in the monotony. Once or twice Bly called Pierre to his side to help him decipher some codex or an obscure foreign language, but this was the only interruption.

  There was no stopping for tea or coffee. They worked straight through lunch. Pierre and Celia moved gradually across the bookshelves, translating the tight rows of books to stacks in a slow-moving process that seemed to have no end. Diane reached the end of one shelf of books and was now rooting through the desk where Celia had found the old, yellowed picture.

  Bly never moved. Not one foot.

  As the day wore on and evening began to encroach it became apparent that he was intent on working throughout the night if need be. Pierre leaned over to whisper to Celia, “We won’t get back safely unless we can work with some daylight. I think we should say something.”

  There was a moment of terrible dread between them; Celia didn’t know how to bring it up with Bly. It would be like approaching a viper which was already drawn back and poised to strike.

  But a strike came before Celia could say a word. At that very moment there was a sharp, muffled cry and the sound of a desk being shoved over, followed by a heavy crash. Footsteps echoed across the library, and then Bly shouted, “Give them to me!”

  Celia whirled around just in time to catch Diane as the woman collided with her. Both of them fell to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs. Celia was sure the other woman was attacking her.

  “Give them to me.”

  The voice thundered down from above. Bly’s voice, shapeless as a vampire’s. Celia felt the other woman stuff something like paper down her shirtfront. Then Diane was lifted roughly upwards.

  Celia didn’t have time to ask Diane what it was that she’d been given. In one swift movement, Bly reached into Celia’s shirt and pulled out a wad of yellowed papers. He walked calmly towards the fire, although the other woman was howling and clawing at his legs and arms like a lioness.

  Ignoring Diane’s rage, Bly dropped the fistful of papers into the fire. But Diane reacted as if she were being burned instead, so terrible was the cry that erupted from her. Celia marveled that despite the woman’s pain, there was no expression from Bly. Nothing at all.

  The scene might have ended there, yet the woman’s grief filled Celia with a passionate and mad strength greater than Bly’s own. She rushed forward and struck him in the face—a paltry blow, but one suitable enough to allow Diane the brief moment she needed to reach into the blazing inferno and grasp at the frayed ends of the burning papers.

  How long Diane’s hand was in the fire for and whether or not she succeeded in recovering any of the letters, Celia couldn’t tell. She fell into a dead faint a few moments later.

  ***

  She awoke in one of the bedrooms of Bly’s castle. Through the window next to her bedside she could see the night, clear and cool, full of stars.

  “I think it would have been better for all of us if we had gone tomorrow,” Pierre’s voice came from a lighted corner in the room. He was kneeling down by a kindling fire, a crumpled paper in his hand. “There would have been no dangerous new snow.”

  Celia did not poke fun at his manner of speech, as she once would have.

  “Diane,” she said. “Is she…?”

  “She and Bly found someone to take care of that hand for her. Bly told her simply to stick it into the snow. He was quite rude with her. The hand we all think will be saved.”

  “But what on earth would possess that woman to put herself in danger like that?”

  Pierre stood from his place by the fire. He removed his glasses and scrubbed a hand through his thick, curly hair.

  “This,” he said, letting the paper fall. Celia picked the paper up. It was one of the papers that Diane had stuffed down her shirt, and the edges were smudged with soot. It was a letter, written in the strange dialect spoken by the townspeople.

  “I can’t read this,” she said, annoyed.

  “Then I will. It is very short.” Pierre held the letter up to the light and translated the few, short sentences:

  Dearest Georgio,

  I do not know where this letter finds you. I hope you will still be alive when it comes. It is twins. The doctor said both healthy, though one’s a bit slow looking a’ you. Mother sends love. She don’t know anything an’ I won’t tell.

  With love,

  Margarette Bly

  October, 1973

  “I don’t understand,” said Celia with exasperation. “A letter from Bly’s mother? Why would that be so important?”

  Pierre put his hand over his face, deeply troubled. “I can imagine it means nothing to
you,” he said quietly, “but for poor Monsieur Bly, it is everything.”

  “Poor?” Celia sat up in bed, disgusted with rage. “Poor? The man who caused that miserable woman to put her hand into a fire to try and save a few scraps of paper? Poor? That monster?”

  “Yes,” Pierre nodded. “A poor and wretched man, because can you imagine what kind of a secret he must hide, what kinds of tortures he feels, if he will drive her to such cruelty? His own sister?”

  Celia was dumbfounded. “Diane? Diane is Bly’s sister? And you still call him a poor man? Why, he’s twice the monster I thought he was!”

  “A monster, but driven into his condition by a fate worse than monstrous. An unnatural fate.” A door slammed downstairs. Bly must have returned from taking Diane to the doctor. Pierre paid it no notice. He was intent on his story.

  “Nebelstatt is old,” he said. “It is a town that has lost much of its history and its stories, simply because it is too old to remember them. What it remembers is pieces of these stories, without their details. This brief note has confirmed one of these old stories—about the unnatural longings between a brother and a sister. Nature punished these longings. The brother went off to work in the mines. An explosion disfigured him so horribly that his family could not recognize him. The sister bore twins, one healthy and one as deformed in the mind as her father was in the body.

  “We have the story, and our note has given us the details,” Pierre said resignedly. “Diane and Thomas are these unfortunate twins. Thomas has tried to keep this misfortune secret but he has been drawn back by fate to face himself. How can we but pity him?”

  “Leave us, Pierre.”

  The vampiric voice cut the air like a razor. Celia felt her skin turn cold with the presence of Bly. He’d materialized behind Pierre without Pierre even realizing, like a shadow.

  “I do not know what more you can do,” Pierre said boldly. “I don’t know what you want with Celia,” but even his boldness was touched with melancholy, as though even the other man’s force of power was something pitiable.

  “Leave us.”

  Pierre turned a look of profound sympathy to Celia. He gave a look of reproach to Bly, and then he disappeared into the corridor. Bly slammed the door shut behind him.

  “What have you done with your sister?” Celia demanded.

  “She is not my sister.” In the intimacy of the room, without other interferences, Bly’s voice lost its coldness, its razor-edge. For the first time, it sounded to Celia like a human voice, inspired by human passion.

  “I know your story already,” she said. “You’ve heard it from Pierre. How can you deny it now? How can you deny the cruelties you’ve done to your sister?”

  “She is not my sister.” Bly took Pierre’s seat from the fireside and wheeled it to the bedside, next to Celia.

  Despite the humanity of his voice, Celia still feared his presence, so like a snake ready to strike, and she flinched involuntarily.

  “Don’t,” said the man. “Be calm. You must be calm if you are going to hear what I shall tell you.”

  “Pierre told me everything,” she spat in defiance. “I don’t care about fate and I don’t care about your past. What I saw you do to Diane is enough to convince me of who you really are.”

  “Who I really am,” said Bly. He laughed. It was a terrible, thunderous laugh, like the sound of glass breaking against glass.

  “Who you really are,” said Celia, dismayed but fierce. Her eyes blazed. “A pitiable man, a victim, but still a monster.”

  “Pierre is an idiot. You knew this when you met him at your university. You knew this here but you haven’t had the courage to say it. Though you have the courage to call me a monster. Please—” he said, anticipating Celia’s retort “—if a monster is a victim of his fate, you are as much a monster as I am. You are as pitiable as I am.”

  “I would not say that,” she huffed.

  “Yes,” said Bly and Celia caught a trace of pathos in his voice, a deep and profound sadness she did not think he was capable of producing. “I know you wouldn’t. And that is your tragedy.”

  “What do you mean?” Celia asked. His tone was worrying her, its intimacy, its concession. “What are you trying to say?”

  Thomas Bly looked at her. His eyes were full of anguish and remorse and self-hatred. They burned so fiercely Celia feared his own passion would engulf him. “I am saying that that fool Pierre had everything wrong in the story except for the truth. The truth that this is not my tragedy. It is yours.”

  “What do you mean?” Celia’s voice was a ghost, floating into the cruelness of the sky.

  “I can only be brief,” Thomas Bly spoke like a man giving his last testimonial before the fall of the guillotine. “The story is much too large to tell you here.”

  Celia’s heart overflowed—but with what? With fear. With tenderness. With the desire for mercy. With misery. With love, the pure love for a fellow, suffering creature.

  “But you must tell me something.” Celia pleaded. “I never asked for a story! Only, tell me something so that I know what to believe!”

  “What to believe,” Thomas Bly repeated, twisting the words around in his mouth, as though he were sucking acid from them. “And what would you believe? Would you believe that the menaces of the past have risen up against us, are threatening to destroy us by the sins of their past life?”

  He thrust his savage, pale face into Celia’s and kissed her hard, painfully on the lips. It came as swiftly as a snakebite. “Now I’ve kissed you. I can betray you.”

  “Thomas!” she pleaded, her eyes filling with tears. “You must—you must tell me something!”

  “Very well,” he said, his passion ebbing. “Then let me be blunt in the telling. Diane is your sister, not mine. It is your parents, George and Margarette Barnette, who are the brother and sister that caused you and your twin sister such torment. They did not die when you were younger as you were told. Your father was crippled in the mines and passed his days away in pain, at his mother’s bedside. Your mother fared better for a time. Pregnant with a sailor’s bastard child, she married my father and then bore me. But he learned of her scandal as she lay dying of a fever. Only too late, because he’d fallen in love with the baby who was not his own!

  “After she died, my father went with me, his infant son, to live far away, but not before his family got news of the entire scandal and cut him out of the family. And for what? For shame! For the shame of being associated, for being related to a man who’d been passionate and taken for a fool! How could my father’s ignorance be his fault? How could he know what crime she had committed before he married her? Yet my grandfather’s didn’t care about fairness or justice when he disinherited my father—yes!—and let a family treasure, a castle that has stood for centuries, rot in disuse. He’d rather it rot than go to a man who would see it restored and renewed!

  “You see how brief and simple the truth can be!” Thomas Bly said, his face cracking wide in a hideous smile.

  His passion thrilled and horrified Celia. She felt as though the man before her could do anything. Could crawl inside her skin and control her. She felt her soul cascade into the passion of his fire. She felt her body glowing in the heat of his ardor.

  “And now!” said Thomas Bly. “Why, what is there now? You have met your twin, my stepsister—a poor, mangled creature! I have done what I could for her in the years I’ve known her but she has lost touch with reality entirely. If she is not lost then she is nearly there. And as for us!” He seemed to notice Celia for the first time, being drawn into the flame of his magnificent being. “My other stepsister! What a happy reunion we’ve made! What a fortunate fate has brought us together! Come—kiss me again!”

  He flew towards her and kissed her passionately on the mouth. Celia didn’t have the strength to resist him. She was held down by her terror and fascination which had mingled within her into a passion of her own.

  “Thomas!” At first she tried to fight him off, bu
t then she held him closer. “Thomas!”

  The man seemed lost in the craze of his desire, but he suddenly stopped. “Celia?”

  She pulled him to her again. “I want this,” she said. “I want you.”

  And then he moved against her, into her, again. He was pouring himself out for Celia, offering himself—a wretched, broken creature—so that she could make his destruction complete. He sucked her lips with abandon, willing Celia to destroy him, forcing his power into her.

  And Celia was drunk with the passion and the strength he poured into her. She knew it was a kind of love that drew them together. Love, and need—his need to be broken by her, and her need for the power that his body was channeling into hers. She knew now why she had resented Pierre, why she could not love him with the force with which she was loving Thomas. This impossible strength, this will, was not in Pierre’s power. It was only in Thomas’s. And now, it was in hers.

  Thomas climbed onto the bed with Celia. He tore off her shirt. The maniacal action made Celia cry but she attacked back with equal fervor, struggling to pin him down, tearing his clothes away until he became a mass of naked muscle on top of her still-clothed form. She would subdue him. She would take this passion into herself.

  Struggling, clawing, she managed to get free from where she was trapped beneath so she could position herself on top, straddling him. Her mouth locked to his in a wild, permanent kiss. Her tongue seared through his mouth, drinking him, consuming him. She grabbed his hair with her fists and held for all she was worth as her kiss cut him deeper and deeper.

  Thomas kissed her back, just as hard. His powerful hands worked the loose pajama bottoms down past her knees where he tore them away from her like they’d been on fire. She was burning him but he held her like fire in the power of his grasp and in the strength of his indomitable will. Her panties came next, discarded roughly like the pajama bottoms. Now he had all of her in his grasp. All of her white heat.