This was obviously not going to play out quite as he’d envisioned.
Ace swallowed and walked up to the platform, offered the auctioneer his mark and told him to collect the bounty from Ace’s chief attendant, and took hold of the chain hanging between the prisoner’s shackled wrists. As he began to lead her off the platform, Dean guffawed. “You couldn’t even wait to get her back to your realm? Ace, you dirty demon.”
“What? Oh. No,” Ace said absently as he tugged the woman toward a side entrance to the palace. “I’m just not interested in any of the other offerings here, so I thought we could go have a chat.”
“Do you want a guard, at least?” asked Fen. “She’s dangerous.”
“I know,” Ace said. “I can handle her.”
The woman growled.
His brothers laughed.
Ace wasn’t listening. He was possessed by a fever he’d only felt a few times before, when he was on the verge of a major breakthrough, when he was about to invent something amazing. That feeling had been stolen from him with the death of Riladin, with his final disastrous visit to Earth, and now he was going to reclaim it.
Despite her growl and her look that said this was the last place she wanted to be, the Fae didn’t resist as he guided her up a set of stone steps to the guest chamber Fen had provided. Clearly his little brother wanted the new weapon very badly, for he had given Ace the best-lit of all the chambers, and he had set up a large table right in front of one of the windows for use as a work space. Ace had already laid out many of his diagrams and plans across the broad wooden surface, knowing his brothers might be interested in commissioning some of them for their own realms. He pulled the woman into his room, straight over to the table.
He looked over at her with a smile that faded instantly. “Don’t be scared. I won’t hurt you.”
“You can try,” she said in a low, threatening voice. But her eyes were wide and darting—to the window, to the door, to the archway that led to the washroom, to the bookcase that she couldn’t possibly have known hid a passageway to the kitchens … could she?
“But I won’t try.” He dipped his fingers into the pouch that hung from his belt and fished out his master key. While she looked on with obvious suspicion, Ace unlocked the cuffs and tossed them onto the table. “I didn’t bring you here to bed you or anything like that. You have nothing to fear from me.”
“Why did you buy me, then?” she asked, rubbing at the red marks on her wrists and wincing.
Ace’s eyebrows rose. “You can’t think of any other reason besides rape? What do you take me for?”
“A slave owner?”
“Ah,” said Ace, rubbing his jaw. “Well. I suppose that’s fair. But I’m not interested in what’s between your legs so much as what’s between your ears.”
The woman gaped at him, and suddenly he wondered if he had said something offensive. He did, sometimes. Usually accidentally, because social graces required effort, and effort was not his specialty. “Between my ears?”
“Your brain, of course.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You can’t have it. I’ll die before I let you take it.”
“I … am not suggesting I want to remove it,” he said with a helpless laugh. “I just want to pick it.”
She took a quick step back. “You are insane.”
“I didn’t mean literally pick it! I just …” Ace closed his eyes, suddenly tired. But he’d just agreed to pay a hefty, almost painful sum for this Fae, so he needed to make her understand, even if he rather wished he could lie down and take a nap. He swept his hand over the plans and drawings on the table. “What do you think?”
The woman frowned and stared at his hand. He pointed down at one of the diagrams, which happened to be for a bow machine that could fire two large javelins hundreds of yards with minimal draw strength. One row of them might be able to shred an enemy line while keeping the soldiers out of the reach of the smaller arrows of Fae archers.
She looked down at the drawing. “You want to know I think of this?”
“Unreservedly.” To most, it would look like a jumble of lines and numbers, hastily sketched, rubbed out, and sketched again. Even Fen, skilled in the art of death and combat, hadn’t known what it was at first.
The woman stared at the plans for several long seconds, and Ace felt a twinge of disappointment. Maybe lock-picking was the extent of her cleverness? Then her brow furrowed, and she said, “I think it is disgusting, that you spend your time drawing things meant to kill people.”
Ace paused, not sure how to translate the conflicting feelings at war inside his chest. “Another fair point. But … maybe you could sort of forget what it’s meant to do and focus on the design? Do you have any thoughts about its efficiency? Or whether it would actually work?”
“You can’t be serious. Why are you asking me this?”
“I want to understand how your mind functions. How you figure things out.”
“Why do you care? You don’t even know my name.”
Ace tilted his head. “That was rude of me. I’m not very good at this.”
She sighed, and he might have been dreaming it, but he could have sworn that a reluctant smile was pulling at her full lips. “It’s Malin.”
“Malin. That’s a nice name. I’m Ace.”
“I knew that.”
“Yes. It makes sense that you would. Now, Malin, here’s the thing. I can see that you’re clever, and I like that. It’s the quality I value most in my subjects and—”
“Your slaves?”
“Um. You know...” In his realm, the slaves had always been managed by Riladin, who had been instructed to keep them well-fed, watered, and rested so they could work efficiently transporting the materials he needed to create the pipes, rails, screws, nuts, bolts, levers, pulleys, hinges, cranks, gears, ropes, wheels, and other miscellaneous components that he needed to produce the conveniences all the other domains in Inferna depended on.
He’d never wondered whether those slaves were clever. “I never thought much about them at all, to be honest.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Malin snapped. “They’re just slaves, after all.” She folded her arms over her chest and lifted her chin. “You will not have my thoughts, Prince. You are asking me to be complicit in the slaughter of my own people, and that is a cruelty far worse than any torture you could visit upon me.”
Ace cleared his throat. This didn’t seem to be going well, but she wasn’t shouting at him or trying to kill him or attempting to escape, so perhaps it was going better than he thought? He had no idea how to tell, so he impatiently shuffled the bow machine plans to the bottom of the messy pile and spread a few other drawings out in front of her. “How about these?”
Malin focused on one of the diagrams, which Ace had hastily drawn after waking from a magnificent dream full of metal and leather and glass. “We do not have things like this where I come from,” she muttered. Her slender fingers traced over the gears, the tiny coiled springs, the curve of a glass bowl, the flint and steel, the oil and its wick. “This arm—the energy from this coil of metal releases it, and strikes the flint against the steel, lighting the lantern. Yes?”
Ace grinned. “Yes! On a timer. If you want to wake early, you can set it when you go to bed, and it will light the dark when it is time to rise.”
Malin seemed utterly absorbed in the diagram, leaning over it, her face close to the figures he had so excitedly sketched, her fingers stroking along them in a way he could almost feel on his own skin. He suppressed a sudden shiver of pleasure.
“But how do you know when it will go off?” she asked. “There is no magic in this at all?”
“Well, no Fae magic,” he replied, working hard to keep the pride out of his voice—that was Asher’s curse, not Ace’s. “It’s all about stored energy.”
She touched the spring. “This is where it is stored. The tension and its release.”
Ace was feeling a bit like that spring at the moment, his body spira
ling tighter by the second. “You are absolutely correct. You wind it—here, see?” He touched the knob that would allow the user to crank the tension in the spring to the necessary level, and then the drawing of the small barrel casing that surrounded the spring, and then the tiny toothed wheels connected to that. “And this barrel transfers that tension to the wheels—that’s what powers the timer.”
Malin let out a laugh, and Ace recognized the sound immediately—delight. She touched a notched wheel connected to the others, then drew her finger along the delicate seesaw-type pallets that fit into the notches. “And this is what keeps all those wheels from spinning out of control! This moves up and down, letting the tension out step by step until the energy is spent over a certain period of time!” She laughed again, and Ace not only heard it—he felt it resonating deep inside his chest. “Ace, this is brilliant!”
Ace gripped the table, unable to wipe the grin off his face. “I think it could work, if the pieces are fashioned just right.”
She nodded, her presence vibrating with palpable excitement. “Yes, but only if you reduce the girth of this cylinder right here. I don’t know anything about figures and sums, but it looks too large to me.”
Ace went over the scrawled calculations in his mind, reviewing the steps he’d followed to figure out how large the balance assembly would need to be to successfully measure out each tick of energy. “Demon balls. You’re right.” He raised his head and looked at Malin. Her face was aglow with excitement, with the thrill of discovery, the flush of victory, of exploration.
Every part of him was aroused by the sight. His body. His mind.
His heart.
He blinked. Chuckled. Turned away and ran his hand through his short hair. What had come over him? He waved toward the plans. “Feel free to look at the others. I make mistakes all the time. Too lazy to doublecheck, you know.” His joy was dampened by the memory of his Keeper. “It can have fatal consequences. I need all the help I can get to keep my inventions from exploding in my face.” He sighed. “And from hurting my people.”
He turned to find her watching him, her dark eyes somber. “You are not as I expected,” she said quietly.
“What did you expect?”
“Someone cruel and vicious.”
“I suppose it’s easy to demonize your enemy, especially when he is, in fact, a demon. Harder to do when you stand face to face, though.” He had taken a few steps closer to her without even realizing it. But now that he was aware, it was all he could do not to close the distance completely. “You are not as I expected, either.”
He hadn’t anticipated someone who made his heart race like this, who made his thoughts a storm of want and wish. And it had happened so quickly, like the lighting strike of inspiration. He swallowed hard and spoke the hopeful vision that had unfurled in his mind and crowded out any doubt or questioning. “I think we could do great things together.”
Her eyebrows rose, and her tawny cheeks darkened prettily. She opened her mouth to speak, and Ace felt as if his very life and future hinged on her next words.
“Ace,” boomed a voice outside his window. It was Fen, calling from the courtyard below. “It’s here!”
Ace rushed to the window, pushed open the stained glass pane, and leaned over the stone sill. The mid-morning sun showered the plaza in buttery light, revealing the enormous machine that was being wheeled through the castle’s main gates. Fen stood with a group of his soldiers, who were gaping at the towering trebuchet in awe. Its sling, already hanging low with a sample payload, was suspended with heavy chains from a wooden beam as thick as a grown man and three times as long. The steam-powered automatic crank—connected to the engine that would shorten intervals between shots and increase the range of the weapon twofold—stuck out from within the frame, its sleek copper casing gleaming under the caress of sunbeams. The counterweight, a hunk of iron precisely weighed and positioned, cast a murky, threatening shadow. Behind the trebuchet came a cart loaded with coal chunks to fuel the deadly machine, along with barrels full of the barbed iron crow’s feet that would fill the specially welded hollow metal balls the trebuchet would hurl down on its unsuspecting victims.
Ace was suddenly painfully aware that Malin had pressed in next to him. Her warm, lithe body was against his, and her wild earthy scent was in his nose … and her lovely face was drawn with absolute horror. They might have been looking at the same object, but it was apparent to Ace that they were seeing two very different things.
Malin turned to him, and her expression had transformed from a moment earlier when she had seemed so caught up in the ecstasy of discovery. “It seems the great thing you want to do, Prince,” she said, spitting his title like a curse, baring her teeth like a wolf, “is to murder as many Fae as you possibly can. And I will die before I help you succeed.”
Chapter 4
The Snare and the Snag
I suppose it’s easy to demonize your enemy, especially when he is, in fact, a demon.
—Ace Vane
Malin sat in the corner of the stone chamber, staring at the dying embers in the fireplace. She tried not to look at Ace, who for the last hour or so had been sprawled, heedless and slumbering, on the bed just a few yards away. She tried not to listen to his breathing, deep and sure, hitching occasionally as if he’d been surprised by something in his dreams. She tried not to imagine those dreams, probably fantastical and frenzied, colorful and whimsical and ticking, whirring, buzzing, clanking, on and on in an empire of sound and brilliance. She tried not to smile when she thought of his face and how it had lit up when she’d critiqued his design. He hadn’t been irritated or hurt when she’d found an error. He hadn’t dismissed her simply because she had no teaching in the ways of numbers. No—he’d seemed ecstatic. Hopeful.
Endearing.
Adorable, even.
Ugh. This was sentiment she could not afford.
The shackles chafed her wrists; he’d put them back on her after her declaration that she’d rather die than help him kill her people. He’d seemed reluctant, almost sad, but he’d done it anyway. He’d chained her to a metal ring embedded in the stone wall, and he’d left her for hours to ponder all the ways she had failed while he went off to sup with his brothers and father and all the nobles who’d bought her people like cattle today.
She was supposed to be bought by Fenris Vane. She was supposed to be at work already, completing her mission with Saana and Zoran, who had both been purchased by Fenris. Instead, she’d messed up again and again. First by freeing Foria and failing to return to her cage before she was discovered—that was what had made Malin interesting to Prince Ace, and that was what had landed her here instead of with the others. Then she’d messed up again, by starting to like the man, by sliding so easily into his realm of chaotic genius simply because it felt like she’d belonged there right by his side. For a few moments, she hadn’t even realized she had stepped into a trap. She’d fallen in love with those drawings, which had carried their own kind of magic, which had shown her things she hadn’t ever imagined but that somehow felt familiar and possible and perfect. Inexplicably, she’d started to fall in love with the vampire who had envisioned them. Now she was caught in the snare, trying to find a way to wriggle free.
Her people had a word for this feeling of connection, one so rare that Malin had never come close to experiencing it thus far in her very long life. Karasi. But no way could this vampire prince be the one, the spirit of her very heart. This was a flaw in her, an illusion brought on by the fear and the stress. She needed to crush it out before she made yet another error—like she had when she’d told him the truth of her feelings about the monstrosity he had created.
It had protected her from speaking another truth aloud, though, the one she’d been about to blurt out before the weapon was wheeled into the courtyard:
Yes. I want to build something with you.
The weapon had reminded her why that would have been a terrible mistake. But she should have pretended. Sh
e should have kept silent. If she had, she wouldn’t be sitting here, shackled and helpless.
She’d already tried picking the lock with another piece of flexible metal she’d woven into her top before embarking on this mission. She had a few of these tools stashed away in her garments, knowing the predicament she’d probably find herself in. But Ace’s locks were impervious to picking, and so here she was. Useless.
Warm, though. Ace had wrapped a blanket from his own bed around her shoulders when he’d staggered in a little while ago.
And fed. He’d placed in front of her a plate of bread, cheese, meat, and unexpectedly, fruit, and mumbled something about how he didn’t want her to starve. They weren’t scraps, either. It was food as fine as she’d ever seen, fit for royalty.
She’d eaten it, because she needed her strength. He’d also placed a cup of wine next to the plate, but one sniff had told her all she needed to know about it. She might be helpless and useless, but Saana was quite obviously hard at work. To any other nose, it might smell like wine, but to those raised in the far-flung wilds of the Outlands, the faint smell of yula extract was detectable. A little sweet, a little bitter, and very potent.
Ace had clearly had some of it, for his sleep was heavy as a boulder.
The door to Ace’s chamber opened, and Malin looked up to see Zoran stride into the room, his movements sure and strong and urgent. “The white-haired brother, Levi, rode off tonight, along with King Lucian,” he said as he knelt before her and examined her shackles. “It’s a shame—I would have loved to slit their throats. And the Prince of War did not partake of the wine—he left the others to their dinner and rode from the castle with his Keeper to go inspect the city wall.”
Copper Snare_A Vampire Girl Novella Page 4