Thief of Hearts (Elders and Welders Chronicles Book 3)

by Margaret Foxe

  Then he looked straight at her, waiting.

  As if he knew.

  And perhaps he did. He was a bloody time traveler, after all. But if he’d seen the future—or the past—or whatever the hell it was—he’d have to know…

  “I do,” Hex said grimly. “I know where he went.”

  He gave her a grin that didn’t reach his eyes. “I thought you might,” he murmured.

  Hex wiped the tears she’d not even known she was shedding from her cheeks with the back of her hand, ignoring the wide-eyed looks around her as she told her tale.

  When she was finished and she dared to finally look around the room, she saw Lady Christiana and the inspector staring at her with something like wonder on their faces. Wonder and hope. But she had a sinking suspicion that their hope might be in vain—that they wouldn’t have their happy ending after all.

  For she couldn’t bring herself to tell them the way things had truly ended nearly a decade ago. She couldn’t tell them that Rowan Harker, Earl of Llewellyn, the god from the sky and the father of her children, had died. That she’d watched him go to his death with her own eyes.

  She couldn’t tell them, because that damned seedling of hope had rooted itself deep inside her heart, just as it had in the hearts of everyone else in the room, and it refused to go away. For after all of the miracles she’d witnessed in the last twenty-four hours, anything seemed possible. Even resurrecting a dead man.

  “Just bring him back to me,” she whispered. “I’ve already lost him once. I’ll not lose him again.”

  Prologue

  Western Sahara Desert, ca. 2150 BCE

  FORTY-SEVEN YEARS. Forty-seven circuits around the sun. Five hundred and sixty-four months on a calendar that didn’t even exist yet. Over seventeen thousand days of catastrophe. War. Flood. Famine. Drought. Blizzards. Earthquakes. The world was breaking apart, and it was, as usual, his fault.

  He had come into this time and place stripped of his identity, but he had known he was different from the start. He should have died those first few days blundering about the desert without food or water, the sun beaming relentlessly into his too-sensitive eyes, the nights freezing him to the marrow of his bones, the sandstorms choking his lungs and scourging his skin. Any normal human would have.

  When he’d finally encountered people, he’d been even more convinced that he was wrong. He was too tall, too pale. He couldn’t understand what any of them were saying, and the only word he could think of to describe them was primitive, with their maces of stone, knives of flint and bronze, and soiled, crudely-woven linen loincloths and robes.

  And he had yet more proof that he was different, because he should have been afraid of them, considering they were armed and vastly outnumbered him. But he wasn’t. They were afraid of him, judging from their loud voices and aggressive stances and the spellbound way they reacted to the elaborate Chinese dragon swirling over his shoulder and down his back.

  He hadn’t a clue how he knew that it was a dragon—and a Chinese one at that, since he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d looked in a mirror. All he knew for certain was that he’d acquired the tattoo a long, long way from where he was.

  But what really confirmed his theory that he was…well, other, was when the men had made it clear that they meant to kill him and steal the strange amulet that hung around his neck.

  It was the only thing besides his own skin that he’d been wearing when he’d awakened in the desert. The thick, rough-hewn chain made of platinum seemed half-melted—and how he knew the metal’s name, yet not his own, was just one more mystery on a very long list. The bauble dangling from it was similarly misshapen, a tangle of warped clockwork mechanisms surrounding what could have been a large diamond—had diamonds been the color of amber and cracked down the middle.

  The necklace was as unnatural and broken as he was, and its purpose was as lost to him as the rest of his mind, but he’d known he couldn’t lose it. He’d known he needed it.

  So he’d defended himself. Or at least he’d started to, raising an arm to fend off their attack. One blow to his forearm with one of the primitives’ bronze knives, however, and the fight was over before it had really begun, for when the blade broke his skin, the man who’d attacked him screamed in agony as a strange, amber liquid spurted from his veins and burnt the man’s face like acid.

  Moments later, the wound on his arm had healed over as if it never was.

  And the primitives had dropped to the desert floor, prostrate at his feet.

  He’d had a lot of that in the last forty-seven years.

  Apparently, the primitives had decided he was a god. He’d been certain that this was a ridiculous notion, despite his golden blood, but he’d decided to go along with it because, though the desert hadn’t killed him, he was bloody well tired of it. And thirsty.

  So very, very thirsty.

  Eventually, they had reached civilization…such as it was. The men he’d met in the desert had been nomadic, but they’d taken him to a village in the east after many weeks of travel. The primary occupation there seemed to be farming weeds and herding goats, and everyone lived in mud huts and smelled like the sewers of London—not that he could, at first, remember what London was, other than that it was colder, greyer, and wetter than the desert environment surrounding him.

  The nomads had left him to his own devices in the village, and he had begun to make his own way, for even though he was a god in their eyes, they were hardly eager for his company. He’d quickly learned the language of the land and traveled to bigger villages and cities, feared and awed wherever he went. It seemed that gossip spread like wildfire even in this primitive society.

  Bits and pieces of his memory began to return, though nothing personal at first. Just information. Knowledge. How to calculate things like gravitational force, the velocity of a falcon flying overhead, and even the hours of the day and the months of the year that no one around him seemed to have quite mastered yet.

  He remembered Mendeleev’s table of elements, Faraday’s law, and all of the complex mathematical theorems he’d been working on before...whatever had happened to him. He’d been some sort of scientist, perhaps. And he’d lived in a world of steel and iron, steam and industry.

  One day he remembered that his mother had been from Wales and his father from East Anglia, and that they had despised one another. His family was long dead now, all of them, except for a cousin. A beloved cousin, more like a brother and best friend, though they had somehow drifted apart over the years.

  Then he started to remember the history books he’d read, and as the days—weeks—months—passed, and he traveled farther east and saw more of the world he now inhabited—the customs, the hieroglyphs, the giant, gleaming pyramids only a few hundred years old, and the serpent-like river that seemed to split the earth down the middle—he began to understand that he’d somehow become a part of that history.

  His father and mother had not even been born yet, nor Rome, nor even Greece.

  He was stuck in Egypt. About 3,500 years before he was born.

  And making a great cock of things. He’d arrived at one of the worst periods in Egyptian history, and he feared that it was his own intrusion into this history that had caused the world to go pear-shaped in the first place.

  The kingdom seemed to be collapsing in on itself, while warlords from all directions vied for power and the natural world seemed intent on self-destruction. Snowstorms in Memphis, floods in Thebes. Earthquakes that swallowed whole villages, and continuous, inexplicable haboobs out of the Western Sahara that swept their choking winds in all directions, sparing no one.

  He couldn’t control nature, but he’d tried as much as he could to stay out of the affairs of the world while piecing together what had happened to him. It was hard to do, though, when he looked so different from everyone else…and when he didn’t die and didn’t age. There was nowhere to hide. People either wanted to kill him or worship him. Or both.

  The Pai
nted Man, some called him. Others called him Apophis, God of Chaos, come to earth to punish mankind for their assorted transgressions. Sometimes he’d even found himself believing it too, for he wasn’t human, and he did seem to leave quite a bit of chaos in his wake without even trying.

  Eventually, he’d found the rest of his memories in the Pharaoh’s court at Herakleopolis, where he’d taken up residence. The pharaoh du jour had decided to curry the God of Chaos’ favor—not that he was complaining of his accommodations, having tired of the peripatetic life years ago.

  At the court, he’d had the time and resources to fashion tools fine enough in construction to start tinkering with the clockwork mechanisms in his necklace. It had taken him nearly a year, but finally something had clicked into place. The filigree-fine cogs and wheels had whirred to life, and the strange yellow diamond in the center had begun to glow brighter than his eyes and hum gently with power despite the split down its center.

  After that, his memories returned at a dizzying pace. He remembered that his name was Gabriel Harker, Duke of Brightlingsea, that he had a clockwork heart that had made him more machine than man, and that he was the reluctant leader of the Elders—or what was left of them.

  He remembered that he had designed a time machine, the blueprints of which Ehrengard and his men had stolen and corrupted—unsurprisingly, considering that was what Ehrengard had been doing for centuries to everything Gabriel held dear.

  He remembered that Rowan, his cousin and brother-in-arms, had been thrown back into the past by the corrupted device, and that Gabriel had traveled through time to find him and bring him home.

  And finally he remembered that he’d already broken the world once in a single second on the battlefield at Sevastopol, and that he was on his way to doing so yet again on an even grander scale.

  Soon after those cogs started ticking away in his necklace and he remembered who he was, the natural world’s balance was also restored—as if fixing the necklace had healed the earth as well as his brain. Which it had, to a certain extent. For it was indeed his fault that the earth was literally splitting at the seams. He wasn’t supposed to be there—traveling into the past through the faulty prototype had created too many paradoxes—and every step he’d taken, every interaction he’d had, every miniscule change he’d made in the timeline, had put a crack in…well, the universe.

  The necklace had been a temporal damper, a device made of diamond and platinum circuitry and complex clockwork machinery, hastily constructed and then forged in his own Heartsblood. It was supposed to have allowed him to remain in the past without poking too many holes in the universe. But it had been damaged in the crossing, alongside his mind.

  It hadn’t been designed to last all that long anyway, a temporary, imperfect solution only, meant to give him just enough time to find Rowan and bring him home. It was an undertaking he’d thought would take minutes, hours at the most.

  But he’d landed in the wrong time entirely. Somehow his calculations had been slightly off.

  Well, he said slightly…

  Ten years into the past had somehow become nearly four thousand. It was an error that could prove catastrophic if he didn’t manage to return to his own time as soon as possible.

  How to return, however, had taken many more years to coordinate once he’d finally had his memories back. The wheel hadn’t even really reached that part of the world yet, so his options were somewhat limited in the technological department. Somehow he didn’t think introducing scientific advancements centuries—millennia—early was the best way to avoid temporal paradoxes and leave the world only slightly the worse for wear.

  He’d tried his best to sustain the life of the damper and minimize the damage he was doing, but the device had failed after only a few more years of careful coaxing, and the cracks in the world had started coming through once more.

  He’d even considered killing himself, which was possible if he were determined enough. But he’d known that would solve nothing. If he didn’t manage to tear the universe apart, then Rowan would, wherever he was, with no damper at all and no way home. Gabriel was the only one who knew how to get him back. He couldn’t die.

  His work had been slow and secretive, and he might have capitalized on his status as a god once or twice in order to acquire both the manpower and the conductive materials he needed to go home: precious metals from the west, diamonds from the south—as good as he was going to get in Ancient Egypt. Then he’d returned with them to the Western Sahara, to the exact spot where he’d fallen into the world.

  It was not hard to find, that original fissure in time, once he’d located the melted sand where he’d first landed. The site was so far-gone one could even see the incongruity with the naked eye. The world seemed to be split from the sands of the desert straight up to the heavens. It was like looking at light refracted in water, or a painting ripped down the middle then poorly mended back together, its edges not quite aligned.

  It was an anomaly of awesome power, a glitch in time and space, its trickling future-energy the cause of all the strange natural phenomena of the last half-century.

  His followers had thought they were building his burial chamber to send him back to the underworld, but he was, in fact, building a conductor strong enough to push him back into the future, all sides of the tomb covered in sheets of polished silver mirrors and gold and diamond encrusted circuitry.

  The chemical composition of the sands in that particular part of the desert was unique, which would explain why he’d landed there, of all places on earth, to begin with. But the sand wasn’t enough to get him back home without a little enhancement, not after shooting four thousand years off course and spending forty-seven more years blundering about.

  The good news—the only good news he could see in this whole epic debacle—was that the fissure—the damned rip in the universe he’d caused because of a ridiculous mathematical miscalculation—was that the channel was still open on the other end, so time had to be passing differently there. The machine’s engine could never have sustained itself for forty-seven years—not to mention the fact that no one on the other side would have waited around so long for his return.

  Well, Miss Bartholomew probably would have. She was expecting him to return with Rowan, after all.

  When the chamber was finally completed, he could feel the static charge slowly gathering in the heavens above him, trapped in the rift, the result of an overload of conductive energy gathering in one spot. It wouldn’t be long until the electrical storm hit. Just one strike was all he needed to pry open the portal wide enough to send him home…or back to London anyway.

  He wasn’t sure where home was these days, or even what that word meant. He hadn’t been sure for centuries.

  Most of the workers had dispersed by then, their jobs done. Some ardent followers remained behind, performing their frankly disturbing rituals to Apophis, but he’d ordered them to stay a healthy distance away, far beyond the melted sand, where at least they wouldn’t be burned alive when the storm hit. They were the ones who would eventually seal up the tomb behind him and make sure it remained hidden and—hopefully—forgotten by time. He wouldn’t have need of it again for thousands of years.

  He thought about waving goodbye to their distant figures but stopped short of making a complete fool of himself. There wasn’t really anyone to say goodbye to, even after forty-seven years. He didn’t have friends here. Not that he had many where he’d come from either, aside from Rowan. He’d been extremely careful to keep his distance, as much as possible, from the people around him. The risk of changing something crucial because of one careless gesture was just too high, though he’d probably already done significant damage as it was.

  He just hoped London still existed. That Rowan still existed, and that it was not too late to save him—and the rest of the world—from his own hubris.

  Again.

  So he entered the chamber, sat down amid the gleaming walls in the robes that would soon burn fro
m his body during the crossing, and closed his eyes, going over the calculations in his mind for the thousandth time, trying to discover where he’d gone wrong forty-seven years ago and four thousand years in the future.

  Just as the lightning struck and time cracked open, he opened his eyes and gasped in surprise as the answer suddenly came to him.

  A misplaced decimal point.

  Damn.

  Such a silly thing.

  Chapter One

  Western Sahara Desert, 1887

  HEX BARTHOLOMEW TURNED her face into the burning, unforgiving desert sun shining through the porthole window and tried to calm the chaos in her mind—at least for a few moments. She was at the ass-end of nowhere and knee-deep in trouble, and her odds of coming out alive were even longer than usual. Panicking would get her nothing but dead, a state she was determined to avoid at all costs.

  The bright light seared away the worst of her anxiety until she was able to turn back to the task at hand with something resembling serenity. She reached beneath the captain’s table and retrieved the small, pearl handled pistol Janus’s men had failed to confiscate.

  After checking to make sure it was fully loaded, she shoved the weapon into the discreet leather holster built into her right boot. Then she sent up a quick prayer to the heavens that she wouldn’t need to use it. She was a horrible shot.

  With the way her luck had gone lately, however, she wasn’t holding her breath on that account. The use of firearms was fast becoming an inevitability.

  She strode out of the captain’s roost into the raw desert sunlight and crossed the burnished deck of the Amun Ra. Simon was waiting for her on starboard side, his lean, sun-browned face set into grim lines behind brass-rimmed pilot’s goggles. He lifted the goggles off his head and handed them over to her, his gray eyes reflecting the same worry she’d been carrying around since Cairo. He didn’t like what was happening in the desert below any more than she did.