by Tish Thawer
Theodore threw his hands over his ears, but by the time he managed to cover them, the chime was already done.
“Sorry about that,” I said.
“What?” Theodore asked, slowly lowering his hands.
“I changed my mind,” Charlotte said. “I think you should focus on fixing that damn chime.”
“All in good time,” I said, shooting her a crooked smile.
I stood up from the bench, carefully lifting the leather apron over my head. It held nearly as many tools as I had strewn across the workbench. “Ready for a little hike?”
“I’m ready to learn how to run those stills,” Theodore said.
Charlotte slowly raised an eyebrow. “I believe what Theodore means is that he’d like to learn how to run the stills without blowing himself up.”
I frowned slightly and nodded. “As I said.”
I hung the apron on a small rack sunk into the wall. I pulled a discreet lever, capped with a polished walnut handle, and the entire rack sank into the wall, only to be replaced by a display of some of Charlotte’s finest puzzle boxes.
“How cold is it today?” Charlotte asked.
“You haven’t been out?” Theodore asked.
Charlotte shook her head. “Haven’t needed to yet. Living above the shop is rather convenient like that.”
“I’d say it’s close to sixty.”
“Take your coat,” Charlotte said, eyeing me as I circled around the workbench very much without my coat.
“I don’t think that’s really necessary,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter if you think it’s necessary,” Charlotte said. “Take your coat.”
I blinked at my wife, and while I pondered arguing for a moment, I instead hurried to the back, grabbed my coat, and joined Theodore in the front of the store. “We’ll be back in a few hours.”
“If you’re not,” Charlotte said, “I’ll assume you’re dead.”
Theodore laughed, but he shut up when I shot him a cutting glare.
I rolled the cuff of my coat back and checked the watch sewn into the lining. It would likely take a half hour to hike to the stills if we didn’t run into trouble. That would give us two hours before we needed to head back. “I’ll take you out for a fine dinner tonight,” I said.
Charlotte harrumphed. “As long as you’re not cooking it, it should be fine indeed.”
I leveled my gaze at her. “Charlotte.”
She grinned at me and shooed us out the front door. I sighed when the chimes sounded again as the door closed behind us.
“Let’s get on with it then,” I said.
Most of the town had gravel streets now, but a few places tended to get muddy enough to trap a wagon wheel. I glanced back at the shop as my boots crunched in the rock. When we first opened the store, it had been my decision to simply put up a sign that said horologist. Charlotte protested, saying too many people wouldn’t realize that we even sold watches, much less puzzle boxes and automata. As usual, she’d been right. So below the word horologist, we now had gilt lettering that said, “Timepieces, Music Boxes & Gifts.”
I took a deep breath and smiled at the brick façade lined with rich lumber. It had long been our dream to leave our old seafaring life behind and open a shop, and it gave me hope that life would be good in this new town.
“You okay?” Theodore asked, pulling me out of my thoughts.
“I’m excellent, son,” I said, pulling my coat a little tighter against a chilly breeze. “Into the woods.”
Chapter 2
The town had come a long way in the months since Charlotte and I moved in. Or had it been a year now? I tended to lose track of these things when I was focused on my work. It was easy to let the days slide by, exchanging one set of dangers for another. From the outside, frontier life looked softer than life on the seas, but they were both hard.
I helped design some of the buildings here. Others were a bit more what I would call clunky. Inefficient architecture and designs that served no real purpose other than a rural Main Street aesthetic I’d seen a dozen times before. I supposed that was well and good. Most people wouldn’t want their town to look like a square box. What truly set the view apart were the mountains—soaring, majestic things that reminded me of the white-capped waves in a squall.
My gaze lingered on the conservatory we’d been repairing on the back of the inn. The structure was mostly a framework now, as we had to pull the glass down to get to the root of the problem, and I doubted anyone would realize what I’d hidden there. It had taken some convincing to get Mihail, the inn’s owner, to let me include the ward designs, but that wasn’t the kind of thing you did without permission. Or, at least not without partial permission. This was especially true when the owners were vampires. They may have understood the threat of other vampires, and even hunters, but I suspected they hadn’t had dealings with the darkest side of the Unseelie fae like Charlotte and I had.
The rock and dirt of the streets gave way to trees and the meandering creek. Theodore and I followed the old creek north into the mountains. In the distance, I heard the faint crashing of the waterfalls.
There was something both reassuring and threatening about the more remote parts of the woods. It would take some time to reach the stills, as they were deeper into the wilderness, closer to the falls. I was pretty sure Theodore felt the same way about our isolation. I caught his gaze flickering from one side of the path to the other, trying to locate whatever wildlife was bouncing around the trees above us. It was early in the day, but not much sunlight reached the forest floor, leaving us in a surreal world of shadows.
We hadn’t run anything through the stills in a couple weeks. Not only because I was behind on the projects and repairs in the shop, but because the heavy rains in the springtime tended to wash out the path around the creeks. And a small footbridge that only spanned half of the raging current of water wasn’t much good to anyone. I wasn’t too happy about the delay occurring right after we replaced the still Theodore had destroyed.
We spent most of the walk in silence, only the sounds of the forest keeping us company along with the crunch of underbrush beneath our boots. The kid may have been young enough to maintain a conversation during the more difficult parts of the hike, but I wasn’t nearly so young as him. In some ways, I supposed I was jealous of his easy stride up the side of the mountain, but I’d never want to live through those years again. Charlotte and I were building a new life, in what I hoped was a safer place. We weren’t exactly spoiled for choices.
I slowed as we crested the ridge, and a small spiral of steam curled up from the shack that stored our stills. In the year since I’d set up, no one had bothered the operation. I didn’t really know if it was simply because our neighbors were all good people, or they understood the dangers of the still, or perhaps the smells were overwhelming to those with enhanced senses. In any case, the steam meant someone had been here, or was still here.
That wasn’t to say I’d never seen anyone in the area before, and I was nothing if not cautious. I slid the sleek form of a small pistol out of a hidden pocket in my coat. From another pocket, I pulled the strange clip of ammunition and cylinders that gave the gun its name: the harmonica pistol. It wasn’t until I slid the ammunition home and cocked the gun that Theodore realized what was in my hand.
“What are you doing?”
“Someone’s here,” I said. “And I’m getting ready to greet them.”
“Oh,” Theodore said. “It was me. I pulled the mash and fired up the stills yesterday. I just wanted you to see that I’m not an idiot.”
I slowly raised an eyebrow. “I told you not to touch these things without me. That’s not a complicated instruction, is it?”
“It’s fine,” Theodore said, biting off the words. “Yes, of course I understand. But I’ve been following you around up here for six months, and you haven’t let me touch a damn thing.”
I frowned at the anger in Theodore’s words.
“No,”
I said, “and when you didn’t listen? We lost a still.”
The boy had always been patient, but perhaps he was reaching the end. He was recently in his twenties, and I had a fuzzy remembrance of being that age myself. I took a deep breath, trying to will my frustration away. But Theodore had managed to blow one of our stills up, and it could have been him, if he’d been standing too close. I didn’t want to be the one to explain that to his parents, or any part of his family.
“What time did you start yesterday?” I asked.
“About noon,” Theodore said, some of the anger bleeding out of his words. “I made sure to mark it.”
I nodded and started toward the plain cedar door, considering the idea I should put a lock on the shack. I slid through the doorway, sweeping my pistol around the room before releasing a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
“What do we have?” I asked as I hooked the pistol into a loop on my vest and checked the pressure on the still. Theodore had obviously put an adequate amount of fuel in, but not enough to cause a rupture. It was still good on water, which meant as long as he had a proper mixture of corn, sugar, yeast, and water, this batch of moonshine should be just fine. But something didn’t smell quite right. It smelled too mature, too rich. I frowned.
“I did it just like you always told me to. The only thing different is the stream was a little muddy.”
“You put muddy water in the still?” I asked, unable to hide the disgust in my voice.
“Of course not,” Theodore said. “I went a little farther upstream. Where the pond is.”
“The pond?” I asked. “You put water from the pond in here?”
I hadn’t explained to him exactly why that was a bad idea. He didn’t know what Charlotte and I knew. I bit my lip and thanked the stars that the stills hadn’t blown up again. That didn’t do much to alleviate the slightly more concerning thought that the stills could blow up in our face now.
“Shut the fires down,” I said. “Whatever we have, we have. We need to shut this down now.”
“I’ve done it before.”
“Kill the fire now. We’ll lose the whole still. Again.”
Theodore didn’t ask me to clarify. We went about our business, throwing the lever to cut off the airflow around the fires underneath the still. He pulled another lever to drop the tray of charcoal out from underneath and slid it into a fire pit in the corner of the shack.
I turned the nozzle on the collection barrel and whistled when a clear stream of moonshine splashed down into my copper mug, with one small side effect. A subtle golden light glowed from the normally crystal-clear liquid.
“What is that?” Theodore asked.
“There’s something I have to tell you about that old waterfall, and the pond you took this water from.”
I took a deep breath through my nose over the copper cup in my hand, surprised to find the usual burning aroma of fresh moonshine, but there was something else. The water Theodore had used had imbued it with something more. I pondered the mug for a moment, before deciding I’d lived a good life and took a sip.
I winced at the ungodly sear, but exhaled slowly as the burning left and a slightly sweet aftertaste remained. I ran my tongue across my teeth and sighed.
“That pond is where we harvest the aether. It’s in the very waters. Whatever placed it there, of which I’m fairly sure was a magic beyond anything I’ve encountered before, also holds it there. It doesn’t seem to be anywhere downstream. It stops at that pond.”
Theodore blinked at me.
“But it’s a pond,” Theodore said.
I shrugged. “You’ve seen the power sources that fuel some of the automata. I’ve been filling vessels here for almost a year, and it hasn’t diluted at all. Whatever it is, I think it might be more closely related to some of the strangeness around this town than any natural phenomena.”
“Like someone put it there?”
I nodded. “There are a few beings I’ve heard of with the power to do it.”
There was a time Theodore would’ve asked me more questions. Or he would have scoffed at my mention of supernatural things creeping along in the night. And something stalking the woods in broad daylight? Unthinkable. But we’d all seen things. Some of the families of the town had been open with Charlotte, and even a few with me. We knew there was a great deal more to our little town than one saw on the surface.
I took another sip, frowned, and looked down at my copper mug. Warmth flooded through me, sliding into my arms and down to my toes. That one sip felt more like a misguided night in my youth spent curled around a bottle of rum.
“I think this might be a little stronger than usual,” I said. “Might even make the vampires happy.”
Theodore frowned and stared at the stills for a moment, quite probably contemplating the still exploding. The kid had gotten lucky the first time. I was glad he hadn’t blown himself up, or the new still.
“Old man, are you there?” a voice shouted from outside the shack.
I muttered under my breath, fairly certain the man would be able to hear every word. “Let me do the talking. I don’t want you going and getting shot. Or worse.”
Chapter 3
I raised my voice and said, “I’m here. And I have Theodore with me.”
“You going to ask me in?”
“I thought that was just a legend,” I said.
The voice on the other side of the door chuckled, and light flooded the shack as Roman, one of the Bishop brothers, stepped inside. Charlotte thought the man was handsome—debonair was the word she’d used. I knew his ilk. I suspected if he lived long enough, he’d have far less savory dealings than running moonshine. We’d have used him as bait on the galleons we once sailed.
“You’re not so skeptical as most,” Roman said, brushing dark hair away from his ocean-blue eyes. “But I already told you, I am no vampire.”
“You hear stories,” I said. “I suppose you heard our whole conversation?”
Roman hesitated, and I suspected he was pondering whether or not to play dumb in an effort to use the information as leverage at some later date. I rather thought he’d make a great politician someday, and I wasn’t particularly fond of politicians. After a time, he nodded.
“Many of us in town already know about the pond. But I must admit, we hadn’t thought about making moonshine out of it.”
I barked out a harsh laugh. “That’s because most of you have a better sense of self-preservation than my apprentice here.”
Roman looked at Theodore and studied him for a moment. I took a deep breath, forcing myself to remain calm despite being in the presence of a creature I didn’t fully understand. He wasn’t entirely human, of that I had no doubt. Roman turned his attention back to me, his gaze boring into mine. “Have you thought about my offer? In all my years, I haven’t met a bootlegger that could make a moonshine like yours.”
“There are plenty of moonshiners out there that can do better than me.” I held out the copper mug.
Roman frowned at it for a moment, and then apparently decided that he too had lived long enough. He sniffed at the rim of the mug before draining it in one long gulp. I studied Roman’s face, watching his subtle frown lift slightly and the crease of his brow relax.
“Not bad?” I asked.
“You could sell this at every bar in town.”
“We only have one bar.”
“For now,” Roman said. “I know you’re not earning enough to keep that shop running. How many of the people who live here even know what horology is?”
I bristled at his words before muttering some rather inappropriate curses at Roman.
He smiled. “I was just trying to make a point.”
Roman took a deep breath and settled onto a stool near the door. “Charlotte has been more open about your financial situation. She seems willing to entertain me handling distribution.”
The liquor was clearly beginning to affect Roman, and that surprised me. He sighed and crossed his
arms. He looked more relaxed than I’d seen him since I’d known him.
I crossed my arms, mimicking Roman’s pose. I knew he’d spoken to Charlotte, and perhaps he thought he’d been subtle about it. That irritated me. But the simple fact of the matter was that we needed the deal, and I might be able to use it to get Roman’s unwitting help.
I nodded. “I do have a condition. Two actually.”
Roman inclined his head.
“Keep everyone away from the conservatory tomorrow. And if anything happens to me or Charlotte, you’ll treat Theodore as you would me. With respect.”
Roman’s lips curled into a smile. “You’re a brave man to demand what can be taken so easily.”
“Make the deal,” I said.
Bishop studied my hand for only a moment, then reached out and exchanged grips. “You’ll be making some serious coin off of this, old man. You made the right choice.”
“Be in the conservatory at daybreak,” I said. “Make sure it’s cleared out. I’ll have a contract drawn up.”
“Of course you will. See you around, Theodore.” He paused at the doorway. “I understand there’s an Unseelie fae that’s taken some issue with you. Maybe they heard about your agreement to install the wards and didn’t much like it.” With that, Roman Bishop left.
I blinked at the empty doorway.
“You said yes,” Theodore said.
“We need the money, and I imagine the Bishops will be more discreet than a lot of runners would be. I’m somewhat more concerned how Roman knew about the wards.”
“The good news is he probably wants you alive,” Theodore said. “You’ll be his new supplier, after all.”
I harrumphed. “We shall see.”
I wondered if there was more to Bishop’s warning, if something from our past had caught up to us.
Theodore pursed his lips, but said no more.