Cold Copper: The Age of Steam (24 page)

But instead of the glass globe in the middle of all that copper being empty, each globe was filled with something alive and skittering.

“God in heaven,” Rose breathed. “Something’s trapped in there.”

Hink, for just a moment, wrapped his arm around her waist. For just a moment, she was held against him, protected in the strength of his arms, his body.

“It’s the Strange,” he said very quietly. “Can you see them?”

Rose nodded.

“So can I, though I don’t usually. Do not touch them,” he said.

Then he gently let go of her and walked across that room toward them like he was approaching a wall full of rattlesnakes.

It took all the will Rose had in her not to turn and run from this
place. The Strange were evil, mindless, brutal creatures that enjoyed nothing more than torturing people. She’d seen what they could do. She’d seen them make the dead walk. She’d seen them do worse.

Suddenly, she was too hot and too cold at the same time. She wanted to be anywhere else but here, yet she could not make her feet lift to run.

Hink was almost at the globes. He was going to touch them. He was going to reach out and then there would be nothing but a thin curve of glass between him and the creatures that were destroying the world.

They’d kill him. Draw him in. Devour him.

“Lee.” She said the word all in an exhale. “Please, Lee. Don’t touch them. Don’t leave me.”

Hink didn’t stop. Didn’t pause. He stepped up to the towering stack of caged Strange and stared at them, making a decision. Then he reached out and pressed his palm against the glass.

C
edar landed hard on his shoulder and hip. He gritted his teeth against the pain spearing through his side and leg. He’d broken a rib for sure, maybe done worse to his leg. He pushed up and out from under his brother, his head pounding. Even though it was cold enough to see his breath coming out in steamy gasps, his skin was on fire.

He struggled to get on his feet, but couldn’t do any more than rise up upon his knees. Every inch of his body hurt more, much more, than it should. His mind slipped between conscious thought and raw hunger to kill.

The curse wrapped around him, broken free from Father Kyne’s hold, stretching his body, twisting him into the shape of the beast. Changing from the body of a man to that of the wolf had never been a painful experience.

Until now.

Cedar yelled as the curse broke the spell and claimed him again, turning him into a creature that hungered for the blood of the Strange.

But even with the curse in full force beneath the power of the moon burning bright, the thin chain he wore that the Madders had given him months ago managed to separate just enough of his thoughts that he retained the barest vestiges of logic. Still, he had very little control over the beast.

Control that slipped.

The world broke apart into color and fragments of trails and scents: shattered bits of all the things, living and dead, that had passed this way.

Above it all, the scent of the Strange was strongest, tangled though it was in the smells of Wil next to him and of the wildflower scents of Mae from where she stood with the horses.

Mate
.

The beast demanded he run, hunt, and rend the Strange until they broke and bled.

Wil was on his feet next to him, and like him, wore the skin of the beast. They would hunt, together. They would kill, together. It was what they were made for. It was all they breathed for.

To kill the Strange.

Cedar howled and Wil lent his voice to his brother’s song, to his rage. There was a Strange nearby. A familiar Strange. Cedar growled. That Strange stood, just on the other side of a fallen tree. It held a ribbon in one hand.

Cedar could smell its fear, could hear the sour song that bled from it into everything it touched. He knew the Strange understood what he was. Knew the Strange understood he was death to its kind.

But still it stood there, not attacking, not running. It lifted its hand with the ribbon, as if making sure Cedar knew it carried a human token, a child’s ornament.

And then it ran.

Instinct curled and exploded in his chest. He would hunt it, track it, run it down, kill it.

Wil was right beside him as they pounded across the snowy terrain. Through the forest and over hills, across a field spread wide beneath the moonlight. The Strange ran faster, always just ahead of them, leaving a trail so strong Cedar could have found it with his eyes closed.

And then he heard water, a river flowing hard beneath a layer of ice. He knew that river. He had been here before, here where the road split
in two, branching toward the city of people and away through a stand of trees to the frozen river.

Danger.
The beast knew it was a trap, and so did his logical mind. He stopped, hidden in the shadows, Wil at his side. They waited, watching as the moon slipped in and out of the clouds at the horizon.

The moon would soon set. Dawn was only a few hours off. Though the curse was still strong, Cedar could already feel the power of it fading.

There was no reason to wait. They should kill the Strange.

But something held him back.

Danger.

The Strange was waiting for them. Waiting on the bank by the frozen river. Waiting to kill.

Cedar moved out of the shadow, drawn by the unbreakable need to kill the creatures that tread the earth. He held near the curve of the path, slipping silently through brush. This was a trap. He knew it must be.

And as he neared the river, he heard more than the song of the Strange. He heard children crying in the night, calling out for mothers and fathers. Calling out to be saved.

Wil heard it too, and whined softly, his ears flicking forward and back.

Because even though they heard a hundred children calling, crying out, there was only one child they could see.

A little girl, maybe three years old, barefoot and shivering in her nightshirt, her hair braided at each ear. She clutched a tattered blanket close to her chest and walked across the snow-covered stones as if she were blind or sleepwalking, following the sound of children’s voices straight to the icy river.

The Strange stood upon the ice, the pink ribbon pinched between its fingers and trailing in the predawn breeze. It stared at Cedar, watching his every move with those odd eyes.

He growled, but the Strange did not move.

It waited.

When Cedar had the clarity of a man’s mind, he would say it was not afraid; certainly he no longer smelled fear on it. Nor did it seem set to attack the child. When he had the clarity of a man’s mind, he would say the Strange was waiting for him to understand. It was desperate. And sad.

But the beast warred with his thoughts:
Save the child or kill the Strange.

“Help,” the Strange whispered. Not asking. Showing.

The wind rose with the early light, bringing with it more than the sound of the children calling, crying, begging. That wind brought with it the scent of the Holder.

Cedar jerked his head up and took a backward step.

The Holder was here, and as the Strange pointed at the ice, he knew the Holder was there, in the river, hidden beneath the ice.

Calling the children.

The little girl was almost at the river’s edge.

Save the child,
his logical mind demanded.

Cedar ran for the girl.

Just as the Strange ran for her.

She collapsed before either reached her. But it was the Strange that somehow whisked her up and, faster than the wind, pulled her away from the river and ice and ran away with her into the forest.

Cedar dug claws into the frozen ground, twisting to catch at the Strange, launching after it.

But the sun broke the horizon, lifting the curse. He writhed in agony as his flesh and bone once again snapped, shifted, and compacted, forcing him too soon into the shape of a man.

H
ink didn’t blow apart or fall down dead from his hand on the globe. So that was a good thing. The bad thing was the six men who came striding over from a door across the way. Men who were armed with ordinary, but no less deadly, sorts of guns and rifles. Men who looked an awful lot like a sheriff and his posse.

“Step away from the glass, mister, or I will blow your hand off.”

Hink, wisely, stepped back. “Evening, gentlemen,” he said smoothly. “Or is it about morning now? We got ourselves turned around, trying to find a hotel. We’ve just come to town. Found an open door and took shelter from the wind.”

The men didn’t move. Worse, they didn’t put their guns away. A man with a long, drawn-out sort of face and cold black eyes said, “What’s your name?”

Thomas took a small step forward and every gun shifted to him. He looked a little startled at that, and Rose thought he also looked a lot like a bumbling greenhorn who had stumbled into a situation he couldn’t quite get the hang of.

That was an act. The same act he’d used on her to make her believe he was just a nice young man showing her through the library, and offering to walk her home, when really he was probably trying to gather information about Captain Hink.

“I’m sorry if we’ve wandered into your, uh”—he craned his head and squinted at the ceiling, then down at the wall across the way—“building. Would you be so kind as to point us toward a hostel?”

“Name,” the man repeated.

“Oh, yes,” Wicks said. “My name is Thomas Wicks. Pleased to make your meet.” He tapped the brim of his hat and hitched a short bow.

“And this is Mr. Hink, and Miss Small, my traveling companions. We’re recently out of Nebraska, and on our way to Minnesota. The snow seems to have set us off course a bit. Is the nearest town Des Moines or Council Bluff? You see, Mr. Hink and I have a gentleman’s bet riding on it.”

“What you and your friend have here is a problem.” The men split their attention so that their weapons were aimed at the three of them equally. “This is Mayor Vosbrough’s town, and this”—he pointed to the floor—“is Mayor Vosbrough’s private property. We are under orders to shoot any man who trespasses on this land.”

“We mean to cause no trouble—,” Captain Hink said.

“Shut up, and get walking.” The man gestured toward a short tunnel that must have a door at the end of it.

At least Rose hoped it had a door. Here, underground, it would be easy to kill them and leave their bodies to rot. No one would know.

She tucked her hands in her coat pockets, and fingered through the bits there, trying to come up with something that might help them out of this mess.

Twine, bolts, a smooth lump of lead, but nothing that could take down six armed men.

Hink threw Rose a look, and she decided the plan was to cooperate with these men. He started down the tunnel, and Rose finally unfroze her feet and started after him.

As she passed near the globes filled with the Strange, the creatures slammed against the glass, slapping it with their hands, shoulders, causing the whole wall to take up a sour chiming, like someone was hitting milk jugs with wooden spoons.

A few of the Strange called out, their voices too faint and hollow to carry words.

Chills stuttered down her arms and spine, and her stomach turned. There was something very wrong about this. Something very wrong about trapping the Strange in those copper batteries.

And there must be something about those devices that allowed her, and the others, to see the Strange.

“I really don’t think there’s a need for guns,” Wicks was saying. “I assure you we mean no harm. This was just an unfortunate misunderstanding. Perhaps if we could speak with Mayor Vosbrough, we could explain our case and apologize properly.”

“You’ll see him,” a man with a scar on his face said. “Walk.”

The tunnel did indeed end in a door, which one of the men had opened, letting the rising dawn breeze in. Rose paced up the sloped floor behind Hink, and then through the door and up a ramp that must be for wagons.

The men turned to face them again in a half circle, guns pointed. Off to the right was the airship landing field. Now that dawn was purpling up the horizon, the buzz of airship fans broke the stillness, and in the distance, she heard a train whistle blow. Steam and smoke and the sharp stink of hot metal drifted through the still-dark morning.

Behind the men were three more warehouses, and off a ways, a building was being erected, a strange bric-a-brac structure made of wood and brass that tipped upward at over a hundred fifty feet high. It wasn’t an airship tether: too wide, with no looks of a landing platform. Maybe a water tower?

The entryway to the lower section of the warehouse was cleverly hidden by a gear and track system that silently closed a wooden floor over the ramp, so it looked for all the world like a place to park a wagon, not a place to hide captured Strange and rail tunnels.

She had no idea how they even captured the Strange to begin with, nor how they trapped them in the glass. Most people couldn’t see the
Strange. And that wall had been filled floor to ceiling with globes. There were easily several thousand Strange in those copper batteries. She didn’t even think there were that many Strange in the entire world, much less in a warehouse in Des Moines, Iowa.

Did they ship them in on the train? They shipped the copper batteries. Maybe there had been Strange on the train with them.

Before she could grapple with that nightmare idea, a steam wagon rolled over from one of the warehouses. It was built closer to the ground than most horse-drawn wagons, and the back of it was boxed in by wood sides and roof, leaving room for a driver and passenger up front to work the boiler and steering devices.

“You’re all going to get in this wagon. Now,” the man with the scar said.

Hink gauged the men. Rose knew what he was deciding: to fight or go along with them. And she knew what decision he’d come to. There wasn’t a fight Captain Hink would walk away from. Didn’t matter if he came out the winner or the loser.

“Of course,” Wicks put in cheerily. “We are happy to do as we’re told. Aren’t we, Mr. Hink?” he added.

“We?” Hink drawled.

“Yes,” Rose said quickly. “
We
are.” She walked off to the back of the wagon, a smile set on her face in hopes it hid the fear clogging up her throat.

Please don’t start a fight,
she thought desperately. They were outnumbered, outgunned, and so far outside of any civilized part of town, they could be shot and kicked down that shaft, which would put a short end to all their adventuring days.

She had a lot of the world left to see, and watching Hink get killed over whether or not he should get in a wagon was one sight she intended to avoid.

He finally turned and walked after her, his boots crunching through the layer of tamped snow. Wicks was ahead, between the two men who
stood at the back of the wagon. He nodded to the men and stepped up into it.

Rose climbed into the wagon next. It was dark, windowless, stank of old beer, sweat, and leather. The floor was wood, and there were benches along two walls. Wicks sat on one side and Rose settled across from him.

The wagon springs dipped as Hink climbed up the step. His wide bulk blocked out what little light there was coming in from the open doors. He ducked low and swung onto Rose’s bench, nearest the door.

The doors slammed shut behind them, punctuated by the slide and clank of a bar being thrown across to keep them locked.

“We could have taken them,” Hink said quietly. But there was no chance anyone would hear him. The steam boiler kicked up, starting the wagon to squeaking and rocking over the uneven ground. He could probably yell and not be heard by anyone outside the vehicle.

“No,” Mr. Wicks said. “We couldn’t. You may be a fast draw, Marshal, but we were outgunned in close quarters. And besides, this suits our needs all the better.”

“What needs?” Rose asked.

“There has been information coming out of these parts that the Vosbrough family is gearing up to make a move against the United States government. We don’t know how, and we don’t know when…”

“. . .or where, or who, exactly,” Captain Hink added, “or even why. So basically, we know squat. And squat ain’t nearly enough to die for.”

“What we know,” Wicks said with cool disapproval, “is that the Vosbroughs are involved, and are likely the figureheads and money behind the unrest. They are gathering glim, through legitimate and illegal suppliers.”

“I shut down Alabaster Saint’s operation,” Hink said.

“I read the report. Nasty business. Torture.” Here he went silent, and Hink just returned his look with his single, remaining eye.

“Yes,” Hink said, “it was.”

“Don’t you see?” Wicks said, leaning forward a bit and using his
hands as he spoke. “This is a perfect chance for a face-to-face meeting with the mayor, Vosbrough.”

“Because he’ll think favorably of us trespassing in his warehouse. A warehouse that contained more than a thousand trapped Strange?”

“What?” Wicks asked.

“Did you look at those glass-and-copper globes?” Hink asked.

“Well, it was dark.”

“They were filled with Strange. Each and every one of them.”

Wicks didn’t say anything for a moment. Outside the wagon, the sounds of the working city grew louder and quieter as they made their way through streets. The yells of a news hawker and of a fishmonger, the hammering of a smithy, the clanging chains of horses and wagons, and the puff and bells of steam matics all navigated in such a tight space made Rose wish there was a window in the wagon. Des Moines would have been the largest city she’d ever seen. If she could have seen it.

“Why?” Wicks finally said. “Why capture the Strange? And how, for that matter?”

“Maybe you can ask the mayor,” Hink said. “I’m sure he’d be happy to just spill it all out for you.”

“Batteries,” Rose said. “That’s what the man on the train told us it was. Somehow the Strange and the glim in those globes make batteries.”

“Power storage for glim?” Wicks shook his head. “I don’t understand that at all.”

“Think of it as a watch that doesn’t need winding because glim sees to the powering of it,” Rose said.

“Watches?”

“No. I don’t know what the batteries are powering, exactly.” Here she glanced at Hink.

They had an idea: the battery fit in the puppet man they had pieced together. If the Strange could be somehow used to power that creature. To work as a heart or drive a spring…

Rose wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly cold. She’d seen
what Strange did when they took over dead bodies. They killed, devoured, tortured. And if they had puppet bodies, would they do the same?

Why would anyone want to use the Strange as a power? Or maybe the use of the Strange drained them and killed them.

“What have you heard about the Vosbroughs raising forces?” Captain Hink asked.

It looked like he’d given up on believing Wicks was lying about being on the same side of the law. Either that or he was doing what he always did: gathering information on the glim trade, the Strange, and other unlawful things.

“Not much,” Wicks admitted. “We know Alabaster was raising men and dealing in glim trade he transported by air. One of the main drop points was Cedar Falls, just west of here and easy rail to Des Moines. If those copper globes were filled with glim, it likely came from the western mountains to Alabaster, then by airship to train, and train to here.”

“Are all the Vosbroughs set up in this town?” Hink asked.

“No. Killian is here. His brother is in Chicago and sister is in New York.”

Hink nodded. That was something he seemed to already know. Rose wondered why he didn’t tell Wicks about the puppet, the possible homunculus, but maybe he was smart not to do so. Wicks had fooled her before; she wasn’t feeling favorable to trusting him again so quickly.

“Any news on what the Vosbrough siblings are doing, specifically?” Hink pressed.

Wicks shook his head. “Nothing the papers wouldn’t print.”

The wagon jerked and came to a full stop. Moments later, the bar was lifted from the doors, and when the door was opened, the full light of dawn freshened up the darkness. Rose held her hand over her eyes to block the worst of the glare.

And saw the row of men outside the wagon, all armed, all wearing
green and gold with armbands embroidered with the initials VB. A personal guard? Or maybe just the town police? She didn’t know.

“This way.” It was the same dark-eyed man from the warehouse.

Hink sighed, as if tired of the whole thing, slapped his thighs, and then stepped out of the wagon, being sure to stretch up to his full six-and-a-half feet.

The men in the line below gripped their guns a little tighter. Hink could be an intimidating presence when he wanted to be.

“Fine city you got here,” Hink said. “Real nice welcome a fellow gets, plus a free ride to town.” He stepped down to the ground and held his hand out. Rose took his hand and walked down the steps. She tried to smile, but couldn’t hide her worry.

That was a lot of firepower pointing at them. She heard Wicks climbing out of the wagon, but her eyes were suddenly too full of the sights to pay him much attention.