Thief of Hearts (Elders and Welders Chronicles Book 3) (9 page)

“What was that?” he asked.

“I just sent a message to Simon,” she said.

“Simon?” Who the hell was Simon?

She just pointed upward, where, as if on cue, a shadowy figure began lowering a rope ladder over the side of the dirigible. The ladder came to rest over the heads of two other men hovering in the shadows. He recognized one of them as Omar. The other man was older, with wild, faded red hair and moustaches and a ruddy complexion. It had to be Hubert Bartholomew. Rowan immediately disliked him, and his opinion definitely didn’t change when the man raised a small, pearl-handled pistol and aimed it at his head.

“That’s
my
pistol!” Miss Bartholomew hissed. “How the hell did you get your hands on my pistol?”

Hubert looked smug. “Had it off of one of the Arabs who took it out of your boot. Don’t think for a moment I’ve lost my talent in my dotage, girl. And why is
he
here?” the man blustered out, wiggling the pistol at Rowan.

“He’s coming with us,” Miss Bartholomew said.

Hubert scoffed. “Like hell he is.
Whatever
he is. Good Lord, did you not see what I saw down in that tomb?”

“It’s my ship, and I say who comes on board. If you don’t like it, you’re welcome to stay behind,” she said, gesturing toward the battle behind them. “I’d be more than happy to leave you to it.”

Hubert’s grip on the gun wavered, and Rowan took the opportunity to snatch it from his hand in his momentary distraction. Rowan thought it only fitting he returned the favor, and so he aimed the gun at the man’s head. Hubert gasped at the threat, his mouth working soundlessly. Rowan couldn’t decide whether Hubert looked furious or terrified. It was most likely some combination of both.

Rowan pointedly lowered the gun and handed it over to Miss Bartholomew, a wave of self-disgust at his pettiness washing over him.

He did
not
like guns—yet another thing he knew about himself.

“Hex…” Hubert began in a wheedling manner that immediately grated on Rowan’s nerves.

“Don’t push your luck,” the redhead growled. “And start climbing. We don’t have all damn night.”

Hubert scowled and huffed, straightening his wrinkled waistcoat, as if that would bolster his dignity—or what little there was left of it. He gave the swaying ladder an edgy look. “I need a hand up,” he muttered.

Miss Bartholomew rolled her eyes. “For the love of…”

Hubert looked pleadingly at Omar for assistance, whose eyes popped wide in alarm. But before Hubert could cajole him into helping him, the man jumped up and grasped the first rung of the ladder. He started racing toward the ship’s deck, barely eluding Hubert’s angry hands. Hubert turned back to his daughter with an even deeper huff. Hex sighed and gave Rowan a sidelong look.

The last thing Rowan wanted to do was help the horrid man up the ladder, but Rowan had a feeling that refusing wasn’t an option. He cast about for an excuse anyway, too far from the ladder to follow Omar’s lead and just slip away.

“My shoulder…” he began, touching the gunshot wound…or what once was a gunshot wound. It was now little more than two tattered holes in his robe, front and back. He felt the skin beneath and could detect no sign that an injury had ever occurred. It didn’t even hurt anymore.

Hex’s eyes narrowed on him, comprehending what he was just discovering. Her bravado faded for a moment, and that uncertain, fearful
thing
that had been in her expression when he’d first met her—had it only been hours ago?—returned. His stomach plummeted to his knees. Could she have been right?

“I
was
shot. I felt it,” he insisted.

“I know. I saw it. Both times,” she returned grimly. She cocked her head toward her father. “Now help the old bastard up and let’s get the hell out of here.”

Hubert finally allowed Rowan to give him a leg up, though he grumbled about it the entire time. The man was no lightweight, judging from that giant beer belly of his dangling over his trousers, yet Rowan felt absolutely no strain as he hoisted him high above his head. When Hubert managed to start climbing up on his own, Rowan turned back to Hex and offered the same service to her.

She waved away his help, stowing away her pistol in her belt at the small of her back. She reached for the ladder to pull herself up, but he put a hand on her shoulder to stop her. He’d had a sudden, horrible thought. “You’re not going to have your man pull the ladder up before I can board, are you?”

He saw the guilt flash over her eyes, so brief he would have missed it had he not been looking for it. “I was going to,” she said. “But you saved my life back there.”

Well, at least she was honest. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t already suspected her intentions, so he couldn’t even say he was surprised. Even still, his heart sank to know that she was as wary of him as her ghastly father was. She was just better at masking her fear.

He clenched his jaw and nodded stiffly at her in acknowledgement of her admission. He shouldn’t have expected so much from her. They’d only known each other a few hours, after all.

He waited a moment until she was on her way up, then a moment more, and another, until he saw her climb over the ship’s railing. He might have been an idiot to give her a chance to change her mind, but he couldn’t bring himself to move. Not until he made sure she’d not go back on her word. He’d not go where he wasn’t wanted, no matter what the sheikh had ordained.

When the ladder remained dangling even after she was aboard, he finally started climbing, though it was with a heavy heart. He had no clue what the future would bring any more than he knew what had passed before, but he had a feeling that it wasn’t going to be anything good.

SIMON TIGHTENED THE
final steel pin in her left thumb with his small screwdriver and sat back with a sigh, unfastening the loupe around his eye. Hex flexed all the digits on her newly repaired hand and reached for her black glove.

Somewhere between the events in the tomb and the flight to the
Amun Ra
, a few of the more fragile mechanisms in one of her Welding hands had been warped. The journey out of the Western Sahara had been fraught with one perplexing mechanical problem after another, and they’d not had a moment to spare for the repairs to her hand until now. She’d been piloting the ship practically one-handed for two days—hardly an ideal situation. But the need to put the remote location behind them had been more urgent than a few bent screws, considering their nearly empty water stores and ransacked larder. Janus’s men had been thorough in their greed.

When they’d finally made it to Giza, they’d restocked on some basic supplies and made a beeline to St. Mina’s Sanitorium to visit Helen. Her father had insisted upon seeing his youngest daughter, and Hex was not going to deny him this.

Hex planned on it being the last time he’d ever see Helen, however. Cruel, perhaps, but then again Hubert was a danger not only to himself but also to his own daughters. He’d been willing to sacrifice Hex for his own gain in the desert. Who knew what he would be willing to do to Helen, if backed into a corner.

Hubert made no secret about Helen being his favorite child, despite the fact that he’d not even raised her. But Hex didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him—which was not far at all, considering that gut of his. She shuddered to think what would have happened to her sister had she died out in the desert. Helen had not had to grow up on the streets with Hubert, so she didn’t really comprehend his true nature. But Hex couldn’t tell her the truth about Hubert—she was too young, too sick, and too naïve to understand.

Having been raised in Baltimore with their mother, Helen had never had to do the things Hex had done as a child. Helen still had her innocence, and Hex wasn’t about to take that away from her. But Hex
could
do her damnedest to shield her from Hubert, and if that meant cutting off his access to Helen, then she was more than willing to do so.

She’d not have Helen suffer as she’d suffered. Hex only had to glance down at her Welding hands whenever her conviction faltered on the matter.

She’d only been a few years older than Helen.

“Thanks, Simon. A few more hours, then we’ll head back to Cairo,” she said. “Do you think we can make the last leg?”

Simon shrugged. “The mechanics of the
Amun Ra
are in order. I was even able to fix that glitch in the sun panel while you were running around in the desert.”

“You make it sound like I was on holiday,” she muttered.

Simon smirked at her. “The electricals, however, are cooked to high hell. I can’t seem to pinpoint an exact cause, which is highly unusual,” he said, his smirk metamorphosing into a scowl. He was definitely frustrated, a relatively rare condition for the genius, whose brain was usually big enough to overcome even the most convoluted of problems. “Ever since that storm, nothing’s been right. And ever since
he
came aboard…” He broke off and shook his head.

Hex knew exactly what Simon was talking about. She’d seen with her own eyes the way the dials on the helm spun in circles whenever Rowan walked past them. It was…unsettling, to say the least.

The first night on board, he’d touched one of the nodes connecting the sun panels to the engine, and the thing had shorted out. It had taken Simon hours to repair. When the same thing had happened again shortly afterward, she knew it hadn’t been a mere coincidence and had forbidden Rowan from entering the engine room for the duration of the journey.

He looked so ordinary—well, not
ordinary
, considering how damned pretty the man was, with his marble-hewn physique and luxurious mahogany hair. But it would have been hard to believe there was anything abnormal about him had she not seen the evidence with her own eyes.

He’d been shot twice in the last three days, but his skin was as flawless as an alabaster statue. He’d taken a slab of stone that must have weighed well over a ton and
thrown
it across a room without breaking a sweat. And he’d lifted her father, who
really
needed to lay off the ale, up the ship’s ladder as if he’d weighed nothing.

His strangeness had only been brought home to her over the last few days. In the wake of all of the mechanical glitches, Rowan had grudgingly allowed Simon to do some cursory examinations of him, which had yielded yet more bizarre results. When Simon had scanned Rowan with his spectrum oscillograph, the needle had surged off the scale. Hex had no idea what that meant, or even what a spectrum oscillograph was, but Simon had assured her that it was not normal.

And when Simon had drawn Rowan’s blood, the blood itself—or whatever the hell it was—had burned through the metal syringe like acid. Simon had managed to salvage a bit of it in a glass beaker, but he had no equipment to properly analyze it aboard the
Amun Ra
.

But she didn’t need Simon’s analysis to tell her that nothing
human
had blood like that—pale, sizzling amber the same strange color as Rowan’s eyes.

After the debacle with the blood, Rowan had refused to be tested further—much to Simon’s displeasure, since Rowan had quickly become a worthy puzzle for him to solve.
Something new,
as Simon had said out in the desert. Normally Hex adored Simon’s insatiable scientific curiosity, but in this case, she rather hoped he’d let the matter go. Even Rowan himself seemed terrified of Simon’s findings.

She
sure as hell didn’t want to get any more involved with whatever was going on with Rowan. It could only bring her trouble, and that was the last thing she needed more of in her life. Especially with Helen to consider.

“Once I get to Cairo, he’s out of our lives. He is
not
my problem,” she stated firmly.

Simon’s scowl deepened. He really didn’t like the idea of his new project being taken away from him. “Something happened in the desert, and something is happening with Rowan.”

“Again,
not
my problem,” she gritted out. “You didn’t see what I did, Simon. It’s wrong.
He’s
wrong.”

“He’s
interesting
,” he corrected stubbornly.

She sighed in exasperation and stood up. There was no reasoning with the man once he found something
interesting
.

“Once we get to Cairo, you’re welcome to him, then. Just leave me out of it.”

Simon gave her a mock salute. “Noted, captain,” he said dryly.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “I’m going to make sure Hubert hasn’t absconded with my sister,” she said, ending the conversation. The sad thing was that she wasn’t even joking. She wouldn’t put it past the old man to do something so impulsive, even though he knew how sick Helen was.

She left the workroom and walked out onto the deck and into the shadow of Khufu and Khafre, the largest pyramids at Giza and Helen’s favorite place to picnic when Hex came to see her.

Other than a few tourist caravans huddled around the base of Khufu, they had the place to themselves. She surveyed the sand and found Hubert lurking at the edges of the small crowd to the far left of the dirigible, glaring up the side of the smaller third pyramid, Menkaure.

Her heart sank. She’d known she was taking a risk letting Helen go off the ship with Hubert, but she’d thought that if Rowan went with them, Hubert would have been less inclined to misbehave, considering how terrified he was of the man. She’d needed to have Simon fix her broken hand, and she’d always hated exposing Helen to her Welding enhancements any more than she had to. Helen would never admit it, but the sight of her sister’s mechanical hands upset her.

They upset Hex as well.

Yet in protecting Helen from that unpleasantness, she may have just put her in jeopardy. What had she been thinking?

She quickly scrambled down the ladder and ran to her father’s side.

“Where is she?” she demanded.

Hubert, looking a bit green beneath his sunburn, pointed upward. “He…he took her up there!” he cried.

Her stomach lurched as she caught sight of Rowan and Helen at the very top of the pyramid, waving down at them.

“Good God,” she murmured.

Helen had always wanted to climb to the top of Menkaure. Hex had long ago ruled out climbing Khufu, given its massive height—and thank hell Helen had let go of that fantasy without much of a fight—but she’d always been too sick to even attempt the shorter climb up Menkaure. Until today, apparently.

“He just went up, like it was nothing,” Hubert whispered.

“They’re coming down,” she murmured, watching as Helen climbed onto Rowan’s back for the descent.

Hex’s heart was in her throat the entire time. She didn’t know whether to feel angry or elated at Rowan for giving into Helen’s pleas, for she knew her sister must have put on quite a show to get her way. With the ample depth of the massive cut stones, there was little to no risk of actually tumbling to one’s death unless one really tried, but it was still quite a long way to the top for someone in Helen’s condition. Even Hex was dizzy just staring up at them.

Rowan finally made it to the bottom and gently helped Helen dismount. Hex hurried to their side, caught between her outrage and mounting worry for Helen’s health. Rowan wasn’t even winded, but Helen’s face was flushed beneath her bonnet, her breathing a little bit labored just from holding on to Rowan’s neck during the climb. Yet her smile was so wide, so beautiful, all of Hex’s anger quickly fizzled into oblivion. She’d not seen Helen smile like that in years.

The little girl threw herself into Hex’s arms. “Did you see us, Hex? Wasn’t it incredible? I could see for miles, just
miles
! And did you see Mr. Pharaoh throw that stone? It went
forever
!”

She’d not seen
that
particular feat, but she could well imagine how far Rowan could throw one, judging from the spectacle she’d witnessed in the tomb. “Mr. Pharaoh?” Hex inquired teasingly.

Helen’s smile grew even bigger, so big Hex had to choke back tears. “He doesn’t remember his last name, so I gave him one.”

“It is very…fitting,” Hex said, glancing at Rowan, who was also beaming. He flushed a little under Hex’s scrutiny and cleared his throat as he tried to rein in his smile.

Helen tugged on her waistcoat to recapture her attention. Hex grew immediately suspicious of the calculating gleam in Helen’s wide eyes. It was just like her father’s, unfortunately, but without his particular brand of malicious guile.

“Mr. Pharaoh said it was no trouble, Hex, so I was thinking…” she began. Hex groaned inwardly when Helen fluttered her lashes and drew up her cupid’s bow lips into a pout. The girl was pulling out all of the stops, so whatever she was up to could not be good. Not at all. She braced herself. “Maybe he could take me up to the top of Khufu,” Helen finished sweetly.

Hex should have seen that one coming. She snorted and playfully flicked Helen’s bonnet back on her forehead.

“Absolutely not. You’re lucky I’m not tearing into you for this little stunt. It was dangerous enough.”

Helen adjusted her bonnet with a sniff. “Hardly,” she said. “Not for Mr. Pharaoh.”

Hex put her hands on her hips and stared her sister down. “What if you got tired of holding on to him? What if you fell before he could catch you?”

“He wouldn’t let me fall,” Helen insisted, her pout settling in, her arms crossing stubbornly over her pinafore.

“No, and that’s final,” Hex said.

“But…”

“
Helen
,” she warned.

Helen huffed. “Fine. But one day, when I’m well, I’m going to climb it, see if I don’t,” she stated petulantly.

“When you’re well,” Hex conceded, unable to bear contradicting her. She doubted she’d deny Helen anything when she was well.

If
that ever happened.

Helen continued to pant, unable to catch her breath, and started to unconsciously lean into Hex’s legs. Though the girl would never admit it, she’d had enough fun for one day.

“Back to the
Amun Ra
, I think,” Hex said.

Helen grinned up at her, but instead of grabbing her hand as she would usually do, she sidled back to Rowan’s side. She pulled on his robes until he bent down and whispered something in his ear. He grinned at her and crouched low so she could climb on his back again, wrapping her thin arms tightly around his neck. Her eyes sparkled mischievously in Hex’s direction as she peeked over his broad shoulder.

Hex shook her head in exasperation. From the moment Helen had laid eyes on Rowan, she’d been smitten. It had not even been Hex’s intention to introduce them, for she’d hoped that the man would make himself scarce during the visit.