A Dance Like Flame (Of Magic & Machine Book 1) Read online

  Her heart squeezed. What could have happened to a child so small to make him so mistrustful?

  “That’s right,” she assured him. “Just roll your finger over it a few times to get it wound up.”

  Robert did as instructed, and once he was finished, she flipped it back over and placed it in his hand. This time a full smile spread across his face as the butterfly took flight.

  “Excellent job, Robert. I do believe—”

  Bits’s words were cut off by the door of the car slamming open. Unfortunately, the automaton was flying near enough that it was swept up and smashed against the wall. Tiny pieces of glass and miniature gears scattered across the floor, but Bits had little time to mourn the loss. Too much of her concentration was needed to be completely terrified by the two men standing in the now open door. They were perched on some type of horseless cart which was not only keeping pace with the moving train, but staying steady enough they were able to aim their guns inside.

  How had they found out who she was and what she could do? And how did they find her here?

  “Didn’t think we would find you, did you, gel?” the one with thick eyebrows and greasy locks of hair asked in an accent more refined than one would expect out of a person whose neckcloth was stained with tobacco and breath reeked of gin. “His Lordship is none too pleased that you tried to run off.”

  Since the only lords who cared one whit about Bits’s whereabouts were the ones to put her on this train in the first place, she had to assume they hadn’t meant her.

  “I say, what is the meaning of all this,” Lady Birkitt barked at the gentlemen as if her snobbery alone could stop a bullet. “Put those things away and conduct your business elsewhere. Do you have any idea who I am?”

  Mr. Eyebrows spit on the floor, the wad of tobacco narrowly missing Lady Birkitt’s boots. “No, nor do I care. I’m here for the fairy and the boy, and I won’t be letting any overstuffed toff get in my way. Now mind your mouth and hand over what belongs to us, and we’ll be on our way.”

  Bits’s heart galloped like a team of runaway horses. She didn’t know what was going on, but she knew she couldn’t just sit by and let these men take Alice and Robert. Whatever their purpose, it certainly wasn’t admirable.

  The ring adoring her middle finger felt heavy. She’d put it on never believing she would have the occasion to use it, yet if ever there was a time to put a bit of protective jewelry to use, this was it. Her thumb found the small gear and began worrying it back and forth.

  Beside her, Alice had pulled on the silver chain around her neck and snatched a vial from the collection of trinkets attached. It appeared as innocuous as water, but when she pulled the stopper, the smell of sulfur filled the car.

  “Put down the potion,” Eyebrows said, thrusting his pistol forward. “His lordship didn’t say anything about bringing you back alive. Just the boy.”

  Heedless of the man’s threats and the barrel of the gun pointed at her face, Alice started chanting. Bits understood Latin, French, and German, but Alice’s incantation resembled none of those. Gaelic was the most obvious choice. Many Touched claimed to be descendants of pagan gods.

  “I said to stop.” Eyebrows braced his hands on the door of the carriage and leapt inside. As he did, Bits slammed the back of her hand against his abdomen. A sharp bite of electricity went all the way down to her elbow, but it was nothing compared to what Eyebrows felt. His body jerked back and then crumbled, like a puppet cut from its strings.

  Her victory was short-lived. How she could have forgotten the second man she didn’t quite know, but forgot him she had. Unfortunately, he had not forgotten her. He, too, was now in the carriage, his pistol pointed at Bits. Alice’s voice rose and transformed until it sounded like an entire chorus. Realizing where the true threat was, he didn’t waste his bullet on Bits. Instead, he slammed his pistol against the side of her head with enough force her head snapped back. She was vaguely aware of her body slumping rather unbecomingly to the side as darkness ate away at the edges of her vision. Just before she completely lost her senses, she heard Alice’s voice suddenly go silent, and then the world exploded.

  Chapter 2

  The guest rooms of Breena Manor were all lushly appointed. Even the smallest and most seldom used was papered in satin, boasted priceless works of art on the wall, and had a thick, plush carpet. At the moment, it was the last of these items for which Ezra Nash was grateful.

  “Will she live?”

  He was painfully aware of each of the bones and muscles required to raise his head and meet the eyes of Corrigan’s prodigal daughter.

  “Yes. It will be a while before she wakes up, but she will live.”

  Lady Alice Pearson stood above him in the door of the guest room they had converted into a sick room. “Will you?”

  Would he? He was as close to total exhaustion as he’d ever been. Residual magic hammered through his veins and crawled beneath his skin. Aether swirled in the air before him and everything around him, from the woman lying on the bed to the boots on his feet, hummed with energy. But he could think and reason, and even though he was currently slumped in the floor, he was aware he was slumped in the floor, so all was not lost yet.

  He was surprised to discover Alice was no longer lingering in the doorway, but standing beside him.

  She was also undoing the buttons along the front of her dress.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, even though the answer was fairly obvious. The panic was another good sign. If he was alert enough to understand the wrongness in seeing Alice naked, then he was certainly in no danger of succumbing to the magic currently eating away at his body.

  Alice flicked another set of buttons open with an uncomfortable amount of efficiency. “You have done me a great service by healing my friend. I owe you a debt.”

  “Certainly not that sort of debt. For God’s sake, Alice, stop taking off your clothes.”

  She stopped with her dress pulled down over one shoulder. Through the material of her chemise he could see the outline of one breast. He closed his eyes and wondered if there was a spell to alter the human brain so as to erase images one should have never seen.

  “Ezra, you need to expel your Residual,” she said as if speaking to a very small child.

  “I am well aware of that fact, however there is more than one way to relieve oneself of such a burden.” In fact, most any strenuous activity could burn off the excess magic casting left behind in a Touched’s body. Bed sport just happened to be the only activity that not only helped siphon off the Residual, but fed untainted energy back into the practitioner. The fact that it was also the most enjoyable of all the ways commonly employed secured its position as the single most popular method.

  Yet, despite being effective and enjoyable, there was no way Ezra was using Jack’s little sister to take care of his current needs. For one, Alice was very much like a sister to him as well. For another, Jack would kill him.

  As if knowing the direction of his thoughts, Alice slid her dress back into place with an exasperated sigh he’d heard often during their childhood.

  “You do realize you can barely stand,” she said, fastening the row of pearl buttons she had undone only moments before. “You can’t even walk to the ring. How exactly you plan to punch Jack enough times to get that much magic out of you is beyond my imaginings.”

  “I am afraid I left my boxing days behind in school when I realized the only things stepping into the ring with your brother would get me were a black eye and bruised ego.”

  “You cannot fence.”

  Ezra tried to shake his head, but it merely lolled to one side. “Not even on a good day.”

  “Riding is out of the question.”

  “Most certainly.”

  He wasn’t aware of time passing, but one moment she was looking down at him as if she’d never seen a creature quite like him before in her life, and the next she had his head cradled in her hands and was slipping her tongue past the seam of his lips. Ev
en then he was nearly oblivious to her soft lips and sweet taste. His entire focus was on the Residual slowly draining from his body. When she finally pulled back, he found himself leaning forward in an attempt to reclaim her lips.

  “Well, I guess that answers that, then,” she said as she gracefully rose to her feet once again.

  His body still buzzed, but Alice’s kiss had drained off enough of the excess magic that he was able to hold his own head up. “I’m sorry,” he said, pleased he was no longer slurring his words. “I don’t follow.”

  Alice ran her hands along her skirts, smoothing out the wrinkles. “The rumors,” she said. “You’re going to do some sort of mystical, mumbo jumbo now, aren’t you?”

  “It’s called meditation,” he said, already arranging his body in the position a former classmate had shown him years ago. “It’s not mumbo jumbo. And one would think you would have had more pressing things to do in the short time you have been home than indulge in gossip.”

  Very few could get away with reprimanding a descendant of an Oberon, but Alice had grown up alongside Ezra’s own sisters. In many ways he felt as if he was responsible for her as well, even if it had been years since they had last seen one another. No one knew where she had been these last four years, but when they had been warned that Alice’s life was in danger, both Jack and Ezra raced to find her. Why she was on a train bound for Scotland and how it came to be that she’d destroyed the car in which she’d been riding were still a mystery. Alice refused to speak on it, and for some reason, Jack didn’t force her, just as he did not force her to disclose who fathered the son she had in tow.

  “Actually, I heard news of your odd habits in Town,” she said, walking over to the bed where the magic he’d commanded still strived to repair Alice’s friend. “When a young, respected bachelor with all his teeth and no obvious defects swears off women, people tend to talk.”

  Having learned long ago there was nothing he could say in response to gossip about himself, Ezra said nothing. He supposed he could have told Alice how he was adhering to a body purification ritual he’d read about that would aid him in a spell he would need to perform someday. She was one of the few who would actually understand. Yet, he didn’t. It was ridiculous perhaps, but somehow he felt as if not speaking of the ritual gave it even more power.

  He watched in silence as Alice reached out and plucked a bit of the aether into her hand like a maiden picking berries from a patch. If ever he needed proof there was a difference between his own meager powers and those commanded by the upper echelon, this was it. He could only see the aether when his body was nearly crushed by Residual. Not only could Alice see it, but she could touch it. Move it. Command it.

  If it had been anyone but Alice, he would have been terrified at the amount of power exhibited.

  “Mo chorp do miss,” she whispered, clasping the other woman’s hand in her own. The aether she held stretched into a single cord and wound itself around their joined hands, binding them together with magic.

  My body for yours. The vow was one of the most sacred a Touched could make. Not only had Alice made it with one of the Untouched, but she had bound the words with magic. Ezra opened his mouth. He didn’t know what he would say, but certainly something needed to be said. However, Alice cut him off with a look, one that reminded him of her position in their world. And then with a sweep of her skirts, she was out the door, leaving him alone.

  Well, not quite alone. There was the woman currently being pieced back together by magic lying on the bed nearby, but at the moment she could do little to interrupt his concentration.

  Resting his hands on bent knees, Ezra let his eyes drift close. In his mind’s eye, he envisioned pulling air into his lungs and then expelling aether back into the room. Slowly, the restless hum of magic beneath his skin diminished. His muscles relaxed, and his heart’s rhythm returned to normal.

  “Lord Trowbridge…?”

  Ezra jerked back to consciousness to discover his patient awake and staring at him.

  “Beg your pardon, but I thought you were someone else,” she said, eyebrows arching over eyes whose color hovered somewhere between green and brown. They were interesting eyes. Interesting, and far too intelligent. All the peace his meditation brought him disappeared. It wasn’t a good idea for him to converse with a woman who knew Trowbridge and had intelligent eyes. “Are you well, sir?”

  “Yes, quite.” Realizing how odd he must look sitting on the floor with his legs all twisted together, he quickly found his feet. “My apologies,” he said, giving a slight bow. “Ezra Nash, at your service. I am the surgeon who has been overseeing your care.”

  “Surgeon…?” Those expressive eyebrows knitted together as she stared off into the distance. He could see her working through the memory and knew the moment she remembered the events which led her to his care. “Oh dear! I was injured.” Her hand probed the side of her head where her carefully constructed series of knots and braids had unraveled into a tangle of copper-colored hair.

  “The head wound was minor,” he informed her as he checked the thrum of the pulse in her wrist. “Ironically, it may have been the very thing to save you. Should you have been conscious and attempted to brace yourself, you may have suffered irreparable damage when the train car exploded.”

  At that, her eyebrows climbed towards her hairline. “The train car exploded?”

  “Indeed.” Technically Alice’s spell had caused the car to disassemble itself, loosening every bolt and ripping apart every seam, but that wasn’t quite as easy to explain. Alice herself couldn’t explain it. In the end, it didn’t truly matter how exactly it had happened. A train car that was once whole was now in pieces.

  “There was a little boy. Robert. He and his mother—”

  “They are both unharmed,” he said, cutting her off.

  “And Lady Birkitt? And Mary? Are they unharmed as well?”

  “They are quite well,” he lied. In all honesty, he had no idea how the women in question fared, but it wouldn’t do for her to get upset. Magic was a fragile medicine. Fragile and not always predictable. So far things seemed to be progressing nicely, she was awake and alert, but her heart was beating faster with every passing moment and her eyes were unable to focus on anything beyond his face.

  “How is your vision?” He leaned toward her to compare the size of her pupils. “Do you see any shadows? Dark spots?”

  He waited for her to respond, but all he heard was a sharp intake of breath. He pulled back to find her pale cheeks flushed with color. “Are you in pain?” When Demir had carried her into Breena Manor, she’d had more than one broken bone, but the magic should have healed all of her major injuries at this point, unless he had missed one. “Tell me where it hurts.”

  Her eyelashes fluttered closed a few times as if coming out of a trance. “N-n-no.” Her face flamed an even brighter shade of red. “Nothing hurts. I’m fine. I’m actually…” Her gaze cast about as if searching for the appropriate words before snagging on her gloveless hand. She raised her fingers up in front of her face and turned them one way, and then the other, examining them from all angles. “I’m glowing,” she said as her fingers danced back and forth in front of her eyes. “How am I glowing?”

  “Ah, that would be the magic I used to heal you.”

  He waited for the shocked gasp or outraged tirade, but his patient did neither. Instead, she began her own assessment of her body. She moved one leg, and then another. She rotated her shoulders, scrunched her nose, and even examined the ends of her auburn hair.

  “The buzzing under my skin. It feels like a million ants have chosen to parade around my muscles and bones. That is magic as well?”

  “It is. If you still feel it, then it’s still working to repair the damage your body endured in the accident.” Unlike the residual magic that lingered in a practitioner’s body, the active magic cast upon a person eventually found its own way back into the aether.

  “Magic,” she said as she once again examine
d her hands. “I never once imagined when I left London this morning that I would be in an exploding train carriage, healed by magic, and then find myself in conversation with a mage.”

  Ezra squared his shoulders as well as his jaw. “I am a surgeon. I studied at Edinburgh and trained for years under the tutelage of John Tate, an Untouched surgeon.”

  She froze, one hand still suspended in the air, and blinked up at him. “But you healed me with magic. Isn’t that the definition of a mage? A Touched who uses magic to heal the body?”

  There was no censure or arrogance in her tone, only curiosity, making Ezra feel like a cad.

  “I must apologize for my severe tone. That was rather poorly done of me.”

  “No, it is I who must apologize. I did not mean to offend. I know very little of your world. I did not realize mage was a term of disrespect.”

  “It isn’t.” Or at least, it shouldn’t be. Yet the world was made for the Untouched, and therefore anything attached to magic was seen as tainted and vulgar. “And in truth, I am a mage as well as a surgeon. I use both sets of skills to aid my patients. So, you see, you do deserve my apologies… I’m sorry, but I could have sworn Lady Alice referred to you as Bits.”

  “Lady—?” She shook off whatever question she’d been about to ask. “I’m afraid you heard correctly. My brother had the audacity to be born a mere thirteen months before me,” she said by way of explanation. “He had trouble pronouncing Elizabeth correctly, and therefore christened me Bits. Since the world bends to the whims of future earls, even those in short pants, the name stuck.”

  Ezra immediately stepped back, correcting posture that had gone lax during their discussion. “Lady Elizabeth, forgive me for being so informal. I was not aware of your rank.” Nor had anyone else been. If so, she’d never been allowed past the city gates, let alone into Breena Manor.

  Lady Alice Pearson had been back in Corrigan for half a day and already she was wreaking havoc and plowing over boundaries. If Jack didn’t strangle the girl, Ezra might.