“He knows about everything, doesn’t he?” Imogen said dryly. “I checked the list, you know. He was never invited to Mama’s party.”
Evelina drew closer, wanting a better look. Some of the parts were shiny and new, others old and misshapen with time. Corrosion reduced what might have been gears to jagged skeletons. Images of shipwrecks and treasure hunters played in her imagination.
“There are bloodstains underneath the sawdust,” Imogen said with disgust, scraping at the floor with her boot.
“One of the workers must have been hurt.”
Evelina barely gave the blood a glance. She’d seen plenty of mishaps at the circus, and even had a few of her own—like the time she’d tried one of Nick’s knife tricks without supervision. She still had a faint scar across the palm of her hand.
It was folly. Wanting Nick was selfish, hurtful to her and worse for him. She had gone over it in her mind a thousand times, and she’d decided to take the hard road for both their sakes. She had a future, better than what she’d left, and she should be grateful. Still, sadness lanced through her like a knife.
She bowed her head, slowly forcing away the idea by concentrating on the jumble on the shelf in front of her. And something reached out to her mind. She recoiled as if she’d been shocked with Aragon Jackson’s evil machine.
“What’s wrong?” Imogen demanded.
“There’s something here.”
“Your magic mustard plaster?”
No, it wasn’t the biting, swarming sensation. It was something more. Something very, very old. She drew near once more to the shelf with the clock parts, summoning the courage to tentatively open her awareness a bit further.
There it was again, reaching up like a baby wanting to be held, but oh so ancient. So lonely. It wanted her to find it, amid the wreckage and dross of forgotten machines. It was one of them, but much, much more. It told her all that, not with words, but with an ache in her heart so sharp her eyes stung with sorrow.
She inched nearer still, reaching out her hand.
“Evelina?”
She brushed aside a litter of screws and wheels, sending them bouncing to the floor with a clatter and ping. Her fingertips sought the source of the thoughts, blindly groping to quiet its plea. She felt her hand connect with it. The sensation was odd—a duality of cool metal and warm energy, not unlike the combination of the mechanical bird and its deva. Curiosity vibrated through her as she realized that this was another combination of magic and machine. Someone else had done what she had done, and put a spirit into a mechanical body—but long, long ago.
She brushed away the surrounding bits and gears and lifted the chunk of metal in both hands. It didn’t look like much, just a brass and iron cube about eight inches across. The surface was lumpy and irregular, as if molten metal had been dripped over a piece of crude clockwork, or else the surface of the cube had corroded away to expose what lay beneath.
Whatever was in the cube reached up to her with a profound and archaic intelligence. Now that she’d found it, was holding it, she could sense more than just its loneliness. There was a feeling of depth, or maybe just vastness. It was like reading an entire library at once. It was like falling into a sky of stars.
“Evelina!”
She started, looking up at Imogen. “Pardon?”
“What is that thing?”
“I’m not sure, but it wants to come with us.”
Imogen looked dubious. “It does?”
“I think someone was about to put it in the scrap bin.”
“Really?” Her friend’s face said that was a reasonable plan.
“But it’s alive,” Evelina explained. “Like my bird, only much more sophisticated than that.”
Imogen blinked. “Sophistication which sadly didn’t extend to wings or wheels. Or much else, for that matter.” She pulled off her shawl. “Knot this around it and it will make a reasonable carrier.”
Evelina took the shawl almost hesitantly. “Thank you. I’m afraid your shawl might be soiled, though.”
Imogen shrugged. “Just hurry. This place is starting to give me the shivers.”
She was right. The warehouse seemed to be growing darker, the shadows creeping in from the corners. It was also growing warmer, as if a boiler had been switched on beneath the floor. Evelina felt a sense of alarm from the cube, and shared it. The stinging, biting presence that must have belonged to the guardian of the place was no longer merely annoying. It had increased from the scrape and poke of crawling ants’ feet to something sharper, like a thousand tiny blades glancing along her skin.
“I think we had better leave,” Evelina said quietly, folding the cube in the shawl and knotting the ends of the soft fabric into a handle. Once again, she was sorry she’d brought her friend.
Imogen opened her mouth to answer, but no sound came out. Evelina spun to see what her friend saw, and froze. Straight ahead, their path had vanished in a haze, as if night had fallen on the far end of the warehouse. It took a moment to figure out why, but when Evelina did, her gut turned icy with alarm. The shadows were moving, rolling end over end to form a long tube of smoky darkness.
Chapter Twenty-one
“What is that?” Imogen asked hoarsely.
“Remember I told you about the devas?”
“Yes.”
“This is the biggest damned deva I’ve ever seen.”
Imogen didn’t even blink at the curse. There were far greater things to worry about. The rolling shadows were arching up from the floor with serpentine grace, seeming to grow thicker and more solid every moment. The front end wavered in the air like a questing worm. The back end grew a long, snapping tail as she watched.
This was no countryside deva of tree or spring, small and formless and more or less harmless, but something ancient. The ability to assume physical form took enormous power, and such creatures were rare. She’d only met an eyewitness once before—an old man who told of the great bear spirit who roamed the north. The rest were just legends—until now. This creature had powers straight out of Gran’s fairy tales.
The touch of its magic grew sharper, scraping along her flesh. Evelina glanced down at her arms, half expecting to see a tracery of blood seeping through the fine sleeves of her gown.
“Back the way we came,” she gasped.
“Sounds good.”
They turned tail and scampered for the door, the rustle of their petticoats loud in the cavernous space. They had gone a half dozen yards when Evelina caught darting movement from the corner of her eye. The roll of shadow slid, gliding along the floor with an undulating slither. Evelina caught her friend’s arm, stopping her just as the thing reared up, blocking their escape.
She had the impression of vast, whiskered jaws and eyes the color of peridots. Red scales glittered from the darkness like flakes of burning coal, as if the thing were made of a living hide of banked fire.
Imogen shrieked, jumping backward in terror. Evelina pushed her to the side, stepping in front, ready to defend her just as she had in the school yard. Evelina weighed the cube in its sling of fine cashmere. She wondered how the entity inside that would feel about doubling as a weapon.
“We can’t go back,” Imogen said, her voice quaking. “It will just outrun us that way, too.”
The thing lunged, snapping fangs that curled up and outside its mouth like tusks. Short, muscular legs churned the air as it reared and lunged again. Evelina ducked, pulling Imogen down with her into the safe space
