Wicked Treasure (Treasure Chronicles Book 3) Page 4

  The nurse hummed as she worked as though that would keep Samantha away.

  “He’s coming, isn’t he? That’s why I’m lucid.”

  The stench from the hall crept into Samantha’s sinuses. She wouldn’t notice it after a few minutes, but whenever she emerged from her trances, it hit her like needles. The metal bars of her crib seemed to shrink. They would descend to crush her.

  Samantha laughed. “If I’m crushed, the captain will be so upset. Who would tell him all his secrets?”

  The nurse kept humming as she worked at the daily changing. Samantha must smell, too. Things crawled on her skin, and slime coated her underarms and thighs. It didn’t feel as though a month had passed, but she’d assumed he would return. The government, with their questions, wouldn’t like someone overthrowing the presidency. Poor Clark, whoever he was. Maybe he would end up like her.

  “Clark,” she called. “Come home to me. Come home, Clark. You belong here with me!”

  Captain MacFarland shoved past the clockwork aid as he stormed into the asylum’s sitting room.

  She shouldn’t have said what she said. She should have smiled at him as she used to, and that stupid girl should have made up some shit that the government would have swallowed.

  Samantha faced one of the barred windows. Her hair had been split into two tight braids, ending with pink ribbons, and she wore a simple white dress. No corset, no petticoat. The dress ended at her shins, the fabric stretched tight over her back, as though she’d outgrown it years ago.

  Her bare feet touched the hardwood floor.

  “You’re not dressed.”

  She chuckled, hoarse. “You didn’t send clothes this time.” When she turned toward him, he almost swore under his breath. The black kohl around her eyes and scarlet rouge gave her pale face a ghastly appearance. “You’re lucky they found this, or I’d be naked for you.”

  “Samantha, the government is furious.” Captain MacFarland sat on the sofa, but she remained at the window. “Come here, Samantha.”

  “I want to stand. I never get to stand. My legs are weak.” She chuckled again, and the sticks that protruded from the hem could have been just that: sticks from a birch branch in winter.

  “I shouldn’t say furious. They’re concerned.”

  “I’m not the government. The government doesn’t touch me in here. Are you the government, Captain MacFarland?”

  He pulled off his leather gloves and lifted his hand. “Please come here, Samantha. It is imperative that the government know more.”

  She took a small, wavering step toward him and held out her arms for balance, as an infant would. “Do you know him? Clark?”

  Of him, yes. Everyone in the country knew of Clark Grisham, who could raise the dead and had defeated the president’s army in the west. People still whispered on the streets: why did the president let him live?

  He lived so one day he could be used.

  “I’ve heard of him,” Captain MacFarland said, for it felt wrong to lie when she didn’t have that luxury.

  Samantha nodded. “Tell me about the presidency. Is it good? Does it deserve to last?”

  “Such an answer would be blasphemy.”

  She frowned; she must not know that word.

  “It is not ours to question the government,” he said. “It is ours to serve it. I serve it and you serve it.”

  “I serve it from within stone walls.” She flicked her hand toward the door. “You think I want to stay in here? I could be free if I weren’t a slave.”

  “That’s what makes a slave. You have no chance at freedom.” Neither did he. For as long as she lived, he would make these visits to her. “Come here that we may get this over with.”

  “Yes, let me go back to my cage.” She peeled back her painted upper lip, but she staggered to him. Something made him pull her into his lap, rather than have her sit beside him, and he wrapped his arms across her chest, breathing in the sick scent of jasmine. He couldn’t question his government, but if he could, he would take her out. Leave her in a cabin somewhere, still alone, but not where she was given an old shift and two braids like a child.

  Samantha stiffened. He wished he could pet her head, as he did for his cat. Instead, he tightened his arms around her while gripping her hand.

  “Tell me,” he said against her ear, “what is Clark going to do?”

  The trembles began; blood seeped from her nose and her eyes rolled back. He held her tighter, as if he could take some of the pain into his body.

  “Fight. His bullet will murder the president.”

  Captain MacFarland committed the words to memory and sought out the next question that had arrived by encrypted telegram. “When will this happen?”

  “When the president refuses to surrender.”

  “What date?”

  “Someone will make him. The prince. It will be the prince’s doing. Clark Treasure will not act without the prince.”

  Samantha gasped and clawed at her throat with her free hand. The captain had once given her a book of landscape paintings so she could know the outdoors. He must have thought it kind, but she’d found it cruel, seeing places she would never experience.

  One had been of a desert. She stood in one now, in her mind, with an orange sky and heat baking her skin. No words came to her mind, no answer to his query.

  People screamed far in the distance, and somehow she knew the world she stood in belonged to the dead. Had death at last saved her?

  Samantha stepped forward, blurred faces flashing past her, up from the sand into the sky. The ground transformed into a green yard, and she faced a white house with black shutters.

  A young man close to her age stood on the porch. A woman in a simple black dress handed a wrapped bundle to him.

  “Take her.”

  “Mrs. Larkin.” The young man coughed. “Clara, I can’t.”

  Clara Larkin. The name sounded too familiar, but Samantha couldn’t grasp the thought.

  “You have your orders, MacFarland.”

  Samantha had never glimpsed the past before, only the future, and she stepped closer. This man was her captain and that bundle—from which a cry emerged—had to be her.

  “What about the other baby?” he asked.

  Samantha ran toward him, her feet silent against the grass. “What other baby?”

  “Follow your orders.” She shoved the baby against the young man and turned back into the house. MacFarland gripped the bundle as he would a toy, his mouth hanging open. Samantha passed him to follow Clara Larkin into the house.

  The woman headed upstairs, and Samantha floated behind her. Two men stood outside the first door, both of them in suits and top hats.

  “Has MacFarland gone?” asked the first.

  “On his way now,” Clara Larkin said. A stupid comment. The man had only just received the baby—her.

  A woman lay on a bed, a pile of bloodied sheets lumped in the corner, and another man wrapped a second baby in a bundle.

  “Doctor, I’ll take him.” Clara lifted her arms. “I’ll see that Tatlock gets him.”

  “The boy to Marin and the girl to Wade,” said the man from the hallway.

  Marin. Another asylum. Samantha had heard it in passing from the nurses. Marin dwelled in the west while Wade resided in the east.

  Two babies split between mental institutions. Could she have a sibling?

  Clara carried the second baby back down the stairs, and Samantha floated after, as though pulled by a thread. She would not look at the woman upon the bed, be she dead now or still alive, for she had allowed her children—or at least Samantha—a wicked fate.

  “The replacements must be gathered.” The man’s voice chilled Samantha. Replacements?

  Clara entered a back room, a kitchen, with a stove and table. A man entered through a back door, stomping dirt from his boots.

  “That the kid, Nurse?”

  “Yes, sir, Tatlock.” Clara pulled a syringe from her apron pocket and shoved the needle i
nto his throat. The man gasped, shoving her away, and he thumped the wall.

  Clara continued out the door with the baby in her arms while the man thrashed on the floor, blood foaming in the corners of his lips.

  She had killed him over the baby? Why had Clara saved this one and not Samantha?

  “Samantha!”

  The world flashed back to Wade, Captain MacFarland staring into Samantha’s face while he slapped her cheeks. The hard floor pressed into the back of her skull.

  “Captain… do you remember…” No, that picture book held no weight. Samantha pressed her lips together as the room shifted.

  “You never fainted before,” he rasped.

  Had Clara Larkin escaped? Samantha shook her head.

  “Why will Clark act for the president?” Ah, that stupid question. He gripped her hand, but the world didn’t attempt to strangle her. Cold washed over her skin.

  The government would have to face him without visions. “The dead won’t let me answer anything more about him.”

  lark still wanted to punch someone. The muscles along his hands burned with that craving, but he couldn’t just go knock the teeth out of the woman dressed only in a red corset and black lace bloomers. She twirled and twisted her limbs into obscure shapes around her body. Placing her at the gate to the circus… maybe she brought in more visitors.

  She twisted her ankles behind her head and cawed like a raven.

  “What in the steam?” Zachariah gripped the door of the steamcoach.

  “Contortionist.” Amethyst shrugged. “I took classes once. It actually feels quite pleasant on the muscles.” She nudged Clark with the toe of her brocade slipper. “What do you think, love? Am I nimble?”

  Clark wanted to speed along the dirt road on his cycle, get to the circus, and twist the neck of whatever maniac had sent the clockwork lion.

  “Clark?” Her voice softened.

  He leaned across the seats to squeeze her hand, but he kept his gaze out the windows. Zachariah had thought a rented steamcoach would be less memorable than a vehicle with the Grisham or Treasure crest, and Zachariah didn’t know how to ride a steamcycle. Besides that little fact, the villains might know Clark loved his cycle.

  The driver turned down the road, over which hung a sign labeled “Clockwork Circus,” and the contortionist waved to them with her bare toes. Trees passed, thickening into a dark forest. Forests offered shelter and hiding spots; more times than he could count, Clark had sought solace there. The desert called to him, though, with the heat and sun and sand. He could ride forever across a desert.

  “Another one.” Zachariah pointed out the left-hand window, where a second contortionist sat on a pedestal draped in beige velvet. She tipped her top hat to them before bending her legs back, balancing on her pelvis, to touch her heels to the back of her head.

  Jolene dwelled somewhere in there. Clark drew back his lips and could have sworn he growled, but the siblings didn’t look at him. He needed to rein in his emotions before it gave them away.

  A man in a red suit with gold tassels on the shoulders directed their steamcoach down a narrower side road to a parking lot where their driver stopped the vehicle amongst buggies, other coaches, cycles, and horses tied to hitching posts.

  Clark jumped out before the driver could come around. Distant animal sounds filtered through the forest, and somewhere a child screamed. Jolene?

  No. He stuck his hands into his jacket pockets. Not his daughter. It sounded like a boy’s call.

  “There are so many people here,” Amethyst said from behind him. “I didn’t expect it to be so crowded.”

  Zachariah cleared his throat. “This is the only clockwork circus anywhere in the country. People want to see something different.”

  “There are other circuses.”

  “None with clockwork animals. I suppose they don’t have contortionists on the roadways, either.” Zachariah straightened his military cap. “Wouldn’t you want to come just to see animals that aren’t alive?”

  “Of course I’d want to witness something unique. That’s not the point at all.” She hustled past him to link her arm through Clark’s.

  He’d forgotten already how much the warmth of her soothed him.

  “Zachariah,” Clark said. “Team up with Hans, our driver. You’ll go one way, and we’ll go the other once we get inside. We want to keep track of anything suspicious, especially if you catch sight of Jolene.” His throat tightened as if to choke him. Brass glass. Jolene needed him strong; he had to go back to being the Clark who ran and didn’t look back.

  “We’ll find her,” he whispered in Amethyst’s ear. “I promise.”

  His wife nodded, and when she lifted her chin, she became the flighty Treasure princess who didn’t care a whit.

  Amethyst hated herself for the awe that stole her senses. A woman in a gold gown stood at a red stand at the entrance. Behind her, a black-and-white checkered hot air balloon floated, tethered to the ground by ropes. Little girls around ten-years-old twisted around the ropes and hung from the balloon’s basket, miniature contortionists. Did the circus want Jolene for that?

  Maybe they wanted her as an attraction. See the daughter of Death Speakers.

  Clark clenched his teeth from beside her.

  “Hello,” the gold woman cooed. “Will that be two tickets?”

  “This had better not be boring,” Amethyst whined. “Honey, if I hate it, can we leave?”

  “Of course, darling.” He lifted her lips by cupping her chin, and he sucked on her tongue before handing the clerk two bills. “This should cover it, I suppose.”

  The gold woman’s eyes widened, and she stuffed the money into a metal box in her stand. “Barely, yes. Enjoy the Clockwork Circus, only one of its kind.”

  As Clark and Amethyst stepped away, the gold woman greeted Zachariah and Hans, who had hung back. “Welcome, chaps, to the place where your gears grind into boners.”

  How crude. Amethyst almost laughed. It probably seemed perfect for a pair of young bachelors.

  Small clockwork animals circled in brass cages, interspersed with young women dressed in gauze and lace. They writhed within their confines, noises emitting from their mouths like animals, clockwork and pretend. Amethyst shivered.

  A man with flames on his top hat—they had to be fake—stood between two clockwork horses. Two little boys ran around the trio, touching the slick metal and glass sections where the gears showed. A second man, painted in silver, sat atop a clockwork elephant.

  A monkey of gears scampered across the gravel path to climb up Amethyst’s white dress to her shoulder and pluck at the silk flowers woven into her braided chignon. The inner workings of the fake animal clicked like madness.

  “Shoo.” Amethyst swatted at it and pursed her lips. “This place is dreadful, my dear.”

  The monkey leapt off her shoulder onto Clark’s before bolting to the ground and darting between two silk tents. A girl near Amethyst’s age pointed at it, laughing.

  Clark rested his hand on the back of Amethyst’s neck and leaned his forehead against hers. “We should split. Do you see the gals by the striped tent?”

  Amethyst toyed with her choker while she cast her gaze in the direction of the black and white structure. Two woman kissed each other in the shadows; one held a parasol and the other had been covered in beads.

  “I think they work here,” Clark whispered. “Go see if you can get an in. Pretend you want to work here. Get the secrets from the staff.”

  Leave the safety of Clark to pretend to be a circus whore. Fascinating.

  “If you want me to fondle a girl, you only have to ask.” Amethyst bit her painted lower lip to tease him before turning in their direction.

  Clark strode up to the man juggling lit torches. “Excuse me, chap. I have a question.”

  “Yes, sir?” The man paused his juggling. The clockwork monkey scampered between them with a little girl chasing him, a lollipop in one hand.

  Jolene would be that
age soon.

  Clark coughed. “I find this amazing. A real treat for Hedlund. Where can I find the owner of this circus? I’d love to congratulate the man.”

  The juggler shifted his stance. “Well, now, that’s a bit out of the ordinary like, but gay and ga’ the fellow is. Follow along.”

  Clark scanned the surroundings as he trailed behind the juggler, past tents and visitors, all of them laughing and giddy, as if cares vanished within the circus boundaries. Clockwork animals passed amongst the crowds, but he saw no lion.

  This had to be Jolene’s location. It was their only lead from what Clark had seen and the fortuneteller’s words. Amethyst’s fortuneteller, left at the inn rooms they’d rented in the nearest town.

  “Master.” The juggler waved his forever-burning torches, and a young man in a crimson suit turned away from a girl in a short, feathered dress.

  “Yes.” He adjusted his monocle. The feathered female kissed his neck before bouncing past Clark.

  Amethyst was going to fit in like a smash with them.

  “I wanted to congratulate you on what a great place this is.” Clark held out his gloved hand for a shake. “Albert Meyer.”

  The young man grinned as he gripped Clark. “Pleased to meet you. Name’s John Horan.”

  Horan.

  aliva dried in Clark’s mouth. “Are you related to Senator Horan?” He couldn’t be, or this fellow would have recognized Clark. The old Senator must have had his picture shoved over everything. Although Amethyst had dyed Clark’s hair black, made him shave clean, and given him gold-framed glasses, he had the same facial structure.

  Then again, Rancher Horan hadn’t recognized Clark Treasure.

  “Sure right I am.” John Horan touched two fingers to his forehead in a salute. “You a sympathizer of his?”

  “Yes.” The words sounded robotic to Clark’s ears.

  “Tooting shame what happened to that poor man. He was trying to serve his country and bam, they wiped him out.”