Chapter 3
TWO PATHETIC PAINS IN THE ARSE
Sybil was going to claw his eyes out. Baxter Stone would never see daylight again.
Anger gave her strength, and she swiped at his face, but his strength was greater.
He pushed her back, and she hit the floor, twisting her ankle and tearing the knee of her trousers.
She growled and tried to rise. Pain, sharp and ugly, wrenched a gasp from her lungs, and she fell back to the stone.
“Damn you!” she shouted. Her cry echoed down the damp, dark corridor.
Baxter snorted. “Me? Damned? Hardly. I’m on my way up, not down. And you’re going to help me.” Now that she was nothing more than a helpless bundle of bones, he leaned against the locked door of her cell, regarding her calmly as he twisted his gold binding ring round and round his finger.
She spit at him. “You’re mad. Release me now.”
“No. I need you.”
“You don’t need me. Isn’t that why you ended the engagement? I was nothing but an anchor pulling you down.”
“Do not pretend as if your own intentions were pure. Do not pretend you loved me, Sybil dear.”
No. She’d not loved him. But she’d thought maybe one day she might.
“I would not have abandoned you, if you’d found yourself in my position.
” Her entire family exiled from alchemist society.
Her father stripped of his position as Master of the Alchemist Guild.
Baxter had ended their engagement as soon as he’d realized it would do his ambitions more harm than good.
“I would not have led the charge against you.” As he had against them.
“Tell me,” he drawled, “how is exile coming along?”
“It’s a delight. I don’t have to worry about friends and family betraying me. I know quite well who would rather have me dead than anywhere near them.”
His brow furrowed. “I see that could be a perk of exile. I’d not thought of that.”
“Oh God, you’re dimmer than an un-flamed fairy light.”
A sound from nearby. Sounded something like a… snort. But from where? They were alone, and the darkness outside their small circle of light was absolute and empty.
“Enough with the insults, Miss Grant. I’ve brought you here as my guest because I need your inventive mind.”
She should never have agreed to marry him. But he’d always appreciated her skill, and she’d hoped that he would help her nurture it. She’d also enjoyed his kisses. And no matter the quality of his brain, he was quite nice to look at.
He wasn’t nice to look at now, sneering in the dim dungeon light.
“Behind you,” he said, “on the table, you’ll find a book filled with sketches. I would like your thoughts on how they can be practically realized. There’s a pencil. And you can keep this orb.” He set it on the floor by the door and stepped backward, out of the cell.
She lurched forward, reaching for him. “Wait!”
“I don’t think I will,” he said with a crooked slant of a smile as he closed her cell and locked it. Then he stepped into the darkness.
“My brother will kill you for this.”
“He’ll never find out.” The words slid out of the inky void, punctuated by footsteps. In the distance, the groaning of a floating chamber.
Then silence.
He’ll never find out.
He never meant to release her.
Sybil collapsed against the cold stone, giving in to the heat behind her eyes. Captured. Imprisoned. Forgotten. She’d die down here.
No.
With a growl, she scooped up the fairy orb and shoved to her feet. She wasn’t going to die. She’d kill Baxter before she even came close to that proposition.
She shone the light around her cell. A bed, a bucket, a narrow table running the length of the cell’s back wall.
Limping down the barred walls of her cell, she tested the metal.
All of it set. None of it open to interference from a knowledgeable alchemist. Not that she was one of those.
While Temple could steal into unset metal and shape it to his whims. She did not know how.
She needed a flame to shape metal. There was none here but for that inside the orb, and she couldn’t reach it, set as it was.
That certainly reduced her odds of escaping.
She wandered toward the table at the back.
An ordinary notebook lay there, beaten and bruised as most alchemist’s notebooks were.
She flipped to the first page, then the next and the next.
The entire thing filled with sketches of half-finished devices.
No, a single device from different angles over and over again.
Some of the sketches explored alterations to the original designs, some pages were covered in scrawled notes she couldn’t decipher.
Behind her, a hinge, rusted with age and disuse, creaked.
She swung around, fear stealing her breath, and held her fairy orb high.
A man stood frozen in the doorway of the cell next to hers, his back to her, one foot lifted off the ground, and shoulders hunched forward.
A savior.
She rushed toward him, pain searing her ankle, and grasped at the bars closest to him. “Help me! Who are you? Oh, thank God you’re here.”
He uncurled very slowly, tugging down his sleeves, and setting the toe of his boot on the floor.
He turned just as slowly, running his hand through his hair.
And as the light fell across his face, her belly flipped.
He was gorgeous, as he’d always been. His brown hair was darkened by the shadows, and his pale face was well-shaped.
Cheekbones high as a transcendent’s confidence, jawline sharp as an alchemist’s blade, lips full and arrogant.
He was healthier than she’d last seen him, shaved and broadened by the apprenticeship she’d heard he’d taken in Stone’s forge.
Before he’d lost his title he’d possessed the lean grace of a cat.
He retained his grace but had hardened about the edges, as if he’d excised every bit of his softness and replaced it with steel.
“You.” She shook the bars. She wanted to shake the damned enraging men around her. How many times would she have to utter that single word of horrified recognition? Too many.
Apollo Chester swept her an elegant bow. “That’s right, me. And you’re you, and it’s been lovely seeing you again, but I’m afraid I’ve business elsewhere.” He stepped away from her cell.
“Oh, no you don’t!” She lunged at the bars, striking an arm through them. She caught the inner edge of his waistcoat and yanked him closer.
He met the metal caging her with a yelp. “Careful, sweetheart, you’ll mess my clean linen.”
She fisted her hand more tightly around the waistcoat. “You helped Stone bring me here.”
“Seems likely, I admit, but I have nothing to do with this villainy.” He pried her fingers open and stepped out of her reach.
“You’ve come to gloat, then,” she growled.
“About what?” He appeared genuinely curious, head tilting to the side as he smoothed the wrinkles she’d made in his clothing.
“Your teacher’s treatment of me.”
“I barely know who you are, sweetheart. I’m not about to waste a good gloat on you.”
Barely know who you are. The man would not have hesitated to kill her last summer. “You held a knife to my neck. Do you threaten the lives of so many maidens you lose track?”
“Not as many as you’d think.” He leaned a shoulder against the bars of her cell, crossing his ankles as a lock of hair fell over one eye.
“Though I do think I place the incident now. You’re Temple Grant’s little sister, yes?
God, that was ages ago. Don’t take what happened personally. Why are you looking up?”
She continued staring at the ceiling. “When a devil speaks the Lord’s name, one fears retribution. A good smiting. One hopes at least.”
He barked a laugh. “Funny little chit, aren’t you? That comment earlier about Stone being dim as an un-flamed fairy orb.” He mimicked wiping a tear from his eyes. “Biting. You’re much preferable to my dour cousin.”
A terribly idiotic spark of hope flared in her chest. Diana. He was related to Sybil’s sister-in-law. Sybil grasped the bars, her face inches from his shoulder as she peered up at him. He smelled of forge fire and something spicy. “Will you help me? You helped Temple rescue Diana from the Tower.”
He inspected his fingernails, tugged at his sleeve cuffs. “I didn’t come here to help you. I’m afraid curiosity drove this particular cat. Saw some brutes drag you down here and followed. Hid when Stone showed up.” He nodded at the cell he’d exited.
“Help me escape. Go get the key, and—”
“Why?”
“Why! What do you mean why? Because I have been kidnapped, and it is clear Stone has no plans to release me! He might kill me!”
Chester rubbed his ear with a wince. “Bit loud, aren’t we. You don’t want to sound shrewish.”
She grabbed his waistcoat again and yanked.
“Ack!” His face smooshed between the bars.
“You will help me escape or—”
He wrenched himself out of her hold. “Or what? You have no leverage down here. Especially since you may never leave.”
She paced away from him, futility buzzing through her limbs. She felt heavy, tired, hopeless. “We are family. In a way. Your cousin and my brother—”
“Don’t have to find out that I know of your whereabouts.” He leaned against the opposing wall now, out of her reach, all long-legged ease. If he didn’t wear the casual clothes of an alchemist apprentice, he would fit perfectly into a transcendent ballroom or garden party.
“Do you care about nothing? No one?”
“Myself.” He grinned.
“You are selfish, self-absorbed, and—”
“Devious.”
“Infantile.”
“Ooh. I like that one. What about… apathetic.”
She wrapped her hands around the bars and sneered. “I prefer pathetic.”
“Damn. The princess has teeth.”
She bared hers.
He laughed. “Who knew you’d be a delight. Not me. Oh well. It’s a real shame what’s happened to you.”
“Temple will murder you.”
“With his bare hands, yes, I’m aware. And there was once a time I would have welcomed such retribution, but I’ve a bit of life back in me now.
Prospects, even. So I think I’ll keep information about your current predicament out of his ears.
” He sketched another bow and pulled a fairy orb from his pocket.
It threw light across the grim corridor.
Grim, too, her future.
She shook the bars. “Do not leave! You can’t leave me here!”
“Look, Miss Grant, I do wish you weren’t rotting beneath the British Museum, but I can’t see any way to save you from it and keep my own prospects unscathed.
” Scratching the back of his neck, he wouldn’t meet her gaze.
“G-good evening, Miss Grant. S-sleep well.” Those halting syllables—an interesting break in his confidence.
She reached for him, reached for that opening in his defenses.
But he swung down the hallway, his long strides taking him farther and farther out of her reach.
Soon the clangs of the floating chamber filled the air.
Then she was alone.
Hot as the air was, each breath heavy and choking, Sybil shivered.
Only the bars supported her as the last bit of her strength dissolved like her freedom.
Damn Apollo Chester. Straight to hell.
Damn Baxter Stone, too. More so, actually.
Damn all men!
With nothing better to do other than curse those of the masculine persuasion, she flipped through the notebook once more. To spite those men, just to spite them, she would figure out how to make this device—whatever it was—work perfectly.
But she would be damned herself if she told them how.