Infinity Bell (A House Immortal Novel, Band 2) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Devon Monk is the national bestselling author of two urban fantasy series, Allie Beckstrom (Magic for a Price; Magic Without Mercy) and Broken Magic (Stone Cold; Hell Bent), as well as the author of the Age of Steam steampunk series (Cold Copper; Tin Swift). When she's not writing, Devon knits silly things and lives in Oregon with her husband, two sons, and a dog named Mojo.

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PRAISE FOR THE HOUSE IMMORTAL NOVELS

BOOKS BY DEVON MONK

ROC

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1

I thought you were an angel burning in that dark night. I thought you had come to save me. Maybe you did. But I never wanted you to die for me.

—from the diary of E. N. D.

The sound of the seaplane’s engine growling low and loud as it came in for a landing jarred me awake.

I sat, still half asleep, reaching for my duffel, my gun, or anything I could use as a weapon. The seat belt dug into my hips painfully, and a warm, soft cloth slid down away from my chin.

“We’re coming into San Diego, Matilda,” my brother, Quinten Case, said from behind me.

Right. Seaplane, running for our lives from the Houses who thought we were behind the murder of Oscar Gray and Slater Orange. Houses who ruled all the resources in the world, and were, at this moment, using those resources to sift through the world to find me, my brother, and Abraham Seventh.

To be honest, the chances of us slipping their notice weren’t great. The chances of us slipping their notice before the Wings of Mercury experiment—an old time machine my ever-so-great-grandfather had built—triggered and killed me, Abraham, and all the other galvanized in the world was right near zero.

Still, I was a Case. And we Cases never gave up when saving the world.

It was dark outside. Night. I must have slept for hours. The rest of the blanket covering me fell away as I lifted my hands to rub at my face.

“How much longer?” I asked.

“Just about to land.”

I straightened and dug at the knots in my neck, rubbing the ache out of it. Then I glanced back at my brother. He sat with a blanket around his shoulders, cradling a thermos cup between his hands. His dark curly hair was mussed, as if he’d been pulling his fingers through it. Even in the low light, he was too thin, too pale.

Captivity had not sat well with him, somehow sharpening his features and movements and cornering that restless-genius mind of his.

“Coffee?” he offered.

“I didn’t know we had any on board.”

Corb, who sat in the rear of the plane, raised his voice over the lowering rumble of the engines. “We were saving it for when we made land. A victory celebration.”

The big man and his pilot wife, Sadie, had come to our rescue and smuggled Quinten and me out of Hong Kong in their little seaplane. They’d also rescued my farmhand, Neds Harris, who was sleeping in the seat next to me, and Abraham Seventh, the man I might be stupidly falling in love with and who was passed out in the cargo area.

Travel had been less than kind to Abraham. He had a sort of rugged handsomeness about him, dark wavy hair above a broad face with piercing hazel eyes, and a strong jaw covered in scruff. But now his skin was yellow between the bruises that covered it. The stitches that held him together, crossing his face, neck, torso, arms, and legs, had nearly disintegrated in just a few hours. Loose threads poked up out of his skin like sun-seeking maggots in rotted fruit.

At first we’d thought he’d been soaked in Shelley dust, a substance possessed by the heads of Houses and used as a means to control galvanized—people like Abraham, people like me, who were made of bits stitched together. Shelley dust on the skin would burn through the stitching.

Then Quinten had found the bullet holes in Abraham’s chest. Abraham had been shot with Shelley dust, which meant it was doing as much irreparable damage to his internal organs as his stitches.

Quinten thought we could negate the dust’s effects if we got him to a doctor soon enough. I didn’t know how soon would be soon enough. But I knew he didn’t have much time left.

Along the tattered lines of Abraham’s broken stitches were new, thin silver threads holding him together. That thread was my father’s own invention, made of nanos and minerals right out of the soil and water of our farm.

Quinten had sewn Abraham together last night with the spool of thread I’d packed with me. So far Abraham had remained in one piece. The thin silver stitches were precise, clean, and beautiful in their way. My brother had an artist’s hand with stitching.

I should know. He was the one who had stitched me together when I was just a little girl.

But along with the unstitching, Abraham had lost a lot of blood. Too much. The heavy blanket we’d wrapped him in was soaked with it, and it was seeping out of holes we could not patch.

At least he couldn’t feel pain. None of the galvanized had full sensation.

Well, except for me.

“Matilda?” Quinten held out the cup.

I pulled my thoughts away from Abraham and took the steaming, fragrant drink from my brother. Coffee wasn’t my favorite hot beverage, but right now anything liquid and warm would do me fine.

I took a couple sips, the bitter liquid spreading through my empty stomach like a heat wave, then noticed Neds were watching me.

Neds Harris was a man put together in the nonstandard configuration of two heads side by side on one body. He’d been with me for two years now, and had left my off-grid farm when the Houses had discovered not only that I was off grid but also that I was something they wanted to own.

I offered him the coffee.

Right Ned took a sip of it, offered it to Left Ned, who shook his head. “I’m good,” Left Ned said.

The plane dipped suddenly and I almost missed them handing me back the coffee cup.

“Need some help up there, Sadie?” Left Ned called out to our pilot.

“From you?” she called back. “I can handle this with two eyes twice as good as you could with four.”

“Except I wouldn’t hit every pothole in the sky,” Left Ned muttered.

“I heard that,” she said. “Not another peep out of you, or I’ll tell my husband to escort you overboard.”

Neds held up their hands in surrender, although Left Ned was grinning. They both settled back a bit and closed their eyes.

I took another sip of coffee and passed it back to Quinten. “How are you feeling?”

In the dim light my brother’s sharp features were a little blurry, but I could make out that irritated frown of his. “I’ve been thinking about what we need to do.”

When Quinten used that tone of voice, nothing but trouble came of it.

“Get Abraham blood?” I suggested. “And cleanse his system before his organs fail?”

“No. Well, yes, but not that. The break in time. How to fix it. We talked about this,” he admonished, as if I’d been sleeping through a class lecture.

“No,” I corrected, “we haven’t had time to talk about anything. We’ve been running. I guess just you and your genius were comparing notes in your brain again.”

He slid me a quick smile. “All right. Well, we need to talk about it.”

“Now?”

The plane bucked again, and Sadie corrected with a tip of the wings that had me grabbing the armrest of my chair to keep from sliding into Neds.

Neds, eyes still closed, chuckled and Sadie cussed.

Outside the windows I could barely see the city lights through the fog. I sure hoped Sadie had a better view than I did.

“Maybe after we land,” he said.

Better idea.

We held on tight as Sadie brought the plane down into the water, slowing against the drag until we had turned and were trolling over to the...