Clockwork Doomsday (Rogue Angel)

A key. An ancient automaton. A race against the devil to the deep blue sea…

It started in 48 B.C. when a centurion on a rescue mission for Caesar went down with the ship in a storm. With his last breath, he saw the object of Caesar's seafaring excursion—an accursed, mechanical minotaur—hit bottom…and start to walk away!

While taping an episode of Chasing History's Monsters, TV host and archaeologist Annja Creed learns that her sometime friend and protector Garin has acquired an ancient butterfly key artifact, the kind once used to wind automatons, clockwork-style devices. Except, this key comes with a rumor attached, a story that it once worked a god-touched device both rare and unbelievably powerful.

No sooner does Garin hold the key than it's snatched from his hands by a freewheeling historian who plays by her own rules. And she wants ultimate power, which could happily include the sword of Joan of Arc. The quest for the key and the mythological automaton reunites Annja, Garin and his old mentor Roux in Genoa, and pits them in a race across Europe to beat a foe as resourceful and skilled as Annja herself.

Outside Salem, Massachusetts

"You should be here at Halloween."

Tramping across the marshy ground with her flashlight, searching for a firmer trail in the tall grass, Annja Creed glanced at her two companions. In the darkness of the Evergreen Harbor Cemetery, it was hard to tell them apart.

Twenty-year-old goth Colleen Digby was just shy of five and a half feet and wore all black, a skirt over skinny jeans and a hooded trench coat over that. She rustled every time she took a step, and the muddy ground sucked at her boots. Her cropped black hair had an electric-blue streak through it. Her dark makeup stood out against her pallid face.

In a black steampunk double-breasted jacket cut high in the front with a tail nearly down to his ankles, Victor Lambert's hair was cut only a little shorter than his girlfriend's, but he'd left it long in front so it dangled in his eyes. They walked so closely together that they looked, more often than not, Annja thought, like a two-headed creature.

Annja regretted wearing a dark turtleneck and cargo pants, because it smacked too much of the look her two guides favored. She wasn't even sure which one had spoken to her. Their voices sounded a lot alike. "Why Halloween?"

"The whole town loves Halloween." Colleen looked at her.

"They go all out." Victor watched the surrounding woods with his head ducked slightly, as if he thought he was going to be attacked at any moment. "Decorations. Parties. They've even talked about hanging a witch, just for old times' sake."

"He's kidding." Colleen rolled her eyes.

"Maybe I'm kidding. People go missing here, Colleen. For all you know some of the frat houses at the college grab women during Pledge Week and haul them up to Gallows Hill to string them up in the same place they killed all those suspected witches."

"They don't do that."

"How do you know? Remember when that woman went missing last year? The one who ran that herbal shop? I was told that was what happened to her."

Colleen looked at him. "Mrs. Entwhistle?"

Victor shook his hair out of his eyes. "Yeah. That was her. Weird name, Entwhistle. If you ask me, that sounds like a witch's name."

"The police found her."

"They did?"

"Yeah."

"Alive?"

"Yeah, alive."

"Nobody kidnapped her? Everybody was saying she was kidnapped."

"She's an old lady with Alzheimer's who got off her meds because she thought the herbs she was selling would work as a substitute. She got in her car and drove back to Boston." Colleen looked at Annja. "That's where the police found her. She went up to her old house and started yelling at the people who live there now, telling them to get out of her house. Totally wack, right? Old people should take their meds. There should be a law or something. You should see my grandma when she goes off hers."

Annja sighed. It was 3:00 a.m. and she was running out of steam. She'd been tramping through the woods with her "guides" since nine o'clock. "Maybe we could focus on finding the witch's ghost."

"Dude." Victor brushed his hair back with a hand. "You don't find the witch's ghost. The witch's ghost finds you. Kind of like Chuck Norris, you know?"

After listening to hours of inane conversation and now being addressed as dude, Annja was ready to shove Victor's face into the mud. At five feet ten, she had him by at least four inches and outweighed the scrawny guy, as well.

The late March air had enough of a chill to make Annja thankful for her wool beanie, thigh-length coat and gloves. She cinched her belt a little tighter, looking forward to her return to the hotel and a hot bath.

"We've been out here for hours and the witch's ghost hasn't found us yet." Some of her irritation came through in her voice, but she was past caring. Doug Morrell, her producer at Chasing History's Monsters, was going to get an earful in the morning.

Victor shrugged. "Sometimes she's like that. Fickle, you know?"

Annja couldn't believe it. "'Fickle?'"

"Yeah, you know. 'Likely to change.' Like the weather. Like the witch's ghost changes her mind, right? Gets you sometimes, doesn't get you others."

"And you know this to be true?"

"Sure. Even though she's dead, the witch's ghost is still a woman, right? Women are fickle."

Annja's grip tightened slightly on the five-cell flashlight she carried in her right hand that could have easily doubled as a truncheon. "I think that's a prejudicial over-generalization of women."

"Really? I don't." Victor nodded at his companion. "Take Colleen here. She's fickle. Aren't you, Colleen?"

Colleen nodded. "I am. It's part of my nature. I'm still struggling to integrate all my past lives."

"Your past lives?" The instant she asked, Annja wished she hadn't.

"Yeah. Four of them that Victor and I know of. Too bad you're not here about past lives."

Victor threw an arm around Colleen's thin shoulders and hugged her. "In one of those past lives Colleen was a witch who got hung on Gallows Hill. That's why she keeps breaking up with me."

"Colleen breaks up with you because in one of her past lives she was a witch?" Annja was struggling to keep up with the conversation and watch out for deep mud pits.

"No." Colleen rolled her eyes toward the dark clouds that obscured the stars. "Because I'm trying to integrate those past lives. Sometimes when I'm deep into one of them, I don't like Victor very much. Obviously, our relationship—the Colleen and Victor relationship—is solid. But some of the past lives that manifest don't care for him." She sighed. "It's just really hard being more than one person."

"I suppose it would be." Annja looked at Victor. "What about you? Got any extra lives in you?"

"None that we've found. I'm glad. It's sad enough being me." He studied Colleen. "Besides, I can't imagine how Colleen would feel if I broke up with her and went off with some other girl. It would probably kill her."

Colleen nodded. "Victor gets me, though. He knows that when I'm off with other guys, I'll be myself again soon and come back to him." She snuggled into him for a moment, and somehow they remained completely in step and didn't fall despite the sucking mud.

Annja played the flashlight beam around. The stone wall of the cemetery was a hundred yards off to her right, and the uneven coastline was eighty yards to her right. Small, white-capped waves smacked the beach.

An owl took off from one of the nearby trees. The thump of its wings in the wind caused Colleen and Victor to drop to their knees.

Victor cursed. "What was that?"

"Just an owl," Annja replied.

After a moment he helped Colleen to her feet. "What's it doing out here?"

"Probably hunting. They're nocturnal feeders."

Colleen glanced at the sky. "Do they travel in flocks? Was that some kind of scout?"

Annja couldn't believe college students could know so little. "Owls eat mice and rabbits and insects. A few of them eat fish. None of them eat humans."

Victor straightened. "I was a little worried there for a minute because I...