Cogs in Time Anthology (The Steamworks Series Book 1) Read online

  “It was the day I scolded you,” Mordecai said in a soothing voice. “You were playing in the rain with your wooden cart. It crashed on the damp and slippery pavements and you came into my office, soaking wet and crying. You fell asleep, crying. Capsules? You dreamt it all.”

  The voice sounded very convincing, Draegan remembered the rain and the wooden cart. His cart crashed into the Headmaster’s house due to the wet slick roads. He remembered crying in his office. This may not be true. This may be a planted memory. Be on your guard, believe nothing.

  Draegan stopped at the gate. “I will believe nothing I hear from you. Nothing. The Society is a ship of lies.” From behind the trees, which lined the iron gates, two shadowy vampires emerged.

  “Hello, Draegan.” Mordecai’s voice shattered the darkness.

  “Hello, Mordecai.” Draegan spoke as if it was quite natural to see Mordecai materialize as the day broke.

  “You are needed, my son. We need our boy genius back in the flock.”

  Draegan was unsure which sentence seemed stranger. Mordecai calling him his son in a fond manner, or openly insinuating he was needed? Was the Society in trouble? Draegan felt and uncomfortable shiver on the back of his neck. Knowing he must safeguard himself against something, he slowly drew his retractable laser guns from his wrists.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, my son,” said Mordecai as he walked cautiously towards Draegan. “You can trust me, Draegan. I brought you into this world. I planned you and created you.”

  As Mordecai reached out, his eyes closed and the sleeves of his robe stretched as if to wrap Draegan within their folds. Draegan jumped before Mordecai could complete his embrace. Draegan flew backwards upon the roof of the station and immediately crouched down. He stretched out on the cold metal, feeling himself merge with the ceiling. Every pore, his entire body thinned, and liquefied into the roof.

  In less than a second, Mordecai jumped to follow, expecting Draegan’s desperate flight. The capsules had been used six times before, only in the direst of circumstances and they had never failed. Yet, Draegan was born to be a perfect creature, with both strains of vampire strength.

  Perhaps that would limit the effectiveness of the capsule. Mordecai feared exactly this, that Draegan would be impervious to the method of submission.

  Mordecai merged his own essence into the metal also, wading through its coldness to follow Draegan. Each was aware of the other, yet they both belonged now to the metallic sheet covering the ceiling. The unity enabled Mordecai to exert a different force on Draegan’s mind, trying to convince him from within Mordecai’s own mind, to give himself up. Draegan in front, Mordecai followed him like a shark in the water, slipping along, stretching through the silvery tin roof.

  When they reached the edge, Draegan leaped from the metal roof and began to hover over the city. He was weakened from his bodily re-emergence from the metal, combined with the after effects of the tranquilizing ray.

  Turning his body windward, he tried floating. He looked back at the station house to see Mordecai, a weaker vampire, still re-establishing his physical essence after leaving the metal. Draegan felt his own systems shutting down as he drifted slowly towards the ground, like a leaf in the wind.

  I will die before I give up. I will rule this world and all who remain in it. He closed his eyes and everything became dark and quiet. As his body fell through the air, he could only hear his own breathing. He grew weaker and weaker as he fell. As he was about to hit the ground, he felt peace.

  “Will you help us?” It was the voice of Mordecai, again.

  “No.”

  “Think of all you have yet to do. You could take over the Society one day. But you must come back with me.”

  “Me? Not Luca?” Draegan challenged. But even in his weakened state, Draegan felt greed wrap itself around him.

  “You are ambitious,” Mordecai continued.

  Draegan opened his eyes as he lay on the ground and Mordecai knelt beside him.

  “Ambition is good. Look at me! I head the High Table and both clans. They look up to me, and I keep the peace.”

  “Keeping the peace keeps you a prisoner of your desires. This peace is unnatural.”

  “Luca would bow to you,” appeased Mordecai. “Make your decision now and live to see that day. Otherwise, you will perish a cold, deserted, nameless vampire.”

  Draegan’s mind spun. He knew his options were few in his weakened state. “I will return with you. I will obey you for now, in return for this place of power you have promised me.”

  Mordecai’s wrinkled countenance smiled. He picked up Draegan in his arms and peered at his deathly face. It would be Draegan’s ambition that would be his end.

  Mordecai blew gently across Draegan’s face to fully revive him. He blew air into his mouth and over his eyes. The thin translucent skin over Draegan’s eyes twitched as his mobility and strength returned.

  Mordecai then placed Draegan on the ground, under a tree. He and the other vampire each took one of Draegan’s immobile hands in theirs. Mumbling in a low monotone groan, Mordecai raised his face to the sky. As his voice rose in decibel, a small tornado formed from the ground around Draegan. The tornado grew, expanding towards the clouds, forming a giant wall of dust and air that whirled around the three vampires in the otherwise deserted stillness.

  Mordecai’s voice rose with the tornado, becoming equal with its strength and force. The cyclone broke into three smaller ones, two balanced on either side of Draegan. The third twisted into a small line of violent air, spinning quickly as it forced itself between Draegan’s parted lips.

  The force jolted Draegan and his lungs expanded painfully. His face contorted in a silent scream and his eyes bulged as he rose slowly from the ground. The dual winds carried the vampires over the city. Draegan’s eyes sparkled with a strange vitality as Mordecai’s chants strained into the dusty wind. The winds died to a slow breeze as they approached the Society’s main offices.

  “He will remember nothing,” chanted Mordecai, blowing into the face of Draegan. Mordecai closed his eyes, confident of his success.

  Draegan looked at the serene, confident face of his leader and smiled. But I do, I will remember everything…foolish old man.

  Chapter Seven

  The Birth of Death

  The building hung on to life by a shred. Its exterior decayed and damp, the brownish gray paint peeled back from the brick and concrete wall like a fungus. Steel rods jutted out of the crumbling corners, exposed and sharp. The rods stood like sentries, sticking their sharp corners into the foggy air, ready to stab into any hapless visitor wandering about unaware.

  Between the Romanesque flying buttresses of the front façade, hung a broken but blood curdling face of a carved demon. Sections of the gargoyle’s stone profile had crumbled into dust on the street below, lying unrecognizable along the walk. The demon’s eyes were intact, rage and violence still strong in the stylized remains of its face. The corner of its mouth was sculpted into a feral snarl, its lips curled back, sneering with demonic amusement. The cheeks hollowed from vandals smashing the stones. The face stood still in the hazy night, threatening whosoever dared to come near it.

  It was not for that reason alone that nobody visited the building that had been, not so long before, the headquarters of the Society. It lay in such a part of town that it would take anyone, human or vampire, far off the usual paths of Gravesend to get to it. Yet once, it had been the center of Vampire Law—the birthplace of the Vow of Peace.

  It stood as a monument to the emergence of the vampire as a god-like creature. It was in the gloomy, gothic reliquary that the document had been penned asserting Vampire’s rights as Guardians of Science and Genetics, in exchange for a life of peaceful co-existence with the human race. Secrets remained buried deep in the deserted headquarters, still haunting the rooms of the decrepit building, guarded by the decrepit demon.

  “How much longer?” begged the woman, shouting into the air. Her voice scr
eeched through the halls, pleading to be answered. Yet, she lay alone, and her voice bounced back to her from the night sky. She lay in the empty gray room, away from civilization, behind the thicket of the gardens that hid the smog-smeared windows.

  Her forehead dripped with the sweat of her labor, each bead lay side by side on her brow like a delicate tiara. Her eyes were wild with pain and her fists clenched in controlled hysteria. Her naked body shined in the moonlight, glimmering like storm tossed waters. Her abdomen rose and fell, contracting and pushing, as she lay alone.

  “How much longer? When will you arrive?” she cried.

  A few minutes, not much longer. Help me. The small voice in the air sounded neither alive nor dead, it existed without a physical presence. Fear sat in the woman’s throat. Her pain changed to desperation. For the voice came from within her and belonged to a female.

  The woman had little time. She pulled herself to a sitting position. Her stomach distended and twisted as she tried to stand. “Stay,” she commanded. “It is not safe for you here.” She pulled a blanket to cover her naked form, but the pains of labor threw her to the cold ground. She groaned like an animal as she crawled to the locked door. The pressure grew and she tried not to push. Blood leaked from her body, welling around her ankles.

  She held her breath and bit into her lips. Grasping the rough wall, she struggled up into a standing position. Her belly contracted as she slid back down. Trying again, she pulled over a carved wooden priest’s chair. Balancing on the red velvet of the seat, she stretched to the open window. Another contraction. She bent and breathed through the agony.

  Stay where you are! She commanded her child as she slithered through a window, landing in the large bushes below. In her pain, she cared nothing for modesty. Her naked round form ran through the garden gates of the old cemetery. Stay! She willed the daughter with every ounce of strength. It is not safe for you.

  “I am coming to you, Mother. Don’t leave me alone,” the girl’s voice whispered into the wind.

  “I will not give you up,” she promised in return. She curled upon the ground by the door of an old mausoleum. She pushed and breathed. Nothing. She moved to a squat, her knees bent as she balanced on her feet, staring into the dark sky. The sounds of wolves sung in the night. Her body, stained with sweat and blood, swayed as she pushed to expel her daughter.

  “A girl,” she whispered into the wet grass. “Impossible.” Somehow, the child would be her daughter, and she would not give her back to the Society to destroy. For she knew, she knew the Society had forbidden female births. Whoever had left her there, alone, must have also known.

  As her back arched and thighs quivered from strain, she howled out in pain, her cries were in a strange dissonant harmony with the wolves. A slippery wetness oozed from her onto the dark earth. She instinctively blocked the baby from exiting. Then nothing. Blackness covered her eyes and mind. Her body relaxed, she felt like a rubber band.

  “No,” she said, barely audibly. “I will not give her up.” She closed her eyes and fell into a silent and dark world, her mind entering another realm of awareness.

  As she came to, a butterfly clung to the window of the strange dim room. She did not know where she was; her body still heaved with late pregnancy and the violent contractions of imminent delivery, yet she felt nothing anymore.

  “This could be the one,” whispered Mordecai from behind the blackened glass window. “The one to destroy our balance.” His eyes, barely crinkled along the sides, stared into the belly of the woman. “Virginia?” he spoke through the intercom, his sudden voice calling her name, startled her.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “I am cold. I need to be covered.” She lay, unclothed upon a metal gurney, a white sheet beneath her. Along the walls of the room, microscopes and beakers lined the tables.

  “Did you not keep your medical appointment with the Society?” Mordecai’s voice boomed, demanding answers to the how the pregnancy developed, unnoticed by the High Table.

  “I don’t remember,” she lied. “You should know. It’s your Society!”

  “Cover her foul human form, please.” Two vampires, medics, entered the dim chamber. One covered her with a thin white clinical sheet; the other drew a blue curtain around her body. “That is better,” said Mordecai.

  “How did we miss her?” Castille, Mordecai’s assistant, worried. He paced behind the glass observation area. “This child is ready to be born. We may not be able to do anything.”

  “Virginia had no idea she was laden with a girl child,” said Draegan from underneath a spherical dome in the medical laboratory. “The sex chromosome virus transmuted the XX to XY. But it is only effective on one child. Look again, Mordecai. Virginia is carrying twins.”

  Mordecai had brought Draegan to be detained as a special prisoner in The Society’s Genetics and Medical Research Lab. As a precaution to keeping the young vampire there, Mordecai installed an impenetrable 15 x 15 foot glass dome, guarded by two of the fiercest and strongest of the old Phoenix clan. Within the dome, he had set up a tranquilizing gas release valve. At any moment, if ever necessary, a heavy concentration of etherized chloroform would subdue Draegan’s unsavory activity with a simple pull of a lever.

  Virginia’s fingers began to twitch as Mordecai concentrated on the undulations of her belly. “Call the crone,” he shouted. The old vampire woman, Draegan’s nursemaid, was a gifted midwife. “She will help us deliver the boy safely and dispose of the girl.”

  “You can’t dispose of the girl,” Castille objected. “The humans are becoming suspicious that no female vampires are being born of the breeders. It won’t be long until they suspect we are still experimenting with genetics and altering viral matter.”

  “We have to take that chance. What do you suggest? We welcome our destroyer into the Society?”

  “I must let you know, England’s leaders suspect we haven’t kept our vow to refrain from genetically modified science. Our own women have been rendered infertile. We use breeders who, over time, will dilute the purity of our DNA strands. And now, right here, we have a chance for a vampire daughter. A true vampire, one of us, who we can raise as we wish, who can be mated with the best of our clan, and can strengthen us.”

  The crone entered the room. “Hello, Mordecai,” she rasped. “You in a bit of a bind are you?”

  “Deliver to me the boy. Reject the girl.” Mordecai turned to leave the room.

  “Sir!” yelled Castille.

  “Enough. Speak of it no more.”

  The nursemaid walked behind the curtain. “Free her,” she said to Mordecai. “I can’t deliver a healthy boy if the mother can’t move. Release her.”

  Mordecai obeyed. Virginia felt her body return to her control, first her feet, and then a burning wave pushed up her body. As soon as she regained control and feeling, she screamed in pain.

  “Hush,” said the crone. “I will do my best with you, but you must save your energy for the expulsion.”

  “Expulsion?” asked Virginia.

  “Delivery,” she answered. “I am Ivy, I will help you.”

  “You are a child snatcher! You will take my son from me! And kill my daughter!”

  “Keep quiet,” Ivy stepped between Virginia’s legs. “I am no murderer. I was the one who hid you. Hush now.”

  “I don’t understand, I don’t remember.”

  Ivy reached deep within Virginia’s body and cupped the head of one of the infants. “Push, push quietly.”

  Virginia tried to restrain her body, but her belly pushed anyway. Within moments, a small undersized boy was born.

  Draegan laughed from behind his glass prison. “Look at what you are breeding, Mordecai. Undernourished weaklings!”

  The small infant was whisked away to an incubating basinet. Its small, red hands were covered in miniature mittens to keep him from scratching his face as he whimpered quietly.

  Ivy put the scissors, bloodied from the umbilical cord, back on the metal side table. Once agai
n, she reached into Virginia. Virginia moaned with pain. “This one is breech,” said Ivy. “I will need to cut the mother.”

  “Don’t bother,” said Mordecai. “I am not interesting in either one of them. Take her from here, Ivy. Deliver her elsewhere and remember what I said about the girl.”

  “Get rid of her?”

  “Precisely.”

  Ivy placed her hand on Virginia’s stomach as she wheeled her from the room. She swept back the damp curls from Virginia’s forehead. “How will you cut me?” Virginia grabbed Ivy’s hand. “Don’t hurt me or my daughter. Leave me and I will deliver her myself.” Madness and hysteria took root in Virginia’s mind. “What will they do with my son?”

  “Hush. I lied to Mordecai. Your baby is not breech. I am taking you to the River Thames. Do not push!”

  “They will know you lied. They will see your plan! They are prophetic!” said Virginia.

  “They are also arrogant men,” the crone answered. “Not unlike your human men. It will not cross their minds that they could ever be outwitted by an old woman.”

  “What about my son?” pleaded Virginia.

  “I cannot help you with him. He belongs to them.”

  “And my daughter?”

  “She belongs to me.”

  “What will happen at the river?”

  “You will be quiet and you will find friends.”

  ***

  Mordecai sat in his office. Before him awaited papers for him to approve regarding the future of genetic modifications. An application for the secret manipulation of the human gene to increase the red blood’s iron content, sat in front of him, waiting for his approval. He pensively reached for his quill.

  Does this violate the Vow of Peace? He fingered the papers in front of him. No, a stronger blood supply will make stronger vampires. I need sated vampires, not hungry fiends at my High Table. He skimmed the proposal until he came to the sections marked RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS. Under the heading were the two words: HIGH and UNKNOWN.