Revenant's Storm (The Wicked West series)

Theo walked briskly towards the hotel through the shadowed, twisting alleyways.

She remembered the sunlit path from earlier today and had even figured out a shortcut, but now that she was hurrying alone in the dark, she felt less certain of its nighttime application. She felt as a mouse does in a labyrinth as it scurries towards the cheese at the end. She felt the phantom eyes of observers as she walked.

Dr. Hertzog had checked them both in while she had been negotiating with Englestead at the Indigo Plume, and her luggage would be waiting for her in her room. They had arrived just that morning in a carriage and had gone directly to the science conference, leaving the carriage and their suitcase waiting by the curb.

Without her possessions or secured housing, Theo had truly felt like a vagrant while wandering through the teeming convention hall. She had felt that way the duration of the day, regardless of her location. Was this how it was to be, forever, so far away from the comforts of her homeland? She did not know if she could bear it. For someone who dreamed of becoming a scientist beyond reproach, she had not liked the anonymity of being a foreigner. Her identity was of the utmost importance to her.

The night was reddened iron cooling after the forge, and she pulled her shawl tighter around herself. She envisioned the buttery yellow light of the hotel and the comfort of her belongings and soft pillows in a warm bed. She quickened her step.

Soon it was almost as though she had wished herself there. But it was not what she had expected, although given the hour, she wondered why she had not expected it. The sconces in the hotel had all but been extinguished; the lobby nearly unattended. It was clear that the front desk was closing for the night.

When she climbed the narrow wooden staircase to their rooms, tagged key dangling from her fingers, she found that they were the kind that corkscrewed up into mystery. Where the turn is so sharp that its outcome cannot perceived until you have already stepped around the corner and into the unknown. The wooden floorboards groaned from beneath the carpet under her footfalls. Candlelight licked the walls of the narrow stairwell from the hogscraper candlestick that the bellhop had wordlessly handed to her.

Their hotel certainly wasn't as glamorous as the Indigo Plume, but it was what Theo and Dr. Hertzog had been able to budget with newly-acquired Federation money, recently exchanged from their native currency.

How she longed to discuss the day's events with Dr. Hertzog. The splendid booths at Councilman Cleary's science convention. Her dismal meeting with the man of honor. The gambling tables and the wily cowboy. Cyrus, with his magnetic eyes that were pulling her into his plot. An apology for wandering off alone. Gratitude for having the rooms prepared in her absence. Most of all, Theo couldn't wait to see the doctor's reaction at her gambling winnings.

She arrived at their floor at last, the third and highest, and scanned the doors. The hallway was obscured by a darkness that thickened with distance. The pulse of her candle trembled weakly against its absolution. Theo wondered if she was perhaps overwhelmed after all, remembering her excuse to Cyrus, as the eeriness of her surroundings began to seep into her nerve.

When she stepped up to the door which matched the number on the brass key in her hand, she stilled. She was facing forward, but her eyes were cast to the side. On the door to the right. It was ajar, the room darkened inside.

Dr. Hertzog's room.

The body is full of imperceptible tricks to preserve itself in the face of danger. It conserves its energy; dismantling and reinventing itself to prolong its existence by any means necessary. Her heart-rate accelerated as adrenaline and cortisol fizzed into her bloodstream, reflexive and instinctual. She underwent the physical changes associated with a fight-or-flight response: her body heat flared; her breath coming rapid and shallow. Digestion stopped so that the blood flow to her brain could take precedence. Her senses became a blade sharpened to a deadly point.

Theo silently extinguished the flame of the candle. Darkness closed in around her and she felt better, hidden in the blackness, with the element of surprise as her advantage.

Her heart thudded in her chest and she realized with a sort of fascination that it was a pump; that it was expelling the blood outwards to her extremities and sucking it back inwards to its core. She did not know what to do with this epiphany, but she felt enlightened by it and held onto it as a distraction from the fear.

An ambush would be better than a melee, she assured herself, as she reimagined the iron candlestick in her hand not as a torch but as an instrument of blunt force. She hesitated at the doorway, straining to listen for movement inside as she let her eyes adjust to the night, like a cat.

The door was blessedly silent as she slowly pushed it open with her fingertips. She stepped around the bunched carpet near the entrance and avoided tripping over the upended coat rack. She edged forward through the debris, navigating meticulously, letting the terror steel her resolve, until she could glimpse around the edge of the hallway and into the room.

It was empty.

She quickly checked under the bed and in the wardrobe, anyway, because she would not be senseless enough to not sweep the room. It was not a large space, but she imagined a man with knife in hand springing out at her twenty minutes from now, "Blargh!", and her perishing as the fool. She shook her head. Not today.

When she was satisfied that she was alone, she lit the sconce in the room with a match from her pocket, and then hastily relit the candlestick. Then she shut the door and turned the lock.

The lamplight brought into stark relief what her eyes had determined in the dark. Her terror caught up with her in the safety of the light.

The room was in shambles. It had been ransacked in totality, with clothes tossed about like a cyclone had torn through. Cracked oil lamps dripped between the floorboards. The drawers had been pulled out and onto the floor. His suitcase had been ripped open and eviscerated, with its contents sifted through in piles around it. Papers were scattered everywhere, scrawled on with the doctor's chicken-scratch shorthand. The unused bedpan had been flung into the corner of the room. The furniture was in disarray, and the shape reminded Theo faintly in her horror of the boxy clusters of sodium chloride beneath a microscope. She was comforted by a sliver of a fraction, and kept her thoughts upon science.

Her heart perked up when she could find no blood in the debris, but sank with the confirmation that Dr. Hertzog was truly gone.

Think, think, think.

She paced towards the bed, whose mattress was toppled onto the floor, and then changed direction and paced towards the nightstand. The way that she was breathing was all wrong, high and gasping, and she slapped herself hard across the face to focus.

How had this happened? She forced herself to think like an intruder, like the Visigoths sacking Rome. There was a window, but it was small and high up near the ceiling. It was propped open and a dusty moth flitted against the slanted glass.

No, this had been done in a rush, and who knows how long ago. The only way in and out was through the door, to which the doctor had a key. Did the intruder also have a key? Or could they have caught the doctor unawares as he was unlocking his door?

She began to ask the forbidden question– Is Dr. Hertzog still alive? – and started to panic. Theo pinched the soft flesh on her forearms until her thoughts could align again, and then refocused on the room. There had obviously been a struggle. But was there anything out of place?

Her attention snagged on the desk, where a note sat perfectly flat and undisturbed beside an inkpot. A sanctuary of order in the chaos. She approached, and the growing suspense made it all feel unreal to her. Like a practical joke.

The page was blank.

When she picked it up, careful to only pinch the edges on the page between the tips of her fingernails, she saw that there were indentations carved onto its surface. With a morbid fascination in the midst of her circumstances, Theo realized a message had been written there. Unfortunately, it had been drafted with a phantom pen.

Had the doctor tried to say something before he was abducted?As he was being abducted? Had he an inkling of his fate? Had he written a letter with an empty quill by mistake? Even at his most frazzled, Theo could not envision the doctor being so careless as to botch an entire note by omitting the ink.

It had to mean something, she just knew it. Or rather, she hoped and suspected. Squinting in the pulsing candlelight, she struggled to decipher the curves of the letters and found that she could not.

Theo understood that, statistically, the longer she tarried, the more unsafe she was. And the more time that passed after Dr. Hertzog's disappearance, the more likely his imminent death became. Time was of the essence. She folded the note carefully and tucked it into her pocket, beside the bundles of cash that weighed down her skirts.

On a whim, she also pocketed the peculiar bottle of oil beside it. Theo had been responsible for his chemical inventory as his assistant and had never seen it before in her many years of knowing the doctor. Had it been a gift from a colleague at the convention, or was it clue? She prayed it was the latter. With a final glance around the room, she confirmed that everything else was in shambles or held no distinguishable value to the investigation.

In all honesty, it was better than she had hoped for. She fingered the folded note in her pocket. She had a lead, which was a fortunate coincidence. She would make it count, and she would track down the doctor, if it was within her power.

When the key turned in the lock and she entered her own room, she found that it was untouched. She lit the lamp on her nightstand with her candlestick.

Her unperturbed suitcase lay on the made bed. Tucked inside of the folds of clothes were her most prized possessions: knickknacks and curios of interest and fossils from the past and a few beloved books. A photograph of her and Dr. Hertzog at the river collecting samples, with the youthful doctor proudly beaming and a juvenile Theo grinning and showing off a trout, skirts tied off around her knees and ankles submerged in muddy water.

Her mind turned back to her investigation as she hesitated over the clasp of the suitcase, having wanted to bring the photograph along as well out of sentiment. A reminder of why she had to keep trying. A reminder of what she had to lose.

How long ago had this happened? Theo could not definitively tell. She had been out for many hours, and she did not know what the doctor had done with his spare time. She could ask what time he checked in, which could perhaps narrow the timeframe of when it could have taken place.

When she had breathlessly explained this to the concierge, she was shocked to find that they would not take action. She had flagged down the last employee about to head home for the night. He expertly evaded her pleas with a professionalism that informed Theo that it was not in their payroll, nor their best interests, to engage themselves in suspicious activities. Not when they were in the thick of gang territory, and Councilman Wilson's Bootcamp did not extend its protection to the solicitous dealings of casinos and hotels.

As it turned out, the hotel did not record the time of check-in within its logs or ledgers. Theo felt the disappointment like a punch to the gut. She wandered back to her room and sat on the edge of the bed, staring hard at the woven rug beneath her feet. She reached into her pocket, past Dr. Hertzog's note and bundles of cash, and removed a slip of paper. She looked down upon it and bit her lip.

The golden text of Cyrus Englestead's business card flashed its teeth at her.

* * * * *

It was her only plausible next course of action, Theo convinced herself, as Domingo led her through a hidden entrance into the casino. She had not noticed him in the casino before, and he took on the role of a newfound acquaintance in her mind. Her overstuffed suitcase was heavy, and as she tugged it up over the curve, she discreetly observed the older man.

Her first impression was that she sensed an incredible coldness from Domingo. She knew, instinctively, that he was a killer, by the way his shoulders rolled forward when he walked. He possessed the predatory lurch of a panther, brimming with potential energy, and it chilled her blood in her veins.
Domingo was unpredictable and ruthless and comfortable in his superiority, and that was Theo's advantage. Her secret, fearful evaluation of him gave her an edge of quiet preparation. It was the precarious balance of strategy versus unprovoked instinct.

Theo eyed the emblem stitched into the leather of Domingo's black vest. To her awareness, it was her first time encountering a member of the Hounds. She had been warned about the danger of the gangs upon her arrival, killing each other in the streets for land and power.

Her worried mind flashed to Dr. Hertzog. Perhaps it was heresy to consider the possibility that he could have been taken at random by bandits. The motive could have been anything with the culprit undetermined; his attendance at the science convention, or merely because he was a foreigner and a feeble old man. The brevity of her task began to feel hopeless.

As she worried, Domingo led her along the perimeter of the Plume, through a sparsely-populated corridor and past an unimpressive door. They climbed a plain stairwell reserved for staff. She huffed with the effort of having to fight the combined weight of gravity and her suitcase. She felt like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the hill.

While she struggled, glasses askew, clever Theo adjusted her impression of the floor plan, adding the new rooms into its schematics. The Indigo Plume was a complex organism with a splaying network of pathways for its attendants. She was a student learning its anatomy.

She wondered what sort of company Cyrus kept, how dark and deep the branches of his business ties went. Who were his associates? How many properties did he own? How big was his empire? Theo intended to find out.

Domingo deposited her at the door to the solarium. His eyes flicked over her once. He saw a small woman, young and naive and shivering. His eyes passed over her and, for the moment, she was undetected as a threat.

Englestead had lingered there after their meeting, which was lucky for Theo because she was desperate for his aid. When she hesitantly stepped back into the familiar room, it felt much bigger now that she had lost her haughty confidence.

He was further back in his exhibit and turned away from her, swirling an amber liquor in deep contemplation. He startled when he noticed her, hastily running a hand through his relaxed hair. Cyrus was in a state of undress, having unwound his ascot and shed his suit jacket. The top buttons up his shirt had been undone; the sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. Theo had the impression more than ever that his impeccable wardrobe was an armor, and now she had seen him exposed.

Breathless, she instantly stepped away from Domingo and closer to him, until she was but an arm's length away. Cyrus noticed her panicked expression. He set his brandy down and motioned for Domingo to leave them. When Theo launched into a frenzied description of the scene of the abduction, she was so distressed that she did not notice the soft click of the door. They were now alone in Cyrus's exhibit, both slightly undone after their bold introduction only a short while ago.

It had been much more civilized in her head, when she had planned how this conversation would go, but the desperation of finding Dr. Hertzog crashed over her like a tidal wave. Her resolve had crumbled to dust when she saw Cyrus's concerned expression. He gave her his unwavering focus while she babbled. When she finished her explanation and trailed off, the look he was giving her was so intense that she wondered if he might have been hypnotizing her.

Her pleas had touched his heart. "Miss Hartmann– No," he grasped her hands, "Theodosia. I am so sorry to hear about Dr. Hertzog. I can think of a few things that we can do to start, if you would have my assistance."

Theo thought of her skirt pocket. She considered showing him the note, then decided against it until she could find out more. It was a minor instance of immeasurable importance, for it drastically altered the direction of both of their destinies.

Where Jules Lewis could be considered a man of charity, Cyrus Englestead, certainly, could not. He stroked her fingers with his thumb and continued, "However, you must understand Miss Hartmann, I am not a man of infinite resources. This search, like all endeavors, will be an investment." His eyes flashed up to hers, shining. "I would request your service in return."

She understood it well. Cyrus would extend his help, but only at the indication that she would work with him on his project. Theo had no choice, and when she weighed the risks, she found it had little consequence. If she didn't like his terms she could always leave in secret. She was clever enough to make herself scarce somewhere distant and start anew. Without Dr. Hertzog, she had no ties or affiliations, and anywhere could be as good as where she stood. Men like Cyrus depended on contracts to snare their prey, but words on paper mean nothing when you are but dust in the wind.

Theo found herself, in that moment, at her crossroads with her very own devil. Cyrus extended his hand to seal the bargain, and Theo, her mind still whirling with escape plans and contingencies, shook it.

His grip was warm, his hand large over hers, and it lingered longer than what could be considered proper. The glint of his rings sparked as he retracted his hand from hers. They would discuss the contract and tour the facility first thing tomorrow morning.

Chest hot and head spinning, she stepped out of the solarium. The hallway was cooler and she set her suitcase down to fan her face with her hands. When she tilted her head back and closed her eyes against the stress of the day, a familiar voice cajoled her.

"Well, well, Little Miss Highroller." Ace propped his hands on his hips. His silver pistols gleamed in their holsters. Theo noticed the patch on his vest and paled. She thought of Domingo.

"You are one of them," she accused coldly. "A Hound."

He tipped his hat and winked. "Name's Ace. I know your name now, so I thought it appropriate to share mine. I happen to be your personal guard, lucky you."

She crossed her arms. The sarcasm in her voice was cutting. "Lucky me."

"Looks like neither of us are who we pretended," he remarked, and there was a tone of betrayal in it. He jerked his chin towards the closed door. "Friends in high places?"

Theo was tired and did not have the patience for whatever this was. She wanted to return to her new and extended hotel room, one of Cyrus's properties, which would house her for the near future. Until she could learn more about the project and move to the headquarters. Until she could find Dr. Hertzog.

She stepped irritably forward in a direction, because she did not know where to go and it did not matter where she stepped, only that she was angry.

Ace meandered behind her at his own pace with his hands tucked in his pockets, letting out a short whistle whenever she turned the wrong way. He did not offer to carry her suitcase. Her braid swayed as she walked, and for some reason he had an urge to bat at it.

He couldn't resist his curiosity as they stomped through the peaceful night. "So, you're some kind of bigwig scientist?"

"And you're some kind of conman planted by the casino," she snapped, and remembered her grouchy mentor, and then felt incredibly saddened. She had to will away the tears pricking at her eyes. She turned her face away from him as she sniffled.

Ace didn't have a response for that. She had figured that he wouldn't. They walked in charged silence.

She was amazed by the opulence of the hotel, despite the terse atmosphere between her and the brooding cowboy. When they stood beside the potted plants outside of her suite, Theo darted into her room so quickly, Ace let the sentence on his lips die out of sheer surprise.

Inside the room, with her back pressed against the door, Theo let out a shaky breath and took in her lodgings. They were splendid, as expected of the debonair aristocrat.

The white furniture was tasteful and refined; the periwinkle wallpaper elegant. When she opened the boudoir, she was surprised to find it stocked with bright dresses and beaded hats and stylish shoes. Frills and folds and silk and bows. She admired the quality of the items, feeling the softness between her fingertips, before shutting the boudoir door.

The queen-sized bed had four posters and fresh sheets. She was tempted to sink into its goosefeather depths, but sat instead on the duvet in front of the vanity. She looked at herself in the mirror as she loosened her braid and reviewed her investigation.

Dr. Hertzog had been taken. He could possibly be injured, or worse. His current state and location were unknown to her. She wracked her brain, sifting through her memories of the past few weeks to find any mention of affiliates or adversaries in the Federation, but the shock of the day was too fresh and she could not cajole her mind into focus.

She unfolded and studied the note from her seat at the vanity. It had been stocked with perfumes and cosmetics, tinctures and tonics. She moved cup filled with fluffy powder brushes aside to smooth the note across the flat surface of the desk.

There were the scribbles, in plain sight. But with no ink, she could not decipher the featherlight press of the quill alone. She recognized the shape of her name in the greeting of the letter. Her chest tightened and the forlorn whisper was squeezed out of her. "What are you trying to tell me, Doctor?"

Her focus was so intent on her plight that the abruptness of Ace's voice, muffled behind the closed door but considerately projected to account for this factor, that she nearly dropped the small green-glassed bottle of oil. Theo fumbled to catch it before it cracked against the hardwood floor and barely succeeded. She stashed the note and bottle in her vanity drawer and stared, wide-eyed, at her surprised reflection in the mirror. What am I getting myself into?

"Nighty-nite," Ace announced cheerily. She could hear the movement as he settled himself against the wall outside her room and realized that Ace was meant to stand guard there the entire night. At the sound of her groan, she could hear the wicked smile in his voice. "Don't let them bed bugs bite, now."

Theo readied herself for bed, shaking out her loose hair, and donned a nightdress from her suitcase. She avoided the wardrobe and cosmetics and burrowed under the plush covers.

She pursued sleep but it evaded her, and she sat staring up at the unfamiliar ceiling until the conception of the new day. Her thoughts would not release her from their prison, and she obsessed over them in the dark contemplation of insomnia.

Fifteen feet away from her restless body, Ace leaned against the wall. Unlike Theo, he did not think. He simply tipped his hat back and enjoyed the coolness of the night air. The papery moths danced around him in the jig of the cricket song.

He dexterously flipped something up into the air and between his tricky fingers. It was a chip from the Indigo Plume; one of the ones that Theo had returned to him. It was becoming somewhat of a lucky relic for him.

As her mind ran frantic circuits, something in her gut told Theo not to trust Cyrus or his pack of Hounds. Especially the cowboy with the long sun-streaked hair and the spitfire eyes.