Clockwork Heart: Clockwork Love, Book 1 (2 page)

Cornelius hadn’t told anyone. Not even Valentin, his longest, dearest friend. But he knew the heart hadn’t yet moved on to wherever Félix intended to hide it next, and he hadn’t destroyed it. As the Austrian soldier lay dying, his heart of flesh too damaged to beat on its own, all Conny could think of was the perfect substitute locked away downstairs, lying useless with its owner vowing never to let it see the light of day.

Surely the safest place to hide the heart was inside of someone. A man who would not live without it.

Cornelius set the clockwork heart next to the mechanical pump, coaxed it into working independently before sewing it up inside the thin gold cavity he made in the man’s chest. He made a flesh-seal and tucked the access port under the man’s right arm, sealing it up with a cap that could pass for a mole to anyone who didn’t get close enough to see this mole had a tiny hinge. He stood over his patient, his own still-human heart thumping madly as he realized what he’d done.

Then it occurred to Conny, since he’d crossed one line, there was nothing stopping him from breaking as many rules as he needed to not only save his soldier but give him every advantage in whatever the next chapter of life brought him.

And that is precisely what Conny did.

* * * * *

Johann Ber
ger was fairly certain he should have been dead.

He couldn’t yet be sure he
wasn’t
dead, though that he had a headache and ached all over seemed a good indication he was probably still alive. Death seemed like it would either not hurt at all or hurt a hell of a lot more, to pardon the pun. But Johann’s aches felt muted. Annoying, but tolerable. His left arm and his legs felt very odd. His mouth tasted like ash, and his chest felt…strange. He was warm, however. He lay in something soft and fragrant. Inhaling, he caught hints of lavender, sage and the lemon tang of a cleanser. He could not, for the life of him, imagine where he was or how he got there. Hoping for visual cues, he opened his eyes.

After drawing in a sharp breath, he closed them again. Tight.

When he opened them once more, his pulse beat hard against the back of his throat. He could see. Out of both eyes. Not a blurry haze out of his left which his right eye had to ignore. He
saw
, with crystal clarity, though his left eye saw everything with a sharp-edged tinge of yellow-brown.

He raised his hands to his face. Through the amber edging, he could see his right hand looking normal, his arm bare and scarred and marked with service tattoos. He also saw his left hand, which did not look like a hand at all. In any kind of light.

Oh, there were five fingers, true enough. But they were made of copper casings, not flesh. Tiny wheels held every joint in place and larger gears made up what he could only call a wrist. More wire and more clockwork comprised a forearm he could, technically, see through. What should have been his left arm was now a delicate machine. But even stranger than his new appendage was the discovery that when his brain told his left arm to move, his left wrist to turn, the fingers of his left hand to curl—
they responded in kind
. He let out a shaking breath and touched his left hand with his right. The clockwork arm didn’t register sensation in the way his right hand did. It felt like a slight fuzzing on his brain, an odd tickle that resonated more in his elbow than in his substitute fingers. He noticed, too, that his movements weren’t as smooth or dexterous with the mechanical arm as with his real one.

This was clockwork.
Incredible
clockwork. He’d seen some clumsy versions on a few officers who’d lost limbs, and once his unit had been stationed near Italy, where Johann saw a nobleman wearing gears on his flesh arm, but the kind of clockwork fused to Johann was like nothing he had known could possibly exist.

How had this happened? He tried to recall his last memory, but everything felt blurred and confused in his head. Had he ended up back with Crawley? He couldn’t see how. The pirates had left him, the commander had found him, and they’d put him straight onto the front lines. Onto a special assignment, the regiment sent to storm Calais.

A suicide mission. He remembered now. A distraction so the English airships full of Austrian troops could land on the eastern shores. Something about destroying a weapon. Or finding it. Or something. Nothing to do with him—
his
job was to be cannon fodder for the French.

So how had he ended up in a nice-smelling, soft bed with a yellow eyeball and a clockwork arm?

His belly curdled as he remembered the rumors, the warnings the sergeants had taunted them with at camp.
The French are turning their war prisoners into automatons. Don’t let them catch you alive, or they’ll make it so you can never die and can’t do anything but fight for Archduke Guillory.

Terror brought back missing pieces of Johann’s memory. It had been fear of that story that had made him fake death and swallow his cry of pain as the French soldiers had tossed him onto the corpse barge. He remembered lying cold and trembling in the foggy night, waiting for death, knowing being burned alive would be better than the future they had in store for him as a prisoner of war.

And then a pretty young man had climbed the corpse heap, touched his face and whispered in French.

The curtains around Johann’s bed parted, and the pretty Frenchman from his recollection smiled down at him, head backlit by gaslight, his features outlined in a strange amber hue in Johann’s left eye.

“
Voilà, vous êtes réveillé enfin.
”

The Frenchman sat on the edge of the bed and smiled kindly down at Johann. As he spoke more lyrical words Johann had no hope of comprehending, he touched Johann everywhere. His face. His neck. He laid a hand over Johann’s chest, pressing gently—it was then Johann realized that flesh was slightly numb.

They have captured me and turned me into their slave. That is why I have the clockwork arm and God knows what else. I am an automaton.
He began to panic.

The pretty man shushed him, petting his shoulders and entreating Johann once more in French. He didn’t sound like an enemy doctor intent on hacking men into reusable pieces. In fact, Johann hadn’t heard anyone speak with this much tenderness since he’d left his mother.

It was a little drugging. He decided he would gladly fight for Guillory’s army, if it meant this man would croon to him at the end of every battle.

The pretty man explained the mechanical arm, with slow French and pantomime. Johann got the idea the man had installed it, or designed it, or something, because he was intensely proud and could explain how to work it even without a shared language. “
Nerf,
” he kept saying, tracing a line from Johann’s elbow to his brain. He said
nerf
as he touched Johann’s left eye too, putting Johann’s right hand up there to feel the strange metal socket placed over the hollow where his mangled eye should have been.

He had Johann sit up, which was when Johann saw his legs.

The Frenchman hushed him once more when he cried out at the sight of his lower half—his right leg was
entirely
machine, steel and copper skeleton rising almost to his hip. His left leg was natural to his calf, where he had something which looked much like the foot version of his left arm. It was more intricate than the right side by far.

He had no legs. No feet. He was more clockwork than man.

Though Johann wanted to panic, it was difficult to remain upset with his doctor soothing him in what tonight had to be the prettiest language on Earth. The man hugged Johann’s shoulders and spoke quietly into his ear, his lips gently brushing the skin and wresting Johann’s attention away from his artificial limbs.

“
Tout ira bien, mon chér
i. Croyez-moi. Je vous soignerai.
”

Johann shut his eyes, wondering how that worked when one was basically a copper lens. It did shut, though, when he told it to. In fact, all the clockwork parts seemed to respond to his most casual thought.
His
, not the Frenchman’s. The question was, would it remain that way?

Would he care, if it meant this man would continue to be so kind to him?

“I don’t know what you’re saying or what you’ve done to me, but…” He leaned helplessly into the man. “Please…don’t stop talking. Or touching me.”

With a soft French coo, the man prattled on, his tone even gentler and sweeter now. “
Je m’appelle Cornelius
.
Quel est votre nom?
”

Name
, Johann’s rusty brain offered up in translation.
He wants to know your name.
“Johann Berger. Of the Austrian Army’s 51st regiment.”

A shiver ran down his skin as the man—Cornelius—threaded fingers into Johann’s hair. Johann decided he liked it, but it was strange. His mother always said the French had odd ways. He hadn’t realized they were such
touchy
ways.

Probably he’d have run away to France when he’d first deserted the army, if he’d known.

“
Bienvenue, Johann Berger. Sur mon honneur, je jure que je vous protégerai.”

Johann felt a kiss on his hairline, and he curled his mechanical hand instinctively at the touch.

As he lay in the embrace of the Frenchman, Johann recalled his mother. Her gentle hands on his face, her tears as she said goodbye. They’d both known it would be the last time they saw one another. Johann wondered if she had put him out of her heart the way he’d sealed off her and the rest of his family, his life in Stallenwald. It hurt too much to remember a time when life had been good.

In the Frenchman’s arms, Johann broke the seal. He let himself feel the ache of loss, let himself acknowledge how much he missed love and light in his life. A sense of purpose that wasn’t futile. A future filled with hope, not despair. It was a fever, no doubt, that let him turn the incomprehensible French coos into something to latch on to. He had no idea to what purpose this man meant to assign him now that he was a clockwork man, but in that moment he didn’t care. However it happened, whether or not it was real, right now he felt safe and peaceful.

He’d been a son, a soldier, a pirate, a human sacrifice. If it meant he could keep feeling like this, he’d be whatever the Frenchman wanted him to be.

Chapter Two

Corneliu
s liked Johann.

He’d long maintained people in hospital revealed their true selves whether they liked it or not, and as a patient, Johann was gentle, friendly and eager to please. Conny had worried he’d end up with a grousing Austrian bruiser in his bed, but his patient was as far from this as a man could be. Cornelius couldn’t imagine Johann Berger hurting anyone, though of course he must have, as a soldier. Here, however, he seemed happy, even grateful to be in Cornelius’s care.

He also had a lovely smile, and though larger, rougher-looking men weren’t usually Conny’s type, he couldn’t help but acknowledge his patient was attractive, in his own way.

For the first few weeks, the two of them existed in a quiet, charmed bubble. Cornelius kept Johann in his rooms, and by and large Johann mostly slept in between Cornelius’s attempts to teach him how to manage his clockwork. To help those efforts along, Cornelius also taught Johann rudimentary French.

He told no one about his mystery patient, and at first the secret was ridiculously easy to keep. Maryann, the girl who ran the register in the shop and set up appointments for surgeries, was too busy flirting with customers to notice anything different about Cornelius’s habits. Master Félix hated stairs and never went up to Conny’s apartment unless he had to, so Cornelius gave him no reason to do so. The only trouble was convincing their maid Louise he didn’t want his room disturbed for cleaning. She was almost ridiculously insistent she be allowed inside, but since no one but Félix could undo the locks he set on his doors and windows, she had little choice but to concede.

Cornelius’s friends were a bit trickier, especially his closest friend, Valentin Durant.

While Val was away at a house party in Paris, keeping his friend in the dark was as simple as sending the occasional telegram, but once Valentin returned to Calais, he became annoyed his friend wouldn’t come out drinking and whoring as he usually did. On the third day he was back in town, he convinced Louise to let him in the kitchen, then cornered Conny when he came down for a pair of sandwiches.

“What do you mean you don’t feel like going out this evening? You haven’t been out at all for weeks, from what everyone’s been telling me. And none of them are fucking you, so they’re agog to know who is.”

“No one is fucking me. I’m working.” Conny lifted the tray of sandwiches and tried to make his escape.

Val blocked him and gave a rough snort. “No one is fucking you? Darling. I’ve watched you arrested for inappropriate sexual display and fuck your way out of the arrest by servicing the police department and half the male inmates of the jail just for fun. You are never
not
fucking. Either you’re ill, which is terrible, or you’re lying to me, which is so very much worse.”

“I have an unusually intense tinker project.” Conny shooed Val out the door with a kiss. “I will tell you all about who I’m fucking once it’s finished.”

Val gave him a cutting glare as he hailed a cab, and Conny knew he had mere days before his friend renewed his efforts to find out what was going on.

Which meant he’d better be a lot quicker about teaching Johann French.

His patient was a remarkable student, which helped because Cornelius wasn’t much of a teacher. When Conny went on nervous babbles in French so rapid-fire there was no way the man had any idea what Conny said, Johann listened so politely, so prettily, Cornelius had a hard time
not
talking to him constantly. About everything. And he couldn’t seem to stop.

This was dangerous, because Val hadn’t been exaggerating when he said Conny was always fucking someone, or thinking about fucking someone. And right now the only man Cornelius longed to take to bed was the beautiful brute of an Austrian listening patiently to him from the other side of the room.

He tried to keep things business between them, to remind himself as much as possible why an affair would be a terrible idea even if Johann
were
interested. “My father is the archduke,” he explained to Johann one morning. “Guillory. The one who thinks he’s going to conquer all of Europe, the one who, despite the existence of Emperor Éloi, is the real ruler of the French Empire. Which is why I need to be careful about anyone seeing you here. Well, I would need to be careful regardless of
who
I was, but being Francis’s bastard makes everything more complicated.”

Johann’s eyes widened. “
Sie sind des Erzherzogs Sohn?
” He paused, then added, “
Unehelich
?”

Conny sat at the other end of Johann’s bed—technically
his
bed, though he’d been camped on the pallet by the hearth since Johann’s arrival—and crossed his ankles. “I have no idea, but goodness, everything that comes out of your mouth is deliciously guttural and raw.”

Johann blinked at him, then smiled uncertainly, looking for all the world like a large, charming boy.

Groaning, Conny rubbed his thumb along his bottom lip and shifted to make room for his erection. “I should tell you, darling, I’m what my mother refers to as a nancy. We call it
mignon
, in French. I don’t know what it is in German. None of the terms are nice, though, so I mostly say that I prefer the company of men to women in my bedroom. Which isn’t to say this is all about seducing you. I’m not so coarse as that. Well—unless you
wanted
me.”

Johann brightened and gestured around them. “Bedroom. This is bedroom, yes?”

“God help us both, it is indeed a bedroom.” Conny sucked his lip into his mouth for a moment and let out a sigh. “I still have no idea what I’m going to do with you once you’re healed and ready to return to the world. To be honest, it’s causing all manner of problems, keeping everyone in the dark. Valentin, my closest friend, suspects I’m up to something. Eventually he’ll make me confess. Which is why I need to find a way to explain to you that I’ll be gone for a whole evening soon and that you must be quiet in my absence.”

Johann settled against his cushions and listened intently.

Conny poked Johann’s clockwork leg gently with the toe of his sock and let the pressure linger afterward, as if it had been an accident, which it of course had not been. He spoke slowly and clearly. “Leg, Johann? Does it hurt?”

Johann perked up again. “Is good,” he replied as he touched his thigh where the clockwork appendage joined by magnets and plugs to his central nervous system. “No hurts.” He smiled, pressing his hand against Conny’s voyeuristic toe. “
Danke
. Thank you.”

Conny colored under the praise and the touch. “It’s nothing, really. You don’t hurt because of the aether. Lovely side effect, the speedy healing. There’s that fine line between when it heals, when it knocks you unconscious and when it kills you, but I promise I’m quite adept at managing those thresholds. I’ve done my best to put you completely to rights in all ways. I’m not fond of soldering clockwork parts to human skin, so I gave you sockets, which means we can easily swap you out if your clockwork parts get damaged. This also means if someone grabs your arm or your leg and pulls, they’ll come off, and the disconnection without proper procedures will cause you pain.” He bit his lip. “I really need to teach you French enough to explain that properly.”

He still hadn’t been able to even attempt to confess about the heart. Johann had noticed the scar and the flesh door, but who knew what was German for
mechanical heart
.

Johann smiled, his gaze falling on Cornelius’s lip tucked between his teeth. Then he cleared his throat and straightened. “I must toilet, please.”

“Oh. Certainly.” Cornelius popped off the bed and ruffled the back of his hair nervously. “Do you—ah—want help?” He held out his arm.

Johann shook his head and reached for the metal cane propped by the bed. “
Nein
.
Ich muss lernen.
”

Even Conny could suss out that much German. “I must learn,” he corrected.

Johann smiled. “Yes. I must learn. All things.” Pushing the cane hard into the floor, he rose unsteadily on his clockwork feet.

Cornelius didn’t steady him, but he walked with Johann across the room to the water closet. “You’re doing fantastically well for having two artificial legs. I long to fuss with the nerve bundle at your hips, possibly give a clockwork translator for increased sensation. I need to review my neural anatomy before I attempt that, though. I
do
know how to rewire a spine, but I also know it’s ridiculously impossible to get it exactly right. I’d hate to cut off all sensation entirely in an attempt to give you a boost. Oh. Here we are.” He tugged at his ear and cast his gaze down at the floor. “I talk too much.”

Johann stopped with the water closet door half open. “No.” He waited until Cornelius looked up, and then he smiled. “I like you talk.” He paused, frowned and corrected. “Your talking. When you talking.”

Heart melting, Conny bussed a kiss on Johann’s cheek. “You’re a darling. Now go ahead and—”

A hard knocking on his bedroom door cut him off. “Cornelius, love? Make yourself decent, because I’m coming in.”

All the blood drained from Cornelius’s face. “Oh God. That’s Valentin.
Hide
, Johann, hide.”

“I hide,” Johann echoed, and shut the water closet door behind him.

More knocking sounded on the door. “Conny? I hear you in there. I’ve come to collect you. You’ve been holed up in here far too long. The boys weep for the loss of you, and I’m getting bored drying their tears alone.”

Cornelius did a quick sweep of the room to make sure nothing incriminating lay about. He’d been tweaking Johann’s arm, so all those tools were on the table, but that wasn’t anything Valentin would notice. Conny focused his attention on stacking sets of dishes so they looked like piles, not pairs. He’d decided he was almost in the clear when he spied the pallet by the hearth, and he unmade it with his heart in his throat.

Now Valentin was using his entire fist on the door. “
Cornelius Francis Stevens.
”

“Calm down, I’m
coming
,” Conny called. Tossing his pillow onto the bed, he kicked the pile of sheets into the corner and headed for the door. Before he opened it, though, he messed up his hair and rubbed his eyes, trying to give himself the look of one who had been working too hard.

He barely had the latch pulled before Valentin burst into the room, dragging a cloud of scent behind him. He positioned himself in the center of Cornelius’s workshop, propping his walking stick on the toe of his ivory suede boot as he took in the room with an eagle eye. “My God, this place is even more of a sty than normal. You haven’t let the maid in? If you tell me you truly have been working on one of your bits of nonsense all this time, I swear I shall throw it in the bin.”

“I
have
been working.” Conny tried to think of what he could say he’d been working on, since he couldn’t very well produce Johann from the water closet. “A project for Master Félix.”

Valentin rolled his eyes and collapsed into an easy chair, pushing several scrolls of clockwork schematics aside as he did so. “
Tedious
. And no signs of sex at all. I thought this might have been another one of your slums with some dog from the docks. We all know how you love to dirty your knees for something rough. But it appears you have, inexplicably, been a nun.” He opened his legs and palmed his crotch with a naughty wink. “You must be gagging for it, sweetheart. If you want to take the edge off with me, I won’t mind.”

He and Valentin hadn’t done anything more suggestive with one another than dance since they were in university together, so he knew the offer wasn’t serious, but the thought of Johann hearing Valentin’s salacious tones through the water closet door made him blush and purse his lips. Yes, he was a terrible tart—but not with
Johann.

“Enough.” Conny waved a hand. “You’ve made your point. I’ll come to the café tonight. But not for long, and I’m not taking anyone home. I have…a great deal of work to do.”

“You’re the bastard son of Guillory and a rich English actress, living off an allowance and tinkering with clockwork nonsense in a demented old master’s shop. You have no
work
to do. Nothing you can’t shunt aside for an evening.” Valentin’s eyes narrowed. “Which means there’s something here you don’t want me to see.”

Don’t look at the water closet. Don’t look at the water closet.
“That’s nonsense. I’m not in the mood for your games.”

Valentin rose with a snort of disbelief and poked about the piles of clutter. “God bless, Conny, you’ve never been any kind of a liar.” He sighed as he toppled a pile of laundry and kicked aside more schematics. “I’ve never seen you this panicked for me not to find out, though. Most intriguing. This is why I love you, darling. You never let me get bored.”

“There’s nothing to find. I’ve been a hermit, simple as that.” He struggled for a whisper of truth to sell his lie. “I…haven’t been myself since the night the corpse barge came through. It upset me, seeing so many men dead for such a stupid reason.”

Valentin pursed his lips. “Yes, I hear that was terribly grisly. All those stinking Austrians, rotting in your backyard. You should have rung for me, my love. That isn’t the sort of thing one should contemplate alone. I know I was in Paris, but I would have come home for you.”

“I wanted…to work. So I’ve been working.”

“Such a terrible affliction, this yen of yours to
work
. I blame your mother.” He stopped still at the bed, poked the pillow with his stick, then crowed in triumph. “
Ha
. I knew it. You have a lover tucked away in here.”

Cornelius’s stomach lurched. “What? I do not.”

With a smirk, Valentin held up one of Johann’s long, dark and slightly curling hairs from the pillow. “You do. This hair says he’s been here, and your zeal to remove me says he’s here
right now
. I
knew
you hadn’t lost your inner whore.” His gaze shifted to the water closet, and he laughed. “But of course.”