The Girl in the Clockwork Collar (Steampunk Chronicles #2)(42)

A fellow didn’t have to be a genius to figure that one out. Griffin ran a hand through his hair. “Basically, a weapon that could obliterate us all, then?”

The older man nodded. Fascination mixed with the concern in his eyes. “Perhaps the entire building. The entire city block, if it overloads, that is. And it sounds like it is about to do just that.”

“We’d better shut it down, then, eh?” Griffin forced himself to be calm as he turned to Emily and Tesla. “How do we do that?”

He look absolutely flabbergasted—not the sort of expression Griffin found overly comforting. “It should not even work. It is not connected to its Aether engine. I have no idea why it is working.”

Griffin began to see why this was such a strange and terrible thing. Somehow something had given power to an otherwise inoperable machine—one that could kill them all—and its maker had no idea how to turn it off.

Had he done this? Had his toying with the transference device somehow caused a spike in the Aether? He’d never had anything like that happen before—it couldn’t have happened now. When he peered beyond the physical world into the Aetheric, he couldn’t see any connection between himself and the machine. This was not his doing. But if not his, whose?

Now was not the time to stand around thinking. He had to act. The thing was practically whining now, it was operating at such a high frequency. It wasn’t going to hold together for much longer. It could detonate at any moment and reduce the four of them—and possibly the entire building, perhaps the entire block—to ash.

“Can I crush it?” Sam asked.

“Don’t you touch it!” Emily exclaimed, cheeks red. “It will kill you, you great oaf.”

Sam scowled, but didn’t do anything. They all knew Emily only called him “oaf ” when she was worried about him. “It’s going to kill us, anyway.” Then he surprised both his friends by asking, “Can you tell it to stop?”

Cautiously, Emily reached out her fingers toward the vibrating device, obviously trusting her affinity for machines to keep her safe. The moment she made contact her ginger eyebrows snapped together. “I can’t understand it. It’s like it’s screaming, and I can’t make out the words. Ow!” She jerked her hand away, her face a mix of astonishment and hurt. “It shocked me!”

“I’ll stop it,” Griffin informed them—sounding much more confident than he felt. Obviously this was a lesson in being careful what he wished for, because he had wanted to feel useful, and now if he couldn’t be useful enough, people would die. He would die.

He looked at Sam, who watched him with a grim expression, and then moved toward the machine. The Aetheric energy that swarmed around it wasn’t right. Normally, the Aether was filled with the brightness of organic auras or soft and gray with ghosts, but this energy was dark and sooty. It looked like a smear of something viscose—dirty automaton grease on a clean white glove.

And it seemed to be watching him, but that wasn’t possible. Unless … unless it was a ghost, but there was no form to it. Just a feeling of darkness.

He didn’t know what touching it, letting it into him, might do, but he had no choice.

It slithered toward him as he held out his hand, black tendrils curling around his fingers. It felt almost slippery, like the tentacles of an octopus. And sharp. His fingers began to bleed where it touched him. What the hell?

“Griffin?” It was Emily who called out. She’d seen the blood, no doubt. To her, it would look as though his hand had suddenly begun to bleed for no reason. He gritted his teeth and extended his hand even farther, until he touched the device, which was now shaking so violently, it was certain to explode at any second.

The moment his fingers touched the hot metal—so hot— the machine began to quiet. Griffin clenched his jaw even tighter against the double onslaught of pain and placed as much of his hand as he could over the shivering heat. Tendrils wrapped farther up his arm, cutting into his exposed forearm. Blood dripped to the carpet as what felt like a dozen razors slashed at his flesh, and his palm burned.

Once most of the dark energy had gathered around him, he drew a deep breath, pushed past the pain and focused all of his will at the curling black. He drew it toward him, into him.

He was not prepared for the assault. He thought it would put up a fight, that it would take a great force of his power to overcome it.

He was wrong.

The swirling black tendrils drew back. For a second, they seemed to come together, arching upward to form a mistshaped cobra that undulated before him.

The blackness struck before he could think to defend himself.

It was like shards of glass exploding in his chest. Pain screamed through his body, slamming him to his knees, bringing the taste of blood to his mouth. He opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out. It felt as though his vocal chords had been cut in half.

And then there was nothing. The vice of agony that gripped him let go as suddenly as it had attacked, sending him sprawling face-first onto the floor, gasping for breath. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to think.

He heard someone call his name from a great distance. He tried but couldn’t answer. His eyes rolled back into their sockets as darkness swamped his mind. He was either going to pass out or die—either was preferable to the pain. He coughed, tasted blood in his mouth.

Finley’s face swam in his mind. If he could hold on to the thought of her, he just might live. She just might keep death away.