Gears of Mischief (The Valhalla Mechanism Book 1) Read online

  “You know how it is, Mother,” I lamented, feeling the pearl earrings in my ears jingle with my movement. “I’d give anything for a man that can keep my attention, but alas, they’re all sheep.” It was a conversation we had held many times, one that I always lost and was forced to bear another call from a man, but it still gave me pleasure when my mother nodded in understanding.

  From what I knew, Lord Kingston had been far from boring. He had been an adventurer, taking my mother on safaris and trips around the world. When he had died, it had left my mother in a sort of hole, their love the purest thing I had ever seen from the portraits. Even in grainy photographs, it had been easy to see they had been blissfully in love. Losing her husband has led my mother to adopt me, however, so I could not lament his loss too much. I did hope that one day, if I was forced to settle down, it would be with a man such as the ghost that still haunted my mother.

  “What about the men you work with?” mother asked for the thousandth time. It was a common conversation, one we repeated over and over.

  “You know it’s against the rules.”

  She sniffed. “As if you follow the rules. Besides, there are exceptions. My dear late Robert was employed by the Queen.” Not as a spy but in the science department. I knew from her stories. I shot her a look that said some of the rules ended with death, mine mostly, and my mother rolled her eyes. She knew the weight of what breaking that particular rule could bring. It just so happened that she was able to get permission back in her day. There was no way to do so now. “Well,” she continued. “Then you need to find a man who’s nothing more than a connection. Stop looking for faults in everyone you meet.”

  “I have plenty of connections.”

  “A husband is a tool, Tillie. You know that having a husband offers you an even greater cover.”

  I grumbled, speaking under my breath so she could not hear. “Tool is an apt description.”

  I lifted my chin as another bachelor made his way over to where we stood and introduced himself. This one was far too old for my tastes, but my mother leaned over and whispered, “he’s a good tool, Tillie,” before she nodded and gave us privacy.

  I forced a smile to my face and greeted the new disappointment, my hands slightly too close to one of my daggers.

  The poor innocent man talked about an ache in his back, a new concept with his growing age, and I tried my hardest not to picture myself fixing his ache with my dagger.

  If he was dead, well, then it wouldn’t ache anymore.

  I should really be paid for my wisdom.

  Chapter Two

  We arrived home later than expected, but it had been impossible to get away from the man for at least an hour. He had been too interested, too comfortable reaching out and grabbing my hand, until I had nearly sliced his fingers for the impropriety of it all. How dare he grab me as if he owned me! And after hardly having met!

  In the end, only my mother stepping in to say it was time to depart had made the man leave. He had done so after a request to call on her, which my mother had accepted in my stead. I just barely hid my scowl.

  But even though I was tired when we arrived back to our home, my night was far from over. With the help of Betty, the kind older woman my mother paid to take care of our household affairs, I extracted myself from the extravagant pink ball gown and pulled on my leather trousers and a loose blouse. I wouldn’t be in the field this evening, but I still had to go into the Guild to finish up paperwork from the night prior. I hated paperwork, but it came with the position. I was simply thankful there was not quite as much for my department as there was for the desk jockeys.

  The Raven Wing Guild was sequestered in the art district, some fool before my time determining the art district was the least likely place to look for a den of spies. Sure, no one thought to look, but the man had undervalued the arts, and so it was becoming increasingly more difficult to sneak into the office without detection. Of course, I never had trouble, but the new recruits did. Director Stephens insisted it was a test of will for the younger ones, that it helped make them better spies. I agreed, mostly, but thought it foolish to have such a test every single time we had a need to come in. At that point, it became a risk and a waste of energy. At least it was simple to go in at night, when the streets were only filled with late night patrons of pubs, rather than those hoping to catch a glimpse of a masterpiece.

  The office paraded itself as a fine art gallery, as nothing more than a beautiful room full of too expensive artwork. Every so often, a rich wanker found his way inside to purchase one of the art pieces, but there were full crates in storage to replace what was purchased. There was even a curator to keep up appearance, the old man a bit of an arsehole when he was asked to do anything other than sleep at his desk with his feet on top of it. He was a master of art, though. I should know. I spent hours before discussing the differences in Renaissance artwork and Surrealism and had somehow earned his respect after that. It didn’t make him any less of an arsehole, but occasionally, I got a smile.

  I slipped around the back of the building labeled the Raven Art Gallery and knocked on an intricate pattern on the side door. When the gallery was closed, we used the side entrance rather than going through the art rooms. A small panel slid out and I pressed my hand to it, allowing it to be scanned for clearance. As always, I was passed through without problem. In all my years at the Raven Wing Guild, I had never been denied entrance, not even after—

  “Welcome,” a robotic voice called over the intercom that I ignored. When I had stepped inside the office for the first time at the age of seventeen, I had answered back, not realizing there was no actual person behind the voice. It had been embarrassing, something I had been teased over for months before my skills shut them up.

  “Today’s date is—”

  I stepped from the passageway before the robot voice could finish its speech, heading towards my desk that was hardly used for more than the bits of paperwork I was forced to do.

  “Tillie,” Calvin Wench called from his desk. “You’re late.”

  I grit my teeth at the man calling me, causing him to smile. “I was subjected to an attempt at romance by our target this evening, Calvin. I could do without your criticism.”

  “Which target?”

  “The Baron.”

  Calvin had the good sense to grimace, always rehearsed, always fake, before he nodded his head. His angular jaw seemingly reflected in the light, the slight scruff there that he attempted to shave into a fashionable pattern ruined by the slight height the left had on the right.

  When my mother suggested I date someone I worked with, she meant Calvin, but I didn’t have the heart to explain exactly why I would never, not anymore. Calvin was attractive, his sharp jawline and amber-colored eyes sending many women into a faint. He spoke like the professors from the colleges, his tone like that of melted butter. It also helped that Calvin came from money, his family wealth large even by London’s standards. He was considered one of the eligible bachelors in London, but of course, even had I ignored that Calvin was a proper arsehole, it was against the rules. Mingling with another spy could result in a one-way ticket into a wooden box, but that hadn’t stopped me from flirting with the man once. Marriage was forbidden but casual relations were not. So I had attempted to bed the gorgeous man once upon a time, and I had succeeded.

  It had been a disaster.

  Not the sex. The sex had been pleasant enough, even if it was tamer than I had hoped. But sleeping with a spy came with a whole host of problems. We wore our masks every day, and sometimes, when you wore the mask for so long, you forgot who you were meant to be once you took it off. Sometimes, the mask became permanent. Calvin was ambitious, determined to prove he could make his own way without his family’s money all while still drawing from the family accounts. Any opportunity to take advantage, to use information against something, and he took it. I had not realized his true intentions after the lackluster sex, and that had been my mistake. I called it a lesson
, one I would never repeat, even if I caught the idiot looking at me every so often as if he wanted a repeat. Just like a man to use me for his gain, to throw me under the bus while he got what I had been trying for.

  “You have a stack of paperwork to turn in,” Calvin murmured as he worked through his own stack, nearly twice the size of mine. Even if Calvin was a right arsehole, this was the one thing we had in common, our work ethic. Both of us worked far too much, took on too many jobs, all for the sake of excitement. Calvin had two desks, however, and so he split his time between the one out here and the tiny one inside the Director’s office.

  I raised my brow and took a seat at my desk. “Not as much as you,” I pointed out. “Perhaps, you should get one of the new recruits to help you.”

  “And let them have all the fun?” Calvin glanced up at me, the corners of his eyes crinkling briefly before he looked back to the paper he was filling out. That look had been the one to hook me when I was still young and naïve, the eyes crinkling. His elegant handwriting already filled the page he was on, reporting what he had seen during one of his assignments. It was something I had to do as well, the stack of papers in front of me nothing more than a waste of time. No one ever read the reports. They were only meant to file, to sit in a cabinet for the day that the Queen might have a request of them. She never did. In fact, if the Queen wanted to know anything, she requested the Guild to send the spy who had been present, and she got an in-person account.

  “Don’t forget to send a beetle to the Director about the target,” Calvin warned me, not looking up from his papers again.

  “Did he slip already? He seemed insistent on finding a wife earlier.”

  “Apparently, he did so last night and attempted to pay off a footman who witnessed but the man was already in our employ. The footman came to us just before you arrived, detailing the account. We were able to corroborate with another witness. It’s all the proof we needed.”

  I nodded and pressed the button on my desk. The mechanical clicking came first and I fought the shiver that threatened to travel up my spine. Even with working so many years in the office, I never got over the creepiness of the mechanical beetles that the Guild used for correspondences. They were large, about the size of a man’s hand spread out, their metal bodies meant to protect them against harm as they traveled across the city to deliver coded messages. They were not the only forms of communication—the clockwork pigeons were also used—but they were the most common. Unfortunately for me, Greggory, in the messaging department, figured out that I didn’t like the beetles, and so he always sent one. I hadn’t received a pigeon in over a year, not since he found out about my grievance.

  The large clockwork beetle climbed up on my desk, its large pinchers terrifying even to someone who liked beetles. At first, I hadn’t been able to figure out how the large machines went undetectable throughout the city, delivering secret messages for the Raven Wings and those that needed a message. But then I had realized that most people did not take in the world around them, that they went about their lives without a care for anything but themselves. No one was scaling the walls looking for mechanical insects, and they certainly wouldn’t check into the weird shadow crawling quickly along a windowsill. Rarely did we lose a beetle to a rogue broom.

  The beetle lifted expectantly, waiting for me to type in the number of the recipient before I slipped the rolled piece of paper into the compartment at its belly. I did so quickly so the beetle could climb from my desk and head for the Director’s office, leaving me to shiver after the strange machine.

  “Still haven’t mastered the unease about the beetles, have you?” Calvin asked in amusement.

  I grimaced. “Hold your tongue, Calvin, or I’ll tell everyone what it is you fear.”

  Heights. The other spy feared heights. I had discovered it on a mission with him, when we had to scale the side of a ten-story building and Calvin had nearly fainted, his shaking making it near impossible for him to do much more than nearly wet himself.

  Calvin grinned but he didn’t press, lucky for him. It was difficult to keep a secret when you worked in the profession, especially when everyone was a master at finding information. The fact that no one knew Calvin was afraid of heights meant that I was the only one who knew, and while I had suffered a brief moment where I considered using it against him as he would have done to me—he was the one who told Greggory my unease with the beetles—I realized it would bring me no true satisfaction to do so. I left it alone, preferring not to start an all-out war between us. Let the arsehole think I was a twit enough to forgive him and let sleeping dogs lie. It afforded me another mask.

  I began to fill out the papers before me, settling in for a long night. Every so often, I glanced over at Calvin to catch him doing the same to me, and though there was an invitation in his eyes, I looked back down at my paperwork, to the most boring part of my paperwork, and finished it.

  When I finally arrived home, I collapsed on my bed just as the first rays of the sun crested the horizon. I was thankful that I would not have to do anymore paperwork for the week.

  Too bad I’d still have to see Calvin’s face.

  Chapter Three

  I woke up with the brightest sunshine filtering in through the curtains my mother threw open like some extravagant wench. The sunshine itself was an oddity, but my body rebelled after the long night and I covered my head to avoid the wake-up. It felt as if I had not slept at all, as if I had barely closed my eyes before the sun ruined it.

  “Is it three already?” I groaned from beneath the blankets. When I spent the night working, I slept through the morning until three in the afternoon. No one knew the difference that a lady did not wake up so early because no one was ever in our home at such early hours. It was how I had functioned for so long, replacing what would normally be lessons with sleep after working long nights. Instead, my lessons were in the afternoons, when we had no party or ball to attend to in order to keep our cover.

  “It’s brunch time,” mother corrected, and I peeked over the edge of the blankets, squinting my eyes through the sunshine. “You have a gentleman caller.”

  “Why on earth would I want to wake up for such a thing? Tell him ‘no, thank you’ so I can go back to sleep,” I grumbled, jerking the blankets back up, or attempting to.

  Mother grabbed the bottom of the blankets and yanked, stealing my warmth and happiness. “Get up, Ottilie Kingsford, if for nothing more than to keep up your appearances. Ladies do not normally sleep until three, and this gentleman will discuss your strange habits if you refuse to meet with him.”

  I groaned harder, slamming my face into the soft pillow a few times. I wanted nothing more than to sleep, to erase the bags that would no doubt be under my eyes. They would have to be covered if I was to look presentable for whatever wanker decided that calling before noon was a good idea.

  “I’m sending in Betty!” Mother called from outside the room as she left, taking my blankets with her. She knocked on the wood three times, the rhythm evenly spaced.

  I glanced up just in time to see Betty step across the threshold, her eyes bright in the morning sunlight.

  “Oh dear,” Betty murmured, taking in my squinting eyes, messy hair, and overall displeasure at the circumstances. “We have a lot of work to do in a short amount of time. Up, up, Tillie. The gentleman is waiting.”

  I grimaced and pulled myself like a slug out of bed to sit on the stool Betty set up. I stifled a yawn behind my hand and waited for Betty to start taming my hair into some sort of order. I could do some of the more basic hairstyles, could braid it to my skull when needed, but those hairstyles were better suited to my work rather than meeting a man. No, things had to appear as if I was a lady who did nothing more than embroider.

  “Is he at least worth the loss of sleep?” I murmured, rubbing my eyes.

  When Betty didn’t answer, I blinked and looked into the mirror to see the cringe she was attempting to hide. In a conspiratorial whisper, Betty leaned for
ward and said, “I think you’ll hate this one the most.”

  “Bloody—” I did not finish my sentence, didn’t waste my breath, not when there was no choice. Everything I did, every action I took, was a mask, an illusion. I had to look, for all appearances, like a normal lady. Perhaps, a lady that was too picky with her choice of husband, but nothing more than a demure woman to the rest of the world. They could not know that I was so much more than that, could not know that I could kill them so easily. Even if they knew, if everyone knew, they would never genuinely believe it; that was how good my mask was. Sometimes, like today, it was difficult to keep the mask in place. Other days, I forgot who I was without it.

  Betty worked on my hair, pinning it into a loose pile on top of my head. I felt a little like a poodle but saw the reasoning behind it, the highlighting of my slender neck. I much preferred my hair down or in a braid, but the style had never called for such things. Hair up, skirt touching the floor, waist cinched so tight, one could not breathe or speak. It must have been decided by a man at one point, I thought, as Betty went to work covering the black smudges under my eyes.

  “Can we at least leave the corset looser than normal?” I begged when Betty fetched the undergarments.

  “I’ll leave it so you can breathe, love. Now, arms up.”

  I did as the woman asked, allowing her to dress me up like I was a porcelain doll rather than a human being. Sometimes, that was all I felt like, a doll on the shelf, constantly being switched into different attire, repainted with a smile. Sometimes, I realized my profession was truly a curse and because of it, I would never be satisfied with subpar again. I knew I would always crave adventure and excitement over everyday life.

  As I finally descended the stairs thirty minutes later, I knew without a doubt that the man waiting for me in the sitting room would not be the excitement and adventure I searched for. He had to be at least thirty years my senior, and when he stood on wobbly knees, he looked ready to fall into pieces right there. He reached out a hand, excitement clearly on his face. Society etiquette dictated that I allow him to take my hand, allow him to kiss the back of it, so I slid my fingers into his and swallowed the cringe at the clammy skin I felt.