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  Clockwork Twist

  Book Seven: Family

  by Emily Thompson

  Text copyright © 2018 Emily Thompson

  Cover and artwork by Emily Thompson

  “Clockwork” poem by Janice T

  All Rights reserved

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Beginning

  Bad Dreams and Old Friends (Algeria)

  Setting Out for France

  A Brief Rest (Paris)

  The Camp

  A Sudden Storm

  Cornered

  Final Note From the Author

  Previously in Clockwork Twist...

  Twist has come a long way since he first left home. Back in those days, his life was quiet, methodical, and safe. He only left his house on rare occasions. He never engaged in social activities. Adventure and excitement were things that only existed in books. He had no friends or loved ones. And he never set foot outside the rigid confines of London.

  Now, Twist is a dragon slayer. He had always assumed that after traveling aboard the intrepid airship Vimana all the way to the Himalayas, to find and rescue a fairy-tale princess, he would then return home to London. But now that he’s been out in the world for so long, home has little attraction for him. Twist has crossed the world many times and seen fantastic faraway lands, modern foreign capitals, and luxurious tropical getaways. He has adapted to a life forever on the move, with his closest friends always at his side.

  Twist now spends his days with Myra, his clockwork princess, and Jonas, the bold sky pirate. Together, they have thwarted pirates and secret societies who tried to steal Myra away from them. They freed Jonas from being kidnapped away to outer space by dragons, causing the dragon’s ship to be destroyed and Twist to accidentally kill one of the huge, terrifying beasts himself. Killing the dragon left a strange energy on Twist’s skin, called dragon’s blood, that some say might grow stronger and more troublesome with time. The other dragons weren’t pleased by the murder and destruction, and they forced Twist and Jonas to pay for their crimes with work. Once that debt was paid, however, Twist, Jonas, and Myra were once again free to do as they liked. They promptly spent an entire week in the company of the king and queen of Hawaii, relaxing on the island’s sunny beaches.

  Unfortunately, this short vacation didn’t last long. When Jonas received a call for help from Aazzi, an old friend and member of the Vimana’s crew, Twist and Myra joined him to rush to her aid. Along the way, they ran into a pair of continental gypsies, who were also old friends of Jonas’s. Twist was somewhat disturbed to find that his friend had practically been raised by these gypsies and their family, in a rugged camp full of thieves and hooligans, but he managed to put his distaste aside for the sake of helping Aazzi. Her husband, Dr. Philippe Rodés, had been captured by vampires in Ghana and needed urgent rescue.

  It turned out that the vampires who had stolen Philippe were actually Aazzi’s own family. Although she was a vampire herself, Aazzi had always hated her own nature and shunned her family and all of her kind. Stealing her husband was the only way her family could lure her back to them. Twist, Jonas, Myra, and other allies banded together to mount a daring rescue and finally managed to succeed as some cost. The bulk of the cost, however, fell squarely on Twist.

  Jonas had glimpsed a vision of the future that promised Twist’s imminent demise. Twist, however, refused to believe that his life would end so soon. After all, Twist’s Sight didn’t respond to Jonas the way it did to others—touching anyone but Jonas or Myra always forced Twist to suffer a vision of that person’s greatest pains, but Myra’s ghostly nature and Jonas’s Sight rendered them both safe to touch with no ill effects—and knew that the same was true of Jonas’s Sight. While Jonas would usually see a person’s death if he looked them in the eyes, he had looked at Twist many times before and seen nothing of his death at all. Twist simply couldn’t believe that Jonas had seen his death this time, either. And so he went into the vampires’ castle.

  Jonas’s vision did, however, come to pass. Just as he’d seen, Twist and his companions found themselves trapped with a horde of monsters bearing down on them. The only escape was through a door that could only be locked by Twist, from the outside. In all of the commotion, Twist managed to usher his friends through the door to safety, shove Jonas through as well despite his protests, and lock himself outside. But as the vampires attacked, the ghost of the dragon that Twist had slain, the dragon’s blood, exploded over the vampires in fire, killing them all and leaving Twist alive.

  Escaping the mostly empty castle with his friends, Twist was overcome with thoughts of what he had nearly lost. It wasn’t until death had stared him square in the face that Twist fully realized that he was mortal at all. He’d been lucky this time. He’d been right. But even so, he’d nearly lost his future. And the moment he thought of his future, Myra was the only thing he could see. Even if he was mortal and she was not, even if he didn’t know how many days he would have to give her, he didn’t want to spend a single day without her. His priorities now aligned, Twist found the courage to finally ask Myra to be his wife. Of course, she accepted with glee.

  Now Twist, Myra, and Jonas are together, alive, and free once again. Their friends are no longer in danger, and many are still traveling with them as they slip away from the vampires’ territory and into the vast, sunny sands of the Sahara. The dragon’s blood that still lingers on Twist’s skin, and might still threaten him in the future, is now the only issue that troubles them. And so, with an idea that gypsy magic might do the trick, they head north to deal with this minor irritation...

  Although his confidence had grown

  Her love he did not know to own

  But when pried

  She verified

  In ways she felt he should have known.

  —Janice T

  Jonas looked over the airship railing at the golden vista that seemed to stretch out to forever on all sides. Standing at his side and following his friend’s gaze, the emptiness and sheer immensity of the Sahara Desert was staggering to Twist. Though they had seen herds of horned buffalo, lumbering elephants, and occasional zebras, lions, and giraffes as they had flown over other areas of Africa, he now saw no signs of life anywhere in the strangely silent golden dunes below.

  There hadn’t been much time to appreciate the desert outside of Suez in Egypt, as Twist and Jonas had hurtled over it in a wooden bird. Remembering what little he had learned of the shape of the world in his travels, he began to wonder if that part of Egypt, and the land he now flew over aboard the Vimana—heading directly into the Sahara from the southern coast of West Africa—might both be made of the same, continuous desert.

  “Yes,” Jonas said with a sigh. “That’s a sandstorm, all right.”

  Twist couldn’t find any sign of a disturbance on the hot, hazy horizon, but he knew Jonas’s powerful Sight well enough to trust him if he said that he saw a storm. It was even possible that Jonas could be speaking of a vision of the future, rather than what his keen eyes managed to pick out of the present.

  Standing at Jonas’s other side, the Vimana’s captain, Howell Davis, wore a grim expression. “Will we make Tamarasset before the storm?”

  “I think so,” Jonas answered with a nod. “It might be close at this speed, but we’ll make it. But, of course, we could be grounded there for a few days.”

  Twist glanced around him at the state of the airship. The gray wood of the hull was still scarred from the battle she’d been through in Sierra Leone. Aazzi’s vampire family had attacked the Vimana and her crew only a week before, leaving the balloon with a few hastily patched leaks and the rigging in tatters. Considering that they had left the vampires’ estate in flames and killed quite a number of them while rescuing Philippe, they ha
d decided to set out regardless of the airship’s wounds. They were now heading to a town in the center of the Sahara, far outside the reach of any remaining vampires.

  “It will take us a little while to fix up the ship, anyway,” Howell said to Jonas. “I guess it can’t be helped. There are far worse places to be stranded. Thanks for the warning, Jon.”

  Howell then returned to his place at the helm, leaving Twist and Jonas alone at the railing. Once he was gone, Twist turned to Jonas with a troubled frown.

  “Is it just me, or are we often attacked by storms?”

  Jonas gave the breath of a laugh. “You know, it rather does seem that way. There was the rainstorm in Melbourne and the thunderstorm over Utah, not that long ago.”

  “And sometimes you’re even accosted by a boy who happens to be named Storm,” Twist added with a grin.

  “Oh yes, we can’t forget that strange lad,” Jonas agreed with a nod.

  Jonas seemed to pause, as if in thought. Twist’s own memory flitted back to the boy with pink eyes who had other people’s dreams. He’d told Twist that Jonas’s dreams were his favorite to watch. Twist idly wondered if the boy was still following Jonas about in the dream world, or if he’d grown more fascinated with his new life in Australia with his mother.

  “I wish Kima was having a better time of things these days,” Jonas mentioned with a concerned and somber note to his voice.

  “Kima?” Twist asked, surprised to hear him mention Storm’s mother with such unexpected emotion.

  “Oh. Well,” Jonas said quickly, as if startled. He flashed Twist a tight, dismissive smile. “You know. She’s used to being with her own people, hunting buffalo with harpoons and whatnot. But now she’s halfway around the world from home and dealing with her weird little boy. I mean, she doesn’t complain, but it must be very trying.”

  “I suppose it might be,” Twist agreed, noting the sudden nervous energy in his friend. It almost seemed to Twist as if Jonas hadn’t actually meant to mention her out loud at all. “But she and Storm are better off where they are, out from under Cypher rule.”

  “Oh yes, certainly,” Jonas agreed. He then looked to Twist with troubled, pale-green eyes and turned to lean against the rail with his arms crossed. “By the way, are you going to hold up until we get out of Algeria?”

  The sudden change of subject threw Twist for an instant, but he managed to follow Jonas’s meaning easily enough. Although the dragon’s blood on Twist’s skin was invisible to the eye, the substance was affecting Twist’s Sight more and more strongly over time. As it was, he could only sleep in Myra’s arms. Only her ghostly touch was enough to distract his Sight till daybreak. He also was forced to shy away from all mirrors for fear of seeing an apparition of Kazan, the dragon, in the glass.

  The two gypsies that still traveled with them, Luca and his father, Harman, suggested that gypsy magic would be able to remove the blood from his skin permanently. But the only skilled witch they knew of was currently in northern France, with the rest of their troupe. Until they reached her, Twist would still be at the mercy of the slain dragon’s spirit.

  “I’ll be fine,” Twist told Jonas with the most reassuring conviction he could muster.

  Jonas looked back at him silently as his eyes shifted into purple with the illusion Twist’s Sight put into them. “Fine, huh?”

  “Yes, fine,” Twist snapped back. “I like to think I’m not so weak as to need constant supervision.”

  “You know I don’t mean that,” Jonas said, his voice taking on a shade of impatience. “You’re facing an adversary that is not just insidious but literally monstrous as well. Were I in your place, I think I’d rather like some extra supervision.”

  Twist gave him a skeptical look. “Were you in my place, you’d barricade yourself in your cabin and refuse to let anyone pity you.”

  Jonas paused, tossing Twist a sour look. “All right, I probably would. But that blue bastard is in your Sight, Twist. And according to what everyone keeps telling us, he’s going to do all he can to drive you mad. If you need help, you have to tell me. I don’t care if you want to or not. I’m not going to just sit here and let him torture you, damn it!”

  As he listened to his friend’s tirade, the situation appeared in a new light to Twist. A smile began to grow on Twist’s face when he looked at their argument from a different angle.

  “Oh, and now you’re laughing at me, you stuffy little dandy?” Jonas grumbled.

  A chuckle managed to escape from Twist, though he tried to hold it back. Jonas’s eyes flashed dangerously.

  “No, I’m not,” Twist said quickly, holding up his hands in surrender, his smile covering his face. “I’m sure that, if things were actually reversed, I would say the same exact things to you.”

  Jonas smirked, relaxing. “Yeah, you would. You’re so pushy.”

  “Just have some faith in me,” Twist said, finding no bitterness and only warmth in his own voice as he now saw his friend’s affection in his concern and false anger. “I’ve survived a great deal thus far. Including that vision of yours.”

  Jonas grimaced and looked away, clearly recalling the vision that he’d had of Twist being very nearly killed by a few dozen vampires. The belief that Twist was close to death had shaken him, despite the fact that Twist had come through the ordeal without a scratch.

  “I wish you could lend me some of that courage,” Jonas responded, his previous anxiety dimming in the buzz at Twist’s neck. “You’ve clearly got more than you should be entitled to.”

  “And why shouldn’t I have courage? I’ve got you to defend me from evil, don’t I?” Twist asked with a smile and brazen confidence.

  Jonas laughed and shook his head. “No, no, you’ll not distract me with compliments, you clever little bastard. Even if you’re sure you’re all right, I want a promise from you. I know how you keep them.”

  “All right, all right,” Twist said with an exaggerated sigh. “I promise, on my honor, that I shall tell you if things with the blue bastard get any worse. Is that good enough?”

  “Yes,” Jonas said, smiling at Twist with pale-blue eyes. “I feel much better now.”

  “Thank heaven,” Twist said, mocking great relief.

  “Cut that out!” Jonas reached out to shove Twist’s shoulder roughly, though his smile never left his face. “And damn you for making me worry about you in the first place.”

  Twist laughed. “You can blame your sister for that, not me. If she’d never come to me, I’d still be safe and sound in London.”

  “Yeah, and you’d still be a boring old clock maker, too.”

  Twist laughed again. “Some days I rather miss boring.”

  “Well, you’ll get some boredom for a little while,” Jonas mentioned, turning to look over the endless golden desert. “There won’t be much to do once we’re grounded.”

  “Only you would consider something like a sandstorm to be boring,” Twist observed.

  “I’m a dashing rogue of a sky pirate,” Jonas said with perfect ease and conviction. “I’m best accustomed to adventure. Sitting still doesn’t suit me, sandstorm or no.”

  “Of course,” Twist said, putting on an air of sympathy. He patted comfortingly at Jonas’s arm. “But if I know you at all, I’m sure you could find someone to quarrel with, anywhere.”

  Jonas looked at him suspiciously, his eyes shifting to a deeper blue color. “Are you calling me an insensitive, brutish pirate cur again?”

  “I’m being supportive!” Twist said, mocking offense through his smile. A tiny jolt of excitement flitted through Twist’s heart on seeing Jonas take his bait.

  “You’re being a smartass,” Jonas snapped at him, narrowing his cobalt eyes.

  “I thought you liked people to think of you as a brutish cur,” Twist said as innocently as he could manage.

  “For the record, I prefer ‘dashing rogue,’” Jonas grumbled.

  “Oh, come now, old boy,” Twist with with a long-suffering sigh. He smiled and lean
ed closer, as if to impart a secret. “I’m only playing along with your games. We both know that you’re truly a very compassionate man, but you don’t like to admit it.”

  “How dare you spread such slander!” Jonas gasped as if in horror. “A sky pirate is wholly without any such flowery nonsense!”

  “You see?” Twist returned, struggling to hold back his laughter. “I call you a brigand, and you take offense. I pay you a compliment, and you fly into a rage! And you call me the one with the emotional problems?”

  “I’ll give you some physical problems to deal with too, if you don’t keep your damn mouth shut about this fictional compassion of mine,” Jonas growled with a raised fist.

  Twist chuckled, finding no malice at all in the blue-green eyes of his friend but an equal measure of enjoyment in this much more entertaining battle. “Yes, yes, of course,” Twist said with a smile. “It shall be our secret.”

  “Nosy little dandy…” Jonas grumbled.

  “Insensitive brigand,” Twist said back with a smirk.

  “Damn straight, and don’t you forget it,” Jonas said, laughing as he shoved at Twist’s shoulder again.

  Twist accepted the blow without contest, silently enjoying the warm sense of comradery in their absurd argument. Even with a sandstorm on the horizon, a dragon’s blood on his skin, and any number of confusing and strange things happening in his life, Twist knew that the path ahead of him was clear. All the darkest moments of his life were surely behind him.

  Twist felt the airship begin to descend under his feet, deeper into the hot, dry, scorching air. The bow was aiming at a distant mountain of rock that stood in the sandy desert like an island in a golden sea. It took nearly half an hour for the airship to draw close enough for Twist to begin to make out orchards of fruit trees standing proud in the more fertile land that surrounded a thin, shimmering, river-like oasis just before the foothills of the mountain. A small town nestled around the water as well, like a distant echo of London around the snaking Thames.