Wicked After Midnight

The only answer was terrifying chaos as the behemoth tipped sideways, sending the unsecured furnishings and trinkets raining around my head. I ducked as a little table crashed past and clung to the bed like a monkey on a ladder. At least the bed was bolted to the floor. Above me, an engine pumped and groaned, while below me, the next giant leg pulled free from its moorings with a shudder I felt in my teeth. I couldn’t imagine what sort of power it took to move something as large as a building or what the prince—or whoever was controlling the elephant—thought he was doing. But I wasn’t about to be kidnapped in a giant robot. It was finally time to test the indestructibility of a Bludman’s body.



I waited until the pause after the last leg broke free and leaped off the bed, dashing for the ladder set against the round interior of the elephant’s stomach. I’d noticed it the first time I’d been brought here for an assignation and had assumed it led to a romantic gazebo topside, since you couldn’t really see it from the ground. Considering that the elephant’s head and belly were occupied and that the grinding gears were coming from overhead, I was guessing the pilot, or at least the engine, was somewhere up the ladder. Whether I was facing a man or a machine, I was ready to throw a wrench into the works.



I tripped on my skirt and went sprawling, narrowly avoiding a concussion, thanks to an ornate urn that was tumbling all over the place. Growling in frustration, I made it to my knees and untied my skirt, then whipped it off and tossed it to the ground before taking off again on my journey to the copper ladder. Ricocheting awkwardly between the bed and the wall, I managed to reach the ladder and start climbing up the rungs. The elephant was really moving now, the metal creaking and swaying as if we might fall with each heavy footfall. I pushed down a wave of nausea. Seasick and about to barf blood from riding in a runaway steamwork elephant—how ridiculous could this world get?



The hatch at the top of the ladder was loose, and it only took a few turns before I was able to lift it. Hot, oily air spanked me in the face. The steaming engine roared with such a thunderous rumble that the figure seated on a captain’s chair didn’t hear me or turn around. I climbed into the cockpit with utmost stealth, grateful that I’d dropped the huge skirts, even if it meant I faced my enemy wearing my lacy underpants. After slipping off my satin shoes, I tiptoed across the warm metal. Along the way, I selected a weighty-looking wrench from a bolted-down box of tools and held it aloft. Whoever the dude was, he was going down.



Just behind him, I could smell his expensive hair oil and see the etchings on the brass of his posh pilot’s goggles. He’d taken off his tuxedo jacket and had his white sleeves rolled up as he pulled levers and pushed buttons and twisted dials. The elephant was moving as smoothly as could be expected, the legs working in tandem to propel us through the streets with a lolloping rhythm. The windshield showed screaming crowds scattering on the cobblestones and conveyances rattling away down side alleys on two wheels. A throng of gendarmes up ahead was readying a catapult, and I knew that whatever Sang had for defense, I wanted the elephant to stop moving before I suffered for the driver’s insanity.



As soon as the pilot chuckled darkly and reached for a lever that looked too much like a joystick with a trigger, I knew it was time to act. I whipped the wrench down and cracked him across the skull. When he tried to turn around and grab the wrench from my hand, I smacked him again, harder and at the temple. It wasn’t as easy to put a man out as it looked on TV.



He slumped over, his hands forcing the two large levers forward as he fell.



And the elephant fell with him.



It caught me by surprise, and I slammed forward, right into the windshield. The glass cracked beneath me and gave just a little as the entire monstrosity continued in a slow, graceful fall forward. I reached wildly around me, trying to find something solid to hold on to as, bit by bit, the glass behind my back caved outward. When the unconscious driver crashed into me, the glass finally gave, and I fell out with a gentleman kidnapper and a million-pound copper elephant right on top of me.



* * *



I wanted to pass out, but I didn’t. It hurt like hell, a hundred times worse than my fall from the catwalk at Paradis. And it didn’t help that I was covered in broken glass and twisted metal and the hot, heavy body of my kidnapper. Luckily, I’d fallen out of the window seconds before the entire elephant collapsed, so the cockpit had basically fallen around me, forming a protective, air-filled bubble. Still, I was completely trapped in the pitch-black dark, and no one knew I was here, except for the dead guy on top of me.



Wait.



No, he wasn’t dead yet.



As the fear ebbed away, his smell replaced it, forced into my nose and mouth by his closeness. I was pinned, with no way to rid myself of his weight. I tried to shove him away, but he was limp and thick and floppy, and I only succeeded in making the meaty part of his arm fall against my mouth.



Screw it. Dude tries to kill me with a copper elephant, eating him is totally fair game.



Considering the fact that I wasn’t trying to woo him or bring him any sort of comfort, I just flat-out bit the bastard’s arm, sinking my fangs in like traditional vampires do and ripping a little until the blood really started to flow. The sustenance was more than welcome, considering the fear and exhaustion weighing me down. I’d never felt more like an animal, a creature with no empathy or kindness or reason. In the dark, I became nothing, just an appetite.



Only at the very last moment did I come to myself and remember that you couldn’t question dead people. If there was any hope of finding out this guy’s motives, he had to be alive when they found him.



Oh, shit.



And if there was any chance of me not going to jail or facing whatever grisly fate Sang used in place of jail, the driver needed to be undrained. I stopped drinking and held my hand around the wounds, willing them to stop bleeding. There wasn’t much blood left, but his breathing was shallow, and his heart was still beating, so there was some hope. The machinery creaked and squealed overhead as the gigantic beast settled, but it was quiet enough to hear voices in the small space. I put my mouth right up to his ear and swallowed back my hunger.



“Why did you kidnap me?”



Nothing.



“Who do you work for?”



No answer.



“What do you want?”



At last, a low chuckle, breathy and barely more than a flutter. “Mal—” The machinery overhead groaned and resettled, cutting him off.



“Mal what?”



But his breathing had stopped. God. Damn. It.



I kicked a slippered foot against the metal, and a cacophony of new sounds took over. Shouting, clanking, and the hum of a great machine starting up. I eased my arm out from under the man’s body and rapped on the closest metal wall. The shouting outside escalated, and I heard an answering knock but not quite near me. I knocked again, and we knocked back and forth until I could feel the metal-muffled ring of a fist against the palm of my hand, playing a Sang version of Marco Polo. I knocked frantically until someone shouted, “Quiet!”



I went silent, waiting.



The voice was muffled but slow and careful. “Shield your eyes, and back away from this wall. We have a saw. Do you understand? Knock once for yes, twice for no.”



I knocked once.



“Here we go!”



I maneuvered the man’s body so that his arm covered my face; I’d let the dead bastard bear the brunt of whatever damage the rescuers inflicted. The whine of a saw started up outside, and I squeezed my eyes shut as it shrieked against the metal toward my side. Hot sparks sizzled against my arm, and I tucked it in more tightly, hugging the dead body to me and shrinking as far away as I could. I was mostly indestructible but not stupid, and a saw wound would majorly mess up my act, not to mention Lenoir’s painting.



Soon I felt a welcome breath of fresh air, or at least what passed for it in the cities of Sang. The metal curled back like a bit of apple peel, and a pair of heavy clippers helped widen the hole. Strong hands in thick gloves reached in to lift me gently from the ruins of the cockpit like a baby bird from a cracked egg. I didn’t realize until they laid me on a stretcher and covered me with a rough woolen blanket that I wore nothing but the ruined corset top of my fancy dress and my stained and ruffled bloomers.



“There’s another one in here,” a man called, and I quickly added, “Don’t let him get away. He’s the villain who tried to kidnap me.”



“He won’t be running anywhere, mademoiselle. Nearly dead, he is.”



I feigned surprise as I sat up and looked on the stretcher beside me. The face was unfamiliar. He could have been any one of thousands of seeming gentlemen who had passed through Paradis since I’d started just a few days ago. Slender, slicked-back blond hair, thin lips. Very pale, but that was mostly my fault.



“Lie down, mademoiselle, and we’ll get you to the chirurgeon. You might have broken bones.”



My heart jerked in my chest. Perhaps Charline had paid well to keep a Bludman in the bounds of Mortmartre, and perhaps Louis had brought enough security to keep us safe on our jaunt to the Tuileries, but I was willing to bet that me showing up in a hospital next to a drained body would cause legal trouble and possible hysteria among scared Pinkies or any men who’d heard of me.



I scrambled to my bare feet, holding the blanket around my body like a cloak.



“I’m fine, really.”



All three of the men digging through the rubble of the gigantic elephant stopped to stare at me.



The lead one who’d helped me out was an older gentleman, a barrel-chested human gendarme with a sharp gray beard.



“You are . . . fine?”



I smiled confidently. “Totally fine. Can I return to Paradis, please?”



One of the other men was a daimon, and he leaned in to hiss, “La Demitasse.”



The leader shook his head in confusion and disbelief. “If that’s what you want to do, mademoiselle. Did you leave anything in the, eh . . . pachyderm?”



They’d opened the entire cockpit up, showing a tumble of gears, wires, cogs, levers, and gauges. I didn’t see my skirt, but I had no qualms whatsoever about snatching up the kidnapper’s abandoned tailcoat and exchanging it for the rough blanket.