Page 16 of Trapped By Clocks and Hearts

I gawked. What the hell had she done to the place?

The entire room was filled with a constant low hum of machinery amidst the hollow ticking of the clock tower. A faint scent of oil and metal hung in the air.

Allie was busy—moving about the room with purpose, adjusting dials on a little rusty metal box, a machine of some type. Pencil in her hand, she scribbled something down on a half-crumpled scrap of paper on the table. Her lab coat was stained with various substances.

“What the hell is all this?”

Not startled by my proclamation in the least, she glanced up and incorrectly assumed that I was gesturing to the huge glass wall of scribbles and sketches. “I’m eliminating possibilities.”

“No.” I cleared my throat to amend. “What the hell is all this? Where did you find all this stuff?”

Her attention was still trained on the metal box as it softly whirred. “When was the last time you ventured downstairs? You didn’t know that all eight stories below us in this creepy clock tower are a veritable gold mine of spare parts?”

I narrowed my eyes in mocking. “Everything I need is in my loft upstairs. Why would I waste my time going downstairs?”

“So much for pride in ownership,” she mumbled.

I sniffed haughtily. “I don’t own this clock tower. I merely live here.”

She still barely looked up from reading her graphs, her tone as haggard as my own. “Why are you even down here? Look, if you’ve come to yell at me again, why not just write me a note? I promise I’ll read it with a screamingly loud tone in my head.”

Frowning, I couldn’t seem to phrase in my head what I wanted to put across. I needed to help her? I wanted to help her? We needed to help each other? Every way I thought to say it sounded preposterous.

I pursed my lips. “I’m…looking for something.”

“What? Attention? Still feverish?” She gestured offhand toward the messy single cot. “There’s a blanket.”

I followed her with an indignant gaze as she walked around me to peer out the tinted windows. Did she even forget that she was the reason I had succumbed to a staggering fever last night and nearly died? “Let me get this straight. I don’t even get any sympathy?”

“Sympathy?”

“You tried to kill me last night!”

She rolled her eyes. “That was an accident.” She looked me up and down and I belatedly realized I was standing in front of her workspace. “Can you—get out of the way, please?”

Annoyed I wasn’t making any headway, I shot her another frown. Her entire aura was shooing me away. It was highly disconcerting. Normally, women couldn’t get enough of my company. I had to remind myself again that, for whatever reason, my spells didn’t work on Allie. I had to think of another way to get through to her. I clenched my fists in frustration.

Hearing my exasperated breath, perhaps the guilt finally caught up to her. “Look,” Allie paused. “I am grateful that you saved my life and…let’s suppose I was sorry for last night. But I have work to do. Needing to find a way home and whatnot.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here. It occurred to me—”

“It occurred to you…or Chez?” she interrupted with a knowing tone.

“Either way,” I pressed, “it seems that our goals are aligned, and I believe it would be to our mutual benefit if we worked together.”

Allie nodded as she pushed past me again. “Yeah, Chez totally thought of that.”

I spun around to where she’d gone. “Whatever. The point is you would like to recover your memories. And I—” I broke off. There was no point explaining the entire situation to her, nor exposing the fact that whatever she remembered, whatever we discovered, she was still my prisoner. “Have a slightly related problem,” I finished. “Therefore I have a proposal: I would be willing to offer you my help if you would be willing to cooperate with me. No doubt you must already realize that having the assistance of the most powerful sorcerer in the land would be to your benefit.”

Allie’s gaze was critical, clearly still suspicious. But after a moment, she conceded, “Fine. I guess two heads are always better than one.”

Puzzled at her turn of phrase, I made a face. Since say, for example, the creature you were fighting had two heads instead of one, your chances of prevailing would in fact be smaller. But I dismissed my query.

I cast a glance at the plethora of odd equipment Allie had set up on the work table. “So what exactly are you doing here?”

Allie’s hazel eyes lit up. “I’m building a frequency detector. It compares the vibrations of one object against another. It’s simple physics.”

I wasn’t expecting the depth of her answer. Her passion for her work was immediately clear in her voice, in her mere posture. “I thought you couldn’t remember who you are. How do you know how to do all this?”