WICKED TREASURE
Book
3 of the Treasure Chronicles
A
young adult novel of romance and the paranormal set in a steampunk world.
An asylum patient has a cryptic vision:
Clark will overthrow the presidency. She's just insane...right?
When a clockwork lion kidnaps their daughter,
Clark and Amethyst's calm new life shatters. Hunting down the beast leads the
Grishams and Treasures to a conspiracy not just against Clark, but also against
the country.
The conspirators attacked their little girl. An
offense like that can’t go ignored. With his old gang at his back, Clark is
ready to take on an abandoned circus, dethroned royalty, a corrupt orphanage,
and the presidency itself.
Can’t wait to read the next installment
in the Treasure Chronicles
world? Check out the first chapter:
They washed her
hair, so she knew it was coming: the next visit. The nurse shoved Samantha’s
head beneath the water in the tin tub, the liquid already cold from the air,
and she stayed still; if she fought, they might bind her wrists. Last time they
did that, the linen ropes had cut her skin.
Droplets
splashed over the edge as the middle-aged woman shoved her deeper, Samantha’s
chin striking the bottom. Blood filled her mouth where her teeth had nipped her
tongue. She fought to not gasp as the nurse pulled her up to drench her hair in
lavender oil.
The gas lamps
shone too bright in the ceiling. Yellow glows twirled around each other like
macabre dancers. She could drift back into the soapy water and inhale; death
would take her to join that dancing.
“Filthy nits,”
the nurse mumbled as she yanked a silver comb through Samantha’s ginger curls. Oil
splattered onto Samantha’s bare shoulders, pooling along her collarbone.
She could say
the nits weren’t her fault. She could request regular bathing.
Samantha stared
out the room’s lone barred window as tears stung her eyes. Each jerk of the
comb snapped more hairs from her scalp, and the oil’s scent burned her lungs.
A bell rang from
somewhere deep within the asylum, muffled by brick and wood. Two nurses laughed
in the hallway. They all got to go home at the end of their shifts. They had
families and houses.
Samantha could
have pushed them into the tub until the final air bubbles burst past their
lips.
The comb
clattered onto the side table, where cosmetic products had been lined up on a
silver tray like medical instruments. Her gums where they’d ripped out her
molars ached at the thought. Whatever rich sod received her teeth better have
taken care of them.
“Ugly thing.” The
nurse jabbed pins into Samantha’s hair to keep her curls up. “Should shave your
head, we should. Get rid of those nits and all this fussing. Get you a wig
then. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, chit?”
If it kept away
the suffering of bathtime, then yes.
“Rise.” Nurse
Hairy Mole—the huge brown mole grew at the tip of
her nose—slapped a ragged towel against
Samantha’s frame. “We’ll put you in the sitting room this time. He didn’t like
the parlor, said it was too cold. That man doesn’t like a thing.”
And Samantha
didn’t like him.
#
Captain
MacFarland gritted his teeth as he took the front concrete steps two at a time.
The stone plaque beside the door matched well with the asylum’s cold interior.
Wade Asylum. The
only institute in the northeast for the mentally unhinged.
He hummed under
his breath to keep away morbid thoughts, and the bronze attendant opened the
door for him with a nod that sent the machine’s gears grinding. They might
think him off, bringing music into the darkness, but the walls tended to close
in around him, as if he too might become strapped into one of the cribs.
He’d seen the
cribs once when his friend had insisted they come to visit his wife. The cribs,
Captain MacFarland understood, were reserved for those who fought confinement,
and his friend’s wife had screamed as though a banshee had possessed her.
Come night,
dreams of Wade Asylum plagued him, and she’d haunted the majority for the past
year. He could still hear her shriek, “You only put me here so you could be
with that slut!”
His friend had
stroked his fingers across her arm, her wrists bound to the sides of the metal
crib. “Of course. I’ll always love you, but you didn’t like my mistress. You’ll
need to stay here until you can accept her. They’ll help you right your mind
here.”
The woman had
spit at him, one of her eyes swollen shut. No one had told them who had punched
her.
Captain
MacFarland hummed louder as he approached the mahogany front desk where a young
nurse in a low-cut white bodice wrote in a journal.
“Hello, Captain
MacFarland.” She closed the journal and clasped her hands atop the leather
cover. “Always so punctual, aren’t you?” The girl bent forward to expose more
of her pale bosom. The song faltered in his throat as he pictured hopping over
the counter to push her against the wall. He could push up her skirt, he
imagined her without bloomers, and take her there in the waiting room that
smelled of lamp oil. Those pink-painted lips of hers would part in a gasp, and
she might even bite his neck. He loved it when they bit.
“I pride myself
on punctuality.” He pulled the brass pocket watch from his brown jacket to
flash her the time, and she smiled enough to show her straight white teeth.
“I made sure to
assign you the sitting room in her ward, Captain. I recall how much you loathed
the parlor.”
How anyone could
call that drafty room a parlor escaped him. “Wonderful. I was wondering, Miss
Nurse, about how you would feel meeting over a meal this evening. We could talk
more about what it’s like here at Wade.”
“Captain, yes! I
get done here at six if that works.” She chewed on her fingernail before she
tipped back in her seat, her bosom bouncing. “I’ll get an orderly to show you
to the patient, sir.”
He leaned one
arm on the desk and winked. “I’d like that.”
His pleasure
diminished with each step as he followed the brass orderly, who moved on
wheeled feet, toward Ward 8. The machine unlocked door after door, and sealed
them behind, until he seemed he’d entered a box he could never escape. Bars
covered the few windows; bare bricks replaced wooden paneling on the walls. Gas
lamps flickered close to the ceilings.
The air adopted
a damp, musty odor, mixed with medicine he didn’t recognize.
The orderly
unlocked a final door and entered what he assumed counted as a sitting room. Unlike
the parlor with a table and chairs, this space offered velveteen settees. Light
shone through two windows across the chipped tile floor.
Samantha sat on
the settee closest to the door. Iron cuffs fastened her ankles together,
visible beneath her black velvet skirt. The material matched the collar of her
purple brocade jacket.
“I see you’re
wearing the clothes I sent.” He cleared his throat when it rasped, and he
glanced at the orderly, but of course it couldn’t make judgments on what it
overheard. By order of the government, the orderly who attended them had to
have its recorder removed so the conversation wouldn’t leave.
Someone had
painted her lips a too dark red. “You can take them with you when you leave. I
never get to see them again.”
“What do you
wear normally?” Captain MacFarland had always imagined the girl posing in them
before a mirror whenever he departed. He chose the highest fashion for her to
make her feel… well, like she wasn’t a mental patient.
“A shift.” Samantha
shrugged. “We’re not allowed anything else, and it’s sewn on us, didn’t you
know. If we had loose sleeves, we could strangle ourselves.”
Her matter of
fact tone made him shudder. He dropped onto the settee across from her. The
last time he’d sat beside her, she’d lunged toward his eyes, and the orderly
had pinned her down while administering a sedative from those brass fingers. The
trip had been wasted.
“Do you
remember,” he murmured, “when you were a child and I brought you peppermint
sticks?” He should have done that for her again. Her green eyes had always
adopted a life then, rather than the bloodshot, bulging quality they possessed
otherwise.
“Better than the
toys. They took those away after you left.”
He coughed. “How
are you, Samantha?” It seemed wrong to take what he wanted and leave. She
deserved a social call; he knew he was her only visitor, and his boss only
required one visit every two months.
“They don’t
allow me to take lessons anymore now that I’m sixteen.”
Captain MacFarland
winced. Her birthday had occurred earlier in the month. He should have given
her more than the clothes, no matter they would vanish. A nurse probably
commandeered them.
“What do you do
with your days then?” When she was younger, before she realized what it meant
to be in Wade Asylum, she would have chatted with him about nonsense, like
shapes she spotted in the clouds. He could have told her about the upcoming
date with the nurse, and she could have told colors looked best on him. Brown,
he already knew, but hearing from her had always brightened him.
Then, she asked
questions he couldn’t answer. She learned about life outside from the nurses. She
came to hate him as her jailer.
Samantha tipped
her head as if judging his query. He’d brought her a hat this time, and it slid
cockeyed across her head. Sixteen… young lady now despite her frail frame. He
was thankful he’d delivered the white blouse with the high lace collar,
fastened with a cameo one of the nurses must have supplied; it fit with a more mature
age.
“I’m drugged
up,” she said. “They didn’t give me anything, because of you I suppose. This is
Ward 8. I hear stuff, you know. Ward 9 is the toughest. Constant lockdown. Violent
criminals. I’m just in the criminal wing.” She scowled, her yellow teeth
crooked. “We can’t wander. Oh no, that would be too dangerous. We get ropes and
medicine.”
Ropes and medicine. Bile burned his
throat. It wouldn’t help if he voiced aloud his wish for a different life, one
where his boss didn’t make her stay under lock and key. One where he didn’t
have to venture into the sterile building to see her on a clockwork basis.
“I’m not crazy.”
She’d said that at every visit since she turned ten. “I know why I’m here. Someday
the doctor’s going to believe me.”
“Oh, sweetie.” The
doctor could believe her all he wanted. Money kept him quiet and her confined,
and so long as he kept getting his checks, he wouldn’t so much as whisper the
truth in his sleep.
Her pale face
hardened, and she stuck out her hands, the fingernails broken, blood caked
under them. “Come get what you want.”
He pulled off
his leather gloves and placed them in his jacket pockets. Something told him
he’d be doing this for the rest of his life, and was only thirty-four. “Tell me
what the country needs to know.”
She squeezed her
eyes shut and breathed through her mouth, the sound loud and harsh in the room
where the only noise came from the tick-tock of the orderly’s body. He gripped
her hands and interlaced their fingers, hoping it would lend her strength.
Perspiration
dotted her skin despite the frigid winter air. Snowflakes stuck to the window
glass. A trickle of blood seeped from her left nostrils and her teeth
chattered. Her eyeballs rolled back in her head as her lids fluttered.
“Tell me what
the country needs to know,” he repeated.
“Clark Grisham
will overthrow the presidency.”
Jordan Elizabeth became obsessed with steampunk while working at a
Victorian Fair. Since then, she’s read
plenty of books and even organized a few steampunk outfits that she wears on a
regular basis (unless that’s weird, in which case she only wears them within
the sanctuary of her own home – not!). Jordan’s young adult novels include
ESCAPE FROM WITCHWOOD HOLLOW, COGLING, TREASURE DARKLY, BORN OF TREASURE, RUNNERS
AND RIDERS, GOAT CHILDREN, PATH TO OLD TALBOT, and VICTORIAN. WICKED TREASURE is her sixth novel with Curiosity
Quills Press. Check out her website for bonus
scenes and contests.
In honor of WICKED
TREASURE, check out book one, TREASURE DARKLY, on sale now
for 99 cents!
