Read Online Curio by Evangeline Denmark - Free Book Online Page B

Chemist attack she’d faced?
    Haimon drew near, his expression distorted as though she looked at him through a peephole. His beady eyes jumped into hers. “Find him and bring him back.”
    What?
    â€œFind him and bring him back, Grey.”
    Haimon disappeared. Grey lost all contact with her body for a moment. Sensation returned like the current of a rushing river. She tumbled down, her bones and skin lost amongst the fluid force. The pressure built in her ears and pushed at the back of her eyeballs. Rose-colored fog filled her vision.
    Then, nothing.

    A shape plummeted through the fog hanging over Curio City. Blaise jerked midflight, dipping into a lower airstream before regaining altitude. He shook his head and scanned the mist-shrouded horizon. He hadn’t really just seen something fall out of the sky, had he?
    He disengaged the fins on his boots and let his legs drop beneath him so that he hovered above the roofs of Blue Willow Heights. Pushing his goggles up to his forehead, he inspected the gables and steep pitches. Nothing unusual. No cries of alarm rang out. The quiet neighborhood in the fashionable part of town was all dark windows and orange streetlights. A few carriages bumped along the bordering streets—porcies returning from the evening’s entertainment.
    Blaise ascended a few feet, an eye on the approaching vehicles. Humid air coated his skin despite the constant whoosh of the canvas wings. The fog clouded his eyes, and he dragged his shirtsleeve over his face, blinking hard to clear his vision. Still nothing out of the ordinary.
    He pulled the bellow cord at his side and the pack on his back hummed with building steam. The wings beat harder, and he engaged the steering fins on his boots. Angling back into a horizontal position, he readied himself for flight.
    The hair on his arms and the back of his neck rose. A twang of excitement passed through his core. He paused before turning in the direction of Sir Hinderoot’s home. He had seen an object fall into Curio. Certainty built with every second. Nothing had fallen out of the strange, fog-laden sky over Curio for one hundred years. Not since he’d tumbled, bleeding and terrified, into a world where one home replicated into twenty or thirty, streets and gardens sprang into existence, and people—the strangest people—went from motionless figures to walking, talking beings.
    Sir Hinderoot’s tune-up would have to wait. Anticipation coiled in Blaise’s gut, and a tug drew him toward the falling object’s trajectory. He fitted his goggles over his eyes and took off in the direction of the newest curiosity in Curio City.

    Pain jerked Grey out of numbness. Her head throbbed. Rhythmic flapping broke through the darkness cradling her. The whooshing sound changed into running footsteps.
    She had to get up.
    She struggled to open her eyes.
    Muggy heat filled her nostrils, blocking breath. Her mind swam.
    The footsteps slapped nearer, jarring her head. Someone bent over her. Creaking and muted jangling seemed to come from all sides. The scents of sawdust, machine oil, and sweat blended with the sticky air. A rough hand touched her cheek.
    Grey’s lids fluttered just as another sound invaded—the cadence of many feet. The shape kneeling beside her jerked. Rope-like strands whipped through the darkness and a strange outline came into view. A wing? Shouts rang out and the winged being bolted away.
    She strained to hear the flapping noise again, but the thud of the marching feet pounded nearer, sending reverberations through the surface beneath her. Wincing, she lifted her face then eased her upper body off the wet pavestones with her elbows. She lay in a darkened street. A layer of fog overhead gathered light from street lamps and shed a faint brown glow over her surroundings. Vague outlines of buildings lined her peripheral vision.
    Grey peered at the approaching figures. They moved as one entity, their clanging