17. Time Is a River
17
TIME IS A RIVER
A tray finally appeared in the hall outside my prison bedroom about an hour and a half after my talk with Jasper. Only a discreet knock, one I hurried to answer — only to find that whoever had dropped off the tray had already disappeared.
And as soon as I’d picked it up and closed the door behind me, I heard the soft snick of the lock slipping into place.
Clearly, the Wilcox primus wasn’t taking any chances.
Not that there was much I could even do. His magic was so much vaster and stronger than mine that I doubted I’d ever be able to escape this place under my own power.
In the meantime, though, I needed to eat.
It seemed he’d thought the hour was close enough to lunch that he could dispense with breakfast food, so my meal was a ham sandwich with cheese and just enough spicy mustard to make it interesting. Accompanying the sandwich was an apple, and I couldn’t help shaking my head.
Add in a bag of chips, and it wasn’t too different from the sorts of meals I might have found in my lunchbox before I got old enough to decide that chips and sandwiches weren’t that great for me and I’d be better off getting a salad at my school’s lunch room.
I took the food over to the window so I could sit down in the chair there and look out at the backyard. Not much to see, true, but it was better than staring at the wall.
As I’d feared, the day had only gotten darker and gloomier, and I could have sworn I saw a few isolated white flakes begin to drift down from the lowering sky. Nothing close to real snowfall yet, but in Flagstaff, it was usually a matter of when it would happen and not if in terms of getting a decent storm.
Since I wasn’t a weather witch, I knew there wasn’t much I could do about it.
Speaking of things I couldn’t change, I wished this bedroom overlooked the front of the house rather than the rear. I supposed this was a prettier backdrop, but what I really wanted to have was a view of the garage. That way, I’d have some idea of when Jasper was coming and going, and whether I’d have a snowball’s chance in hell of escaping once he was out of the house.
If he intended to go anywhere at all. It was the weekend, and therefore the primus wouldn’t be expected at one of his businesses downtown. And unfortunately, I knew next to nothing about him, had no idea whether he was like my cousin Lucas, who seemed to spend every spare minute on the golf course, or whether Jasper was the sort of person to stick close to home unless he had some sort of other pressing engagement to draw him out.
The house seemed eerily quiet, though, which made me wonder whether his son Joseph was even home. Surely a boy of around three or four would make lots of noise, although maybe he was off at someone’s house so he could play with his cousins. In my own time, people were always sharing babysitting duties so their kids could have a chance to hang out with each other and their parents could grab some free time to go to the movies or go shopping or just sit down and have a date night with their spouses. I had to imagine things weren’t too different now, although I doubted anyone asked Jasper to watch their kids.
Then again, this house was big enough that I supposed Joseph could have been having the mother of all Lego parties somewhere else, and I’d never hear a single peep.
Did they even have Legos in 1947?
Not being able to whip out my phone and consult its built-in AI to supply me with the answer to that particular piece of trivia, I had absolutely no idea.
However, since it seemed as if Jasper didn’t have a problem with leaving me to my own devices, I figured I should try to take this time to get myself out of this mess.
The window was as locked down as the door, so I knew I wouldn’t be escaping that way. Not that the prospect would have been too appealing even if I’d been able to open the window. I was at least twenty-five feet up, thanks to the home’s high ceilings and the way it was elevated above the landscape, and I couldn’t see any helpful ledges that would have given me a place to land.
Which meant the only thing that could possibly help me would be my time travel gift.
Maybe.
Even though I’d grown up in Flagstaff, I’d never had much reason to come to this part of town — the Wilcox primuses had moved on to entirely different houses by the time I arrived on the scene, and I didn’t have any friends or relatives who lived on this street, although I thought I’d driven down it once or twice over the years. Because of that, I had no idea whether the place was even still standing in the twenty-first century. I’d be a little sad if I found out it wasn’t, just because the house was beautiful and an architectural masterpiece.
It wasn’t the home’s fault that Jasper Wilcox lived here.
Anyway, if I’d known for sure the house had been torn down during the intervening years, then I would have tried sending myself far enough into the future that the walls and locks that contained me now would be gone.
But I didn’t know, and that meant I needed to do something a little less ambitious…but just as potentially fraught, thanks to the way I couldn’t seem to get my talent to do anything I needed it to.
Except when I’d had Jeremiah coaching me. Thanks to his help, I’d managed a couple of time jumps that were within a few minutes of their targets.
You had the amulet then, I told myself. Without it, you wouldn’t have been able to get even that close.
Maybe so. But the amulet was with Seth — thank God, because I wouldn’t have wanted it to fall into Jasper’s hands — and that meant I needed to get my damn so-called talent under control.
I’d marked the time when whoever it was had knocked at the door and left the tray behind. Fourteen minutes before noon.
If I could somehow manage to send myself back to that exact moment — or even the one or two immediately following, when I’d retrieved the tray from the hall — then the door would be unlocked. Yes, I’d have to deal with whoever was out there, but I had a feeling it was probably the housekeeper or cook or whomever kept the house running who’d actually set the tray down outside my door.
Jasper Wilcox just didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would offer personal room service.
So, okay. I’d go back to that time, open the door, and flee.
Into a snowstorm that was slowly beginning to ramp up, without a coat or boots or anything that might help me survive the weather.
I told myself that didn’t matter. Thanks to the research Seth and I had done, I knew exactly where Jasper’s house was located — and I also knew where Adam lived, which was only a quarter-mile away, give or take. As long as Jasper was physically out of his home when I made my escape attempt, I thought I should be able to make it to Adam’s place. It didn’t seem as if the primus had any idea that his cousin had been involved in Ruby’s jailbreak, which meant I should be able to get Adam to drive me out of Flagstaff and down through Oak Creek Canyon until we reached the border of McAllister territory. In fact, I could probably get patched through to Jerome using a phone at the Texaco I’d spied on my way up here, the one in the spot where, someday in the future, the Indian Gardens restaurant would be located.
This all sounded very reasonable, and not a half-bad plan…except for the part where it was all predicated on me being able to get my time travel abilities to work properly.
I picked up the glass of lemonade that had come along with my lunch and drank it down. Most of the time, I preferred tea or just plain water, but I was thirsty and figured something to wet my throat was probably a good idea…even though I guessed its current dryness had much more to do with nerves than anything else.
Even though I already knew that looking out the window wouldn’t give me any helpful information, I couldn’t help glancing down at the backyard anyway. The snow had picked up a little but wasn’t accumulating yet.
Only a matter of time, though.
Time. It had always seemed like an enemy to me, something I should have been able to work like clay in my hand but instead was as stubborn as a stone wall.
But maybe that was the wrong way of looking at it. Maybe instead of thinking time was something I could control, I needed instead to view it the way an experienced whitewater rafter might look at some rapids — to analyze the flow, to take note of the places where the water moved smoothly, uninterrupted by any rocks or shoals hidden just barely under the surface.
Why not? It wasn’t as if anything I’d tried so far had been of much use.
In this particular instance, I needed to find those spots where time wanted to flow backward. Intellectually, I knew that time was everywhere at once, that human brains assigned a linear flow to it because we couldn’t process it otherwise, but still, imagining a reverse flow in some places made it easier for my mind to grasp what I was trying to do.
Time flowing backward…moving toward the exact moment when the housekeeper or whoever it was had set down the tray outside my door and unlocked it just long enough so I could retrieve the food.
The clock on the table across the room had ticked steadily the entire time I’d been there. Now, it continued to do so, but with an odd, hiccupy sort of cadence, as though the sound had somehow reversed itself.
Reversed itself….
Because it was now moving backward, I realized. As I watched, the hands shifted counterclockwise, reversing the temporal flow.
Or that was how it looked to me. The best I could describe it, when my power asserted itself, somehow I was placed outside time’s currents, which was probably why I seemed to disappear into thin air even though I hadn’t actually gone anywhere in space.
Only in time.
Sound outside the door, possibly footsteps. The faintest rattle that might have been a key turning in the lock.
Holding my breath, I moved closer, telling myself this was the point where I needed to rejoin the flow, to jump in and put my arms out so I wouldn’t sink.
Sure enough, the odd ticking I’d heard a moment earlier stopped and the clock began to tick normally again, signaling that I’d dropped back into time’s regular current.
The clock told me it was eleven forty-eight.
Perfect.
I put my hand on the doorknob and turned it, then peeked out into the hallway. Down toward the stairs, I spotted the rapidly disappearing form of a sturdy-looking woman in a plain black dress. No doubt Jasper had told her to drop off the tray and leave, knowing the door would re-lock itself as soon as I picked up my lunch and brought it into the room where I was being held.
Which it had.
But since I knew what it was going to do, it was easy enough to slip into the hall even as I pushed the tray into the bedroom. Once there, I allowed the door to close behind me. Yes, I’d be leaving all my clothes in the closet, but I couldn’t worry about that now, not when the most important thing was to get the hell out of there as quickly as I could.
Although I knew where the main staircase was located, I still did a quick inspection of the hallway, hoping I might find a second stairwell, maybe one that went straight down into the kitchen like the one we’d had in the old house where my family had first lived before we relocated to the Walnut Ridge neighborhood when I was around seven.
No such luck, though. I supposed it was possible the house had been built with a servants’ entrance and it had been boarded up over the years, but still, there wasn’t one now, which meant I had to go down the main staircase.
All was not lost, though. While I couldn’t turn myself invisible, it seemed I’d gotten enough control over my power that I thought I could just pop myself ahead in time until it was the middle of the night and everyone should be safe in their beds. At least that way, I’d have less of a chance of bumping into the housekeeper.
Or worse, Jasper himself.
No clock to look at here, but I told myself I didn’t need it, not when the light coming through the stained-glass window at the end of the upstairs corridor should be enough to tell me whether I’d been able to jump ahead twelve hours.
Time moving forward, flowing past noon and sunset, to a moment when the house would be quiet and no one would be able to see me drifting down the staircase, silent as a ghost.
Everything went dark, so quickly that I had to reach out a hand and place it against the wall behind me so I could get my bearings. A blink or two, and then I found my eyes beginning to adjust, letting me see the faint glow of a streetlight coming through the one window at the end of the hall, and the even fainter illumination filtering up the stairs, probably from a lamp that had been left on in the foyer or maybe the front parlor.
Either way, I could see just enough to find my way to the stairs and begin to inch down. My fingers clung to the banister, and I prayed I wouldn’t trip over a toy or even my own feet.
Actually, I doubted I’d find a toy here, since what I’d seen of the house told me it was far too tidy for that. But as the heel of one shoe caught on the edge of a step and I had to hang on to the banister to keep myself from stumbling, I thought my feet just might be the ones to do me in.
When I reached the bottom, I saw that the glow I’d noticed from upstairs was a small lamp sitting on a table in the foyer, one of those old-fashioned types I’d only seen before in movies, the kind where you could turn on either the top or the bottom portion, or both of them at once if you needed that much light.
In this case, only the rounded bottom had been switched on, providing just enough illumination for me to see my path clear to the front door.
Still, I hesitated for a moment. What if Jasper had some kind of ward set on the door, a sort of magical alarm system that would let him know the second someone opened it? I thought that seemed like the sort of thing he might do, especially with a young child who might have a notion to wander in the middle of the night. My brother Patrick had been like that, always crawling out of bed to roam the house when everyone else was asleep and seriously freaking out my parents on more than one occasion.
Well, even if there were wards, I had to hope that all they’d do was send a signal to Jasper and not actually lock down the door itself. And if that happened, well, I wasn’t above picking up a chair or table and throwing it through a window now that I was safely on the first floor of the house and wouldn’t have to worry about dropping more than twenty feet to reach solid ground.
That seemed to decide things.
I still hadn’t been able to tell how much snow had fallen, but in the end, I couldn’t allow the weather to be the reason why I didn’t try to escape. The low-heeled pumps that were part of my 1940s ensemble weren’t the most practical thing in the world, and yet I knew I’d walk barefoot through snow drifts up to my hips if it meant getting safely away from Jasper Wilcox.
After sending a furtive glance around me and determining that I was still alone, I sucked in a breath and walked over to the front door, then placed my fingers on the knob. It turned easily.
Thank God.
Outside was a freezing night with a thin scrim of snow on the dry grass of the front lawn, although the sidewalk in front of the house looked clear enough. It seemed my worries about inches of snow hadn’t materialized.
Just as I began to step across the threshold, though, a hand grabbed my arm and pulled me back, and the door slammed shut, the deadbolt sliding into place.
“I suppose you think you’re very clever.”
Jasper Wilcox, looking far too dressed for the late hour in black slacks, a white shirt, and a black cardigan, his het-hued hair perfectly combed.
Adrenaline had flooded my body the second he grasped my bicep, but I did what I could to ignore the electric zing of anxiety along all those nerve endings and face him as calmly as I could.
“I don’t know about ‘clever,’” I said. “Determined, yes.”
He was silent for a moment, shadowed eyes surveying my face. “Your talent is time travel.”
The words were flat, and definitely not a question.
All the same, I thought I had better try to bluff my way through this.
“Why in the world would you say that?”
He smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant expression, not much more than a baring of teeth, and I somehow managed to hold back a shudder.
“I assume you were trying to jump ahead to midnight so you could slip out under cover of darkness.”
Assume? Wasn’t that what I’d just done? It sure as hell wasn’t late morning anymore, not with the gloom I’d glimpsed outside, the kind of night heavy with clouds and not a hint of a moon.
I didn’t reply, and to my surprise, he let go of my arm, his smile now widening.
“It seems, my not-quite-Wilcox interloper, that you miscalculated. Three days have passed since you disappeared — three days that have given me a good deal of time to think.”
“Three days?” I repeated, knowing the words had come out as an unfortunate squeak.
How could it have been three days? I’d only wanted to jump ahead twelve hours.
Then again, since when had my intentions mattered a single bit when it came to using my worthless talent? It always seemed to do exactly what it wanted no matter what my own wishes on the subject might have been.
Three days. Seth must be going crazy with worry. For just a second, I wondered why he hadn’t come to rescue me, but then I realized there was no way he could have managed such a feat on his own. His gift of teleportation was very useful, true, and yet it still wouldn’t have allowed him to enter a place as protected as Jasper Wilcox’s house. He would have been caught the second he arrived.
“Yes, three days.” Jasper paused there, and although the unpleasant smile had finally disappeared, something in the way he inspected me then made worry start to churn away in my gut. “I suppose you think you know why I kidnapped Ruby McAllister.”
I stared up at him, wondering what the hell kind of game he was playing now. “You were going to bind yourself to her at the dark of the moon in the hope that doing so would break the curse.”
He chuckled. “I suppose I can see why you might think that.” Another pause, and again, that uneasy acid stirred in my stomach. “But no, that was not my plan. Or rather, although I had every intention of breaking the curse, I had no desire to bind myself to an insipid McAllister witch. Instead, she was to be my sacrifice, a gift I offered to the spirit of Nizhoni to show that I hadn’t inherited the weaknesses of my forebears and could do what needed to be done to remove the pall of darkness that has lain over this clan for far too long.”
My veins felt as if they’d been pumped full of the snow that fell outside.
Sacrifice? Was he insane?
Maybe not insane in any way that was covered in the DSM-V. But certainly driven mad by the need to get rid of the Wilcox curse.
Before I could say anything in response, though, he went on, “After you disappeared with no indication of where you could have gone, I cast many spells on this house, and I realized you were still here, in some odd way. And that was when it came to me.”
Although I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer, I couldn’t quite stop myself from asking, “What came to you?”
“That I had a strong witch already under this roof. A witch no one would ever miss.”
His dark eyes glinted at me, nothing more than two shiny, soulless pieces of night under those black brows.
“The dark of the moon is in an hour and a half. You will take Ruby McAllister’s place on the table of sacrifice…and the curse will be lifted forever.”