The Last Encore (Timeslider #3)

Prologue New York

Prologue

New York

I will find a way …

Pixie was in turmoil. She leaned back against the gnarled trunk of the tree and pressed a hand to her chest, but nothing could ease the pain beneath it where her heart ached with a searing longing and a terrible emptiness.

Nothing could bring back a moment that had been snatched from her one-hundered-and-two years ago.

With all the will in the world she, a proficient timeslider, could not slip back to a precise instant.

Metaphysics was not an exact science, it was capricious.

That moment was gone forever, like a pearl lost in the ocean.

Pixie, as Constance, had been due to meet Cavill here, on Bethesda Terrace in Central Park, but Constance had been murdered and Pixie had returned to her own time. She would never know what he had wanted to tell her, and he would never know what she had planned to tell him.

How could she possibly go on living in a world without Cavill?

She pictured his gravestone in the long grasses outside the church at St Sidwell Manor, and the sight of it, so cold and still, brought her up short.

Those dates, branded on her memory, were so final.

So dead. 1857–1943. It was now September 2014.

He had been gone one hundred and seventy-one years.

But Pixie had seen him yesterday, in 1912.

He had held her hand. He had unbuttoned her glove and brought it to his lips where he had kissed the naked skin on her wrist. And she was sure he had recognised her, Pixie, behind Constance’s eyes, even though he didn’t know it.

Even though he couldn’t possibly know it.

But he had, on a subliminal level. She knew he had.

The realisation that he loved her had dawned on his face like a beautiful sunrise and revealed itself in his unfettered smile.

In his unrestrained joy. After all he had been through – the disappearance of his nephew Felix, the deaths of his sister-in-law Cordelia and his wife Hermione – did he not deserve to be happy?

Yes, he deserved to be happy, but his happiness had once again been snatched from him with Constance’s death.

Pixie shuddered as she realised how close she had come to telling him the truth.

She was going to meet him on those steps and explain everything.

She was going to break the cardinal rule of timesliding by telling him who she really was.

But for what purpose? For whose benefit?

Certainly not for his. Why would he believe such a thing?

How could that knowledge possibly make him happy?

She grew uncomfortably hot as the memory sharpened.

What had she been thinking? But it had felt so right at the time.

She realised now that she had been blinkered by her own selfish longing.

Blinded by a burning need to be loved for herself.

Not as Hermione, not as Constance, but as her, Pixie Tate.

She had needed him to recognise her behind the eyes, but how was that even feasible?

She closed her eyes and let the tears squeeze between her lashes and trickle down her cheeks.

What was the point of loving Cavill, she thought miserably, if she could never stay long enough to be with him?

Was there a point, or was it simply the fact that her heart, like a magnet, had pulled him to it – would it continue to pull him to it slide after slide?

A force greater than the two of them with an unrelenting attraction.

Would she ever be free of him? Or were they connected now, doomed to meet for fleeting moments in the past; a love that could never be fulfilled?

Was she fated to endure this agony over and over again?

In which case she had to put a stop to it, for her sake as well as his.

If she had somehow tied her destiny to his, she had to work out a way to untie it.

The sun found a gap in the leaves and shone a golden beam onto her face.

It was warm and gentle, and she was immediately reminded of that final carriage ride around Manhattan with Cavill.

She pictured him and the knife twisted deeper into her heart.

She was seated beside him, and he was gazing at her, his cornflower eyes full of tenderness and recognition.

She could almost feel him next to her. She could almost reach out and touch him.

She didn’t want to open her eyes and lose this blissful feeling.

Then a thought slithered into her consciousness like a serpent with the whispering voice of temptation.

Couldn’t she hold on to that feeling and slide through the veil?

Would her love for Cavill take her back to him?

She could try …

Her heart began to accelerate with anticipation.

There was no harm in giving it a go. She had no object to link her to Cavill – his sketchbook that she had stolen from St Sidwell Manor was in the hotel – and she had nothing tangible to link her to 1912, but she did have the park.

She was right here where she wanted to be, a short distance from the Bethesda terrace – surely, she could project herself back to April 21st 1912.

If she focused on the park and the meeting they’d arranged for midday, wouldn’t the Law of Attraction see to it that her desire was fulfilled?

She wouldn’t be Constance, of course, for she was dead.

She’d be someone else. But maybe she wouldn’t need to possess a body at all.

She could slip out of her own body and transport herself back, as she had spontaneously done on many occasions as a child when her parents’ fighting in the kitchen below had got too much.

Back then, she had consistently arrived in a meadow, believing it to be heaven.

It was years later that she realised it wasn’t heaven at all, that she had actually slipped through time and was in the very same place, only long before her house had been built.

Could she not, in the same way, transport herself back to 1912 and simply observe, as herself.

She wouldn’t be able to stay for long, admittedly – that was the drawback of timesliding without acquiring a body, but it wouldn’t matter.

She’d see him again, and that would be enough – even though he wouldn’t be able to see her.

To him she’d be even less perceptible than a breeze. Could she bear it?

She could.

With mounting excitement, she took a series of deep breaths, focusing on the rise and fall of her ribcage and the sensation of air entering and leaving her nostrils.

Shortly, she felt the familiar heaviness in her limbs and the dizzying feel of her finer, etheric body loosening from her physical body and slowly detaching.

She thought of Cavill, and her yearning seemed to lift her up so that she was hovering in the branches of the tree, a wisp of wind, a ray of sunshine. Then she was slipping through the veil.