18. Chapter 18
Iwrapped my arms around my body. The urgency of our situation had felt real from day one, but having someone confirm that Dusk would curl up and die like a diseased stray had the dread seeping into my very bones.
“There is a fine line between success and failure,” Esther said. “One that might not appear obvious. But as you go forth to cure Dusk, you must know one thing: you cannot change poignant events of the past.”
“What?” My head snapped up to look at her properly. “You can’t be serious.”
Did that mean we couldn’t stop Isadora and Freddie from casting their spell even if we found the correct time?
“But we have to change it,” Kira said. “That’s the whole point of us coming here. If we can’t change it, everyone dies.”
“Not so.” Esther grabbed a wooden bowl off the shelf behind her and sprinkled some contents into the potion.
“How, then?” I asked.
Esther rolled her eyes. “Good gracious, children. Surely you know I cannot tell you. That in itself would change a poignant moment in Dusk’s history. The very fabric of time is ingrained with these significant events itself and to change them is to risk tearing that fabric. To do so would mean catastrophe on a universal level.”
Poignant moment. That was the second time she had used that term. I wondered what she was trying to tell us by using it.
“You’re trying to tell us it’s possible to save Dusk but... not change the past?” Ben asked.
“Oh, I’m not saying anything,” Esther said, lightly.
Kira turned around and glared at me with a manic expression that she usually reserved for the most mind-boggling situations. Like when Allison stole a spoon of her ice cream at dinner.
Esther carried on making her potion as if we weren’t there. “You can go now,” she said, eventually. “It’s been a pleasure, mostly.”
The three of us exchanged bewildered looks. Whatever had just happened, I needed some processing time before I ever made sense of it.
But Ben shrugged and took my hand, leading me back toward the stairs.
“Good luck with your potion,” I said.
“Oh, I’ll get it right eventually,” Esther said, without looking up. “Persistence is the key.”
She would know, I thought.
Once we were outside, we hurried back into the forest to avoid anyone seeing us.
“That was the most confusing interaction I’ve ever had,” Kira said, throwing her hands up in the air. “Are we still doomed, or what?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Or at least there’s a chance we won’t be.”
Although by the sounds of things, that chance wasn’t huge.
“None of that made any sense, though,” Ben said, ducking under a tree branch. “How do we save Dusk without changing the past?”
“Well, however we do it, we won’t find it in this time,” I said.
I couldn’t decide what our odds were at that point, but Esther’s words had given me a quiet confidence that, at the very least, there was a way to resolve all this.
Persistence is key.
***
It took us a good twenty minutes to find the dot of a portal in the tree, but once we had, one touch of the amulet had us hurtling back through it. When we emerged back onto the pirate ship, only one lookout waited for us. He snored softly in his chair, fast asleep and with his hat pulled over his eyes.
“Where’s Ade and Bronwyn?” Ben muttered.
That was an excellent question.
“Let’s find them,” I whispered. It wouldn’t hurt to have a look around this ship without the escort of bored pirates.
We tiptoed down the ship’s halls, peering through every door and finding nobody.
“Gods, they aren’t torturing them or something, are they?” Kira asked, her wings taut and reaching so high that she walked on tiptoes.
“Just relax,” I said, patting her arm.
Esther’s enigmatic conversation had put her on edge. Kira solved puzzles with ease and mysteries she couldn’t solve immediately made her uncomfortable. But I didn’t want her taking it out on the pirates, given how outnumbered we were.
After a good ten minutes of tentative exploration, my ears pricked up at the sound of Bronwyn’s voice down the hall.
We hurried to the door of the food hall, where we hadn’t long struck our deal with the captain.
Poking our heads through the gap in the door like an odd totem pole, we peered inside. I stifled a laugh.
Bronwyn sat on the head table, her hands in her lap as she told a story to a congregation of pirates who sat on stools surrounding her. Their heads in their hands or leaning on their arms on the tables, they hung on to every word without breaking focus.
Adrian sat at the back, his hand smushing his cheek as he fell asleep on it.
“What the fae didn’t know was that the demon who had promised them a fruitful tree had actually given them a seed that had soaked in dark power for three moons,” Bronwyn said.
Small gasps rippled among the pirates.
“The demon wished to sow his seeds of darkness far and wide, hoping to corrupt every coven he met and take them for his own,” Bronwyn continued. “And-. Oh! You’re back!”
Every head in the room turned to us as Bronwyn straightened up and smiled at us.
I blinked. Far from the fear I had expected from her since we’d been gone, Bronwyn looked like she was in her element.
“No, don’t stop now!” one pirate insisted. “What happened? Did the fae plant the seed?”
“I’ll tell the rest later,” Bronwyn said, jumping down from the table. “Did you find anything?”
“We found something, but not what we were looking for,” Kira said, stepping through the door.
Adrian stood up and massaged his cheek. “Does that mean you’ve got to try another one?”
“Not until the cap’n has heard what you’ve seen,” Eyepatch said. He stood up and beckoned a few of the crew along with him.
A groan rose from the crowd as Bronwyn skipped between them toward us. Wow, the power of storytelling.
“That wasn’t part of the agreement,” I said as Eyepatch ushered us down the hallway.
“You’re on the capn’s ship. You do what you’re told and nothing less,” Eyepatch said.
He and his band of dewy-eyed school children escorted us to the captain’s door, and he rapped a few knocks on it.
When the captain opened the door, he was pulling his jacket on and doing up the buttons.
“And what did you find?” he asked us.
“Not much.” Kira sniffed.
“And my potion?”
“Coming,” I said.
The captain leaned in to make direct eye contact with me. “Then you had best be on your way.”
He shut the door in our faces.
“So rude,” Kira muttered.
“He’s a pirate,” Ben said, balking when he caught sight of the other pirates over his shoulder. “Uh, no offence.”
But Eyepatch didn’t bat an eyelid. “You heard the captain. Get on with it.”
“Does that mean we can finish the story?” one pirate asked.
Eyepatch glowered at him with his one good eye, and the pirate shrank into his jacket.
“Are you going to be okay?” Ben asked as we made our way back toward the food hall.
“Only if I don’t get bored to death,” Adrian grumbled. “My phone doesn’t work in here.”
Well, if that was the worst that could happen to them while we were gone, I couldn’t complain too much.
It wouldn’t stop the suspicions lurking in the back of my mind. These pirates would still attack us at the drop of a skull-and-crossbones hat if they wanted to. Bronwyn’s storytelling would only keep them sweet for so long.
“How do we choose, then?” Ben asked as we reached the corridor that housed the portal we had just returned through. “Do we do them in order or...?”
“Yes, because then we can keep track of them properly. I’m already confused enough as it is,” Kira said through gritted teeth.
Eyepatch watched us with folded arms as we stepped up to the next porthole, and I shot him a suspicious look as I teased the amulet out from my polo shirt.
No wonder the captain wasn’t worried with his lap dog watching our every move.
“You can take your time,” Bronwyn said cheerfully. “We’re having fun.”
“Please hurry,” Adrian mouthed at Ben.
I snorted and pressed the amulet to the porthole. In another blinding flash, we were tossed out onto a lawn surrounded by well-trimmed bushes.
“By Aries.” Kira gazed up at the stately manor we had landed on the grounds of. “Which rich assholes live here?”
I elbowed her in the ribs. We were outside the Everhart house, long before Isadora and Freddie had reduced it to rubble.
The creak of the automatic gates opening had Ben grabbing me and Kira and pulling us into the bushes.
“Wow, that is some retro car,” I muttered, as an old 1997 Ford pulled up the gravel driveway.
“My parents got rid of that car when I was a kid,” Ben whispered, peering over the top of a begonia.
“Wait, this is your house?” Kira rolled her eyes. “Someone could have told me.”
I moved a few branches between the two bushes in front of me to get a glimpse of the car as it ground to a halt outside the front door.
I swallowed hard as Margaret Everhart got out of the passenger side, at least twenty years younger and sporting much less make-up. But her extravagant tastes hadn’t changed a bit; her leopard-print coat brushed the ground as she opened the back door and reached inside.
Ben inhaled sharply as she eased a baby, not much older than eighteen months, out of a car seat and into her arms. The little boy, his black hair cut short, rested his head on her shoulder and wrapped his tiny arms around her neck.
“Gods,” Ben whispered. “That’s...me.”