24. Frosty the No, Man
Frosty the No, Man
The bell above Louise’s shop door jingled with inappropriate cheerfulness.
The time witch’s usually peaceful domain now resembled a carnival midway, with tourists clustered around, soaking up the strangeness.
In the center of it all stood Louise, her violet eyes blazing with barely contained rage as she dealt with a line of customers.
“No, this bauble shall not reverse the irreversible decay of your mortal flesh,” she was saying to a middle-aged woman in a fanny pack. “It merely marks the ceaseless march toward your inevitable oblivion. Nothing more.”
“But the sign says ‘Turn Back Time,’” the woman insisted.
“Such is the deceitful tongue of commerce. A linguistic snare crafted to extract currency from the perpetually gullible masses that swarm like mindless larvae across this realm.”
The woman huffed. “Well, there’s no need to be rude!”
“Rudeness is but one of the infinite horrors at my disposal.” Louise snapped her fingers, and the woman vanished with a small pop .
A horrified murmur ran through the remaining customers.
“Uh, what just... I mean, where’d she go?” bumbled a man in a “GOT HEXED IN OAK HAVEN” T-shirt.
“She dwells now in what your historians call the Middle Ages,” Louise said with an unnatural smile.
“Where she may commune with the pustulant harbingers of plague, witness the exquisite spectacle of public dismemberment, and experience the olfactory symphony that is human existence without sanitation. Who among you yearns to be next?”
The shop emptied with astonishing speed.
As the last tourist fled, Louise turned her gaze on Delilah and Jasper. “Ah I see, you’ve returned. Very well...” She made a vague little wave with her hands. “Get on with it, then.”
Delilah and Jasper glanced at each other, then back at Louise. “Get on with what?” Delilah asked.
“Well, I can only assume you’ve come to prostrate yourselves at my feet, expressing infinite gratitude for how I dragged your pitiful forms across the vast temporal abyss.”
“Ah. Uh, right. Yes, we are supremely grateful...”
Louise nodded. “Of course. Prostrate away.”
“Sure, right,” Delilah said hesitantly. “Actually, though, we’re here because we need your help again.”
Louise went terrifyingly silent, fixing her gaze directly into Delilah’s soul. “You what?”
“If you could send me back to before Saturnalia...”
“You dare petition me for what abomination against the cosmic order?”
“Oh, nothing as big as an abomination, surely. Just a few days, a week maybe? See, then I can warn everyone not to surrender their magic. And none of this would have happened.”
Clocks slowed, stopped, and began to run backward. Louise seemed to grow taller, her shadow stretching impossibly across the floor and up the walls. Delilah feared her anger but the face of the time witch held an expression that was far more terrifying than rage.
She looked . . . disappointed.
“I bestowed upon you a boon beyond mortal comprehension,” Louise said miserably.
“I parted the veil between epochs and guided your insignificant forms to the natal moments of your wretched settlement. You fetus , do you not see that I provided you with greater assistance than I have provided any human in a thousand years?! I helped! I never help, but I helped you!”
“You did! You totally did, Louise!” Delilah could feel the conversation going deliriously wrong, but she didn’t know how to reverse course. “And that was really great, Louise. So great. It’s just that?—”
“Yet my generosity has failed to slake your thirst?” Her voice was an anguished mix of shock and grief. The tone of a creature who’d never had her feelings hurt before. Of a creature who hadn’t realized she possessed any feelings in the first place. “You are saying... I am... insufficient?”
“Oh no, that’s not what Delilah means at all!” Jasper leaped in to try and help. “You’ve been enormously helpful. It’s just, we have this new idea about how to fix Oak Haven’s problem. And we just thought?—”
Somewhere in the shop, a pocket watch exploded into a pile of gears and springs. “The arcane manipulations of chronological fabric do not exist to rectify every trivial disbenefit your kind inflicts upon itself!” A cuckoo clock began to melt before their eyes.
“But this isn’t some trivial disbenefit,” Delilah argued. “This is the fate of our entire town, our way of life!”
The time witch threw back her head, releasing a laugh like the death rattle of a thousand condemned souls.
“You mewling specks, do you not see? Your ‘entire town’ is but a momentary aberration in the cosmic horror that is Time itself. You would have me unravel the fabric of reality because your pitiful holiday ritual yielded undesirable consequences?”
“But—”
“BEGONE FROM MY SIGHT!” Louise thundered, her voice seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. “Lest I cast you into the gaping maw of the universe to witness the final extinction of your species. An event I have joyfully observed countless times across infinite timelines!”
The bell above the door jingled again. A balding man in cargo shorts stepped in, cradling a broken pocket watch. “Excuse me, is this the clock repair shop? My grandfather’s watch stopped working and?—”
Louise’s rage evaporated instantly, replaced by a predatory gleam. “Yes. Enter, temporal pilgrim, and let us see what I might do to you. I mean, for you. Have you ever given any thought to the many benefits of timeshares?”
Jasper seized the opportunity to pull Delilah outside, half dragging her down the street before she could protest further.
“She sent that woman to the Middle Ages for literally no reason at all!” Delilah complained. “But she won’t help us fix this very serious problem?”
“I got the impression that Louise considers human problems beneath her notice. Like asking Stephen Hawking to balance a checkbook.”
She sighed. “Okay, I surrender. Let’s go to the inn. Maybe Scarlett has a plan that doesn’t involve Ms. Temporal Superiority Complex back there.”
“There’s always the Agnes plan...” Jasper reminded her.
“Shut up,” she suggested.
Together, they started down the street toward the inn, as the shadows lengthened behind them like an omen.
Getting to the Stargazer—or what had been the Stargazer—was like navigating a witch-themed Pinterest obstacle course.
And when they arrived, they found the inn was in the same shape.
It was a nightmare of fake cobwebs, plastic cauldrons, and animatronic black cats that meowed the theme from Bewitched . This wasn’t her home anymore.
“Listen, Delilah,” Jasper said carefully as they strode toward the inn, “I have a thought, if you don’t mind hearing it?”
“I am made of ears at the moment. What’s your thought?”
“Well, Aphra said the forgetting spell was getting shaky, right? So, maybe we can use that to our advantage here. Maybe I could actually get to my office, find the portal spell, and get back here, then back there without a problem.”
Delilah stopped short. “Why are you so eager to leave all of a sudden!” Her voice came out sharper than she intended, that old defensive edge back in full force.
“No no,” he said gently. “Not eager at all. Just practical. I mean... I want to save the town, Delilah. Don’t you?”
“I want to save us , Jasper. Don’t you?” Her vision went a bit swimmy as her eyes filled with tears.
She knew she shouldn’t be taking this out on him.
It wasn’t Jasper’s fault the town was in shambles.
All he’d wanted was to help out. But the thought of him walking away, forgetting her.
.. it clawed at her insides like a mouse trapped in her chest.
Delilah and Jasper stood there on the sidewalk, facing each other, caught between the past and future, trapped in a present neither one of them wanted. He reached out and gently stroked her cheek, then pulled her toward him, pressing his lips to hers.
She took hold of his face with both hands and looked at him—really looked at him.
His rumpled shirt from their wilderness adventure, the slight stubble along his jaw, those worried eyes behind smudged glasses.
Her chest ached with the absurd, impossible wanting of a future she clearly couldn’t have.
She’d spent so long avoiding attachments only to find herself desperate to keep one.
“Last resort,” she said finally. “Agnes is our last. Damn. Resort.”
“Agreed.”
Locating the old coal chute required circling to the back of the building, where thankfully few outsiders ventured. The rusted metal door yielded to Delilah’s push, revealing a narrow, dusty slide into darkness.
“Ladies first?” Jasper suggested weakly.
“Chivalry really is dead,” Delilah muttered, but she went ahead anyway, sliding down into the musty darkness below.
She landed with a thud on a pile of cushions, Jasper following seconds later with considerably less grace. Before they could orient themselves, a familiar voice called out: “Password?”
“Quentin,” Delilah replied.
“Del?” Scarlett emerged from the shadows, her hair wild and her eyes ringed with exhaustion.
“Holy shit, you’re back!” She flung herself at Delilah with enough force to nearly knock her over, hugging her fiercely.
“I went to see Louise and demand she send you back... I nearly ended up in the Jurassic period myself!”
Delilah hugged her back, surprised at how good it felt. “We met Agnes Bartlett. It’s a long story.”
“Save it for the others,” Scarlett said, pulling back to examine her sister. “You look... Something has... Wait, did something happen between you two?” Her eyes darted suspiciously between Delilah and Jasper.
“Focus, Scar,” Delilah said, feeling heat rise in her cheeks. “Aphra said you’ve been organizing resistance?”