Chapter 28 #2
Fire in my veins, rushing together with my blood. I was on my feet before I knew it, and I was charging for her. I didn’t care where we were or who she was or who was watching—I was going to make her bleed.
Someone moved from my side when Anika yelped and moved back, using my sketchbook like a shield.
But my body knew exactly what to do now that I was on high alert, how to duck and swerve and spin around to avoid whoever was trying to stop me, grab my sketchbook from Anika’s hands as she let out another scream and pull down with all my strength.
Sparetime save me, I didn’t think. I didn’t want to. My sketchbook slipped from her hands, and I swung it as hard as I could—right at her face.
She spun around three times, all the way to the reading desk, and fell against it while others gasped. I turned around to warn them to leave me alone one more time, or I was going to fight. They wanted to know what was wrong with me? I’d gladly show them—and I only needed my sketchbook.
Unfortunately for me, there were still five of them, and the moment I turned around, someone pushed me from the left, and someone else pushed me from the right, and I lost balance.
The room spun. Levana was in front of me, grabbed my shoulders to straighten me up, then slammed her hands on my chest with all her strength within the second.
She looked at me like I was a monster—worse than a clockbeast, and Russ was waiting right behind me to slam his foot on my ankle at the right second.
I fell again with a small scream, but my sketchbook was still in my hands. As soon as they came for me, I was going to use it. I wouldn’t stop, I wouldn’t run—I was going to fit until they knocked me out cold.
So I turned on my back and waited for Russ to try to grab me. He was coming and I was ready, eyes wide open and on him, muscles locked tight.
But then he just…disappeared from my view.
A blink, and the noise in my head faded all at once. Another scream, and I looked to the side to find Russ on the floor with a knee to his chest and a hand around his neck.
March’s hand.
Everything stopped for a tick.
“Do you want to die, Diamond?”
“March, get off him!”
Anika was trying to pull him back by the arm, but she could have been trying to pull back a marble pillar for all March moved.
Levana was on his other side. “He can’t breathe, March—stop!”
I sat up, disoriented, unable to look away from March’s profile. He looked possessed, his muscles strained, his breathing deep, even.
Meanwhile, Russ was choking, trying to take his hand off him, his knee, but March was a big guy. He refused to budge.
My sketchbook was in my hands. I dragged myself to the side, the need to call his name battling with the anger, the rage inside me that wanted him to finish Russ off. Just snap his neck and be done with it, see if he liked being offed just in case.
But the girls screamed and they got through to March, thankfully, and he removed his hand from Russ’s neck, but not his knee yet.
He finally looked at me then, and his eyes were bloodshot, and his hair looked wilder and darker than usual, and he looked bigger somehow. Like his anger had inflated his shoulders.
My heart stopped. He held me together and broke me apart at once. I was relieved and embarrassed and enraged—and I was empty at the same time.
Then March turned to Russ again. “I see you near her again, I will break your leg.”
A simple statement—like he was telling the guy to meet for dinner. His voice was calm, just over a whisper, and he didn’t sound angry. He just sounded like he meant it.
Then he stood up.
I did, too.
“She started it!”
“She hit me with her book! My head is pounding!”
“She’s a freak—she doesn’t care about us!”
“For all we know she’s the reason we’re here!”
“Didn’t you see her when Reggie died? Didn’t you see her when Erith was throwing up, and-and-and Helen? She’s evil!”
“Enough,” March said with a growl. “That’s enough.”
My own body felt foreign to me, which wasn’t anything new.
I was on my feet, and I thought about running out of there already, but I still had to pick up my things from the floor, and the others still watched.
Anika and Levana helped Russ to sit up, and the rest of them watched me.
Mimi and Seth were there, too, and Mimi was crying, a hand to her mouth, looking from March to me like she didn’t know what to think yet.
Me, neither, so I didn’t. I just grabbed my backpack, put in the throw-up bag, my sketchbook, the library book, and—
“You okay?” March asked me, the same second someone else said, “What is that?”
We turned around, my mind too crowded to recognize voices, and my eyes moved from Russ—rubbing his neck, giving March a look that clearly said how much he hated him right now—to Anika, who was still holding the left side of her face with both hands, and then Seth, who was holding something in his hands, something familiar.
The device I’d stolen from Master Talik’s shelf.
My stomach dropped. Shit, shit, shit! It must have fallen from my backpack, too.
I moved without thinking, strode the three feet to him and grabbed it from his hand. If Master Talik found out that I’d stolen from him, he’d never speak to me again. If the White Queen found out—
“Ora.”
I pulled down my backpack again to put the device inside, intending to make sure to zip it all the way this time, then run—but before I could, March was towering over me, close. Too close. So, I froze like I always did, and I looked up with my breath held.
“Where did you get that?”
He was looking down at the device in my hand.
I found my voice somehow. “Nowhere.”
His hand wrapped around my wrist. Gently, but I still couldn’t move.
Silence in the library. Nobody was complaining or calling me names anymore.
“That’s a heartlock,” Levana then said. “Where did you get a heartlock, Spade?”
I looked up at March—what in the Everstill is a heartlock?
“Where’d you get it?” he asked me and slowly reached his other hand to grab the device. I let it go, gave it to him.
“I…” Lie! “In the workshop. I got it in the workshop.”
I never said I stole it, or that I didn’t ask for permission, or that Master Talik didn’t see me putting it in my pocket.
“What is it? It looks…familiar.” Seth was near my right, and the others were all coming closer, eyes on the device. None seemed interested in me anymore—at least for the moment.
Familiar, Seth said.
“It’s a heartlock. They’re memory extractors. Our court uses them on convicted criminals as proof and to make them forget,” Levana said. “This one looks to be old. We don’t make them like this anymore, but it’s full.”
Court of Hearts.
Of course. I was never going to find information on the device in books about Timekeepers. This was made by Hearts.
“Full? What do you mean, full?” Russ asked from the other side, still rubbing his neck, not daring to go close to March, but he was curious enough to stand on his tiptoes to see better.
“It means it contains a memory,” March said, and every inch of my skin rose in goose bumps.
A memory.
“Is it yours?” Anika spit with all the hatred she could muster into those three words.
“No, I…no, it’s not. I just…” drew it.
Why did I draw it? Was it mine for real?
“So, whose is it?” asked Russ, and another tick went by in silence.
“There’s a way to find out,” March said and stepped back. Fell on one knee on the floor, just like that.
“That’ll cost you minutes,” Levana said, but she was already stepping back, too, pulling Anika with her.
“What will?” I asked, unsure whether I wanted to keep watching or stop this nonsense right now before it got even more out of hands.
“To open it,” March said and looked up at me. “If I can.”
A heartbeat, and the words no, don’t! died on my lips.
It probably wasn’t smart to do this, not here and not now in front of all these people, but I also couldn’t help myself.
If there was indeed a memory inside that thing, and we could actually see it, I wanted to know.
I had to know—because why would I have drawn this?
But…what if it was mine?
What if it was my memory in there somehow?
What if…I was the criminal, and someone had removed the memory of a crime from my mind?
Shivers danced on every inch of my skin. I watched with my mouth open as March held his hand over the device and red smoke slipped out of his palm while he called for his magic. He looked at me for another moment, as if to give me time to stop him if that’s what I wanted—and I did.
But I couldn’t. I had to see. I had to.
So, he reached for the pocket of his pants and pulled out his Life Clock, and we all gathered around closer, leaned in to see better as the hand moved and the minutes expended with March’s magic.
One minute, two, four…
His jaws locked. The red of his magic became more intense.
“March,” I thought I said because his muscles were strained again and he looked almost like he was in pain.
But March didn’t stop until nine minutes were spent from his Life Clock—and then the device hissed.
The magic faded.
He stood up and stepped back, his arms out to tell us to move, too. Another hiss, and all those metal strings that were wrapped around the device began to retreat, reshape themselves below, setting the small glass ball in the middle free.
Stop, stop, stop, st—
All at once, colors burst out of the glass and spread around us. Most screamed as we jumped back, myself included. The library was drenched in colors that were coming straight from that little light that had burned at the center of the glass ball.
It was a projection, half faded, but plenty clear to see exactly what it wanted us to see.
The mechanical garden outside the palace.
A boy standing not ten feet in the distance with his hands in his pockets, watching the steam curl up what looked like a rosebush to his side.
It was Silas.
Every inch of me was frozen in place.
Laughter—but this wasn’t from Silas. He was still looking at the rosebush.