CHAPTER SIXTY #3
Sabrina touched Grace’s shoulder once and returned to her chair.
Margaret moved to the table and set down a tray no one had heard her fetch.
Tea. Brandy. Clean cloths. A small tin of salve.
Food cut into practical pieces because Margaret apparently believed crisis could be negotiated with sandwiches.
“Eat,” she said.
No one moved.
She looked at Archie. “You first.”
He obeyed with an expression of wounded dignity.
Duncan almost laughed again and did not.
The gate pulled a fourth time. This one struck less sharply, but it lasted longer.
The lamps dimmed. The brass clock on the mantel stopped, started, then stopped again.
The hands trembled at twelve minutes past three.
Ceci bent over the table, both hands flat against the wood.
Duncan reached her at once, one hand at the center of her back. Archie came too, slower, his fingers finding her wrist.
Sabrina whispered, “What does it want?”
Ceci’s face was pale with concentration. “It isn’t a want. It’s more like…”
She struggled.
Duncan rubbed a slow circle between her shoulder blades without thinking. Ceci drew a breath and continued.
“It’s like pressure. A room filling with water. The door has to open somewhere.”
“And Voss thinks he can choose where,” Grace said.
“Yes.”
Archie looked at the pinned note. “By using attachment.”
Ceci looked up at him. Fear moved between them, naked now.
“What happens if he uses us?” Archie asked.
Duncan said, “He won’t.”
“You cannot promise that.”
“No. But I can make his attempt costly.”
Archie’s eyes sharpened. “That sounds like the beginning of another noble suicide.”
“It is the beginning of strategy.”
“Those overlap too often with you.”
Ceci straightened. “Stop.”
Both men looked at her. She kept one hand on the table, the other on Ginger’s damp head.
“No more talking around it. We have less than three hours. Voss needs me at the gate. Maybe he needs all three of us. Maybe he needs the attachment, whatever that means. So, we decide how to make that dangerous for him instead of only dangerous for us.”
Duncan felt the shift in the room. She had become the center because everyone allowed it. Because she had seen more of the future than any of them. Because the gate was pulling through her body. Because love had made her afraid, and fear, in her, had become purpose.
Archie smiled faintly. “I do love when you become terrifying.”
Ceci glanced at him. “Do not be charming to me.”
“I have few other settings.”
“You have courage.”
That silenced him.
She turned to Duncan. “You have control.”
He gave a humorless breath. “Less than I did.”
“Good. We can use that.”
His brows lifted despite everything.
Sabrina leaned back. “I adore her.”
Ceci ignored that too. “Grace and Sabrina can build the story. Margaret can keep the house from becoming chaos.”
Margaret looked satisfied. “At last.”
“Archie knows how Voss thinks politically. He has been studying crowds, persuasion, all of it. He understands the psychology of men who need to be followed.”
Archie’s face changed. The compliment struck somewhere deeper than flattery.
Ceci looked at Duncan last.
“You know how to hold a line.”
Something in his chest tightened. He did not trust himself to answer. Grace’s pen moved again. “So, what is the line?”
Ceci looked toward the black window and the note still lying wet on the table.
“The gate,” she said. “We go there before Voss finishes whatever he has planned. We don’t wait to be pulled. We choose the terms as much as we can.”
Duncan said, “You are not going there alone.”
“I know.”
“Archie is injured.”
Archie waved a hand. “Archie is present.”
“Archie may be concussed.”
“Archie is increasingly tired of third person.”
Ceci’s mouth twitched. “Archie comes because if the attachment matters, leaving him here may be worse.”
Duncan hated that she was right. He hated more that Archie looked relieved.
Sabrina reached for a fresh sheet. “Then we divide the next hours.”
Duncan turned sharply. “You are not coming to the ruins.”
Sabrina looked up. “I know.”
That surprised him.
“I would only make you all worry about me,” she said. “And someone must remain here with Grace and Margaret to begin the papers.”
Grace nodded. “Documents. Legal instructions. A sealed account. If this goes badly, we need evidence of Voss’s actions. If it goes impossibly, we need evidence of yours.”
Ceci went still. “Impossibly.”
Grace met her eyes. “If you take them.”
The words entered the room and did not leave. Duncan could feel Archie looking at him. He could feel Ceci trying not to.
He said nothing.
Because if he spoke too quickly, the answer would be no. If he waited too long, he feared it would become yes. Margaret picked up the folded death record and glared at it. “If this is false, it should burn.”
Grace took it from her. “If it is true, we need it.”
“It is cruel.”
“Yes,” Grace said. “So, we make it useful.”
Sabrina’s eyes brightened with unshed tears. “That is the family motto now, I’m afraid.”
Archie looked at Duncan. “Your relatives are remarkable.”
“I have noticed.”
“Recently?”
“Repeatedly.”
Ceci smiled for half a second. Then the clock on the mantel began to tick backward.
One click.
Then another.
Every person in the room turned. The minute hand trembled, jerked, and slid from twelve minutes past three to eleven. Then ten. Then nine. Ginger growled from beneath the table. The fire flattened as if pressed by a hand.
Ceci whispered, “It’s getting closer.”
Duncan crossed to the clock and stopped before touching it. The sound filled the room with delicate, mechanical wrongness.
Eight minutes past three.
Seven.
Six.
Then it stopped.
The fire rose again.
The lamps steadied.
No one breathed easily.
Archie said, “Well. I disliked that enormously.”
Ceci’s hand had gone to her pocket.
Duncan saw the movement. “What is it?”
She drew out the phone. For a moment, the room seemed to recoil from it, the small black object from a century ahead, the first proof she had ever given him, and still the strangest. The screen lit under her thumb.
Her face went blank.
Duncan came to her side. Archie rose despite the pain. Sabrina and Grace leaned over the table. The battery icon blinked red. The date, which had long ago made its impossible peace with 1938, flickered.
31 October 1938.Then 1 November 2023.Then 12 November 1938. A message appeared on the lock screen.
No sender.
No signal.
Only four words.
OLD HAWARDEN. DAWN. CHOOSE.
Ceci stared at it.
Archie’s breath came out unsteadily. “Subtle little object, isn’t it?”
Duncan looked from the phone to the clock, then to the rain-dark window.
Three hours, perhaps less.
Voss at the gate.
Time bending toward them.
Love made into mechanism.
Ceci closed her fingers around the phone until her knuckles went white. Duncan reached for her hand. Archie’s hand covered both of theirs a second later. This time, no one moved away.
Sabrina looked at the three joined hands, and whatever she saw there made her face tremble before she mastered it.
Grace bent over the page again. “Then we begin,” she said.
Margaret poured more tea.
Duncan looked at the stopped clock. Outside, somewhere beyond the wet lawn and the black trees, the old gate waited open in the dark.