Not In Virginia Anymore
Milo
The moment my fingers touch her palm, Rowan and I are instantly transported to… I have no idea where. Not Virginia, that’s for sure.
Wherever here is, it’s nighttime, but the sky seems bigger and darker than the one I’m used to. It’s lit by a million shimmering stars that, somewhere out over the navy horizon, blend with the foam-capped waves of an uncharted ocean.
A gentle and warm breeze rolls in from the surf that crashes onto shore just below the shallow cliff we stand on. The roughened trunks of lean palm trees glow golden in the firelight they borrow from the tiki torches that surround this… resort?
Only now do I notice the rustic terracotta-tiled promenade that Senora Tiempo strolls along. Her scrappy sandals click as she guides us past wealthy guests who dine to the sound of soft jazz played on an open-air piano.
Rowan’s hand on mine tightens, and he keeps me pressed in close behind him as we weave around the individual cloth-covered tables. We follow our eccentric host up a winding path lined with agave plants, and through a small gate to a private terrace.
Gradually, the warm weather and relaxing atmosphere encourage my shoulders down and away from my ears.
I remain unconvinced that I’m not actually dead, and that all of this isn’t some sort of afterlife dreamscapade.
Impulsively, I reach out and prick my finger on an agave leaf.
When it hurts and bleeds, I smile and suck the finger into my mouth.
Rowan uses his free hand to pull out a chair for me at a table already set for three, and checks my wet finger with a frown. Unsure how to be with him, I divert my gaze to the little candles trapped in small glass lanterns at the centre of the table.
I ignore the noisy scrape of his chair’s legs over the tiled floor, but when he sits, he’s so close that our thighs almost touch. Then he settles a hot and heavy hand on my knee, and I suck my bottom lip between my teeth. What does this mean?
I like it—really like it—but I don’t want to read into it. Possibly, it’s some alpha or pack thing, because I’m still under his protection… And I did just run off and almost get myself killed… And so probably, he’s now being extra bodyguardy.
Senora Tiempo removes her extravagant feathered headdress and it vanishes into thin air. When she smoothes her precise finger-curls into place, I briefly wonder what shampoo she uses, but the flash from a large pair of citrine and gold earrings distracts me. She’s dazzling dressed in all gold.
Finally, she takes the remaining seat, then raises her hand high in the air, and gives it a little wave. “Jesus? Tres margaritas, por favor.”
Rowan’s shoulders sag, and he blows out a long-suffering sigh.
I know he didn’t really want to come here—that he only agreed because I made it clear that I did.
Likely, he wants to get back to the Nest and debrief.
Definitely, I’m in for a telling off. And now instead of any of that, it seems we’re staying for drinks.
Lady Time studies him for a moment and then corrects her order. “Dos margaritas, y un whisky de malta.”
He still projects unease, but Rowan does at least settle back a little more with the new drinks order.
Our host then conjures a cigarette in a long and carved holder, the type you see in old black and white gangster movies, but not ever in real life.
Well, not in this century anyway. In fact…
I tilt my head. Senora Tiempo’s whole image is very exóticas meets flapper girl, and I’m here for that.
“Rowan, you are both entirely safe here.” She lights her smoke with the flame from a candle on the table, then conjures a glass ashtray. “Your wolf can relax too. There’s no enemy who can access you here.”
Rowan grumbles under his breath and squeezes my knee. Then he asks, “Where exactly are we?”
“An elite—you may interpret that as a heavily secured—compound on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, Baja to be precise, in nineteen twenty-three.”
A man wearing a crisp white linen suit with a black apron and bow tie brings our tray of drinks. Jesus, I guess, sets them on the table precisely, and Rowan doesn’t even wait for his glass to touch the soft tablecloth before he’s downed it.
I snort a laugh and slide my margarita closer. It’s in one of those saucer-style glasses that was popular way back, the rim thoroughly salted, and the overwhelming fresh citrus scent carries on the sea breeze. Senora Tiempo raises her glass, and I carefully pick mine up to clink it against hers.
We maintain eye contact as we each take a sip. Oh. My. Goddess. That’s delicious. I take another, longer sip, and as the syrupy yet bitter drink warms me from the inside out, I give a happy little sigh and shoulder shimmy. I deserve this after today.
Our host signals for another round of drinks, and my gaze strays Rowan’s way.
He’s still not at ease, his eyes focused down onto the larger terrace below.
He’s cataloguing all the guests and the threat they might pose, a force of habit as much as anything, but my intuition is telling me that we can trust Lady Time.
Hoping to convey that things are okay now, I mirror Rowan’s position and rest my hand on his impossibly thick thigh. He stares at me, brow set low and hazel eyes flickering amber in the candlelight, but I can’t read his expression.
He turns his focus to the new whiskey on the rocks Jesus delivers, finishes it, then asks Senora Tiempo, “About Janus… How was what he did—and what he almost did—allowed to happen?”
She nods, and exhales a plume of fragranced smoke to the side. I watch it carry away on a gentle gust of wind. “This is my fault…”
Recrossing her long and stockinged legs the other way, a contemplative expression settles into the heavy lines of her dark makeup, and she takes a sip of her margarita.
I imitate her.
“Immortality is a strange beast,” she begins. “In the beginning, it inspires greed: an insatiable drive—a compulsion—to experience everything. The hedonism of it all is addictive. You can’t die, you see, and so there are no limits.”
She takes another drag on her cigarette and stares off over the moonlit Pacific Ocean.
“Imagine it: everything you can dream up can be your reality, if you wish it. The wildest highs and hottest love…” Her dark brown eyes, impeccably lined into symmetrical upward flicks at the outer edges, latch onto my face.
“Alas, the universe presents experiences to us along a spectrum. And so, for every high there is an equal and opposite low.”
Senora Tiempo drains her margarita. “Lost loves, lost lives… and lost hope.”
I finish my first margarita, too, and push the glass away to make space for the second. These are lovely.
“I’d lost hope. Those I’d grown to love had passed, their time expired.
I made new loves and new lives, of course.
But then they too expired. And where once there’d been a thrill, there was only a draught.
That endless cycle of love and loss, of joy and pain, grew cold.
I no longer wanted to love, if it meant experiencing the loss. ”
She sits back and takes another drag on her cigarette. Through the cloud of blue smoke, her dark eyes never leave my face. “And from what you told me in your message, I think you know a little of how that feels.”
I swallow, but not the margarita; I know exactly how that feels.
But I also know I still have the hope that she describes as having lost—that I still want to love, in spite of the pain of the loss.
Glancing furtively at Rowan, who immediately stops scanning our environment to give me a small and private smile, I squeeze his thigh.
Lady Time pulls herself out of whatever memory she’s trapped in. “Anyway, that was why I conceived the Office of Time. It was a way to put a layer of protection between me and…” She waves her hand in a vague gesture over the other patrons. “Mortality.”
I nod in understanding. After all, isn’t that what I tried to do? Craft a spell that would slow Ethel’s mortality. My mouth finds its way to the rim of the glass of my second margarita.
“But instead of using it like a shield, I used it as a wall and blocked myself off from all my responsibilities. I let the people vote for those who they felt would represent them well, bestowed upon them a portion of my powers and immortality, and then hid myself away.”
Senora Tiempo finishes her cigarette, then smoothes her red-painted fingers over the tablecloth, tanned skin contrasting with the white cotton.
“It’s been over two thousand years, and do you know what I’ve learned?”
I shake my head—no.
“That with great power comes great responsibility.”
She holds my gaze. But my brain glitches—did she just quote Spider-Man?
Lady Time laughs. “Sí, Milo. That’s what you think it is.
What you have to remember in all of this, is that I’m not human: I’ve existed forever.
Yet, despite that humans have been around for just a fraction of that time, the culmination of the knowledge you all share and pass down through the generations is more than I’ve ever gleaned for myself.
“So, imagine me—a bored immortal—sitting in an empty theatre screening of a comic book movie in New Jersey, hearing that line. I never considered that I had power, not in any meaningful way, I just was, and so I never accepted my responsibility.”
I take another long sip. Then, emboldened by the most excellent tequila I’ve ever had, I challenge the god of Time.
“But Spider-Man came out over twenty years ago. Even if you only realised you held responsibility then—which, by the way…” I give her my best side-eye, the one I learned from Ethel. “What have you been doing since?”
My gaze drifts out over the beautiful resort we’re in. “Have you been hiding here the whole time?”
Senora Tiempo at least has the decency to look away sheepishly when she picks up her drink. “I’ve been gone a long time, Milo. I didn’t know how to—”
“Bullshit.”