“To stop Mama’s baby from being born. It’s gonna try to go back in time and stop her.”
The amusement went out of me and I bent, placing Angie on the couch. My arms free, I studied Molly, confused about what the little girl might really be meaning. How could an arcenciel go back in time to stop something that will take place in the future? How could Angie know what the arcenciel was thinking/planning/wanting?
Several things occurred to me all at once and my knees gave way, lowering me to the couch beside Angie. Arcenciels might have much stronger powers over time than I understood. What if they could see the possibilities of the future, and then go back in time to stop a certain thing from happening tomorrow? What if they could go back in time to stop anything they wanted to, no matter how far in the improbably distant future it might be? Based on Angie’s statements, maybe Opal wanted to keep Molly from getting pregnant? Or, much worse, stop the Everhart sisters and Evan Trueblood from ever being born. “Holy crap on crackers with toe jam,” I muttered. I had been thinking too short-term about time. “Angie, I get part of that, but how does the skull fit into it all?”
Angie was concentrating on my face, hers serious. “They gots to have a focus. A focal thing.” She grimaced, trying to find the proper words. “If Opal goes back in time, she gots to follow a thing that went back there too.”
“Ahhh. So if she has the skull, she can follow along the skull’s timeline back. To what?”
“To stop you from being given the skull.”
“Okay. So Opal would go back in time and stop me from getting the skull.”
“And that will kill you, Aunt Jane.”
I remembered back to a time when I had been on the verge of death and Beast had drawn on the skull’s DNA and RNA and taken mass from nearby stone. She had shifted into the sabertooth lion’s genetic form, even though he was a male big-cat, which I had thought wasn’t supposed to be possible. Not that I knew a lot about the process, as my skinwalker training had stopped when I was five or so. But the shift had saved our lives. Without the skull, that shift would not have been possible, and I—we—might have died.
Like my father had died in midshift, his injuries too severe to survive. And if I died, Molly’s death would eventually follow, on the timeline created by the arcenciel. And I still didn’t know what was going to happen on the current timeline. Dealing with time, thinking about time, made my brain tie up in knots. Thinking about changing time was so confusing that it gave me mental vertigo.
Eli passed me, checking the windows. He stepped out onto the side porch through one door and back in through another. He was carrying a subgun, a small, fully automatic weapon, in one hand and his full-length flat sword in the other. No shirt, no shoes. Brown skin catching the shadows and throwing back the light as muscles flexed and relaxed.
He said, “I think the arcenciel is gone.”
Molly’s hands quivered and slowly relaxed. She fell into the nearest chair, dripping with sweat, red hair clinging to her face. Angie left the couch and stood beside her mother, taking her hand; with her other hand, Angie pushed back her mother’s damp hair. “I gotta get this mess cut again,” Molly whispered to Angie.
“Daddy will have a cow again,” Angie said back, startling an exhausted laugh from Molly.
Molly stood and pulled her eldest up the stairs. “I need a shower, and you, young lady, have some explaining to do.”
“Tell your mother everything, Angie,” I said. “And I mean everything. Including about the skull.”
Angie gave an exaggerated sigh, an omen of what they would sound like when she hit her teens. “Okay, Aunt Jane. But she’s gonna be mad.”
“Yeah. Probably.” The two disappeared up the stairs, Molly’s footsteps sounding exhausted.
“That little girl is gonna be nothing but trouble in about ten years,” Eli said. Which echoed my own thoughts. Eli made the best partner.
“How’s Alex?” I asked.
“Still out. He’ll be okay. Pupils equal and reactive. Breath is even and slow at twenty.”
At the same moment, the lights flickered back on and my cell rang. I raced to the kitchen table to answer. It was Evan, his voice frantic and babbling. He had been unable to reach Molly and had clearly been thinking the worst. Which was not far from the truth. I said, “Molly’s okay, Evan. They all three are.”
Evan stopped talking and then stuttered ahead, “Sssshe told you?”
“No. She didn’t. Angie told me.”
“Angie doesn’t know.”