I smiled and thought, Yes. Like a den.
Ward is cage den made by Molly. Kits and littermates are safe in cage den made by Molly. She sounded pleased with herself for understanding the concept of a cage that was for safety and not for capture. Satisfied with that understanding, she looked out into the rain through my eyes. Jane needs to go into Gray Between. See what arcenciel sees in time.
No thanks. I’m not overfond of being sick and throwing up blood.
Beast wasn’t in a mood to let me avoid it. Faster than I could stop her, she raked a clawed paw on the stone of our soul home and pulled the Gray Between out of us and around us like a cloak.
But that’s where she stopped. There was no entrance into the slo-mo experience of time stoppage, no bubbling time so we could act outside of it. More slowly than usual, time began to tighten and grind down, something I could follow as the rain began to fall at a more leisurely pace than atmospheric conditions and gravity usually permitted. I could see water droplets slowing and slowing again. When they hit, I could make out the rounded teardrop shape and the splatter they threw as they landed and broke and then gathered into the pooled water closest. Capillary attraction, I thought, remembering that from some high school chemistry class.
Time and the rain slowed again. And then halted. This gradual dipping into the timelines made the experience easier and I felt none of the nausea I usually experienced. My belly didn’t cramp or burn. Relief replaced the tension that had built in me.
In each droplet that hung in the air, a tiny vision of the near future was captured, a moment in time, each different, though sometimes only in minuscule ways, of the captured possibilities of the next moment. In the water on the ground, in puddles, were the ruined possibilities of the near past, possibilities that had almost happened, but hadn’t, changed, destroyed by the choices made. In one was a distorted vision of Angie being eaten by the arcenciel, her blood running down its jaw. In another puddle the arcenciel had crashed through the side wall of the lower floor, the one that now was composed of doors. In another was a ruined vision that might have been Eli, dressed in camo pants and T-shirt, killing the arcenciel with his sword, a possibility that had never been, perhaps because of one simple decision—the clothes my partner had chosen to wear prior to the attack. Could a timeline be altered by such a seemingly simple choice? Or was there more that affected that discontinuity in time?
If Angie was right, then arcenciels are able to see time as I could while in the Gray Between, but see back along a timeline into the more distant past. Unlike me, while working in the Gray Between, they could move forward and back in time along the possibilities.
The idea was way over my head, and it made me nauseous thinking about it. But at least I wasn’t throwing up blood. Maybe just looking at time wasn’t quite the same thing as altering time or moving and acting outside it. Or maybe Beast had found a way to halt what I had come to call the timesickness. But I wasn’t holding my breath. Life was seldom so easy.
I looked out into the droplets of rain that were still hanging in the air just beyond the ward. In one, I could see myself, looking out into the rain. In another, I could see myself on the cell phone, my face like a thundercloud. In another drop, farther out, I could see Angie sitting in front of me watching me, my eyes closed in meditation, but the background was different, not on the back porch. A brick wall was behind me, perhaps out in the garden. Another was me asleep in my bed. I strained my eyes and drew more on Beast’s vision, seeing out into the droplets. The futures there were much more odd, as if the area around me contained the most likely possibilities and as if the possibilities of the more distant future lay farther out. So the things I did in the here and now could make the potential futures more likely or unlikely.
If I walked in among the falling droplets, might I see enough of the potentialities, enough of the possibilities, to chart a course for a future I liked? And if I spent enough time looking into the puddled droplets, would I see decisions I had made, that others had made, in the past, choices that had made today what it was? Was that what Opal had done, looked into the past and the future and seen a disaster that she could avert? Could her kind walk among the water droplets of the future and the past both, and see what dangers and disasters awaited there, and then go back onto the puddles of the past and fix them? If so, that was a power and talent more terrible and vast and profound than any I had ever heard of. Arcenciels had the power of time.