“The Order will have heard about it,” Logan said, belaboring his point. “Who knows what that will do. . . .”
“Maybe it won’t matter,” she said, trying to will away her uncertainty. “We’ve never changed anything before.”
“No one has ever seen us before,” he pressed.
“Well, we don’t live in the 1920s. It’s not like they’re going to keep looking for a couple of teenagers for the next hundred years.”
“The Order has a long memory.” Logan glared at her, or he tried to, but his eyes still weren’t quite focusing, and the dizziness that usually hit him after slipping through time was having a clear effect. He fell back on his elbows. “When are we, anyway?”
Esta looked around the musty stillness of the hallway. All at once she felt less confident about her choices. “I’m not sure,” she admitted.
“How can you not be sure?” He sounded too arrogant for someone who was probably bleeding to death. “Weren’t you the one who brought us here?”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure exactly what year it is. I was just trying to get us out of there, and then the gun went off and . . .” She trailed off as she felt a sharp pain in her shoulder, reminding her of what had happened. She touched the damp, torn fabric gingerly.
Logan’s unfocused gaze raked over her. “You’re hit?”
“I’m fine,” she said, frustrated that she’d hesitated and ended up in the bullet’s path. “It’s barely a scratch, which is more than I can say for you.” She pulled herself off the floor and offered Logan her hand.
He allowed her to help him up, but he swayed, unsteady on his feet, and put all his weight on her to stay upright.
“We’re not any later than forty-eight. Probably sometime in the thirties, by the look of the house. Can you walk at all?” she asked before he could complain any more.
“I think so,” he said, grimacing as he clutched his side. The effort it had taken to stand had drained him of almost all color.
“Good. Whenever this is, I can’t get us back from in here.” Pain throbbed in her shoulder, but the bullet really had only grazed her. She’d heal, but if she didn’t get Logan back to Professor Lachlan’s soon, she wasn’t sure if he would. “We need to get outside.”
The fact was, Esta’s ability to manipulate time had certain limitations, mainly that time was attached to place. Sites bore the imprint of their whole history, all layered one moment on top of the other—past, present, and future. She could move vertically between those layers, but the location had to exist during the moment she wanted to reach. Schwab’s mansion had been torn down in 1948. It didn’t exist during her own time, so she couldn’t get them back from inside the house. But the streets of the Upper West Side were still basically the same.
Logan stumbled a little, but for the most part, they made it through the empty house without much problem. As they reached the front door, though, Esta heard sounds from deep within the house.
“What’s that?” Logan lifted his head to listen.
“I don’t know,” she said, pulling him along.
“If it’s the Order—”
“We have to get out of here. Now,” she said, cutting him off.
Esta opened the front door as a pair of deep voices carried to her through the empty halls. She tugged Logan out into the icy chill of the day, and they stumbled toward the front gates of the mansion.
Traveling through the layers of time wasn’t as easy as pulling on the gaps between moments to slow the seconds. It took a lot more energy, and it also took something to focus that energy and augment her own affinity—a stone not unlike the Pharaoh’s Heart that she wore in a silver cuff hidden beneath the sleeve of her maid’s uniform.
Against her arm, her own stone still felt warm from slipping through time a few minutes before. The pain of her injury and everything else that had happened had left her drained, so trying to find the right layer of time was more of a struggle than usual. The harder she tried, the warmer the stone became, until it was almost uncomfortably hot against her skin.
Esta had never made two trips so close together before. She and the stone both probably needed more time to recover, but time, ironically enough, was the one thing that neither of them had if she wanted to avoid being seen again.
The voices were closer now.
She forced herself to ignore the searing bite of the stone’s heat against her arm, and with every last ounce of determination she had left, she finally found the layer of time she needed and dragged them both through.
The snow around them disappeared as Esta felt the familiar push-pull sensation of being outside the normal rules of time. Schwab’s castlelike mansion faded into the brownish-red brick of a flat-faced apartment building, and the city—her city—appeared. The sleek, modern cars and the trees full with summer leaves and other structures on the streets around them materialized out of nothing. It was early in the morning, only moments after they’d originally departed, and the streets were empty and quiet.
She let out a relieved laugh as she collapsed under Logan’s weight onto the warm sidewalk. “We made it,” she told him, looking around for some sign of Dakari, Professor Lachlan’s bodyguard and their ride.
But Logan didn’t reply. His skin was ashen, and his eyes stared blankly through half-closed lids as the modern city buzzed with life around them.
LIBERO LIBRO
November 1900—The Bowery
Dolph Saunders sat in his darkened office and ran his finger across the fragile scrap of material he was holding. He didn’t need light to see what was written on it. He’d memorized the single line months ago: libero Libro.
Freedom from the Book.
At least, that’s what he thought it said—the e was smudged. Perhaps it was better translated, from the Book, freedom?
“Dolph?” A sliver of light cracked open the gloom of his self-imposed cell.
“Leave me be, Nibs,” Dolph growled. He set the scrap on the desktop in front of him and drained the last of the whiskey in the bottle he’d been nursing all morning.
The door opened farther, spilling light into the room, and Dolph raised his hand to ward off the brightness.
“You can’t stay in here all the time. You got a business to run.” Nibs walked over to the window and opened the shades. “People who depend on you.”
“You don’t value your life much, do you, boy?” he growled as the brightness shot a bolt of pain through his head.
Nibs gave him a scathing look. “I’m almost sixteen, you know.”
Dolph gave a halfhearted grunt of disapproval but didn’t bother to look up at him. “If you keep using that mouth of yours, you won’t make it that far.”
“If you drink yourself to death, I’m not gonna last the month anyway,” Nibs said calmly, ignoring the threat. “None of us will. Not with Paul Kelly and his gang breathing down our necks. Monk Eastman’s boys have been making noise too. If you don’t get back to work and show them you’re still strong enough to hold what’s yours, they’re going to make their move. You’ll lose everything you’ve built.”