Colton turned a few pages. “What’s that?”
Danny roused himself from his thoughts and focused on the book. Colton was pointing to a picture of a woman’s hideous face, her hair a riot of crawling snakes.
“That lovely lady is a Gorgon. Her name’s Medusa. With one look, she could turn you to stone.” He turned the page to show him a picture of a dark-haired, handsome young man holding a sword and shield. “This is Perseus, the only one who could kill Medusa. He couldn’t do it on his own, of course. He had help from the Greek gods, like Hermes.” Danny flipped to the back of the book, where the gods were depicted, and pointed at a curly-haired youth with wings on his sandals. “With their help, Perseus was able to chop off Medusa’s head.”
Colton lifted his thin eyebrows. “That’s rather violent.”
“A lot of Greek stories are violent. Best not tell you about Troy, then.”
“No, no—tell me.”
So they spent the afternoon talking about the fall of Troy and Achilles’s wrath, of Theseus’s heroism in the Labyrinth, and how Cupid and Psyche had fallen in love. Colton would have demanded more, but Danny wanted to show him the other things he had brought.
As he handed Colton the figurines, their fingers occasionally brushed. Each time a flash of heat started at Danny’s fingertips and traveled all the way to his stomach, where it sat like a hot coal.
Colton laughed over the drunken German, although Danny told him that not all Germans looked like that; they actually had a very nice German family on their street who did not wear lederhosen. He talked about the colonies in Australia, the American Revolution, and the Irish Question. Scotland was a land of kilts and bagpipes, and Italy of wine and art.
Danny took out the second book he had brought with him. An atlas.
“This shows you the world,” he said, opening it to reveal the maps within. He pointed at Greece. “That’s where all those stories come from. Here’s where Troy would have been, near Turkey.” He turned the page. “That’s Egypt, in Africa. Long ago, they built pyramids to appease their Pharaoh.” Danny drew a pyramid in the dust.
“They have their own gods, too, but not like the Greeks. Some Egyptian gods have animal heads.” He attempted to draw jackal-headed Anubis, but failed utterly. “There are different gods for each religion, for the most part. And then there are the Gaian gods.”
“What are those?”
Danny fiddled with the chain of his timepiece, thinking back to when his father had first told him the story of Aetas’s demise. “The Gaian gods once protected the earth. They were cast-offs from Chronos, the creator of time. One of them, Aetas, inherited the running of time from Chronos.
“But it went wrong. He gave the power to humans, and Chronos wasn’t pleased with that, so he confronted Aetas on earth. They fought in the sea, a storm raging all around them …”
Colton was staring at him so intently that Danny trailed off, mesmerized by the gleam of his amber eyes.
“And?” Colton prompted.
“And …” Danny shook his head. “Aetas lost. Some say that Chronos chopped off his head and fed it to a kraken. Other stories say that Chronos took away Aetas’s powers, turned him mortal, and then burned him alive.”
“But the version I like best,” Christopher would say as Danny sat on his lap, listening raptly, “is the one where Chronos tried to reattach Aetas as a finger on his hand. Aetas resisted. He took out his own beating heart and crushed it into dust, scattering time around the world. That’s why some parts of the world run on different times. Aetas’s blood pooled into the sea—”
“And that’s why it’s so salty!” a younger Danny would finish.
Danny took a deep breath, returning to the present. “So that was the end of the Timekeeper. We’re the Timekeepers, now.”
Danny felt a touch at his jaw and raised his head. Colton, golden and solemn, regarded him as though he was trying to read Danny’s story. As if everything was printed on his skin, his face a picture in substitute of words.
Danny ducked his head and pulled the atlas closer, turning the pages quickly. He stopped at random and pointed.
“This is India.”
Colton watched him a second longer, then leaned closer to take in the map. “It’s big.”
Danny picked up the elephant and handed it to Colton. The spirit tilted it this way and that, making the sunlight spark off the tiny jewels.
“Those beasts are huge up close. People ride them. From what I’ve heard, India is so different from England that it’s like stepping into another world entirely.” Danny turned back to the atlas. “Britain’s taken the place over, though.”