by W. J. May
The tiny redhead absorbed this as best she could before turning to her best friend with a solemn command. “Don’t panic.”
He stepped between them with a carefree laugh. A lot more carefree than Rae was willing to bet he actually felt. “Don’t fret, Red. We’ll try again in the morning once things have calmed down.”
The others glumly accepted the wisdom of this statement as he began leading the little troop aimlessly down the street.
With no destination in mind, the entire city was wide open. A thought that was both exhilarating and terrifying. They wandered past taverns and pubs. Closed-down shops and a hundred tiny residential homes—the shuttered windows pulling shut as the families inside blew out the candles and prepared to go to bed.
Gabriel walked as if he knew where he was going, even though that couldn’t possibly be true. Striding along with that inborn confidence that made him seem strangely at home regardless of the century. The others were content to follow. They had strayed off the reservation. Hundreds of years off. In times such as this, when conventional logic failed, they found themselves turning to the less conventional members of their group. The members who took these kinds of things in stride.
None of them said a word as they followed him in the dark. None of them said a word as Rae hurried to catch up with him, falling into silent step alongside.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, hitching up her dress a bit to keep up with his long strides. “For running late, for Natasha’s ballet—all of it.”
He shrugged it off, staring out at the river with a thoughtful expression on his face.
“I’m serious, Gabriel.” She tugged on his arm, pulling him to a stop. “I’m really sorry.”
One look at her mournful eyes, and his face melted into a smile.
“Cheer up, sweetheart.” He wrapped his arm around her shoulders with a wink, and together they set out into the darkness once more. “It’s not like the night could get any worse.”
And just like that... it started to rain.
Chapter 3
Sometimes, a good night’s sleep is all you need to get some perspective.
Sure, Rae and her friends were trapped hundreds of years in the past. Yes, they had lost their powers and ended up stranded in the rain. And yes, by ‘a good night’s sleep,’ Rae meant that she’d shared her bed with two sheep in a stable. But all that was in the past.
Literally.
Today was a brand new day. Full of possibilities. Full of hope that, at any moment, the dice might roll in their favor and she might find a way to send them all home.
But all that was priority number two. Because, from the second she woke, it became clear to Rae that she and her friends had a far more urgent problem.
Breakfast.
The gang had been planning to have dinner together after the ballet so, as far as she could tell, none of them had eaten anything since noon back in the twenty-first century. She’d woken up at the crack of dawn with a hollow pain in her stomach and a mewing ewe nestled in her lap.
Normally, these were all things she’d delight in complaining about. But, seeing as it was her fault that the gang had to spend the night in a glorified barn in the first place, she decided to put her own misery aside and do something proactive with her time.
She might have lost Devon’s tatù, but she still heard the women of the town when they went out that morning. She was still able to clumsily follow after them as they left the fledgling city behind and headed out to the forest.
It absolutely baffled her. The way there were trees where there used to be buildings. The way the river was so clear, she could see several feet past its glassy surface to where schools of fish frolicked beneath the waves. No telephone lines crisscrossing the horizon. Not a speck of smog marring the crystal-clear sky. It was sad to say, but the beautiful scenery bore little resemblance to the place where she and the others were living now.
She’d followed the townsfolk on a whim, and looked out in wonder from her hiding place amongst the trees as they made their way methodically through the meadow that lay outside the city limits. Picking up roots and herbs and stacking them in wicker baskets. Calling out greetings to each other and cooing at the sleeping babies strapped in worn strips of linen to their backs. They saw the world in a way Rae had never imagined. Noticing all the little details she drove past without a glance.
She was far too shy to venture out herself. Especially considering the fact that her vintage Dior gown apparently translated to ‘hooker’ in the seventeenth century. Instead, she studied them from afar as best she could, wandering out only when they were finished to try to replicate a breakfast gathering of her own.
It wasn’t easy work, but in the end she was pleased with what she’d done. At least, she was pleased until she carried it back to the stable and presented it to her un-caffeinated friends.
“Good morning!” she declared, strolling back through the doorway, arms stacked high with her precious wares. “And how did everyone sleep?”
Bad question.
Gabriel was having a reluctant stare-off with what Rae assumed was some kind of muppet-alpaca, Devon and Julian were picking bits of straw out of their hair, and Molly and Luke had made the mistake of nestling down too close to the communal water trough.
It was unlikely their egos would ever recover.
No one answered. But they all shot her the same unfathomable look. She wisely chose to ignore this, keeping a smile fixed on her face as she proudly held up her rural collection. “Anybody hungry?”
If possible, an even worse question.
Devon and Julian paused what they were doing long enough to shoot her a look of supreme disdain. Luke and Gabriel avoided eye contact altogether—one sidestepping a flock of unruly chickens as the other edged carefully away from the alpaca. Whilst Molly looked as though she would rather set the barn on fire than eat anything Rae was holding in her arms.
Only Angel looked perfectly at home. Sleeping peacefully on one of the high beams stretched across the sunny rafters. Like some sort of pastoral cat.
“Rae Kerrigan, put that down at once!” It was Molly who spoke first, stomping angrily through the mud while doing her best to mitigate the giant water stain spreading across her crimson dress. “It’s bad enough we’re stuck in this mess, without you going out and playing in the weeds!”
Rae wilted imperceptibly, glancing down at what she’d gathered. Now that Molly mentioned it, the whole thing did look a bit like weeds.
If only the critique had stopped there. However, the others were just getting started. They were hungry, sleep-deprived, and developing all sorts of latent allergies that should have died out with the plague. What was worse, they all knew exactly who to blame.
“Sweetheart, when we get home I’d like you to call the lawyer at once.” Devon smoothed down his shirt with as much dignity as was possible, considering one sleeve was covered in what he sincerely hoped was mud. “I’m divorcing you. Effective immediately.”
Julian cast him a quick glance of approval. “You should know, the marriage lasted a good ten months longer than I predicted it would.”
“While we’re at it, you should know that you’re no longer Benji’s godmother,” Luke added, wringing out his cuffs. “You’re now something that must be hunted and destroyed.”
Rae hung her head, not knowing where it was safe to look.
“Oh, don’t be so hard on her.” Gabriel left the alpaca and sauntered forward, somehow looking more vengeful than the others despite his sparkling smile. “Look, the girl is obviously trying to make amends. She went out early and got us all breakfast.”
Before she could stop him, he grabbed the things out of her arms one by one. Identifying each before dropping them carelessly in the dirt.
“Looks like we’ve got a stick, a bunch of tree roots, oleander—that’s poisonous—a good deal of pond water, and... nettles.”
Rae looked down at the fistful of greenery that was left.
; Crap. Is that what those are? It would explain the itching...
She dropped them at once, wiping her hands discreetly on her dress as she cast an apologetic look around the barn. “Okay, I deserve that. And I’m sorry for the goats. And the pigs. And that family of bats that swarmed in here around midnight. But you should know that I’m going to do everything humanly possible to make this right. In the meantime, I just thought... I thought that I’d try to make us all breakfast.”
It was silent for a moment before Julian lifted his eyes to the ceiling.
“...there’s a family of bats?”
At that point, Rae sensed it would be best to gracefully exit the conversation. She also sensed it would be a bad time to mention she’d spotted a snake. Instead, she left the others behind and followed Gabriel outside to the sunny courtyard, relieved that whoever happened to own the barn still appeared to be fast asleep.
The streets around them were slick with dew and covered with just the faintest hint of sewage. A scent that was soon lost in the crisp morning air. Together, they stood and watched as the world from their history books slowly woke to life.
Women threw open their windows and shook out dusty blankets. Rickety wagons rolled down the cobblestones, pulled by slow-moving donkeys that brayed loudly at everything in sight. Men argued good-naturedly amongst themselves as they opened the doors to their shops. All the while, an old-fashioned nursery rhyme floated down on the breeze, chanted in the voices of a dozen children skipping rope beneath a grove of trees.
“I want to thank you for helping me out in there.” Rae finally broke the silence, shooting Gabriel a rueful look from the corner of her eye. “That little show-and-tell? Very constructive.”
He never took his eyes off the street, but his lips curled up in a playful smile. “One day, this will all be some hilarious anecdote. But we’re not there yet, Kerrigan. Roll with the punches.”
“A hilarious anecdote?” she replied bitterly, turning to face him head on. “Like... ‘remember when you tried to whore me out for whiskey in the 1600s?’ That sort of thing?”
“Rae, be reasonable.” He flashed a coaxing smile. “We both know I’ve done far worse.” The two shared a long look and he turned back to the road. “Besides, I was drunk.”
“You weren’t drunk.” She snorted with laughter. “I’ve seen you drunk. There isn’t enough whiskey in London to do it. You were having fun.”
“Can you blame me?” he retorted. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been sucked down the bizarre rabbit hole that is the life of Rae Kerrigan.”
Fair enough.
It was quiet for a moment as they stood there. In a ball gown and a tux. Both wondering how it was their lives had gotten so strange.
“So, how did you know about the nettles?” she asked after a moment of silence.
He glanced back distractedly, his mind clearly somewhere else. “Hmm?”
“The nettles,” she repeated. “How did you know that’s what they were?”
It wasn’t the first time either he or Angel had pulled out some random bit of trivia. They might have been lacking some basic ethical and cultural norms, but they more than made up for it with their inexplicable knowledge of the obscure and inane.
The other week, Gabriel had cured her migraine with a tea brewed from seemingly random plants he’d found in the garden. A week before that, Angel had hacked into the living room wall to fix an electrical problem plaguing the TV. Granted, after that, Rae needed to fix the wall...
Gabriel paused for a moment before lifting his eyes back to the horizon.
“He taught me.”
Rae realized her mistake at once, and abruptly fell silent. There was no need for Gabriel to clarify who ‘he’ was. They both knew perfectly well. And while she wasn’t sure if Gabriel realized it himself, ever since the battle at the factory he never said Cromfield’s name. Neither did Angel.
“Oh. Right.”
It was a bizarre paradox. Say what you want about Cromfield—and Angel and Gabriel could say plenty—but the man had given them a magnificent education.
Botany, mechanical engineering, astronomy, Japanese poetry. Just when Rae thought she’d seen it all, one of them would sit down on the floor and hand-draw the London sewer system.
Needless to say, she shouldn’t have been surprised by the nettles.
“How would he have gotten you past something like this?” she asked quietly.
They didn’t talk about him often, quite the opposite. But desperate times called for desperate measures. When Gabriel looked over sharply, she hastened to explain.
“I just mean... he trained you, right? Helped develop your powers?” She tucked her hair behind her ears with a sigh, feeling uncharacteristically helpless. “What would he have done now?”
Gabriel thought about it for a moment. Staring off into the distance.
“Pain,” he said simply. “Extreme, unrelenting pain until he got what he wanted.” Rae stifled a shudder and he glanced down with the ghost of a smile. “But I’m guessing that’s not exactly what you had in mind.”
“No.” She forced her lips into a smile. “Not really.”
They were quiet for a minute, both lost in thought, when he turned to face her.
“You know how many hybrids I helped Cromfield capture when I lived there? How many sets of ink came through those doors?”
She shook her head, staring with wide eyes.
“Hundreds,” he said flatly. “Maybe a thousand.” He tensed for a moment, almost like he was bracing against a strong wind, before forcing himself past it. “Want to guess how many of those people could travel through time?”
Her shoulders hunched as she looked down with another sigh.
No, she didn’t want to guess. And she didn’t have to. She knew perfectly well that there was no record in the supernatural world of anyone being able to jump through time. It was an anomaly. Just like everything else about her. A unique and freakish Kerrigan gift.
“If you’re saying I’m some kind of monstrous aberration, save your breath. I’ve already got my own space carved out at Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”
He chuckled, running a hand back through his golden hair. “I’m saying, give yourself a break. Devon’s right. It doesn’t matter how you got it, the ink is yours now. You’ll figure it out.” He tugged her hair with an affectionate grin. “You always do.”
She smiled in spite of herself. He had a way of making her do that. “And in the meantime?”
He shrugged, stretching his arms above his head. “In the meantime, I’m content to blame you just like everyone else.”
She shoved him with a quiet giggle, oddly reassured. But no sooner had the tension cracked than it shot right back up again. This time, in the form of a tiny Scottish harpy.
“Sorry to interrupt this provincial postcard, but do you think you could get your arses back into the barn?” Molly demanded from the doorway, hands on her hips. “Since we’re all stuck here, we might want to discuss the small matter of how we’re supposed to survive.”
“It’s the coffee,” Rae said under her breath, gazing at Molly with equal parts fondness and fear. “She’s always like this when she doesn’t have coffee.”
Gabriel stuck his hands in his pockets, heading slowly back to the barn. “Let’s make that the first thing we discuss...”
THE MOOD HADN’T IMPROVED by the time the others got back to the barn, but at least the people were gathered on one side and the animals were penned safely on the other. They looked up when Rae and Gabriel walked back inside, and Devon automatically extended his arm. She ducked underneath, peering up with a tentative grin at his handsome face. He felt her eyes and gave her a little wink, squeezing the sides of her ribs as she tuned in to a conversation already in progress.
“—beside the point.” Luke was pacing back and forth. “Devon’s right. We’re here now. And as long as we are, we’re going to have to figure out a way to get by.”
“What do you mean
?” Angel dropped down from the rafters, looking impossibly refreshed as she shook out her long white hair. “A way to get by?”
It never ceased to amaze. She looked just as much at home here, in a seventeenth-century barn, as she did in her ritzy London home. The girl was a chameleon. Effortlessly adapting to every situation under the sun. But every now and then she found herself unable to fully blend in.
Julian glanced at her, trying to follow the line of thought. “Since Rae can’t conjure, we have no money. No way to take care of ourselves.”
By now, Gabriel had come to stand beside his sister. They were both staring at Julian with the same blank expression. Like they were waiting for him to make sense.
“We’re stranded with no money and no place to stay,” he repeated with a hint of frustration, endlessly trying to get them on the same page. “We can’t even buy food.”
The siblings stared at him. Offering no response.
“What?” he finally demanded. “I hate it when you guys look at me like that.”
It was quiet for a moment, then a slow smile started spreading up Gabriel’s face.
“He’s so innocent.”
“Leave it,” Angel warned, but she looked just as amused.
“It’s adorable.”
“I said leave him alone.” She stroked Julian’s hair with a tender smile. “I love it.”
For his part, Julian was completely clueless. He had married into a family where logic and reason had little part to play. Instead, a little twisted creativity was required.
“Don’t worry, princess.” Gabriel clapped him on the shoulder as he and Angel walked in perfect synchronicity out of the barn. “We won’t let you starve.”
RAE SAT ON THE BANK of the river, her head still spinning from what she’d just seen.
She’d known Angel and Gabriel had been raised with a completely different set of reference points. She knew they tended to operate as a closed unit, doing whatever they had to in order to survive. She even knew they’d had less of a childhood and more of what you’d come to expect from one of Dante’s circles of hell. But she had still been completely unprepared for what she’d seen in the marketplace just ten minutes before.