Also by Myra McEntire
hourglass
timepiece
An Hourglass Novel
EGMONT
We bring Stories to life
First published by Egmont USA, 2013
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 806
New York, NY 10016
Copyright © Myra McEntire, 2013
All rights reserved
www.egmontusa.com
http://myramcentire.blogspot.com/
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
LCCN number: 2013937007
eISBN: 978-1-60684-442-7
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and the copyright owner.
v3.1
To Ethan, Andrew, and Charlie:
I owe you a year
To Stephanie Perkins: TWYLA
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1: Hallie, September, New Orleans
Chapter 2: Dune, November, Ivy Springs
Chapter 3: Hallie, Mid-November
Chapter 4: Dune
Chapter 5: Hallie, One Week Later
Chapter 6: Hallie
Chapter 7: Hallie
Chapter 8: Dune
Chapter 9: Dune, Early December
Chapter 10: Hallie
Chapter 11: Hallie
Chapter 12: Hallie
Chapter 13: Hallie
Chapter 14: Hallie
Chapter 15: Hallie
Chapter 16: Hallie
Chapter 17: Hallie
Chapter 18: Hallie
Chapter 19: Hallie
Chapter 20: Hallie
Chapter 21: Hallie
Chapter 22: Hallie
Chapter 23: Hallie
Chapter 24: Hallie
Chapter 25: Hallie
Chapter 26: Hallie
Chapter 27: Hallie
Epilogue: Emerson, Late April
Acknowledgments
“The only person you are destined to become
is the person you decide to be.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Chapter 1
Hallie, September, New Orleans
“The only reason you want my help is so you can see my girls in a corset,” I said.
“Hallie. Keep it real.” Poe rolled his eyes. “I know those aren’t yours.”
I launched a thigh-high boot at his head but missed, leaving a black mark on my bedroom wall.
Poe Sharpe was built like a spark plug, compact and hard, with an imperfect face that always made girls take a second look. Probably as they tried to figure out why he was attractive. I chalked it up to his smile, his swagger, and an unhealthy amount of leather.
“Why can’t you just pop in and be done with the whole thing?” I asked.
“You have to distract the front man so I can get the job done,” Poe answered, with a fair amount of tolerance for all the bitching I was doing.
“I’m just saying,” I grumbled as I laced up the other boot, “that there’s no point in being able to teleport if you still need a sidekick. I could be doing something more useful.” And more exciting.
“Don’t call it teleporting. It maxes out my geek factor.” He pushed away from the wall. “And I like to think of you as my companion.”
“Only if I get to be Amy Pond.”
“Who?”
I sighed. “How can you call yourself British and not know who—”
“Hurry up. You know how he gets when we aren’t on time.” He was referring to Paul Girard, who didn’t like to be kept waiting by anyone, especially his daughter.
“Out.” I pointed at my door. “I need to finish getting dressed, and I’m not putting on a free show here.”
“Even if I drop a couple of dollars?”
“Not even if you make it rain.”
Grinning, he tossed my boot back and headed downstairs to my father’s office, whistling, “Brown Eyed Girl.”
My eyes were hazel.
Poe and I had started circling each other the day we met two years ago. He carried his sexy in a dangerous way. Bonus, he could teleport right into my bedroom. By the time my dad caught us in a “delicate” situation, we’d discovered we were better friends than friends with benefits. The fact that my dad allowed Poe to walk out of our house alive that night confirmed his worth. A regular guy would’ve left in a body bag.
I continued lacing my boot while staring at my lips in the mirror, concentrating on making them bigger, smaller, wider, thinner. I’d learned how to go chameleon and stay that way when I was twelve. My body was considerably top-heavy for the next couple of years, but there was no one around to impress. No one appropriate, anyway. Holding a different shape for too long made me tired, and the novelty wore off, so now, at seventeen, I looked like me unless I was on a job. Barely a B cup.
I could transmutate, much like Mystique of X-Men fame, but with zero blue skin and much better hair. Of course, her boobs reigned superior. My cells didn’t follow the same rules of time everyone else’s did. They regenerated constantly. I could speed them up or slow them down, manipulate them into different shapes, sizes, even colors. Handy in a pinch. Or in a theft.
Today’s mark was Skeevy’s Pawnshop. All the intelligence I’d gathered—in a different meat suit each time—supported the fact that the shop perfectly fit its name. Dusty glass cases held jewelry, firearms, guitars—the usual pawnshop fodder. They also displayed the forsaken dreams the items represented, but those outlines weren’t quite as clear.
Through the back door of Skeevy’s existed a mysterious space that rivaled the Vatican’s secret archives. Instead of papal secrets, it housed much trashier cousins.
Tonight, Poe and I were responsible for stealing one of its most prized items and delivering it to my father.
Type Paul Girard into a search engine, and you could find anything from white lies to blatant truths. Rumors that he was a mob boss, a drug lord, or an arms dealer.
In truth, he headed up a worldwide conglomerate: Girard Industries. Privately funded, with anonymous investors and elusive headquarters. Or as legit as my father could go and still make the kind of money to which he’d become accustomed.
Girard Industries’ enormous umbrella hid one business in particular.
Chronos.
Add to this the suggestion of my dad’s gangster reputation, the rumors that swirled about how honest his business practices were, and the amount of enemies he’d created in the past twenty years, and the sum equaled bodyguards and fear and my ivory-tower life. The only time Dad let me out of the house without a bodyguard was to do jobs for Chronos, and even then he had a security detail on me 50 percent of the time. No better way to manipulate a daddy than by putting his little girl on the firing line.
More than one hit had been put out on Paul Girard. Only one had been put out on me. My transmutation gene had allowed my body to heal before I bled out.
Others hadn’t been so lucky.
My phone chirped, and without looking, I knew it was Poe texting from my dad’s office, telling me to hurry. I pulled on a T-shirt over my corset and taffeta tutu and headed downstairs.
Once Dad learned about things like time travel, teleportation, remote viewing, and psychometry, it wasn’t a huge leap for him to figure out the best way to use them. He was the leading dealer in the “special” artifacts black market. I could’ve called him a magical mafia boss, but I wouldn’t. Not to his face, anyway.
<
br /> Poe and I were partners. He could teleport. I could change my appearance, change it again, and change it some more. He could get in and out of places quickly. I could gather intel, ask questions, and cause distractions, all in a hundred different disguises.
There were veils in the fabric of time. Poe once compared them to waiting rooms for wormholes, and they were his conduits to teleporting in and out of places. I could see them, like solid walls of water in the atmosphere, but only Poe could get into them, which meant I had to take a lot of cabs.
I found my ability infinitely more valuable than Poe’s, but my father didn’t seem to agree.
“The guy behind the counter will be alone,” Dad said. “Hallie will distract him. You’ll handle everything else.”
Even though he’d made a point of waiting for me to walk through his office door to go over the rundown of tonight’s activities, Dad spoke directly to Poe, like I wasn’t even in the room.
“Why does Poe always take care of the big stuff?” I asked.
A lesser woman might be too intimidated to speak up, but when you went through puberty with Paul Girard for a father and no mother as a buffer, tough was a by-product. He would accept nothing less.
He ignored me and kept talking to Poe. “You’re the only one I want in the back of the shop.”
“Yes, sir,” Poe said. I’d never seen him be subservient to anyone except for my father, and it was because my dad was a scary mother trucker.
Even so, subservience wasn’t in my repertoire. I resented playing the part of the sidekick again, and Dad knew it. I wanted to make sure he knew it.
Dad continued, “All the scouting work we did—”
I interrupted. “You mean, all the scouting work I did.”
Dad’s dark-eyed stare was created to intimidate, and his mere presence was effective enough to sway most people into going along with anything he said, but I wasn’t backing down.
“Taking the watch shouldn’t be a problem,” he said to Poe, “as long as you port in.”
I put my hands on my hips. “Well, he isn’t going to walk in.”
“Then you port to the agreed-upon location,” he finished.
“Which is where?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter.” Dad landed his eagle eyes on me. “You’ll take a cab home.”
“Tell me, Dad. Do you dismiss everything I say because you’re sexist or because you think I’m stupid?”
Wisely, Poe backed into a corner to stay out of the line of fire.
“Your level of respect is inappropriate.” Dad’s jaw was clenching.
“When do I ever do anything that is appropriate?” I asked.
“If you want to do this job, I would suggest you start immediately.”
I knew from Dad’s jaw and the tightness around his eyes that I’d pushed him too far. Now wasn’t the time to challenge him unless I wanted to get rolled over, and I wasn’t about to lose the chance to leave the house.
“Yes, sir.” I dropped my head.
And today’s round goes to Alpha Daddy.
Poe didn’t say a word as we walked out of Dad’s office, but his look clearly indicated I should’ve shut up way before I did.
My look back indicated he should screw off.
“He only acts that way because he loves you,” Poe said.
“So ignoring me equals loving me?”
“It does when it means he’s scared.”
I grabbed my bag and headed for the front door. Even though I preferred it, taking Dad’s town car wasn’t the best way to stay undercover. A cab waited at the corner, and I climbed in and gave the address. The driver didn’t balk when I pulled off my oversized T-shirt and adjusted the laces on my corset. New Orleans cab drivers were tough to rattle.
I’d figured out the art of decadent camouflage. Thanks to the number of flamboyant visitors to the clubs on Bourbon, I found it easy to blend in the Quarter. I had one rule when it came to my disguises: Go hard or go home. Dressing up gave me a chance to step into someone else’s fictitious life. Sometimes my characters had elaborate backstories. Other times, the simplicity of the costume sufficed.
I gave my makeup one last check in my compact mirror. Tonight, it involved glitter, false eyelashes with feathers on the ends, and lots of glittery powder in my fake cleavage. My blue wig topped it all off, perfectly and literally. I slicked my mouth with bright pink lip gloss for the finishing touch, and tapped the back of the cabbie’s seat once we hit the edge of the French Quarter. I gave him the fare plus twenty bucks.
“You never saw me, right?”
From the way he looked at my chest, he’d seen way more of me than I’d wanted.
My platform boots gave me a definite swagger, and my taffeta tutu accentuated the swing of my hips. I focused on the ground and concentrated on lengthening the shape of my eyelids, along with puffing up my lips and making my cheekbones more prominent. I searched for my reflection and found it in a plate-glass window. I could see my own face underneath, but only because I was looking.
It had rained most of the day and a fine mist hung in the air, but the endless party still went strong. I melted into the crowd, noting details for my escape route, since I’d be on foot.
I couldn’t always tell the bums from the tourists, and even though Mardi Gras was only one week a year, some glassy-eyed coed was always ready to lift her shirt for a string of cheap plastic beads. Stories were ripe for the picking in the Quarter, and most were written all over their authors’ faces. The same creepy-ass clown stood outside Oz, juggling shot glasses tonight. I skirted my way past him without making eye contact.
I hated clowns.
I hooked a right down a side street. More warning than beacon, Skeevy’s neon sign shone red off the wet payment. I straightened my shoulders and headed for the front door. Heavy metal bars covered the bulletproof windows. An electronic ding sounded my entry as I pushed open the door. Easy to get in, harder to leave, especially if you held something in your hands.
Good thing Poe would be taking a shortcut.
The register was the old-fashioned kind with ticker tape and a little bell that rang when the drawer opened. Cash only at Skeevy’s. Checks bounced and credit cards left records, and no one on either side of the counter wanted that.
Danny Launoux was my target.
Thanks to my rock star surveillance skills, I knew he liked comics, vodka, and girls. That last part was crucial to my role in this little drama.
He wore 1970s, tinted glasses that didn’t hide his eyes but did make him look like a pimp. The heels of his boots hung on the rungs of the stool where he sat hunched over, reading a Batman comic. A set of keys dangled from a chain on his belt. His hair was out of control, frizzy, curly, and more tall than wide. I forced fifty product suggestions to stay on the tip of my tongue and crossed the dirty, tan carpet. Danny didn’t look up until I reached him. I waited for a reaction. I didn’t get one.
“I’m looking for a ring,” I said. It had been one of my mother’s. I’d sold it earlier in the week as a blonde with thin lips, all Broke College Student Who Needed Tuition. I’d even managed tears. He hadn’t been impressed then, either.
“Prices are on the tags. No bargaining. What you see is what you pay.”
I browsed. Poe was already supposed to be in the back, but I couldn’t be sure until I got confirmation. I checked my phone as I slinked toward the jewelry cases. No texts.
I made a big show of bending over, and then arched my back and stretched. I’d at least expected curiosity from Danny, but he’d gone back to reading. I dropped my arms to my sides with a sigh and tried the direct approach.
“Is that the latest Batman issue from the New 52 series?” My Internet research had told me all I needed to know about the 2011 relaunch of DC Comics. It had also lured me into placing an order of my own.
He blinked, lowered the comic, looked at me, looked at the cover, and then at me again. “That’s what it says.”
“I feel sorry for Batma
n. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have to hide your identity. Never to be truly close to a woman. I like to get close. Don’t you?”
“I don’t care how hot you are. I’m not going to lower my prices because you’re coming on to me,” Danny said in a monotone. Definitely not distracted. More like bored.
Damn. I’d hoped my fierce comics knowledge would work in my favor in case my flirting didn’t. “I’m not coming—”
“I know how women are,” he said in a Cajun drawl. “And I could smell you angling for a deal when you walked in the door.”
He could smell me? Jackass. I hated to use my sexuality for evil, and here he was, trivializing my effort.
“I happen to like Batman, and I told you, I want a ring. Show me the blue one.”
He dropped his reading material with a sigh and slammed the side of his fist into the register drawer. It popped open, and he fished a set of keys from underneath a stack of twenties. If he could open the register with nothing less than a punch and wasn’t afraid to let a customer know it, he wasn’t worried about what was in the cash drawer. This confirmed his main concern was for whatever lurked behind the vaulted door on the far wall.
It was certainly mine.
“Is that a blue topaz?” I asked.
He squinted at the ring in question. “Aquamarine.”
I checked my phone again as Danny leaned over to open the case. Nothing from Poe. An uneasy feeling stirred in the pit of my stomach.
Danny cleared his throat, and I realized he was holding out the ring for me. I dropped my phone into my bag. “How much?”
“Three hundred and fifty.”
Broke College Me had let it go for a hundred.
I took the ring and held it up to the light. “Do you have an appraisal?”
He snorted. “Hello. You’re in a pawnshop.”
“Who sold it to you?” I asked.
“We have a privacy policy.”
I didn’t budge.
He looked from me to the ring and back again. “Two hundred.”
“Is that how much you paid for it?”
“Two. That’s the price.”
Infinityglass Page 1