“Forget about it, Cathy,” said Elegy. She squeezed her eyes shut, and as she did, the bar shifted and stretched until it was the Renaissance Tavern from before. The door blew open and Shakespeare hurtled inside. He landed on the floor with a grunt.
Warily, he gazed around him at the surroundings. “Does that door even lead to the outside anymore?” he asked. “Or am I trapped in this bar for all eternity, destined to be tortured for my indiscretions?”
I furrowed my brow. “You said whatever you did to him before scrambled his wits completely. You said he was like a vegetable.”
“Right,” said Elegy, “in the outside world, he would have been. But in the bar, he’s still out of time, so the consequences don’t take full effect.”
Sometimes, I really thought she just made up the rules to suit herself. She had an answer for everything.
Elegy stalked over to Shakespeare. She stood over him, her arms crossed. “You need to apologize to Lizzy.”
Shakespeare sat up. He peered around Elegy at Lizzy. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Truthfully, I think I really like men better than women. I’m not sure I’m as good at being in love with them.”
“Ha!” said Elegy. “I knew he was gay. Didn’t I tell you he was gay?”
“I’m okay,” said Lizzy. “You didn’t damage me permanently.”
Shakespeare swallowed. “I know the world isn’t always fair to women. I mean to write about it someday.”
“You will,” said Elegy. “Now get the hell out of here and have a fabulous life.” She knelt next to him and placed her fingers on his forehead. They glowed. “That should undo any damage I did before.”
Shakespeare blinked hard and shied away from her hand. He looked at the door. He looked back at Elegy. “I can go? Really? I won’t just walk back into this bar if I open that door?”
“You can go,” said Elegy.
He got to his feet and went to the door. His hand on the doorknob, he looked back at Lizzy. “I really am sorry.”
She nodded. “It’s okay, Will. It’s really okay.”
He swung the door open and left the bar.
It was quiet.
Lizzy dragged her toe against the floor, not looking at any one. I looked from Elegy to Lizzy and then down at my fingernails, which seemed easier to look at than anything else.
Elegy snapped her fingers and the bar shifted back to its regular sports bar set up. She started humming to herself as she bustled behind the bar. “So,” she said, “who wants a drink? A drink will make everything better.”
I really didn’t think that was true, but Elegy sure said it enough.
“Can I have one of those rum runner things you’re always making Cathy?” Lizzy asked.
“Of course,” said Elegy. She began to bustle around behind the bar, making the drink. She seemed overly cheerful, even for Elegy. “You’re going to love this drink. It’s going to be your favorite from here on out, I can just tell.”
Lizzy snorted, settling into a stool in front of the bar. “Are you just saying that, or can you see my future?”
Elegy smiled. “Not in the bar, I can’t. The bar’s out of time. I have no idea what goes on here. Only what happens on earth. So... it’s just a prediction. I’m trying to lighten the mood.”
Sure. Because if she was going to be a crazy, glowing, wrathful goddess at any second, it was nice to know she went back to kooky bartender at a second’s notice. Did I want to be stuck here? Did I have any choice, really?
“How about you, sidekick?” Elegy asked me.
“I think I’d just like a coffee, actually,” I said. I sat down next to Lizzy.
Elegy stuck out her lower lip at me. “Boring.”
Lizzy jabbed me in the side playfully. “Yeah, come on, live a little, Cathy. Have a real drink.”
I gaped at them. Two seconds ago, everything was all doom and gloom and crazy excitement, and now we were just pretending none of that had happened, huh? Fine. Whatever. “Maybe you could put a little liquor in the coffee.”
“That’s my girl,” said Elegy. She finished Lizzy’s drink and slid it down the bar to her.
Lizzy stirred it with its straw thoughtfully. “It was weird to see him again.”
“Shakespeare?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I always thought that if I saw him, I wouldn’t be able to take it. I really did love him, you know. But I guess that’s the thing about exes. They’re always larger than life in your memory. Then when you see them in real life, they’re just human-sized.”
“Are they?” asked Elegy. She was brewing my coffee. She looked up from the coffee maker to give Lizzy a sincere stare, as if she really wanted the answer. Did Elegy have exes? Could goddesses of fate really date? She didn’t love Kellen. Was there someone else she loved?
“Yeah,” said Lizzy. “They are.” She turned to me. “Don’t you think so?”
I shrugged. “I don’t have very many exes, I guess. Just Richard. He almost killed me, so if I saw him again—”
“You won’t,” Elegy interrupted. “I swear that you will never see him again. I promise.”
I guess she was trying to reassure me. But I wasn’t sure that I was completely okay with being trapped in this bar for eternity. I wasn’t sure at all. However, I had absolutely no idea how to get out. If what Elegy said was true, the minute I left the bar, the Fates would see to it that I died, since I was supposed to be dead. But was living in this place, unstuck from time really that much better than being dead? What kind of life could I have here? I’d asked before if I could date. Elegy hadn’t really answered me. I glanced sidelong at Lizzy. She wasn’t much better off, I guessed. She could go out and fix time paradoxes, but her life was stopped as well. Once she’d been a bar wench who’d loved Shakespeare. Once, she’d nearly had a child. Now... “So, Lizzy, you’re a volur, right?”
She looked at me like I was an idiot. “I thought we’d already established that.”
“Does that mean you’re, like, dead? I mean, do you age?” I asked.
Lizzy shrugged. “I don’t really know.”
Elegy brought me my spiked coffee. “Not in the bar, she doesn’t. There’s no time here.”
Huh. So I guessed that meant I didn’t age either. Weird. “Can you, like, get pregnant if you’re a volur?”
Lizzy chuckled. “Getting pregnant requires having sex with a guy, Cathy. And in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lack of men in this bar.”
“What about another volur?” I asked. “If you were both together—”
“Not in the bar,” said Elegy. She sounded bitter, suddenly. “You can’t get pregnant in the bar. Not if you’re a volur, a sidekick, or a goddess of fate. There’s just no way to have a relationship here.”
“Oh,” I said. I gazed down into my coffee.
“Bottoms up, girls,” Elegy said. Her cheerfulness sounded even more forced. “There’s nothing like a drink for what ails you.”
3: The One That Got Away
Achava Zenon stormed into the bar, slamming the door behind her. She clutched her head with one hand. “Shit!” she said.
Achava was a volur, which was a person who was unstuck in time and traveled around fixing time paradoxes. Achava hailed from sometime in the twenty-fourth century, from what I gathered. Unfortunately, the bar we were in translated everything to a language I could understand, so I had no idea what slang was like in the future.
Elegy Flynn, the bartender and Fate who chauffeured volurs around in time, looked up from the bar. “You know, ever since I picked up Catherine, the success rate of volurs has gone way down. Don’t tell me you couldn’t stop him.”
“He hit me over the head with a lamp,” said Achava. “I’ve been unconscious. I’m lucky I even found the bar at all. The paradox is already getting started.”
I spoke up. I was sitting at the end of the bar, swiveling on a stool and sipping a rum runner through a straw. Rum runners were my favorite drinks. “Could someone explain to me how thes
e paradoxes work exactly? Like, when we were saving Hitler, there was a paradox outside, but when we went back in time to get the time travelers into the bar, there wasn’t one. So, do the paradoxes radiate out from the future into the past or—”
“Stop trying to figure it out, Catherine,” said Elegy. She sighed. “So, you didn’t stop him,” she said to Achava.
“I tried,” said Achava, settling on a barstool. “He knocked me out.”
“So you said,” said Elegy.
“Can I have some ice?” asked Achava. “I think I’m developing a knot here. For all I know, I have a concussion. Can you take me to the sixtieth century? The medical advances during that time are really the best. After that, the whole apocalypse thing really starts to put a cramp in finding a doctor.”
“Wait,” I said. “When’s the apocalypse?”
Elegy set a bag of ice wrapped in a towel in front of Achava. “She’s exaggerating,” she told me. “It’s not really an apocalypse. It’s more of a fall of civilization.”
“You say tomato...” said Achava, putting the ice on her forehead. “Look, this guy is completely off his rocker. He’s crazed and violent. He wants that girl back really bad.”
Achava had been trying to stop some guy from going back in time to convince the girl he had a crush on in high school to date him. If he were successful, which he apparently had been, this would mean that he’d have no reason in the future to go back to the past, thus creating a time paradox. One couldn’t screw with the fabric of time. It messed everything up. That was our job—making sure time ran smoothly. I was stuck in the bar because Elegy had saved me from my abusive boyfriend killing me. I couldn’t leave, because I didn’t belong in any time stream anymore. If I did, the universe would zap me or something.
Achava was still talking. “So, I think what you’ll need to do is find someone else with more upper body strength, if you know what I mean. They can fight it out with him.”
“I thought you said this one was going to be easy,” I said to Elegy. “You said that we weren’t messing with any big historical figures this time, and it would be a piece of cake. You said you’d take me to the fiftieth century so I could communicate by mind-beaming.” Apparently, people stopped using words in the fiftieth century.
“I’m sorry,” said Elegy. “I thought it would be easy.”
“Sorry,” said Achava to me. “I didn’t know he was going to start flinging shit at me.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I understand about violent men.” After all, my ex Richard had beat me all the time.
Elegy made a face like she was thinking very hard. “There’s no one else, Achava. Everyone’s busy right now.”
“Busy?” I said. “How could they be busy? What are they doing?”
“Fixing time paradoxes with other Fates, of course,” said Elegy.
“Hold up,” I said. “You never told me there were other Fates doing this. I thought we were the only ones. You mean there are other time traveling bars?”
“Well, not bars exactly,” said Achava. “I think the praxidae that Clothos uses looks like a hair salon a lot of the time.”
Hair salon? Seriously?
“Elegy’s is the coolest,” Achava continued. “You get free drinks here. Speaking of which, can I have Sex on the Transvids?”
“Transvids?”
“They’re like virtual reality,” Achava told me. “Everyone uses them in my time period. Actually, it’s sort of funny, because a lot of people only get virtually drunk in the 2410s, so even though there’s a real drink called Sex on the Transvids, people also order them when they actually are on the transvids, so there are all these layers of weird, right?”
I scrunched up my nose. “Um... yeah.”
“I don’t know how to make that,” said Elegy. She gestured around at the surroundings of the bar, which looked like a sports bar from the 1980s. Elegy really liked the 1980s. “I’ve told you before. Nothing that wasn’t invented before 1989.”
Achava rolled her eyes. “Fine, then. How about a Liquid Cocaine?”
Elegy made another face. She bent down under the bar and pulled out a bartender’s bible. She paged through it, looking for the recipe for Achava’s drink. Once she found it, she started to mix together various liquors in a shaker glass.
“So, there’s really no one?” Achava took the ice pack away from her head and gingerly touched the place her bump was.
Elegy scooped ice into Achava’s drink. “Well, there’s Kellen, but things are touchy between us right now.”
Elegy and Kellen were fuck buddies, but Kellen wanted more. Elegy didn’t. It was all screwed up. That was why being fuck buddies never worked. I didn’t know why people even tried it. It was a recipe for disaster.
“I can’t go back out anyway,” said Achava, “because I’d be crossing my own timeline. So, I think you’ve got to go pick him up. But, seriously, can we make a pit stop someplace with good hospitals?”
Elegy shook the drink up and strained it into a shot glass. “I’m thinking we should try something else.”
Achava picked up the drink. “This is a shot.”
“That’s what my recipe was for,” said Elegy.
“Yeah, but I wanted a whole drink.”
“Well, I only had a recipe for a shot.”
“So double the shot recipe and turn it into a drink,” said Achava.
Elegy glared at her.
Achava shrugged. She sipped at the shot. “This is fine. Thanks, Elegy.”
Elegy tapped her chin with her forefinger. “Let’s just take the bar back to right when he gets out of the time portal and try to get him inside. I’ll talk some sense into him.”
“That’s what we did when Kellen screwed up,” I said.
“Let’s not talk about him,” said Elegy.
“It’s not going to work,” said Achava, taking another sip from her drink. “He’s on a mission. He won’t come into the bar.”
“We’ll see,” said Elegy.
* * *
Elegy and I stood in the doorway to the bar, the door flung open beside us. We waved at the guy who was coming out of a time portal. The outside of the bar was a city street, pretty normal looking except for the fact that the cars parked on the street had a decidedly different look. They were smaller, squatter, more rounded and aerodynamic, and they all had big solar panels opened on top of them, pulling in sunlight. I guessed the world would eventually lose its dependence on fossil fuels. I wanted to ask Elegy about it, but she wasn’t paying any attention to me.
“Hey, you!” she yelled. “Come over here!”
The guy glanced at us, shook his head, and started walking the opposite direction.
“Let’s flash him,” said Elegy, pulling at the hem of her shirt.
“Uh...” I didn’t want to flash this strange guy. I didn’t move.
But Elegy had her shirt up to her armpits.
I looked away. I didn’t want to see Elegy’s boobs. Actually, I didn’t even understand why she had boobs. She wasn’t human. She was a Fate. Was her human-looking body really just an illusion, like everything else in the bar? If so, why didn’t she shift appearance any time she wanted? If I could look like anyone, I’ d change my body type and hair color and shape of my nose—
“Come on, dude.” Elegy was putting her shirt back in place, thank God. She stalked back inside the bar. I followed her, closing the door. Elegy sat down next to Achava. “You were right.”
“Told you,” said Achava. She finished the last sip of her drink. “Did you really flash him?”
“Of course I did,” said Elegy. “Catherine didn’t, though. Chicken.”
“I have self respect.” I plopped down next to my half-empty rum runner. “I don’t just go around showing my boobs to guys.”
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” said Elegy. “They’re just breasts. They’re big globs of fat attached to your chest that men find interesting because of a primitive instinct that chicks with bigger brea
sts will be better able to feed the children they hope to sire on them.”
I rolled my eyes. “That is not why guys like boobs.”
“Sure it is,” said Elegy. “What’s your other option? They miss their mommies’ breastfeeding them?”
“Eew,” I said.
“Maybe it’s just because they’re soft and round,” said Achava. “Men really aren’t very complicated.”
“Whatever,” said Elegy. “Point is, I guess we’ve got to go pick up Kellen.”
“And drop me off,” said Achava. “At a hospital.”
“You don’t have a concussion,” said Elegy.
* * *
When we picked up Kellen, he was already drunk. He stumbled into the bar, slurring his words a little. As he rambled on and on, I picked up that while several days had passed for Elegy and me, Kellen had only been away from Elegy and me for three hours after saving Hitler from dying. The volurs had different time streams than we did. Elegy had tried to explain to me why this was once, but I could hardly follow anything she explained, so I just accepted it. It was easier. Kellen was still pretty upset about the fact that Elegy didn’t want a relationship.
Elegy managed to get Kellen seated on a barstool.
“I want a drink,” said Kellen.
“You don’t need a drink,” said Elegy.
“I thought you said you’d pick him up a point in time before he got mad at you,” I said to Elegy.
“Couldn’t,” said Elegy. “He was busy in every other time stream.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “How can he be busy? We’re in a time machine, right? So, couldn’t you go to any point in time and pick him up?”
“Sure,” said Elegy, “if he were actually in time at any point right now, which he’s not.”
“What?” Half of the things that came out of her mouth made no sense.
“Well, you know how when you’re in the bar, you’re out of time?” she said to me.
I nodded. That was why I could be alive still, but only if I stayed in the bar.
“Well, if he’s in the Clothos’ hair salon, he’s out of time too. So I can’t pick him up.”
Adventures of Elegy Flynn Page 6