She pulled a towel down from the rack, mopped up the water, and shoved it into the hamper, hoping it would dry by the time anyone found it. Then she heard a low moan.
The woman had lived alone. She was sure of it.
Oh, but there was something else. She still felt the pull of the place, the tugging sensation that each of the psychopomps felt when there was a sticky soul, a geist. The feeling had not gone away when the woman had gone through the Door.
Astrid grabbed her phone from the bathroom counter where she had set it and shoved it into her damp pocket. Then, she let her instincts guide her.
The kitchen. A soul was in the kitchen. The room was bright and cheerful, if about twenty years out of date, with hand-drawn pictures from grandchildren on the refrigerator and a floral painted tea kettle on the burner.
A thin, balding man in the corner glowered at her with a look of pure hatred.
“It’s not you!” the man hissed and slid into the dining room. “There’s nothing else! It’s a balloon, but it was before. Not now. You weren’t even there. You can’t know!”
This geist was not only troubled, it was insane. The spirit felt stale. Old. Embedded. That was bad. The whole reason for her existence as a psychopomp was to prevent these things from happening. Souls were in pain when they were trapped in the mortal world, and that pain intensified until they went insane. This man was a tragic example.
She tried talking to the man, using all her normal lines and tricks. She tried reaching into his mind to pull on strong threads, hoping to trip a thought that would encourage him to go through the Door she made. Nothing worked. The spirit made a circuit through the dining room, living room and kitchen, always moving, raving and shouting the entire time.
Why had he appeared now instead of when Astrid first arrived? Perhaps he was connected with the dead woman. Was he her husband? And if that was the case, why had they both been trapped here? Few souls remained in the human world after death, and two in the same house was unusual.
She tried talking about the woman, asking him questions, reaching further into his mind to find thoughts, still with no success. She needed a new tactic. If she couldn’t get him to go willingly, she’d force him.
As he passed the door to the dining room, she leapt out and grabbed for him, but he slipped sideways out of her grasp. He screamed, shoving his face up into hers until their noses almost touched. She jerked back, banging into the dining room table, knowing consciously that he couldn’t hurt her, but afraid all the same. She had been raised as a normal human being for her first eighteen years and still felt like one. True, she wasn’t human by birth, but she hadn’t known that at the time. Geists could still frighten her. Still, she took her job seriously and she wasn’t going to call for backup just yet
She tried a few more times from different positions, but could not catch the wily geist. Her phone dinged with an incoming text from Jeff, the head psychopomp. There were five psychopomps in the world, and Jeff was the de facto leader.
She had an idea. Slipping back against the wall, she waited for the spirit. When it appeared, she made a Door directly in its path. It leapt back, but she expanded the Door and moved it, forcing it over the spirit like a net.
The thing screamed, but she continued pulling the Door tighter until the geist passed through the mirrored surface and into whatever afterlife awaited it.
She waited for a minute, making sure she didn’t feel any other sticky souls. Nope. The house was clear. She made a Door to Jeff’s bookshop in Nebraska, the place the psychopomps typically met.
“Why are you all wet?” asked Jeff, turning from his bookshelves to look her up and down. He was a middle-aged man of ordinary looks and inquisitive mind. Astrid liked him and found her psychopomp colleagues easier to deal with than most regular people.
“A geist was stuck in a drain and the water was on,” she said. “But more importantly, I ran into an older geist. It was an elderly man, but I don’t know how long he’d been stuck.”
“Did he speak in sentences?”
“Yes, but they made no sense.”
“But he still had the capacity for basic grammar?”
“Yeah. And he kept making this loop from room to room.”
“Always in the same direction?”
“Yes.”
“I’d say six months to five years, depending,” said Jeff. “At least it could still talk and had human form.”
She thought about it, making a mental note to add to her growing list of experiences. One day, she would know as much as Jeff did.
“Your text said you had news for me,” she said.
“I do. The Seelie finally called.”
A feeling of relief flooded her, followed immediately by dread. She hadn’t heard from the Seelie in years. Due to a complicated past in which she had cheated the Seelie out of her cousin Elliot’s execution, she was obliged to perform three tasks for them. She had completed two tasks already, but the Seelie were saving the last one. She could be waiting a lifetime for them to give her the last task, and as time went on, she found herself wishing they’d give it to her and be done with it.
“They have a task for me?”
“So they say. Now, you know I’ll help you if I can. We all will.”
Astrid knew they would. The other psychopomps, Jeff, Gopan, Robin and Graciela, were all decent people. And as the only psychopomps in existence, they were family, in a sense.
“Where do they want to meet me?”
“They said to come through to the Seelie version of Luna Park. They’ll call you tomorrow when they’re ready.”
“I wish they’d just come here. I hate being in the sidhe worlds. Time passes so strangely there.”
“Yeah, but at least after this, it’ll all be over.”
She hoped he was right. She said good-bye, made a Door to her apartment in New York and changed into dry clothing, then heated leftovers for dinner.
She thought of Sister, her human twin. Astrid was born to the Unseelie, the cousins of the Seelie. But when a human infant had been in danger of dying, Astrid was given the child’s appearance and was swapped with her. Astrid was a changeling. That human girl was Sister, who had been raised and tormented by the Unseelie until Astrid had gotten her out of their terrible world and sent her to another. She missed Sister.
The Seelie, though claiming to be opposed to the cruel and lawless ways of the Unseelie, were not so different from them when it came down to it. They had threatened Astrid by threatening Sister, so Astrid and the Time Corps had sent Sister to live in another world with a much older version of Hazel, one of the founding members of the Time Corps. Once her third task for the Seelie was complete, Sister could come home and Astrid could breathe easy, free of her obligation.
It wasn’t only the Seelie who were trouble though. She had other ties that she could not break. She had made a deal with a drake and had to have dinner with him fortnightly. But Yelbeghen never threatened her or her loved ones.
After washing her dish, she found her little iron owl bell on a bookshelf. The thing was made of cold iron from a meteor, one of the things that all sidhe, both Seelie and Unseelie, hated. It caused them intense pain. Though Unseelie born, she was immune to this particular piece, and she set it on her nightstand. If the Seelie came early, they’d have a tough time approaching her in her sleep.
It was raining, and she looked down on the wet street below where cars hissed past on the wet pavement and people hurried along, umbrellas up. She wanted to change into her aspect, an owl, and go flying, but she wouldn’t. Not in New York City and not tonight. She needed to get a good night’s sleep so she’d have her wits about her for dealing with the Seelie.
Chapter 3
Professor Seamus Doyle tore a page out of his notebook and pushed it across the table toward Frieda, a s
triped tabby cat.
“See if you can figure it out,” he muttered.
The cat looked it over while Seamus tried the mathematical problem again on a fresh sheet of paper.
“This part is incorrect,” said Frieda, setting a paw on the page. “See? Simple error.”
Seamus growled a curse, made a note on a clean sheet of paper, crumpled the older paper and threw it toward the trash can where it fell to the floor to lay among its discarded kin. He ran his hands through his hair and heaved a sigh.
“Even without that error, it still won’t work. It’s impossible.”
He shoved himself back from the desk and stood, toppling the chair with a crash. He cursed and picked it back up, only to catch his foot on a coil of spare tubing he had left on the floor. Banging his thigh on the edge of the worktable, he let out a stream of cursing. He regained his balance, disentangled himself, jammed the chair against the desk and turned as the laboratory door opened. Frieda darted through the open door. Like all cats, she hated a commotion.
“You all right, Professor?” asked Hazel. She was in her mid-twenties, but to Seamus, she seemed much younger. He supposed she always would.
“I’m not blowing things up, if that’s what you mean.”
“I only heard banging and yelling, and—”
“I know what you heard. I’m busy.”
“Don’t you get cross with me. I was only checking on you.”
“You ought not to talk,” he said. “You’ve been prowling around the house all week, looking for trouble.”
“Not looking for trouble. Only waiting.”
“With you, it’s the same thing. You can’t keep still to save your life. You and that ship, gallivanting all over the place. And then you marry a golem.”
“It’s Neil, and you’ve known him for years. And you gave your blessing.”
“Under duress.”
But he smiled as he said it, and Hazel tiptoed to kiss his cheek.
“Now, what are you upset about?” she asked.
“The machines,” he said, starting to pace between the window at the far end of the room and his worktable. “The vials of blue fluid. I can’t figure out a way to make more time machines without more fluid. There’s simply no way to use the amount we have and make the numbers work.”
They currently had four time machines, but Seamus wanted the security of being able to make more. His wife, Felicia, had come through to his world years ago and still could not return to her home world. Her nephew was suffering from a rare form of cancer and she needed to return home to put his mother in touch with a Brazilian doctor who could save him. No matter how hard he worked or what he tried, he could not find a way to get from this world, the hub world, to Felicia’s.
Traveling to the world where he and Hazel had originated was simple, as was traveling to a few other worlds. But Felicia’s world eluded him. It was entirely closed off, and yet she had somehow come through.
“We’ll just have to be careful with the machines we have,” said Hazel. “And perhaps Felicia will return with useful information.”
“Unlikely. Unless she can analyze the blue fluid and duplicate it. So far, all of our efforts have been unsuccessful.”
“Professor,” said Frieda, poking her striped head through the door. “A package has come for you.”
They went downstairs and Seamus found the package on the front step.
“It has no postage or return address,” said Seamus. “In this time, people typically don’t hand deliver packages.”
“I know that, Professor,” said Hazel. “They also tend to put addresses on it, and this one just says your name.”
“In my own writing.”
“Yeah?” Hazel grabbed the package, clearly excited at the prospect. As for Seamus, he was chilled by the notion.
“What would I send myself?”
“Open it up and see!”
“But what if it makes another unstable time loop?”
“Many things we do create time loops,” she said.
Hazel was correct. The origin of the time machine had been an unstable time loop. It still was. He tried not to think about it, but the fact hung over him like a specter. All time loops were dangerous. They destabilized the worlds. Sometimes, they tore holes in time. The Time Corps existed to repair these holes, either through technology, or by inserting itself into events to make sure no object, idea or person created a time loop.
In short, unstable time loops were bad. Stable time lines were good.
Each object needed a stable origin, a lifetime and an ending. Under normal circumstances, with time passing in a linear fashion, this took care of itself. Every item, idea or person was created, had its span of existence and then, in the case of physical things, decayed. It was a universal constant. But when time travel was involved, things became complicated.
The first time machine, the one he had used years ago, the one he had duplicated for the Time Corps, had come to him from an older version of himself. He had not invented it, not yet, and as the years passed, he found this more and more troubling.
At this point in his personal time line, he could make as many time machines as he liked. He understood the technology fully, except for one aspect. Hazel and Felicia could recreate the machines as well, as he had written the instructions down in the event of his death. But that wasn’t the problem.
The problem was the vials of blue fluid. The first machine had come with two inexplicable items. One was a book of coordinates. That was still a problem. True, Seamus had recently created a book and had written in it extensively, but he would never have done so if he hadn’t received the same book when he was younger. The second item was the vial of pale blue glowing fluid that was a necessary component in every time machine.
He never knew what the fluid was, nor was he able to make more. Long ago, his former friend, prison cellmate and colleague, Oren McCullen, had received the blue fluid from a man named Mr. March. But March hadn’t bothered them in some time, and even when Julius and his siblings had known where their brother was, they did not pursue him. March would never have given up the secret of the liquid.
Seamus found a kitchen knife and slit the tape holding the box closed. He knew already what was in it. How could it be anything else?
Chapter 4
“Here’s everything I have,” said Elliot, pulling the recording device from the time machine and handing it to Seamus. “I hope you can do something with it.”
“I’m not sure,” said Seamus, inserting the device into the computer in his laboratory. He downloaded the files, and Elliot watched as he scanned through it.
For a man born in the early 1800s, Seamus had adapted well to the technologies of the early twenty-first century. For Elliot, these things were second nature, but some of the older members of the Time Corps had trouble with them. Elliot loved technology, especially the devices of his personal distant future. While others hesitated to embrace their use, he had received removable implantable devices with delight. Why wouldn’t a person wish to improve themselves if at all possible?
“Did anyone see you?” asked Seamus.
“Of course people saw me, but you didn’t, and neither did Felicia. That’s all that matters.”
“Are you certain you got close enough to the time rip?”
“I got as close as I could. It did involve an omnibus crash. I couldn’t get too close without getting killed.”
Seamus grunted and scrolled through the data. Like all people except for Neil, he could not travel to a place and time within ten miles of himself. Since he, Hazel and Felicia had all been in New Orleans when Felicia had accidentally stepped through a time rip in 1857, Elliot had volunteered to go to Seamus’s home world and take readings on the rip. It had required him to get very close to an omnibus accident
and to avoid detection by a disoriented Felicia and by Seamus, who lived across the street. Neither of them had met him yet, so he was just another face in the crowd.
“The readings are just like my world. My world and Hazel’s,” said Seamus. “And they’re also like your home world. So close to both. Almost as if—sweet Jesus. It’s as if her world is between them. But that can’t be right. I’ve tried every setting and combination of coordinates, even the ones listed here.”
He continued talking, and Elliot half-listened, knowing the Professor’s proclivity for working out problems by talking through them. Eventually, Seamus took to muttering to himself and Elliot turned to leave.
“Wait, I need one more thing,” said Seamus. “A few weeks ago, Felicia and I went to San Francisco to try to get readings from their great earthquake in the early twentieth century. It’s one of the times when there is a super synchronicity. It touches multiple worlds at one spot. But with this,” he motioned to the screen, “I’ll need something else. Give me two or three hours and I’ll give you specifics. Then you can go.”
“Do I need to go right away?”
“Do you mind?” Seamus asked, blinking up at him in surprise.
“Well, no, not precisely.” Elliot didn’t want to tell him the real reason he was hesitant. It was because of a woman, a woman he had met while trapped in the Library, a woman he wanted to find once again. Every day he spent doing other jobs for the Time Corps was another day apart from her. But how could he deny Neil the right to see how he had been created or do anything other than try to get Felicia home? She had been far from her home world for so many years. He couldn’t ask his friends to delay their own trips through time so he could indulge his romantic impulses.
“I can go,” Elliot said.
The Time Corps Chronicles (Complete Series) Page 118