Their bargain was threefold. First, she had promised to take him on three psychopomp jobs to send souls to death. Though Yelbeghen was a Door, he was not a psychopomp, and he was fascinated with witnessing such a rare occurrence as a soul being escorted to the afterlife. Second, she had to dine with him every two weeks for a ten-year period. And third, she had to make him a piece of art.
“You never gave a time limit for how long I’ve got to make it,” she said.
He smiled and gave a little shrug. “It wasn’t my cleverest bargain.”
Her phone rang and she excused herself to answer it. It was Gerard, the Seelie who usually served as the spokesmen for his people when dealing with her. He instructed her to come to the Seelie version of Luna Park immediately.
“I’ll be there in an hour,” she said to him and hung up.
“Only an hour?” said the drake. “I was hoping we could go to the opera. There’s one tonight in Vienna, but its starts in three hours.”
“Sorry. I have to meet up with the Seelie. My third task.”
His face went blank, and she knew he was disappointed. But more than that, he was unhappy. Worried even. If he had been merely disappointed, he would have covered it with a joke or a jab.
“Be careful with them,” he said. “You know to call on me if they give you any trouble.”
“I’ll be fine. They can’t imprison me. I can get out of anything they’ve got.”
“They have other ways to hurt you.”
Yes. She knew.
An hour later, she made a Door to Luna Park, then another Door from the boardwalk in her world to the one in the Seelie world. She walked to the main office, noting the Seelie with their animal and human parts and their beautiful or strange clothing. A few studied her, but she kept walking. As beautiful as the Seelie world was, with its apricot sky and green sea, and as delicious as the spiced, sugar-sprinkled fruit at the snack stand smelled, she did not want to linger. Like the drake, she was no friend of the Seelie. Their tasks were set as much as a punishment for her as they were selected as a benefit to the Seelie.
She found Gerard, the small, sturdy centaur with a powdered wig and smartly cut coat sitting in the manager’s office, chatting with twin girls. They wore matching yellow dresses with ribbons tying their brown hair into sleek ponytails. They looked at each other once and then smiled, exposing triple rows of wickedly pointed teeth.
Once they left, Gerard closed the office door behind them.
“You said you had my final task,” said Astrid.
“I do. But first, tell me how your Door-making is going.”
Gerard had been her first instructor on the art of making Doors. After years of being a psychopomp, she was as skilled as any of the others at it. Perhaps Yelbeghen was better than she was, but Gerard would already guess that.
She told him that she was doing well and asked after his health. He asked her a few more questions which she deflected with polite but uninformative answers. He got a grim look and finally sighed in exasperation. “I know you don’t like me, but I am on your side.”
“You’re on your own side. Let’s not pretend.”
“Very well.” He fiddled with a button on his jacket. “I want to make it clear to you the magnitude of what we are asking. We do not do it lightly or without great thought and deliberation. It has taken us years to get to this point. There’s a person who has caused great harm to the Seelie. He has now committed a deed so grave, that it must be answered.”
“What did he do?”
Gerard gave her an assessing look. “He closed one of the few openings we have to the human world. It’s gone now. Completely vanished. The Seelie are more trapped than ever.”
Understanding hit her, and her stomach tightened.
“Not only that. We know that a drake will open the void further, to free the void wyrms.”
“How do you know that?” she asked, a touch more defensively than she would have liked. She hated her inability to conceal, to trick and manipulate. Gerard’s expression changed. He knew that she understood.
“You forget our far-seers. They are, sometimes, correct,” he said. “And the drake is a danger.”
“He hasn’t harmed anyone.”
“You are too fond of the monster. But I suppose that’s to be expected from someone like you. Even your own mothers, both human and Unseelie, couldn’t love you. And you only seem to enjoy the company of the wicked and the strange.”
“I won’t be baited with this.”
“Consider it. The golem assassin? The ship’s captain who killed one of the Twelve? The monkey-footed convict professor who destabilizes entire worlds? The Kitsune who lost her tail for bad conduct? The Coyote with the lying silver tongue? You see? The wicked.”
“I’m not going to argue good and evil with you. Your words don’t make you good any more than your passivity in the face of conflict does. Besides, some of them are innocent. There’s Sister and Elliot.”
“The tongueless mental patient and the man with his brain unwinding? Those would be the strange.”
“What do you care? It’s nothing to you whom I associate with. Why not tell me the task and be done with it?”
“Because I want you to understand what’s at stake. There are people you care about. If you don’t complete your task, the Seelie will find your friends and either kill them or drive them mad or torture them. Maybe all three.”
The viciousness of the threat hit her like a blow. Never had Gerard spoken to her like this. Sure, he was not her friend, not really, but he had always been cordial. He had been her teacher, once.
“I’ve upset you,” he said and moved forward to take her hand. She stepped back.
“Don’t touch me.”
“I may be the only friend you have left after all this is done.”
“You’re not even my friend now.”
“And the drake is your friend?”
“His name is Yelbeghen.”
“You still believe that? Years of dining with him, and you don’t even know his name. Yelbeghen is the type of drake he is. Not his name.”
She hadn’t known, and the revelation left her feeling small and alone. He was her friend and she didn’t even know his name.
“It hardly matters though,” said Gerard. “Your task is not to learn his name. Your task is to kill him.”
Chapter 7
Neil Grey studied the sky and inhaled. The air was warm and heavy and the scent was off. Not unpleasant exactly, but wrong somehow. Massive dark clouds gathered, altering the quality of the ambient light and changing the color of the streets to darker tones. That itself wasn’t unusual. There was something else. It felt as if the hairs on his body were about to stand up and his spine felt electrified.
“I wish it would just go on and rain,” said Elliot. “LA needs the water.”
Thunder rumbled in the distance and Hazel got a look of delight. She loved thunderstorms. Neil wondered if she missed her home in New Orleans. She never seemed at home in Los Angeles. But she never seemed at home anywhere, really. Only when she was on her ship was she ever really at peace.
“It’s just up this street on the right,” she said.
There was one last home to check, one last person who might have heard where Julius had gone. The woman who lived in the house kept an extensive collection of old microfiche from back when libraries used them.
“You two go on ahead,” said Neil. “I’ll buy lunch and we can take it home.”
Hazel and Elliot went on without him and he watched the pair of them, Elliot’s blond head turning toward Hazel’s shorter brown one, her small upturned face and the way she looked into the distance when she spoke. He saw the small bit of discontent in her posture because she was traveling on foot, unable to go fast the way she preferred. Ell
iot’s manner and laugh were so easy, so relaxed, unlike Neil’s own emotions which always left him feeling overwhelmed when he could not keep them tightly controlled. Pictures, plants, paintings, voices raised in song, they all were too beautiful for him to bear sometimes, and it seemed to be getting worse the older he got. It was as if he might break open one day, and all the tiny cracks in him would fill until his interior could hold no more and he would split open, spilling everything. He tried to keep himself in check, with silence, with stillness.
He wondered how much of this Elliot and Hazel knew instinctively. Hazel was a more solitary being than Elliot, who got along with almost everyone and loved socializing, even with strangers. In their own unique ways, they both understood human nature in a way he never would.
“To love someone is to have one’s heart walking outside one’s body,” said a man.
He knew the voice, though he had only heard it once before, right before the man had killed him. It was Mr. March. This was not the elderly pale man who had brought him to life, but rather the one who had come after, the same man in a new body. This man was dark-haired, more robust, taller, younger and more muscular.
“I loved you like that, once,” said March. “You were my son, in every way that mattered.”
“Normal people don’t turn their sons into killers. Normal people don’t murder their sons when they want to quit killing innocent people.”
“And normal people don’t have their fathers murdered by their future wives. But you and I aren’t normal people. Come, walk with me.”
Neil felt none of the old compulsion to obey him. The discovery lit him with a new fire. He had wondered before if March’s power over him still applied, but now he knew. He was free. Truly free.
He didn’t move, didn’t turn with March. He had no reason to speak with this man.
“Or would you rather we ask your best friend and your wife to join us?” said March. “I can run and fetch them.”
Hazel and Elliot had turned the corner and moved out of sight. Every protective instinct in Neil told him to keep March away from them.
“I’ll go.”
They walked together in the opposite direction from Elliot and Hazel, Neil sizing up the man beside him. They were roughly the same size, and Neil had no idea how strong March was in this body. But March’s power over him had never been in physical strength.
“Your Professor Seamus Doyle, is he still alive?” asked March.
“You know he is.”
“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did something vastly stupid and got himself killed.”
“You’re the only one who has tried to kill him.”
“I was correcting a mistake. I never should have given Oren McCullen the blue fluid. I thought I was being like Prometheus, giving fire to a suffering mankind. The fluid allows the creation of wonderful engines. Did you know that? Before the time machines, McCullen used it to make engines that could produce more power than anything the humans could come up with on their own. I wanted to help humanity to advance. The fluid allows them to make tiny pinprick holes between worlds and McCullen was able to make such brilliant use of them.”
“By stealing Seamus’s designs.”
“He improved upon them. The two of them together could have created such wondrous machines.”
“They did. Seamus made the time machines.”
“Yes, but there is a problem. When I gave McCullen the fluid, I knew he could use it inside the engines and make those pinprick holes between worlds, like tiny holes in skin. Those holes can heal themselves. Tiny ones usually can. All was well as long as the holes were small. It’s the giant rips that Seamus made that became a problem.”
“Then why not take it back? You could have confiscated the machines years ago. Instead, you tried to kill Seamus and let McCullen get away with another machine. God only knows where he is now.”
“He’s safely tucked away in his own home world. The machine did not work again once he used the coordinates I gave him.”
“You gave two inventors something without forethought and then punished them for using it.”
“I was punished, rather.”
“How? By getting killed by Hazel? She was defending the Professor. He’s like a father to her. She loves him.”
“And she was defending you. Don’t forget that she loves you too.”
March purchased two cups of coffee and handed one to Neil along with two sugar packets.
“Two sugars, no cream, correct?” said March.
He still remembered, and Neil despised it. He carried the coffee without drinking it.
“Being shot by Hazel was not my only punishment,” said March. “I did two terrible deeds, and I had to correct them. Like a modern Prometheus, I gave mankind fire, but I also made an unnatural man. Like Doctor Frankenstein, I made me an amalgamation, but you were perfect and I loved you.”
“I wasn’t meant to exist. That’s why you killed me.”
“I didn’t want to.” He stopped and turned to Neil and he saw the pain in March’s face, the regret. “If you had stayed with me, if you hadn’t turned on your creator, I could have protected you. But you failed me. And so I was commanded to kill you.”
“Commanded by whom?”
“Always the cleverest, my Neil. Always asking questions, even when you were first made. I was commanded by one of the Seven.”
“You have a boss?”
“Not a boss, as such, no. Did you think the Twelve just appeared out of nowhere?”
“None of you will ever tell us. September, Julius, Red Fawn and June are all so cagey about it.”
“They would be.”
“So what are you? Watchers of some kind, I know that. And who are the Seven? And who are above them?”
“The Three.” March was amused now, and Neil felt some kind of trap closing.
“Why come and force me to talk to you?”
“Force? I cannot force you to do anything. Not anymore. You’re here on your own.”
“If that’s the case, then I’ll say good-bye. Thank you for the coffee.”
“No, wait.” March reached out and touched Neil’s arm. “I want to explain everything to you. Not that you’ll remember. You won’t. Things are being turned back to their original factory settings, so to speak. I told you that I made two mistakes. One was making you, and I corrected that.”
“And yet here I stand.”
“I owe your wife my thanks for that. But leaving that aside, I couldn’t correct my second mistake, the mistake I made in giving the blue fluid to Oren McCullen. I couldn’t kill Seamus, and now I’m being so closely watched that I can’t if I wanted to. So they’ve pulled out the big guns.”
“The modern Prometheus must be punished.”
“They’re beyond punishment now. The time rips are too big, the instabilities too great. When that girl, Astrid, used Seamus’s machine to augment her natural talents and tear a hole to the Library in the void, something changed. It was a trigger. A catalyst. Like a tear in fabric. Once you get a tear started, it inevitably continues. And now, it’s too late.”
“What are they going to do? What are you going to do?”
“As I said, turn it back to its original factory settings. As it was in the beginning, so it ever shall be.”
“Seal off the worlds? Close them off from each other? Can you do that?”
“I can, with help. Not on my own, though. It’s the only way. This way, McCullen won’t get the blue fluid, the machines will never rip holes and the worlds will continue on, just as they ought to have done from the start.”
It was too much, the thought too momentous to process in a moment. Everything would reset. Hazel and Seamus would be in their home world with their steam-powered creations. Astrid, Sister and
Elliot would be in theirs, the world of living ships and multiple gods and sidhe and people who could also be animals. Felicia would be in her world of ordinary things.
“Which world is mine?” asked Neil. “Which is my home world?”
“The one with me.”
“And I’ll be enslaved again.”
“By necessity. You’ll never meet Elliot from the Time Corps on that train and you’ll never leave me. If you stay in my employ, you will be safe. I won’t have to kill you again.”
“When do you planning on doing this? How long do we have?”
March glanced at his watch. “A few minutes.”
Neil didn’t wait, but dropped his coffee and took off running.
Everything depended on the time machines. March was right. Neil understood that now. There were too many time loops already. Their friendships created time loops. The existence of the time machines themselves were time loops, as Seamus had never figured out how to create the blue fluid. Neil had thought, had hoped, that they would untangle the mess at some point. After all, everyone lived, some married, life continued in all the worlds.
Now he knew differently.
Without the machines, Seamus would never create an accidental time rip, and Felicia would never be in an omnibus accident. She’d never meet Seamus. She never would convince him to take in Hazel, the street child, as his ward.
He tore up the street, past the cars and pedestrians, never running out of breath, never slowing. He might be enslaved again, he might be a killer again, but today, now, he would use his abilities as he chose. For a few minutes, he was still free.
In this world, the hub world, where Astrid, Elliot and Sister originated, things would be a little more stable. Without the machines, Sister and Astrid would still have been swapped at birth. The Unseelie and Seelie would still do as they pleased. Astrid could still free Sister from Unseelie. But Astrid would be trapped in the void. Without Elliot to travel in time and make her little cold iron owl bell and to ring it and lead her home, she’d be lost in the void forever.
The Time Corps Chronicles (Complete Series) Page 121