Sands of Time (Out of Time #6)

by Monique Martin

  It had been a hell of a few days and hardly what she’d expected. They’d been planning on moving down Sebastian’s list. Having a list of people, places and times where the forces of darkness threatened made their life simpler, except for the nearly dying every time.

  Their most recent trip to Natchez was a case in point. They’d had several close calls and Simon’s arm took over three weeks to heal, but all that remained now was a thin red scar. However, the part of the mission that shadowed Elizabeth, shadowed both of them, was Old Nan’s prophecy—that their child, their future child, would die. They’d discussed it and then discussed it again, finally deciding that they could not live in fear of what might be and put their worries aside as best they could. Despite that, it was never far away, this fear for a child they did not yet have, lingering just on the edge of thought.

  Trying to move on meant a return to normalcy. Of course, normal for them was planning another time traveling adventure. They’d been about to do just that when a different sort of ghost from the past appeared at their door. Peter Travers, a member of the Council for Temporal Studies, arrived and brought with him disturbing news from the Council. Was there any other kind?

  The Council had apparently split into two factions, one even less trustworthy than the other. This new Shadow Council, as Travers had called it, the enemy within, was secretly trying to collect all of the time traveling watches. To what end, Travers didn’t know, but it surely wasn’t anything good.

  Of the few loyal members, one had disappeared completely and another, Charles Graham, fearing for his life, had gone on the run. In order to stop whatever nefarious plans the Shadow Council had, Travers and the handful of remaining members he trusted made plans of their own to recover all of the watches. They’d sent George Mason to find one that had been lost in time, its location unknown. But when Mason himself hadn’t returned as scheduled, Travers had come to Simon and Elizabeth for help.

  While they wouldn’t have wept at the demise of the Council, the idea of its corruption was the stuff of nightmares. Each member held a powerful privilege, the ability to travel in time, and if it were turned toward evil…

  Elizabeth shivered, shook her head and went back to brushing her still damp hair. She couldn’t get caught up in the giant what ifs, she had to concentrate on what she knew. Which, sadly, wasn’t very much.

  They had no idea what Mason knew about the location of the missing watch or why he’d gone out into the desert in the first place. Or, honestly, what they should do now that he was dead.

  Elizabeth sighed and put down the brush just as Simon emerged from the bathroom, a towel around his waist. He scrubbed another towel over his hair and then held onto the ends and put it behind his neck.

  “Feel better?” she asked.

  He ran a hand through his hair, slicking it back. “Marginally. No food yet?”

  On cue, there was a knock at the door.

  “Ask and ye shall receive,” Elizabeth said with a flourish.

  She started to get up to answer it, but Simon waved her off. He ducked into the bathroom and re-emerged belting his robe.

  Answering the door, he took the tray of sandwiches and two bottles of Perrier, and set them on the small table in the sitting area.

  He patted his robe pockets. “I’m sorry, I don’t have anything today. But, tomorrow,” he assured the bellboy.

  “Wait,” Elizabeth said as she dug into her trunk. She pulled out a small clutch purse and pulled out one of the of-the-era pound notes Travers had supplied them with. She hurried to the door and handed it to the man. He blinked at it for a moment and then grinned, bowed and hurried down the corridor.

  Simon closed the door. “That was extravagant. Probably fifty times what he’s used to receiving.”

  She shrugged and went straight for the food. “Let him live a little.”

  She bit into her sandwich and said in between bites, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s good.”

  Simon took a sandwich and carried the tray over to their bed.

  “Oh, breaking Cross House Rule Number Seven,” Elizabeth said. “Food shall not be eaten in bed unless: A) The person in bed is ill or B) It’s a very, very special occasion.”

  He swallowed and put the tray down at the foot of the large bed. “This qualifies under the second exception.”

  Elizabeth arched a questioning brow.

  “We’re alive.”

  “Good point,” she agreed and stacked the pillows against the headboard before she crawled up onto the high bed.

  Simon took the damp towel from around his neck and tossed it into the bathroom before sitting up at the head of the bed with her. Elizabeth slid the tray between them and took another bite of her sandwich as he uncapped one of the green pear-shaped bottles of Perrier and poured each of them a glass.

  Elizabeth clinked her glass against Simon’s. “To staying that way.”

  He looked into her eyes and nodded solemnly.

  “Do you think Hassan’s all right?” she asked. The man had risked his life for them and not knowing his fate had started to eat away at her.

  “Yes, I think so. He’s rather…resourceful, I’m sure he has things under control.” He took a drink and set his glass aside. “However, on that front, I’m not sure we should pursue this.”

  Elizabeth shifted to the side. “The watch?”

  “Yes, all of it.” Simon’s brow furrowed.

  She put her sandwich down. “After all we went through?”

  “Precisely because of that,” Simon said. “We are out of our element here. I understand we have to accept some dangers, but…”

  She reached out and laid her hand on his forearm. “We made it through the worst of it.”

  “We don’t know that, Elizabeth,” he said with a sigh. “And if this mission is anything like the others, and I have no reason to suspect otherwise, things will only get worse the nearer we get to our goal.” He picked up his drink again. “No, I think perhaps we should leave this for someone else.”

  Elizabeth frowned. Something wasn’t right. Simon was definitely not one to dive into anything headfirst, but he’d come to terms with the dangers inherent in what they did. Or she thought he had.

  He looked down into his glass and then finished it and put the empty glass on the end table.

  “What’s really wrong?” she asked.

  He glanced over at her and opened his mouth to speak, but closed it. His eyes danced over her face until he shook his head. “Nothing. I’m just tired, I suppose.”

  She didn’t quite believe that. There was something else going on, but she didn’t want to push him. Not yet, anyway.

  She was about to change the subject when an enormous yawn overtook her. Maybe it was just fatigue. They’d barely slept or eaten for days and had spent half of the time tied up and the other half running for their lives. It tuckered a person out.

  “Finished?” Simon gestured to what was left of the sandwiches she’d wolfed down.

  Elizabeth nodded and Simon set the tray aside. He smoothed down the pillows and lay back against them. She followed suit and rolled onto her side.

  Simon’s head turned toward her and he smiled tiredly and lifted his arm, his silent plea for her to join him. Elizabeth nestled into the crook of his shoulder. He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her more snugly against his side.

  Elizabeth ran over the days in her head, but the usually crisp IMAX feature was running slowly and increasingly out of focus, until sleep finally claimed her and the picture stopped altogether.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Jack ran a smoothing hand over his hair and then knocked sharply on the Crosses’ door. He waited a minute and when no one came, he knocked again. He checked his wristwatch. Almost eight o’clock. They’d only had four or five hours rest since they’d arrived at the hotel, but it would have to do.

  He was about to knock a third time when the door opened and a frazzled Elizabeth greeted him.

  “Sorry, we oversl
ept.” She turned back into the room and hurried over to her large steamer trunk. “Jack’s here!”

  She gestured for him to come in. “Simon’s shaving.”

  “You want me to come back?” he asked.

  She waved the thought away and pulled open one of the trunk drawers. “He’s getting pretty good with the straight-edge, it shouldn’t be-”“

  “Dammit!” came the cry from the bathroom, followed by some low-level grumbling.

  Elizabeth stifled a laugh. “Usually. We’re both still a little googley-eyed.”

  Jack nodded. He hadn’t gotten much sleep himself the last few days and the few hours shut-eye he’d managed that afternoon were hardly enough.

  “Aha!” Elizabeth cried and held up the shoes she’d apparently been searching for.

  “Take your time,” he said.

  Elizabeth smiled her thanks and sat down at the vanity. She slipped on her shoes and then turned to look at her reflection, needlessly touching up her perfect make-up. A small frown tugged at the corners of her mouth and she sighed heavily.

  Jack walked up behind her. She looked beautiful, as always, but a little worried, maybe even sad. It was an expression she seldom wore and he didn’t like seeing it on her face. “Something wrong?”

  She looked at his reflection and tried to brighten, but quickly gave up the pretense. “Simon thinks we should go home.”

  That wasn’t all that surprising. As far as he could tell, Cross felt that way every time they’d traveled anywhere. And, frankly, Jack could hardly blame him. Putting yourself and your wife in mortal danger didn’t come easily, shouldn’t come easily. Hell, if the roles were reversed, he wasn’t sure that he could do it.

  Jack squeezed her shoulder encouragingly. “He’ll come around.”

  Cross entered the room, wiping the last bits of shaving cream from his neck with a small towel. “Who’ll come around?” he said as he plucked a tiny bit of toilet paper that covered a small shaving nick from his chin.

  Elizabeth turned around on her bench. “You.”

  Cross made a sour face and tossed his towel back into the bathroom. “Let’s just say I’m unconvinced this is worth the risk.”

  He picked up the dress shirt that had been laid out for him. Slipping it on, he worked on the buttons and looked at Elizabeth in a gentle challenge as he waited for her inevitable counter-argument.

  Elizabeth raised her hands out in front of her, balancing out the options as she ticked them off. “Maaaybe getting hurt, versus the end of the world as we know it.”

  Cross opened his mouth to say something, something harsh judging from the set of his eyes, but caught himself with noticeable effort and settled for one of his mildly chiding “Elizabeths.”

  She might have been a bit dramatic, but from what that weaselly little man Travers had told them, it was a possibility.

  “The power of the watches in the wrong hands?” she said. “If there is this Shadow Council like Travers said and they really are secretly trying to gather all of the watches…”

  Cross tucked his shirt in. “I’ll admit that is troubling, but it doesn’t mean we have to be the ones to stop them.”

  “There aren’t exactly a lot of qualified applicants,” Elizabeth said.

  Cross shouldered his suspenders with a snap. “I’m sure they can find someone.” He turned away to search for his jacket and Elizabeth looked pleadingly at Jack.

  He was sympathetic to Cross’s concerns, but his time in WWII had taught him that hoping the other guy would take care of it rarely worked out.

  “I know I don’t have as much skin in the game as you do. I’m new to this whole time travel thing,” he said. “But I do know that nothing good happens when people who can do something don’t.”

  Cross pushed out a long breath through his nose. Jack could see the tension in his shoulders as he turned back to face them. He glared at Jack, but didn’t argue the point.

  Elizabeth stood and walked over to her husband. She straightened a twist in his suspenders. “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

  Jack could see Cross weakening. His eyes softened as he looked down at her.

  “If this Travers guy is right,” Jack said. “And the bad-guys on the Council have plans for the watches, the good guys better get them first.” He peered at himself in the mirror. “Like it or not,” he said, straightening his tie, “that’s us.”

  Cross shot him another glare, but Elizabeth patted his chest and the fire in Cross’s eyes dimmed. Not for the first time, Jack thought a beautiful and compassionate woman was the best weapon ever invented.

  Jack dipped his hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out Mason’s watch. “Ya know, now that we have two of these, if you wanted to go, I could stay and see it through.”

  As expected, Cross’s eyes lit up at the possibility while Elizabeth’s forehead wrinkled in worry.

  “You’d have to teach me how to use it,” Jack said, as he put the watch back into his pocket. “But—”

  “And you’d have to wait until the next eclipse,” Elizabeth said quickly. “And we have no idea when that is.”

  As exciting as the idea of having his own time travel device was to Jack, having to travel back and forth during an eclipse made things a little dicey. Not knowing when the next one was, made it even more so.

  “Or we could give him the key,” Cross said, deflating her balloon in one stroke.

  There was that, Jack thought. The watchmaker, Teddy Fiske, had made a special watch key for Elizabeth that allowed the bearer to travel without needing an eclipse. Problem was, there was only one key.

  She looked at Cross briefly and nodded. “We could.”

  “But you don’t want to,” Jack prompted.

  “It’s not that,” she said. “We could give it to you, but then we’d have to wait for an eclipse to leave.”

  Cross grunted, clearly displeased his idea embraced flawed logic. “True.”

  “Besides,” Elizabeth said softly, her eyes lowered briefly before she looked up at Cross. “I want to stay. I know this is dangerous, but three of us have a better chance of success than one of us. No offense,” she added.

  “None taken,” Jack assured her.

  “And,” she said. “This is who I am.”

  Cross looked at her. The unease and admiration mixing in his eyes.

  “It’s who I want to be,” she said.

  Jack saw Cross’s jaw muscle clench and unclench as he fought his instinctive reaction to argue. Cross reached out and caressed her cheek tenderly before remembering Jack was standing there. He dropped his hand and cleared his throat.

  “If I do agree to this,” Cross said somewhat pompously, clearly more comfortable standing on imperious ground. “Where can we possibly start? Mason didn’t reveal what he knew about the missing watch to Travers. It was pure luck Travers discovered Mason had traveled to Egypt at all.”

  Cross slipped his jacket on and continued, “And need I remind you that our one lead died this morning and any chance of picking up the trail for the missing watch died with him.”

  “Not necessarily,” Jack said as he walked across the room toward them. “We know Mason was here looking for a watch that some other Council member lost or left behind here, right?”

  Elizabeth nodded. “Travers said that Mason had somehow traced it here, but he wasn’t sure exactly where.”

  Jack reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope. “On the train Mason said he was close to finding it.”

  “Yes,” Cross said. “But he died before he could tell us anything more.”

  “I think he did anyway.” Jack took a piece of paper out of the envelope and unfolded it. “He had this on him.”

  Cross took the paper and he and Elizabeth frowned as they looked at it. “I don’t understand,” Cross said. “It’s just a long series of numbers.”

  Jack pointed at the top line. “It’s a code. I’m not sure what kind yet, but y
ou don’t code messages that don’t have valuable information in them.”

  Jack jabbed at the paper. “He knew something. Something he didn’t want anyone else to know.”

  “Except the person he was sending that to.” Elizabeth examined the envelope. “Louche, Blomster & Blackwood.”

  She looked up at him questioningly, but all he could do was shake his head and shrug.

  Cross took the envelope from her. “Solicitors. A very old English firm.”

  “The plot thickens,” Jack said.

  Elizabeth worried her bottom lip for a moment. “The code, can you break it?”

  Jack wasn’t sure. He’d had some training in it, but he was far from an expert. “Eventually.”

  Cross arched an eyebrow. “That’s hardly comforting.”

  “This isn’t all we have to go on, ya know,” Jack said as he took back the paper and envelope and tucked them into his jacket. “Everyone leaves a trail. And Mason might have been good at what he did, but he left us a trail a mile wide in the desert. Five’ll get you ten, we can pick up his trail here in Cairo too.”

  “He was staying here at this hotel,” Cross reasoned. “He must have chosen this particular place for a reason.”

  “What do you mean?” Elizabeth asked.

  “If you want to stay off the radar,” Jack said. “You don’t fly high.”

  Elizabeth frowned and looked to her husband for an explanation.

  “Shepheard’s is the hub of the Cairo social scene,” Cross said, warming to the mystery. “If someone didn’t want to be seen, this would be the very last place they’d stay. He must have come here because he needed something here.”

  “Or someone,” Elizabeth added.

  “Right,” Jack said with a grin. He tugged on his shirt cuffs, ignored Cross’s obvious hesitancy, and held out his arm for Elizabeth. “I say we go downstairs, have some dinner and make some new friends.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Simon had been too tired to appreciate the wonderfully grand absurdity of the lobby and entrance hall at Shepheard’s before, but now, rested, it stood before him in all of its overwrought glory. He might as well enjoy it while he could. He was still unconvinced staying here was wise. He’d see it through tonight and hope he could talk sense into Elizabeth in the morning.