by Bee Ridgway
“You have a concussion,” she said. “And it serves you right.”
“Be that as it may, we have to jump again,” he whispered, eyes closed. “If only back a few hours into the darkness. Take my hand.” He lifted it and felt her take it, tenderly enough, bless her. “Here we go,” he said. “Hold on, sweet chuck.” He reached, in his mind, for the River. But there was nothing. He couldn’t sense the River at all.
“Well?” she asked after a long time.
“Can’t jump. Head hurts too much.”
“Ah.” She dropped his hand.
“You’re going to have to go alone,” he said. “Take my boots. Get several streets away, then jump away from here.” He thought about her, in her shift and his big clumpy boots, her hair all jumbled up. “Jump to the 1980s,” he said. “You’ll look enough like a punk waif to pass. It’s the twentieth century, though, so be careful. The big metal things that charge through the streets? They can kill you. Look for the white paint on the roads and cross there. Red man means don’t cross, green man means go ahead. There are catacombs under Soho Square. Yellow house. Corner of Carlisle Street. Ofan hideout. Stay there until I come for you.”
Another long pause.
“Better get going,” he said, opening his eyes a crack and peering up at her.
“I’ve never jumped alone,” she said. “I don’t know how.”
“Oh shit. Of course you don’t. Hannelore. Hiding your God-given talent from you . . . the fucking Guild . . .” He subsided, because she was laughing. It was a small, pitiful sound, but it was brave, as well.
“I guess you’re going to have to be my time tutor after all,” she said. “Poor Mr. Vogelstein!”
He attempted a chuckle. “I knew you’d come running back to me,” he whispered, and smiled when he heard her laugh gain strength.
At just that moment, the builders arrived.
Alva had to admit, Vogelstein handled the situation with aplomb. Speaking a version of English she could hardly understand, he showed the men his golden ring, said he was some kind of aristocrat, and pointed out the fine lace on her shift. They’d been robbed, he explained, and dumped here, and he was injured and his wife was freezing.
Alva was still contemplating the oddity of being married, without her consent and with no warning, to two men in one day, when she found herself being draped in a builder’s warm cloak and lifted in the arms of a strong man. He carried her out of the building site and down the street to a little inn. Vogelstein followed, stretched on a board like a corpse. Soon, the two of them were ensconced in a cozy room up under the rafters. The landlady left them, after a great deal of fussing, with plenty of beer and a cold chicken, and Alva finally had a chance to sit down. Which she did, on a little three-legged stool by the window.
Vogelstein, tucked up under the covers with a bandage on his head, gave her a smile. “Well, wife,” he said. “Come bring your husband that beaker of beer, and stroke his fevered brow.”
She raised her eyebrows, and took a sip of the beer. “It’s good,” she said. “And I’m not sure you should have any. Is alcohol good for your poor head?”
“Confound it, bring me that beaker!”
• • •
“How are we going to pay for this room?”
Dar opened his eyes to find her standing over him, still in that ridiculous shift.
“Didn’t the landlady give you a dress?”
She didn’t answer that; just looked at him with those drowned violet eyes of hers. She was holding a copper cup, hopefully of water, hopefully for him.
She held it out, and he drank. He was feeling much better. The mice had finally chewed their way out of his skull, leaving it sore and full of holes, but his own again.
“Thank you,” he said.
She regarded him soberly. “No jokes,” she said.
He shook his head. “I shall be earnestness itself.”
“No remarks about wives or husbands.”
“None.”
“All right, then.” She put the cup on the windowsill and came back over to the bed. To his amazement, she drew the covers back. He was still in his linen smock, but the chill air nipped at him. She must be cold in nothing but her shift. “May I?” It took him a moment to realize that she was asking permission to crawl into bed with him.
“Of course.” He shifted a bit to the side, and she tucked herself into bed, under the coarse linen sheet. She smiled at him before she laid her head against his shoulder, and she put her arm across his chest, just like . . . well, like a wife. “How long are we stuck here?” she asked.
Experimentally, he curled his arm around her back. She didn’t object. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I don’t know when my talent will return. Or how long it will take to teach you to use yours.”
She was silent for a moment, and he reveled in the feeling of her warm breath against his neck. Then, “Keep still,” she said, and she insinuated her freezing feet in between his calves.
“Oh my God, woman!” he jerked his legs away.
Her feet stalked his warmth. “Keep still, I said.”
“Noah and all the shitting animals! You’re going to kill me.”
But wherever he moved, she found him, until finally he gave in and lay still and let her brand him with her icy extremities. “Tsssss,” she said in his ear, imitating the sound of hot irons being doused in water.
“I suppose I deserve it,” he said, when the worst of the suffering had subsided.
“You most certainly do.” She raised herself up on one elbow and grinned at him, while she wiggled her toes to a yet warmer spot on his leg. Her breasts were pressed to his chest, and the evil glint in her eye held a promise of heat. She was really having a good time at his expense, the blasted Swedish witch.
He watched her, knowing he was grinning, too, like a fool, knowing he was falling in love with her.
He hoped it took a long time for his talent to return.
He hoped she was a very slow learner.
• • •
Vogelstein was propped up on a pillow and bolster, drinking beef broth and looking, after a night’s sleep, quite a lot more like himself. Or at least Alva guessed he looked more like himself. She’d only ever really seen him in a series of terrible costumes. His explanation for why he had flown to her “rescue” was strange—he had awoken in the middle of the night with the conviction that she needed him. And so, for some reason that he couldn’t adequately explain, he had broken into the Guild mansion, snuck up to her room, and tried to gently awaken her by whistling his grisly tune. He’d intended to sneak her back down to the sleeping mansion’s ground floor, and jump from there.
“Could it not have waited until morning?”
“It felt urgent,” he said.
“But it wasn’t urgent. I was sound asleep.”
Vogelstein shrugged. “Maybe I got you out of there mere moments before hell swallowed London. Or a split second before space aliens atomized the Guild mansion.”
Alva paid no attention to his nonsense. The fact was, she had thought of him during the whole horrible episode with Hannelore and Susan in the guildhall. She had thought of him with an intensity that had kept her holding on to Hannelore’s hand, kept her from running screaming from the room. That had been about three hours before he turned up, but . . . maybe she had called to him and he had somehow heard. A little late, but nevertheless.
“What are you thinking, sweet chuck?” His voice was gentle.
She snuggled herself close to his side, and he tightened his arm around her. “Last night,” she said, “or . . . that night, that night in the future . . .”
“Yes, yes, I know what you mean.”
“Hannelore had me and Bertrand down in the room, the room with the mosaic floor. She called in Susan, held me and Bertrand by the hand, and . . .” Alva paused. “And she su
cked the power out of us. Or rather, she put her power into us, and somehow we magnified it. And then she took it back and used it against Susan.”
Vogelstein put his cup down, and took his arm from around her. “Who is Susan?” He was glowering, and she had to assume it meant he was concentrating, not that he was angry at her. But it was difficult to be sure.
“My maid. Or rather, that’s what I thought until last night. I think she was actually a Favorite, but she is a maid now, in some kind of penance. Yesterday I learned that the Favorites are all working on experiments that Hannelore is conducting about the talent, and what it can do. Ed said that they have been doing this for years.”
“Who is Ed? And what kind of experiments?” Now he really did look angry. His dark eyes seemed to be shooting lightning bolts.
“It isn’t my fault,” Alva said, pushing against his shoulder with the heel of her hand. “I’m just telling you what people said.”
“What precisely is that damned evil Transylvanian genius getting up to?” he barked. “What the hell is she cooking up in that creepy mansion of hers?”
“She’s from Transylvania? I thought she was German.”
“Austro-Hungarian,” he muttered. “You know. Evil scientists, the whole lot of them.”
“No, I don’t know. Will you listen to what I am trying to tell you, or not?”
He subsided, and she explained what Ed had told her in the kitchens. That some fifteen years ago Hannelore had started experimenting with time manipulation. She discovered that if she channeled her power through other people, she could produce strange, sometimes horrifying effects. She stopped training her Favorites in time travel and started using them instead, as both conduits for her power and subjects of experimentation. It had been fifteen long years since she had trained anyone to jump in time. Instead, she kept her Favorites close, experimenting with them and on them. When Alva had asked Ed why they all stayed, he had gotten passionate. “We are pushing the boundaries of our knowledge,” he had said. “It is noble work.”
“But you are being aged; you are giving her your life’s breath,” Alva had said.
And with that the worst of the truth had come out. He believed in the work, he said, but the emotional power of the experiments was also addictive. “You don’t know it yet. But there is no feeling like the feeling of her power coursing through you, and no feeling like being held suspended in time at her will, then all at once rushing through more of your life than you can live on your own. It is the best and the worst feeling in the world, and the intensity . . . anyone who has once felt it wants more and more of it. We all have come to depend upon it. Upon her.”
When Alva was finished telling Vogelstein about it, he sat, staring at her. “Well I’ll be drawn, hung, and quartered,” he said after a long pause.
“It’s horrible,” Alva said. “And even more horrible to witness. I felt that power flowing through me, and perhaps it takes more than one time to become addicted, because I certainly never want to feel it again.”
But Vogelstein was shaking his head, not listening. “That blasted, bloody prodigy of an old vampire! She stole a goddamn march on me!”
Alva drew back. “What?”
Vogelstein waved an angry hand in the air. “It’s just exactly like everyone discovering photography at the same moment all over the world, or when everyone invents the telephone simultaneously, or what have you. That woman has pipped me to the post! I’m arsing around making pathetic little advances with Stan, Stan the Madrigal Man, and she’s got a mansion full of zombies to practice on!”
“But”—she put a hand on his arm—“she was torturing Susan, do you understand?”
He frowned. “I thought this Ed person said they wanted it, that it felt good.”
“He did say that. And you could tell that it brought Susan a strange sort of pleasure. But she didn’t want it. She accepted it for reasons of her own, but she didn’t want it.”
“What do you mean? What did Hannelore do to her?”
Alva took a deep breath. “She . . .” But she found she couldn’t go on. She didn’t want to remember what had happened to Susan, and how Susan had writhed in the silver chair, seeming to both love and hate what was happening to her. Afterward Hannelore had said it was because Susan was experiencing the entirety of three days’ physical sensations in one brief period of time. All the sorrow, all the joy, all the physical pleasure and pain, all the dreams and all the waking thoughts.
Alva had watched, unable to look away, feeling her own power and Bertrand’s being funneled into and through Hannelore, used by her to speed time, and to hold another human being pinned in that rushing cataract of minutes, hours, days.
When finally Susan was released, she had slumped in the chair, unconscious. Hannelore, murmuring feathery endearments, had rushed to her side, lifted her in her arms with the tenderness of a mother, then they had both winked out, leaving Bertrand and Alva alone in the cold room with just the chair and the mosaic man and the serpents. When Hannelore returned, she had looked older, as if she, and not Susan, had had three days of her life torn from her. . . .
“Alva.” Vogelstein was speaking. “Alva, come back to me. Try and tell me what happened.”
But Alva shook her head. He was warm beside her, and the morning sun was pouring in the window, and it was hundreds of years ago, and it was spring. She didn’t want to tell him, didn’t want to even remember it. She wanted to live, right now, in this hour. Live it in delicious real time, with each second tumbling voluptuously after the last. She turned to him, looked him in the eye. Between one heartbeat and another she was on fire. “Ignatz,” she said, tasting his name. And she leaned in and kissed him. Then she climbed on top of him, her legs straddling his hips. She kissed him fiercely, demandingly. He tasted good. She began pulling at his smock.
He pushed her away by the shoulders, a sad smile on his face. “Hush, now, Alva. I want you, too, darling, but first you have to tell me—”
“No,” she said, straining toward him. “I shall tell you later. I promise. Let me have you, Ignatz.”
“Sweet chuck,” he murmured.
“What does that mean?” she whispered.
“It means . . .” He seemed to think about it for a moment. “It was something my nurse called me,” he said. “I think it means sweet chicken.”
• • •
“Never call me that again. Never, do you hear me?”
He held up his hands. “It’s just a name. I shall never call you it again.”
She sank her face into her hands, and he could feel, from the tension in her, that she was fighting back some huge emotion. “Call me lovely names, Ignatz,” she said after a moment. “Just not bird names.”
“No more bird names.” He stroked her thighs, on either side of his hips. “How about . . . sweet pea? Peach?”
Silence. Then a little sigh. “No. I don’t like that. No fruits or vegetables.”
“Mignon?”
“No. No French. Bertrand is French.”
“Hell.” Now it was his turn to pull back. “Bertrand.”
“Yes. Bertrand.” He watched her eyes widen. “Oh, no. I just remembered. He told Hannelore that we were engaged. I’m not sure whether or not he believes it to be true.”
• • •
Ignatz pushed her up and off of him and scrambled out of bed. “He told her what?”
Alva sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. She couldn’t help but smile. He looked quite magnificent—tall, enraged, with his black hair all wild and that bandage wrapped round his head at a dashing angle. She wished he would take off his absurd smock and just let her see him. She wanted to see him quite desperately. “He told her that we were engaged. It was when she was testing us, and he was trying to prove that we were both trustworthy. It seemed to work. But what if he believes it?”
Ignatz paced ba
ck and forth. “He’s wildly in love with you. Told me he was going to marry you, come hell or high water.” He groaned. “Alva, he’s like a little brother to me. Sixty percent pain in the ass, forty percent pride and joy. What’s this going to do to him?”
Alva flopped back against the headboard and rolled her eyes to heaven. “I like your arrogance. It’s actually one of your more attractive qualities. But if you are thinking that I would be marrying Bertrand if only you hadn’t come along—”
He rounded on her, pointing. “I am arrogant,” he said, “because I’m a great time traveler and a great teacher. What I’m not, apparently, is a great friend.”
She shrugged. “You haven’t done anything yet, and I’m certainly not going to force you. But as a point of information, I’ve told him a hundred times that I don’t love him. He has no reason to believe I do.”
“Except that you’ve slept with him.”
“Ignatz.” She reached for and took his hand. “Do you believe that a woman loves you just because she sleeps with you? Do you believe that a woman loves you even if she’s told you many times that she does not?”
“No,” he said. “Of course not.”
She laced her fingers with his, and tugged, ever so gently. “You’re mine,” she said.
But he resisted coming to bed. “‘Midway upon the journey of my life,’” he said with a lopsided smile, “‘I found myself within a forest dark.’”
“And I suppose that I am the forest dark. How dismal.” She let go of his hand. “You are welcome to overcome your dark, foresty urges and keep snuggling innocently with me in this bed for heaven knows how many more nights, Ignatz. But I put you on warning. I am going to make a concerted effort to seduce you.”
She loved watching that smile change into a wicked grin. “Then I am clearly doomed. But perhaps I shall be able to hold out for just a little while longer.”
She leaned forward and propped her chin on her fists. “I don’t believe you will, Ignatz. I think you will find yourself beseeching me, before much more time has passed. Take off your smock. Let me see you.”