by K. C. Archer
She’d done it. Used Miles’s glasses to bull’s-eye her way through time.
Teddy tailed her past self as she walked with Kate through the party. Watched as Kate scoffed and rolled her eyes. Teddy took a steadying breath, oriented herself in the moment.
This is when she tells me that Miles is Whitfield’s grandson.
No one would notice a traveler here except her past self. So she needed to stay out of view until the right moment. She couldn’t risk sending past-Teddy into full panic mode.
Teddy followed Kate and her past self inside, careful to stay a few paces behind. Her eyes locked on Maddux as soon as she entered Whitfield’s lavish entryway. It would be easy to shoot him right there, but she had to wait for all the threads to weave together: the bomb had to go off, Whitfield had to see Maddux’s involvement, Miles needed to know his own power.
She stationed herself in a corner, impatiently watching events unfold as she remembered. She saw Eli pour drinks at the bar. Watched Miles and past-Teddy making small talk. As if on cue, Teddy watched a woman cross the room and interrupt past-Teddy’s conversation with Miles. The woman pulled Miles away to speak to other guests. Past-Teddy headed to the bar.
Go time.
Once again, Henry’s words raced through her mind.
Let it explode
Though perhaps he hadn’t consciously known it, Henry had been referring to the IED that the PC had planted at Whitfield’s party. Teddy had to let it explode. That was the only way. Even Jeremy had said there were always casualties of war. He was right. Only this time, if Teddy pulled it off, the casualty would be General Maddux. A victim of his own collateral damage.
She felt a second’s hesitation as she remembered Marysue’s warning. Yes, there were risks, but they were worth it. They had to be.
Pull the thread.
Aloud, she said, “Teddy.”
Sure enough, past-Teddy turned. Her eyes widened as she did a double take. Teddy caught her breath. How much had she known about astral travel in November? Could she have guessed what seeing her astral self meant? Incredibly enough, the only person in the room who could thwart her plan was . . . her. She jerked her head toward the hallway, indicating Whitfield’s office.
Past-Teddy waited a second, then another. Considering. Then she turned without a word and entered Whitfield’s office, uncharacteristically compliant. She hesitated near the door. “Am I going crazy?”
“No,” Teddy said. “But after you hear what I came to tell you, you might think I am.”
* * *
They returned to the living room. Teddy hoped she’d told her past self enough. It had been almost impossible to restrain herself from saying too much. She would have loved to warn her past self what would happen if she failed. That Eli would be murdered, that Miles would be kidnapped. That the PC would use HEAT as a cover for their actions. But that was too much information. No telling what past-Teddy would do if burdened with all that knowledge.
In the end, the only information she could give her past self was that Maddux was the leader of the PC, and the IED he planted at the party had to be used to take him out. She could clip only one of time’s many threads. Any more information than that and she risked unknown consequences to her future time line.
Teddy looked on as her past self spoke with Eli at the bar. Watched him move out from around the bar, carrying a tray. He dropped a glass and bent to retrieve it, ducking beneath a skirted table that held a punch bowl. A second later, he came up empty-handed and moved away. She watched her past self peek under the skirted table.
But this time, past-Teddy didn’t cry out to clear the room. She didn’t telepathically reach out to warn Kate Atkins. She did exactly what Teddy had asked her to do. She walked toward Miles and suggested he go outside for a moment with his grandfather. Miles complied, and he and his grandfather stepped through the French doors, leaving them ajar.
The room’s exit was wide open. Hollis Whitfield was safe.
Miles was removed from the site of the bomb. He wouldn’t absorb the energy, wouldn’t interfere with its detonation. It would go off exactly like Maddux had planned. And when the ballistics were analyzed, past-Teddy would have the piece she needed to connect the C-4 bomb to the PC.
Past-Teddy stood by the table, a look of panic on her face. She lifted the table skirt. When the bomb’s timer reached three seconds, past-Teddy grabbed the IED and lobbed it directly toward Maddux and Nilsson.
Too late, Teddy noticed someone standing near the general. An innocent victim, a casualty of war, but that couldn’t be helped. The IED detonated. Teddy watched the agonizing detail as a wave of intense pressure, accompanied by ear-splitting noise, knocked past-Teddy off her feet. Flames licked the ceiling. Glass shattered and walls crumbled.
Then Teddy felt a sharp pull at the center of her chest. The edges of the room began to fade. The glasses went hot in her hands, and the whole world went dark as she was plunged back into a Pilgrim’s Tunnel.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
TEDDY WOKE TO THE FAMILIAR feeling of emerging from utter darkness. Not blackout drunk, though. More like waking up anew. Her thoughts rose like helium, a gentle force moving up, up, up. With this came the realization that she was warm and safe, enveloped in layers and layers of soft downy feathers. If this was waking up without a body . . .
She stretched out her arms. She had arms! And she was in bed. For a moment, she wondered if the whole thing—her race to Sector Three to find Miles, the meeting with her mother on the astral plane, the decision to allow the PC’s bomb to detonate at Whitfield’s party—had been a dream.
The bedroom was airy and bright, natural light spilling in from a huge picture window. Beyond it was a view straight from a postcard. Crisp blue cloudless sky, snowcapped mountains, and a pristine body of water reflecting it all back. The kind of view only rich people could afford.
She was back at Lake Tahoe.
Back in Whitfield’s lodge. She recognized it by the vaulted pine ceiling and sturdy crossbeams. But this wasn’t the guest room. She was in a king-size bed with the kind of soft, welcoming sheets that made you feel like there was nowhere else you’d want to be.
Strange. Her last clear memory was watching her past self being knocked flat by an IED. Forcing herself to take inventory, Teddy lifted the duvet to inspect her own body. She was in an oversize T-shirt. Nothing was hurt, broken, or bruised. She looked at her feet and wiggled her toes. Pink nail polish. Where the hell had that come from?
She turned her attention to the steady whoosh of running water coming from the bathroom. Someone was taking a shower. She glanced around the room for clues to who it might be but saw only a man’s blue shirt draped and a pair of jeans tossed over a tufted chair. Hmm. Definitely getting interesting. Maybe the siren call of the casinos on the other side of the lake had been too much to resist. Not exactly Vegas, but a girl had to make do. Maybe her night’s winnings had included a sexy stranger who—
Then she saw something on the bedside table. A pair of round, wire-rimmed glasses.
At that moment, the water shut off and the door to the bathroom opened. There he was. Bare-chested, with a towel wrapped around his narrow waist.
Miles.
He squinted, trying to see. “You’re up,” he said cheerfully, as he ran his fingers through his damp hair.
“Miles?” She was too stunned to say anything else. He was alive. Her plan had worked. Of course, that wasn’t the only shock. She was in his bed. Why was she—Well, okay. She could fill in the blanks, especially since he didn’t seem at all surprised to find her there. This wasn’t the first time she hadn’t remembered what had happened the night before, although she didn’t make a habit of completely skipping all the good parts.
He grinned. “You were expecting someone else?” He walked to the nightstand, grabbed his glasses, and put them on. Then he bent over and kissed the top of her head. “Sleep well?”
Teddy stared up at him.
Holy crap.
“What’s today’s date?” she asked, aware that she had slammed back into her body after traveling back to Thanksgiving.
“Last I checked, Christmas was still December twenty-fifth.”
“It’s Christmas morning?”
“And it sounds like you need some coffee. Come on, get dressed. I gave the cook the day off, told her we’d make our own breakfast.” He dropped his towel, opened a dresser drawer, and pulled out a pair of boxers. And Teddy turned her head and blushed. Teddy Cannon blushed like some preteen because she was seeing her supposed boyfriend naked. But she’d skipped so many steps that Teddy couldn’t begin to wrap her head around what the hell was happening.
Miles stepped into the boxers before grabbing his jeans and shirt from the chair. Even though she was embarrassed, there was something about this routine that pulled at her heartstrings, as if she’d been watching Miles get dressed like this for days. Maybe weeks. She tried to access a specific memory of when the two of them had become a couple, but she couldn’t. And yet she couldn’t shake the feeling this was real. The emotions attached to this moment felt deep and genuine. She and Miles were a thing. Not some holiday hookup.
“Come on, sleepyhead,” Miles said. He grabbed a green and red sweater from the drawer and pulled it over his head. It wasn’t a corny holiday sweater, like Pyro would have grabbed, but a soft cashmere crew neck in ruby red and deep emerald green. Even in her present state of mind, Teddy appreciated how beautiful he looked. Like a gift.
She glanced away and stared out over the lake. There was so much she needed to ask him. Clearly, whatever she had done at Whitfield’s party had changed her present time line. She needed to get her bearings and understand this new world she had created. But she couldn’t ask too much outright. She had to carefully feel her way forward.
“Uh . . . okay if I meet you downstairs?” she said. It wasn’t that she felt self-conscious about dressing in front of him, it was that she felt like she should feel self-conscious about dressing in front of him. There was a part of her that felt very at home in this new life.
“I’ll get breakfast started,” he said, heading for the door. “Waffles or pancakes?”
“And after that?”
“Whatever you want. But I was hoping I could get you back on the slopes today.”
Back on the slopes? Oh, come on. She hadn’t actually been skiing, had she?
“I didn’t mean for the rest of the day, I meant . . .”
“The rest of the break?” he asked. “Anything. As long as we get to campus by the time classes start, we can do what we want.”
We? She studied his face, trying to understand. “You’re coming back to school with me?”
“Why wouldn’t I? My grandfather thinks it’s about time I enrolled. And I figured you lot could be my private tutors and catch me up on what I missed first semester.”
You lot. Plural. Teddy repeated the phrase in her head, letting the words fill her with hope. Please let this mean my friends are alive. That she’d righted the course of her time line and saved the people she loved.
“You mean me and Dara?”
Miles shrugged. “And Jillian. If we can drag her away from Eli. Kind of cool to start at a new school with a ready-made group of friends.” He paused and cocked his head. “Are you okay?”
Eli. Teddy got out of bed and threw her arms around him.
It had worked. Everyone was okay. The end.
Miles backed up to look into her eyes, resting a hand on her cheek. “What’s wrong?”
“I . . .” she said, and paused to find an excuse for her surplus of emotions. It was simply too soon to explain everything. “It’s the holidays. I get a little nostalgic.”
“Missing your family?”
She nodded. “And my friends. And school, believe it or not.” Teddy let out a long breath. The only question was whether she should call Clint right away or wait until she got back to campus. There was so much she needed to tell him. About Yates. About her mother. And most important, about Maddux.
“Does that mean more skiing?” he asked.
Teddy laughed. “Maybe.”
She looked around the room for a cell phone. She found one on the dresser next to a tall white vase, plugged in and fully charged.
“You didn’t tell me what you want for breakfast,” Miles said, pausing on his way out.
“Pancakes,” she replied. Always pancakes. “I’ll be right down. I just want to call Clint.”
“Clint?” He stopped abruptly. Turned to look at her.
“I won’t be long,” she promised. “Just a couple of things I need to go over with him.”
Miles stepped into the room and shut the door behind him. He walked across the floor toward her. He gently pulled the phone from her grip and put it back on the dresser. Then he took both her hands in his and looked into her eyes. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong.
“Teddy,” he said softly, “I guess you’re still a little confused. I know that happens sometimes when we lose someone we love, and when you hit your head as much as you tend to do.”
Teddy rubbed the back of her head as a reflex. Miles studied the floor, clearly searching for the right words.
“Where’s Clint?” she asked, her voice almost a whisper.
“Teddy, Clint is dead. He died at the party. He threw himself on top of the bomb. It took out Maddux and his aide as well. Thanksgiving Day, remember?”
It can’t be. It can’t.
Because if Clint was dead, that meant it wasn’t the end. That meant it was her fault. Clint. The very person who had warned her that changing the past could have dire consequences.
She scanned Miles’s face for some indication that he had misspoken.
“Your friend Pyro blamed himself,” he said. “He took Clint’s death pretty hard. That’s why he left the institute. Said he should have been there to stop the bomb. That if he couldn’t protect the people he loved, he shouldn’t be in law enforcement.”
Teddy sat down on the bed, her head in her hands. Miles sat next to her and rubbed her back.
“Don’t you remember? You two fought about it.”
She wanted to say: Tell me. Tell me how it happened.
Instead, she said: “It’s my fault.”
“No,” Miles said. “You tried to save us all by tossing the IED away from the crowd.”
Not exactly. But Teddy wondered if she could try again. If she could go back, keep Clint away, and everything would be okay. Clint wouldn’t die, and Pyro wouldn’t leave.
In her mind, she tried to find the right thread to pull, but each time she encountered another knot—she could save Clint, but what if she lost someone else? What if she got caught in an endless loop of saving one person only to lose another? Was that how the universe worked? Sacrificing one life for another in an endless code for the space-time continuum?
It was a conundrum she couldn’t possibly answer. Worse, the one person she would go to for advice was the very person she had lost.
What sacrifices was she willing to make? The question had plagued her ever since Wessner’s first class.
She didn’t want to face this day. Or the next or the one after that. She wanted to crawl back into bed, burrow under the covers, and stay there. She was turning to Miles, trying to think of what she could say to him, when she felt a strange warmth radiating against the middle of her chest. At first the sensation was entirely foreign. But then she realized what it was.
The ametrine necklace.
Teddy pulled it out from under her T-shirt and looked at it in her hand. Then she wrapped her fingers around it and thought about the power it gave her. Suddenly, she felt flooded with hope. Because there was someone she could talk to. Her mother. Even if she didn’t know Teddy as anyone but a fellow traveler. And in some way—some big, important way—that made her feel better.
“You okay?” Miles asked.
“No,” she said. “Because it’s not the end
.”
Teddy Cannon hadn’t given up yet.
More from this Series
School for Psychics
Book 1
BOOKS IN THIS SERIES
School for Psychics (Book One)
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