by April White
“Lost? Why?”
She didn’t answer. Instead she seemed to study me from head to toe for a long moment before finally speaking again. “Where were you last night?”
“1888.”
The only indication of surprise she gave was a twitch in her hand. It looked like she was about to clutch the desk but managed to control the instinct. “Interesting. How?” She might have been talking about the weather, but there was a tightness to her voice that told me she believed me.
“You tell me.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You found a spiral.”
Very interesting. Millicent knew what a spiral could do, and intriguingly, she didn’t ask where the spiral was. Which meant there was more than one. Doran, the graffiti artist, had done the one in a Venice tunnel and maybe even the one scratched into the tile of the Whitechapel underground station. What if I drew a spiral right here? Would I be able to travel through it back to Elian Manor before Millicent was born so I wouldn’t have to be having this conversation?
“I should have left you in Los Angeles.”
That’s nice. Way to make me feel wanted. “Why didn’t you?”
“Because you are your mother’s daughter and therefore my blood.”
“That didn’t seem to bother you before when you threw my mom out.”
“I’m sure it’s easier for you to believe Claire was pushed out of this family.”
“Easier than what?”
Millicent actually sighed, like I was making her tired. “Your father was a completely inappropriate match for Claire. When she didn’t get permission to marry him she ran away from the family instead of facing up to her responsibilities as an Elian.”
“Responsibility? She was pregnant! Her responsibility was to me! I would have run away from a family that dictated who I could love too.”
“And how, exactly, did that turn out for her? Or you? It seems to me that if your father had been worth any of the drama you would all still be together. A happy little family.”
“You must have really hated him.”
“I hated what he did to this family.” Millicent’s tone said the subject was closed.
“Yeah, well, he’s dead so it’s ancient history now.” I can close my own subjects. I was seriously ready to walk out. I figured I’d grab my suitcase and maybe go stay in a youth hostel or something until my mom got back… from 1888.
“Why is my mom hanging out in Victorian England?”
The look on Millicent’s face almost made the whole fight worth it. I loved that I could jolt her out of her superiority. She stared at me. “How do you know that?”
“I saw her there, I mean then. She was at the Whitechapel station.”
Millicent got up and started for the door. “Come with me, Saira.”
We were still on the main floor of the Manor, but in a totally unfamiliar section. The hallways were narrower and the doors we passed were plain, solid wood. It seemed like an older part of the house, if such a thing were possible. Millicent confirmed it as she stopped in front of the last door at the end of the hall.
“There was a stone keep built on this property when Adelaide Elian built the Manor House. She incorporated the keep into her design so well that no one remembers it was ever here.”
“That’s why this part is so much colder?”
I surprised her again, but only her eyes showed it. “It is?”
I reached out to touch a stone wall and the chill seemed to seep directly into my bones. I snatched my hand back like I’d been burned. “It’s freezing.”
Millicent looked thoughtful as she pulled a big iron key ring out of her pocket. She chose a plain, black, oddly-shaped key and unlocked the heavy wooden door in front of us. It opened into a low-ceilinged, dark room. Millicent crossed to a table in the middle and picked up a barbecue lighter lying next to an old-fashioned lantern. She lit the wick inside the lamp, then went around the room lighting other oil lamps hung like sconces on the walls.
“No electricity?”
Millicent shook her head. “The keep was never wired for it. The walls are too thick.”
“Creepy.”
I thought I saw a tiny smile at the corner of her mouth, but it was gone in an instant. The lamps were all lit and the room had a warm yellow glow that seemed to banish a little of the cold.
Millicent went over to a shelf and pulled down a big, leather-bound book. She brought it over to the table and opened it. “This is the Elian Family History. Begun by Adelaide Elian in the 1500s, it’s as complete as we’ve been able to make it.”
As Millicent turned pages, the paper crackled with age but didn’t seem as fragile as it should have been in a 500 year old book. She found a page and showed it to me. Two little girls looked solemnly back from a formal photograph, one of the old-looking kind with really cool sepia colors.
Both girls looked somehow familiar, even though I was sure I didn’t know them. The older girl was maybe five and looked like she was about to laugh. The younger one was probably three and clearly loved her big sister.
“The one on the left is your mother, Claire.” Millicent watched me for a reaction and it was a big one.
“You’re lying! That picture’s ancient!” I didn’t know why she was messing with me like that but I wasn’t an idiot. The photo was practically a tin-type and we don’t even have that technology anymore.
“And the younger girl is my grandmother.”
Millicent’s Grandmother. There was the bombshell. The one I’d halfway been waiting for since all this weirdness began. All of a sudden I couldn’t get enough air and I started circling the room like a wild animal in a cage. Millicent watched me silently. Maybe she was waiting for my head to explode and brain matter to splatter the room. At that point nothing was impossible.
I needed something to fix on, like a dancer does when they’re spinning. A painting in an elaborate gold frame caught my eye and I went over to it. It was painted in a Renaissance style and looked a little like the Last Supper except there were five people at the table, not thirteen. Two women and three men, dressed in robes that looked almost sheer, even though you couldn’t see much of their bodies underneath.
All five people were beautiful. There was no other way to describe them. Even with the long-faced Renaissance style of the painting, they had an ethereal look to them.
The blonde woman sat at one end of the table staring off into the distance with a dreamy look on her face. A ridiculously handsome blonde guy stood behind his chair next to her. He held something that looked like a long staff in one hand and his face had kind of a sneer on it. Even though he was model material he looked stuck up and superior, and there was something about him that reminded me a little of Slick. I shuddered. Next to him sat a brown-haired man who was kind of a stunning mountain man. If it was possible to look graceful, strong and capable while sitting in a chair, he did it. His gaze rested on the dark-haired woman to his right.
I’m not sure how it’s possible to see that in a painting, but I felt like the dark-haired woman had just looked away from the mountain man and was now looking directly at me. Obviously, not me exactly. But the artist had made it seem like she looked straight out of the canvas. I moved closer to study her eyes.
“That’s Jera.” Millicent’s voice startled me. I was so engrossed in the painting I forgot she was there.
“She’s staring at me.”
“She does that.”
That seemed as unreasonable as anything else my grandmonster had said so far so I ignored her and continued to examine the painting. Sitting on the far side of the scene, a full space beyond Jera, was a black-haired man who was the most striking person there. Everything about him seemed dark, and even his sheer robe was two shades darker than everyone else’s. He wasn’t glaring arrogantly like the blond guy, but the intensity in his gaze was unsettling.
I couldn’t tell if the Dark Man was looking at Jera or the Mountain Man or both of them, I just knew I wouldn’t want to be on the re
ceiving end of that stare.
The strangest thing about the painting though was not the cast of characters in it. It was the space between Jera and the Dark Man. It was what wasn’t there. The artist had a perfect sense of proportion and scale. Every person was fully occupying their own space in the scene and their body positions were completely balanced by the person next to them. It made the gap feel like a hole, a mistake, or maybe like something was missing.
I looked closer but couldn’t find any marks to show that someone had been painted out. Somehow that was even more unsettling. Like the artist wanted the viewer to feel the wrongness of the scene.
Jera was still staring at me from the painting and her eyes felt alive. I gasped and stepped back, and with the extra foot of distance her eyes became painted again.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Millicent sounded awed. I turned to her, surprised at how angry I suddenly was.
“It’s wrong.”
She took a step back from me. “What do you mean by that? What’s wrong with it?”
I scoffed at her. “If you can’t see it on your own nothing I say will change it for you.” I turned away from the remarkable painting and went back to the leather-bound book on the table. Millicent was studying the painting so I had the book to myself. I turned pages beyond the two little girls. The photos were old and the clothes and hairstyles were probably from around Victorian times. The photos were family shots mostly, of the girls and their parents doing things around the manor house.
I turned another page and barely contained another gasp. A young woman stared out of a sepia photograph – a young woman wearing pearls, my pearls, who would eventually become my mother. Millicent wasn’t lying about that. Could she be telling the truth about everything else? The final picture of my mom showed her at about twenty-two. She was laughing at whoever took the photo and she looked totally happy.
I stared at Millicent, realization suddenly dawning. “So you’re not really my grandmother.” It wasn’t a question and she didn’t answer it.
“I never had any children.”
I had to fight a feeling of sympathy that single statement roused in me. Like her weird bitterness about my mother leaving the family, this was personal, and probably way more information than I’d ever get from Millicent in any other circumstance.
“So why did you help me?”
Millicent sighed. “I am your first cousin, once-removed and, as your mother will have nothing to do with us, the current matriarch of the Elian Family. Regardless of my personal feelings about what she’s done, it’s my duty to care for every member of this family.”
Oh my God. This woman sounded like she was saddled with the weight of the world and it was all my mother’s fault. I suddenly felt sorry for Millicent. She must have sensed it because her eyes narrowed dangerously.
“Even the illegitimate ones.”
That did it. Sympathy gone. Millicent was absently stroking the back of a velvet and gold chair, waiting for my reaction. “Well, the job doesn’t seem to be without its perks.” Scorn crept into my voice and I didn’t bother to hide it.
The lines on Millicent’s face were etched in stone and her voice was suddenly flat. “Or costs.” She suddenly turned back to the painting and started talking as if she was reciting a lesson. “Like time itself, the rules for Jera’s family are strict and cannot be changed lest we invite catastrophe.” Millicent turned back and spoke to me in the softest voice I’d ever heard from her. “What I might want has no place in Jera’s rules for us.”
“Jera’s rules? You lost me.”
Millicent indicated the painting. “Has anyone ever spoken to you of the Immortals?”
Not since last night, I thought with some satisfaction. But I decided to play dumb. I shook my head “no.” Millicent pointed to the vague-looking blonde on the left of the painting. “Aislin. The Immortal, Fate.” Her hand moved right to the handsome blond warrior guy with the sneer. “Duncan. The Immortal, War.” She kept moving across the painting. “Goran. Nature.”
I interrupted her. “Isn’t Nature usually depicted as a woman in mythology?”
“Mortals have always tried to tame nature and make it soft and gentle, so they’ve created female representations. But Nature is unforgiving, harsh, strong and totally careless in its destruction. It’s also unexpected and striking and can take your breath away with its gifts. And as you can see, Goran, as the Immortal, Nature is unquestionably male.”
No doubt about it. He was about as manly as they come.
“Jera is the Immortal, Time. Thus we are of her family.”
“So, we’re time-travelers?”
“The Elians are the descendants of Time. The ability to travel in time flows through our family lines as a direct inheritance from Jera herself.”
“Can everyone in our Family do it?”
Millicent seemed to pause slightly before answering. “No.”
And I got nothing else on that one. She pointed at the black-haired man on the end of the painting, effectively changing the subject. “This is Aeron. He is the Immortal, Death.”
“Death that can’t die? Sort of an oxymoron.”
Without a trace of humor, Millicent remarked, “Aeron isn’t fond of the term. I’d advise you don’t use it in his presence.”
I stared at her. “In his presence? You mean there’s a chance I could meet Death?”
“A certainty, I’d say. One of the few in life.” The corners of Millicent’s mouth rose very slightly. Her attempt at a smile apparently. Okay, I’d give her that one, it was funny in the way Roadrunner dropping an anvil on Wyle E. Coyote is funny. Kind of morbid. Kind of tragic. Kind of worthy.
“Okay, Millicent – do you mind if I call you Millicent?”
“I suppose it’s more appropriate than ‘Grandmother.’”
Not to mention the other things I’ve been calling her in my head. “So, the people in this painting are Immortals, and supposedly Jera, the Immortal of Time, is our ancestor…” I looked to Millicent for a reaction. She nodded but didn’t interrupt. “Which is nice and all, to know who you’re descended from, but I’m sorry, I’m at a complete loss for how all this Immortal Descendants thing works.”
Millicent recited like she was reading from a book. “Each Immortal created their own lineage and gave their children and their children their own gifts. We, of Jera’s line, have gift of time travel.”
“I understand the concept of the legacy, but what does it mean?”
“Think of time as a circle. Actually, it’s more like a spiral that expands upwards. Elians aren’t bound by the edges of the circles. We can slip from one ring to the next through spiral portals like the one you traveled through.”
“Still not getting it.”
Millicent scowled and took a breath. “Let me put it into real terms then. Your mother, Claire, was born in 1850 and my grandmother in 1853. That’s their native time. Claire ran away in 1871, but instead of running away through space, she also ran through time. She traveled through a portal to the next ring, if you will, approximately 125 years ahead. To what has become your native time.’”
That actually made sense, but it felt like just barely scratching the surface of everything I wanted to know. “You keep saying ‘native time.’ What does that have to do with anything?”
“Many things. But in Claire’s case, there’s one in particular that makes traveling back to 1888 vital. In one of Time’s remarkable traits, our family doesn’t physically age unless we are in our native time.”
I stared at Millicent, then said something really mean that I instantly regretted. “You must not travel much then, do you?” The expression on her face slammed shut and Millicent strode toward the door. “And your remarkable cruelty is another trait you inherited from your father.” Her tone was as cold as ice.
“I’m sorry, Millicent. I shouldn’t have said that.”
She spun to face me. “As you say, I don’t travel. My family duties keep me as chained to thi
s time as if I were wearing real shackles. And unlike some members of this family, I take my responsibilities very seriously.”
She waited for me to leave the room in front of her so I had no choice but to go. I really wanted another crack at the Elian Family history, but doubted she was in the mood to loan it to me now. Millicent closed the door behind me with a loud ‘click’ and locked it firmly. “And when you have washed and dressed for dinner we’ll discuss your punishment for disobeying me.” With that she strode away, forcing me to run after her like a puppy rather than lose my way in the bowels of the manor.
Child of Time
The main hall was bright with daylight. I’d forgotten what time it was in the windowless keep. Once we made it back to where we started Millicent disappeared into another room, closing the door firmly behind her. I waited for a moment in the hall, half-expecting the Hobbit to appear out of thin air and lock me up in my room again.
That didn’t happen. I was forced to find my own way back to my bedroom, and more importantly, my suitcase that was hopefully still stashed under the bed. I took my time getting back to the east wing. I made a point of memorizing landmarks as I went – a painting here, a carved wooden bench there.
The art in this place was actually pretty remarkable. A lot of landscapes and some fairly impressive portraits. Most of it was in older styles that didn’t really appeal to my own aesthetic, but I still appreciated the collection.
Some of the landscapes looked familiar, and I looked more closely at one in particular. It was a small stone cottage perched on the edge of a forest. A big cat, like a Mountain Lion maybe, stared across the painting at the cottage door as if waiting for someone to emerge. Instead of being menacing, the animal looked lonely, and it infused the painting with a sense of longing. There was a small metal tag attached to the frame that said ‘Epping Place.’ I’d never seen the place, but the style of painting was unmistakable. In the bottom right corner was my mother’s perfect signature. And the date. 1871. The year she ran away.
I looked around me to try and figure out where I was. I knew if I continued on to the left I’d be in the east wing, but the section of hall I was in seemed to be a crossroads. Turn left, go East. Turn right, go West. The painting was on the right side of the intersecting halls so I decided to go right.