Kiss Across Tomorrow (Kiss Across Time Book 8)

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  The future Veris glanced at him. “And I know who will be needed for what comes next,” he said dismissively.

  Veris came over to Taylor. “How do I argue with me? I have to figure I know what I’m talking about, so disputing myself is…” He shook his head. “We’re going to have to work on my snotty attitude, Taylor.”

  She smothered her laugh. So did Alex, who was within earshot.

  Remi was asked to sit at the table. Neven looked relieved. “It’s past midnight in France. I want London and Jason to go home and sleep, so we’ll go back.” He kissed Remi. “Take notes.”

  Remi tapped his own temple. “I will.”

  Sydney and Alex were also included at the table. Rafe shrugged. “He’s recruiting fighters. I’m okay with that but I’m damned if I’m going home. Liberty is asleep upstairs. I wanna hear every single word of this. I’ll just sit on the counter and eavesdrop.”

  Sebastian and Winter moved to the table and selected chairs. Sebastian looked defiantly at David. “We’re coming on this…expedition, whatever it is. Period.”

  David nodded.

  Nayara settled at the table, taking the chair to the immediate right of the one which David pulled out. Kieran, though, stayed in the kitchen. He leaned against the counter and crossed his arms, in an eerie echo of Veris’ favorite defensive posture. Only he was not on the defensive, as far as Taylor could tell.

  Taylor’s Veris was asked to sit down, too. That relieved her. Veris would cycle out of control if he wasn’t included.

  Kieran reached out and almost touched her arm, halting Taylor as she crossed the floor and said in his deep voice. “Ma’am, if I might impose…it’s late, and we’re likely to be here for a while. Would it be possible to get a sandwich, or some fruit?”

  “You’re human?” she asked, surprised.

  “Very,” he said, with a small smile. “Although to hear some folks back in my time, I’m a freak of nature who should be destroyed before he breeds.”

  “That doesn’t sound…tolerant,” Taylor said.

  “It was a lot worse a few years ago,” Kieran said bleakly.

  “I’ll order pizza,” Taylor said, reaching for the phone.

  “I’ll do it, Mom,” Marit said, taking the phone from her and moving back to the corner near the pantry to hear herself talk.

  Alannah and Aran were included at the table and Taylor objected loudly. “They’re too young.”

  “We’re just talking,” Nayara said.

  “You’re recruiting an army,” Taylor shot back. “They’re not even legal adults yet. I forbid it.”

  “Taylor has a point,” her Veris said.

  The future Veris hesitated. “If you don’t include them this time, they’ll be included by default on future occasions and not be prepared or trained for it.”

  “Far…!” Aran protested in an undertone, his face pink because everyone was talking over him.

  Taylor’s Veris blew out his breath and nodded. Quickly, Alannah and Aran sat down.

  Taylor whirled away, fear spearing her.

  They’ll be safe. I promise. The words formed in her head as if she had thought them herself, although the tone was strange. Deep and reassuring.

  She looked at Kieran. He studied her, his gaze steady.

  After that, she could concentrate on the discussion at the table. It was hard to dispute a thought in her own mind, for she could feel the intent behind the thought, the determination to protect her children.

  David spread his hands on the table. They were strong hands, with long fingers. “If we are not to stir time even more tonight, then we should leave explanations and histories out of this discussion. Agreed? We can always catch up later.” His glance slid to Nayara. “As much as we can, at least.”

  She smiled.

  “Nayara has convinced me she is following my future self’s orders,” David said. “Now I must know what those orders are.” He spoke with the softest of accents, one which Taylor had never heard before. It made his words very precise. His voice was deep, too, yet not as deep as Kieran’s.

  David hesitated, looking around the table. “For millennia, I have remained hidden. To speak freely now feels dangerous. Yet Nayara and Kieran and Veris being here tells me I must. So, for the first time in history, I will speak these words aloud.” He paused. “I was born able to see time. Not just the timescape as you jumpers see it, but all of time. I could see it form. I could watch worlds split from each other and grow into new alternatives. Each time they split, I was divided, too. Only, unlike you, I am still connected to my other selves. I am aware of them and they of me.”

  “Wow,” Alannah breathed.

  “Yes, wow,” David agreed. “It was overwhelming. Confusing. It took me a long time to learn how to live a normal life, to hide myself among other humans and to behave as a human, while encompassing all of time with my consciousness.” He glanced around the table. “Because I could see everything, I knew how dangerous time could be. Whole universes destroyed by a single decision. Mankind rides a thin rail, with voids on either side. A single step, a slip, and we are all gone.” He looked at Taylor’s Veris. “I have watched you for many years. You have a greater sense of the awful possibilities than any who have come before you. You must finish your book, Veris. It will be needed.”

  Veris drew in a breath. Then he nodded. Taylor could tell he was repressing his usual need for explanations, for answers.

  “I have spent my life suppressing time travel,” David answered. “To impede its use, to discourage its discovery. For that purpose, I formed the Council.”

  Sydney straightened. “Then the Council is not to control vampires?”

  David shook his head. “It is to control time.” He sighed. “It is an imperfect tool. The Council knows of time travel—they had to. They have never understood the dangers, though. Eventually, the power at their control corrupted them and my purpose was warped and misused. Some of the abuses of the Council emerged from the great power they wield, for power they must have to complete their work. I have been forced to be ruthless in suppressing time travel, for the dangers were too great to show mercy. Despite that, you who are in this room have thrived. By the skin of your teeth, by the most remarkable will to survive, you have lived through what destroys everyone who discovers how to move between or along timelines.”

  Taylor’s Veris laughed. “You thought you could stop people from discovering time travel? When has anyone ever been able to stop anyone from exploring the world? It’s like the twentieth century idea of teaching kids abstinence as birth control. They were surprised when kids had sex anyway. Sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies were rampant and they couldn’t figure out why.” He snorted. “For someone who has lived so long, you’re shitty at learning from the past.”

  David considered Veris for a long moment. “If I was so bad at learning from the past, then I would not have survived my father’s plot to kill me, or my uncle’s. Or the thousands of years which have passed since then. You have lived nearly as long, Veris Gerhardsson. You tell me—does a fool ever live longer than he should?”

  Veris shook his head. “Semantics.”

  “We can wage battle over semantics later,” David responded, his tone one of agreement. “For now, we must keep this discussion lean. Let me finish. I have observed Sydney’s beginning efforts to wield time instead of being afraid of it. It is an intriguing concept.”

  Sydney didn’t shift her gaze from his face. She kept her chin up.

  David nodded. “Yes, I agree,” he told her softly. “It is time to learn how to control time travel, not avoid it.” He pointed to Nayara. “Her presence here—and Kieran and Veris…they tell me my fears are realized, that despite everything I have done, time travel thrives.”

  “Not in the way you think,” Nayara said. “I cannot say much. I came here tonight to coax Veris and Taylor to find Brody. To find out how far along in their search they had come, and to guide them with a hint or two, if they w
ere still focused upon the Council. Your arrival, David, has made my involvement more complex than it can safely be.”

  David and Taylor’s Veris both spoke at once.

  David raised his brow at Veris. “This is your home. Your table.”

  Veris nodded. “If we all agree we need to learn how to use time instead of fearing it, then worrying about changing the future because we know too much is pointless. We must know as much as we can so we can act in the best interests of that future.”

  David pointed to him and nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “Nayara? Why don’t you put us all out of our misery? Explain why you are here, in full.”

  “I must work against instincts trained over two hundred years, but very well.” Nayara drew in a breath. “Sometime in the future, on this timeline, time travel was discovered and commercialized. The vampire travelers use psychic abilities which they learned from laboratory-designed human psychics—what we call psi-filers.” She looked around the table.

  Everyone was listening carefully, including David.

  “Our form of time travel is different from yours, yet in one respect it is the same. Vampires, with their long memories, make perfect travelers, for they remember history while humans merely learn about it.” She paused. “May I have some water, please?”

  Taylor straightened and went to the cupboard for a glass. Then she whirled. “Wait, if all your travelers are vampires, then you must be a vampire. How is it I’ve watched you drink coffee and eat muffins for weeks?”

  Nayara’s smile made dimples in her cheeks. “When we use purely psi talents to jump back, our symbiot goes into stasis. Essentially, we become human, while we are in the past.”

  Taylor pulled the filtered water from the fridge, sorting that one out.

  “That isn’t what happens to us when we jump back,” Alex said, his tone polite. “Not unless we jump back to when we were human.”

  Nayara nodded. “About thirty years ago on my personal timeline, during a period when commercial time travel was reaching a peak, a group of people—vampires, all of them—emerged from passing and contacted the Agency. They were led by you, David,” Nayara said.

  David drew in a breath. “And the circle closes.”

  “They also included Veris and others who moved through history with him, including generations of what we now call natural time jumpers.”

  Nayara looked around the room. “Psi-filers were lab-built psychics, while Kieran and others of his kind are natural psychics, who also moved silently through history. It is the DNA of natural psychics upon whom the psi-file DNA was built. That won’t happen with natural time jumpers. We have not yet isolated the gene which gives naturals their abilities. As you can imagine, gene therapy in my time is extremely advanced. Expert consensus is that time traveling abilities are a gestalt of a number of genes, and the combination will never be determined. The pool of naturals is too limited to draw a statistical analysis from. Somewhere in the next hundred years, natural time jumpers become so rare they are in danger of extinction. Only by making them one of the Blood have enough of them survived to my time.”

  “Interesting, but it does not explain why you came back here,” David said.

  “I am skipping across the surface of nearly three hundred years of history,” Nayara said, her tone diplomatic. “I’m reaching that point, now.” She picked up the glass Taylor put in front of her and drank deeply. “Thank you,” she added and put the glass down. She spread her hands again. “My Agency not only supplies commercial time travel services. It also polices time. When changes are introduced by our travelers, we go back and fix those changes, to preserve our future. We learned the hard way that sometimes the smallest changes, if they are far enough in the past, can have massive effects as they ripple through time. The change creates more changes, which create more changes, until you have a tsunami of changes which can—and has—destroyed our world.”

  “Are you saying you’re here to fix something one of your guys fucked up?” Rafe asked, from the counter where he was sitting, his feet kicking.

  Nayara considered him. Then she grimaced. “Yes.”

  Veris drew in a breath. “Brody…” he breathed.

  Nayara nodded. “This should never have happened.”

  “What shouldn’t have happened?” Taylor demanded, her heart thudding hard.

  Nayara sipped the water, giving herself a moment. “Perhaps we should focus on fixing, first. Later, when everyone is assembled and the task is done, I will feel more comfortable talking about this.” She added, “Time is essential. At least, at this end of the timeline, it is.”

  “How were you going to fix things, before?” David asked her.

  “I have been trying to push Veris and Taylor into investigating.” Nayara’s mouth turned down. “They were too immobilized for that. I decided that revealing myself in this one instant, as Veris is already known to me in the future, would push them into action. Now, though…” She shrugged.

  “You know what happened to Brody,” Veris breathed. He leaned forward. “Tell me.”

  The future Veris watched Taylor’s Veris closely, his eyes narrowed. She saw his jaw working.

  Nayara looked at David. “The policies we built around security and compartmentalizing…keeping the timeline pure—we made them for good reasons. This is extraordinarily dangerous.”

  David shook his head. “Veris said it perfectly. We need information if we are to make the best decision for the future.”

  “It is my future!” Nayara railed. “Yours, too. If you make a decision which changes that future, then I and mine suffer.”

  “Only on one timeline. On the other, you prosper,” David said. “This is why I said time travel is a dangerous tool, why I have spent a lifetime suppressing it. Who gets to decide such things? Certainly it should not be you or I, yet time travel has been thrust at us. All we can do is learn what we can and make the best decisions we can. You must tell us where to find Brody, Nayara. I insist upon it.”

  Nayara swallowed. She nodded and sat back. “Time is too critical now for me to argue. You must go at once and get him. Kieran has the location. He can share it with everyone. But you must go now.”

  The silence which greeted her words throbbed.

  When the front door bell chimed, everyone jumped.

  “That will be the pizza,” Taylor murmured and hurried to answer the door. On the way through the sunroom, she paused, for Marit was sitting in the same corner armchair. Her knees were against her chest and she had her arms wrapped about them as if she was cold. As Taylor changed directions and moved closer to her, she could see that Marit was trembling.

  Taylor crouched down in front of her. “What is it, Marit? What’s wrong?”

  Marit shook her head. She glanced Taylor, then her gaze skittered away. “I’m just…recalibrating,” she whispered.

  Taylor smiled. “You, of all people, must have always sensed some of what Nayara and David have been saying. It can’t be that much of a shock to you.”

  “He is,” Marit breathed.

  Taylor frowned. “Who?”

  “David,” Marit whispered. She closed her eyes. “He’s the one. The man. The voice I know, from my future.” She buried her head against her knees. “Only, he’s not in my future anymore and I’m…I’m not ready.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The thirteen people who would make the jump to collect Brody and Nial gathered in the sunroom. It was the most bizarre party Taylor had ever seen, for they armed themselves from among the illegal and monstrous collection of weapons Brody and Veris had collected over the years.

  It began simply enough. Veris from the future had clapped Taylor’s Veris on the shoulder, which made Taylor’s Veris look down at the hand resting there, with a frown.

  “You still have a stash in the lock box beneath the garage floor?” Veris from the future asked.

  Veris’ frowned increased. “There’s—”

  “Always a stash,” Veris from the future
finished.

  Veris scowled. Silently, he went to get the bags which were always locked up, away from kids and prying neighbors. He returned carrying three great nylon bags over his shoulder, which he dumped on the floor and stood back. “The Uzi is mine. Anything else, first in.”

  For the next thirty minutes, while Nayara grew increasingly impatient, everyone selected weapons and light armor and tried them on for fit. Even Sebastian grabbed the AK-47.

  “We have to go in quietly,” Nayara said. “We’ll be easing through one of the most violent cartels in South America and there’s too many of them and too few of us.”

  Sebastian reached for a bayonet instead and weighed it. “This will do.”

  Winter did not arm herself. “I’m the MASH unit,” she told Taylor, when she caught Taylor looking at her.

  “Both Alex and Veris are medical doctors,” Taylor pointed out.

  Winter raised her brow. “Alex, too?” She glanced at the men, who were all concentrating on settling their weapons.

  “They’ve been learning their trade for hundreds of years, too,” Taylor added.

  “I think they’ll be a bit busy tonight,” Winter said. “What are you taking?”

  Taylor lifted her knee so Winter could see the knife tucked into her boot. There was a second in the other boot. “I’m fast,” she added.

  “Vampire speed.” Winter smiled. “I’ve seen Nial moving at top speed. It’s too fast to see with the naked eye.”

  David clapped his hands. “Five minutes! Take positions.” He wore the short sword he’d had in his hand when he first appeared, thrust through his belt.

  Taylor waited for Veris to come to her. Winter was her other passenger. At first, future Veris had been assigned to her, and had curtly refused. “I’m human right now. Taylor is—no offense, Veris—she is a distraction to me in this state.”

  As he moved away, Taylor wondered if his “snottiness”, as her Veris had called it, was because of that confusing state. She had only been a vampire for a few years, yet her short time back in Norway had been filled with over-the-top stimulus, her body zinging and reacting to everything.