A Matter of Circumstance and Celludrones (11 page)

He only went as far as two doors down.

Ana answered his knock at once.

“Neco needs your help,” he told her. “He’s searching the train for
Lady Ostrich.”

Her eyes zoned in on him, instantly alert. “Did she board?”

“That’s what I need you to determine.” He stood back to allow her to
pass.

“Stay right here, Miss Lily,” she issued over her shoulder before
hurrying down the passage.

“Is she here?” Lily was already on her feet, palms pressed to the
extendable table she’d folded out from the panel below the window. “Did she
find us again?”

“I very much doubt it.” Greyston slid the door closed behind him. He
leaned a shoulder against it, keeping as much distance between them in the
compact cabin as he could. He was coiled tighter than a spring and didn’t trust
his temper right now, whether Lily was to blame or not.

“Who all knows I can step back in time?” he demanded more sharply than
he’d intended. He wasn’t accustomed to any person knowing enough about him to
impact his life with their mistakes. “How many people have you told?”

 
“Not a soul.”

“Then how did you explain returning from the dead?”

“I didn’t.” A frown sliced her brow as she held his dubious stare,
then cleared on a blink. “Ah, I begin to see, and while I did express the
danger to Evelyn, I thought it wise to suppress some of the detail.”

His eyes narrowed on her. “Evelyn knows Lady Ostrich has killed.”

“Yes, but she has no idea I was the victim.” She sank into her seat
with a sigh. “I’m not a complete idiot.”

Greyston sucked in a slow, easier breath and pushed away from the
door. “Thank you.”

“Rewinding time is your secret to bear or share.” Her hands remained
on the table, spread over what appeared to be a notebook. “Besides, who’d
believe it?”

“You did.” He moved to sit on the bottom berth opposite her, his gaze
appraising her afresh.

Far from being a vapid idiot, she was quick-witted and astute. So, she
didn’t keep a pair of pistols strapped to her hips—and he’d been on intimate
terms with a few women who did—and she might not step up courageously in the
face of immediate danger. He’d overlooked the quiet core of her strength, a
remarkable quality that bounced off all the traumatic and bizarre thrown at
her, that kept her afloat when most would flounder. He’d dismissed her pretty
features into a bland, hollow wasteland, but that was the farce, the rigid
guard she kept in place.

“What choice did I have?” she said, rolling hazel eyes at him. “I was
right there with you, the world fading into shades of nothingness around me as
you undid time.”

Her lips mesmerised him as she spoke. How had he ever thought them
thin? Before he knew it, he was wondering at the woman who’d be revealed if
some of those guarded layers were stripped away. “There’s always a choice, and
you chose to open your mind to the impossible over a host of hysteria-induced
alternatives.”

He clenched his jaw to trap his smile. Damn it all, he couldn’t start
admiring Lily now, not in that way. He could strip her to the bone and there’d
still be too much to fit into his world. Too prim, too proper, too complicated.
She’d never be his for the taking.

“Don’t build me a halo of false attributes,” she said curtly. “My
ready acceptance of all things unnatural is a mark of cowardice. It means I can
put off delving below the surface where monsters lurk.”

“I disagree.”

She lifted a brow at him, her lower lip twisted beneath a row of white
teeth. Then she gave a ragged laugh. “You also disagree that I’m partly
responsible for the ghastly state of Evelyn’s marriage, but it’s no less true.”

“You seem more upset about Evelyn’s marriage than she is.”

“Reserve your judgement until you know her better.”

He’d already judged Evelyn from a hundred different angles and liked
each and every one.

“I like her just fine right now,” he drawled, relieved to divert his
thoughts to a safer passion and feel the welcome tug of desire for a woman that
could, and—given the trail of hints she’d scattered his way—would, be his for
the taking.

Lily opened her mouth, then closed it abruptly without pursuing the
subject. One hand drifted from the table to her lap, revealing part of a
charcoal sketch that covered the page on which the notebook lay open.

He leaned forward to get a closer look. The likeness to Lady Ostrich
was striking. “You have an artist’s eye for detail and the talent to do it
justice.”

“My mother ensured I had a fine education,” she said with a trace of
bitterness, flipping the notebook shut. “I can stitch, draw, dance and engage
in witty banter or political debate, depending on the mood. I play the
pianoforte and can even hold a tune if called upon. All sterling
accomplishments and all worth absolutely…nothing…” Her voice trailed off and
her gaze went over his shoulder, her finger tracing a random pattern on the
leather cover of the notebook. Her eyes snapped back to him. “Was she a witch?
My mother, I mean. Was my mother a witch?”

Greyston almost laughed aloud. But she had a serious look in her eye,
in the set of her chin, and hell, maybe she was right. Maybe the whole lot of
them were witches and warlocks, druids or some other creature he couldn’t even
imagine. He’d given up trying to put reason to the madness long ago. “Do you think
such things are real?”

“I didn’t think it possible to hurl a man across a room with the crook
of a finger or rewind time on a whim, yet that didn’t stop it from being real.”
She mangled that lower lip with her teeth again—a recently formed nervous habit?
“If all this extraordinariness ties back to Castle Cragloden, and it seems it
must, then my connection is through my mother.”

“You have that the wrong way round. It is your mother who is connected
through
you
to Cragloden and Duncan McAllister.”

A spark of cognition lit behind her eyes. She’d just recalled a
forgotten memory, reached a new conclusion…or he’d just stumbled on a truth
she’d been hiding from the start.

The time for dilly-dallying around each other’s trust was long gone
and he was prepared to lower the first barrier.

“My father sent me away to Cragloden Castle the day I turned fifteen.”
Without explanation and with very little regret on both sides, not even when
Greyston had thought Cragloden must be a workhouse for unworthy vermin. His one
reason for staying had also become a pressing reason to leave. His brother
Arogan, older by three years, had suddenly become more aggressive in his
defence of Greyston. Unnecessarily. How often hadn’t he wished his father would
strike him, give Neco cause to knock the old man to the ground? But his father
had never posed a physical risk and Greyston had hardened himself to emotional
attack from an early age.

“Was Cragloden an academic institution?” asked Lily.

Greyston shook his head.

“Did your father say why you were being sent there?” she pressed.

The only words his father had ever had for him was abuse shouted in a
drunken rage. Which had been preferable to the times when the haggard man would
sit across the table in silence, staring at Greyston with hate and accusation
in those sunken eyes.

“The first I heard of Castle Cragloden was when my father called the
direction out to the driver.” Before she could voice the question furrowing her
brow, he moved the story along. “To my amazement, McAllister welcomed us as
guests.”

“What other kind of welcome were you expecting?” Lily leaned forward,
practically squinting she was concentrating so hard on him.

Warmed by the depth of her gaze, he felt himself slipping toward a
moment of confidence.
A swift kick through the servant’s entrance? Slapped
in chains and hung to dry?
None of the kinds of welcome she was capable of
imagining, and exactly why he couldn’t start losing himself in her eyes.

“We weren’t the only guests.” Greyston shot to his feet and paced a
path to the door. “Anya Preshkin, a petite, black-haired girl from St.
Petersburg had arrived three weeks prior.” He turned to watch Lily as he spoke,
but saw no flicker of recognition in her puzzled expression. “There was Horace
Stowe, a red-haired lad from New York. Piederre Strezzo, youngest son of the
Marchese Strezzo di Picante from Florence.” Names and faces burnt into his
mind. Strangers he’d barely gotten to know but would never forget. “James
O’Leary came a couple of days after me, from Meath in Ireland.”

“My goodness, what was that?” Lily exclaimed. “A gathering of the
Foreign Legion?”

“We’d all also recently turned fifteen, within days of arriving
there,” Greyston said, “and we each had our own advanced celludrone who’d been
with us since birth.”

“That sounds…”

“Sinister?” he supplied. “You wouldn’t have thought so, not if you’d
been there. Not at first. McAllister was friendly enough, encouraged us to do
as we pleased and answered many of our questions.”

One night, though, Greyston had snuck downstairs to the workroom
converted from the old castle dungeons. He hadn’t glimpsed much more than the
shadows of towering bookcases, closed cabinets stacked against the wall and the
long workbench over which McAllister had been hunched. The man had rushed
forward immediately, shooing Greyston out with a firm hand and locking the
reinforced iron door behind them. He hadn’t seemed angered at the intrusion,
but the secrecy had unsettled Greyston.

“Once he got talking about his celludrones, he’d go on for hours about
the intricacies of their design and the unique defence instructions he’d
loaded. He even showed us the original celludrone schematics.”

“What did he want with you?” Lily folded the table away and stood,
putting her back to the window. “Why were you there?”

“McAllister promised to explain everything. He was waiting on one last
person before commencing what he referred to as his
orientating schedule
.”
He shoved his hands into his pockets, leaning a shoulder against the door. “But
you never came.”

“Me?”

“Your mother arrived without you, all hell broke loose and we never
got to hear McAllister’s explanations.”

“Wait.” She put out a hand. “You were there the same weekend my mother
died?”

Greyston nodded, his jaw tight as he remembered the aftermath. “The
gas explosion ripped Cragloden apart at the seams. There was nothing left. No
one survived.”

“Except you,” she said, her voice a little breathless with what
sounded suspiciously like awe.

The way she was looking at him, Greyston knew at once where her
thoughts had headed. “I didn’t time-run to save myself. Hell, back then, I
didn’t even know I could.”

“Then how did you survive?”

“Neco and I were out riding at the time,” he said flatly, then turned
the conversation on its head. “Your turn to share, Lily.”

“Me?” One hand flew to her bosom. “I’m struggling to make a shred of
sense from what you’ve told me. What makes you think I have anything pertinent
to add?”

“I don’t think,” he said roughly, yanking his hands
from his pockets. There was only so much naïve innocence and false ignorance he
could take. “I know.”

“Based on what?” She notched a brow at him. “Arrogant assumptions or
wild guesses?”

He moved forward, one slow step at a time.

He’d been watching from the library window when her mother’s carriage
had pulled into the courtyard all those years ago. He hadn’t minded Cragloden,
hadn’t had any better place to be, but they’d all been growing restless waiting
for solid answers.

“Lily isn’t coming,” the lady was saying when he put his ear to the
door of the room her and McAllister were ensconced in.

“What’s done is done, Amelia. Changing your mind was never an
option.”

“This is my daughter’s decision and that choice was always hers.
You gave me your word.”

“She’s in no position to make any decisions,” McAllister said. “She
doesn’t even have an elementary knowledge—”

“I’ve told Lily everything.”

He was almost on top of Lily before he stopped. “Your mother swore
she’d told you everything.”

“Obviously she didn’t. She never said a…” Lily faltered as she met his
gaze, couldn’t look him in the eye while she lied outright.

“Dammit, Lily.” He slammed his palm flat against the window, just left
of her head. She shrank from him, gaining herself no more than a few inches
that he reclaimed by leaning in. “She said you knew exactly what was at stake.”

“Lily wants nothing to do with this…this ominous army of yours.”

Excitement coursed through his veins at the mention of an army, and
turned his blood to ice the next moment as he thought of the petite Anya and
how they’d each been handpicked from various corners of the world. This was no
army sanctioned by government, and if it wasn’t for the greater good of the
country, then it had to be against.

McAllister’s voice faded to an inaudible muffle, then came back
strong. “She must be trained in protection and defence at the very least. Sweet
Jesu, Amelia, you’re not shielding her; you’re throwing her to the wolves
without so much as a club to swing. Your good intentions will see her dead.”

“She has Ana.”

“Ana is not enough.”

Greyston didn’t stick around to hear the rest. He didn’t even
bother with his belongings. He grabbed Neco and the two of them appropriated a
pair of horses from McAllister’s stable. He owed McAllister nothing.

A night spent roughing it in the open, however, had left plenty of time
for his guilt to stew. When he’d returned to Cragloden the following morning to
warn the others that McAllister was up to something deadly, the sight of a
constable wagon and men in uniform scouring the ravaged ruins for bodies had
greeted him.