Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (30 page)

“
Math!” He shouted the name
to the skies.

Justin laughed, and Carew called from
David’s right. “God favors us, my lord!”

Math must have marched through the night
from Dolwyddelan, taking the mountain paths between ridges that
only local Welshmen would know, to arrive here at this moment.
Madog’s men were now caught between them.

David directed his gaze again to Madog,
knowing he was gloating and unable to stop himself. Madog looked
away for a second, eyeing the men around him—and then he threw
himself at David, a blade pulled from his boot flashing in his
hand. David’s shield arm came up to block the knife, and with a
thrust, he skewered Madog through the gut with his sword.

As Bevyn had taught him.

Chapter
Eighteen

November 2019

Anna

C
assie hurried Meg and Anna back out through the maze of
corridors. They were more heavily burdened than before. Cassie and
Anna each carried a backpack over her shoulder, and this time
Cassie and Mom held the giant, bulging duffel bag between
them.

“
How far to the coffee
shop?” Anna said.

“
A few blocks,” Cassie
said. “We have to go the long way around, though, because we want
to avoid surveillance cameras.” She glanced over at Anna. “Don’t
worry, Callum and I planned ahead.”

“
Clearly,” Mom
said.

Cassie led them through a stairwell, and
they came out on a different street than the one they’d come in on.
“I don’t know if I can explain what it’s been like, being left
behind.” She walked rapidly across the cobbled road and entered
another doorway on the other side.

“
You don’t have to,
Cassie,” Mom said, “I know all about it.”

“
I guess you would.” Cassie
took a left and then a right through another maze of
buildings.

“
When David was born, Mom
did everything she could to get back to Dad,” Anna said. “She
couldn’t.”

“
Your mom’s life was never
in mortal danger,” Cassie said.

“
True,” Mom said, “but I’m
not so sure how this would have worked if it had been. David was
still a baby. He wasn’t ready.”

“
We saved Dad’s life at
Cilmeri,” Anna said, “but if you had brought us back sooner, Dad
wouldn’t have gone at all.”

Mom’s expression turned brittle. “Now that I
couldn’t promise you. The man is stubborn.”

Cassie’s lips twitched in a quick smile
before she took the lead again. “I think I need to explain
anyway.”

Anna certainly wasn’t going to stop her.

“
Callum and I had to make
plans because we didn’t know how soon you would return, and we
wanted to be ready when you did.”

“
That explains the safe
house and all the rest,” Mom said.

“
Exactly,” Cassie
said.

“
Is that why you two
haven’t—?” Anna stopped. She’d been about to ask one of the most
personal questions possible.

Cassie made a ‘hm’ sound. “Were you going to
ask if that’s why we haven’t had kids yet?”

They’d crossed another street and passed
through several basements before taking a set of stairs back up to
street level. A wooden door blocked the way.

Before she opened it, Cassie leaned against
it. “This isn’t the Middle Ages, Anna. Waiting two years is nothing
here. But yes.”

Anna was still catching her breath, but she
ducked her head in acknowledgement of that sacrifice. “Thank you
for telling me.”

“
I wouldn’t want you to
mention it to Callum.” Cassie looked from Anna to Mom.
“Ready?”

“
Ready,” Mom
said.

Cassie opened the door, and the three women
stepped out onto another cobbled street. Callum and Darren stood
two feet away to the right, half-hidden underneath a large green
awning.

“
Hey,” Cassie
said.

“
Hey yourself.” Callum took
the duffel from Cassie and slung it over his shoulder. It clashed
with the proper look of his suit, tie, and trench coat. He was
bigger than any of the women were, though, and he hadn’t exactly
let his hard won medieval physique run to fat. “Any
trouble?”

“
Not that we know of,”
Cassie said. “I gather we’re catching a bus?”

“
The 25.” Callum checked
his watch. “We have five minutes to get there.”

“
Then we should go.” Cassie
looked back at Mom and Anna. “This is where it gets tricky. The bus
stop is at the end of this street in the exact spot where we got
out of Darren’s car. We should walk determinedly without running.
Anna, could you walk with Darren as if you know him
well?”

Darren and Anna looked at each other. He
shrugged. Anna nodded.

“
Meg, you and I will stay
together, and then Callum can bring up the rear,” Cassie
said.

“
We may have to bunch up to
cross the street, but otherwise, don’t stop for anything,” Callum
said. “We’ll be in the open and vulnerable.”

Darren lifted one arm, eyebrows raised, and
Anna moved close enough so he could put his arm across her
shoulders. She kept the backpack slung over her left shoulder, and
she put her right arm around his waist. It was awkward and weird to
be walking this way with a man she barely knew. Math would just
have to forgive her. If she ever told him. Maybe it would never
need to come up.

“
There it is!” Up ahead,
the bus swung around a corner. It was an orangey-yellow and
turquoise double-decker—not the London red—and faces peered down at
Anna from the top level. Darren raised a hand to warn the traffic
that they were crossing, and they dashed across the street. The
others hustled along behind. Darren ducked around the front of the
bus so it couldn’t leave before they got on it unless it ran them
over, and they entered through the folded front door.

The bus driver, sitting at the front of the
bus to the right, didn’t even look as Darren dropped a handful of
coins into the meter. Five adult tickets spat out.

“
Another month and this
wouldn’t have worked,” Darren said. “The buses are going to stop
taking cash.”

“
Yeah, and our cards would
be a big fat neon sign for MI-5.” Cassie crowded onto the top step,
her hand in Callum’s, and looked past Anna down the length of the
bus. “There’s Mark.”

Mark looked exactly as a computer nerd
should. He was in his early thirties, of average height,
semi-balding, with extra padding around the middle, glasses, and
rounded shoulders from too many hours spent in front of a computer.
He, too, wore a backpack, and as the companions filed down the
crowded aisle towards him, he made room for them to stand around
him. At the front of the bus, the seats were arranged with their
backs to the windows, but where Mark stood, they were in rows, two
seats to a side with an aisle down the center.

Mom found a seat on the left in the first
row next to the window, and Callum heaved the bag off his shoulder
to lean it against the seat beside her. Anna took off her backpack
and dropped it onto the seat itself, and then she sat with her back
to the window, right in front of Mom. Everyone else remained
standing, holding onto a floor-to-ceiling pole or the bar above
their heads.

The bus hadn’t moved, and Cassie peered
towards the front, standing on tiptoe to look past the other
passengers that crowded the aisle. “It’s okay. The bus isn’t going
because the light’s red.”

Anna shifted in her seat, anxious with the
wait. She was glad to be moving, though Callum hadn’t actually said
what the plan was and where they were going next. A few seconds
later, the bus started forward, drove a short distance, changed
lanes in order to take a right, and then passed in front of a large
white building on the left.

“
That’s the courthouse,”
Cassie said, pointing, “and that’s City Hall beside it—” She broke
off. “My God!”

People had begun exclaiming all around the
bus. A woman screamed.

Anna had been looking at Cassie but now
twisted in her seat, half-kneeling to look out the window—at the
exact moment the front façade of City Hall ballooned outward in an
explosion of yellow and red. Rubble, flames, and even vehicles that
had been parked in front of the building shot up and outward. A
second later, the percussion wave hit the bus, rocking it and
throwing the passengers around.

If Anna hadn’t been holding onto the back of
the seat, she would have fallen into Mom’s lap. As it was, Cassie’s
staggered, and her backpack whacked into Callum’s arm. He caught
her around the waist. “Christ.”

A few people had burst from the front doors
of adjacent buildings. Others ran down the sidewalk, trying to
protect their heads from falling debris. The bus had been slowing
in order to stop at the bus stop in front of City Hall, but the bus
driver stepped on the gas instead, ignoring the people gesturing
frantically from the bench at the bus shelter, desperate to get
away quickly.

All around, people were screaming both to
get off the bus and for the driver to go as fast as he could. Then
the bus skidded sideways, coming to a halt as a light pole crashed
down across the road in front of it. The bus couldn’t go any
farther forward, so with some jerky back and forth starting and
stopping, throwing the passengers around in their seats as if they
were ping pong balls, the bus driver managed to turn the bus
around. He didn’t even bother to drive on the left side of the road
as he should have, but accelerated back the way he’d come, heedless
of the panicked traffic coming at him.

Callum and Anna crossed to the opposite
side, pressing close to the window. Smoke billowed from the ruined
City Hall, and Anna tried to make out what was happening through
it. The bus driver, having just passed the near corner of the
courthouse, yanked the wheel sharply to the right to avoid an
oncoming car.

And then the courthouse exploded too.

Anna couldn’t say who screamed first—her or
Mom or everyone on the bus together—but there was no other possible
reaction. No human had any power over the mountain of stone and the
wave of hot air the explosion sent hurtling towards the side of the
bus. Anna put up her hands in a futile attempt to protect her face
and—

Heart-stopping terror.

The black abyss.

More screams.

And Callum’s quiet voice, saying, “Here we
go again.”

Chapter
Nineteen

November 1291

David

I
t
was a double-decker bus.

It was a freaking
double-decker bus, bursting out of nothingness to the right and
driving through Madog’s men, to come to rest on top of Madog
himself, squashing him like he was a wicked witch and this
was
The Wizard of Oz
. Except that he was already dead because David had killed
him.

“
Sweet Mary, mother of
God.” Samuel had clearly learned to curse like the Christian
soldier he’d once pretended to be. “My father has hinted over the
years but—”

“
Nothing could have
prepared you for the truth,” David said. “I’m sorry I didn’t reveal
all to you sooner, especially after Callum disappeared.”

Samuel nodded, but David didn’t think he’d
really heard him. Like everyone on the field, he had eyes only for
the bus.

If Bronwen were here, she
might have said,
“Like you couldn’t have
shown up twenty minutes earlier?”

In that initial charge, Dad had taken his
men down the left side of the field, David had taken his directly
up the middle at Madog, and Carew had ridden up the right. Like
David, Dad had dismounted during the fight, but David caught sight
of his plume. He stared at the bus too. David thanked whatever
intuition had urged him to leave Madog where he lay and return to
where Samuel held his horse, or else he would have been squashed
too. William, wherever he’d disappeared to, would be even more
starry-eyed after this.

All around the giant vehicle, horses reared
and men scattered. David found himself swallowing down the
semi-hysterical laughter filling his throat at the incongruity of
the giant turquoise and orange bus invading a medieval battlefield.
The laughter didn’t last long, however. There were dead and wounded
to see to, not to mention an entire army that had just learned it
was defeated—first by the death of its leader, then by the arrival
of Math, and now by the appearance of a modern bus.

David gestured to Justin, who’d surfed up
beside Samuel. “Don’t look at it; don’t think about it. Just do
your job. We need to contain and control Madog’s men. Now.”

“
Yes, my lord,” Justin
said.

David caught his arm. “If some run, let them
go rather than shooting them from behind. These are Welshmen.”

“
Yes, my lord.”

David nodded. “I will explain about the
vehicle later.”

The bus had split the field in half. On this
side, the only side David could see, those of Madog’s men who’d
seen him fall had lost the will to fight already. The front ranks
had thrown down their arms, and David’s soldiers had already begun
rounding them up. Ieuan’s force lay just behind David to his left,
and they too were corralling Madog’s spearmen. David didn’t know
what had become of Madog’s archers or Ieuan’s, but as long as no
more arrows flew down from the heights to harm anyone, he wasn’t
worrying about them at the moment.

While Justin raised his hand to those men
who were still mounted, calling them to him, David loped towards
the folding door nearest to him, which lay about two-thirds of the
way down the length of the bus. Before he reached it, it opened,
and Callum swung down. He wore a suit and trench coat but held his
sheathed sword in his left hand.