Children of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book Four) (17 page)

“Admittedly, I am thankful they didn’t mention my aunt’s minivan, but how could they possibly know about that?” I said.

“They know because one of your father’s men talked. Or his wife did. Or a man-at-arms was drunk and embellished the details—”

“Lied, you mean.”

“—and then it spread,” Lili continued, ignoring me. “Everyone in Wales talks about you all the time. You know this, right?”

“But for the story to reach Windsor?” I said. “That’s crazy.”

“Is it?” Lili said. “Why? People love heroes. They tell stories in the hall and to their children at bedtime. But that’s not the part you won’t like.”

I could just make out the shadow of a smile on her face. She had tucked both hands between her cheek and the pillow.

“You might as well tell me the rest,” I said.

“The man ended his story by relating the tale of the last time Edward attacked Wales, when the rivers flooded. You stood on the bluff overlooking the debacle, and as it became clear that Edward’s men were routed, you held up your sword and shouted,
God wills it!
”

“I did not—”

“And then, Tomos says, as the man finished his story, everyone in the bar lifted their right hand and said it too—not as a shout, but solemnly.”

I closed my eyes. Gotten out of hand? This was so far beyond
out of hand
that I had no idea how I was going to reel it in again, and what I would do if I couldn’t.

Chapter Fourteen

18 November 2016

Meg

W
e ended up in a ramshackle shed full of rusting gardening implements, on the far side of the spa’s property. It was November. It was cold and raining. After such an auspicious beginning, it came as a shock to be fleeing what I had thought was a haven.

“We have to keep moving,” Goronwy said.

“Llywelyn needs to rest,” I said.

“I’m fine—”

“You’re not and I have to call Ted,” I said.

“Ted is the one who betrayed us!” Goronwy said. “He’s as bad as Dafydd!”

I knew without asking that Goronwy didn’t mean my son, but Llywelyn’s brother. Given that he had betrayed Llywelyn four times, and tried to assassinate him once, it was something of an exaggeration to compare him to Ted, but I got the point. Still, I thought Ted’s problem was ignorance, rather than malice. “I know, Goronwy, but I don’t think he meant to.” I dialed Ted’s number and didn’t quail under Goronwy’s glare.

“Where the hell are you?” Ted’s voice came over the line an octave higher than normal and twice as loud.

“Where are you?” I said.

“I don’t know. Some road, about a mile and a half from the spa. I almost got hit by an SUV squealing into the parking lot as I was leaving,” he said. “Let me come get you.”

“Listen, Ted. You need to tell me what you told your friend.”

“I told him everything!” he said. “I told you that I came to the UK after David chose to return to the Middle Ages, right? During that trip, I had drinks with my friend. He and I have talked often since then. I called him as soon as I arrived at Heathrow. My friend was very excited and wanted to know everything.”

I pressed a hand to my forehead and closed my eyes. “What’s weird is that he believed you,” I said. “Did he ever say why?”

“He had independent confirmation,” Ted said. “He knows people who know people and he could trace your other disappearances and returns. Something about satellites and the Norad tracking system.”

I moaned. “Ted—”

“Don’t you see how
exciting
this is?” he said. “We’re
this
close to figuring out what’s really going on!”

“Who’s
we,
Ted?”

Pause.
And now Ted sounded defensive. “It’s not like he pumped me for information or anything and I never asked him what he was doing with what I told him. I assumed he wasn’t doing anything with it—that he was just as curious and excited as I was.”

“Oh, Ted.”

“Do you really think he could have called the cops down on you?”

“He works at the University of Cambridge, right?” I said. “Does he have ties to the military?”

“No!” Ted said, but then his voice became very small. “But his wife works—” he cleared his throat “—for the government. MI5, I always thought.”

I gazed down at my wet feet. While MI6 was the British equivalent of the CIA, MI5 was the government agency tasked with internal spying. “I’m hanging up, right now,” I said.

“No—wait! What should I do with your stuff?”

“Are you near a crossroads?” I said.

Scuffling sounds came from Ted’s side of the line. “Yes. Looks like there’s a sign—Yswyth is the name of the village—and my God—there’s an actual telephone booth.”

“You mean a call box?” I said. “Is it big and red?”

“Got to love the English and their antiquated phones,” Ted said. “We’re so isolated out here we’re lucky to have cell phone reception at all.”

“The people who live here are Welsh, Ted,” I said, automatically. “Leave our duffel by the box. We’ll pick it up.
You
get out of there now.”

“Why?” he said. “Why can’t we go wherever you’re going together?”

“Who paid for our room?” I said, and then answered my own question: “You did. This has gone way beyond your friend. If they don’t already have all your contact information, they will in a minute. They’ll be on the lookout for your rental car, and at the very least, they’ll trace your cell phone—and then mine—if they haven’t already.”

“
They
, Meg? Seriously?”

“I’m hanging up, Ted. Thank you for everything. Give my love to Elisa and the kids.”

I snapped the phone shut, flipped it over, and removed the battery. I stood in the darkness of the shed, not speaking, trying to think. The rain pounded on the metal roof and dripped through unsealed cracks, forming puddles on the wooden floor that was so filthy, it was indistinguishable from the mud outside. Goronwy eyed me from beside Llywelyn, who’d found a seat on an overturned bucket and sat with his head in his hands.

“Can we go home, Meg?” Goronwy said.

“That’s the best idea I’ve heard all day,” I said. “The question is—how?”

And that was something I didn’t have an answer to. Regardless, we had to get out of this shed and to a place where Llywelyn could lie down. My memory of the spy movies I’d watched in the past had me casting around for all the ways those men could track us.

I had a little money. I couldn’t use my credit cards anymore, but when Ted had straightened things out with the spa, he’d handed me two hundred pounds in cash, too. I still had my $400 American dollars. If we could find a place to stay where they wouldn’t ask questions, we could pay.

“I knew it was too good to be true,” Goronwy said.

“I told you that the cracks and the dirt of our world would reveal themselves, given time,” I said. “It takes a while sometimes to see it—though in this case, not as long as I had hoped.”

“Then let’s go.” Goronwy poked Llywelyn who rose to his feet. The two men ducked under the low lintel above the doorway of the shed and straightened. Llywelyn stretched and tipped back his head to allow the rain to fall onto his face.

“I feel great,” he said.

I eyed him sourly and pulled up the collar of my jacket so the rain wouldn’t drip down my neck. We set off. If I’d been leading us, we would have been stumbling around in the dark, but the difference in my men between the environment of the hospital and the countryside was tangible. They knew who they were out here. They liked being outside.

Within a few minutes of leaving the shed, Goronwy found a makeshift road across the field which allowed us to keep moving. Beside me, Llywelyn breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth as he strode along, as if nothing at all was the matter with him. I feared that he might really have a heart attack if he had to exert himself too much, but he kept pace.

I used the other half of my brain to worry about the men chasing us. Any moment, a spotlight from one of the SUVs could find us. But after twenty minutes of walking, we came out on one of those typically narrow Welsh roads that were big enough for one car, even though a map might claim two could fit. I took comfort that any SUV that attempted to come down it would find it impossible to maintain any rate of speed.

At the same time, the stone wall on one side and the hedge on the other had my nerves even more on edge because if an SUV followed us, we’d have nowhere to run.

“What are we walking on?” Goronwy said. “This material covered the road that led up to the spa too.”

“It’s called
asphalt
,” I said, using the English word since the Welsh equivalent wouldn’t make sense to him anyway.

“A cart would ride very smoothly on this, but it doesn’t seem like it would be healthy for a horse’s hooves,” he said.

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s not. These roads were made for cars, which you haven’t really seen up close yet. It’s our method of transportation.”

“I know about them, Meg,” Goronwy said, gently. “I saw yours, and your son’s, and Bronwen’s, even.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot.” And maybe that was why he was taking this trip to the modern world so well. In addition to knowledge of the vehicles, after David had rescued my suitcase from its hiding place in Scotland and Aaron had brought it back to me, I had been able to show him and Llywelyn pictures of the modern world. They’d handled my phone and my laptop, and felt the fabric in my rain jacket.

We’d gone another half mile when the road straightened out, allowing us to see the lights of the village twinkling in front of us. That call box couldn’t come soon enough. Without an umbrella, Goronwy and I were soaked through. Llywelyn was probably in the best shape, since he had his thick wool cloak with a hood. My cloak was in the duffel bag that we were hoping Ted had left us.

We hugged the side of the road as we approached the town. The call box sat on the corner where our little road and the main one (which admittedly was hardly any wider) intersected. At the start of a hedge that circled one of the houses, we hesitated. Llywelyn and Goronwy stayed close on either side of me, pressed into the bush, surveying the road from a crouch. Now that we’d left the darkness of the field and were in Stwyth, a string of streetlamps lit the street, the call box, and the stores and houses that made up the small town center.

I caught my breath. Ted leaned against his car, which he’d parked in the narrow, graveled parking lot of a convenience store on the other side of the street. He was clearly keeping an eye on the call box, which was on our side of the road, only fifty feet from me.

“What’s he doing?” Llywelyn said, low in my ear.

“Is he thinking that if he watches for us, we’ll let him come with us?” Goronwy said. “If so, he’s in for a rude awakening.” Goronwy remained unforgiving.

I knew what Goronwy and Llywelyn were thinking: if they’d known the rules, they would have done better. The implication was that Ted—who did live here and did know the rules—should have watched the backs of those who didn’t. I studied Ted and his surroundings. Perhaps he sensed my eyes on him. Before I could draw back, he looked in my direction. Our eyes locked. He straightened and took a step toward me.

I couldn’t let him do that. “Wait here,” I said to Llywelyn and Goronwy.

I broke from our hiding place, dashed to the rear of the call box where Ted had left our duffel, threw it over my shoulder, and ran back to where Goronwy and Llywelyn waited, the heavy bag bouncing awkwardly against my body. When I reached the men, I looked back. Ted was staring at me, his mouth open, and I waved a hand at him in a
go away
motion.

I was preparing to shout the words at him, to make myself completely clear, when two black SUVs screamed through the intersection. They pulled to the side of the road—on the wrong side of the road—where Ted waited. The vehicles blocked more than half the road, big enough that cars coming both ways would have to squeeze between the parked cars on the left and the SUVs on the right.

“That can’t be good.” Llywelyn backed away, burrowing deeper into the hedge.

I turned to look at him. He had a wry smile on his face—maybe the first I’d seen in a long while—and had made a deadpan joke. I wanted to hug him. “Sorry about this. I can’t believe anybody really cares who we are, but—” I gestured to the SUVs, “—obviously someone does.”

We couldn’t hear the conversation between the men in black and Ted, but it went on for a few minutes. Then one of the men led Ted around the back of one of the vehicles. To his credit, Ted didn’t look towards us. One of the soldiers opened the back passenger door and urged Ted inside with a hand on his shoulder and another to the back of his head. Ten seconds later, both SUVs pulled back into their lane and headed north. Goronwy stirred, but I put a hand on his arm. “Wait.”

Sure enough, thirty seconds later, both SUVs roared through the intersection going the other way, back to the spa. A spray of water flew up as the right wheels of the following vehicle hit a puddle. I caught sight of Ted’s face, illumined in the rear passenger window—and then he was gone.

Once the tail lights had disappeared into the distance, we rose to our feet. The rain continued to pour down. “Come on,” I said.

We trotted across the street, me in the lead and Llywelyn and Goronwy following, carrying the duffel bag between them. When I reached the car, I bent to look under it. Relief washed through me. I
had
seen what I’d thought I’d seen: when the first SUV had appeared from the south, Ted had closed his mouth, looked at me for a split-second, and nodded. He then dropped his car key to the ground and kicked it under the car with his foot. It lay in a small puddle behind the right front tire.

I grabbed it, unlocked the car, and pulled open the driver’s side door. I waved Llywelyn around to the other side. “Get in, gentlemen.”

“I thought you said we couldn’t ride in Ted’s vehicle because those men could track it?” Llywelyn said.

“However it is they might do that,” Goronwy added.

“They can, but …” I popped the trunk and felt around for anything metal. I came up with a tire jack. I stepped back, took a deep breath, and swung it at the little light that lit the rear license plate. The jack rebounded off the plate with a thunk. I’d missed the light. I aimed a little better, swung, and the light went out. “I don’t think they’ll be looking for his car at the moment, now that they have Ted. I’m thinking we have a little time before they begin to wonder if they should have brought in the car, too.”