Infinity Bell: A House Immortal Novel (18 page)

“What is taking you so long?” I panted. “Haven’t you ever undone a girl’s britches? That top thing is a button and you just push it through the hole, and then there’s a zipper. Undoes easy if you tug it.”

He huffed out a breath on a chuckle, but still wasn’t doing anything to further my undress.

“Here, let me show you . . .” I started.

His hands clamped over mine, catching my fingers before I could get ahold of my waistband. He crawled up
over me and leaned forward, eyes glittering with heat, a wicked smile curving his lips and making me want to lick him.

He stretched my arms up over my head, held them there with one hand loosely around my wrists. “You are disturbing my romancing moves, woman. Stay put and let me untie your boots.”

I opened my mouth to ask him if that was an euphemism, in which case I’d be happy to stay put, but he headed me off with a kiss that made my back arch and toes curl, which was, I’ll admit, less fun in combat boots.

He pulled away, and I spent a minute or two trying to catch my breath and not squirm. Then he spent a minute or two untying my boots and pulling them off.

“Now,” he said, his wide hands massaging up the inside of my calves, knees, thighs, urging the heat inside of me to build. “Let’s see to those britches.”

They say the plague is in the cities. We don’t know how long it will be before it reaches House Brown.

—from the diary of E. N. D.

A
knock woke me from of a deep, glorious sleep. I opened my eyes onto a darkness broken only by the wedge of yellow light coming in from under the door.

“Matilda,” Quinten said from the other side of that door. “We need to be moving out in a half hour.”

“Mmm?” I was still picking the dreams—very nice dreams, I might add—out of my waking thoughts. Abraham had been in my dreams, and he’d done such things. . . .

“Tell Abraham too, please,” Quinten said after a slight hesitation.

“I heard,” Abraham said from behind me. No, not so much behind me as wrapped up tightly around me, his hand on my bare stomach, his leg tossed over one of mine, his body bent around mine, as I used his arm for a pillow.

Okay. So those weren’t dreams.
I smiled.

And while I was very much awake now, I was not sure what to say to my brother. Silence seemed the safest way to go. I bit my lip and after just a short pause, I heard the retreat of his boots on the wooden floor.

“Morning,” Abraham said into my hair. “Sleep well?”

I smiled, then rolled over toward him, untangling from his embrace and then tucking myself back into him, snug, as he shifted onto his back.

“My arm’s asleep,” he said. “That’s annoying.”

I tipped my face up from where I’d rested my head against his chest. “Sorry?”

“Don’t be. I haven’t had this problem in a couple hundred years. It’s worse than I remember.” He shook his hand and hissed, then chuckled.

“About last night,” I said.

“Mmm?” He reached across to tug my hair off my face, absently twisting his fingers in the curls.

“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about this. About us,” I said.

He was silent for a couple seconds. “All right. So what is the right idea?”

I propped up beside him so I could look down at him through the dark. There was just enough light coming in through the door that I could make out his face, relaxed, his smile softened by more than sleep, and the ridges of scars and stitches marking his face, neck, chest. Those scars were the mark of a warrior’s life, battle scars of being galvanized, of strength.

And, yes, I got a little fluttery just looking at them and the man who wore them.

“Matilda?” he asked softly.

“The right idea,” I said, “is that this, what we just had, what we just did . . .”

“Twice?”

“Shh, I’m talking.” I pressed my fingers over his lips, and he gently bit my fingertips and raised an eyebrow. “What I’m trying to say,” I said, pulling my finger away before I just forgot all words, all needs, all hungers except for him.

“Yes?”

“You said you’d do this only if you thought it was your last night alive,” I said simply.

“Mmm?”

“I don’t want this to be your last night alive. I don’t want that to be the only reason for this. For us.”

He paused, his fingers halfway to the curls that refused to stay in place behind my ears.

The rest of what I was thinking and feeling came out of me in a rush. “I don’t want you to think we can’t win this fight. I don’t want you to think this is all we’ll ever have, you and I. We are going to get to Grandma, make sure she’s safe, then trigger that machine Quinten built in the basement and thread that loophole in time. We are going to save the world. Our world.”

“All right,” he said slowly. “And then what, Matilda? Don’t you think that if someone, if your brother, goes back in time, that just his presence there will change things? Let’s say he does adjust the Wings of Mercury experiment so that it doesn’t break time. We don’t die. No one dies. We live our lives. Mortal lives. No break in time means there will be no galvanized, no immortality.

“The chance that he’s worked through all the
possibilities that will allow this”—he tucked my hair behind my ear and cupped his palm over my cheek—“to play out in the same manner, is so finite as to not be logical to contemplate. Your brother’s going to change time. That will change the world. He’ll change our lives. He’ll change our deaths. And this . . .”

He drew his hand down my neck and shoulder, his gaze following. “This will never have happened, because I will never have met you.”

It was logical. I’d been worried about the same things. Quinten was amazing, but no man knew what would happen if time were altered. I knew Quinten wanted a way to save me, and he’d even said he wanted another chance at saving Mom and Dad. I didn’t know how he intended to work that out while also restoring time.

If, as Abraham had just said, we mended time or adjusted the Wings of Mercury experiment so that it no longer broke time, then all this . . . this world, the Houses, my almost death, my life, and the man lying beneath me would be gone.

Dust.

“We can find a way . . . if I was a girl back then . . .”

“No,” he said softly. “The body was a different girl. You were born in the modern world, Matilda. If I live my life, one life, a mortal life, I will be two hundred years in the grave before you take your first breath.”

“I hate that,” I said, tucking against him again and wishing I could stay here forever in this quiet room, under these soft blankets with him.

“There is always the chance I’m wrong,” he said. “I
am not educated in the sciences of time or in what your brother intends to do with it. He might have investigated an angle I’m unaware of.”

“Maybe,” I said, wholly unconvinced. “But just in case you’re right . . . kiss me one more time.”

And so he kissed me one more time. And I kissed him back, as if there were no more time, no more tomorrows for us.

*   *   *

I expected a bit of teasing when Abraham and I finally emerged from that bedroom and joined everyone else in the living room. But other than a quick smile from Gloria and an approving thumbs-up and wink from Welton, everyone was more than happy to get on with the real business at hand.

“We’ve scanned the property for hours.” Quinten stood in front of the wall of images, a cup of coffee in one hand. “The guards are from House Silver, we’re fairly certain. They don’t appear to be too concerned about being attacked. Which probably means they have their own surveillance team off-site looking out for them, looking out for us. That’s going to work in our favor.”

“How?” Right Ned was busy strapping on guns, knives, and grenades. He hadn’t made eye contact with me yet, and I was a little worried my late-night decisions had put a dent in our friendship.

I’d told him before we were running for our lives that I was in love with Abraham. So it couldn’t be a surprise to him. But I didn’t always know what was going on in their heads.

“That’s where I come in,” Welton said. He’d changed
into very practical boots, jeans, and a heavy jacket, and had a duffel next to him, packed and ready to go.

“I’ll throw false signals here, then, as we get closer, I’ll throw a few other tricks into the mix. The goal here is misdirection and subterfuge. Also, we’re going to set that dragon of yours loose.”

“Lizard?” I said. “Don’t hurt it.”

“Can anything hurt it?” Welton asked.

“There will be no lasting damage to Lizard,” Quinten assured me. “We’re going to cut the fence and prod it a little. You know how that will go.”

“How?” Abraham asked.

“Lizard doesn’t like being bothered,” I said, spotting a couple extra cups of coffee. I handed Abraham one. He gave me a short smile, and I had to look away so I wouldn’t be tempted to do anything about that.

“The last time it was irritated,” I continued, “it tore down half the barn and cut a swath through the forest. We turned the cleared land into a nice pear orchard.”

“Those guards are armed, aren’t they?” Gloria asked.

“Yes.” Quinten said, “But they’d have to have a lot more firepower than they currently have on hand to slow Lizard down, much less stop it.”

“We get in while they’re looking somewhere else,” Left Ned said, “then set off the reptilian killing machine in the middle of the property. Fine. How do we get in the house and to the grandmother without her getting killed?”

“That’s a little less tasteful,” Welton said. “We’re going to walk into the house and surrender. We can take out the guards patrolling the perimeter of the house, but
inside . . . we can’t get a good lock on that. Your property, and the house specifically, Miss Case,” he said to me, “is a little too well blocked.”

“Thank genius over there,” I said, pointing to Quinten.

“No,” Quinten said. “These weren’t blocks I put up. You must have put them in while I was away.”

“That was me,” Right Ned said. “Thought the place needed an upgrade, so we jimmied in a few nonstandard systems.”

“Mr. Harris,” Welton said, “you are officially hired once we get out of this mess. Well, if I go back to being head of House Yellow.”

“You can do that?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s never been done before,” he said. “So yes. I might just do it.”

Foster First sighed and shook his head slowly.

“Now, don’t give me that sour-lemon look,” Welton said. “It might be fun to pick up the mess Libra is leaving behind. She might even want me to.”

“What, exactly,” Abraham asked, “do we have for firepower?”

“The second basement of this place is an armory,” Gloria said.

“There’s another basement?” Quinten said, stealing the words out of my mouth.

She nodded. “I was looking for medicine. Found a trapdoor down. Bunker chock-full of things that go boom. From heavy land-to-air munition all the way down to can openers.”

“Well, hell,” Left Ned said. “Let’s go get us some can openers.”

*   *   *

I thought the whole plan of diversion, distraction, dragon, then walking in the front door to surrender seemed a little too vague to go on. No one else appeared concerned about it.

When I brought it up, Neds just told me to keep my hands on a gun, my finger on the trigger, and my eyes on the targets.

We were loading our supplies into the bus behind the cabin. Quinten spent a little time trying to convince Gloria to stay behind. She refused to do so and finally just gave him a gentle kiss, then got on the bus, a gun on her hip and a case of medical supplies in each hand.

“This is crazy,” I said to Quinten, who couldn’t seem to pull his eyes away from the bus window where Gloria sat.

“Yes, it is,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t work.”

“Will it?” I stepped around so I was in front of him, so he had to look at me. “Even if you manage to get back in time and change the settings on the Wings of Mercury experiment, you can’t know what that will do to today, to the future. You can’t know that I won’t be dead. That Mom and Dad won’t be dead. You can’t even know if you’ll be born.”

“Do not doubt me,” he said through clenched teeth. His eyes glittered with an anger I’d never seen in him. “You of all people. Do not doubt the years of my life I have lost to searching for this answer. Do not doubt what I have
sacrificed
for this answer, for this single chance to make this right. Right for
you
, Matilda.”

Wow. That was a strong reaction.

I pulled back my shoulders and straightened but did not step away from my brother. Why the sudden rage?

“I don’t doubt you, Quinten. I love you. Do you want to try that again?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said a little cooler. “Yes, it will work. You will survive. All of the galvanized will survive. Yes, our parents will survive and I’ll be born. I have considered every angle of this problem. I have broken the code.”

“Without the journal.”

He stared at me, finally dropped his gaze. “I can do this. I promise you.”

He stepped past me and stormed up onto the bus.

I stayed where I was for a minute, the heat of confusion flashing across my face. I didn’t know if he was angry at my questions, at my doubt, at Gloria for refusing to stay behind, or, hell, at me for sleeping with Abraham.

What I did know was that the brother who had walked out from those years of being imprisoned by House Orange carried wounds with him. And somewhere deep in that brilliant mind of his, those wounds still twisted and cut.

Just like the death of our mother and father still twisted and cut.

My big brother hadn’t been capable of letting me die when I was sick. He had been thirteen years old when he’d transferred my thoughts and memories into the galvanized body. He also didn’t find it easy to forgive. It just wasn’t in his nature.

He’d never forgiven himself for our parents’ deaths and he wouldn’t forgive himself if time snapped back and killed me.

The wind picked up a bit and I smelled rain on the air.
I turned my gaze up to the sky, where clouds churned in every shade of gray. A stray drop struck my cheek just below my eye and tracked down to my chin.

A second followed.

If I were the sort of woman who prayed, I’d be on my knees. Instead, I adjusted the semiautomatic over my shoulder, strode to the bus, and got on.