Infinity Bell: A House Immortal Novel (27 page)

A very alive Quinten, wearing flannel, jeans, boots, and an irritated scowl on his face, strode up to me. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Did you feel that?” I asked. “Just now, did you get dizzy or smell roses or see . . . anything?”

He paused and gave me a look. “No. Why? Did you?”

I shot a look behind him. This was still the property I’d always known, but the familiar pear orchard wasn’t in sight, and a flock of six pocket-sized sheep of various pastel shades shambled along a fence line, stopping to nibble on weeds there.

We had only three pocket-sized sheep in the time I was from.

So I had to be back to the time where Evelyn had grown up.

“I felt something. I . . . saw someone,” I said. “Do you know John Black?”

He shook his head. “Matilda . . .”

“He must have been an echo,” I said. “No, it was more than that. I saw what this place used to be. What I knew it as. And he was real. He felt real.”

“You’re telling me you saw something from your own time?”

“Or I somehow stepped into my time. Is that possible? Did I just disappear and reappear?”

He camped back on one foot and stuck his hands in his pockets. “No. You were walking toward the house and I was walking after you.”

“Maybe it was just a second for you, but longer for me. Why would that happen? What would make that happen?”

“Don’t look at me,” he said. “Until today, I would have told you time travel—of any kind—was impossible, and now you’re telling me you’ve experienced it twice. Maybe you’re just tired, and your mind can’t sort through what’s happened. Maybe it’s old memories surfacing. Something glitching in the switch between what Evelyn knew and remembered to what you know and remember.”

It wasn’t a hallucination. That had been John Black. That had been his touch. And that had been our demolished house. I was sure of that. But I had no way to prove that to Quinten.

“Okay.” I swallowed and nodded. “Okay. Maybe it’s just a onetime thing. I can deal with that.” I set my shoulders and turned toward the house. Sometimes experiments had unintended consequences. Maybe seeing into my old time stream was that consequence.

Or maybe it was a fluke of the Wings of Mercury mending time. A wrinkle that hadn’t been ironed out yet.

Whatever it was, I would handle it. Right now, here in this time—the real time—I needed to save our lives.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To get the information I need to save both our heads,” I said over my shoulder.

I heard the sound of his boots as he did a short jog to catch up with me. “Does ‘no’ mean something else in your time?” he asked.

“No.”

That, finally, got a chuckle out of him. “Just. Please. Listen to me on this. Trust me on this. I know the way the world works, with or without time travel.”

“I am listening. I am also going to get us some information.”

“We do not do business with mercenaries.”

“Is that the family motto?”

“It is now.”

“Well, I’m still going off the other family motto: do whatever is necessary to keep the people you love alive.”

Quinten swore softly.

We’d rounded the house. The big barn, a worn wooden structure two stories high with odd creatures slipping or winging in and out of the windows, doors, and other cracks of it, was behind us now. I hadn’t had time to get acquainted with the stitched beasties my brother was keeping, but from the glimpses I’d caught, Quinten had a full-blown menagerie here.

However, I had not missed the half dozen winged lizards of various impressive sizes that skulked a little farther out by the trees, or filled up the dirt road, bellies flat as they soaked up the sun.

“Sure are a lot of dragons around the place,” I noted.

“Lizards,” he automatically corrected me, just like I had corrected everyone else who had met our single stitched, winged monstrosity back in my time.

“Do you use them for scale jelly?”

“Of course. Other than stitching, it’s the jelly that keeps this place running,” he said. “But mostly they patrol the property and make sure the things, and people, we don’t want here never make it to the house.”

“How many do you have?”

“Thirty-six.”

I shot him a grin. “We only had one. Big as a barn.”

“Still do,” he said. “And, well, a lot of others, the size of other buildings.”

“As soon as I get the three killers in our kitchen sorted away, I want to see all the critters. We had a unicorn. Well, sort of a unicorn.”

Quinten picked up the pace enough so he reached the door at the same time I did. He straight-armed it, his palm smacking flat in the middle of the wood. “Listen to me, Matilda.”

I stopped, folded my arms over my chest.

His face was a little sweaty from the jog, but also pale. “We are not on their side. They are not on ours. They want us dead, and they plan to make a profit on our deaths. Anything they say, any information they give us, is suspect.”

“I don’t see that we have a choice,” I said. “Good idea, bad idea doesn’t matter. We need to know who wants us dead, and why, and they can tell us.”

The door opened, swinging inward.

Quinten moved back and took hold of one of the guns under his overshirt so quick, you’d think he was on fire.

I stood my ground but didn’t draw the gun strapped to my thigh.

In that doorway, filling the most of it with all six foot four of his height and his muscles, was the galvanized Abraham Seventh. The man I’d loved.

In a different world.

In a time that I didn’t think existed.

The man who was now a stranger to me.

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