Twin Speex: Time Traitors Book II (17 page)

He looked at her impassively. “Your mother has been murdered, your father brutally attacked—our prime suspect is a woman who looks very much like you—your brother is missing, and you have been assaulted. That’s some run of bad luck for one family, Miss Speex. Can you shed any light on these crimes?”

“I really wish I could, Inspector Hamilton,” she replied with heartfelt sincerity.

*

Charles Drake stood at Arthur Bradley’s bedside and looked down at the injured man. He had seen Ettie leave the hospital with the inspector and waited patiently until only the overnight crew remained. Through a corrupt police intermediary, Faith had bribed the guards, and he had found no one outside the hospital room. He knew this state of affairs would not last long and picked up one of the pillows from the bed. Drake stared down at it with unfocused eyes.

His initial assignment had seemed to be moving forward as planned. Then the woman appeared, and suddenly everything crumbled and fused together again into an entirely different reality. Like Odell, he had recovered his memories of other dimensional lives through someone else’s needs and actions.

The woman never told him her name, so he used the pronoun as a substitute. He had thought to give it another spelling such as Shi or Xhi, something more like a real name. But he had abandoned that in favor of the anonymity and universality of the word itself. It fit her…
She
of the past and present,
She
of death and shadows,
She
of pleasure and torture, a woman defined only by her mission and her increasingly unhinged desires.

She
had shown up at his doorstep, dangling a crystal key in her hand. Her appearance seemed to envelop him in a warm, sticky fog, a vaporous shroud he breathed in and was transformed. As memories of his exploits crept back under his skin and found homes in the folds of his brain, he knew his life was irrevocably changed… and not for the better.

Drake had travelled forward in time to recruit Odell and steal his technology. It was a mission he believed he had yet to fully embark upon. There was no sufficient adjective to describe his shock in finding that, not only had he completed this mission, he had apparently done so twice before. But
She
was there to tell him everything had changed.

The last time someone had sought to control him, it was at the hands of the man who lay before him. Drake gritted his teeth in frustration—no, not
this
man. He threw the pillow away from him and walked over to the darkened window. That particular honor had belonged to Sir Archibald Brandon, a man who had both given him and taken away his life.

At nine, he had been part of the ragged multitude, the human offal that polluted the streets of eighteenth-century London. Abandoned at birth, he had never known a mother’s care. He remembered only vaguely the cold comfort and neglect of the workhouse. At four, he escaped with other children onto the streets of London where, ironically, they had a better chance of survival. And survive he did… barely, begging and working when possible. He was finally thrown into Newgate Prison when caught “stealing” scraps from the trash pile of a local innkeeper.

Ragged, filthy, and covered with fleas, he had been plucked from that hell by none other than the King’s spymaster. He had appeared to Drake like a god, a savior and, in many ways, he was. There was no doubt in Drake’s mind that, if not for Sir Archibald, he would have died, starved and forgotten.

But the price exacted from him had been enormous. The years of work and study were not supplemented by warmth or kindness. While he would never again experience the level of deprivation that defined his early childhood, his living conditions were stark. Sir Archibald was a megalomaniac of the highest order; he exhibited neither compassion, nor even appreciation. Drake was being fashioned into a tool for his use, and like any other tool could be easily ignored or discarded.

A torment of doubt and insecurity latched with sharp talons onto his subconscious and led him to kill Sir Archibald and seize the future for his own. But the paradox of time travel had sent Drake to complete his mission yet again, and this time, it was he who was killed—gunned down by the pitiless hand of his savior.

Drake touched his chest. He could feel it, the white-hot bullet cauterizing the wound as it pierced his heart. Was he there now, being killed again and again? Were there other dimensions where his life was being played out with a very different script? His hand dropped to his side. The mechanics of time travel were beyond his comprehension. He had begun to believe they were beyond anyone’s, that even Odell was playing this game without fully understanding the rules. Drake sometimes wished that he had been left to die in the dungeons of Newgate, a nameless boy lost to history, neither mourned nor remembered.

Except, now there was Ettie. She was his target, his new assignment. “Get close to her,”
She
had told him.

An easy task for one so ruthless, he had thought. He believed himself beyond love, a creature molded from societal neglect and greed… an automaton to be wound up and sent into battle.

He turned abruptly from the window and walked out of the room. He would bring her no more grief.

What a fool, he thought derisively of himself as he exited the hospital by the alleyway door. It seemed he was human after all.

Thirteen

ODELL AND AVA sat in the comfortable parlor of a modest two-story home. The nighttime journey from the stables to the house on Walnut Street took a little under twenty minutes. For Ava it was the most astonishing walk of her life.

By modern standards, eighteenth-century Philadelphia was a modest city at best. But she knew it to be at the center of colonial life and the unofficial capital of a soon to be new nation. They walked beside the dirt-packed and cobblestone streets neatly laid out on an intersecting grid. Georgian architecture dominated in varying scale in both the public buildings and private residences. She could almost imagine herself on the set of a costume drama if not for the authenticity, the realness that could not be faked.

It wasn’t quiet. It had all the sounds of a city with the bustle of commerce just beginning to settle down at the onset of evening. But the lack of mechanical sounds was jarring. No car engines revved, no air conditioning or heating units hummed, no aircraft buzzed overhead. Even the crackle of electric wires was notable by its absence.

Real, yet unreal… she took a deep breath to steady her nerves. Two-hundred year old air, she thought. And for a brief panicked moment she believed her body would reject it, as if receiving the wrong blood type. She would go into shock and expire on the streets of 1776 Philadelphia.

Odell was walking a little ahead, talking with Gabriel. She had reached out into the space between them and grasped his hand. It was dark with only the infrequent streetlight to half-illuminate their faces. He slowed his gait only slightly and thrust their clasped hands into his coat pocket, bringing her securely to his side.

He had not turned to look at her or acknowledge in any other way her momentary dread. There was no need. They walked within the same space. The dry, firm skin of his palm pressed against hers. Their arms brushed together. He was there. He would not leave her to die gasping for breath.

Now, on the generously upholstered loveseat, Ava sat next to Evelyn. Both of them sipped at cups of coffee and stared contemplatively into the fire. Ava had discarded her coat and looked very much like a time-traveler from some distant future. Her cargo pants and black hoodie were a jarring modern accent to the homey environs of an eighteenth-century colonial parlor.

Odell sat across from them in an armchair. They were waiting for Gabriel to return. Upon arriving home, he had gestured them into the parlor and asked Hugh to put a kettle on before rushing out again.

During the walk from the stables, he and Odell had exchanged only the barest details of their respective experiences. But it was clear from this, that Ambrosius had put into motion a complex plan of action that encompassed them both, as well as Odette’s disappearance.

“You say she is with Ambrosius,” Gabriel had said. Odell caught the soft edge of hurt and disbelief in his voice. “He is the reason we are here in the colonies.”

“How?”

“Odette was having disturbing dreams. It went on for months. She would wake up shaking and in a cold sweat. Finally, she discerned a pattern, a message. So she went to… to the standing stones.”

“Stonehenge?”

“Yes, I believe so. She met Ambrosius there for the first time. I think she already knew him to be her father. It was after that we made plans to come here, to Philadelphia.”

“Just like that?”

Gabriel had laughed quietly. “No, Odell, not ‘just like that.’ It was an agonizing decision, surprisingly more so for Odette than me.”

“Fancy,” Odell stated with certainty.

Gabriel nodded. “Fancy has done truly amazing things, Odell. You would be proud of her, as we are. Odette refused to tell her the real motivation behind our move. Because—”

“Because she knew Fancy would insist on coming,” Odell finished for him.

“Yes, quite right,” Gabriel affirmed.

It was at this point that Ava had grabbed his hand. Like that moment in her kitchen when they had grieved for his mother, he felt a connection. As strange as ending up in Revolutionary-era Philadelphia was for him, he had done this before, and he was among his own people—his family. He had wanted Ava to be reassured without bringing undue attention to the fear and panic she was feeling. But observing her now, she seemed as calm and collected as when he had first approached her at the university. She and Evelyn exchanged the occasional murmured comment, but mostly they sat quietly drinking their coffee.

During the last half of the walk, Gabriel had delivered a quick informational monologue. It seemed the appearance of Ambrosius aboard the ship had very nearly prompted Captain McKiddie to toss them all overboard. Only the presence of the prominent and respected Doctor Benjamin Franklin had kept him from committing so rash, yet understandable in Gabriel’s estimation, an act.

Ambrosius had felt the risk necessary to bring them news of what was happening in the colonies. Privately he told them that events were moving more rapidly than anticipated. The Time Traitors had made “tunings,” as Ambrosius called them, to the timeline in hopes of giving them more leeway in preparing for their mission, a mission to eradicate an evil that had poisoned a new nation from the moment of its birth. The very same that had brought Odell and Ava back through time.

“Slavery,” Odell had said.

“Slavery,” Gabriel agreed in his patient way. “It’s frustrating to hear the noble sentiments… the high-flown rhetoric associated with this revolutionary movement and know that those espousing these grand ideas have no intention of extending them to the slaves. For when one begins to speak of slavery in this new world, with these new freedoms, they don’t apply to the black man; he is not fully human.”

“George Washington was once quoted as saying, ‘Nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union.’ ”

Gabriel had looked astonished. “When did he say that?”

“Near the end of his life, I believe.”

Gabriel laughed a little harshly. “Well then, he made a long journey from where he is now.”

Odell wasn’t sure how much of this conversation was overheard by Ava. She didn’t venture a comment and seemed only too grateful to sit down beside the fire once reaching the house.

It had been almost thirty minutes since Gabriel’s departure. Odell stood up and took a restless turn about the room, stopping only when a bustle at the parlor door heralded the arrival of Cara.

Odell grabbed at the back of the chair as his vision telescoped. It was as if he saw her from a long distance away and then, just as abruptly, snapped back to normal.

She stood as always perfectly groomed and manicured. If her dress was less elaborate than in the past, it was no less elegant for the lack of adornment. There was no Cara equivalent in the restored timeline, but he felt a surge of affection for the years she had been his only source of love in one timeline, and a surrogate mother for him and Odette in yet another. His heart thumped painfully when he saw that the passage of years had finally written fine lines across her lovely face. Her bearing was still regal, but there was a fragility to her frame that had not been there before.

Odell smiled and opened his arms as she swept majestically into the room to embrace him. He almost laughed aloud when looking down at the top of her head he could discern no gray in the mane of rich auburn hair.

“Cara, you haven’t aged a day.”

Her green eyes twinkled up at him, and the still-red lips parted in a wide, delighted smile.

“And as beautiful as ever,” he said with genuine appreciation.

A firm clearing of the throat was followed by a familiar, yet unexpected voice, “Well, Mister Speex, she’s a married lady now, so you’ll have to be more careful with your compliments.”

He furrowed his brow momentarily at the small, wiry man who had followed Cara into the parlor.

“Hershel Gordon!” he said disbelievingly and heartily shook the smaller man’s hand. “How’s this? When I left, she was still playing hard to get.”

At that, Cara hit him playfully on his chest and said, “How dare you accuse me of such vulgar behavior! ‘Hard to get’… honestly, Odell!”

This time he did laugh out loud, because he could not think of a better ending to the most unlikely of romances. Odell had stayed in the past only long enough to see Odette and Gabriel married. In those few weeks, he had come to appreciate the intellect and acute observational skills of the diminutive Bow Street runner.

Hershel’s attempts at courtship, however, were less finely tuned than his deductive reasoning. Unpolished and brutally honest, he often had to retract comments and stumbled over the most basic elements of flirtation. Cara was never particularly unkind, but she had her standards and could be quite caustic with her replies. Odell had caught glimpses here and there of moments where they appeared to be in perfect accord, Cara, especially, with a look of comfort and serenity he had never seen before. But overall he had felt the runner’s chances were pretty slim.