“For as long as we need it to,” Chase assured her. “We’ll clear it with Barnaby, but I know he’ll say yes.”
“I appreciate that,” Gemma said, still staring at the screen. “I’m mad enough at that man to wring his damned neck, but that doesn’t mean I want anything to happen to him.”
Thank God my mother laughed first, which gave the rest of us permission to do the same. “He’s your husband,” Mom said, “if he’s going to get killed, you definitely get first dibs on doing the murder.”
That’s when Dad chimed in. He’s been playing straight man for them forever. “Can I point out that as the only married man in the room, this conversation is starting to make me a little nervous?” he said.
Beau chortled. “I, too, once had a wife and I feared her wrath far more than any horror of the battlefield.”
“Ditto,” Festus said, raising his paw in agreement. “My Jenny knew how to put her claws out. She had a damned good aim, and I’ve got the scars on my backside to prove it.”
He was sitting on the hearth between Lucas and Greer. Since I didn’t know a lot about Lucas, I noticed that he grinned at the banter, but didn’t say anything. I took that to mean he’d never been married. Even though we’d just met, I already understood that sometimes Lucas gives away a great deal more about himself when he says nothing.
“Quit your bellyaching, you scoundrels,” Greer teased, making her eyes flash. “You’re all lucky those good women agreed to marry the likes of any of you in the first place.”
“Here, here,” Beau agreed. “You could not be more correct, dear lady.”
Dad caught Mom’s free hand. “I never said I wasn’t lucky,” he grinned, “just that I want to stay on your good side.”
“You don’t have anything to worry about,” Mom said, pausing for the perfect amount of time before adding, “for now.”
At that, all the men in the room roared with laughter. “She’s got you there, Jeff,” Festus said, looking fondly at my mother. “That’s a Ryan woman for you.”
In his long career, Festus has guarded both my mother, and my grandmother, Kathleen Allen Ryan. And honestly? I think he fell in love with both of them.
The good-natured teasing at the expense of the men present helped Gemma to regain her composure. When she asked the next, and perhaps most important question yet, her voice sounded strong and confidant.
“Let’s get back to business,” she said. “How did Seraphina and Ioana survive us dropping a lightning bolt on their heads?”
When we confronted the Strigoi Sisters the night before under the boiling clouds of a gathering storm, Anton temporarily distracted the girls with a taser. His gaze met mine and he told me what we needed to do to kill them. “Call down the lightning,” he said. “It’s the only way.”
Apparently not.
Chase answered Gemma. “Good question,” he said. “We kept the drones in place over the square tonight for good measure. First, let’s all take a look at what Jinx and Dad saw.”
He started to change the display, but Gemma stopped him. She had a strange look on her face.
“Before you switch the video,” she said, “could you ask the drone pilot to zoom in on the dresser by Scrap’s bed?”
“Sure,” Chase said, tapping on the screen.
As we watched, the camera panned over the top of the piece of furniture revealing a set of keys, a wristwatch, a wallet, and a bottle of Obsession perfume.
“Thank you,” Gemma said briskly. “That’s all I wanted to see.”
I looked at Tori and raised an eyebrow in question. She shook her head. It wasn’t until later, when we had a moment alone, that she told me Gemma doesn’t wear Obsession. In fact, she hates the stuff.
2
The drone’s perspective gave us new insights into the evil trio’s movements, in particular, the fact that they entered and exited from the same spot on the corner.
“Do you think there’s a portal there?” Tori asked.
Greer held out her hand to Chase, who relinquished the tablet. She played the video frame-by-frame. When Chesterfield and the Strigoi Sisters became visible, the wizard appeared to be slipping a pocket watch into his white waistcoat.
Greer froze the screen. “There,” she said. “Do you see that?”
“What?” I said. “The pocket watch?”
“Yes,” Greer said. “Now, observe his behavior in this frame.”
She fast-forwarded to the end of the video, slowing the speed again as Chesterfield and the Strigoi Sisters approached the corner to leave. This time, the wizard took the watch out of his pocket and paused long enough to fiddle with it.
“Is he setting the time?” Chase asked, squinting at the screen.
Greer zoomed in. The high-resolution camera yielded amazing detail. Chesterfield’s watch had not one, but three winding crowns.
“That looks more like a stopwatch,” Tori said. “Maybe he timed how long they stayed at the festival?”
From her perch on the arm of the sofa beside me, Glory spoke up. “It’s not a stopwatch,” she said. “Mr. Chesterfield built that pocket watch himself. I watched him do it. He’s obsessed with clocks. They were all over his shop. At night, the ticking almost drove me crazy.”
Greer pulled one of the chairs out from under the work table and turned it around. That put her more or less at eye level with Glory. “Can you tell us anything else about the watch?” she asked.
Closing her eyes as if she were trying to picture the timepiece, Glory said, “The case is gold, and there’s a big, shiny diamond on the face up at the top where the number 12 should be. Then down on the right, these little windows cover up the place for the 3.”
“How many little windows?” Greer prodded.
Glory counted on her fingers. “One, two, three, four . . . five,” she said. “There are five.”
It wasn’t hard to imagine a watch showing month, day, and year, but what were the other two?
“When did Chesterfield begin to work on the watch?” Greer asked.
The little witch opened her eyes. “He had already started when I . . . when I, uh, moved in,” Glory said. “But when he sent me over here, the watch wasn’t finished. It was still sitting in this clamp thingy on his desk. You know, holding it steady while he worked.”
“How often did he tinker with it?” Greer wanted to know.
“Oh, every night,” Glory said, “but especially after he bought some new kind of clock. It was like he’d study the one he bought to get ideas for the pocket watch. Then, sometimes he’d be at his workbench until the sun came up.”
Tori frowned. “You mean he sat there in the middle of his shop and played with the pocket watch where everyone could see him?”
“Oh, no,” Glory said. “Nobody was ever allowed to go in Mr. Chesterfield’s workroom. He didn’t know that I could see through the little window up on top of the door.”
“The transom?” Lucas said.
Glory nodded. “Yes, that’s it. I knew it had a name. I could see right through the corner where the hinge opened up. The top of his workbench was just clear as day. Since I couldn’t watch movies or TV, it was something to do.” She glanced around uncertainly. “Did I do something good? Does what I saw help?”
The tiny woman’s spare, but eloquent description of her lonely imprisonment on the side of the cup, coupled with her eagerness to contribute almost broke my heart. Don’t be fooled by the way Glory talks, or her obsession with decades-old popular culture. She’s plenty smart, but she’s also guileless. Chesterfield would never hurt her again if I had anything to say about it.
Greer smiled at Glory, who couldn’t help but flinch at the sharp canines studding the corners of the woman’s dental work. Greer is baobhan sith, a form of Scottish vampire. She’s every bit as much a bloodsucker as the Strigoi Sisters, but Greer long ago threw in her hand with the forces of order in the Fae world. She’s one of the good guys.
“What you’ve told us is extremely important
, Miss Green,” Greer said. “I suspect we will be relying on you for more insights into Mr. Chesterfield’s machinations.”
Glory’s face turned a deeper shade of emerald, which meant she was blushing. “You can call me Glory,” she said shyly.
Greer extended one slender hand. “Thank you, Glory,” she said. “I do hope we will become friends.”
Hesitating for a second, Glory reached out and took hold of Greer’s index finger, giving it a delicate shake. “I’m sure we will,” she said, looking up at the tall vampire with eyes gone round and wide. “You’re just the most glamorous person I’ve ever met who wasn’t on a movie screen or a magazine cover,” Glory blurted out.
Greer rewarded the words with a radiant smile. “Thank you,” she said. Then, leaning in conspiratorially, she added, “Perhaps, dear, we can work together on your wardrobe. This Barbara doll person with whose clothes they’ve burdened you may be quite popular, but her sense of style lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.”
“Barbie,” Glory said earnestly. “Her name is Barbie. And not all her stuff is bad. Would you really help me pick things out that would make me look better?”
“Of course,” Greer said. “We girls must stick together. We’ll talk later.”
For the rest of the meeting, Glory stared at Greer with rapt adoration. Before long, the rest of us would be staring at the baobhan sith, too, but for completely different reasons.
Greer stood up from her conversation with Glory, sliding the chair back under the table. Then she turned her attention to the room. “I cannot yet be certain,” she said, “but I believe Chesterfield used that bespoke watch to activate a means of travel for himself and the Strigoi Sisters.”
Tori frowned. “Be-what?” she asked.
“Bespoke,” Beau supplied helpfully. “It means an item made to order for the customer.”
“Correct, Colonel Longworth,” Greer said. “A bespoke item is, in your vernacular, ‘one of a kind.’ If I am correct, this concept applies ten fold to Chesterfield’s watch.”
Lucas had been listening to his partner with a thoughtful expression. “You’ve put together a theory based on what he’s been buying since 1936, haven’t you?” he asked.
“I have,” Greer said.
Oh, geez. Here we go again. I thought I had made my feelings about being left out of the loop totally clear — several times.
“Hold on,” I said. “You two are leaving some things out. Big things from the sound of it. How do you know what Chesterfield has been buying all these years?”
Shoving his fedora back on his head as if he knew I wasn’t going to like what he was about to tell me, Lucas answered my question. “Okay,” he said. “Confession time. After Brenna Sinclair used that miner’s cap to break into your basement and had the Amulet of the Phoenix in her hot little hands, Barnaby asked the DGI to reassign us. We’ve spent the last few months trying to figure out why so many magical artifact trails seem to lead straight back to Irenaeus Chesterfield.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Chase smirk. He seemed to be enjoying the prospect of another man getting his ears pinned back for withholding information from me. I hated to disappoint him, but I didn’t plan to fuel their little game of schoolyard tit for tat.
Still, I couldn’t keep my voice from sounding terse when I said, “And you were going to share this with the class when?”
Lucas shot me a disarming grin. “Sorry, Teach,” he said, “we weren’t done with the unit on vampires yet.”
That was a fair answer, and the grin didn’t hurt his case. With his hat pushed up at a silly angle and a shock of unruly, dark bangs falling over his forehead, Lucas looked like one of those lovable scoundrels Clark Gable played in the 1930s. I know. Ancient reference, but I was raised by a classic film nut.
It’s worth adding that for all I knew then, Lucas might have looked the same in the 1930s as he did now. So far, Lucas had denied being a wizard, alchemist, and werecat, but he wouldn’t tell me anything else. Why did it matter, you ask?
Chase doesn’t look a day over 35, but, thanks to his enhanced werecat metabolism, he’s 85 years young. Festus will be 110 on his next birthday. Depending on his Fae race, Lucas might be as old or older. Definitely information I wanted to know if there was a chance we might get involved.
“It’s more my fault than his,” Greer said, loyally throwing herself under the bus for her partner. “I didn’t have my thoughts in order, and Grayson here doesn’t know enough about time to set his own watch, much less form a theory about someone else’s.”
“Hey!” Lucas cried with mock indignation. “I’m just too spontaneous to be forced into a rigid schedule.”
“Sell it to someone who’s buying, laddie,” Greer grinned.
“Okay, fine,” I conceded, “we were preoccupied with vampires, a subject that now seems to involve Chesterfield’s pocket watch. So, what’s the theory?”
“That Chesterfield time shifted himself in and out of the square this evening,” Greer said, “he likely used the same ability to snatch Seraphina and Ioana from beneath the lightning bolt before it struck.”
“But I heard them scream,” I protested.
“Yes,” Greer said, “but we don’t know why they screamed. Was it from the fear of certain death falling from the sky or because an unseen hand was pulling them away?”
Those were questions I couldn’t answer. It wasn’t the first time Greer mentioned the idea of Chesterfield time shifting. The subject came up before the encounter with the Strigoi Sisters, as did the notion that he had used that power against us before. More on that in a minute.
“Okay,” I sighed, “I guess we have to deal with this now. You told us Chesterfield has time shifting powers, but you didn’t tell us he could use them on other people.”
Greer fixed me with a bemused expression. “You watched me stop time on the courthouse square last night to protect a whole crowd of humans,” she said.
She had me there.
“Stopping time and moving through it with other people in tow are different things,” Gemma pointed out.
“Ah, that’s true,” Greer said, “but every time you step through a portal to Shevington, you’re moving through time, and often in groups.”
“Yes, but the portals occupy a fixed point,” Gemma countered. “That’s how they work. The gateways are anchored in time and space, so they don’t disrupt the natural flow of the temporal streams they connect.”
“Spoken like an alchemist,” Greer said, “but you know as well as I do that where science and magic meet, many things that seem impossible within the laws of nature suddenly become possible.”
Festus, who had been listening to the whole conversation behind closed eyelids, spoke up. “You aren’t talking about moving forward and backward in time, are you?” he asked. “You think Chesterfield is making lateral jumps.”
Well, score one for the yellow tomcat.
“Precisely,” Greer said, “and that would be what makes Chesterfield’s ability stand out. If he has, indeed, learned to navigate time in that fashion, it’s a use of temporal magic unlike any we’ve seen before.”
“You’ve lost me now,” I said, shaking my head.
“Try to follow my line of reasoning,” Greer said. “Can we agree that the same increments of time occur simultaneously in a given reality regardless of the corresponding physical space?”
I could already tell that temporal magic was going to give me a major headache, but so far I was keeping up. “I think so,” I said, “but break that down for me a little more.”
“A second, a minute, an hour — they’re all experienced concurrently by everyone within the stream of time,” Greer explained, “but at different geographic locations.”
That actually did make sense. “Okay, I’m with you,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Now, consider this. What if the extra windows on Chesterfield’s watch are designed to hold coordinates?”
Lucas whistled appreciative
ly. “Well, I’ll be damned, Red,” he said. “You’ve figured out how to connect the dots in the inventory.”
“What inventory?” I asked impatiently. “You’re leaving stuff out again.”
“Sorry,” Lucas said. “My bad. I’m talking about the other stuff Chesterfield has been collecting for the past 79 years. It’s not only clocks. He’s been buying up famous navigational instruments going all the way back to the Age of Exploration.”
Navigation. Geographic coordinates.
I was starting to see where Greer was headed with her theory.
“How did you find all of this out?” I asked.
Lucas and Greer described their research in detail, a narrative that included an interesting revelation. Thirty years ago, Chesterfield faked his death. Since the Creavit are immortal, the strategy made sense and was certainly something I’d seen done in science fiction movies.
In fact, during the whole conversation, my mind worked overtime — pardon the pun — to access any understanding I had about time travel. That extended to reading H.G. Wells in high school and watching Star Trek.
Tori neatly summed up my thoughts when she said, “Okay, all I know about time travel is the basic rule. You go back and change something, you probably just killed everyone you know and maybe yourself.”
Greer laughed. She has a good laugh, by the way. Deep and throaty. Greer doesn’t need her vampire charms to turn men’s heads. Even my father, who is as faithful as one of his six “fishing” dogs, grinned appreciatively as he watched the baobhan sith — and he was sitting right beside my mother when he did it.
“A nicely succinct take on temporal paradoxes,” Greer said. “Without complicating the matter any further, your understanding is reasonably correct. Traveling backward in time and altering events rarely turns out well, which is why, in general, time travel is avoided except in cases of absolute necessity.”
“A rule that wouldn’t bother Chesterfield in the slightest,” Chase pointed out.
Witch on Third (A Jinx Hamilton Mystery Book 6) Page 2
