Timeless

by Amanda Paris

  “We look out for each other here in town,” I finished weakly. But even as I said this, I knew that crimes were always being committed, even in small towns. Just last week, a house two streets over from ours was robbed, and I knew of at least one girl at school who’d been raped after a football game last fall. And that was not taking into consideration that we likely had an evil witch on the loose to contend with.

  If it had been left up to me, I wouldn’t have thought twice about moving here with Damien. But I had my Aunt’s feelings to consider, and I was still underage. Even if I’d wanted to move, I couldn’t without her permission, which I’d little to no chance of getting.

  Damien accepted my explanation. Under no circumstances was he interested in leading me down any untoward paths, so once I’d explained how Aunt Jo would likely see our move to his house, he was satisfied. But I could tell it made him more urgent to marry me. I couldn’t be all that surprised. It was just last week that I’d agreed to marry him in the chapel, and he’d asked Father Philip to marry us before we made our escape. Poor Father Philip. If there was one good thing resulting from Lamia’s coming through with Damien, perhaps it was that it had maybe spared his life along with Peter’s and Millie’s. I guessed I’d never know.

  Chapter Fourteen

  "Encounters"

  I was still the same,

  Knowing myself yet being someone other—

  And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed

  To compel the recognition they preceded.

  T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

  I spent the rest of that week trying to teach Damien the ins and outs of modern life—no little feat in such a short time span. Fortunately, Aunt Jo announced that she was going to see an old friend in Orlando on Wednesday, so I was able to stay with Damien until Sunday afternoon, when she returned. She worried about how I’d get to school, but I asked Annie to cover for me again, explaining to Aunt Jo that she’d come by in the mornings to pick me up. I really did owe Annie. She was a great friend.

  Damien had his driver, Dmitri, who lived in one of the rooms at the top of the house, to come for me on Wednesday morning. I didn’t bother coming back in the evening, letting the Duchess out to fend for herself for a few days. I had no worries about her. She left us all kinds of disgusting presents on the back stoop that I was sure I’d have to throw out before Aunt Jo returned. I still left lots of cat food on the front porch, hoping the Duchess wouldn’t be too angry that I was leaving her for a few days. She seemed to understand when I explained where I was headed, though I think she was upset she couldn’t go. When I told her, she’d turn her head away from me and pranced out the back.

  One of the highlights of the week was my teaching Damien the finer points of driving. While he had learned the rudiments before finding me, he wanted to improve his skills. He’d already begun lessons with his driver, but it was more fun, he said, to practice with me.

  Sugar Hill had acres and acres of land, and we practiced on several unpaved roads first before trying the grocery store parking lot, usually late at night, when no one was there.

  Damien caught on quickly. Dmitri often accompanied us on those first outings, and I suspected that he and Damien went out together every day when I was not there. I was learning that Damien was a perfectionist, and he had his driver’s license within a month. I was unsure how he’d arranged it without having to take the dreaded Drivers Ed class we’d all had to suffer through. I wondered if Conrad continued to pull strings. He seemed to have powers as great as mine.

  I knew that people would grow suspicious if Damien didn’t go to school, and if he was to exist in the modern world, he’d at least need a high school diploma. We discussed how to enroll him. Conrad had again managed to get him the passport so quickly, and we called him, trying to arrange for a student visa so that he could stay. I was glad, actually, that we were getting married when we both turned eighteen, a concession I was finally able to persuade Damien to make since it was less than a year away. Applying for his citizenship would be easy then. I could have used my power to arrange this, but I knew that Damien didn’t want that, and neither did I. I knew I’d have to get him settled and likely wield some magic to that end, but I wanted my life to return to normal, as far as it could, with Damien by my side. Now that he was here with me, I hoped never to cast another spell if I didn’t have to.

  We hadn’t talked yet about where we would live after the wedding. I was serious about the desire to earn a college degree. One of the last promises I’d made Mom was that I would go. Damien understood vows, of course, and he was supportive, joking that perhaps he’d enroll in college too.

  This was going to be the greatest obstacle I could see facing us. How would Damien handle school? High school wasn’t exactly rocket science, but for someone who’s never been there, never gone through each grade, it was going to be a nearly impossible task. I thought over what Damien already knew from his past life, and I decided the best course of action was to enroll him as a foreign student, explaining that he’d taken much different classes than American students. No one, I thought, would question this with his strange accent. I knew it was just a matter of picking a country most people had never visited or heard much about.

  But I was careful. I didn’t want to choose a country where Damien didn’t actually know the language. I wanted it to be an English-speaking country despite Damien’s knowledge of Latin, now an unspoken language, and French. Since we’d visited France during our class trip, I thought that was too dangerous. Madame Renalt might also begin to ask questions. I couldn’t choose England because his accent sounded nothing like a modern British accent, even with all of the regional variances. I knew we’d have to explain that he had relatives who’d lived in England, but I thought, overall, that New Zealand was the best country for him. People had heard of it, but it was still not well known—not like Australia. And no one knew anyone from New Zealand to my knowledge. The chances that we’d actually meet a native New Zealander were slim to none.

  Damien was not happy about the lie, but he knew there was no real alternative. We couldn’t exactly explain to everyone that he’d come from the past, nearly eight hundred years before.

  We spent the Saturday before Aunt Jo returned checking out books from the library about New Zealand so that we’d both know something if anyone asked us any questions or started to dig deeper into Damien’s past. I wasn’t too worried that anyone would actually uncover the truth, but I wanted to make sure.

  I knew we’d have to create a transcript and grade record for him and that likely would involve my powers; otherwise, the school registrar would begin to ask questions.

  I was more concerned about how he’d do in his classes. Science, math, history—nearly all the subjects he would take—wouldn’t be recognizable to him. They would be much different from what he would have remembered, and there was no way I could catch him up on everything. Smart as he was, I didn’t think he could fake it. Fortunately, he seemed to have a natural aptitude for math, not that I’d been able to show him much so far. It was too bad I wasn’t terribly good at it, but then I’d never really tried all that hard. I did okay, but there were definitely nights when I’d skipped the homework assignment.

  Damien wanted to hire a private tutor right away, and I didn’t think this was such a bad idea. But I wanted to see first how well he did in school before we did that.It was going to take time for him to adjust to modern life, and I was afraid he could slip up if he worked with someone too closely.

  It turned out that most of my fears were unfounded. I’d underestimated just how smart and hard-working Damien was. Once he did begin taking classes, he did very well in most subjects, much better than I expected. I felt a little ashamed that I’d assumed he couldn’t do it; he had been my father’s best knight in our past life. Damien was a serious student who, unlike the rest of us, actually read his textbooks and did his homework the night before. I had taught him how to use the library before his fi
rst day, and he spent most of his time away from me reading. He was also building his own library at Sugar Hill, amazed at the amount of books readily available. He couldn’t believe that so many people could read. In the thirteenth century, books were a rarity; they had to be copied out by hand, usually by a scribe, and almost no one could read them. He was amazed to discover how the world had changed. It was not just the knowledge that astounded him; the world itself was much bigger and more diverse than what he’d thought possible in the thirteenth century.

  His first day in school was one I would never forget. I spent the night before concentrating on all of the records he’d need. It helped that I had copies of mine in an old box under the bed so that I would know what to imagine. I didn’t want there to be any gaps. Damien wasn’t entirely pleased with this, hoping there could be another way for him to enroll, but I assured him that they’d start to ask questions we couldn’t answer if there was no record anywhere of his having attended school.

  I decided that, though he’d be a native of New Zealand who vacationed with relatives in England, he had spent the majority of his time at a Swiss boarding school, which is where he’d picked up such impeccable French. I researched on the web and found a suitably impressive-sounding school with a name no one, including me, could pronounce. It was just a matter of imagining his records there and having them faxed to the registrar. We listed Mrs. Arthur as his guardian, thinking that no one would question this. I knew everyone would wonder why anyone with that kind of wealth would want to come to our small town and finish high school. True, there was the beach nearby, but really, we couldn’t compete with one of the best private schools in Europe. But there was no help for it.

  I knew when Damien arrived on the first day in an Audi wearing Versace that we’d have to be ready with some sort of plausible background for him. I did consider buying him more normal clothes, but I didn’t have the heart to dress him in Levi’s when there was Armani in his closet. I wasn’t totally immune to fashion.

  On his first day, we rode together, with me behind the wheel. I dissuaded him from having Dmitri take us, since we were already going to cause enough gossip as it was. Though I felt safe with his driving, we didn’t need the police asking questions about his past if we were pulled over.

  I knew, when we arrived in the parking lot, that we’d stop traffic. I didn’t anticipate, however, that this would literally happen. Most students didn’t drive nice cars—not luxury, pricey ones. Angela’s father had bought her a used mustang for her sixteenth birthday, but most students drove boring ones. Even Aunt Jo’s old car didn’t really cause too much comment when I’d first driven it to school.Ben had teased me a little, but that had been the extent of it. Everyone had, of course, long seen Aunt Jo driving it around town for the last fifty years. People began to stare at us as we drove up, and two students actually stopped their vehicles, blocking us as we pulled in.

  “What’s wrong with everyone?” Damien asked me. He still had no real idea about the distinctions between cars, proving, I thought a little smugly, that the “car gene” was not encoded into the male DNA the way Zack and Ben had always argued.

  “Nothing. Let’s just say, if we’d ridden in on a horse, it would be a thoroughbred,” I answered.

  “Oh,” he said. That registered.

  We parked and got out of the car. Everyone stared at us. For once, I really wished that I’d used my power to give me a designer outfit to wear rather than the boring t-shirt and jeans I was wearing. I quickly dismissed this thought, though. People had enough to talk about without wondering how and where I’d finally acquired fashion sense.No one stopped us on the way in, and I made my way over to the office. I thought that this would be trickier, but it was amazingly easy to enroll Damien in school. The registrar seemed to accept our story, only asking how we knew each other—and that was just politeness. Stupidly, I hadn’t actually thought of that.

  “Um, we met on vacation a couple of years ago and kept in touch,” I explained, knowing that I was talking just a little too loud and a little too fast, a habit I had when I felt nervous. I’d have to work on that end of the story later. Fortunately, she didn’t seem alarmed. We were just another couple of students, two of many she’d probably see that day.

  The fax from the Swiss boarding school had arrived just before we did that morning, so it validated our story. It showed his transcript, complete with a prior history of schooling in New Zealand. It was just a matter of registering him for a class schedule.

  We sat in the registrar’s office before first period, and I helped him to choose Latin, which he probably knew better than Mr. Henley, the teacher; English; History; Calculus, which I had the most misgivings about; Anatomy, easy enough without prior knowledge, I thought, since it was mostly about memorization anyway; and Gym. I’d tried to put him in as many classes with me as I could, but I knew we wouldn’t be able to take everything together. I wanted him to have some classes where he had some knowledge of the subject, like Latin or French, but there were no spaces open in my French class. They wouldn’t let him enroll in two languages at the same time anyway. Not surprisingly, Latin was not a popular subject, and there were plenty of openings mid-semester there. It was just as well, I thought. People might get suspicious if we were always together.

  Most of my friends accepted our story easily. I’d begun hanging out with them again a couple of weeks beforehand, so it was easier than I’d originally thought to introduce Damien to the group, which usually included Ben.

  Ben and I had settled into a distant friendship—enough, at least, that we could sit together and ask about our day, but certainly not the closeness we’d once shared. I hadn’t taken off the ring he’d given me. I couldn’t explain why, but it seemed an important part of me, of who I had been before Damien. I didn’t want to let it go, even though I knew it was hurting Ben. Damien had commented on the ring the first week we were together, wondering who’d given it to me. I evaded his question, and I think he assumed it was my mother’s. It matched my eyes, he said. I let him believe the misconception. I still really hadn’t explained anything to him about Ben, and I was fairly certain that the idea of my having a prior boyfriend was inconceivable. I wasn’t sure how he’d react when he learned, either, so I was trying to put it off for as long as possible. Maybe, I thought optimistically, it wouldn’t come up.

  Between Damien’s cross around my neck and Ben’s ring on my finger, I felt like a complete person. It wasn’t fair to Ben, and I knew that when I came to school with Damien, he’d be upset, even if he didn’t show it.

  When we walked into English, our first class together, Ben eyed Damien warily, his face quickly settling into lines of frustration, resentment, and anger. It was a rare look, but I recognized it immediately. I knew him too well. I could see his fingers twitching, and I knew what to expect. I had no idea that the day would end the way it did, though. I might have thought twice about enrolling Damien in school.

  Everyone seemed fine in the morning. Damien had made his entrance with me in the classes we had together, stopping every girl mid-sentence. No one at school had his dark good looks, and the sheer size and height of him made most of the guys, including Ben, look shorter and weaker. As a knight, Damien had mainly trained outdoors; he had an olive complexion, so he fit in with most of the students, who spent time surfing at Daytona Beach and working on their tans. But there the similarity ended.

  Fortunately for me, I thought, thirteenth-century standards of beauty for women were much different than twenty-first century ones. Damien thought it was natural for me to protect my face, which burned easily, from the sun. Fair skin was the fashion hundreds of years ago, and he thought that the girls who attended high school, most of them very tan, were completely unattractive. I couldn’t help but hide a smile when I’d asked his opinion of the girls he’d met. After overcoming the initial shock of their outfits, not considered decent in the thirteenth century, he assured me that he thought my long hair and pale face was the mos
t beautiful he’d seen. I was vain enough to be pleased with this. No one but Ben had ever thought I was beautiful, and I wondered if love gave a person new eyes.

  I thought Ben had taken Damien’s sudden appearance with me remarkably well. We’d had a couple of classes together, and I thought he was handling everything okay. But, by lunchtime, however, his patience had ebbed.

  Damien and I entered the cafeteria, stopping most of the conversations around us. I made the introductions between Damien and those he hadn’t met sitting at the lunch table, when Ben asked us how our day was going—a simple enough question.

  Damien answered.

  “Fine. Emmeline has been most helpful to me,” Damien said fondly, reaching his arm around my shoulders.

  “Emmeline?” Ben asked. I saw the tell-tale twitching of his fingers.

  I hadn’t had the heart to correct Damien when he called me Emmeline. It sent a small thrill of excitement through me for him to use the name I was called in my past life. I hoped that most people would assume that Emily was short for Emmeline or believe they misunderstood Damien because of the accent. His pronunciation wasn’t too far off from Emily in any case. I should have known that Ben would have reacted instantly to the difference.

  I hastened to explain.

  “Yes, it’s a different form of Emily,” I continued, hoping that would be the end of it.

  We’d finished eating, and Damien rose to take our trays up, bending over to kiss my cheek when he stood.

  That was all it took.

  Ben stood up, knocking the trays from Damien’s hands and spilling leftover pork chops, mashed potatoes, and pink lemonade all over Damien’s expensive clothes.

  “Get your hands off of her!” Ben shouted, ready, I could see, to fight.

  Damien had been trained for battle—it’s what knights constantly prepared for. I tried putting a restraining hand on Damien’s arm, concerned more for Ben than Damien.