Those were the same awful sounds that I’d heard time after time, in my dreams, on the road, making dinner, always playing in the back of my head. The deadly, deliberate “pop, pop, pop” that meant my world would never be the same.
The kitchen was around the side of the house and had a back door that opened onto a small herb garden that my mother had been cultivating. I ran into the garden recklessly.
I remembered that long-ago day of murder and destruction like it was yesterday. The Prayer would be in the basement by now. Still, I hesitated before opening the door and looking in.
Then I had to see.
The kitchen was totally trashed, just as I remembered it. The wall opposite me was blown out and the table where I’d made my first drawing with crayons (a perfect copy of van Gogh’s Starry Night) was in shreds.
But I had eyes for nothing but the two people who lay on the floor.
I remembered the last time I’d seen them, looking down as I left the house, a tiny, scared three-year-old disguised as a tick, hitching a ride on The Prayer’s own fur. My mom and dad had been face down on the floor. Dead.
That image was burned into my memory.
But it wasn’t how they looked now. My father was propped against the wall, my mother’s head lowered.
I took a step farther inside, but stopped when my father looked up at me, right into my eyes.
“Daniel! Don’t come any closer.” His voice was barely a whisper. “You can’t help us now.”
I could only stare at him, but I felt my eyes filling with tears.
“I heard the portal open. It could only be you, son. You shouldn’t be here, though.”
“The Prayer. I know he’s here! I’ve been waiting twelve years to find him.” My hands balled into fists. “He’ll pay for this, for everything he did to you and Mom.”
My father shook his head slowly, with difficulty. “No, it isn’t time for that. You’re not ready. You have other work to do. Like dueling with Beta.”
My mother stirred, her eyelids fluttered open halfway, and her face jerked in a way that twisted my heart. She’s trying to smile for me, isn’t she?
I could barely hear her, but I could still tell what she was saying. “Daniel… you’ve grown up well. I’m so proud of you. You’re handsome, and you’re brave.”
“We love you, Daniel. We always will. Now, before he comes back… look around you.” My dad gave a gasp then and rolled over.
I stood there, sobbing quietly in the middle of our garden. The herbs I was crushing underfoot smelled magical. Thyme, mint, lavender. Everything I remembered of my mother’s scent.
“Look around you.” My father’s last words.
So I did. I knew what I was seeing had to be real, but the colors and smells seemed brighter, sharper, like the whole rest of my life had been a dream and I was just now waking up into the real world.
There was crashing downstairs, and smoke began billowing out from the hallway that led into the basement. I backed up a couple of quick steps, the fire suddenly reminding me of Beta.
And how he had told me my parents had him over for dinner.
Had he—?
I couldn’t finish the thought and only howled in more pain and frustration.
But then I stopped abruptly when I saw something more startling, strange, and beautiful than anything I’d ever encountered on any of the seventeen planets I’d visited.
Before me was a hole in time.
PART THREE
THE DARK AGES, MY VERSION
Chapter 49
MY VISION was blurred by tears, but the egg-shaped opening somehow shone clearly through them in an intense focus. It was about twice my height, reflecting a shimmering crystalline light. I could see stars, planets, and galaxies, swirling and coming together the way cogs and sprockets and springs fit together to make a watch tick—but here in front of me was the most amazing and complex timepiece ever.
I’ll be honest. It also scared me. But you know what? Where I stood right now, with The Prayer’s crashing and merciless howling, the smoke pouring out from inside, and, most of all, the two bodies that lay a few feet away from me—those scared me a whole lot more.
So I stepped into the hole.
And found myself falling.
It was the strangest sensation. I’ve been skydiving a few times (none of them intentional), and this wasn’t completely different. And yet… it was.
I wasn’t floating in a vast sky or space, sightseeing the grand landscape below me. Instead, the painful Kansas scene was gone in an instant, and now the universe was rushing past me, giving me the gut-busting thrill of racing 250 miles per hour down a freeway.
Sound like fun? Maybe for a nanosecond. After that, my stomach felt like it was being turned inside out and licked by an alien with a spiked tongue. Good thing I didn’t start to bring up my supper or I would’ve been wearing it.
And my brain—well, it felt like it was about to explode as it tried to take in thousands of images that flashed like 3-D IMAX movies on the walls of the wormhole I was racing through. Some things I recognized—wooden ships, warriors on horseback—and others were gone before I could even tell what they were—shadowy figures, patterns, supernovas of color and shape. Events seemed to flow in and out of one another deliberately. And soon, in among the images, I recognized something else.
Tongues of fire!
A series of multicolored, hypnotic flames writhed like a tortured prisoner. There was no doubt in my mind that it was Beta. And he was chasing me.
I saw flames dancing in gray clouds spit out by a towering smokestack. Fire licking at the remains of an entire city block, its wooden buildings nothing but cinders now. A field of haystacks, all of them burning to ash.
And then, eventually, one image: a lake covered by fire, glinting and sparkling in a moonlit night. Quite beautiful, actually.
A lake covered by fire?
Just as it seemed the fiery lake was about to engulf me, I suddenly gasped. It felt for all the world like I’d just been hit in the stomach with a sledgehammer.
I wheezed for breath and grasped wildly for whatever I could hold on to, hoping to finally halt this nightmarish flight through time. And my hands found something reassuringly solid, cold, flat—and still.
I grabbed at the earth.
Chapter 50
SHAKING MY HEAD rather forcefully, I found that my sadness, the deep, painful sensation that had been gripping my heart, had been blown away, left behind with the rest of the farm, and my mom and dad. Now I was lying on the ground, clinging to a few stalks of straw. The air was humid and smelled like summer.
I just lay there for a while enjoying the quiet peace until I felt a sharp poke in the ribs.
“Is he dead?” I heard a raspy English voice say next.
“Dunno,” said another.
“Well, does he have any coin? May as well take what we can get from him.”
Fearing the worst as always, I slowly opened my eyes. The two men leaning over me took a hasty step back, and I got a good look at them.
What the—?
These guys looked like they’d gotten their potato-sack clothes at a farmers’ market—or a theater costume shop. They were covered in grime, and the ripe smell of unwashed flesh and body odor hit my nose. One even had horseflies buzzing around his mouth and hair-sprouting ears. I wondered if it would be impolite to point this out, and decided that since the same man held a nasty-looking knife, I would let his hygiene issues slide for now.
I squinted at him—and his weapon.
I don’t know very much about the history of European armaments, probably only as much as your average European history professor. As a wild guess, though, I would have to say that this was definitely still England. And I was pretty sure—based on the shape and detail of his knife alone—that it was somewhere around AD 600.
The one with the accompanying swarm of flies smiled at me. I had time to count his teeth—all three of them—before his mouth snapped s
hut again and he pressed the point of the knife right into my throat.
“Oh, yer alive, are ya? Well, there’s a toll for sleepin’ in this field. Hand over yer money or this is going to be a real pain in your neck!”
I decided it was going to be a real pain in his neck, instead. No matter what year it is, teaching a bully a lesson never goes out of style.
Chapter 51
SEEING MY PARENTS die for the second time hadn’t left me in a charitable mood. “Talk about wrong place, wrong time,” I muttered, staring into Flyboy’s bleary eyes.
“You can say that again, stranger,” he growled. I savored his smug, sadistic expression as I curled my mouth into a frown and raised my voice half an octave. It’s a little something magicians call misdirection.
“Please don’t hurt me, kind sirs!” I pleaded.
I tried to look vulnerable and pathetic as I rummaged in my pocket. It took only a moment’s concentration to whip up an authentic-looking medieval pouch, made of tanned leather, a little bigger than an orange.
He snatched at it like a frog after a mosquito, then weighed it appreciatively in his hand.
“Heavy!” he exclaimed with delight. “I think we may have hit the mother lode, Hubert.”
“About time,” Hubert spat—literally. And he was actually the more tidy and the cleaner of the filthy pair. “Now hurry up and kill him.”
I heaved a dramatic sigh. “Well, kill me if you must. But count my gold before you do, just so I’ll know I died a rich man.”
Flyboy squinted at me suspiciously, but he untied the strings on the pouch, pulling the knife off my throat by an inch.
“Better be something good in here,” he said.
“Trust me, there is. Something great, actually.”
At that moment I unleashed all my concentration onto the space inside the pouch. The expression on Flyboy’s face transformed from mean to surprised to terrified so fast that I nearly laughed. This was going to be quite a show.
I used his moment of distraction to grab his knife. “I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself with this,” I told him.
A wide gray elephant’s trunk had popped out of the bag and was grabbing his throat, so he didn’t care much about what I was doing. The trunk shook its captive, and the pouch flew out of the man’s grasp.
Then the bag burst apart and a gorgeous gray elephant now stood before us.
Not many people know that elephants are aliens, brought long ago from my home planet as a gift to Earth. Of course, these medieval bozos probably didn’t even know that elephants existed. And it was a shame, because this one was a real beauty.
Flyboy screamed as the elephant lifted him up like a marionette and tossed him a good twenty feet across the meadow.
Hubert, the more fastidious thug, had both arms shielding his face like he’d just witnessed the beginning of the apocalypse. “Swounds! What in the name of all that’s holy is that ruddy thing?”
Flyboy groaned, and clambered to his feet, growling. “’S a dragon, y’ idiot! We robbed a bloody witch!”
Then he turned and ran off with his partner close behind. If they’d had tails, they would definitely have been between their skinny, grimy legs.
The elephant turned her enormous head, her ears flapping a little in the breeze, and winked a twinkling eye at me. Then she snaked her trunk into the air, trumpeted joyfully, and took off in a thundering run after the two would-be thieves and murderers.
Just in case you thought elephants were all sweetness, I can attest to the fact that this one had the time of her life scaring the bejeezus out of those dudes.
Chapter 52
MAYBE THE ELEPHANT TRICK had been overdoing it. I’d used so much power that I could barely even move my head now.
Not that I wanted to. A light breeze was playing in the grass beside my ears, and the air was sweet and clearer than anything I’d ever breathed in more modern times. I needed to start spending more time in the country—the seventh-century country, that is.
The only thing that made this scene less than perfect was a shadow across my face that was blocking the sun. A shadow that, now that I thought about it, hadn’t been there a minute earlier.
And then a voice spoke. “Anyone who thinks an elephant is a dragon is lacking in wisdom, if you ask me. But those chaps were right about one thing. You are a wizard, aren’t you?”
I did my best to crane my neck backward—and the boy standing behind me leaned forward so that we were staring at each other, only upside down.
I could tell that he was maybe a year or two younger than me, with sandy hair that was a little too long, and made him look like a reject from a 1990s grunge band.
Looking into his eyes, though, was like looking into a mirror. There was strength and intelligence, sure, but beyond that I could see anger, fear, doubt. This was a kid who knew what it was to lose something. I liked him already.
He laughed. “By the way, my dear friend, you’re lying in a cow pie.”
It was helpful of him to point that out, but I couldn’t do much at the moment, so I just kept on lying there like an idiot.
“I know,” was my best response. “I meant to do that.”
He grinned. “Ah, I’m sure you did. And I’m the next king of England. Quite unlikely.”
I squinted. “How do you know about elephants, anyway? You get a lot of them around here?”
“Well, I’ve never actually seen a great mastodon before. But my tutor’s shown them to me. In books. He’s a wizard like you.”
“I’m not a wizard,” I said. “I gave the thug my purse, and that elephant… just jumped out.” I knew it sounded lame, but explaining that I was really an alien from the twenty-first century would probably sound a lot worse.
“Right, then,” he said agreeably, reaching down a hand to help me up. “My mistake. What’s your name?”
“Daniel.” I brushed the remnants of the cow pie off my backside. Luckily, it wasn’t a fresh one.
“Most chaps call me Pendy. I say, if you have time, might I introduce you to my tutor? I daresay he would be most interested in meeting another wiz—er, friend to the great mastodon.”
I shrugged and smiled. If you know me at all, you know I usually try to avoid contact with strangers. Nine times out of ten, they’re out to kill me. That other ten percent are probably trying to sell me beachfront property in Florida or Ginsu knives.
But there was something interesting about this boy. Meeting him made me think of my aunts, uncles, and cousins back on Alpar Nok—who, like Pendy, were all so genuinely warm and friendly and instantly accepting. My alien-radar was definitely not going off.
I wondered if I should tell him the truth—that I was a superpowered agent sent from outer space into the twenty-first century; that he would have to wait eight hundred years before the printing press was even invented, and another six hundred before he could read the very fine pachyderm-themed book called Water for Elephants.
But I had a legacy to fulfill and an alien—no, a whole list of aliens—to catch. I needed to find out where that fiery lake I’d seen earlier was, what it had to do with Beta, and finally, just what it was going to take to get me home again to save my friends.
Chapter 53
THERE’S A BIG FAT DIFFERENCE between having a mission and having a clue about how to execute it. Without my List computer, I felt caught short, and my powers were sapped.
I decided my best bet was to connect with Pendy’s tutor. With any luck, I could draw out some info from a guy with some smarts. Scholars might be few and far between in the seventh century… who knew?
I was definitely unsteady after the thousand-year-plus travel through time. As I followed Pendy across the meadow, I was stumbling like a toddler who really needed to go to the bathroom. Pendy helped me over a stile that crossed a stone wall, then through another field toward a river on the other side.
There was an island in the river, and a wooden building that stood on it with a giant wheel creaking and di
pping in the water alongside a mill. We splashed through the shallows and went up to a little porch.
A white horse was tied to the railing outside, and Pendy grimaced.
“Oh, bother. Kay is here.”
“Kay? Who’s she?” I asked.
“He’s my brother. Well, foster brother. Well, idiot.”
I grinned. Emma usually described Willy the same way.
The door was ajar, and as he pushed it open the rest of the way I heard a crashing and a cascade of centuries-old swear words (“zounds,” “gadzooks,” that sort of thing) coming from inside.
The mill was just one big room, with a rickety loft on one side, and a lot of cogs and gears on the other, which connected the waterwheel outside with a grindstone that was circling slowly around and around at about waist height. Beyond that, the whole room was filled with junk.
There were bowls and jars—many of them broken—and rusting metal cart wheels, animal figurines, half-eaten loaves of bread, animal bones, and on top of everything were heaps of paper covered with notes and pictures. There was even scribbled-on paper stuffed into the crevices of the mill machinery. So this was no ordinary workshop. Paper couldn’t have been that easy to come by back in these times.
I picked up one of the pieces. It said, “Origin of Prometheus.”
It struck an eerie chord with me. I knew the name, from the Greek myth about the origin of fire. Fire—it seemed to be following me everywhere.
Still screaming obscenities at one side of the room was an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old who must have been Kay. His sleeve was caught in one of the gears and he was on his tiptoes, being dragged in a slow, inevitable circle. He kept thrashing his legs, trying to get loose, knocking over pots and shields as he went around.
In his free hand, he held a crumpled piece of paper that he stuffed in his pocket as soon as he saw us.
“Well, don’t just stand there, nincompoops! Get me down from here!” he yelled. “Immediately, if not sooner! Right now!”
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