by Tamara Allen
To say the least. But as quick as our good-byes needed to be, I couldn’t rush them. I started with the easiest. “Henry, old pal. What can I say?” Certainly not that I’d miss him. Okay, he hadn’t been a total asshole; he’d helped us pin down Ezra’s dad. I had to give him credit for that. But I didn’t feel close to the guy and I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.
Henry, for his part, looked me over as if he felt as ambivalent. “You do realize, of course, that if Derry had put forth any real effort, we would have won that race,” he said with an indignant little sniff.
“Yeah, I do.” I smiled and held out a hand. Henry hesitated only a moment before he took it. I turned to Kathleen, then noticed Hannah peeking out from behind her. I gave her shoulder a soft squeeze. “Sorry, Hannah. Don’t stay mad at me too long, okay? I’ll miss you, kiddo.”
Hannah blinked back her tears and hid her face against Kathleen’s coat. A similar gleam shone in Kathleen’s eyes, though she was furtively dabbing away with a handkerchief.
“I feel like I ought to apologize to you too,” I ventured.
“Nonsense. My boarders generally move on at some point. It’s a fact of life I’m accustomed to.”
“Yeah.” I grinned. “I’ll miss you too.” I gave her a hug, whether it was good manners or not. She didn’t seem to mind and patted my shoulder before dropping her gaze to dab at her eyes again.
Derry wasn’t so self-conscious over his tears. He pulled me into a hug and sucked in a long ragged breath to steady his voice just enough to talk. “I’ll meet up with you again on another day, Morgan Nash, on another road. We’ll sit down to a beer, cold if you like, and laugh, till the tears we shed are the happy ones they cannot be just now.” He drew back to look at me, eyes a deep, misty gray, and smiled from ear to ear. “I’m pleased to have known you.”
“I sure hope we do meet again. I love you guys. All of you.” I couldn’t keep my own tears down without choking on them. It was time to go, before I had everyone bawling. I turned to Ezra, to see he’d taken in all the farewells with a calm, waiting air. “Sully’s not here, is he?”
Ezra shook his head with mute sympathy. Ah well—how many good-byes did I really need to say? One thing I knew, none of them were as difficult as the last one. His blue eyes gave away very little as Ezra steered me to the spot where I had first appeared, just weeks before. As I struggled for the words to tell Ezra good-bye, Hannah lunged forward and wrapped both arms tightly around my middle. Kathleen drew her away to a corner of the room and I was glad they hadn’t left altogether. I wanted to see them in the last moment before 1888 became a memory—if it would be even that, once I was home.
There was only one thing left to do. “Ez….”
He placed a slim volume in my hands and looked at me fondly, a flash of humor in his eyes. “I hold to the notion it would have been less trouble to conjure a demon.”
“For damned sure,” I said. “Ezra—”
“You’ll stand just here, then, and please don’t talk, for heaven’s sake, or I’ll lose my place and like as not send you to the moon.” He grimaced. “Just stand still, close your eyes, and think of home. Right. We’re ready, then.”
He stepped back between Derry and Henry and put all his attention into the copied spell in his hands. As quietly intoned Latin fell upon my ears, I wanted to go to Ezra and wrap him in one last hug—but it was too late. I could feel it starting already, the slow, rolling sensation and the accompanying nausea in the pit of my stomach. My vision swam and I blinked rapidly, wanting one last look at everyone.
I could only see Ezra, his curly head bent over the trembling slip of paper as he let one word follow another. I didn’t think I could keep on my feet, but somehow I did, long enough to catch his eye as he lifted his head and looked my way. But he didn’t see me. I knew because the pain he had been hiding from me stood starkly in his eyes. It was loss, stamped forever in my memory as he vanished from sight, the past vanishing with him.
Chapter 24
I woke to the sound of steady beeping and knew I was home. Nothing beeped like that in 1888. The tubes sticking out of me and the antiseptic smell confirmed I’d landed in the hospital. My assumption that I’d survived the trip home was a little less sure when I opened my eyes to see Sully standing beside me.
He said without preamble, “You are one hell of a pain in the ass to look after.”
“It’s been brought to my attention a few times in the past thirty years,” I answered automatically, while another part of my mind wondered how I could see what I was seeing. Despite the comment, the lines of his heavy-jowled face were unusually placid, almost amused behind the familiar veneer of weary aggravation. He was the Sully Ezra had met….
Ezra. The memories were all there, still intact. I sucked in a breath and tried to concentrate on the present. “What’s up, Sully? Am I home? And by home, I mean—”
“I know what you mean. You’re still in the land of the living, yeah. I just wanted to grab a minute of your time before you regain consciousness.”
“Oh.” I felt pretty damned conscious already, but what the hell. “Couldn’t get through to anyone about Gladstell?”
“Sweet Jesus,” Sully muttered and leaned heavily against the bed rail. “You haven’t got a whole lot of time to get this done, Agent Nash, so pay attention. It’s gotten around that you’ve been found, alive but comatose—”
“What?”
“Shut up and listen to me, Morgan. You and I are the only ones who know Gladstell’s their recruitment-in-place and neither of us is in any kind of shape to bust his ass. Tell Faulkner you’re going to need a round-the-clock lookout and you’re going to have to look out for yourself, because part of Gladstell’s goal is to get you out of the picture.”
“What about Nosik?”
“He’s still on the loose. But Gladstell’s a little more worried about you.”
“He’s looking for me?”
“Oh yeah. His handlers want to bury you someplace cold and deep, as soon as they can get their hands on you. I can’t do any more than I’ve done already—”
“Whoa. Wait a second.” Struggling to do more than process Sully’s instructions, I found myself piecing a bigger puzzle into place. “You saved my ass in the museum?”
He exhaled, more of a groan than a sigh. “Yeah. I didn’t like the idea. I knew the Ripper would be one hell of a temptation for you, but there wasn’t much I could do—so the powers that be moved you to a safe house. So to speak.”
I stared at him. “In 1888?”
“In 1888.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Guess they figured whatever you had to learn, you could pick up there just as well. I wanted your butt out of the line of fire until I could get through to you. I didn’t count on you falling for my go-between.”
“I came back, didn’t I?”
Sully stared at me, and I realized how annoyed I’d sounded. I shook my head impatiently. “I came back to do my job. You can bitch at me for everything else but that.”
“I’m not bitching at you, kid. I’m trying to keep you alive.”
“Is that why you told me to drop the Ripper case?”
“They didn’t send you back to change history, Morgan. You could have caused some serious damage if it had gotten out that not only was Eddy screwing boys, he’d slept with the Ripper himself, a few times. Yeah, I know—I don’t like burying the truth any more than you do. But that kind of blow to the monarchy would have had long-ranging consequences I couldn’t let you be responsible for.”
“Just going back, I must have changed a few things,” I said, a little afraid to hear that I had.
Sully nodded. “Inconsequential changes, so they say. But you need to forget the past and worry about your future. You’re home, but you’re not home free. Watch your ass, cuz I didn’t go to all this trouble just to have you show up in the afterlife this early in the game.”
“Sully, don’t go. I wanted to tell you—”
“Ah hell.” H
e rolled his eyes, but I could see the smile pulling at his mouth. “You’re not going to get sentimental on me just because I’m over here and you’re over there? Go on. Wake up. Live the rest of your damned life and let me get some peace.”
A weird little jolt, like the kind that sometimes woke me when I was nearly asleep, hit all of a sudden—and what had felt like consciousness a second ago expanded into a wakefulness that felt decidedly less comfortable. My head ached and my stomach was not too happy, either. Sully was gone, and a scrawnier but equally scowling face, with cheeks and nose nearly as red as the thinning hair, appeared in my line of sight. The lips tightened with the faintest sign of concern. Genuine concern and he was letting it show. I had to be near death.
“What the hell kind of a vacation did you take, Nash?”
While I tried to come up with an explanation, the nurse came to my rescue, though her poking and prodding wasn’t much of an improvement over Faulkner’s interrogation. By the time she had gone, I’d cobbled together some semblance of a lie about how I’d been kidnapped and imprisoned under the most primitive conditions.
Faulkner seemed dubious. “Yeah? What about the watch? And the book of poems. Where’d they come from?”
I told him they were a gift from a friend I’d made in London, and Faulkner hastily changed the subject, even squirmier than Sully about my romantic travails. I offered up a few useless memories of my brief incarceration, tossing in implications of Gladstell’s involvement so that Faulkner could draw his own conclusions. His initial reaction was to post an agent outside my door. I convinced him that an open invitation from a comatose sitting duck was more likely to spur Gladstell into risking capture to tie up loose ends. Faulkner reluctantly agreed to let it get around that I might be starting to wake and, from then on, it was just a matter of time.
Over the next forty-eight hours, Agent Mahoney called on me, the image of doctorly concern with clipboard and stethoscope in hand and his favorite Sig loaded and ready under his white coat. Leonard made a move just after Mahoney slipped out at four in the morning, and he came bearing not a gun, but a syringe. Half-awake, I heard someone move to my bedside and wondered for a minute if it was just Mahoney back early. Then I heard his voice, genial as ever.
“Hit for six are we, Agent Nash?” A gloved hand patted my shoulder. “Pity for you. Convenient, however, for me.” I peeked in time to see him gripping the IV and raising the needle. I didn’t bother to ask what was in it. I just grabbed his wrist before he could inject it and knocked him flat on his ass. The syringe rolled under the bed and Gladstell stared up at me, dazed. “You’re not comatose.”
I gave the call button a good, long push. “Looks like you snapped me out of one, for a change. Funny, huh?”
Another forty-eight hours later, with a warning from a real doctor to never do again whatever I’d done to end up hospitalized, I was on a plane back to New York. Faulkner ruined my first day back with the curt announcement that I was officially off duty for the next two weeks. Not even my grumbling that I had already spent enough time lying around would persuade him to put anything new on my plate. Free time was the last thing I wanted. Stuck with it, I aired a musty apartment, bought some groceries, and set out to get back in synch with the life I’d almost lost for good.
The first few days were unreal. I couldn’t bring myself to consider that Ezra, Derry, Kathleen, and the rest were all long since turned to dust. I didn’t want to dwell on it and, during the day, I managed not to. At night, it was more difficult. Though the ghosts I summoned were just products of my imagination, they were real enough to keep me awake and follow me into dreamland when I finally did doze off. Even worse was waking in the middle of the night on a blessedly firm mattress in a comfortably heated bedroom to find myself utterly alone. No modern convenience muted the fierce longing to feel him wrapped around me, his breath warm on my neck, his sleepy voice murmuring my name in the dark.
With the television for company, I sat up until dawn and wondered how many nights it would take until I adjusted to sleeping on my own again. I had a feeling Ezra wasn’t adjusting any better. In the early hours, in my least coherent state, I could almost sense his presence, and it took some doing to convince myself it was only wishful thinking. I hadn’t expected getting over him would be easy, but this was nothing I’d ever felt at the end of a relationship. He was in my head all hours of the day, and anything else that managed to squeeze in found itself subjected to the consideration of whether Ezra would have thought it interesting.
He might not be around, but he haunted me all the same. I had to get out and do something, go somewhere. I couldn’t work, so I played instead. I hit the bars, resolved to put the past in the past and keep it there. I wasn’t looking for long term or meaningful. I was looking for distraction, pure and simple. I was damn near desperate for it. In the crush of bodies and boom of pulse-pounding rock, I wandered like a kid in a candy store, the opportunities for meaningless sex as plentiful as ever. But the inviting smiles thrown my way didn’t seem to spark a taste for the chase. The idea of hooking up with anyone else right now depressed me and the mere act rang hollow as a cure.
Back home before midnight, I considered whether any potential relief could be found in getting soundly shit-faced. My foray into the kitchen cabinets for leftover booze was interrupted by the doorbell.
Ready to welcome just about anyone, I was shocked to see Reese on my doorstep. For some reason, he seemed just as astonished to see me. “Morgan….”
Well, that was a start. “Reese. What’s up?” It was the best I could do when I didn’t know why he’d come by—and I didn’t know whether I was pleased he had.
His amazement melted into a puzzled smile. “Why so dressed up? You meet a cute stockbroker or something?”
“Can’t a guy dress up once in a while?” Never mind that he looked sloppy in a polo shirt and slacks. Or that everyone looked underdressed to me since I had gotten back. I’d been confident I’d revert to slob mode soon enough; it just hadn’t kicked in yet. “Come back for your tennis racket?”
“You mean you haven’t hocked it?” He moved to come in and I let him. We worked our way through a six-pack while he brought me up to date on his life for the past couple of weeks. He finished it off by asking where I’d been.
“Work.” It was my standard answer and got me the standard sigh.
“Of course. So, really, what’s with the suit? And vest, no less. Who’re you trying to impress?”
He thought I was dating again. I suppose I had been, but somehow the idea of mere dating didn’t seem to define my relationship with Ezra. It was certainly nothing I wanted to tell Reese about. As I opened the last beer, he leaned in to kiss me, and I considered whether I had found the distraction I’d been looking for. Sex had never been a problem between us. By the second kiss, he was unbuttoning my shirt….
By the third kiss, I knew that whatever need I wanted to fulfill, it wasn’t a need to be with Reese. “Hold on a second,” I said, drawing back to catch my breath and figure out how the hell to let him down gently. But I didn’t have to. He looked at me with a small, rueful smile and shook his head as if he couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid.
“Who’s the guy? I hope it’s no one I know.” As he got up, he finished off the beer in one long swallow and put the bottle on the coffee table. “Because I don’t think I want to spend all my time six months from now listening to some buddy of mine alternately cussing you out and whining about you after you’ve dumped him.”
“No one you know.”
“Yeah? So who?”
“A guy I met in London.”
He looked dubious, but didn’t pursue it. “Whatever. I came by because I had this weird dream that someone from your office came and told me you’d been hurt and I was concerned about you. As pissed off as I was, I didn’t want to leave you to fend for yourself if you’d been shot or something.”
“I’m fine,” I said, not even sounding convincingly fine to my own
ears.
His gaze narrowed. “Maybe there was something to the dream, because there’s something going on with you. More than just hooking up with someone new. You want to let me in on it?”
The ache in my throat wouldn’t go away. “Nothing’s going on with me. I just wrapped up a case and I’m taking a little time off—” Even as I said it, I realized I shouldn’t have.
“You’re taking time off?” His eyebrows lifted. “Damn. You must be in love.”
I could tell him the whole story and he would still make a case that I was fleeing commitment as usual. And maybe it was true, to a degree; but to give up everything in my life for the slim chance of turning a two-week affair into a forever thing, that was a lot to ask of anyone.
Then again, who had asked?
