Opal was sleeping with her head on Jack's shoulder, her eyelashes sprinkled with snowflakes. Her coat pockets held a notebook with coordinates written in it for a number of important destinations and the corresponding dates in case they needed to warp to a new point. Not that it would be an easy feat to leave for a while.
The warp had taken Jack's already weary body and stripped him of any lingering strength. He was exhausted, starving, and barely able to stand on his own. It took all his concentration to move the tacos to his mouth and chew every little bite that his body desperately needed to continue living. For the first couple of minutes after they arrived, Jack's mind had been blank. He couldn't think of anything aside from the need to breathe. When he spoke, a jumbled mess of half-formed words came out, terrifying his companions just as much as himself. With Niki's warm arms comforting him and two tacos later, his mind began to clear up and words came easier.
Aside from the canvas backpack that Niki brought that Mr. Allen had filled with unknown equipment from his costume room, they had nothing. And whatever was in the bag, Niki didn't seem to be in much of a hurry to use it.
They had been in a rush to leave the present between reapplying ointment and fresh bandages to Jack's arm where the shock arm band had been removed, Xander and Mr. Allen finding time period-appropriate costumes for them to wear, and Niki driving like a madman through the Queso Shack parking lot to order food before Jack passed out.
Never had anyone needed tacos more urgently than that day.
Jack leaned against Niki's side and closed his eyes, pretending to be anywhere but there. Perhaps his body truly wasn't ready to make a warp after being starved in that cell and then being unconscious for a week in the present. Either way, it became clear that he was far from being fully recovered. Jack sighed when his Time Knight put his arm around his waist and drew him closer, sheltering him from the cold.
Niki whispered to him over the sound of the fighting that grew closer by the minute. "How are you feeling? Everything okay in your head?"
"I think so. Maybe. I can't do this, Niki. I need to go home."
"Do you mean that? I'm sure a Chronomancer as strong as Xander can warp again. He could take you home."
"But Ellie . . . she needs me."
Niki held him closer. "We can find Ellie on our own."
"I need to be the one to do it. I have to. I have to kill them, the people who are hurting everyone. I can't stop until I fix this."
"This isn't just about Ellie, is it?"
Jack shook his head and stuffed the remainder of a taco into his mouth. He spoke as he chewed. "My father. I will avenge him and the rest of my family."
"But you can't do that if you're dead from warp sickness."
Xander stomped over to tower above them, his arms crossed on his muscular chest. "Are you eating something?"
"He's weak." Niki hissed at him. "He hasn't eaten in days. You know that."
"I guess my problem is with what he's eating. Tacos?" Xander pried the purple wrapper from Jack's hand and held it up in the lantern light. "Queso Shack? You brought Queso Shack to 1942 Stalingrad? Are you nuts?"
Jack slid another taco out from his pocket and unwrapped it with nearly frostbitten fingers. "I'm hungry. I have to eat something, Xander."
Niki shrugged his shoulders. "It was all we could get. I even told you we were stopping there before we left."
"I didn't know he was bringing it with him. Do you know what effect this could have on the present, on the entire course of history from this point forward? How could you be so careless, Niki?"
He had to stand up for his Time Knight. "Don't blame him. It was my idea. I'm just starving and this cold isn't helping. I have enough tacos for all of us for a while."
"What? Where?"
Jack grinned sheepishly as he pulled open his fur coat that was lined with nearly one hundred tacos secured with duct tape to the inside. "They're keeping me warm."
"Oh my God. A taco-lined coat?" Niki chuckled and embraced Jack. "Why haven't I thought of this until now? That's what you were doing in the back seat of the car. You're a genius."
"He's going to get us killed."
Opal stirred awake and glared at Xander, but kept her mouth shut. Instead, she stood and pulled her fur-lined hood over her head. She walked out to the edge of the crater and began studying the dead bodies of fallen soldiers. "So many dead. I know there are hundreds, thousands more out there in the rest of the city. What a waste."
Xander called after her. "They died fighting for what they believed in. I wouldn't call that a waste on either side. Now, Jack, put the tacos away and for the love of time, don't drop a single wrapper."
"But I-"
Opal interrupted him as she knelt bent over and held up a snow-covered assault rifle. "Guys, I don't think taco wrappers are our biggest concern right now. Do you know what kind of gun this is?"
"It's an AK-47." Xander answered instantly, shrugging his shoulders.
"Do you see the problem with that? What year is it?"
"1942. Oh. Oh, hell. That thing isn't supposed to exist yet. Where did you find it?"
She nudged the soldier's arm with the toe of her boot. "On this poor man."
"Check his arms for an hourglass. Is he an ill-informed Chronomancer?"
Opal shook her head. "Nothing. I'll test his DNA."
Jack stood with Niki's help so he could watch while Opal pressed the silver disk to the corpse's neck. "And?"
She frowned as she held up the disk. "He's not Avelayan or Iskaydrian."
"Anything in his pockets?" Niki asked.
She fumbled through the dead man's uniform before standing and wiping the snow from the front of her pants. "Just some change."
Xander joined her side. "Check for dates. It's an easy way to know if something is severely out of place."
"What is this?" Opal studied a coin in her hand. "An American penny?"
"Out here?"
"Yeah. But that's not the really weird part. Tell me, Xander, who is on the U.S. penny?"
"Abraham Lincoln."
"Then tell me why this one has Stephen Douglass on it." Opal flipped the coin to him. "Catch."
Xander caught it and turned it over in his fingers.
"Who?" Jack asked, wavering on his wobbly legs.
"He ran against Lincoln for president." Xander snarled at him. "Seriously, did you even to go school?"
"Sorry, I forgot."
Niki's eyes narrowed. "Don't be mean to him. His brain isn't fully functioning right now."
"I apologize, Jack. But back to the coin. I guess this means Lincoln lost. Something changed the timeline and our sixteenth president was Douglass. Oh, shit. I don't know if I wanna be here right now. This is a big, huge problem for me."
"Why?" Jack asked.
Xander rolled up his sleeve and slapped his arm. "I'm black. If the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War, and all number of things didn't happen and Douglass left it all up to a Congress who supported those laws, then I'm . . ."
Opal placed her hand on her Chronomancer's arm. "No, Xander. Don't say it."
"Am I a free man?"
"Xander . . ."
"I mean it, Opal. You remember what we've been through because of this."
Jack bit his lip in nervousness. "Whatever happened to make this possible, we have to fix it."
"But how?" Xander asked. "It's not as easy as you think it is. We can't just go back to 1860 and screw around with the election. Anything we do back then could make things even worse. And I can tell you that I won't be going back there."
"That's understandable."
"Do you know how hard it is for me to time travel, knowing that in some places and times, I would be property? Or face mobs of angry people who want to kill me just because I'm darker than them? One of my first missions with Opal took us to Alabama during the Civil Rights Era. I was dragged out of the hotel we were staying in and almost shoved over the railing on the second floor with a rope around my ne
ck because someone thought I was trying to steal Opal away from her family. I don't want to end up dead or on some slave ship. It's madness."
Jack looked at the ground between his boots. "I can't imagine."
"And you'd better be careful yourself, Niki. Racism is alive and well in many eras and not just against those of African descent. You're from the Middle East, right? You're Arabic?"
He stood up proud with his shoulders back. "Persian, on my mother's side."
"Yeah. It shows. Muslims were persecuted all over and-"
"I'm not Muslim."
"It doesn't matter. You've heard of the Crusades, right?" Xander asked. "Or the famine that some call genocide that happened to your people between 1917 and 1919? You have to be aware of what happened after the terror attacks in 2001. Don't tell me that you haven't experienced racism."
Niki rolled his eyes. "This isn't helping anything."
"It's okay to acknowledge it, Niki. It doesn't make you weak or a victim unless you let it."
"Jack, please tell him to stop because I can't without him wanting to hit me."
"What happened, Niki?" Jack asked, curious himself.
"You want to know? Yeah, I have been a victim of racism, okay? I get insulted almost every time I go the store, walk down the street, or go into an airport because someone thinks that I might be a terrorist. But it's not me I'm worried about."
"Your mother?" Opal asked.
"My father. He's an Avelayan, like me. That's where I got the Avelayan blood. That's not the part that worries me, though."
"I thought he was Italian and Avelayan."
"He was . . . or is, hopefully. All I know is that he left one night before I was born with my mother's brother-in-law, his Chronomancer. They . . . went back in time to an unknown date, telling my mother they had to fight in the Middle East or Africa. He never came back. And I don't know if he was killing people. I don't know if he was involved in hostage taking or hijackings. I don't know what side he was on. I don't know anything. The only thing I do know is that people are hurting and dying over there, all through the Middle East in different places. The fighting doesn't stop."
"What about your mother?" Jack asked, watching the sadness darken his friend's eyes.
"No one knows. She just left after fighting with Allen and told us she was going back to her real family. We haven't heard from her since."
Opal took his arm in an attempt to comfort him. "How could a mother just leave her child like that?"
"I don't know. I couldn't ask her. That doesn't matter, though. She's gone. We're here to make sure that we don't lose another person we care about."
As the light crept across the ruins of the war-torn city, the silhouettes of rolling hills became visible along the roads as if someone had built up walls of dirt and debris. Jack squinted to make out the tan and grey uniforms, the boots, the charred skin and blood that had soaked into the snow. They weren't hills at all. "Are those . . . bodies?"
"Hundreds of bodies. Stalingrad was a very deadly place for both sides. Thousands were killed on-" Xander's words were cut off by the bullet that sped past him where it embedded into the wall behind him. "Shit. Sniper. Everyone, stay down. Opal, get behind a wall."
More gunfire broke through the still morning, echoing across the river and reverberating against the skeletons of the now ghostly buildings. Men shouted as they engaged each other, rushing through the buildings all around them. Flashes of grenades bursted through the shattered windows. A high-pitched metallic clank came from the second story to the left.
Xander bristled. "Shh, shh. Did you hear that?"
"That's impossible." Niki looked around, trying to find the source of the sound. "There aren't any here."
"That, my friends, was the tell-tale sound of an M1 Garand firing its last shot. It's unmistakable. And you're right. There shouldn't be any here. I mean, I guess it's technically possible, but not plausible. What is going on here?"
Jack rubbed his aching forehead. "We can't dissect it like this. We have to get somewhere safe. We shouldn't have even come here, Xander. Let's just go back home."
"Is that what you want to do?" Xander asked. "Do you want to go back to the present without finding Ellie? I trust the spies who reported her presence here. There are significant Syndicate operations in the area and you want to give up?"
The distant rumble in the hazy sky grew closer until the flurry of bullets sprayed from the nose of the fighter plane as it strafed across the battlefield. Dirt flew up from the impact, sending Niki and Opal diving to the floor, taking their Chronomancers with them.
Jack yelped when Niki tackled him to the floor. He covered his head with his hands just as the heat from the booming explosion washed over them. "Niki!"
"It's okay. I've got you."
Once the chunks of plaster and cement had finished pelting around them, Niki rolled off of him. "Jack, are you okay?"
He rubbed his chest and caught his breath. "What happened?"
"A bomb. We need to get inside. Now."
Jack stumbled along behind his Time Knight, rounding the corner before the German soldiers that poured into the courtyard spotted them. He lost his footing on the tiles slicked with frozen blood, but Niki was there to catch him.
"Is everyone all right?" Xander asked. "Nikolas, Opal, are you ready to fight?"
Opal whipped an M1911 pistol from the pocket of her white coat and Niki drew a Thompson submachine gun from the bag he brought. He locked the circular drum magazine into place and held it up, ready to fight.
The older Chronomancer raised an eyebrow. "A Tommy gun? Really?"
Niki smirked. "Hey, I'm half Italian. I happen to know that my great grandfather was involved in some shady activities during prohibition. It feels kinda like I'm a gangster, you know?"
"You . . . you know what? I'll allow it. As long as you know how to use it, then that's all that matters to me. I've always wanted to say this. Let's kick some Nazi ass!"
A new rumbling thundered from the far end of the square when a grey and white vehicle with a long barrel on the top rolled up and over the barricade of bodies and barbed wire. Its treads crushed the dying and injured, snuffing out their pained cries.
"Is that a tank?" Jack asked.
"Shh. Get on the floor and stay out of sight. Hopefully they'll drive right past."
Jack watched through a crack in the wall as the turret turned to the tank's right and blasted a hole in the row of apartment buildings. When nothing happened, the tank rolled on towards the river. "That thing isn't playing around."
"It's best if we avoid it at all costs. This way."
Jack hugged the wall while they moved through the smoke-filled halls and around shredded wooden staircases. Shards of glass, spent bullet casings, and crumpled papers crunched below his boots. With Xander leading the way and Niki and Opal protecting them from the rear, he felt moderately safe . . . at least for the moment.
Xander held up his hand to stop them. He grabbed the doorknob of a side door and pushed it open. Instantly, he filled the room with bullets then nodded his head. "Don't look inside the room. Just keep moving. Quickly and as silently as possible. There are more enemies up ahead, but we have to get through here. With the panzer behind us, the only way is forward."
Opal let out a small scream before firing at a man with a flamethrower on his back at the far end of the hallway. The man opened his mouth to shout, but the explosion from his punctured equipment cut off his words in finality.
With quivering lips, Opal dropped her pistol and fell to her knees. She held her face in her hands, obviously overwhelmed from the killing.
"Baby, it's okay." Niki knelt down and rubbed her back. "You did what you had to do. You kept us safe. It was him or us. You've killed people before. Why is this any different?"
"I killed Syndicate agents and inquisitors, not normal soldiers who were only fighting because their countries told them to. It's not the same. He had a family. He was probably a good person with friend
s and . . . and I took that away from him."
"You can't think like that. You can't. This was self-defense and you know that."
"Have you looked around you?" She picked up her pistol, wiping the snow from its barrel. "There are bodies all over the place. There are children. Children. They butchered the citizens here like they were nothing."
"And that's why we're fighting on the side we are now. You're helping to protect more innocents from being slaughtered. Come on, Opal. You can do this. I know you can."
"I just . . . I hate it."
Xander took control of the situation. "War isn't pretty, but we aren't the Zurvan Syndicate. We didn't come here to change history. We came here to find someone lost in it, rescue them, and get them back to the present where they belong. We are merely observers passing through. If you weren't the one to end that soldier's life, he probably would have died anyway very shortly out here."
"Or I may have completely screwed up the present."
"Maybe. But there's nothing we can do now. We're in far too deep to worry about timeline preservation. I guess those taco wrappers don't matter too much in the bigger picture. Let's keep moving, Opal."
She stood then bowed to him. "Yes, sir. I apologize."
"It's fine. We will discuss it more later."
The rapid thudding of bullets above them sent splintered wood spraying down the hallway. Dust filled the air, knocked loose from the pounding of German boots on the floor of the second story. Jack glanced up just in time to see the sunlight glint on the barrel of a rifle that was pointed straight down through the cracks in the wooden planks. With reflexes quicker than he thought possible, he dove out of the way a split second before a burst of gunfire ripped into the tiles where he had been standing.
"Grenade! Get down!"
Jack didn't even know who yelled it, but he dropped like a rock when the grenade with the long handle was lobbed across the body-filled courtyard and into a window a few feet away. The flash momentarily blinded him and his hearing vanished, overwhelmed with the damaged ringing that dominated his senses and rendered him stunned.
Chronomancer (Time Mage Saga Book 1) Page 21
