Aran looked up from the tablet. He didn’t smile at her.
A chill touched her innards. Made her heart give a little thud. “Am I bothering you, sitting here?”
“I’ve seen you sit in the middle of the garden path in the rain while you thought out a scene, before now.”
“I was watching you.”
He didn’t ask why, the way she hoped he would, which didn’t ease the knot in her gut. “What’s wrong, Aran? I can tell something is.”
In answer, he sat up and put the tablet on the carpet beside the chair, the screen face up and his fingertips behind it. He shoved, and the tablet skidded across the floor toward her. It came to a halt a few paces from the stairs.
Her heart racing, Jesse moved down to the floor, bent and picked the tablet up.
Aran watched her silently.
She turned the tablet, then clicked her tongue with annoyance and tilted it so it would arrange itself the right way up.
The last three paragraphs of a book displayed. Jesse read the first line and could feel the color draining from her face. She knew the words. She knew the story. It was hers. It was the alternative history. Kiss Across Chaos.
She lowered the tablet. She could barely bring herself to look at him.
“I thought I would read it for myself,” Aran said. “Just to find out what the fuss was about. So I could understand why I should be proud of you.”
Jesse could feel the tablet sliding through her nerveless fingers. She moved over to the piano and put the tablet onto the bench. She chose her words carefully. “It’s just a silly little story. That’s why I put it out there under a pen name. It’s nothing like any other book I’ve ever written. I don’t understand why you’re upset about that.”
Aran launched himself from the chair and took two long steps toward her. “She’s mugged in an L.A. carpark and nearly dies! The hero saves her by changing timelines!”
Jesse stared at him, her heart galloping. She tried to claw together her thoughts in the face of his fury. “So?” It was a casual question, but her throat was so tight it came out in a little squeak.
He came closer, his eyes glittering. “An L.A. carpark? Why not a New York alley, Jesse? Why not make the character change history, instead of changing timelines.” He pointed at the tablet. “He’s me!”
She sank onto the piano bench beside the tablet, her legs trembling. Nausea gripped her. “My god…” she whispered. She put her hand out to prop herself up and notes jangled unmusically as the heel of her hand landed against the keys. She snatched her hand away and held it against her chest. The trembling was rising up through her middle, now.
Aran stood over her. “Are you honestly trying to pretend you didn’t know?”
Her lips wouldn’t cooperate. She had to fight to speak clearly. “I didn’t know. Not until right now. I don’t know why I didn’t see the parallels…” She looked up at him. “It’s not you. It’s not me. We’re not the people in the story. That’s why I didn’t see the similarities.” It hurt to talk.
Aran didn’t retreat by an inch. “Why do you keep calling it a silly little story? Why do you keep trying to minimize it, if it really means nothing to you?”
His anger was making it hard to think, but there was something there, something trying to make her pay attention, to notice it…
Then she had it. Jesse gasped. “You remember saving me! How is it you remember? You changed history. It should have wiped your memories. How do you know about it still?”
Aran did not move away from his dominating position over her. “Because I wrote it down, just like you did!”
She stared up at him, trying to understand. “Why?”
“Because I wanted to preserve the memory. Because it was important to me! Because you are important to me!” Finally, he spun and moved away from her.
Jesse felt both hot and cold. Her hands shook as she put them together and pressed them between her knees. “You…I…am important? What does that mean?”
He turned to her and flung out a hand. “What do you think it means? Do you know how long I’ve waited for you, Jesse? How long I’ve wanted you in my life? And now that—” He pointed at the tablet. “That tells me I shouldn’t have bothered. You are so independent, so fucking solitary, it never occurred to you that you were writing out a piece of your own history. You dumped the moment into a story and then you moved on.”
“But…” She was shaking. “But you were with Kyle…”
“You were married to your writing and your bohemian lifestyle,” he shot back. “And I was never with Kyle, and he knew it. That’s why he thought it was perfectly acceptable to hang me out to dry.” He paused. “Sex without even a modicum of feelings tends to piss people off.” His tone was drier than the Mohave.
Jesse jerked, stung. “That’s not what this is!” she cried.
“No?” His tone was withering. “Then why am I pissed off?”
She swallowed. “At least give me a moment to think this through. To figure it out. You just hit me with it.”
“You don’t need time,” he said, and his voice was suddenly soft. Dangerously so. “Not really. You figured it all out when you wrote the book.”
“Not the conscious part of my brain,” she whispered. If she had been aware of what she was doing, she wouldn’t have done it.
Would she?
Jesse shivered and clutched herself.
“Now this story is out there, selling hundreds of copies a day,” Aran added. Then he paused, groaned and shut his eyes. “Far has read it.” He gripped his temples.
“I don’t know if he has or not.” Her voice was without strength. “He said he wouldn’t tell me if he did.”
“Because you were embarrassed about the silly little story,” Aran finished, his tone flat and angry.
Jesse shuddered. There was nothing she could say to refute that. Only, why had she been embarrassed? Was it simply because it was such an odd story for her to have written?
She said the only thing she could say. “This isn’t what you think, Aran. I swear to you. I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t that. You have to believe me.”
“You make up stories for a living,” he said bitterly. “I want to believe you but…I just can’t.”
It hurt. But he’d meant it to hurt, because he was hurting.
Jesse nodded. She knew what to do with war wounds, at least. Slowly, she got to her feet and stood with a hand to the piano lid, until her balance was certain. She felt weak and hollow, like one of the reeds along the river’s edge, just outside the window.
Aran stood watching her, his chest rising and falling fast. “Where do you think you’re going?” he demanded.
“Away from here,” she said as calmly as she could. She thought about heading into the kitchen to pack up her writing gear, but she didn’t think she had the strength or the will to do that. She just wanted to get away. To think. To finally and properly think. “Would you mind taking me…” She frowned. “And this is the basic flaw between us, do you see? I can’t go anywhere unless you take me there, not when I’m in your life. I’m…”
“Dependent,” Aran finished softly.
She swallowed back the hard knot in her throat. Her eyes ached. “Could you take me to Canada?” For there was nowhere else for her to go, and at least there, she would be well out of reach of the media.
“Of course I’ll take you to Canada,” Aran said, his tone lifeless.
She glanced over at the front door and the hooks beside it. Her coat hung there, where Aran had put it, for she tended to drop the coat onto one of the chairs. It was only a few paces across the room, but might as well have been across the continent, for her.
Aran moved over and unhooked the coat and brought it back to her.
Jesse put it on, fumbling and getting her hair tangled in the collar, while Aran moved to the center of the room, where he preferred to jump from.
Jesse followed him slowly. The three steps were difficult, but she stood
before him and realized, her heart aching, that she would have to touch him. She looked up at him, and her vision blurred as tears built.
“Don’t,” he breathed, his hands about her face.
“This isn’t how I thought the day would go,” she whispered.
He kissed her, a soft touch of his lips, and she felt the transition wash over her—a deep, endless blank nothing that she felt more than she saw. Then it was gone.
And she stood alone on a wide footpath with wires overhead and trams clanking by.
It was Canal Street of 1906.
Jesse spun on her heel and heard her skirt and petticoats swish. Where was Aran? Why were they here? What had gone wrong?
The smell of stale tobacco and garlic washed over her as fingers clamped around her arm. “Well, what have we here? The lady with the right hook…”
It was Stinky Aiolfi. The Barbieri family’s button man. The man she and Aran had ignominiously defeated in an alleyway.
Jesse tried to turn, to talk to him, but he yanked on her arm. “Nope. You’re coming with me, lady. My boss wants to have a word with you.”
Chapter Seventeen
Stinky yanked on Jesse’s arm, making her turn and come with him.
Where was Aran? The question pounded in her temples.
Jesse knew she could overcome this fat, squat little man easily, but then what? She needed Aran to jump back to their time. If he wasn’t here, then she was stranded. Only, he had to be somewhere.
If she shrugged off Stinky, where could she go?
She would have to overcome him in a way that didn’t draw public attention. She didn’t want to have to explain how a lady knew how to bring down a man. She couldn’t afford to be questioned by the authorities.
The questions built in her mind as Stinky pulled her along the sidewalk. Most of them she would have to answer in some way before she made any sort of move.
Her apartment!
Jesse almost gasped. The apartment she had been sitting when Aran saved her life… Was it possible the building had been built by now? She didn’t think so, but the address existed, at least. Even if it was a bare road with grass waving where the building stood in her time, it was a location. It was somewhere to head that Aran knew about.
She felt the same little jolt of shock she had felt when he said it the first time.
Because I wrote it down, just like you did. Because I wanted to preserve the memory.
How many times had she heard Taylor and Alex and the others talk about jumps that went wrong because someone was upset and focused upon the wrong memory, which skewed the direction of the jump?
Was that how they had ended up here? He had been more upset than he had shown—of course he had been. He was just like Brody. Silent and withdrawn when he was wounded.
Would he think to look for her at the apartment’s address? It was the only possible rendezvous she could think of that they had in common, here, that wasn’t thick with Italian crooks.
From somewhere very close, a handgun fired.
Jesse ducked and dived for cover without thinking. Then she came to a halt, half-crouched and dangling from Stinky’s grip.
He shook her. “Get up!”
“That was a gun!” she cried, injecting a hint of panic in her voice.
“We’re clearing out the bloody Irish, woman. Get up, I tell you.” He hauled, bringing her to her feet, and set off down the sidewalk once more.
The gang war. She had read about it. Late 1906, the Irish gangs and the Italian mob had clashed. Canal Street was the southern border of Little Italy—or it was in modern times.
Seven more gunshots fired before they reached Stinky’s destination, the last two so close together, the bellow deeper than the rest, that despite the distorting echo, Jesse knew someone had unloaded both barrels of a shotgun.
Few people lingered on the street, unlike the last time she had been here. They had decided that staying indoors was safest today. No wonder Stinky had latched on to her the moment he’d spotted her. She would have stood out. She could see no other women on the street.
The stoop Stinky stepped onto belonged to a white, three story building with symetrical windows, all with window boxes, on either side of the central front door.
A private house, she guessed. Even in 1906, it was a palatial residence.
Once they were in the foyer, she could act. No one would see her from out here. She could deal with Stinky and get herself free.
Stinky pulled the left side of the door open with his left hand. He held her with his right and pushed her through the half door.
Jesse stepped into the tiled foyer and halted, her heart sinking. Six men sat or stood about the foyer. Every single one of them jerked his hand toward or inside his jacket the moment she appeared. They all wore hard expressions, their eyes narrowed.
To the right of the foyer, through an elegant arch, two women in lovely tea dresses were sitting at a round table, a silver coffee pot between them and fine china cups in their hands.
They turned to examine Jesse, their brows raising.
Stinky removed his hat. “Sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Barbieri. Me and the lady need a word with your husband.”
Mrs. Barbieri was the older of the two. She didn’t seem upset by the armada of armed men in her foyer, or that Stinky was pulling Jesse about against her will. “Mr. Barbieri is in his study, Mr. Aiolfi.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” Stinky nodded his head and pushed Jesse toward the stairs.
Upstairs. There’ll be a place I can act upstairs, Jesse told herself. Somewhere along the corridor, out of sight of these goons and their guns. Then she would have to figure out a way to get out of the building once more. There would be windows at the back of the building. She would worry about that in minute, though.
First, Stinky.
She used her right hand to lift her skirts and climb the stairs. Stinky was clearly not the most gifted of button men, for he held her with his dominant right hand, which left hers free. It was an advantage she would use, to his regret.
They turned about the post on the half-landing and moved up to the next floor and Jesse sighed in her head. There were more men up here. They lingered in the corridor, all perfectly dressed, with slicked down hair and stiff white collars, watching her with suspicious gazes. Some of their hands lingered up by their middles, a quick reach away from pulling their guns.
The cluster of armed men, their deployment through the house, reminded her of command posts in Afghanistan. If Barbieri and his family associates were ‘cleaning out the bloody Irish’, then this was a command post, too.
That meant there would be even more men inside the command office—in this case, Barbieri’s study.
Her options had dwindled to next to nothing. She adjusted her expectations down from that assessment to “nothing” because she wasn’t feeling suicidal, which the few moves she could make in this house would end up being.
All she could do was keep assessing and waiting for the moment she could act. It would arrive without warning. It would be up to her to properly identify it and capitalize upon the opportunity, to seize it and run. Literally, in this case. She didn’t need to disarm the enemy this time or leave them incapacitated. She just had to get away from them and head north to where the apartment would be in SoHo…or what might be the beginnings of SoHo, at least.
Jesse drew in a long, slow breath as they reached the top of the stairs and Stinky turned left. She let it out the same way, through barely parted lips, and repeated the breathing, drawing in calming oxygen, flooding her system with endorphins to counter the adrenaline, so that she could properly think, and could act when the moment arrived.
Stinky approached a double door at the end of the wide, carpeted corridor. A man standing right in front of it stepped aside, knocked on the door and pushed his head inside and spoke in quick Italian. A short reply came.
The man pushed both doors open and stood aside.
Stinky nodded at the guard an
d muttered in Italian, too. The guard grinned, his gaze moving over Jesse, a speculative gleam in his eyes.
He made it fourteen handguns outside the room that she would have to overcome or avoid on the way out.
They stepped into the room.
Three more in here, Jesse estimated, scanning the three men standing in front of a big desk. The desk was decorated with hand carvings. Angels and vines, trumpets and scrolls.
The man behind the desk lowered the newspaper he was reading and said something to Stinky. He was middle-aged, well dressed, with the same slicked, smooth hair. The hair at his temples was white. He had dark brown eyes that were small and mean.
“This is the one what I was telling choo about, Mr. Barbieri.” Stinky pushed Jesse forward.
Barbieri folded his newspaper with slow, deliberate movements and laid it precisely in front of him. He laced his fingers together and put his hands on the desk in front of the newspaper, before looking up at Jesse once more and examining her closely.
She almost smiled at the obvious intimidation tactic, only she was supposed to be a distressed housewife. She wasn’t interested in playing that role today, though. The need to leave this place and find Aran beat at her temples and made her heart run too hard, despite the calming techniques.
Don’t underestimate people from the past. Don’t disrespect them because they were born in an age that appears simpler than ours. That is a fallacy that could prove fatal. Veris’ voice whispered in her mind, even though he’d never spoken the words aloud. Jesse had read them in his time travelling handbook, when she had edited it. They came back to her now.
She shifted her feet, so her weight was evenly distributed and brought herself back to situational awareness, the mindset which would help her spot any anomalies, any weaknesses.
Her right hand was free, she was at full strength and had the element of surprise on her side. She just had to wait…
Barbieri’s eyes narrowed. “There is more to her than her appearance says. I begin to understand how she embarrassed you, Federigo.” His accent was mild.
Scratch the element of surprise. They knew she’d taken out Stinky. They wouldn’t underestimate her.
Kiss Across Chaos Page 19
