Cheating Death

by April White

“Here for the cure. Saira told you what Shaw’s working on, didn’t she?” Adam faced me, and it didn’t sit well with the Edwards kid, who inserted himself between us and demanded Adam’s attention.

  “Connor and Archer. How are we going to get to them?” Logan glared at him, but Adam’s eyes were still locked on mine.

  “If Seth Walters is out in the open and wearing that ring, getting you to Shaw is going to be tough. The Mongers have had eyeballs on Shaw ever since he started working on Archer’s blood.”

  I still had no idea what Adam was talking about, but pieces were starting to fall into place. “Do you mean Shaw’s found something that affects Sucker blood?”

  Adam nodded, but his expression was strange. “Yeah, that’s one of the reasons Saira and Ringo went to find you. They wanted to bring you back here for the cure.”

  I exhaled sharply. “My God, does it really work?” The idea that something could actually cure the hunger that had driven me to murder Léon was almost too much to imagine.

  Logan was exasperated that Adam’s attention was still on me. “No one knows. They think it’ll either kill you or cure you. It’s not like there are gobs of Vampires around to test it on, and if my brother and Archer are buried under all that rubble, you’re it.” He spun back around and pushed Adam. “Let’s go!”

  Adam had been watching me for my reaction, but I kept my expression completely neutral. Finally, his eyes found Logan’s angry ones. “Take me to the cave-in,” Adam said grimly. Logan Shifted instantly from naked boy to enormous Bat, and he shot Adam a look that dared him to keep up.

  My feet were still rooted to the floor of the passageway, and Adam stopped when he realized I hadn’t followed. He turned back to face me. “You coming?” I shook my head mutely. Adam took a couple of steps back toward me. “Where will you go?” he asked.

  “There really is a cure?” I hated how hopeful my voice sounded to my own ears.

  Adam nodded. “I can try to get you some eventually, but I have to keep the mixed-bloods we just risked our bums to rescue out of sight of the Mongers. Their safety is my first priority until we can figure out how to get Walters arrested for their kidnappings.”

  “He’ll never be taken in while he has that ring,” I said.

  Adam sighed. “That bloody ring. Ringo held it in his hand once, but Saira wouldn’t let him steal it.”

  Bitterness edged my words. “Of course she wouldn’t, because it’s Saira’s plan or nothing.”

  Adam looked sharply at me. “What’s your problem, mate?”

  I really didn’t want to get into it with Adam, since he clearly still had a crush on her. I shook my head. “Nothing. Go, follow the Bat or he’ll come swooping back in here like some prehistoric mutant thing.”

  “I heard that.” Logan’s once-again human voice came from the far end of the passageway. “And I’m still waiting.”

  “What are you going to do?” Adam’s voice was quietly urgent.

  “I want that cure.”

  Adam made a face. “As I said, I can’t help you now. I have to stay low while Walters is anywhere out there with that ring.”

  “Thanks to the zombie horde up there, so do I.”

  “Zombies?” Logan’s voice piped up from the other end of the passage. The kid must have still been sporting his Bat ears.

  Adam ignored him. “The key is the ring. How can we get it away from him?”

  I scowled. “Unfortunately, when I went for Walters’ throat, I painted a target on my back.”

  My cousin looked surprised. “You went for his throat?”

  “I’d wipe out his whole line if I could. I would have killed his grandfather if Saira hadn’t interfered.

  I could have gone my whole life without seeing Adam look at me the way he did at that moment. “Tom,” he said quietly. “That’s your great-grandfather. If you’d killed him then—”

  I interrupted sharply. “There’d be one less lethal Vampire in the world to destroy the lives of people he cares about. And,” I cut him off before he could protest, “you wouldn’t be having the problem with that ring now because he was wearing it then. I could have grabbed it from his corpse, and … problem solved.”

  The sick-looking horror on Adam’s face shifted to surprise, and he stared at me. “Wait - can you go back?”

  I shook my head in disgust. “Not on purpose. I have no idea how I get anywhere. When I go through a spiral, I pretty much just Clock where it sends me.”

  “Saira says it’s all about focusing on a specific time or place, and she has to have a picture in her mind of where she’s going.”

  “Well, I don’t have any of her blood. I just have her mother’s, and Ms. Elian needed the necklace to focus.” The conversation was beginning to set my teeth on edge. “And regardless, I apparently can’t go where I already was.” My voice was bitter. Medieval France seemed so long ago, and yet it was the first place my thoughts went during a conversation about Clocking.

  Adam nodded vaguely, but his mind was obviously somewhere else. His eyes finally re-focused on mine. “Saira can take you to the ring, no matter where or when it is.”

  “Unless I’m missing something big, Saira’s not here,” I snapped.

  “You could leave a message for her somewhere,” Adam said. “Or maybe some-when.” It’s worth a shot if it might keep Walters from ever getting that ring.”

  I was willing to consider anything for the sake of getting the cure, but it sounded ridiculous even to me. “Chances are I’d Clock back like she did before she knew she could direct it. That would put me somewhere around 1889 or 1890. Where could I possibly leave Saira a message that she would find sometime in the future, and where could I also hang out waiting for her to find it and maybe come looking for me, if she feels like it?”

  Logan came into view from down the hall, still naked, and even angrier than before. “Ringo’s flat. No one knows about it, and it’s totally hidden.”

  Adam looked sharply at the kid. “How do you know where it is?”

  He shrugged. “Ringo told me. It’s where I would hide out in London if I had to. Ringo’s with her. Seems logical they’d go there.”

  “It also seems like the mother of all longshots,” I grumbled. “But tell me where it is anyway.”

  Logan had a memory for details that was like being handed a picture, but it was a twenty-first century picture, not the nineteenth century I’d likely end up in, so I wasn’t particularly confident in my chances of finding the place.

  Once he was sure I’d gotten it all, Logan turned to Adam again with a growl in his voice, and I wondered if there was such a thing as half-Shifted. “Right – if there’s any chance at all my brother is still alive, we need to get him out. Now!”

  I thought the probability of anyone surviving that blast was pretty much zero, but the kid was actually terrifying in his Lion form. I didn’t need to be the one to provoke it again by saying as much.

  Adam surprised me by pulling me into another hug. “Come back as soon as you can,” he said as he turned to follow Logan down the passage.

  “I’ll try,” I answered quietly.

  Saira – Alternate Present

  Ringo and I had taken to sleeping in the Clocker Tower at St. Brigid’s. It was pretty much forbidden on every level, but I thought Ms. Simpson – the one on this timeline – had figured out I didn’t really care about the rules, and there was very little she could do about it anyway. Worst case scenario, we’d leave. Best case scenario, we were leaving anyway, just as soon as we could figure out how to get back to the right timeline.

  I hadn’t slept well since we’d gotten here. Losing Archer had settled over me like a fever that made my skin hurt, and searing agony sometimes lanced the constant, dull, throbbing ache with breathtaking suddenness. It didn’t matter that this could be temporary – that on the real time stream the bomb hadn’t exploded in 1944 – and Archer was probably still going about the business of trying to find the mixed-blood Descendants Seth Walters ha
d kidnapped. The fact was that he wasn’t on this timeline with me, and I didn’t quite know how to get back to him.

  The nightmare didn’t help. It was the same one every time I closed my eyes, playing through my subconscious like a deadly videogame with challenges to overcome and levels to beat. I flexed my hand again before I picked up the pen. The memory of stabbing pain lived in the tissue, even though there’d never been an actual injury, and I was starting to get jumpy when I had to round a corner in dark halls.

  “What’re ye writin’?” Ringo said quietly. He’d come down the hidden staircase from the tower room where he slept, but I hadn’t heard him behind me. His wraith-like powers were getting better, or my own survival skills were slipping. Considering I couldn’t beat my nightmare, I was going with survival skills slippage.

  “I’m making a list of everything I notice about this time. If we do fix the time stream, I want to record what I can in case …” I faltered, but Ringo finished the sentence for me.

  “In case this time gets erased?”

  I swallowed and nodded. “Theoretically, that’s what happens, right?”

  “Right. What do ye ‘ave so far?” He flipped a chair around backward and sat across the desk from me. His arms hung over the chair back in the fluid way guys draped themselves across furniture, as if the furniture, not their bones, was the thing keeping them upright.

  I worked down the list. “Obviously, the fact that Millicent got married and Elian Manor has been deserted since Millicent’s parents died.”

  “I’m not actually sure ye didn’t change that before time split,” he said.

  “I had a two-minute conversation with Sean Mulroy as I was stepping onto a plane in 1944. No way was that enough to cause something so big. I mean, Millicent is married. She has kids and grandkids. That’s a huge change from the history we know.”

  His eyes held mine. “When are ye goin’ to see ‘er?” He’d asked me that question pretty much every day we’d been here, and I always gave him the same answer.

  “I’m not.”

  “‘Er grandkids go to school ‘ere.”

  “Hopefully we’ll be gone before term officially begins.”

  “Students are already startin’ to come back. Ye can’t stay ‘idden from ‘em forever.”

  “Don’t push me, Ringo.” He watched me silently long enough that I looked back at my list. “Do you want to hear this or not?”

  “If she’s ‘appy, ye’re afraid ye won’t be able to do what ye need to do.” I looked up at him sharply, but my automatic denial died before any sound came out. Ringo nodded. “Yeah, that’s it.” He thought about it for a moment. “Ye ‘ave to think of this time as more of a ‘what if’ than as somethin’ that’s actually real.”

  “These are real people, Ringo – people who love and laugh and have lives that matter to them.”

  “Are ye arguin’ to keep this time intact, or are ye planning to fix the breach?”

  I ground my teeth. “We’re fixing it. Now, do you want to hear this, or not?”

  He rubbed the back of his neck and then waved his hand for me to continue.

  “No one here knows us. I mean, Ms. Simpson said she’d Seen us, but only in some weird prophecy vision.” We had tried to stay away from the adult staff as they were starting to ready their classrooms for students, but I’d run into the cook, Mrs. Taylor, who’d looked through me as if I wasn’t actually there, and Ringo’s charm had taken days to work on Annie so she’d give him coffee in the mornings.

  “Ye’re ignorin’ the bigger fact that ye don’t actually exist on this time stream,” Ringo persisted.

  “It’s implied. I couldn’t be here if I did, could I?” I didn’t know why I was getting annoyed with him – he hadn’t done anything more than state the obvious, but I had an itchy conscience at the idea of messing things up for Millicent.

  “And apparently, yer kind isn’t quite so endangered ‘ere, what with the Mulroys and the MacFarlane Clocker Ms. Simpson said was comin’.”

  I shook my head at him. “I’ve never even heard the name MacFarlane among Clockers. How does a Family line just show up like that in the seventy years since the war ended?”

  Ringo shrugged. “Maybe the MacFarlane Family was killed by the bomb explodin’, or even by the George Walters who lived on the true timeline. Time splits like it did, and anythin’ is possible.”

  “Makes as much sense as any other theory we have about time stream splits.” I shook my head to punctuate the irony in my voice. “Maybe, if he’s a Clocker, he can go back to the British Museum ghost station and fix the time split for us.”

  Ringo’s expression was suddenly serious. “‘Ow are we goin’ to change that bomb explodin’, Saira? Ye are the only one who could actually Clock into that station, and like ye said, ye can’t go where ye already were.”

  I couldn’t meet his eyes so I stared at the list in front of me. “I don’t know. I just know we have to figure it out.”

  Ringo stood and shoved the chair away. “C’mon. Let’s go run. Ye can show me yer new moves.”

  I scowled. “What new moves? We haven’t been running since we got here.”

  “Ye made it further in yer dream last night didn’t ye?”

  I stared at him. “How did you know?”

  He shrugged. “Took ye longer to cry out. Show me what ye did and I’ll show ye a new flip I’ve been workin’ on.”

  It was an offer I couldn’t refuse, because stir-craziness made the itchy conscience worse. We’d spent most of the last few days in the libraries of St. Brigid’s and Elian Manor, looking for anything that would help us fix the time stream split. Ms. Simpson was busy with start-of-term business, and I didn’t really get the sense she was too interested in helping us. I had a place at the school if I wanted it, she had said, but Ringo was not a Descendant, so she couldn’t allow him to enroll as a student. Even though we hadn’t planned to stick around long enough to attend classes, it chapped both of us that merit wasn’t even a consideration in her decision. It was all about blood.

  We didn’t bother with stairs, and instead, took off across the roof. There was probably about an hour to run before the light faded too much for a rooftop return. We alternated between straight parkour and fancy-trick freerunning. Ringo was definitely better at the freerunning flips and dives, but I had endurance on my side, so if the run was long enough, I could usually pull ahead.

  Today’s run was farther than we’d ever gone from St. Brigid’s, and I recognized the road that led into Brentwood proper.

  “Come on,” I said when we stopped for a breath, “I’ll buy you a coffee.” The fading light turned the sky the color of old denim, and it was an odd time of day for most cafés to be open, but we found one near the church and went inside. The place had a cheerful, bohemian vibe, with a big sideboard along one wall full of paperback books, puzzles, and games. There was no one behind the counter, so I grabbed two menus and we sat ourselves in the window.

  “I love places like this,” I said in a low voice.

  Ringo nodded as he scanned the menu. “We should open one. The profit on a cup of coffee is massive.”

  I smirked. I used to dream of opening a café with big glass cases of homemade desserts, and walls lined with books, until my mom gave me a very eye-opening view of where the money goes. “Well, a cup of coffee here is £1.30, and last time I checked, minimum wage is £5 for anyone under twenty-one, so it takes four cups of coffee times eight hours, thirty-two cups a day, just to pay for the person to make and pour it. Then there’s electricity, water, and gas, and a shop like this probably rents for about £1000 a month, so that’s probably another eight hundred cups of coffee, divided by twenty-four days a month that they’re open, so …” I did quick calculations using math that I swore to my mother I’d never use outside of school. “That’s about another thirty-three cups a day. Which means you’d have to see at least sixty coffee-drinkers every day just to break even.”

  “That’s why we h
ave the books,” said a voice behind me. I knew that voice. It was usually accompanied by a feeling of nausea, but oddly, there was none this time. Ringo’s eyebrows arched up in the only concession to surprise I knew he’d make, and I carefully composed my face when I turned to see Raven Walters, my former roommate and the Monger niece of my nemesis, Seth Walters.

  “Because ye sell them?” Ringo said neutrally.

  “There’s that, but mostly because people come in for a coffee or a cup of tea, get hooked on a book, and then order two more cups, plus a slice of cake before they finally buy the book and go,” Raven said in a friendly tone.

  Ringo winked at me. “I knew there was a reason I liked readers. They’ll be my customers when I open a place like this.”

  Raven gave him a proper smile and pulled out a little pad to write on. “I’m Raven. What can I get you?”

  I was trying to wrap my head around seeing Raven working at all, much less in a bohemian café with a smile on her face. Shock seemed to make my ability to speak run away screaming.

  “I’m Ringo,” he said with a return smile, after a quick glance at my shocked face. “‘Ave I seen ye at the fencin’ gym in town?”

  My stunned expression turned to him. What game was he playing? Raven shook her head. “I’ve tried fencing at school, but I’m not good enough at it to justify the gym fees.”

  “Oh? What school do ye go to?” he asked.

  “St. Brigid’s.” Raven’s tone suddenly downshifted into something far less enthusiastic.

  “Doesn’t your mom teach there?” I said, before I could consider the words that finally decided to make an appearance.

  It was Raven’s turn to look surprised. “Do you go to St. Brigid’s? I’ve never seen you there.”

  I couldn’t seem to think of an answer that made sense, but Ringo came to the rescue. “Saira has distant cousins there.”

  Her expression shuttered, and I had the odd sense that she was about to censor herself. “Oh. I don’t know too many people at St. Brigid’s. It’s a big school.”

  Raven, the Monger mean girl beauty queen, didn’t know people? Everything about this conversation was almost too strange to process and my eyes dropped to my menu. “Could I please have a coffee and a slice of apple tart?”