Cheating Death

by April White

  Tom looked away for a long moment, and then his eyes snapped back to mine. “And I’m on both timestreams?”

  Tom was probably smarter than Adam, a fact I needed to remember. “Yes.”

  He looked intently at me. “And I look different on the other timestream because my parentage was affected by whatever caused the split?”

  Yep, definitely smarter. “Yes, but that’s the part that’s going to suck, so let’s get to your vision. What did you See at tomorrow’s Council meeting?”

  He sat back and seemed to process my words. Or maybe he was deciding how much to tell me. Finally he looked up and met my eyes. “You have something Death wants. He’ll see it, and he’ll come after you.”

  “See what? What do I have?” My heartbeat slammed in my chest, and I took a deep breath to calm the panic that rose with my pulse.

  “I don’t know; that part was hidden. My visions are more of a knowing than something I actually see – they always have been.”

  Huh, that was an interesting piece of Tom to file away, because it might have come from his mother’s gypsy side. I deliberately shifted my brain to practical information-gathering so my heartbeat would quit making my throat jump.

  “Should I be worried?” I asked as casually as I could manage.

  Tom’s eyebrow quirked up. “I’ve never met Death, but I can’t say the idea of him coming after me would be welcome.”

  Another deep breath. “Right. Well, as interesting as your information is, it doesn’t really help me.”

  Tom glared at me. “So you’re not going to tell me the rest?”

  I glared right back. “I don’t break deals, Tom. I’ll tell you the rest. I was just stating a fact. If there’s anything else you have that could help me navigate the meeting tomorrow, I’d be grateful for the heads-up.”

  His defensive posture finally relaxed a little, and then he said, “There’s a hiding spot at the bottom of the stairs leading into the Council room.”

  “I know, I’ve hidden there before.”

  “Well, don’t this time. Get there early and find a place on the other side of the room.”

  “You mean trap myself there?” Yeah, no.

  Tom met my eyes. “You’re never trapped when you have a marker.”

  My eyes narrowed at him. “You Saw me draw a spiral?”

  He shook his head. “It’s another knowing.”

  I studied him for a long moment. “Does your dad know things like you do?”

  His own eyes narrowed. “My mother does. So, my father isn’t my father on the other time stream?”

  Damn, he was really smart, and I could tell from his expression that I couldn’t dodge this one. “Correct.”

  “Are my parents married to each other?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it an affair?” His voice was hard.

  I held his gaze with mine. “No.”

  There must have been something in my tone that he understood, because his eyes didn’t leave mine until he finally nodded. He got up and paced around the room, studied the curves of everything, and even opened the drapes that covered the painting of the London Bridge. When he turned back to face me, his expression was grim. “What am I mixed with?”

  Crap. Really? I had hoped the news of a different father would be enough to forestall this question. Apparently not. I braced myself. “Monger.”

  The pause was shorter this time before he nodded. “Right. Interesting, but immaterial to me now.” Tom strode toward the door, and I jumped off the desk and followed him. He turned to me before he opened the door. “Good luck tomorrow.”

  “Tom …” I faltered. I didn’t really know what to say, but needed to say something. “I’m sorry,” I finally said.

  “Don’t be. Regardless of the time stream, I’ll never know what it’s like to have a father who isn’t a tosser.” He left the room then, and the door clicked loudly as it shut.

  My eyes filled with tears for the Tom I had once known, and I couldn’t look at Ringo as I reached for the door handle. “I’m going to go wash up for bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Saira,” Ringo said softly.

  I shook my head and avoided his eyes. “It’s just a little lingering drama. I’ll get over it.” I took a deep breath and opened the door. I was grateful to find the hall empty, and I closed it behind me so Ringo wouldn’t see me cry.

  I went to look for Ava in the morning to hear about her vision, but her parents had already come for her. The Council meeting was supposed to start at noon, so at nine o’clock, Ringo and I gathered our few possessions together, strapped our messenger bags across our bodies, and Clocked out of St. Brigid’s. I took us directly into the Council room and hoped the early hour would guarantee its emptiness. Fortunately, this Council room was exactly the way I remembered it, and was indeed deserted. I gave Ringo the quick tour of the different Family wall carvings while we searched for someplace to stash ourselves, and I showed him where I’d found the Shifter bone. The problem, however, was that there was no obvious place to hide.

  Ringo finally climbed up on top of the huge black marble table and surveyed the room.

  “Tom said to hide opposite the door,” I said in frustration. We were both very aware of what Tom had said, but hiding in the giant fireplace that was across the room from the entrance seemed a little too obvious.

  Ringo stared at the fireplace through narrowed eyes. He jumped down off the table and crossed the room to run his hand along the side of the mantel.

  “Archer didn’t build this one,” I said. I had been trying for levity, but the words caught in my throat. No matter how much denial I managed every day, thoughts of him continued to hit me right in the stomach, or heart, or lungs, or wherever my emotions happened to be situated in that moment. I needed to change things so I could get back to him, and that need had become like oxygen to me.

  “No, but there might be a common design,” he said as he pushed a carved panel and it depressed into the stone around it. I gasped as the back of the massive fireplace clicked, and a small seam appeared in the corner.

  I pushed it forward and a dark cavity yawned behind it. I stared at Ringo. “You’re a genius. But a common design with what?”

  “You told me about the fireplace passage out of the Saint Séverin Abbey. It was meant for Descendants, and I thought ye might ‘ave exits from any room ye lot built for yer own use.”

  I shone my Maglite into the cavity behind the fireplace. I remembered that Old Bailey had been re-built around 1902, and I wondered if the fireplace had been opened since then. It was relatively clean and cobweb-free – which only meant that spiders hadn’t discovered it. It was also completely empty.

  “No buried treasure,” I whispered.

  “Too bad,” Ringo stepped into the fireplace next to me. It was definitely big enough to stand in with only a little crouching. “Looks big.”

  “Big enough, anyway.” I opened the door wide enough to fit through and looked at Ringo. “Shall we?”

  He shrugged. “After ye, milady.”

  I flinched at the title, technically mine since I was married to the second son of a duke. My fist clenched around my ring, which bore Archer’s family crest, and I took a breath to steady my racing heart before I stepped inside the space. I could stand upright as the ceiling stretched up above the top of the mantel, and I realized there were tiny pinpoints of light shining through at eye level. I put my eye to the wall as Ringo carefully pulled the door closed behind us.

  “They’re spy holes,” I said with wonder.

  “Makes sense,” Ringo said. “So does this interior latch for the door.” He demonstrated a simple mechanism that unlocked the catch from the door so it could be closed without trapping us inside. Still, I was nervous when he shut the door and the latch clicked, until he pressed the mechanism and the door popped open again.

  I studied the interior walls of the hidden room. The back wall of the fireplace was brick, but the other walls were cement
and looked like blank canvases to me. I set my Maglite on the floor pointed up like a candle, and I pulled my fat black marker out of my shoulder bag.

  Ringo watched me work. “Escape route?” he finally asked.

  I concentrated on blanking my mind of any person, place, or thing as I laid down the five spirals. “Yeah. Somehow I don’t think I’d get enough time with the one out there to Clock us out of here if we needed it.” I nodded toward the Council room and the big spiral that was carved in the wall.

  “What other graffiti should we leave to make our mark on this time?” Ringo asked.

  Hmm. That was an interesting thought. Besides spirals and the occasional portrait, I hadn’t been doing a lot of art recently. I finished the last touches on the spiral and then handed the marker to Ringo. “You first,” I said.

  He thought for a long moment, then finally wrote, Fear not for the future, weep not for the past. He met my eyes. “They’re Percy Bysshe Shelley’s words.”

  “They’re appropriate.”

  He leaned back and handed me the marker. “The Missus ‘ad a book of ‘is poetry that I read over and over again after ye took yer mother ‘ome. ‘Is words kept me company the long days I sat next to Archer’s bed, and I began to imagine Shelley ‘imself was a child of Death.”

  My eyes opened wide. “You think Percy Shelley was a Vampire? I thought he died really young.”

  “‘E was twenty-nine. They say ‘e drowned in a storm. But they also say that when ‘e was cremated on the sand ‘is ‘eart wouldn’t burn.”

  I stared at the words Ringo had written on the wall. They were written for me, I thought, and I wanted to believe both were possible.

  I chose a piece of the still-blank cement wall and began to draw while Ringo’s quiet voice recited poetry behind me.

  “How wonderful is Death,

  Death and his brother Sleep!

  One pale as yonder wan and horned moon,

  With lips of lurid blue,

  The other glowing like the vital morn,

  When throned on ocean’s wave

  It breathes over the world:

  Yet both so passing strange and wonderful.”

  He seemed lost in thought for a long moment, then spoke in the same quiet voice. “It was the lips of lurid blue. That’s what gave me the idea that Shelley was Death’s Descendant. Archer’s lips were blue for more than a week, and when the color returned, the Missus sent me away.”

  I knew how much it had hurt Ringo that he hadn’t been there when Archer came back to himself after Bishop Wilder had turned him. “He knows what you did. He knows you stayed as long as you could.”

  “I didn’t this time though, did I?” The edge of bitterness in his voice was sudden and violent.

  “Don’t do that!” I whispered furiously. I wasn’t sure why I whispered, except that I might scream if I didn’t. “Do NOT blame yourself for anything about that night. We were there to stop Tom from killing his great-grandfather and splitting time.”

  “Well, we failed,” he said brutally.

  “Yes, we did. Spectacularly. And we can take responsibility for that. But we weren’t the ones shooting. It wasn’t our bullets that set off the unexploded bomb. That’s on George Walters, and, to be perfectly honest, it’s on Tom.”

  Ringo was silent long enough that I shifted my glare away from him and back to my drawing. “How ridiculous would it be if Percy Shelley actually was a Vampire, since he was married to Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein?”

  “Ye know ‘ow the whole thing came about, don’t ye?”

  I let out a breath, relieved that he could be distracted. “Yes, this I actually know. Mary, Percy, and Mary’s step-sister were staying at a house on Lake Geneva with Lord Byron and some other guy—”

  “William Polidori,” Ringo supplied.

  “Gah! I wanted to know more about this than you.” I’d finished the drawing and was moving on to the words. “Anyway, it was a dreary, rainy summer, which was actually a volcanic winter from the eruption of some Italian volcano the year before, and since they couldn’t go outside, they started reading German ghost stories, which led to a bet about writing something scary.”

  “That’s good. Ye know details I didn’t.”

  “How about this – did you know the idea for Frankenstein came to Mary Shelley in a dream?” I said smugly.

  “I did.” There was a grin in Ringo’s voice. “Did ye know she was eighteen at the time – yer age?”

  I liked the game of one-upmanship. “I did. But did you know that Lord Byron’s submission was a fragment of a story based on vampire legends he heard when he was traveling in the Balkans?”

  “Ha! How do ye know it was based on legends? The first novel that romanticized vampires was written by Polidori after that weekend. How do ye know it wasn’t based on the truth about Percy Bysshe Shelley?” Ringo declared triumphantly.

  I laughed at his enthusiasm. “I didn’t know that Polidori wrote a book about vampires. I bow to your superior education.”

  “Knowledge. Ye can bow to my knowledge, but yer education’s still better.” Ringo’s smug tone was gone. He had inhaled everything he could get his hands on since Archer and I had taught him to read, but it didn’t change his fundamental lack of formal education.

  I leaned back from my drawing to take in the whole picture.

  Leaving something of yourself for others to experience and remember is sometimes the greatest excuse to live a life that’s more than just crossing the distance between birth and death. Ringo read the words I’d written, and there was surprise in his tone. “Archer said that.”

  I nodded. “To Bas, that night in the farmhouse kitchen.”

  He looked at the image I’d drawn and said, “That’s the Devereux seal, the crowned ‘eart on yer ring.”

  “I’ve decided it’s my new tag. A crown over graffiti means the tagger is going ‘all-city.’ It came from New York and originally meant all five boroughs. For me I think it means I’m not going to stop until I’ve done more than just cross the distance between birth and death. I’m going to do something that matters, something Archer would be proud of, and I’m not going to stop searching until I find a way to get back to him.”

  Ringo studied my tag a while longer, then looked at me with a nod. “It’s worthy,” he said simply.

  I thought so too.

  We debated Clocking out to try to find Ava or even Mr. Shaw before the Council meeting started, but I didn’t really feel like running around London looking for the Armans, and the idea of returning directly back into the tiny space behind the fireplace without accidentally embedding myself into a wall was a little daunting.

  So instead, I drew a chessboard on the cement floor and we killed an hour playing chess with small items from our bags. Lip balm was my queen, and the tin of green medicine was my king, but I kept forgetting if the knight was the new five pence or the old shilling.

  I complained often enough that Ringo switched knight pieces with me, so two pound coins became my knights. “Did ye ever see the black knight piece Tom carried with ‘im after Léon died?” he asked as he moved his bishop into exactly the place I’d hoped he hadn’t seen. My knight would be dead in two moves.

  “I have the vague memory of a chess piece that kept moving between his pocket and his hand the night we buried his friend, but I hadn’t realized it was a knight.” I dangled a pawn in front of him in hopes he’d take the bait and leave my knight alone.

  “It was an old piece, ‘and-carved in ebony. ‘E wasn’t conscious of ‘oldin’ it, but whenever talk turned back to Léon, it came out of ‘is pocket again,” he said as he ignored the pawn and slaughtered the knight.

  I didn’t want to talk about Tom, so I changed the subject to the differences between modern coins and the wartime ones that were still in our pockets while I concentrated on the game. The strategic planning that chess required was like a workout for my brain, and when we finally put the pieces away after one win each, I felt a l
ittle more prepared to face whatever the Council meeting revealed.

  I had just pulled out a handful of almonds and was ready to pop one into my mouth when Ringo shushed me.

  “Put it away,” he whispered. “Shifters might ‘ear ye and smell the food.”

  I dropped the almonds back into my pocket and joined Ringo at the peep holes. The MacKenzie and both of his sons had arrived, and the room suddenly seemed smaller with all of them in it. His name was his title since he was the MacKenzie clan chief, and it’s why he was the MacKenzie. He was also the Shifter Head, an actual Highland Bull with the attitude and bluster to match. I’d seen my mother take him down a peg at a Council meeting once, and it was a thing of beauty.

  We could hear every word the MacKenzie bellowed, but his sons were a bit less blustery, so their words were sometimes muffled.

  “Did ye bring the bone with ye?” MacKenzie asked his older son, a ruddy-skinned brutish-looking guy like his father.

  The bone? They didn’t have the Shifter bone. So had they brought a fake?

  “Course, Da, I’m not as thick as ye like to believe.”

  “And if they need it tested? What’s your plan then?” asked the younger brother. That one was the least bull-like and seemed the most reasonable of the three.

  “I’ll Shift and none will dare challenge me,” bellowed the MacKenzie.

  “Challenge you to what, MacKenzie?” A new man entered the chamber. He was about forty years old, tall and well-built, African-looking with very dark skin. He wore a charcoal-colored suit with a topcoat, and had the style and accent of a wealthy Englishman.

  My eyes had been so busy taking in the details of the newcomer that I missed the MacKenzie’s reaction to him. So I heard the fear and awe before I saw it.

  “Sir … forgive me. I didn’t hear ye come in,” he said deferentially, backing up a step as he spoke.

  “I imagine it’s rare you hear anything beyond your own bluster,” said the man. His eyes flicked toward the fireplace, and I swore he looked into mine. Impossible, of course, but my heart leapt into my throat and I willed myself not to move. Ringo’s breath caught next to me, so I wasn’t the only one who had imagined the connection.