BRODY PUSHED THE IPAD away from him with a frustrated sigh. There was nothing in the history sources he could find online that shed any light at all on why Alex had forced himself back in time.
Edward must live and peace must be found. The direction buried in the manuscript was clear enough. Except that every historical source surrounding the events in the tenth century said that Edward had died at the hands of the Vikings. They had butchered Edward’s sister, Aethelfreda, then come after the king himself because he was the last and strongest opposition to Viking invasion and settlement, which was what they had really wanted. Land to live upon.
Once Edward was dead, they had claimed the western half of England for themselves. Gronoya was an indisputable fact. He only had to look at the news for confirmation.
Edward must live.
Fleetingly, he wondered if Alex had gone back there to…would he dare? Change history? No, the outcome of a change like that could be deadly. Alex wouldn’t be that stupid, not after years of listening to him and Veris and Taylor talk about the near disasters they had caused simply by jumping back in the first place. To deliberately change things would create ripples—no, waves of change. Tsunamis of destruction.
Brody wrinkled his nose. Was he imagining that acrid smell?
He looked around. There was no sound, nothing moving. Still, the hairs on the back of his neck raised almost painfully.
He got to his feet. It was nearly three in the morning. Veris was upstairs, monitoring the sleeping three. Taylor had taken Marit and the twins back home to sleep hours ago. The wood paneled rooms of the house were silent and still.
And yet….
Cautiously, he moved out into the big hallway and looked up the stairs toward the bedroom door. It was closed. Nothing moved up there, either.
Then a soft whoomp sounded, accompanied by the tinkle of breaking glass. The sounds were muffled by the bedroom door.
Brody moved up the stairs at maximum speed, his heart jumping all by itself. He thrust open the bedroom door and staggered back as the heat and flames leapt out at him.
“Shut the door!” Veris shouted. “You’re feeding the fire!”
Brody spotted him in the far corner of the room, beating at flames that licked along the edge of the bed, perilously close to Sydney’s still form. The flames were all around Veris, climbing up the wall with ferocious and fear-inducing speed.
There was another smash of glass behind Brody and he heard the same flat woofing sound. An orange glow leapt up from the dining room doorway and flames ran out into the hallway, zooming across the carpet as if they were sprinting.
His retreat was cut off.
Calmly, he stepped into the bedroom and shut the door. The flames in here were crackling upward toward the ceiling. Even the paneling in the ceiling was engulfed in blue tongues of fire.
Veris was working like a machine, the blanket in his hands smacking down on the flames as they tried to claw at him.
“It’s too late!” Brody shouted.
Veris glanced at him. He shook his head and kept beating.
“It’s all around you!”
The fire was roaring, a hungry beast. Fire was one of the few things that could kill a vampire, if it was intense enough. Whoever had done this had known that. The accelerant was making the fire burn with almost white flames.
Brody clamped down on the fear rising in his chest. If he crossed the bed itself, it would be the shorter path. There was no direct route to reach Veris that didn’t take him through a wall of flames.
Veris was relentlessly working to subdue the fire around the sleeping forms. He wasn’t giving up. Of course he wouldn’t give up. The thought made Brody’s fear leap as high as the flames.
Overhead, the blue-burning flames flickered. Timbers groaned.
Time was running out.
That pushed him into action. He moved at full speed, giving it everything he had to push himself through the flames. He jumped over the bed in two large strides.
Veris looked up. His eyes were glazed with concentration. He was focused on saving the three on the bed. Either he had not recognized the danger he was in himself, or he refused to acknowledge it.
Brody slammed into him. At that speed, even his slightly lighter weight was enough to jolt Veris off his feet. Brody wrapped his arms around the bigger man and kept moving, driving them both forward.
Veris’ back hit the big window first, breaking the glass. They kept going, falling forward and down to the ground twenty-four feet below.
* * * * *
Brody came to with the scent of grass in his nose and the roar of a massive fire nearby. As he blinked, pulling his wits together, strong hands caught his shoulder and his knee and he was rolled onto his back.
He groaned. His back stung.
“You’re still burning,” Veris said. He slapped at Brody’s legs.
Amid the crackling of the flames above them, something heavy collapsed. The rest of the house shuddered and groaned at the stress. Far off, sirens sounded. There were shouts from closer by. The nearest neighbors were three hundred yards away and safe from the flames soaring dozens of feet into the night.
The heat of the fire was terrific, drying Brody’s skin. He sat up slowly and Veris helped him.
“Are you all right?” Brody asked him, running his gaze over him.
Veris settled heavily on the grass next to him and looked up at the house. “No, I’m not all right,” he said softly.
Brody dug in his back pocket and pulled out his phone. The screen was starred and cracked. He couldn’t get it to boot up at all. “Dead,” he said flatly and tossed it. “Phone Taylor, Veris. They could go after her next.”
“This wasn’t meant for us,” Veris said. “Not directly.” He pulled his phone out of the pocket of his shirt anyway and thumbed the speed dial.
Brody stared up at the two big windows where the bedroom had been. He felt ill. Nothing could survive that.
“Are you safe?” Veris said flatly into the phone, cutting right to the chase.
Brody heard Taylor’s voice, high with alarm, as she questioned him.
“Someone just firebombed the house,” Veris replied.
Another question. Brody knew what it was without hearing it.
“I’m fine,” he said, leaning toward the phone and speaking into it.
Taylor spoke again and Veris’ shoulders fell. “No, they’re not okay at all,” he said softly. “Don’t come near here, Taylor. Until we know what happened, I want you as far away from this as possible. Guard the kids until we get there. I love you.”
He dropped the phone to the grass between them and watched the flames leaping and pirouetting in fat troupes. The whole house was ablaze now. The fire department would be too late to do anything other than pick through the remains.
Brody closed his eyes.
Veris rested his hand on the back of his neck. “Are you recovered?” he asked gently.
Brody sighed. “Physically, sure,” he said dryly.
“I want to look around quickly before the police and fire department get here,” Veris said. “You and I will be able to spot anything that tells us who did this, while the police may not recognize it…and probably shouldn’t see it, either.”
Brody nodded and got to his feet. They split up, each circling around the burning house. Brody found it first, sitting in the mailbox at the front of the sweeping driveway. He tucked it into his jeans pocket and caught up with Veris at the back of the house.
He showed him the stiff cream-colored card. It was blank and there was a symbol embossed into the stock itself.
Veris ran his finger over the outlines.
“I don’t recognize it,” Brody said. The sirens were very close now. “We should get out of here.” It would be better to avoid any bureaucratic entanglements. There would be enough hysteria over the three bodies they would find, along with evidence of medical equipment and IV poles…. His gut tightened. “This is a mess,” he breathed as he realized how the media and the authorities would react.
“It’s a fucking disaster,” Veris said flatly. He lifted the card. “I know this symbol. It’s what the Council use as a calling card when they act directly to ‘correct’ a situation they don’t like.”
“The Council? They just tried to take us out? Why?”
“I can guess.” Veris glanced around. They were standing on the long lawn at the back of the house. From the sides the flashing lights of the fire engines were showing, lighting up the shrubbery and bushes. “Let’s get out of here and go somewhere we can think.”
They ran for Brody’s car, which was parked on the hardstand at the back of the house. There was a private lane from there onto the street on the other side of the block. Brody got the car onto Santa Monica Boulevard before he spoke.
“Alex and Rafe and Sydney…they’re still in the past. What happens if they try to jump back now?”
“They’ll jump back to their deaths,” Veris said. He was staring out the window, watching the headlights of other cars pass them. His voice was remote. “That’s why the Council did this. Somehow, they’ve learned that the three of them were time jumping and for a reason I can’t figure, this time they felt threatened by it.”
Brody almost jumped. “I was looking at the manuscript just before the fire broke out and wondering if Alex really had gone back to do what the manuscript said he should do. If he has, then he will be changing the past. I don’t imagine the Council would like that very much.”
“No one would.” Veris shifted in the seat to look at him directly. “Something scared them into trying to root out the problem at the source.”
Brody sighed. “So now what? We have to let the three of them die for the sake of preserving history?”
Veris shook his head. “The Council has moved openly against us. Gloves are off, Brody. It’s time we indulged in a little creative history changing of our own.”