December 1926—The Upper West Side
Esta froze as the blond trained the gun on her. His expression was a mixture of disgust and anticipation as he shifted his aim between her and Logan.
“I told you,” he growled at Schwab. “I warned you something like this would happen.”
“Jack!” Schwab yelled, grabbing for the man’s arm again. “Put that gun down!”
Jack shook him off. “You have no idea what they are, what they’re capable of.” He turned to Esta and Logan. “Who sent you? Tell me!” he screamed, his face red with fury as he continued to swing the gun back and forth, alternating between the two of them.
Esta glanced at Logan and noticed the dark stain creeping across the white shirt beneath his tuxedo jacket. His eyes flickered open and met hers. He didn’t look so cocky anymore.
“I won’t be ruined again,” the blond said as he cocked the hammer back again and steadied his aim at Logan. “Not this time.”
Never reveal what you can do. It was one of their most important rules. Because if the Order knew what she was capable of, they would never stop hunting her. But they’d already seen her. And the stain creeping across Logan’s shirt was growing at an alarming rate. She had to get him out, to get him back.
It seemed to happen all at once—
She heard the click of the gun being cocked, but she was already pulling time around her.
“Noooooo!” Logan shouted, his voice as thick and slow as the moment itself had become.
The echoing boom of the pistol.
Esta rushing across the remaining length of the hallway, putting herself between Logan and the gun.
Grabbing Logan tightly around the torso, she reached for safety . . . focusing all of her strength and power to reach further . . . and pulled them both into an empty version of the same hallway.
Daylight now filtered in through an unwashed window at the far end of the hall, lighting the dust motes they’d disturbed in the stale air of the completely silent house.
Logan moaned and shifted himself off her. “What the hell did you do?”
She ignored her own unease and took in the changed hallway, the silent, unoccupied house. “I got us out of there.”
“In front of them?” His skin was pale, and he was shaking.
“They’d already seen me.”
“You didn’t have to come barging in like that,” he rasped, grimacing as he shifted his weight. “I had it under control.”
She should have been irritated that he’d reverted to his usual pain-in-the-ass demeanor so quickly, but Esta was almost too relieved to care. It meant his injury probably wasn’t killing him. Yet.
Esta nodded toward his bloody shirt. “Yeah. You were doing great.”
“Don’t put this on me. If you hadn’t gone after a diamond, you wouldn’t have been late meeting me. We could have already been gone before Schwab showed up,” he argued. “None of this would have happened.”
She glared back at him, not giving an inch. But she knew—and hated—that he was right. “I got you out, didn’t I? Or maybe you’d prefer being dead?”
“They’re going to know.”
“I know,” she said through gritted teeth.
To Schwab and the other man, Esta and Logan would have seemed to disappear, and people didn’t just disappear. Not without magic—natural magic. Old magic. Even Schwab would have understood that much.
“The Order will have heard about it,” Logan said, belaboring his point. “Who knows what that will do. . . .”
“Maybe it won’t matter,” she said, trying to will away her uncertainty. “We’ve never changed anything before.”
“No one has ever seen us before,” he pressed.
“Well, we don’t live in the 1920s. It’s not like they’re going to keep looking for a couple of teenagers for the next hundred years.”
“The Order has a long memory.” Logan glared at her, or he tried to, but his eyes still weren’t quite focusing, and the dizziness that usually hit him after slipping through time was having a clear effect. He fell back on his elbows. “When are we, anyway?”
Esta looked around the musty stillness of the hallway. All at once she felt less confident about her choices. “I’m not sure,” she admitted.
“How can you not be sure?” He sounded too arrogant for someone who was probably bleeding to death. “Weren’t you the one who brought us here?”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure exactly what year it is. I was just trying to get us out of there, and then the gun went off and . . .” She trailed off as she felt a sharp pain in her shoulder, reminding her of what had happened. She touched the damp, torn fabric gingerly.
Logan’s unfocused gaze raked over her. “You’re hit?”
“I’m fine,” she said, frustrated that she’d hesitated and ended up in the bullet’s path. “It’s barely a scratch, which is more than I can say for you.” She pulled herself off the floor and offered Logan her hand.
He allowed her to help him up, but he swayed, unsteady on his feet, and put all his weight on her to stay upright.
“We’re not any later than forty-eight. Probably sometime in the thirties, by the look of the house. Can you walk at all?” she asked before he could complain any more.
“I think so,” he said, grimacing as he clutched his side. The effort it had taken to stand had drained him of almost all color.
“Good. Whenever this is, I can’t get us back from in here.” Pain throbbed in her shoulder, but the bullet really had only grazed her. She’d heal, but if she didn’t get Logan back to Professor Lachlan’s soon, she wasn’t sure if he would. “We need to get outside.”
The fact was, Esta’s ability to manipulate time had certain limitations, mainly that time was attached to place. Sites bore the imprint of their whole history, all layered one moment on top of the other—past, present, and future. She could move vertically between those layers, but the location had to exist during the moment she wanted to reach. Schwab’s mansion had been torn down in 1948. It didn’t exist during her own time, so she couldn’t get them back from inside the house. But the streets of the Upper West Side were still basically the same.
Logan stumbled a little, but for the most part, they made it through the empty house without much problem. As they reached the front door, though, Esta heard sounds from deep within the house.
“What’s that?” Logan lifted his head to listen.
“I don’t know,” she said, pulling him along.
“If it’s the Order—”
“We have to get out of here. Now,” she said, cutting him off.
Esta opened the front door as a pair of deep voices carried to her through the empty halls. She tugged Logan out into the icy chill of the day, and they stumbled toward the front gates of the mansion.
Traveling through the layers of time wasn’t as easy as pulling on the gaps between moments to slow the seconds. It took a lot more energy, and it also took something to focus that energy and augment her own affinity—a stone not unlike the Pharaoh’s Heart that she wore in a silver cuff hidden beneath the sleeve of her maid’s uniform.
Against her arm, her own stone still felt warm from slipping through time a few minutes before. The pain of her injury and everything else that had happened had left her drained, so trying to find the right layer of time was more of a struggle than usual. The harder she tried, the warmer the stone became, until it was almost uncomfortably hot against her skin.
Esta had never made two trips so close together before. She and the stone both probably needed more time to recover, but time, ironically enough, was the one thing that neither of them had if she wanted to avoid being seen again.
The voices were closer now.
She forced herself to ignore the searing bite of the stone’s heat against her arm, and with every last ounce of determination she had left, she finally found the layer of time she needed and dragged them both through.
The snow around them disappeared as Esta felt the familiar push-pull sensation of being outside the normal rules of time. Schwab’s castlelike mansion faded into the brownish-red brick of a flat-faced apartment building, and the city—her city—appeared. The sleek, modern cars and the trees full with summer leaves and other structures on the streets around them materialized out of nothing. It was early in the morning, only moments after they’d originally departed, and the streets were empty and quiet.
She let out a relieved laugh as she collapsed under Logan’s weight onto the warm sidewalk. “We made it,” she told him, looking around for some sign of Dakari, Professor Lachlan’s bodyguard and their ride.
But Logan didn’t reply. His skin was ashen, and his eyes stared blankly through half-closed lids as the modern city buzzed with life around them.