Guardians of Time (17 page)

Meg opened her eyes again, and her attention
was caught by an inspirational poster that showed an eagle
suspended in an over-saturated blue sky as it flew among
white-peaked mountains. Except that the inspirational quote wasn’t,
in fact, inspirational. A rabbit had been caught in the eagle’s
talons, and the message, instead of saying something about soaring
like an eagle or reaching for the stars, said, “Sometimes standing
out in a crowd is the last thing you want to do.”

She gave a gasp of laughter, and the humor
was enough to break through her dismay. “It’s complicated, Elisa.
Believe me when I tell you that the best thing you guys can do is
not get involved and not talk to anyone. Let me call David and get
back to you. Stay where you are. We should be almost done here, and
then we will come to you.”

Meg dropped her hand to look at the screen
so she could hang up the phone, but Elisa’s voice echoed out of the
speaker, “Wait, Meg!”

Meg put the phone back to her ear.
“What?”

It was Ted who answered. “Four men in suits
just entered the restaurant. Believe me, when I say I’ve seen their
type before.”

“Have they seen you?”

“No,” Ted said, “or at least no more than
anyone else. We’re kind of tucked into a corner here. There are a
lot of people between us and them.”

“Good,” Meg said. “Hopefully, they wouldn’t
know you to look at you, though if they get the register from the
hotel, I have to believe it’ll take approximately ten seconds for
someone at MI-5 to flag your names. Nobody is going to think it’s a
coincidence that you’re here at the same time we are.”

“What should we do?”

“Have you finished your dinner?” Meg
said.

“Yes. We were just about to go up to our
room when you called. It’s one in the morning back at home.
Though—” and Meg could hear the frown in his voice, “—Christopher
went off to the bathroom and hasn’t come back.”

If Callum were here, Meg would have passed
the phone to him, but since he wasn’t, she would have to do her
best. Her first thought was that she had to stay confident if she
wanted Ted and Elisa to feel the same.

“When he returns, smile, get up, and make
your way to the door, just like you would any time you leave a
restaurant. You can keep talking on the phone if you like because
it means you don’t have to make eye contact. Maybe Elisa and Elen
can go in front. Kids are a good distraction.”

“You really think we can walk right past
them?” Ted said.

“Is there a back door?”

“Not that I can see,” Ted said.

“Do you have a car?” Meg said.

“Yes, but the keys are in the room.”

“You have no choice but to get to your room,
then. Nod as you pass them, man-to-man,” Meg said. “I am so sorry
to have you guys caught up in this again.”

“We came to Wales of our own accord,” Ted
said, “and you never asked to go to the Middle Ages.”

Elen’s soprano piped up. “I think it’s
awesome.”

Despite the tension, Meg laughed. She was
looking forward to meeting her niece.

“Elen has been listening to Christopher a
little too much.” Ted laughed into the phone too, which Meg
thought, as a whole, was a good thing, if distraction and
nonchalance were what they were going for.

Then Ted said,
“I really think we need to
buy now before the price goes any higher
.”

“Excuse me?” Meg was befuddled by the total
non sequitur, until she realized that he wasn’t talking to her at
all but to a mythical stock market colleague.

Ted’s voice normalized again. “Sorry about
that. One of them just walked past our table.”

“Anna’s calling David right now,” Meg
said.

Anna had walked a few paces away and was
talking quickly into her phone. She hung up. “They’re on their way.
I’ll tell Math and Papa to let them in.”

Meg nodded to Anna, who disappeared. She
herself stood and started getting dressed, trying to put on her
shirt while still keeping the phone to her ear.

“Where in the hell is Christopher—” Ted
stopped.

“What is it?”

“More men in suits. I really don’t like
MI-5’s fashion sense.”

“The agents aren’t all bad, you know,
despite the hard time they gave you,” Meg said. “Callum, the one
who came back to the Middle Ages with us, is a close friend and the
Earl of Shrewsbury.”

“We’ve talked to him,” Ted said. “I can’t
wait to see you guys, but I need to hang up. I’ll call as soon as
we’re safe.”

“Okay.” Meg hung up, her heart pounding.
Then the door to Abraham’s lab swung open to reveal Rachel with her
father right behind her.

Meg faltered. In the midst of the
conversation with Ted, she’d managed to forget all about why she
was here in the twenty-first century in the first place.

Rachel saw the expression on Meg’s face and
held up both hands in an appeasing way. “It’s okay. You’re okay.
The lump is a fibro adenoma, which is not cancerous.”

Meg sagged against the table, head down,
hardly able to believe it. A huge weight lifted off her chest, and
she felt like she could breathe for the first time in weeks. Then
she looked up. “What do we do about the lump?”

“Nothing,” Rachel said.

“What happens if I get another lump?” Meg
said.

Rachel smiled. “Let’s cross that street when
we get to it.”

Meg narrowed her eyes at the two doctors.
“You do realize that I’m going back to the Middle Ages, right? It
isn’t as if I can return every few months.”

“We all have little abnormal bits inside us
all the time. It’s part of the human condition,” Abraham said. “You
just happen to know about one of them.”

Meg sighed. “I suppose.” Then she studied
Abraham for a second. “So, you believe where we’re from?”

“My Rachel wouldn’t lie to me,” he said,
“and, because I have spent the last year trying to find her, I have
known for some time that what happened to her was outside the range
of normal.”

“Like me.” Meg gave a mocking laugh.

“What?” Rachel had turned to her father.
“You never said anything about that.”

Abraham tipped back his head, and a spasm of
pain crossed his face. He wasn’t feeling physical pain, Meg didn’t
think, but the achingly familiar mix of fear and love and worry
he’d felt for his daughter this whole last year. Meg herself knew
that pain very well. Some of it was ever-present in the very fact
of being a parent. The rest was a product of having a child go
missing.

“Through my connections at the Cardiff
hospitals,” Abraham said, “I tracked down witnesses to the Cardiff
bombing and spoke with anyone who would talk to me about what
happened. I have a friend who is a detective in Cardiff, and he got
me the official—and unofficial—reports. I spoke with reporters at
length, and one in particular, Rupert Jones, who has been on your
trail since you and Llywelyn came here three or four years
ago.”

“Dad—”

“He was downstairs just now, I know.”
Abraham put out a hand to his daughter. “I would have done anything
to find you. You have no idea what it’s been like.”

“But I do,” Meg said. “I lost David and Anna
when they were in their teens, and it was a year and a half before
I found them again.”

“Except you knew where they might be,” he
said.

“Yes, I grant you that. Though knowing might
have made it worse because I knew what it was like there, and they
were all alone.”

“Or not, as it turned out,” Abraham
said.

Meg looked at Rachel, who shrugged. “We’ve
had time to talk while we prepared the results.” She eyed her
father. “Though he didn’t exactly tell me everything.”

Abraham was still focused on Meg. “Because
you understand, it is my hope that you will agree to my request not
to be separated from my daughter again.”

“Dad, I have to go back,” Rachel said. “They
need me.”

“I’m not asking you to stay here,” Abraham
said. “I’m asking you to take me with you when you go.”

Christopher

C
hristopher had
been seven when David had disappeared ten years ago. The afternoon
it happened, he remembered playing at his friend’s house long after
he normally got to stay. When David and Anna didn’t pick him up in
time for dinner, his friend’s mom fed them corn dogs, which he’d
never had before, and he’d eaten two because they were amazing.

The fact that his cousins had gone missing,
followed a year and a half later by Aunt Meg, hadn’t really
affected his growing up. They’d lived on the other side of the
country anyway, and since David and Anna were so much older than he
was, it wasn’t as if they’d been friends.

When David had shown up nearly three years
later, at almost the same age Christopher was now, however, he’d
heard the real story about their disappearance for the first time.
Christopher would have
traveled
to the Middle Ages in a
heartbeat then, and he’d do it today if he could. He’d thought
about crashing his car into a tree himself, but even if he shared a
lot of the same genes as David and Anna, he figured he’d just kill
himself, rather than time travel. Even if his girlfriend had dumped
him last week, he wasn’t depressed enough to do that.

This trip to Wales had been his idea because
he’d heard from his mom about how Aunt Meg had tried to return to
the Middle Ages tons of times, even coming to Wales to try to get
it to work. His parents didn’t know he was hoping that being here
might spark the time traveling in him too. But they’d been here
three days already, and Christopher hadn’t gotten any kind of time
travel vibe from any of the places they’d visited. The old castles
were cool, but he wanted to walk into one where people were
actually living.

Which was why when he caught the words,
‘David’, ‘bus’, and ‘Middle Ages’ from people at the bar as he
passed by them on the way back from the bathroom, he stopped and
edged closer to listen, hardly able to believe what he was
hearing.

“Nobody is going to believe us, Darla,” one
older man was saying. “There’s no point in taking this any
further.”

“I tell you, if we talk to the press, we can
make a lot of money selling our story,” she said. “It doesn’t
matter if people believe us, really. What about the blokes who go
on about UFO’s. We’ve got something way better than that. Look—”
Darla opened her purse and showed the man what was inside it.

“Gold, Darla? I thought you told David you
didn’t have any money?”

Darla shrugged. “What he doesn’t know can’t
hurt him.”

Christopher didn’t think that was
necessarily true, but he looked away to study the calendar tacked
to a post by the bar in case either of the people realized he was
listening.

Then a third voice spoke. “I can write your
story.”

Christopher glanced around to see a tall man
in a suit and trench coat lean his hip against the ancient,
polished wood bar. He was holding out a black wallet, the writing
on which Christopher couldn’t see from where he was standing, but
he didn’t dare move closer.

“Rupert Jones,
The Guardian
.”

“Let me see that.” Darla took the man’s
credentials and studied them, her face screwed up in concentration.
Then she handed them back. “Okay. But we want a fee.”

Rupert gestured around the bar. “I’ll buy
you a drink, and if I think there’s something to what you’re
telling me, then we’ll talk about money.”

The man with Darla tipped his head. “Sounds
fair.”

Darla didn’t look thrilled, but she picked
up her drink and followed the two men to one of the few empty
tables in the restaurant, which was too far away and nestled amidst
other tables for Christopher to get close without calling attention
to himself. Frustrated, he looked around at the twenty other people
who were at the bar or near it. These people knew something about
David. Christopher had to find out what that was.

“There you are, son.” His dad’s hand came
down on his shoulder in a strong grip. “We have to go.”

“Dad—we can’t go. These people know
something about Dav—”

His father cut him off. “I know.”

“You know? How?”

“Your Aunt Meg just called. They’re
here.
All of them.” His father’s eyes were lit up as bright
as the Christmas tree in the corner, full of excitement and
something Christopher rarely saw in them—almost recklessness.

“She called—”

“We have to get out here now.” His father
directed Christopher’s attention to four men in suits, two of whom
were conferring near the front door, and the other two who were
moving casually among the diners. “MI-5.”

“Holy sh-crap,” Christopher said, changing
what he was going to say at the last minute for his father’s
benefit.

“Exactly.” His dad beckoned to his mother
and Elen, and they wended their way towards them from their
table.

“Are they looking for us?” Christopher
said.

“We don’t know,” his dad said, “but if
you’ve heard what we’ve heard, most of the people in here were on
the Cardiff bus, which Aunt Meg just brought back from the Middle
Ages. Hopefully, they’ll keep the agents busy so they won’t think
to check the register until later for other names they might
recognize.”

“They might recognize you on sight, Dad,”
Christopher said. Some of the excitement he’d been feeling was
giving way to a cold ball of fear in his stomach. His dad had been
questioned by MI-5 for hours a couple of years ago. If they were
arrested, it might mean that they lost their chance to see David
and the others. “There’s a back way out of here.” He grabbed his
dad’s arm. “It’s on the way to the bathrooms.”

It wasn’t easy for a family of four to look
inconspicuous, especially when three of them—Christopher, his
sister, and his dad—were Americans with bright red hair, but nobody
followed them into the narrow hallway that led past the bathrooms
and then through a narrow supply room that opened into the hotel
part of the inn on the other side. The hotel’s corridors were
twisty and made it hard to see anyone until they were already upon
them, but nobody stopped them from leaving the restaurant. Maybe
MI-5 wasn’t yet as organized as they could have been.