Soulless (Maiden of Time Book 2) (18 page)

Thirty-Six

Purpose

“Maiden of Time?” Alexia’s fingers curled in a tight ball. She hadn’t told anyone—not Kiren, not Sarah. “How do you know about that?”

“You went back, did you not?”

Alexia nodded, her head a wide, cottony ball. She realized Mae couldn’t see her motion. “Yes.”

“You saw what I did to the Soulless. Have you met any Passionate more powerful?”

Alexia held her downy-stuffed head still. “No.”

“But I have.” The blind woman reached across the distance. “And she sits before me now.”

“You are mistaken.” Alexia rose and pulled back, stumbling into the wall, knees threatening to fail her. Her muscles felt like jelly.

Mae smiled. She seized Alexia’s hand, her skin pulsing, bursting with life. “You have the power to shape the world.”

Alexia swallowed, her voice small. “And you, the power to destroy it?”

Mae’s smile remained although her head bowed. “Some give life. Some take it.”

What a terrible gift! Alexia’s heart tore in two. “And that is why you occupy scorched earth?”

The woman’s mouth tightened.

“I rescued the child tonight, but I could not save Sarah. I was not strong enough.” Alexia took a deep breath. “If I could have reversed the minutes, only a few, I might have delivered her from this fate. Why did it not manifest then?”

“Our gifts develop as we do, strengthening as our power to wield them increases.”

Alexia blinked. “But if I can go back, we never need lose the medallion.” She jolted toward the door, blackness inking out the room. Fingers held her firmly in place, the back of her knees smacking into a chair. She blinked her vision clear.

The woman’s smile had shrunk. She squeezed Alexia’s hand. “Do you trust me, Alexia?”

“Yes.”

“Then allow me to help you.”

They spent the evening discussing strength, motivation, and how to trigger one’s ability. By midnight, when they retired, Alexia had a greater sense of how to access her talents and how they drew from her body’s reserves. She could decide where the energy came from rather than destroying her brain—as seemed her default—but it would take practice and focus. Still, she had no greater understanding as to why this door had opened now instead of when she needed it most.

Dana. Her mother. She would have the answers Alexia needed.

She closed her eyes. All she had to do was want it, stepping out of time to the absence where her mother waited—a woman she’d never had the privilege of knowing.

“You have questions for me.” The soft voice eased Alexia’s lids open.

Too-green eyes, like her own, peered back around raven locks that curled freely down the breathtaking woman’s back. She knelt next to Alexia, only a couple years older than herself, head cocked, half-smile welcoming.

“I am sorry that I have not been to see you since—”

“Time does not exist here, Alexia. You go, and the same instant you return. I am here for you.”

“As you were there for my father?” She couldn’t help the smart. Even so, the hurt in her mother’s lowered gaze sent prickles of guilt into her stomach. “Why did you allow him to marry another woman when you still so ardently adore him?”

Dana’s brow twisted. She sat back and heaved a great breath. “I begged Charles not to leave for the university without me, but he felt to honor his father, he must. I intended to follow him...”

“You were prevented?”

Dana rubbed at her nails, focused on the cuticles, but far away. “It was the middle of the night when he came to me. I did not question it. He would leave in the morning and we had often been quite intimate, though not entirely.” She hugged herself.

Alexia placed a hand on her mother’s arm.

“It was not Charles in the darkness.”

Alexia pulled back, shocked.

“His father, Benedict, claimed me.” A single tear glistened down Dana’s cheek. “For years I endured his accosts, even bore him a child whom he would claim belonged to his wife.”

Alexia blinked and shook her head clear. “A child?” A shiver crawled down her arms. “Sarah...”

She had a sister, a true sister. Sarah was her sister!

Dana clasped both hands before her, as though in prayer and pressed them to her lips. “May she forgive me, when I learned of Charles’s marriage, I could abide the union no longer. I forced Benedict’s carriage off the road.”

Alexia knelt. “Using a gift like Sarah’s? To control wooden things?”

Dana’s cheek twitched in a sad smile. “Not like Sarah.” She rubbed a finger along the smooth black nothingness of a floor. “I had greater command of the world than she. For me, all elements obeyed, which is likely why my time was to be so limited.”

Multiple gifts. They could possess multiple gifts like Bellezza’s scream and ability to mist and her strength, or Kiren’s healing and thought reading and adept hearing... Might she have more than one talent? She had not only slowed time, but leapt back and altered the outcome.

Dana’s eyes flashed up, dark under her brows. “I would have moved all the elements to be with your father, and I did.”

Alexia knew the rest of her mother’s story. Her grandparents had died in the accident and Sarah became an orphan. Father had returned from Cambridge with his new bride, Rosalind, and Sarah fell into his custody. He returned to Dana’s arms, his one true love—whom he had believed dead from his father’s communications—and Rosalind discovered them. Their wedding bliss evaporated, but Rosalind still took Dana’s child from Kiren’s arms rather than sending her away after her husband’s mistress died in childbirth. No one knew the deception, and Alexia had always been Charles Dumont’s sole heir, until she could stand the lie no more and left to be with Kiren.

“I am so sorry.” Alexia wiped at her own tears.

Dana huffed a single, sad laugh. “It was always meant to be this way. I should never have lived to raise you, but Rosalind did well.”

Alexia’s heart pinched. Her surrogate mother had given what love she could, constantly forced to face the evidence of her husband’s betrayal. Alexia ached with longing for the woman.

But Alexia had gone back—only a few moments—and she had saved a child. Couldn’t her mother have prevented this fate?

“You could have changed it,” Alexia realized.

Dana looked up. “It is one of the gifts the heir of time possesses.”

Alexia settled next to her mother. “One of them?”

Dana placed both hands flat on the ground. “You can mold time, but there are dangers. You can hasten the moments—though you cannot alter your physical placement.” She lifted one hand and shook her head. “If a wagon should be driven through the space you occupy while speeding time, it will kill you.” Her brow quirked, voice lowering. “Slowing time or jumping back is safer. You can alter the events around you, only a minute or two at a time. You can even evade death. Why, I escaped my own death many times.”

“You what?”

Dana’s fingers curled into loose fists. “You must start slowly—a few minutes at first, eventually an hour, only as far as is needed.”

“Two days?”

Her head shook. “You cannot control the outcome of altered days, weeks, months. The danger of changing things...” She drew in a shaky breath. “The first time, the very first time, your Father and I were married.”

Alexia’s jaw dropped, words escaping her.

Dana smiled. “A simple wedding. He abandoned his family and wealth for me, fleeing to dwell among the Passionate. We lived peacefully in a cottage where he slaved day in and out, working the land to provide for us, labor that had never been demanded of him before.” Her cheeks twitched. “He did not complain, but I could see the toil wearying him, and how he thought about all he had abandoned time and time again.”

Alexia peered at her mother, too bewildered by the image of her father, high and noble, working the land with his own hands.

Dana bowed her head. “I thought I could make it better. I reversed the years and started anew. This time Charles took me to his home and informed his father we would marry. No argument could change his mind. We were in love.” She nodded to herself. “And so we married. His father did not like it. He cut Charles off. Thankfully, we found mercy in a neighbor who housed and employed us.

“Charles made a minimal wage as a clerk and he was looked down upon by all he had formerly known. I became a blight and shame—the fortune hunting girl who had seduced a nobleman’s son with her charms.” Her pained smile broke Alexia’s heart. “Men of money and breeding heard of our circumstance and began frequenting our benefactor to catch a glimpse of the
‘gypsy child’
—that is what they called me.”

“How awful.” Alexia hugged herself.

“In course of time, I had admirers, and it was more than Charles could do to keep them from harassing me.” Her head bowed. “I kept the incidents hidden from him, or jumped back to erase them, but when one—” She shivered, her cheeks flaming red. “When one man
assaulted
me...” Her shoulders curled inward. “Charles happened upon us. He attacked the man, and in the struggle, he snapped the nobleman’s neck.” She glanced up and back down. “We ran to escape a hanging.”

Alexia could barely find a voice. “He actually killed a man?”

Dana’s glistening green eyes met hers, brows low.

Married. They had been married. Alexia bit back tears as they pressed forward.

“We were chased and hunted, and finally I decided I could make things better. I went back. All the way back.” She rubbed her hands as though cold. “The third time, I insisted our wedding be a secret, so Charles might retain his wealth and status. He agreed, reluctantly. We spent what time we could together without rousing suspicion, and in the course of months, I found myself with child. Charles was ecstatic.

“Of course I should have been also, but no one knew of our union. To the world I appeared a lewd woman. I returned to Mae’s care and worried. Would this baby inherit my talents? And if so, what would become of me—for there can only be one, one to govern the flow of time.”

Alexia leaned forward. “And if your child had bourn that power, you would have died?”

Dana nodded. “My time neared. I felt it coming, and at the end I knew I should not live through the experience.” Again she looked at Alexia, her brows creased. “Cowardly, I tried again, the fourth time.

“This time, Charles did not want to marry me secretly. He demanded that we openly go to his father or we not be bound. I chose the latter, knowing what the former would mean. I regret that our relationship progressed. He came to me every night, and I could not refuse him.

“Again I found myself expecting, and this time with no husband to validate my condition. I was shunned by the Passionate. I was turned out and hounded. In his eyes I saw resentment and anger—both consequences of our sins. He stored me in a house with other expectant women until the time came for delivery. I kept thinking I could make it better—like the first time. We were poor and tired, but we were happy. If he chose that path once, surely he would choose it again. But I was mistaken.

“Each time I returned to the beginning, it changed—for the worse. I became a stop on the road, then servant in his house, then the mother of a bastard child—one who did not inherit time—then a murderer...