Susan Squires - [Da Vinci Time Travel] (12 page)

This time was perfect. It needed someone willing to take power and use it. This teeming city would be his. Its wealth, the ships in its harbor (made of metal!), the cars that hummed everywhere—all would bend to his will. He had even seen his first airplane today. How they could make a metal tube fly through the sky like a bird he didn’t yet know. But he would.

He put his palms on the glass of the huge windows, his forehead pressed against the pane, giddy with the possibilities of it. It seemed that he was falling through space and that only magic kept him afloat above the city. He was charmed with the danger of it, the wonder.

He shut the door on the old time and for the first time in his forty years he felt some measure of peace. He’d done what he’d had to do to take his birthright in Camelot. He’d killed the man who kept it from him. Arthur. His
father, though not in name or fatherly concern. Mordred had come face-to-face with the man who had no other heir of his loins and yet refused Mordred the kingdom, who thought he wasn’t good enough to steward Arthur’s life’s work, and he had run him through and watched him topple, life’s blood leaking into the soil he so loved.

Now who was the better man?

Mordred’s arm throbbed. He would take some of the tablets the girl had given him in a moment. He had come away with naught but a scratch, and though uncomfortable, it did not seem to be festering. He would live while Arthur died.

More important, he had been swept away to a world that was truly worth his talents. The poor wooden palisades, men hacking at each other on horseback with swords—was this enough for a man like him? No. He no longer cared what happened to Camelot. It would fall to the Saxons. He laughed.
Had
fallen to the Saxons no doubt, fifteen hundred years ago. He ran his hands over his beard, listening to the wonder in his own laugh.

The girl had been his savior in some ways. But she would have to die. She and the man who recognized him. That was the one who had shot at him. It was him the girl had gone to meet when she sneaked away this morning. They were plotting against him. He couldn’t let them reveal his true identity. So now they had to die.

The man looked familiar, but Mordred couldn’t place him. Was he, too, from the past? Had he used the machine to come searching for Mordred? Sent by the remnants of Arthur’s army?

Or Merlin? Merlin had never been his friend.

It hit him like a stone. The man looked like Merlin and Merlin had a brat, got off the witch Nimue. So. Merlin had sent his son to track Mordred down, even unto this century. But this one was not the great magician his father
was. Mordred snorted in derision. This one would be easy to defeat. Mordred would find and kill them both.

But first, to start upon the path to an army. Time to get busy, as they said here.

He went to the couch, delivered today, and plugged his computer into the outlet in the floor next to it. The couch and two big stuffed chairs sat around a finely woven rug in many colors over the bare stone floor. A bed crouched in the corner with clear bags of quilts and pillows strewn across it. A dining table and chairs of some dark wood he didn’t recognize occupied the center of another rug, like islands in the vast sea of open floor.

Now to find like minds he could bend into an army. White, like himself. Manly men, familiar with weapons, self-reliant. And angry. He needed to find angry.

He found Google as the boy this morning at the large gazebo had shown him. . . .

“Well, that was time we’ll never get back,” Diana said as she shook raindrops off her slicker in the hall just outside Gawain’s apartment.

Gawain wiped his feet on the doormat as he turned the key in the lock and pushed it open, holding it for her to enter. What guy did that for a woman these days? She furled her umbrella. He hung her slicker on a coatrack to drip, then shrugged out of his leather jacket and hung it on an adjacent peg. Her huge roller bag sat under the coatrack from their trip to her apartment this morning. He’d insisted she bring her mandolin. He’d set the tiny instrument case carefully against the wall. All that was missing was her computer bag. No computer anymore. She touched her sweater and felt for the thumb drive that hung around her neck. There it was, under the thick knit, hanging between her breasts. That was all she had left of the book she’d been writing. Twenty-five pages and an awful synopsis. It felt tiny and vulnerable there, like the wispy flame of a candle guttering against the darkness.

“There’s always tomorrow,” Gawain said. But he was frowning. His hair dripped on his red flannel shirt. Why couldn’t guys use umbrellas? Three buttons were open at his neck. That meant you could see dark, curling hair.
And
that
meant that you couldn’t stop thinking about how his chest had looked just out of the shower this morning. At least she couldn’t.

She cleared her throat. “Uh . . . I’m not sure we can count on him showing up there tomorrow, either. He’s a smart guy. He must know we’d look for him at places familiar to him.”

“Then he could be anywhere.” There was a note of desperation in Gawain’s voice as he flopped onto the green leather couch.

She put down her precious shoulder bag and sat in the plaid wing chair across from him. A nice safe distance away. “We’ll find him.”

Gawain gave her a look under his brows. His eyes were dark, dark blue. He looked disgusted with himself. Sure enough, he said, “My father
must
have meant to protect you from Mordred. And now I cannot find him to kill him.”

“Well, I’m still okay. All’s not lost yet.” She wanted to touch his arm, his shoulder, to steady him, but she was pretty sure the effect on her would be a disaster, and she didn’t want to seem like she was coming on to him. He’d think she was pathetic, a girl who looked like she did coming on to a guy like him. She’d been startled this afternoon at how intelligent he was. All that talk about what made a magician . . . Was it fair for a guy who looked like that to be smart, too? “You’re just hungry. Do you want to order out? Or I could forage in your kitchen and see what I can come up with.”

He cracked a smile.
My, my
. White teeth, crinkles at the edges of his eyes—could a guy get more gorgeous? The smile made him look much younger. That smile actually seemed . . . familiar, comforting, as though she had waited for it before. “Let me do the foraging,” he said. “I shall provide.” He was up and striding over to the little
kitchen. “Haven’t had time to buy much lately.” He opened the freezer.

“Too busy stalking me.” She wandered after him and leaned on the bar between the kitchen and the living room.

He rooted around in the freezer until he came up with a freezer bag filled with something brown. “How about some leftover brisket?”

“Sure.” Wasn’t brisket about the toughest and cheapest cut of meat there was? And she’d get to eat it left over.
Yummy.

He rummaged around in the refrigerator and came up, to her surprise, with a head of cauliflower. Her least favorite vegetable besides kale or chard or something else weird like that. “No salad stuff, I’m afraid. But I can make something out of this.”

He seemed cheerful about it. Brisket and cauliflower. He continued to rummage. His fridge actually had things in it, unlike hers. He took out a white wine bottle and examined the label. Another smile. “Here’s a Ferrari-Carano chard. Bet you’d like that.” He glanced over to her. “Cooking goes better with wine.”

Well, that at least sounded good after a day like today. “Let me open it. That’s probably how you got all those scars. Drinking with knives around.” She took the bottle. He spun around and pulled a corkscrew from a drawer.

“Nope. Got them all stone-cold sober. I never drink and fight.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. She’d never had to fight in her life. She opened the wine as she watched him set the freezer bag with the brisket in it in a sink filled with warm water and turn on the oven. She took two glasses from the cupboard over the dishwasher where everyone kept their glasses. Oakwood was no exception. She poured two glasses of wine and put one on the counter next to where he was chopping up the cauliflower. What
guy had cauliflower in his refrigerator, by the way? Oh, cauliflower had been around for forever, and it kept a long time. Of course they would have eaten it in the fifth century. Wasn’t it related to cabbage?
Great.
Another least favorite vegetable.

She eased past him, thinking the kitchen was way too small for both of them. She was very aware of his body.
Concentrate,
she told herself. She sat on a stool where she could watch him work. He was good with a knife. Probably not surprising.

“I learned to cook in prison,” he remarked as he got out a big, straight-sided Calphalon pan.

“You’re kidding.”

He didn’t seem inclined to elaborate.
Guys.
But after a minute of silent chopping he cleared his throat and said, “I got assigned to the kitchen. The food mostly sucked. But the cons in Cell Block B tended a garden, and there was a chef in for knifing the sous chef who’d been, uh. . . . having relations with his wife. The meat wasn’t high quality, but he made it palatable.”

“So you learned from him?” She was about to get prison food for dinner.

“Yeah. The kitchen was a good assignment. It gave you a trade when you got out. And I guess I was interested in eating. We didn’t do it real regularly back in the Resistance. I wouldn’t have been in line for the kitchen except they had to get me out of the laundry.”

“Why was that?”

“It was that or enlarge the infirmary.” He shot her a glance as he gathered the florets and threw them into the big pan. “I didn’t play well with others.” She stared at him. “I never started it,” he assured her.

But he finished it.
“I’ve heard gangs in prison are really bad.”

He rummaged in the fridge again and came up with
some butter. “Bullies are everywhere. I tried to keep to myself. But I didn’t speak modern English when I first got there. Guess they thought I was an easy mark.”

So that’s how he got the scars. At least some of them.

When he spoke again, his tone was deliberately light. “The literacy program was pretty good in the joint. Better than the one at the mental hospital. I’m not an Adapter like Mordred.”

“Mental hospital?” She realized with a start that she thought this guy was saner than most people she knew. To know that he had been in a mental hospital shocked her. Was she wrong?

He saw her look, and his expression clearly registered his “oops.” He turned to confront her: “I’m not a serial killer, I swear. When I first landed in this time, dressed in crazy clothes, speaking a language no one recognized, having just killed two guys in an alley, they . . . they thought I was . . . uh . . . a little off.” He shrugged and stared out the window over the kitchen sink into the wet and shiny black of the San Francisco night. “They couldn’t even interview me. There was no doubt I did it. There were eyewitnesses. And I . . . uh . . . tended to struggle when they tried to put the shackles on.” That rang a bell with Diana. He’d been scared. “So, mental hospital it was. And lots of drugs.” Here he broke his reverie and pulled the freezer bag with the brisket in it out of the sink full of water. “So I acted sedate and palmed the drugs. I realized one of the doctors was using Latin words. I spoke Latin.” He glanced up at her and shrugged. “He didn’t want to think about why I spoke only a dead language like Latin. He just wanted me out of there. He got me transferred to prison. That was lucky.”

“Lucky?”
Right.
She was suddenly glad she’d avoided a mental hospital when she’d been scared like that. This guy didn’t have a Jenna Armstrong to help him.

He tossed the butter into the pan and sprinkled in some salt. “Prison was way better. Fierce and coldhearted I understand. Crazy I don’t. I got twenty to life for multiple manslaughters, once the shrink told them that my language ‘problem’ was post-traumatic stress syndrome. Time off for good behavior after I got kitchen duty—I only served about twelve years.”

Didn’t the eyewitnesses tell anybody that he’d been attacked first? They sent him to a mental hospital where they drugged him and to prison, where he had to fight for his life. That was lucky? He
was
a glass-half-full person.

“The worst part,” he continued, “was not knowing if you needed my protection when I wasn’t there to give it.”

Again with the protection thing.
“So, you going to tell me why it’s me? Or not?”

He grabbed his glass of wine and took a sip, buying time. What would he say? She wanted to know in the worst way, and the only way she could find out was to wait for him to tell her. Finally, he gave a shrug and poured some of the white wine into the pan with the cauliflower. “My father just said you were important.”

Merlin. Merlin, who lived fifteen hundred years ago, thought she was important and needed protection. A girl in twenty-first-century San Francisco. She watched Gawain put the brisket in a pan with some orangish sauce from the plastic Baggie it had been in and slide it into the oven.

She sighed. If he knew more, he wasn’t going to tell her. “You don’t make it easy.”

He was back to stirring his cauliflower. “Whatever the reason, we’re going to find Mordred and I’m going to kill him and then you’ll be safe.”

Diana looked up into eyes that were a swirling mass of color again. Now why exactly did she think this guy was sane?

*  *  *

“So, was Guinevere really having an affair with . . . with someone? We all say it was Lancelot, but apparently he’s fictional.”

Gawain chuffed a laugh and shook his head. “She loved Arthur, hard as he was to love.”

The brisket was so tender it flaked into little strings spiced in a kind of New Orleans style. Gawain said you got it that way by putting it in the oven overnight on low. The cauliflower was braised with butter and wine. She’d never tasted better cauliflower. Prison food? It was a nearly perfect meal. It served her right to be so wrong about him. He was a complicated guy. Masculine to the nth degree, and yet able to turn simple ingredients into a fabulous meal.