Time's Enemy: A Romantic Time Travel Adventure (Saturn Society Book 1) (50 page)

“Please.” Tony’s voice croaked, his face contorted into a grimace as he held out a shaking hand. “If you love me... let me die. Don’t let them—”

“No! You won’t go back. It’ll be for good—”

He dropped his arm. “And they’ll hurt you instead.”

She turned around. A man climbed over the retaining wall. “Yes,” she whispered. She held the knife out to him. “Do what you must.”

She lay the knife’s shining, silver handle in his outstretched palm, but his fingers didn’t close over it. “First... do one thing,” Tony gasped. “Please...”

“What?” Anything. She’d do anything.

“The calculator. Destroy it. Terrible things... because of it. Your work.”

“What?” She clutched the knife more tightly, its handle cool in her palm. “No...” she whimpered.

“Thousands of people. Dead. Satellites falling. All because of... Destroy it. You’ve got to,” he begged.

“What?” Shivers coursed through her. What had—or would—she do?

“Do it!”

Tony’s choked words, the pain he had to be in, tore at her. She gulped. “All right.”

“Promise.” His voice shook.

“I promise.” The calculator didn’t matter. Her work didn’t matter. She snatched his hand and curled his fingers around the knife handle. “Don’t let them take you. It’s Hades on earth, I’ve seen—”

“Better me than you,” he said through clenched teeth. “I can’t. Let them do that to you.” He straightened his fingers and pulled his hand away. The knife slid to the ground. “I love you. Even if you lied to me. Even if you betrayed me. Even though I should hate you...”

Charlotte gazed down upon his broken body, took in the pool of blood forming beneath his hip. It had soaked through his knickers and his strange, stretchy shirt. If he lived, the Society would subject him to unspeakable torture, trapped inside his own mind. He was hurt. But not badly enough to insure the speedy death that would send him to his own time.

Theodore ran along the wall, another man close behind. Clouds had slipped back over the moon, and he hadn’t seen her yet, but she didn’t have long.

There was one thing she could do to save Tony. “You have a family. People who love you. I have no one, let them take me...” She snatched the knife off the gravel and gripped it in both hands. “P- please forgive me,” she sobbed, and plunged the knife into his belly, forced it up under his ribs. Pushed harder. His screams rang in her ears, yet were muffled as if he lay in a deep pit. Heavens, she’d never have guessed how tough the human body was, she thought with an odd detachment. Blood spurted as she drove the knife upward. His flesh ripped with a sickening resistance. The metallic scent of his blood stung her nose, then sticky, warmth burned down the front of her dress as his screams dwindled into a gurgle.

“I do,” he choked as he gasped his last breath.

“Charlotte!” Theodore leaned over the retaining wall, lifted a leg over.

Her mentor’s words faded as she stared down at Tony’s body. The blood bubbled out of the slash in his stomach more slowly now, and his eyes glazed over. Shouts from one of the other men drifted from the wall, then she turned back to Tony’s body. Good Lord, she’d killed. Her thoughts seemed strangely distant as if they weren’t her own but came from somewhere outside herself. She’d murdered a man. Not just any man, but the one she loved more than anything. Nausea gripped her. She curled into a ball and vomited. Nothing came up but bile. She hadn’t had anything to eat since a piece of toast for breakfast. She dry-heaved again, then something flickered at the edge of her vision. Tony’s form grew indistinct, as if drawn on rice paper with pencils. Shimmered like a mirage. The dizziness of someone jumping slammed her. She wobbled as she yanked the knife from his stomach, then his body faded completely.

He’d gone home. She’d accomplished her purpose. Killed the man she loved. And in doing so, she’d freed him.

She hoped.

The only indications he’d been there were black speckles of blood on the gravel, their edges blurring in the rain. Dark stains soaked her dress.

“He’s gone!” one of the men yelled.

“She let him get away again!”

“I’ll take care of her!” Caruthers’ bellow bore a threat beyond the treatment. Theodore slid down the grassy slope of the river bank as Caruthers clambered over the wall.

She leapt to her feet and ran down the gravel along the river’s edge, toward home. Once she destroyed the calculator, let them do to her what they would. Her life was over.

She cast a glance behind her. Caruthers slipped on the dewy grass, and slid into Theodore with a curse. She forced her legs to pump harder and didn’t look back again.

A fall of dead trees came into view, and she stopped running to grab onto a protruding branch, used it to pull herself up the slippery riverbank. She should be close to her house, if she could make it to the top. She let go of the branch, clutched a clump of grass, and pulled herself up, until she reached the retaining wall.

She heaved herself over, gulped for air, then paused. Caruthers’ shouts drifted from the river, then Theodore’s, and another man she didn’t know.

The back of the Paulson’s garage loomed in front of her. She bolted to the alley, then her feet pounded the gravel until she stopped behind her house. “She’s going home!” Caruthers yelled. Closer.

She yanked open the side door and scrambled down the steps. Had to get the calculator before they got her. It didn’t matter that once the Society got hold of her, she’d no longer be a threat, would no longer own the mental capacity to care for herself much less invent anything.

But she’d promised Tony.

The light still burned over her workbench. She snatched the calculator, flipped it over in her hand. Her dreams, shattered. Soon she wouldn’t remember—or would she? The treatment—

“Charlotte!”

Theodore. Outside. She had to do it. Now. She gripped the little machine in both hands and tried to break it. The thing was surprisingly tough. Slowly, the hard, metal back and brushed metal face started to bend—

Upstairs, the doorknob rattled, then a squeak as the door swung open. “Charlotte, my dear,” Caruthers called. “I’m most disappointed in you...”

Footsteps. The stairwell door flew open and light spilled down the stairs. Mutters from Theodore.

Her eyes flitted over the workbench. If only she’d brought the knife! Better that than—

Concrete.
Images of a row of six huge, round pilasters holding the bridge up over the street before her, the roar of traffic overhead, the rumble of a big truck...

The future. She’d gone there before. She could do it again. Maybe it was certain death to jump into the future, but it was far better than the life she’d have in the Society. If there was a chance, however small, she could be with Tony... She gripped the calculator, squeezed her eyes shut, and concentrated on the scene she’d stumbled into with him...

Fluttery in her head. She could do it. She dropped the calculator into her pocket and pulled her quarter out of her dress, stared at its silvery surface between her bloodstained finger and thumb. George Washington. The astronaut. The Wright Flyer. In God We Trust. 2002. Spinning, whirling... nothing existed but her and the quarter, and endless motion, and everywhere, nothing but gray...

H
E WASN’T DEAD.
D
EATH DIDN’T HAVE
fluorescent lights above. Death didn’t smell like antiseptic and bad institutional food, did it?

And surely death didn’t have the mother of all heartburn.

A tinny voice squawked somewhere in the distance, paging Doctor-somebody to the nurses’ station.

Death didn’t have a paging system, did it?

Tony squinted at the ceiling, trying without success to focus. Things behind him dripped and clicked in time to the beat in his head. A giant fist clamped around his chest. He couldn’t pull enough air into his lungs. His whole body ached.

He wasn’t dead. The dead didn’t feel pain.

With that thought, Tony Solomon allowed himself to slip back into welcome oblivion.

Tony reached through the hospital bed rail and gripped Bethany’s hand. “Does your car have a steering wheel?” His voice sounded throaty. But decent for someone who’d just woken from time travel recovery an hour ago. Someone who’d suffered a stab wound in the gut.

Stab wound?
He started to shove the sheet down to look—

“Huh?” Bethany squinched up her nose, making it wrinkle across the bridge.

He’d check his stomach later. “Does your car have a steering wheel?”

“What kind of question is that?” She cocked her head.

“Just answer me.”

“Ye-es,” she said in a long, drawn out inflection.

“What about July third?”

“What about it?”

That sounded positive. “What’s July third?” he asked.

She lowered her chin and looked at him from under her eyelashes. She enunciated each word, as if he wasn’t mentally competent. “The day before the fourth?”

Tony’s head flopped back against his pillow. It never happened.

“Where’s Lisa?”

Bethany gave him another well-duh look. “Probably at work.”

“At the base, right?”

She half-turned and regarded him from the side of her eye. “Last I heard. Are you sure you’re all—”

“Thank God.” Relief washed over Tony like a swim in a cool stream on a blazing summer day. He didn’t care if Bethany thought he was drugged, messed up, or just plain stupid. Everything was fixed.

“You’re like, totally not making sense,” she said. “They must’ve given you some good drugs.” She glanced at the clock. “I have to go.” She rose and gathered up her purse. Tony recalled she’d gotten a summer job in the mailroom at LCT. “I think Mom’s coming by after she gets off work.” She leaned over and kissed him, a cool, blessed spot of moisture on his cheek. He told her goodbye and he loved her, then she was out the door.

It was over. All done. Bethany was alive. Lisa was alive. No S
pa
S
tar
. No sixteen thousand people dead because of him.

He pushed the sheet down until he could grasp the hem of his hospital down and pull it up. There, under his fingers. A short, bumpy ridge maybe an inch and a half long. Already healed, no need for a bandage.

He lifted his uninjured, right arm and touched his neck. Instantly he felt the rough, raised scar. The one from the ancient Mayans’ huge, stone axe.

He’d warped back into the other timeline. The right one.

When he got out of the hospital, he’d look up Charlotte Henderson on the Internet, just to make sure, but he suspected all he’d find was her great-niece’s genealogy web site with its scant information and notation that Charlotte disappeared in 1933, presumed dead.

Charlotte. Dead.

Or worse. The sheet beneath him grew clammy. A drop of moisture trickled down the scar on the leg he’d broken when he’d jumped off the bridge—like the stab wound, already healed, in his return to the present. Had Pippin gotten to her, given her the punishment intended for him?

She killed herself
. She’d had that knife. He had to believe that, couldn’t bear the thought of Charlotte a zombie with a mind empty of anything but pain and misery.

She’d done it for him. Without regard for what they’d do to her. She loved him so much she’d killed him.

He turned his head to the side, crushed his face into the pillow. Wished he could suffocate himself in it.

The pillow grew wet beneath the side of his face. His mom had been there when he’d first come out of recovery. She’d told him a second-shift janitor at Sinclair Community College had seen him in the river and called the cops.

Why couldn’t the guy have just gone on his way and let him die? Without Charlotte—

She’d given him this. Given him Bethany, by telling him how to warp within his own life. Given him the chance to fix everything he’d fucked up. He’d make what he could of his life, riddled with holes as it was.