Warden of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book 8) (25 page)

Lee himself stepped out of the doorway to the tower we’d been aiming for, his ever-present duffel bag strung over his shoulder. Whatever vision she’d had of the way events were going to go, Lee’s sudden appearance apparently wasn’t a part of it. Shock crossed Lee’s face too, and since my breath had caught in my throat, I doubted I had been able to control the surprise in mine.

Then Lee dropped the duffel back to the wall-walk, reached behind him to the small of his back, and pulled out a gun.

He pointed it at me. “Tell everyone to get off the wall.” Then, as if the gun wasn’t bad enough, he raised his left hand to show me the trigger remote he held.

I spoke to Lili in Welsh. “Get away,
cariad
. Find Callum. Find the explosives. I will stall him as long as I can. I love you. Go.”

She obeyed instantly, backing up and ducking under my arm. I glanced back to see her shooing Justin back down the ladder. In a moment Lee and I were alone on the wall-walk.

I turned back to Lee. “Hello. You’ve been busy.” Now that the worst-case scenario was underway, I felt calm. It was almost a relief to face it rather than waiting around as we had been for the other shoe to drop.

The shock on Lee’s face had turned to a sneer. It was a look I’d seen before, but not often and never directed at me. I’d been blind to his faults, taking his cynicism and snide comments as a sign of intelligence and wit. He’d amused me, and I’d enjoyed his company. But in that look, I saw him for who and what he really was.

“I have done what was necessary.”

My son would have called him a bad man, with the clarity that only a three-year-old child can muster. Perhaps ardent Irish nationalists would have excused his behavior, but he’d tried to kill several hundred people. He was a terrorist. It would be wrong to sugarcoat the truth, even if he thought of himself as a freedom fighter.

He also didn’t look good. In fact, he looked terrible. His face was flushed, but at the same time a bit greenish, and he was definitely limping. I’d have to ask Rachel, but my guess was that he was suffering from blood poisoning from his infected toe.

“What happened to you?” I said.

“Nothing.” Lee’s eyes flicked this way and that, looking for a way out that wasn’t there. He sidled sideways, putting his back to the parapet, so he could see both me and the entrance to the tower. He kept the gun trained on my chest. Callum would have known the type and caliber of the gun. All I knew was that it was big.

I was honestly more interested in what was in his other hand. Lee saw my eyes go to the remote, and a gruesome smile appeared on his face. He held the thing up to show me. “Yes, you see that right. If someone tries to stab me in the back or shoot me with an arrow, I release the trigger and the whole tower goes up.”

Except for a few flicks of my eyes, I kept my gaze steady on Lee’s face, resolutely ignoring the activity developing in the bailey. A crowd had formed in the ward below us. Even if the guard at the gate out of the inner ward hadn’t recognized me at first, I was the King of England, and it was midmorning.

“Come here.” Lee motioned with the gun.

I didn’t move.

Lee fired a round at my feet. The bullet sparked off the stones and ricocheted past me. I was really glad nobody was behind me to get hit.

“The next one will be in your leg. You don’t have to be healthy to take me home.”

So it was Avalon he
wanted now, not surprisingly since he had to know that without modern medical treatment, he would die. I didn’t want to go to Avalon and so decided to stall. “I thought you didn’t want to go home.”

“Are you saying you’ll give me free passage out of Dover?”

He correctly read the denial on my face.

“Right. Come here. I won’t ask a third time.”

I took a single step towards him. I hoped that Lili had found Callum, and that even now he was tearing apart the tower, looking for the C-4. It would have been helpful if the gift of time travel had included telepathy. “Why are you doing this?”

Lee’s lip curled. “Did you actually expect me to be
grateful
? Do you know what it has been like for me, listening to those fools at court every day, self-righteous and sanctimonious blowhards, pontificating about this policy or that policy, right and wrong, your vision for England. It just about killed me. My God, if they would just
shut up
! How could you stand to listen to them when you have the power to do anything you want? You could change the world!”

“I am changing the world.”

He laughed. “Right. Just like I am.”

His surety was real, that was clear. He was talking about my friends and the people I ruled. What he called sanctimonious, I called sincere. These people
cared
about England. They could be selfish and arrogant, like any of us, but this was the only world they had. And it was my job—they had given me the job—of ruling them. Lee’s words made clear to me that he’d lied and manipulated his way through the Middle Ages without ever making an attempt to understand it.

“You want to free Ireland from outside rule,” I said.

“You would have done the same for Wales,” he said.

“I did do the same for Wales,” I said, “but I am not your enemy. You should have asked if I had a plan for Ireland. It never occurred to you to ask?”

Lee scoffed. “Money from Ireland feeds your coffers. You would never have let it go. The only choice is to depose you and bring in someone else—someone who has no vested interest in Ireland.”

“Who?”

He laughed. “You don’t know?”

I jerked my head, impatient with his mockery. “Philip.”

“Philip is coming.” Lee glanced to his left.

“You wanted to blow a hole in the castle.”

“Two holes, actually.” His brow furrowed. “The first one didn’t go off quite like I wanted, but this one …”

I didn’t follow Lee’s gaze. If he succeeded in destroying the wall here, he would make Dover indefensible and give Philip an opportunity to take the castle when he came.

Lee took a step towards me, tension radiating from every line in his body. “You’ve been blind to what was right under your nose.”

“Crowning Philip as King of England won’t change anything,” I said. “The barons aren’t going to give up Ireland easily—not for me, and certainly not for a French king.” Nor would they give up the crown of England to Philip, but Lee obviously hadn’t considered that. I worried again about the loyalty of my barons.

“Philip promised me he’d force your barons out of Ireland,” Lee said.

“And you believed him?” I couldn’t keep the incredulity out of my voice. I’d spent the last ten years playing politics in the Middle Ages, and I’d learned a thing or two in that time.

Lee’s expression turned fierce. “After Canterbury, you think I couldn’t make him? Do you think any king would be foolish enough to not keep his promises to me?”

I thought threatening the King of France, especially Philip, was a good recipe for ending up dead. It surprised me how much Lee didn’t understand. The rules he blithely violated in the modern world didn’t exist here. Philip would think nothing of having him murdered. Lee had taken my way of doing things as the way things were done, instead of seeing me for the outlier I was.

He’d allowed his single-minded hatred of all things English to blind him to what was right in front of him. And with that, I wasn’t angry with him anymore. I had no interest in anything so pedestrian as revenge because he wasn’t worth the emotion. He needed to be stopped, and I would stop him if I could, but I didn’t feel anything for him but pity.

I didn’t allow a hint of what I was thinking to appear on my face, however. The tension in my chest was almost unbearable. I couldn’t talk him out of blowing up this wall, not with the disdain he held for me and everyone I cared about. I had kept him talking to give Callum and the others time to find the C-4, but Lee motioned with his gun one more time, and I couldn’t put him off any longer. Another two steps, and I reached him.

But now he had a problem. He knew the story of how Marty had fallen to his death at Rhuddlan Castle, trying to force my mom and my sister to take him back to Avalon. Lee needed to hold onto me, but his hands were full. Then, to my horror, with his teeth he ripped off the safety ring for the trigger and thrust the remote into my hand. “You’d better hold on to this.”

Wide-eyed, I clutched it, hardly noticing that he’d grabbed me around the shoulders and pressed the gun into the small of my back.

 “You will jump now, or you will die. The only way to stop the bomb from going off is for you to take the trigger to Avalon.”

“My men have probably already found the C-4.”

“All of it?” Lee nudged me in the back with the gun, and I was truly out of time.

I eyed the crenellation beside me. No wooden catwalk extended out over the ditch here, which is why Lili had thought this might be the ideal place to do exactly what Lee wanted me to do. I edged to the left and took a quick look down. The wall itself was a good twenty feet up, plus another fifteen at least to the water in the ditch. I’d jumped a far greater distance off the rooftop of the hospital in Cardiff when I’d come home without Cassie and Callum. That didn’t make me feel any better about doing it again. Or more convinced that the time travel thing would work one more time.

I really didn’t want to go back to Avalon today. I had too much to do.

It was some comfort that Lee didn’t know my history with going back and forth to Avalon. A
flash
accompanied every entry and exit. If someone was paying attention, we’d be caught quickly. Lee wouldn’t face justice for the murder of Noah and Mike and for the destruction of two castles, but he might face justice for the bombings in Cardiff.

What’s more, he would no longer be screwing up my life in the Middle Ages. I would face some music too, but I’d been there before and would figure it out, even without Callum and Cassie as allies.

And then it occurred to me that Lee might just shoot me once we arrived safely.

Thinking of Marty, Mom, and Anna, I put my free hand on the battlement and hoisted myself up into a crenellation. Lee was right that if I went to Avalon, the signal from the remote would cut out before it instigated the explosion. I could save all of us in one go. It didn’t mean I had to take him with me, however, and in my head I ran through some possible one-handed moves that would shake him off me. Unfortunately, the gun constituted something of a problem. I didn’t want to get shot—either here or in Avalon. And I didn’t want Lee to shoot someone else if I went and he stayed behind.

And if I didn’t make it to Avalon … well, I’d cross that bridge when I got to it. I would have the whole way down to the ditch to think about it. In other words, I’d have one second. I gripped the remote even more tightly.

Lee looped his fingers through the belt at my waist, having switched the gun from his right hand to his left so he could hold on to me with his stronger hand. I leaned outward over the ditch, drawing him closer to the parapet. Lee put one booted foot up in the crenellation and then heaved himself into it. It was time. I was heftier than he was, and all I had to do was step off to bring him with me.

Which I did.

The instant I let go of the stones, however, I twisted in midair, so that my right elbow drove into the barrel of the gun at my back. My elbow hit his wrist, dislodging the gun, and I reached with my free hand to grapple with him for both the gun and for my freedom. I couldn’t see anything, however, because within a millisecond of jumping, we’d entered the great yawning blackness.

It lasted forever, as it always did. Somewhere in the blackness, I dropped the remote I’d been holding and used that hand to grasp Lee’s wrist while my other hand clutched at the gun itself, struggling to keep it pointed upward and away from me.

Then, still falling, we came out of the blackness into broad sunshine. Lee’s face was inches from mine. He held the gun double-handed, a finger on the trigger.

The gun went off.

Pain surged through my left hand where the fingers held the barrel, and I let go. I heard a second shot, echoing around me almost like an afterthought, and then I must have blacked out for a second.

Time stood still. Right before it speeded up.

Chapter Twenty-four

I
hit the water feet first, thudded down to the bottom of the ditch a half-second later, and fell sideways with a splash into the murky water. My head went under. Happy to be alive, I was glad for the cushioning effect of the water. Still, I hadn’t actually hit that hard, and my feet found purchase on the solid ground beneath the mud and grass. I came up with a surge of strength. The only physical effect of my fall seemed to be that the wind had been knocked out of me a bit. That and I was soaked in muddy ditch water from head to foot.

I put a hand to my chest, feeling an ache there as I coughed and sputtered. Water streamed from my hair into my eyes, and I brushed it away, along with some blades of grass that had adhered to my forehead. I couldn’t have blacked out for more than a few seconds, if that.

I stared up to where the tower still showed against the sky.

The tower still showed against the sky
.

I was still in the Middle Ages.

The wall hadn’t blown up.

I hadn’t time traveled.

I was both relieved by the thought and completely terrified. It hadn’t worked. Just when I thought I had the whole world-shifting thing figured out, it went and threw a wrench into the works.

Whatever ‘it’ was.

Memory came rushing back. “Lee.” I began to move through the water, searching underneath the surface with my hands and feet for a sign of him. It was impossible to see anything in the turbid water. If he’d fallen harder than I had, he could have passed out and be drowning. While that end might be better than the hanging he was going to get if he was alive, I still didn’t want him to end his life in a muddy ditch.

A crowd of people, led by Justin and Lili, burst through the nearby Fitzwilliam gate and ran along the rampart above the ditch to where I stood waist deep in the water. Lili came slipping and sliding down the embankment and flung herself into my arms. “You’re all right! Thanks be to God, you’re all right!”