A Bittersweet Glimpse
“Do you think Veronica’s in danger?” I can barely get the words out.
“I don’t know. Maybe there’s a reason we’re told when—if—we accept the gift of knowing at the point of initiation into the Daeganean priesthood that what’s written cannot be unwritten. What’s remembered is already written and can’t be changed. We’re all just pieces of a story that happens in this timeline and any change to it will drive us mad. Maybe that’s why most of the priests who’ve accepted the gift—like I did and like Veronica did—go crazy within months. Maybe Siobhan and you were right not to accept it, but I did, and whatever just happened is not what I remember.” The wrinkles in his brow etch a little deeper. “Right, Maeve? I’d remember the two of us getting bounced back and—” he swipes with his thumb at another drop of blood on the tip of my nose— “and you with blood on your face?”
I stare at him. From what I understand of this particular superpower bestowed on initiates who ask for it, a priest remembers events from any point in his lifetime but won’t remember everything in the future any more than he can remember everything in the past. Old age and dementia, even drunkenness, can sway memories, but events associated with intense emotions are usually standouts in a lifetime of memories, even if they haven’t happened yet. Of the priests who go mad, it’s often because they see their own deaths and can’t cope. Maybe that’s what they try to change and find they can’t.
“Spencer? What do we do now?”
“We try again.”
I shudder. We’ve stepped off the path of Spencer’s memories, into uncharted territory. The future—our future—is no longer set in stone. If the earth’s poles are shifting a few years before Spencer remembered, then Veronica may be in danger. We have to do whatever we can to help her. We never expected to live beyond this night, so what do we have to lose?
Spencer looks around for his cane and then waves away the thought. Instead, he extracts his two Daeganean hair sticks from his shirt pocket. At this point in his failing health, his hair is no longer thick enough or long enough to hold in a topknot, but the sticks are still both weapons and a time portal, something he and his best friend, Terre Vanderholt, created long ago, sometime in the future. He holds them together over our heads and, as he pulls them apart, the air wavers and forms a sphere of energy around us.
I hold onto him around his thin and bony waist, just as we have so many times in the last forty-five years, and the air around us shimmers. Sparkles, like the very last burst of fireworks when ash is plummeting to the ground. Spencer is the pilot this time, so I don’t bother to follow the flow of the stars to guide us, but I reach out with my energy to find them, almost as if I’m riding in his car, down a country road, with the windows down, and my arm out the window to touch the whipping, fluttering tall grass as we pass it.
I reach for where I know the moon should be and seem to miss it. As if I just caught a thorn in my fingertips. The moon’s altered position sends a jolt of unease through me—it’s a cosmic signpost, and its displacement could mean drastic changes in tides, weather patterns, and even the earth’s magnetic field. Maybe it doesn’t mean catastrophes of that sort. Maybe it’s something different. Maybe it’s a shift in the heavens themselves.
The first thing I see as the sparkles come together is a blinding flash of light, then hear the crack of thunder a second later. Then tombstones. Dozens of them. Exactly where I remember them from our first try. Then another flash of light, and water on my face. I lose my footing in slippery mud, and Spencer grabs me before I can fall.
I blink at him through driving rain against my face. He pockets the hair sticks and lifts his scrawny arm to shield my face from the wind.
“Rain!” I croak into his ear, and he holds me close. “Where did that come from?”
Back at the archive, it’s been only minutes since our last trip here, but to the same moment in the future, here in the cemetery where our old friend is to be buried far from home but in Drusilla’s territory. How then did the skies turn from bright with sunshine to bright with lightning and heavy with rain?
Spencer only shakes his head and draws me closer. He side-steps a small Celtic cross monument, and we step into the shelter of a mausoleum at the cemetery’s edge, out of the line of sight of newcomers. The rain still peppers down hard on us, but the small structure shields us from the wind.
I cup my hands around his ear and say loud enough he can hear me but none of the mourners a hundred feet away can. “This rain. Is this the poles shifting?” “No,” he says in my ear.
“You’re sure?”
He nods. “This isn’t the apocalypse, but something’s different.”
“I know. The skies aren’t where they’re supposed to be.”
He tries to wipe the rain from his eyes, but his sleeve is already soaked through to his skin. “Because it’s raining?”
“No, Spencer. Because the stars are different. The moon isn’t in the right place.”
“How can you tell? It’s daytime and too stormy to see the skies, even if the moon is out.”
Carefully, I count the others in the cemetery. Besides the officiant, there are maybe three concentric circles of observers, but no more than seven people, total. It’s more than will mourn Spencer and me, but we’ve spent our lives hiding from the priesthood, not being cherished as the most powerful—but not shunned—High Priest in the order. Terre is considered to be one of the greatest souls in order, yet he’s being buried here, so far from his beloved Ireland, and with so few people mourning him. And where is his other daughter with Siobhan? How did a leader of such influence come to this? It has to be the work of his daughter, who took the priesthood from her mother, Siobhan, and from whom Veronica is destined to reclaim the priesthood to save it and return it to its original purpose—to save humanity.
“I can tell where the moon is even when it’s not in view,” I remind Spencer. “Occupational hazard for a witch and an astrologer. I can tell you which constellations are in the sky right now, too, even before the sun goes down, and which you’ll see then. It’s who I am.”
“Then why do you say the moon isn’t in the right place?”
“Because. It isn’t.” The wrongness of it settles in my bones, a cosmic dissonance that sets my teeth on edge. If the moon has shifted, what else has changed? What ripple effects might we see in the tides, in animal behavior, in the very fabric of our reality?
A gust of wind bends the trees nearest us, and we force our backs against the marble wall. Its roof has an overhang of maybe ten inches, just enough to keep the rain off our faces but not our chests. There isn’t a dry stitch left on either of us, and already I’m shivering. Spencer doesn’t seem affected by the rain, but I can see in his eyes how weary he is. These trips usually require him to rest for an hour afterward, and I’m worried about him.
“Spencer?” I pull him close, hoping our collective body heat will help us. “Do you remember being here?”
He shakes his head. “This didn’t happen either.”
I start to say something, but it can wait until we get home. If we’re here, and the pole shift hasn’t begun, and he never came here in his memories, then we have changed the future. And if we have had the power all along to change the future, then the priesthood has merely been going along with the events of the lifetime that’s remembered. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe we could have changed things for the better—choice over an unchangeable timeline.
Invisible to the other funeral attendees, we keep ourselves shielded at the edge of the cemetery as we watch a handful of people. The scene before us is eerie—the cemetery is nearly abandoned, even in the daytime. Gnarled trees cast long shadows across weathered headstones, as the sun comes out in the middle of the storm, their branches creaking in the wind. The sky is a canvas of angry grays, occasionally illuminated by flashes of distant lightning—and sunshine through a narrow strip of opening in the skies.
The rain lets up enough to be an inconvenience patter but not so dense that I can’t make out the other observers. I recognize Drusilla St. Augustine crying over Terre’s grave but don’t know the man beside her or the two other men nearby. I sense the energy of two Daeganean priests standing at a distance, glaring at each other. They seem to be more enemy than adversary, but I don’t recognize either of them from this distance, only their energy. I strengthen the shield around us so they don’t notice, but we’re just an old couple caught in the rain. Old and, most would think, harmless.
That’s the first two concentric circles of mourners. None of them notice us, and even if Drusilla did, I’ve aged far too many years for her to know me now. She’s crying harder than anyone else around the grave, and the younger man beside her slips an arm around her shoulders and gives her a kiss on the top of her head. It’s nice to know that Terre’s friendship with her was strong enough to outlast their romance by decades, and I suppose that’s why he’s being buried under her watchful eye rather than his power-hungry daughter’s.
Then I see her—a blonde woman dressed in black, with a black umbrella, standing at the edge of the cemetery, shielded. She’s about forty-five and very elegant, her energy powerful and discernible even from this distance. She’s obviously shielding herself, but I would recognize Veronica anywhere, even though I haven’t seen my daughter in twelve years. Veronica looks exactly as she did when we last saw each other, but I, thanks to bouncing around in time, have aged significantly.
We watch Veronica discreetly as a man—another Daeganean priest—this one with silver hair, approaches her and shares her umbrella. Spencer squeezes my hand. “See, she’s fine,” he whispers. “Our girl’s doing great.”
Unable to speak past the lump in my throat, I nod against his shoulder. Veronica is not only doing great but doing her job, actually, as a recruiter for the priesthood she is now a part of and will someday lead. All that time of hiding her until she was strong enough to stand against Siobhan and her successor and now she’s quietly part of the establishment, waiting her turn, waiting to take the leadership role after her rival botches the transition into the new post-Shift era. I’ve never had the privilege of watching her in this role, as the priesthood’s primary recruiter. She’s present at the grave to sense for Terre’s next incarnation so the priesthood can locate his next mother-to-be and start his training young.
I can sense Veronica’s raw power. I know that she’s on track to turn about the abomination the priesthood has become and return it to its original purpose of ushering humanity into the next age after an extinction-level event. I know it. Both as a priestess myself and as her mother. She is the daughter of my heart if not of my body, and Siobhan is nothing to her. Never was.
As I watch, my heart both swells with pride and aches with longing. The years of separation crash over me like a wave, and I have to fight the urge to run to her, to wrap her in my arms and never let go. Spencer’s grip on my hand tightens, and I know he feels it too—the bittersweet pain of seeing our daughter but not being able to hold her, to tell her how much he loves her. The emotional distance between us feels as vast as the physical one, and it takes all my strength not to cry out to her.
“I wish. . .” Spencer starts, his voice barely audible over the rain. “I wish I could have been a real father to her. But keeping our distance was the only way to protect her from the priesthood when she was younger.”
I lean into him, offering what comfort I can. “You did what you had to do,” I murmur. “We both did.”
Spencer nods, but I can see the regret in his eyes. “I keep wondering if I should have faced her, talked to her. But I don’t remember doing that. It’s all so. . .” He trails off, frowning. His expression is a medley of emotions—love, regret, pride, confusion. “Something feels off, Maeve. About Veronica, about this entire scene. Like the timelines are a little. . .askew.”
His words send a chill through me, separate from the rain. I feel wobbly and I’m not sure if it’s my heart or if something is amiss. This is the right time and place that I’d attempted, and Spencer had landed perfectly. But something’s out of whack. The skies aren’t where they’re supposed to be. I have to fix this.
Without telling Spencer, I wonder if this is why Cora had been desperate to finish her book about timelines and constellations for me to give to Veronica for some reason that Cora couldn’t understand.
I’m not sure how long I stare at Veronica. She and her friend both seem upset as she and the man under the umbrella dip their heads together in an animated conversation. But now the funeral is ending, and Veronica and the man with her start to walk away.
I have to do it now. Who cares if we change the future if we change it for the better? We’ve already changed it, just by being here. I’ll have to run in this awful mud to catch up with her and give her Cora’s tote and the book—
My chest hurts. I feel lightheaded. I reach for the tote hanging from my shoulder. But the tote isn’t there.
I hadn’t even thought of it in the rain or of keeping it dry.
Patting my shoulder for the strap, then my back, I can’t catch my breath. I’m wheezing. Panic rises in my throat, a tide of fear threatening to drown me. The tote with Cora’s book— our lifeline, our key to understanding the shifting timelines—is gone.
“Maeve? Maeve?” Spencer’s voice echoes in my ears, distant and muffled.
The tote isn’t with me. I’d dropped it when I landed bruisingly hard against the arm of the wing chair in the archive after my failed attempt to land us in a sunny cemetery. I’d been bleeding and hadn’t noticed but now I can see it in my mind’s eye, half-way across the room where it slid—and I didn’t.
My heart races, each beat a stinging alert of our dwindling time. Cora’s book—the last sacred book, the one that might hold the key to understanding what’s happening to the timeline—is back in the archive, in the past. We’ll need to go back for and come back this very moment so I can get it to Veronica. She’ll know what to do with it once she gets it. I turn to Spencer, ready to ask him to take us back.
The look on his face stops me.
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