Turning Point #1
Everything within his sight faded to gray, gray with red and yellow specks as if he were about to pass out from too much sun. A slight fluctuation of nausea rolled from his stomach to throat. Raven focused harder on his intention—the first turning point in Lilah’s life.
Sunlight blinded him at first. Then clouds enveloped him. A split second later, he saw the terrain below him as if he’d fallen from one of the few satellites still working after the poles had shifted. He was headed straight for the ground, toward the very center of green pastureland, toward a tan dot that quickly became stone buildings. He was coming down hard and fast, no greenery beneath his feet to soften the landing.
People moved below him, trailing like ants around the buildings but growing larger as he neared them. Raven didn’t feel the landing. By the time he could see the wet surface of the cobblestone street, he’d slowed almost to a stop and then floated down slowly with the rain that was more mist than drizzle. It took no more than a thought for him to find himself dressed like the nearest student in a dark blue university sweatshirt and jeans that were almost as dark. His hair was in a bun again, the sticks holding it in place. He’d left them behind with his body in the future, but here his energy had become matter.
A bicycle horn beeped behind him, and he stepped quickly out of the way, just in time for a half-dozen college students to spin past him. He realized just as quickly that they hadn’t beeped at him, but rather at the line of students with heavy backpacks trying to cross the street ahead of him.
Of course. This was an interactive vision of some sort. He wasn’t corporeal. That’s why he’d been able to float to the surface.
He stepped onto the sidewalk to get his bearings. From the way the students were dressed and their hairstyles, he guessed that he was back in time around the year that he was born. As a boy, he’d seen old college photographs of his parents and had ridiculed them mercilessly. They were definitely in England, probably somewhere close to London. The architecture was right for a university town that had been thriving since the Middle Ages. Almost everyone within sight appeared to be students.
He felt her before he saw her. Grief. Like a hot, damp blanket on a summer’s day. The weight of it. The suffocation. He scanned the steady flow of students and spotted her on a bright blue bicycle, heading toward him. She looked a lot like Lilah, except this woman’s hair was shorter; it was straight and barely clipped her jaw. Her eyes, too, resembled Lilah’s, and not just because both were so filled with pain. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen.
Raven nodded to himself. A turning point in Lilah’s life. Of course. Lilah Burns’ mother. He couldn’t sense a pregnancy, but her grief acted like a shield around her.
She parked her bicycle and leaned it against the brick wall of the building nearest him, just inside an alley between two buildings. Nervously, she looked around her. He realized that she knew she was being followed.
“Yes,” he murmured to himself. “You’re an empath, too.” That’s where Lilah got it from.
She extracted a small mirror from her backpack and pretended to check her lipstick while she scanned the street behind her. The white blouse and dark blue skirt over black hosiery made her look even younger than she was.
Vulnerable.
Raven followed her gaze to a thirtyish man loitering outside the café across the street. Reddish-blond curls, stocky, and a bulky black jacket that was a little too warm for the season. Unlike almost everyone else, the ginger wasn’t in any hurry to escape the damp. Cigarette to his lips, Ginger turned away, hiding his eyes behind sunglasses too dark for a gloomy day, but Raven knew the man was still watching Lilah’s mother out of the corner of his eye. The moment Raven turned back, she scurried out of sight behind double doors into a classroom building.
Leaning against the brick wall, Raven watched the man with the cigarette. As soon as Lilah’s mother was no longer in view, the ginger stopped pretending he wasn’t watching. He stubbed out the cigarette against the outer wall of the café and stalked across the street, hanging back just outside the classrooms.
Another man, green-eyed and lanky with a military haircut, stepped out of the shadows of a doorway and half-ran across the street to meet Ginger. They were almost close enough for Raven to hear their conversation. Almost.
Raven moved closer. He was no longer floating. The ground was firm under his feet, but he barely noticed. Their voices were low, and he could catch only every other phrase.
“… make sure you don’t hit the target….”
“… sync up later with the boss.…”
“… don’t deviate from the plan.…”
“… you lucky dog, getting to play hero….”
Raven took another step, close enough that he could read their lips even if they weren’t talking loudly. The one with the military haircut frowned in Raven’s direction. He squinted. Why did this man look so familiar?
“What are you looking at?” Green Eyes growled.
Raven pivoted to look behind him, then down at the imprint his shoes left on the damp sidewalk.
“You can see me?” He choked back the words to keep them from coming out. He wasn’t sure what his visibility meant—whether he was in danger of harm to his body in the present or harm to his body back in the future. The one thing he was sure of was he couldn’t eavesdrop under a cloak of invisibility.
The ginger took an aggressive step forward, leaning into Raven’s personal space until they were nose to nose. He was trying to make himself look bigger, more intimidating, but Raven knew he could put the man on the ground in one second and in the ground in three. Still, no need to get embroiled in a fight, particularly since the bulky jacket shifted just enough to expose a Beretta at Ginger’s hip.
Raven raised both palms to him and took several slow steps backward.
Ginger matched him step for step, then yelled, “Sod off!” before pivoting and rejoining his companion.
“Sorry! Sorry,” Raven called after them as he continued to back away. “Thought he was someone I knew.”
Green Eyes seized his friend’s elbow and pulled him around for a close discussion. “Back corner,” he said almost inaudibly. “Back left corner. Don’t screw it up.”
As the two men separated, Ginger pulled the hood of his rain jacket over his head. The mass of russet curls disappeared underneath the elastic band that framed his face. The combination of hood and sunglasses resembled a mask. Sinking his hands deep into the pockets of his rain jacket, Ginger pressed his shoulder blades into the wall outside the corridor, propped one foot against the wall, and checked his watch. Green Eyes had already disappeared down the alley, far into the shadows past the double doors that Lilah’s mother had disappeared into.
Raven kept his distance from Ginger. He stayed close to the wall and tried to blend in with a dozen bicycles. What was it he had found in the journals of other priests who had experience with The Book of Time? They had all been observers more than experimenters; for those who did experiment, the changes had been very specific to their intention. Most of the journal keepers had stepped into a turning point and changed a narrow future, but the book had been lost for over a century and the journals were far older. Those journals reflected a more agrarian time when the world wasn’t as interconnected as it was now. How could they have known if they were successful or not? Changing the future in a village of eighty people who might never travel far from their birthplace was very different than changing the future on a global scale. Raven wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do in this turning point that would change the future, but he was positive it had something to do with the two men stalking Lilah’s mother.
He also wasn’t sure how long he could stay corporeal. According to the different journals, other priests had described a sense of being pulled backward before they had wished to return to their altered reality. Once back, they had only minutes unless they made the sacrifice of carving the sigil into their own flesh or else the new reality reverted to the one before the time journey.
Ginger stared for a long time at his watch as though watching the secondhand tick by. Suddenly he straightened and took a deep breath. With a running start, he kicked the double doors to the classroom open.
“Lord Daegan, help me,” Raven whispered. He knew what this was! He’d read about it, this massacre of university students long before mass shootings became more common. Lilah Burns’ mother had been in the midst of it, but she’d been rescued by a bystander who’d whisked her away to safety. No one else had lived to identify the gunman or describe the events inside that classroom, and she had fled to the States for the next decade.
Raven was already in motion, instinctively, even before he heard the shot fired, then a second and a third. He ran, reaching for one of the sticks in his topknot.
Medieval Studies Seminar, the sign on the broken door read. Everyone inside the brightly lit room was screaming and scurrying under desks and tables, overturning chairs. Bodies on the floor. The shooter hadn’t missed yet. But he was staying clear of the far-left corner. Raven sensed Green Eyes rushing in beside him and instinctively threw up an elbow that cracked the man’s nose.
Before the guy could hit the floor, Raven pressed the end of the Daeganean hair-stick with his thumb and its hidden blade thrust outward. The weight of it on his knuckle balanced in a split second before he hurled the tiny weapon through the air. The razor’s edge dug deep into Ginger’s neck.
He dropped the Beretta in his left hand and clawed at his throat. Pulling a Sig Sauer from a holster, he whirled to fire a shot at Raven. Even as he missed, Raven was already hurling the second hair-dagger toward the man’s bare throat.
Sunglasses askew, the shooter raised the Sig Sauer in his right hand. His hand shook and never quite reached an accurate height before it fell from his grip, hitting the floor before he did.
Raven was moving on instinct now. The Book of Time be damned. Maybe he was the one who was supposed to keep the empath’s mother from dying? He squinted around the brightly lit classroom. Time seemed to freeze. Was he being pulled back? If he was, he had to move fast. Some students rushed past him. Others didn’t move at all. None were Lilah’s mother.
There. The far-left corner. Crouching behind an overturned desk next to where Ginger had fallen dead. Trying to make herself smaller than she was. Hand jamming something into her pocket.
He leaped over two tables and dodged a fleeing student before he could get to her. She didn’t move, not even a tremble. She peered up at him. He couldn’t tell if she was in shock or not afraid at all to die. Some, like the other students, had taken flight. He, as was his habit, favored fight over flight and always ran towards the sound of gunfire. Lilah’s mother had taken a third option, not fight or flight but freeze.
Raven brushed his long hair out of his face and reached for her. She stared back at his outstretched hand and moved her head from side to side, not quite a shake but definitely a no.
“Come with me,” he urged.
This was why he was here. Of course. To save Lilah’s mother. The child she would have one day. Here to save her either from being murdered along with her classmates or from being kidnapped and then who knew what. This moment. This moment was the turning point in Lilah’s life.
He waved his outstretched palm in her face and curled his fingers, beckoning, almost pleading. She moved only her gaze to look at the shooter on the floor, now still. He pulled her up and along by one arm and then flung her over his shoulder as he ran out the door.
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