Fight, Flight, Freeze
Her name was Aubrey. That was all he had managed to get out of her. He could have pressed harder and longer for more information, and she would have folded, but she seemed too fragile for it, and he certainly didn’t want her to bolt.
She was still asleep in the bus seat beside him, her head lolling against his shoulder and her smooth hand still clasping his tightly. When the bus stopped in Cardiff, he had given up on trying to draw any more information out of her beyond her name. Instead, he had whispered a sleep chant into her ear and let it take effect. It might have been better if she didn’t remember anything about the day, but then she would also not remember the danger she had escaped from.
He had visited Cardiff many times over the years. Particularly, he had an affection for a small, rare bookstore that substituted for a Daeganean library. Or, at least, in his own time, that’s what it had been. The building was undoubtedly there in this time, Aubrey’s time, but he didn’t know when the priesthood had installed its first librarian in Cardiff. For all he knew, in this era, the previous incarnation of the bookstore was a pub serving Welsh food.
He lightly tapped the back of Aubrey’s hand. “Wake up, little one.” He tapped again.
She curled both arms around his and snuggled closer to his chest. “Mama. Don’t leave me, Mama.”
He ignored the ache in his chest. She might have been bright enough to be a good student, but she was still a child. Lost. Alone in the world. Anyone coming to look for her except him meant her harm.
He waited until most of the passengers had left the bus and then tapped the back of her hand again. “Aubrey. Wake up.”
Her eyes sprang open, taking in everything around her. The market outside the rain-speckled bus window. Fresh flowers in bundles. Red, pink, and white geraniums in hanging baskets. The arm in her grip. She followed the curve of his elbow up to his shoulder and then to his face, framed in long brown hair. Her eyes grew wide. She let go of him and backed up against the window. Frozen, again.
“It’s okay, Aubrey. You remember me, don’t you? I’m the one who rescued you. From your classroom?”
Memory settled over her, and she looked as if she might cry.
“It’s okay, Aubrey. You are okay. I will keep you safe, I promise. We need to get off the bus now. I’m going to take you some place safe.”
She nodded and grabbed his hand like a lifeline. Without questions, she followed him off the bus.
He pulled her under the shelter of the shallow eaves of the market and held her close while the mist from the rooftop rolled off in a thin curtain. Raven squinted up at the sky. Clouds crisscrossed in three distinct layers of breeze. It was late in the day, and he needed to get his bearings before heading down some side street. They had escaped the university town north of London without being followed, but for how long? The lanky guy with the now broken nose might be following them, but Ginger would not. Raven looked down to find Aubrey staring up at him.
“Who are you?”
“I told you. My name is Raven.”
“No, I mean, who are you? That guy in the mask—he would have killed me. I saw my instructor fall. And the boy I study with sometimes. And then you came through the door and… you stopped him with those two little knives.”
Two little knives. Damn. He’d left materialized bits of his energy behind, sticking out of the ginger’s neck.
“You weren’t even close by,” she continued. “How did you do that?”
Raven shrugged. “Special Forces.” Rather than laugh at the double meaning, he added, “I spent some time in the military.” It was true, though that wasn’t where he had learned to throw knives, hatchets, or the sacred weapons of the priesthood. As the only child of a priest and priestess, he’d learned their tricks early.
She raised one eyebrow and pointed at his long hair. “You don’t look like you’re in the military.”
He winked at her, then smiled. “I’m on vacation.” He held his palm out under the eave and waited. The spitting rain had changed to a fine sheen of mist.
As he took a single step out from under the eaves, Aubrey grabbed onto him and pulled him back. “Please don’t leave me.”
“I’m not leaving you. Not yet.”
“Not ever. I’m not safe except with you.”
“Mama, don’t leave me,” she’d said on the bus, still half-asleep.
“Where are your parents, Aubrey? They’ll be worried about you.”
“They’re gone. Both of them. My mother died three weeks ago.”
Ah, that made sense. The blanket of grief that she was wrapped in. He clutched her hand and pulled her forward across the street, pausing momentarily for a gap in traffic. “So, is no one worried about you?”
She shook her head. “No one will miss me. Who was that man? The one killing all my friends.”
Raven shrugged. “Maybe you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
He had a bad feeling that wasn’t the case. Deep down, he sensed that the carnage had been a side show. Their real focus had been on her. But why? They could have come up with a thousand ways to kidnap her quietly without anyone knowing, letting alone taking a bullet. Who were they? And who was she, besides one day to be Lilah’s mother?
“Raven? Where are we going?”
“To find some friends. Look, I’m going to make arrangements to keep you safe.”
“Can’t I stay with you? Please? You’ll keep me safe.”
He grimaced and pulled her down the street behind him. She came willingly, just not fast enough.
“Aubrey… no. Just no. I can’t stay here, and we have to hurry because I have to get you to somebody who can safeguard you. Anything I can do for you, I must do now. Do you understand?”
How could she? He himself couldn’t understand, but already he felt the strange tug in his solar plexus chakra. What if he were pulled back to the future before he could get her to a safe place?
“Come on,” he shouted over his shoulder. “We’re only a block away.”
He hoped they were only a block away. The city had changed over the decades since this era, and he knew it better in its later years. Or maybe it was the fog of old memories? He had been nearer this era once as a boy, after leaving the States, but he barely remembered it. In those days, old bookstores and libraries were musty rooms and far less interesting than soccer. He couldn’t remember the directions or the landmarks of this era. The only way he could find it was to keep his left hand low and inconspicuous but open at his side, feeling for the energy where he had walked years ago as a boy, led now only by the breadcrumbs of energy that were somehow present here in a time when he did not yet exist in the flesh. It was as if the energy of all the possible timelines converged to lead him forward. His energy was here from a time he remembered that here had not yet happened, as if time wasn’t linear at all.
Omnipresence. “All time is now.”
He saw it half a block ahead. Lightning Spark Rare Books Emporium. Beneath it was the Welsh word for books. This was it. If he didn’t know it by the way the energy led to a circle at the front door, he would have known it by the reference to the priesthood—Lightning Spark. He had seen the sign before, but this one looked new.
He stopped so quickly that Aubrey slammed into him. He pulled her close to him and gave her a half-hug. Empathically, he felt her anxiety. The door was freshly painted with a sign that welcomed them to the grand opening. The priesthood couldn’t have a library in every city, but they did try to have at least one in every country. Over the last twenty years—in his timeline—many of the libraries had been consolidated because there simply weren’t enough of their priest-librarians to defend them. As their numbers dwindled, more and more libraries lived behind the façade of a rare bookstore, and a few librarians outside the priesthood had joined their ranks under the auspices of a mixed sacred-secular organization known as The Historical Society.
A little bell clanged as Raven opened the door and gently pushed a tentative Aubrey inside. He skimmed the room with his eyes. An old man in a pink button-down shirt. A white-haired woman beside him who might have been his wife. Wall to wall books. A fireplace and a reading room area near the back, fire blazing in a surprisingly chilly space. Maybe it was the curator’s attempt at climate control for the books.
He gasped. The smell of fresh-baked cookies and hot chocolate!
Raven’s palm tingled as if ants were crawling all over it. He flexed his fist several times, now stinging like ants. He knew this energy. He hadn’t felt it in years. And it hurt his heart to feel it now.
A dark-haired woman in a simple black dress and white pearls looked up from behind a desk with an old-fashioned cash register. At first, she smiled. Then her jaw dropped.
“Tessa!” He bolted across the shop and threw his arms around her. “Oh, Tessa! It is so good to see you again.”
She pushed out of his embrace, the heel of both palms against his shoulder to keep the distance. Frowning, she searched his face, then stepped back.
“You shouldn’t be here.” She stared beyond his shoulder at the disheveled college student behind him. “Neither should she.”
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