Belmary House Book Three (18 page)

“I don’t mind the clothes in this time,” he said, easily sweeping her sweater over her head.

“Yes, they’re pretty convenient,” she agreed, popping open his waistband button.

Her camisole straps were shoved down over her shoulders and he picked her up and took her to the bed, laying her down and greedily nuzzling her breasts. She let herself drift away under his magical fingers and lips, almost giggling aloud at the thought of it. They actually were magical now, but she’d thought so all along. He’d always been able to incite instant and crazed passion in her with the barest touch. Just the sound of her name on his lips melted her.

She held on tightly, too wrapped up in bliss to stay angry at him, trying to make him understand with her actions that he was a fool if he thought he could live without her.

He pulled away, looking tormented, and she tried to pull him back toward her, erase his look of misery, but he resisted her.

“You should despise me,” he said, resting his forehead against her collarbone.

“Not possible,” she said.

“If I was stronger I would let you go. You should have gone with your cousin. It should have been goodbye. You’d be safe that way.”

She wrapped her arms around him and pressed a kiss onto the top of his head, unable to reassure him. There was no way of knowing if she’d be safe staying with him or not, and the fact that she’d made her choice didn’t seem to matter to him. He was too afraid of losing her.

“I have to go with you,” she said. “It’s the only hope of saving Kostya.”

He growled and pulled away, looking down at her with steely eyes that overflowed with desperation. “That’s nonsense, and a sign of my weakness that I’ve agreed. Why should you risk your life for Kostya?” he demanded, squeezing her shoulders. “Why do you care?”

“Because you care about him, and I care about you.” She wriggled out from his grasp and pulled the sheet over herself, wishing they could get back to what they’d been doing before he let himself get sucked into the morass of angst he constantly treaded around.

He blinked, and for one second she thought he might actually understand, but then his look hardened. “I’ll never know why you do, Matilda,” he sighed.

She ran her fingers down his chest and leaned in to brush her lips against his. “Just go with it,” she murmured.

He closed his eyes and she knew she had him when he returned her kiss. After a moment his hands roamed her body again, tugging the sheet away so he could press against her. This would be their last night together in this time and she was determined to make the most of it, still fearing he’d change his mind and refuse to let her go back with them at the last moment. Though their chances were slim with her acting as his catalyst, they didn’t have a prayer if Ashford couldn’t use his powers, even if Kostya was able to help them. She had to make sure she went, to make it as fair a fight as possible.

“I believe in us,” she said, meaning the three of them fighting the Povests.

 The sweet look on his face made her mean the two of them together, regardless of what evil they had to go up against. It looked like he finally believed her, in all the times she’d tried to tell him or show him she was willing to risk everything for him. If this moment was their last like this, she’d be grateful for it.

“Perhaps I’m beginning to as well,” he said, trailing kisses down the side of her throat.

She hoped so, and her worries were soon swept away by his touch.

“Are you okay?” Tilly asked, reaching up to touch the side of his face. “Are your ears popping? How’s your stomach?”

“I’m fine, mother,” Ashford said sourly, poking at the screen in the seatback in front of him. She leaned over to help him select some soothing music, and as soon as she settled into her own seat, he changed it to a raunchy movie.

“You’re going to regret that,” she said.

“I watch films when I visit 1948,” he said. “I quite like them.”

“They’re different now,” she said, still not completely able to relax after the nerve-wracking trip through the security check.

Her passport was still in London, along with all her other belongings she’d left behind, and Ashford didn’t have any sort of identification that would pass muster in the twenty-first century. Liam had rummaged around in his sketchy bag of tricks and never-ending supply of money and produced the shoddiest looking fakes she’d ever seen, long since expired, and with photos of people who looked nothing like any of them, and assured them they’d have no trouble once he hexed them. Apparently he and his wife traveled extensively, across the world as well as through time, and it was just another of his talents he’d kept hidden from them.

She was positive she’d be tazed to the floor as soon as the first checkpoint person glanced at her and saw she wasn’t a forty year old Indian woman, but everyone had merely nodded and told her to have a nice trip, which was more than she ever got with her own passport. Peeking behind her, she saw Liam several rows behind, crammed in between a sullen teenager and a nervous woman who gripped both armrests and looked positively green.

She waved at him and he pulled his eye mask down, ignoring her. He’d wanted to fly first class with all the money he’d accrued over the years doing who knew what shady insider trading or gambling on sporting events he knew the outcomes to, but she’d thought it was a terrible waste. He assured her he could get plenty more, but when Helen had given him a disapproving look, he begrudgingly settled for coach.

When they had to walk past the large, plush seats of first class and Ashford finally saw what they’d be sitting in for four hours, he gave her about the saddest face she’d ever seen on him.

“It’s character building,” she’d said.

His look clearly told her he’d disagreed, but when they took off and he was able to find all the entertainment that the seatback held, he stopped pouting.

She glanced over to see a half-naked woman filling his small screen and he hurried to turn it off, looking around to make sure no one else had seen.

“I told you,” she said, trying not to laugh at his scandalized expression. “Here, I’ll find you one that won’t have any nudity or swear words.”

She set him up with a family movie and turned the same one on so they could watch together. She got as comfortable as she could in the lumpy, narrow seat, tugging the thin blanket over her lap, marveling that she and Ashford were watching a movie. On a plane. It was almost enough to make her forget that once they landed and got closer to the spot where Kostya was back in Ashford’s time, they’d be doing the spell to return, then facing unknown dangers.

She hummed along to the familiar soundtrack, and pushed those thoughts aside. There was so much unknown to face, she’d learned to concentrate on the only moment that mattered, the one she was in. And this was a good one, together with Ashford, even with the uncomfortable seats. Damn it, but she should have let Liam buy the first class tickets. Her character was fine without having to suffer through someone bumping into her back every ten minutes.

Tilly managed to fall asleep with Ashford holding her hand under their shared blankets. He’d turned up his nose at the plastic covered meal they were offered and dozed off with his headphones in. She turned toward him and fell asleep while watching his face, harried even in repose.

By the time they arrived by taxi, Ashford studying the modern maps and trying to explain what he wanted to the driver in a bad mix of Romanian and English, the three of them were on edge and ready for action, at the same time dreading what they were about to face. They followed Liam as he found them a suitable spot to do the spell.

“Are you certain this is it?” Liam asked irritably, when they reached a sparse wooded area. “We won’t end up in the middle of someone’s house, will we?”

Ashford replied just as irritably. “It’s hundreds of years since I visited, and I was a child at that, so no, I’m not certain of anything. But, I think it’s fairly close. We shouldn’t be too near the village.”

“Let’s do it,” Tilly said, her airline food rolling in her stomach.

Liam fumbled in his coat pockets until he found his vial of dried herbs, handing them to Ashford.

“I’ll tell you what to say, but you need to try it,” he said.

Ashford shook his head so hard, Tilly feared it may come off. “If it works at all, I’ll probably send us to the dark ages.”

“Then we’ll try it again,” Liam said, calm as a kindergarten teacher. He looked meaningfully at Tilly, who wondered why she was being brought into it. Ashford sighed and they sat down in a circle.

Tilly seriously didn’t want to end up in the dark ages, or any other time than the one they needed to be, so she cleared her mind and concentrated with all her might on Kostya as they nicked their arms and Ashford said the odd spell. She sang a children’s nursery rhyme and same as the first time, everything started swirling before her eyes. Ashford gripped her hand, and she felt a jolt, as if she was in a cart on a bad road, but she didn’t lose consciousness this time.

“Did it work?” she asked, cracking open an eye.

Liam was several feet away, already poking around, and Ashford untangled her fingers from his. The woods were very clearly different from when they’d first sat down, but they were still woods, timeless, with nothing to indicate they’d got it right.

“He definitely got us sometime else,” Liam said, clapping Ashford proudly on the shoulder. “Do you know what this means, my boy?”

Ashford scowled at the endearment, but he looked at Tilly with different eyes. She imagined it was because of her strange power as his catalyst and looked away bitterly. She didn’t want to be some weird magical appendage to him, she wanted him to need her for the same reasons she needed him.

They set off in the direction Ashford thought was correct, as he told them it should lead them to where Kostya’s family home was.

“It’s not in the village proper, and his parents are no longer living,” he explained. “We should be able to stay concealed. Are you cloaking us somehow?” he asked Liam nervously.

For the first time, Tilly could feel the thing Ashford had always tried to point out to her, like a humming coming up from the ground and emanating off the trees. It wasn’t menacing in itself, but Ashford and Liam’s obvious distress was as palpable as the magic that surrounded them.

“I’m doing my best,” Liam said.

Tilly felt a sudden wash of dread and stopped in her tracks, terrified to continue. Ashford handed her his dinged up gold pocket watch, pressing it into her palm and closing her fingers over it.

“It’s not real,” he said. “It’s to keep us from moving forward into their boundaries.”

“It’s probably going to get worse before it gets better,” Liam warned.

Tilly rolled the smooth edges of the watch in her hands, feeling the metal warm up as she squeezed it, trying desperately to cling to what was real. She looked up at Ashford, meeting his eyes, somber and dark.

“It’s going to be fine,” he promised, but his eyes told a different story.

She could tell he agreed with Liam. Things were going to get worse.

Kostya plodded along toward Sorin’s house, ducking his head in greeting whenever he passed someone. The village was somber after the purge, but no one treated him like the pariah he felt like. There was no blame in anyone’s eyes, and out of necessity and to avoid any further punishment from his grandmother, everyone went about their normal business within a day of losing their loved ones, only grieving secretly in the privacy of their carefully warded homes.

Sorin was being especially quiet about the loss of Natalia, planting a flower at the head of her grave and then refusing to speak of her at all, as if she’d never existed. Kostya could see how deeply it affected him, and could only stand by and watch, not knowing how to comfort him. He knew he would never forget the devastation in Sorin’s eyes when he’d met him sitting on the side of the road, moments after he found out she’d been one of those taken.

The fact that he wasn’t being reviled or treated like an outcast made him feel worse, and every day that went by without a summons from either the council or his grandmother drove him closer to the edge of despair. With Sorin heartbroken over Natalia, and Daniel gone, their little group hadn’t had a meeting in a week, since before the terrible purge.

There were whispers that it was the worst one in two generations, with over thirty lives lost. Kostya didn’t understand how his grandmother could so easily dispose of people, or why she made the choices she did. Perhaps she didn’t care at all and there was no rhyme or reason to it, as long as she had enough people around her to carry out her nefarious deeds and keep her in the lifestyle to which she was accustomed.

He didn’t think it was that simple though, not when the two people he cared about here, his only friends from childhood, had suffered the most. And Tatiana had lost an aunt, making everyone in his circle a victim. He was certain it had to do with him. He should have been more respectful. He thought he remembered how they were, but it turned out years of living freely had made him forget.

He kept his head down, unable to take the kind looks he received anymore, and nearly walked into two men standing in the path before turning onto Sorin’s lane. He stopped and saw they were his grandmother’s guards. Was he that important to rate two? That fearful? He nodded, not needing to hear their summons. They gave it anyway, with a resolute set to their faces and emptiness in their eyes. He wondered if they’d lost anyone, and it was on his lips to ask, but decided it would seem impertinent and kept his mouth shut.