Chrysocolla (20 page)

All? He looked horrible to me.

“Did you see who did it?” I had a clue, but it would have been nice to have a confirmation of it.

“No. I was too worried about Seth to look at the person.” Dee led me to a bench and sat me down. While I could pretend all I wanted that I was better, I wasn’t. The walk alone had winded me.

“So what have you guys been doing?” I asked. “Did you find out who was inciting the Hittites to war?”

“No, we didn’t even have a chance to look into it,” Dee replied as he sat beside me. “I’ve seen Seti do some amazing things in his lifetime, but that was the most amazing move to get away from the person. I still don’t get it.”

I stared into the water. This was a game of puzzles. I normally liked puzzles, but this wasn’t any fun. When a life or two hung on the line, puzzles were a bit nerve-wracking. I continued to sit in silence with Dee. We were both too anxious to talk much. I closed my eyes and felt the bond with Seth. It was still there, but I could tell now why I didn’t feel the pain when I woke from my first time passing out and travelling. Seth didn’t feel the pain. At least I knew that much.

I kept my mind on the bond between us. He was safe for now and everyone would take care of him. But were we really safe? Would we ever be? This was such a close call this time. I was more than a little worried. Seth was still there in the bond but at the same time completely gone mentally as they worked on him. I prayed he would be okay.

“Do you want to go back in?” Kye asked, breaking me from my thoughts.

“What?” I asked. I looked up at him and the sun was no longer overhead, but was now on my right side. I had no clue how long I had sat there.

“He’s all fixed up?” I asked. Hours must have passed.

“As much as they could do. Good thing I don’t travel into the past without a few modern conveniences,” Kye added with a wink. I vaguely remembered he had a small shoulder bag with him when we arrived a week ago.

“Is that why he’s not dead?” Dee asked as he stood and helped me stand. He had been as silent as me the whole time.

“No, the antibiotics I gave him will just help. I prefer it to the moldy bread they use that might or might not have penicillin in it,” Kye replied. My mouth dropped at the mention of using moldy bread. Kye smiled at me. “Really, don’t worry. Egyptian surgeons are the best around. He’ll have a scar, but that will be it.”

“Is he awake now?” I asked.

“He was just passed out before. He’s coming to a little bit, but he’s sure to have a hell of a headache. You might want to talk softly to him for the next day or so until the alcohol wears off,” Kye advised.

“Alcohol?” I asked. I looked to Dee. He shrugged.

“We needed him to be quiet and the pain was bad. We got him drunk, and it seemed to do the trick,” Dee replied. “Seti’s actually a really quiet drunk.”

“You got a sick, bleeding man drunk?” Really, even I didn’t think that sounded like a good idea.

Kye laughed. “Mari, he’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

I wasn’t about to believe it until I saw with my own eyes. I had to try to calm my nerves a bit as we got closer, and he was still numb to everything. My worst fears were coming true. Here I was, stuck in the past, with no technology to actually help the people I loved. Good surgeons or not, they still couldn’t do what people could do in the future.

“Why didn’t the blow kill him?” I came back to the question that kept popping back into my and Dee’s head.

We turned the corner, and I walked into my rooms in the palace. I hesitated before walking into my bedroom. It felt weird to know I had pulled him back through time to my own bedroom. I was glad no one seemed to wonder how, or why, that happened as they treated him.

“Seti can get hurt—and trust me—he got really hurt, but none of us can die in this time,” Kye replied.

There was no one in the room but Seth and Ty. Seth was still asleep as we entered.

“That’s not possible. Seti, Dee, and Ty are from this time. Maybe I can’t get killed, but they sure can.” I slowly walked to the bed. Seth’s eyes flickered open a bit and he gave me one of those smiles that melted my heart into goop.

“Hey, wife of mine,” he said, a bit slurred still. He patted the space beside him on the bed. “Guess our wedding night will have to wait a bit.”

I shook my head as I couldn’t help but smile. All the tension in the room was gone in an instant. Seth had that way about him. I climbed up carefully on the bed. Seth picked up his arm and made room for me right against his chest as he lay on his side. I curled right into it. My heart, which had been beating a mile a minute since I saw him return to me all bloodied, slowed down. I had my Seth, and he was safe with me. Kye was right. He was alive. I looked across the room to Kye and raised an eyebrow. He hadn’t finished explaining.

Kye rolled his eyes and shrugged.

“When someone returns from time traveling, they either have to return to the exact moment they left, or like in the case of your mother to the exact moment it would be as they had aged. I kind of didn’t return the four of you to the right time. Your real time is about two days in the future. I did it as a safety precaution in case Logan went a little nutty. None of you four can be killed in this time.”

Chapter 10

Time to Play the Game

Seth’s recovery was
faster than anyone expected. The healers and surgeons had returned the day after they had stitched him up to find not a single infection. Kye’s single dose of antibiotics had worked wonders for Seth. It was great that Kye was thinking ahead, but we still couldn’t get ahead of Logan. The war he had created was still going on; just now Seth couldn’t be added to the casualty list. None of us could. But that didn’t stop it from happening.

“Why didn’t you tell us that you returned us to the wrong time?” I asked Kye, sitting beside Seth as he continued to lounge around the bed all day.

Seth was on his third day of recovery, and he was beginning to feel better. He was already itching to get back out there to help his father fight.

“I didn’t know if I should. I basically was making you guys immortal without any input from you. I was going to tell you guys later, but I guessed Seth would want to stay around as long as you could, and since you were born in the future there was no way to keep you both in the same time. I figured Dee and Ty might want to go back to their own times, but I didn’t want to tell anyone until we got all the stuff with Logan figured out,” Kye explained.

“So if we are all four, well five with you, immortal, then how did Seti get hurt?” I asked. I sat beside Seth and he listened to everything without interruption beyond tugging on my curls and watching them bounce back into place.

“You may get to live forever, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get hurt. You can get hurt and you can get near death, but you can’t die. So basically, you can get into a lot of pain and have to recover for months on end, but you’ll live.”

That didn’t sound like much fun. I liked my own picture of immortality that included superhuman powers and being made of something sort of like steel—indestructible.

Seth reached over and took my hand. He squeezed it and smiled at me.

“You couldn’t get back to me,” I said to him as a question, but it came out as more of a statement.

“I tried after I got hurt. Kye tried pushing me here also, but we couldn’t pass through the wall your father controls over Egypt,” Seth explained.

Seth pulled me back from my perch on the edge of the bed into his arms. I pretended to fight to sit up, but I was never going to turn down being in his arms no matter how long we lived, even if that was forever. It was great he was healing so fast, but it was still hard to get the images of him covered in blood out of my head. It felt like we had come so close to him being gone. I liked the idea of him being immortal with me, and I never wanted to let him go back to his own time.

“Did you find anything?” Ty asked from his spot near the doorway. He was back to switching between dutiful servant when anyone came around to normal Ty as soon as they left.

Kye shook his head. “I looked and looked, but I couldn’t find a trace of the Hittites even near the city. When the army came close, I headed to where I thought they’d stop one last time to get supplies. I was right and easily found Seth and Dee. Too bad I was too late to stop Logan, though.”

“You did stop him. Looks like, thanks to you, we don’t have to worry about him killing us after all,” Seth replied.

“No, he can’t kill you, but trust me, once he gets word that you survived, he will change his tactics and you don’t want to be around him when he knows he can’t kill you,” Kye added. I shivered. Logan was more evil each time something new happened. The question I had now was, was he ever good or was I too blind to see it?

“So there’s no war about to happen?” I asked. It was beginning to sound more like a ruse to get to Seth.

“I don’t know. We didn’t stay around long enough,” Kye answered with a shrug.

“It doesn’t matter if there’s one going on or not,” Seth said from behind me, his words tickling my neck. “My father is marching on neutral ground. As soon as the Hittites find out, they will be coming and war will begin anyways.”

Everyone got quiet at the thought. Not only did Logan manage to lure Seth out of protection and in his eyes probably kill him. He also started a war that was dragging the general and the military away from Egypt. That didn’t sound like a good combination. Everything was getting more messed up by the moment. I wished I could just go and write my own history and not include what Logan had changed.

My eyes snapped up to Kye as I sat up. I looked at him and wondered. He was still a gatekeeper even if he didn’t have his own time. Would he even know how to rewrite history?

“What?” Seth asked as he slowly sat beside me. Even if he was hiding it, his back still hurt a lot. He was trying to be tough, but the stitching across his back said otherwise.

“Let’s say I were to take someone that’s here right now and send them back to the time they were supposed to be in, could I essentially rewrite the past?” I asked Kye. It sounded good until I spoke it out loud. I really had no clue what I was doing.

Kye’s eyes lit up at the idea.

“Like, if you were to take one of us here and put us in the right time?” Kye asked to clarify it for the guys in the room. He understood completely what I was getting at.

“Yeah, but that won’t help any. If I send anyone to the right time, I take away their ability to live forever. I’d put them in danger from Logan,” I replied. I looked around the room. They were my friends and now family.

It sounded good, but the more I thought about it, I couldn’t go through with it. Everyone connected to me was in danger. With Kye’s quick thinking, they were all safe for now, but I didn’t want to see how things would turn out if it were different.

Everyone thought about it with me as we sat silently. It would work, but we couldn’t put someone in danger.

“I’ll go,” Dee finally said, breaking the silence.

“You can’t,” I quickly replied, but he held up a hand to keep me from talking further.

“It has to be me. Seti needs to always stay immortal if you’re going to be. Ty would never leave you unprotected and thus will remain immortal with you guys. That leaves me.” Dee shrugged.

“But…” I wanted to complain more.

Dee smiled with a shrug. “It actually makes sense. I’m the most normal one of all of us. I have a wife, and I didn’t want to tell anyone yet, but soon I’ll have a child. I can’t imagine living forever and outliving my own children. I’d have to go back sometime anyways. Now is just as good a time as ever.”

Ty and Seth nodded along with Dee as he spoke. They always seemed to share ideas and had a similar mindset when I knew them in the future, but it must have always been like that between them. They were as close, closer than, brothers, and they were as much like a family as any. It hurt that Seth, Ty, and I would have to live and watch Dee grow old and die, but I understood. Dee had a life and a different future from us. He went to the future. He had lived a fun life, but now he was ready to take responsibility and settle down. Dee was taking the first step away from the guys and none of them were sad. They admired him for it.

“If we do this, that means you have to stay away from us,” I told him. “Anyone close to me is a target for Logan. You’d have to give up being with Ty and Seti.”

Dee nodded.

“I knew that it would come to this one day. We all knew that. Seti was destined for greatness from the day he was born. Ty and I were only along for the ride. I hate to have to give up the good days, but I think I have a pretty good reason.” Dee was set on his sacrifice. This was the second time he was sacrificing for us. I was glad I had gotten to know him over the past year. He wasn’t the jerk I thought he was when we first met.

Seth rose slowly and walked over to Dee. He grasped his arm and they pulled each other close. Ty followed and did the same. They were saying goodbye.

“What if I can’t do this?” I said as the guys were done with their silent farewells.

Kye smiled from across the room. He wasn’t part of the goodbyes, but I could see it in his eyes. He knew exactly what the guys were going through. From his explanation of Miller, I kind of had the feeling he had gone through the same thing with him.

“Mari, there’s nothing you can’t do. This is what you are meant to do. It’s within you. Just believe in yourself,” Kye told me.

I took a deep breath. I was breaking up the three friends, and this was much more than just using his stone to go to a different time. They would be separated by death when this journey ended. I looked between them and their silent glances at each other.

“You don’t have to do this,” I told Dee. “We can find another way.”

“Mari. I’m ready. I am ready to grow up.” Dee knelt in order to be eye level with me as I sat. “It was a privilege to get to know you, but you have to do this. It is the perfect way to keep Egypt safe. We don’t need another war right now, particularly after our last war brought many casualties.”