The Hourglass Door (27 page)

A shudder ran through Dante’s body. He wouldn’t look at me, turning instead to rest his forehead against the window. “Anywhere but there.”

“Okay,” I murmured. My adrenaline high from the play drained away, replaced with a chill brittleness that filled the space between us.

I drove aimlessly through the town, circling familiar streets, slowly making my way farther and farther away from the heart of the city. At one point I flipped on the CD player, eager for a little music to break the silence in the car, but Dante stopped it before the first notes sounded.

Dante didn’t want to talk, either. He sat rigid in the passenger’s seat, his eyes locked straight ahead. In his hands he held his mask from the play. Amanda had gone all out for the leads, and Benedick’s mask was a shimmering silver-green marvel with gray goose feathers arching above the dark and empty eyes.

I watched from the corner of my eye as he methodically stripped the feathers from the frame, then the gray fibers from the quills. When he started on the green metallic sequins rimming the bottom edge, I knew where I should take him.

I flipped a U-turn at the next light and made a beeline for Phillips Park.

We pulled into the deserted park and I turned off the car. We sat for a few minutes in the dark, listening to each other breathe.

“I like to come here when I need to get away from it all,” I said, unbuckling my seat belt. “Sometimes I sit on the swings. Or go to the playground. Sometimes I just sit on the grass and look up at the stars.” My voice trailed off, and for the first time all night I didn’t mind the silence that filled the car.

Dante looked down at the ruined mask in his hands, seemingly surprised at what he’d done without thinking. He closed his long fingers around the now-blank mask, crushing the edges in his hands. His own face was blank, drawn and pale in the shadows.

I heard his breath catch as he murmured something in Italian. I thought it might have been “I’m sorry.” I leaned closer to hear his next words.

“I’m not who you think I am, Abby,” he said in English.

I almost smiled. It was the kind of melodramatic line people said in bad made-for-TV movies, but then I saw his eyes, bleak and distant, and I knew he was telling the truth.

“I thought you were Dante Alexander, foreign-exchange student visiting from Italy.”

He shook his head slowly, sadly. “Not exactly.”

A touch of fear brushed through me. “Then who are you?”

Chapter

16

Dante flung open the car door and stumbled outside into the night. Starlight bathed his body. Shadows layered his dark hair. His shoulders rounded under some unspeakable weight. His hands were bunched into tight fists at his side.

I gathered up my heavy skirts and opened my door. Circling the car, I approached him slowly, cautiously, like he was some kind of wild animal.

“Dante?”

He leaned against the car, tipping his head back, his beautiful gray eyes closed against the brightly burning stars.

“Tonight was a revelation, Abby,” he said, his voice ragged with strain. “Being onstage . . .” He shook his head and ran his hands through his hair. “Being onstage tonight was a revelation. It’s easy to be someone else. It’s easy to pretend. To say the lines someone has scripted for you. It’s harder to be yourself. It’s harder to speak from the heart. Harder to speak the truth.” He drew in a shuddering breath. “And the truth will be harder yet to hear. But I’m tired of pretending, Abby.”

My heart broke at how jagged my name sounded in his mouth. “Dante—”

He moved to me then, suddenly and without warning. His hands slid up my bare arms, curled around my shoulders, came to rest at the base of my neck. His body was close enough to mine that I could feel his heart beating swiftly in his chest. His eyes searched my face. “I’m tired of pretending to be someone else, Abby. I’m tired of no one knowing the truth.”

The gentlest of pressure from his hands—and he tilted my face to his—

“I’m tired of
you
not knowing the truth.”

His lips came down on mine, soft as the starlight, hot as the sun.

He tasted like cinnamon—both bitter and sweet. He trembled like a flickering candle flame in my arms, his skin hot and sweaty under my fingers. Warmth filled my blood, my heart, my mind. A wild rushing sounded in my ears, like wind in the trees, like water falling into foam, like a note quivering on the edge of sound. It was the kiss I had dreamed of. A kiss that opened inside me like a flower, blooming into sweet life. A kiss that carried inside it all the words and emotions that could never be voiced.

Dante cradled my head in his hands and drifted kisses along my jaw, down my neck. “Abby,” he breathed into my skin, his hands unfastening the pins holding my hair in place. “I’ve been waiting to do this since the moment I first saw you.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked, my own voice unsteady. Valerie had been right; it was impossible to breathe in a corset. I felt his fingers combing through my curls as they tumbled free. I ran my hands along the smooth muscles of his back.

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” he said.

“Trust me,” I breathed out in a smile. “This doesn’t hurt.”

Dante pulled back, his face serious, his gray eyes dark with some unnamed emotion. “That’s because I’m being very careful.” He slipped his hands from my hair and rested them on my shoulders. “I’m as dangerous as Zo in my own way. Maybe, to you, even more dangerous than to anyone else.”

“What are you talking about? You’re nothing like Zo.”

He brushed his thumb along the curve of my neck, across my collarbone, to the hollow of my throat. “Oh, no, Abby,” he murmured sadly. “I’m exactly like Zo.”

Dante dropped his hands from my neck. He unbuttoned the cuffs of his sleeves and folded up the fabric with three sharp, precise motions. Then he stripped his gloves from his hands, letting them fall to the ground like empty husks.

There on the backs of his wrists twined two heavy black chains branded on his skin. And on the inside of his wrists, two circles with arrows pointing at nothing and the letters: MDI. MMIX.

Cold fear leached the heat from my body. I brushed a finger along one of the chains around his wrist. I narrowed my eyes. “What is this?” My voice sounded harsher than I intended it to. “When did you become such a big fan of Zo’s band? Was it before or after he stabbed you—?” The words stuck in my throat.

“No, you don’t understand. I’ve had these a long time. . . . This was done to me long before . . .” Dante groaned and pulled his hands out of my grasp. “I’m not explaining this very well. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

“Then explain it to me. Is this why you always wear those gloves? So people won’t see these marks?”

He nodded.

“So what do they mean?”

Dante hesitated. “Do you remember what I told you that night at the dance? When you bandaged me up?”

I nodded cautiously. How could I forget that night?

Dante seemed to be waiting for me to say something.

I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want it to be true. It
couldn’t
be true. “You told me it was your birthday,” I hedged.

“And?”

Dante was right. Speaking the truth was hard. I found I couldn’t do it. I bit my lip and looked down.

“And I said I was born in 1484. Five hundred and twenty-five years ago,” he said in a low voice. A ring of white-frost ice edged his gray eyes.

“How . . . ?” I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

Dante unclasped his masquerade cloak from his throat and spread the gray-green cloth on a nearby patch of prickly winter grass. “Don’t tell Amanda,” he said with a crooked smile. “She’ll kill me.” He sank to his knees and gestured for me to join him.

I didn’t know what to do. What was he talking about? Five hundred and twenty-five years old? It hadn’t been possible the first time he’d said it; it wasn’t any more possible now. Only this time I was sure I hadn’t misheard him.

He looked up at me. “I promise I’m telling you the truth.”

I bit my lip, then sat beside him, spreading my skirts over my knees. “I’m listening.”

Dante chafed at the chains around his wrists. “I was born Dante di Alessandro Casella in the year 1484 in a small village outside of Florence, Italy. I was the second, and youngest, child of Alessandro and Caterina. My older brother, Orlando, had gone to war. I had wanted to go with him. But I was too young. And I had different talents.”

I remained quiet, uneasy but intrigued.

“I was apprenticed to Leonardo da Vinci as one of his scribes and messengers.”

My eyes opened wide. “
The
Leonardo da Vinci?”

“Yes,” Dante said. “
The
famous da Vinci. He was famous even in my time. It was an incredible honor to work for him. Those were amazing days, living and working with the Master. Days I’ll never forget.”

He fell silent, his eyes wistful and distant.

“But . . . ?” I prompted. “In stories like this it seems like there’s always a ‘but.’”

He smiled a little. “Indeed.
But.
But the job was incredibly difficult. Da Vinci always had a new invention, a new idea, a new way of looking at the world, and all of those new ideas had to be written down, copied out, documented, and annotated. It helped that I had a near-perfect memory and a near-perfect hand for writing and drawing. I think it was because of those two things that da Vinci shared with me the secret of his most terrible invention.”

I leaned forward, twisting the hem of my dress in my hands.

“A machine that could break through the barriers of time itself,” Dante said delicately, as though he feared the words would disappear before he had a chance to say them.

I blinked. “You’re telling me Leonardo da Vinci invented . . . a time machine?”

“He invented all sorts of things that you take for granted in this day—helicopters, tanks, calculators, musical instruments. Is a time machine so hard to believe?” Dante’s voice turned sharp in the darkness.

“Well, yes. Because time travel isn’t possible.”

His lips thinned into a hard-edged grimace. “Yes, Abby, I assure you that it is. It’s how I came here. It’s why I received these.” He held up his hands, revealing the chain brands around his wrists.

“Tony and Zo and V have the same marks. Well, almost the same. Theirs are darker.”

“I think they’ve enhanced their marks with tattoos. But trust me, underneath, they are branded just as I am.”

“Are you telling me that they came through the time machine too?”

Dante nodded. “They came through shortly before I did. Leo helped them make the transition. He’s helped all of us.”

I frowned. “Leo has these same marks too?” A faint memory stirred: the sound of glass ringing on glass and a pale pink drink. “How many of you are there?” I couldn’t believe we were even talking about this. It was crazy. But as crazy as it was, I had to acknowledge the fact that maybe, just maybe, he was telling me the truth. Dante had never lied to me before.

Dante hesitated, sensing my confusion. “I know of at least a dozen besides the five of us.”

“And you all came through this machine?” I struggled with the flood of information. “Why brand you with chains?”

Dante swallowed, looking down at his hands, away at the empty swings. Anywhere but at me. “We’re chained like this because we’re criminals. It’s a mark of our guilt. A brand we must wear the rest of our long, endless lives. The time machine was our punishment, our sentence, and our execution.”

In my memory I heard Valerie’s voice from all those months ago:
He’s dangerous. . . . He killed someone.

No. Not Dante.

But in my memory I also saw Dante’s explosive anger at Zo—Dante’s quickness, his strength, his temper—his hands becoming fists.

The night wind slipped through the high trees as though fearing to come too close.

“What . . . what did you do?” I had to force the words past numb lips.

Dante didn’t say anything for a long, long time. He clamped one hand around his wrist, hiding the black mark. I could almost see the white bones of his knuckles moving beneath his dark skin. He squeezed so tightly I wondered if he was trying to erase the mark through sheer pressure.

“Dante?” My fingers twitched in my lap. I swallowed. I reached out to touch his arm, but his words stayed my hand.

“‘As soon as any soul becomes a traitor,’” he muttered, his Italian accent so thick it almost obscured his words. “‘As I was, then a demon takes its body away—and keeps that body in his power until its years have run their course completely.’”

My forehead furrowed in confusion. “What are you talking about?”

He shook his head. “Dante’s
Inferno.
The ninth circle of hell. Where traitors to kin and country are forever locked in a frozen lake, endlessly tormented by Lucifer himself.”

Misery etched harsh lines along his mouth, shadowed his clouded eyes.

My heart stood still in my chest. Traitors to kin and country? What had Dante done? “Who did you betray?” The words slipped out soft as a breath.