Unwrapped (15 page)

You are not at a bar
, I reminded myself. It was a testament to my strength of will that I found my voice. “Mr. Devitt, please—”

His brown eyes searched mine. “I saw you this morning.”

“Of course—”

“No,” he said impatiently. “I mean, I
saw
you.”

My blood chilled. I’d hoped that he would have forgotten the nature of my appearance this morning, the actual circumstances that led to me nearly being mangled by a spooked horse.

Or if he hadn’t forgotten, then I’d hoped that he would be politely confused and then just as politely forget about it. But Sophie/Drusilla had warned me. Henry Devitt was not a polite man.

“How?” His voice lowered to a whisper. “There was a light and then you materialized. There was no one there and then you were.
How?
”

The wheels turned in my mind. Time travel was bound to have missteps, and in school we’d learned which era-appropriate excuses were the best for silencing unanswerable questions. The ancient Greeks and Persians were always happy to buy any story that involved gods, your average feudal peasant would settle for a good demon or angel yarn, and hippies dropping acid at Woodstock were more apt to view anything mysterious with slack-jawed wonder than suspicious questions.

“Do you believe in spiritualism, Mr. Devitt?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Absolutely not.”

Too bad, since time travelers were almost solely responsible for the unexplained manifestations that had led to the craze in the first place. Mediums weren’t seeing spirits, but thin spaces, windows into the between-space, where retired couples and Asian tourists hurtled toward their pre-paid vacations, already in costume for their chosen destination.

“There’s more to it than candles and shaking tables,” I told him. “I have a gift. I’m even known to some circles for this very thing. But you can understand why a young lady of background would wish to be discreet about such things. Spiritualism is not given the regard it deserves.”
Because it’s total bosh
, I wanted to add but didn’t. Part of acting was believing in the lie—hushing the tiny reminders of the truth that invariably popped up.

“You will forgive me for being doubtful,” he said. “See, I actually owe my abrupt departure from Oxford to this very question—well, that and a minor, overblown incident with the Dean’s niece—and I still refuse to believe that spiritualism is a movement with any merit, despite what my professors may say. I am a man of science and I suspect that you are cut from the same cloth. So if you please, Miss Jenkins, the truth.”

I couldn’t tell him the truth. It was out of the question.

But I wanted to. I don’t know why I wanted to, but there was something so direct and observant about him, like he would understand if I told him. Instead, I allowed another impulse to take over. I tugged off one of the elbow length gloves and reached out and lifted his top hat from his head. He opened his mouth and then shut it as I ran my fingers through his light brown hair.

He stared at me intently as I fingered the slight-too-longish strands, which felt every bit as soft and silky as I had imagined. He caught my hand and then slowly brought it to his mouth, touching my bare fingertips with his lips.

Goosebumps raced up my arms, the feeling of his mouth on my fingertips echoed by a tugging between my legs. It had been so long since I’d been touched like that. Between my course load and a part time job tutoring high school students in history, I hadn’t had much time to hit the bar scene...or any kind of scene.

“You intrigue me so,” he said in a low voice, the kind of voice that made nice, modest Victorian girls fan their faces.

“Oh, Emilia, thank
God
!”

“What the hell?” I dropped my hand from Henry’s mouth and looked for the source of the noise.

Mr. Devitt’s mouth quirked up. “And I think your language might be the most intriguing thing about you, Miss Jenkins.”

I shot him a look as Sophie/Drusilla came panting up the stairs. She barely spared Henry a glance.

“Listen, Emilia, I swear to God it isn’t my fault, but I was showing my tourists the portable platform, just a quick demo in the lobby while it was empty, and then it wouldn’t turn off properly, and it is only a prototype, you know, so not all of the bugs are worked out, and then after the tunnel opened up, there was a time-storm—”

“Wait,
what
?”

“A time-storm—a little one, stop looking at me like that, Emilia, Christ. It wouldn’t even register on the L’Engle scale. And so I sent them back to the hotel…” she seemed to really notice Henry for the first time. “Oh, hello,” she dropped into her terrible accent. “You must be Henry Devitt. Emily was telling me all about your heroic rescue earlier.” She gave him a coy smile and tossed her head so that the artificial ringlets set around her face bounced and swayed.

“Just a moment ago, you referred to Miss Jenkins as Emilia.” He didn’t bother to bow or kiss her hand or any of the other things he should have done upon making someone’s acquaintance. “Is that…a pet name of sorts?”

“Yes,” I said. I glanced at Henry, then thought
what the hell
. With the things Sophie had said, he’d already need a reset from the Bureau. I looked back at my former classmate. “Now, start at the beginning. What happened?”

Sophie gestured hopelessly to her brooch, which, upon further inspection, was glowing very faintly and emitting the occasional golden pinprick of light. “I just wanted to show my tourists the platform,” she said, her voice once again very American and very whiny. “It’s worked perfectly every other time I’ve used it. I don’t know what happened.”

“Did you calibrate it once you arrived in London?” I asked. Even stationary platforms had to be calibrated. Without precise measurements, traveling was like it was in the early days—wild, unpredictable and with a fifty percent chance at best of landing where you meant to.

I could tell by the way Sophie’s face froze what the answer was.

“You better come to the lobby.” She grabbed my hand and tugged me down the stairs. Henry Devitt followed.

I sighed at him.

“I’m coming,” he said, before I could say anything.

I sighed louder.

“Aren’t you eager to prove your spiritualism to me?” he provoked.

A final sigh. “Fine. But I am not responsible for your safety or your mental health. Understood? I’m not a damn tour guide.”

“Hey,” Sophie/Drusilla said, but the protest lacked feeling.

Once I alighted onto the lobby floor, I saw what had Sophie so alarmed. The air itself seemed to spit tachyons, giving the room the illusion of a sparkling gold mist.

“It’s like being in a snow globe full of glitter,” Sophie said.

“Poetic. Really.”

She glared at me. “So what do we do?”

“We?
We?
” I rounded on her. “I don’t recall
us
playing with an un-calibrated prototype in the middle of the busiest opera house in London. If you could have resisted the urge to show off for three seconds—”

“You are just jealous!” she accused. “You’ve always been jealous of the company, and if you would have taken the stupid job offer that I made Daddy give you instead of insisting on a
useless
degree and living in that hovel, then you could have had nice things too!”

“I don’t need your pity!” My voice echoed across the marble floors. “Did you ever think that maybe I actually care about what I do? That I like to learn about it? That I want to get better? This isn’t about money, it’s about enriching our lives and our society—”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, spare me that graduate student bullshit. Yes, eating noodles for lunch and dinner every day is
enriching
. Jesus.”

Henry Devitt didn’t bother hiding his naked delight at our exchange. “I feel like I purchased a ticket for the wrong entertainment.”

We both glared at him.

“And your stupid, fucking storm is spreading, Sophie, you idiot,” I said. While we’d been arguing, the golden mist had crept over the entire lobby. “Great. Just great. A time-storm in the Savoy. Marvelous.”

“Your sarcasm isn’t helping,” Sophie said, and then her anger split apart, leaving a very adorable pout in its place. “What am I going to do?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Hand me the brooch,” I said through my teeth.

She unpinned it. And then a small scream came from the stairs.

We all turned to see a young woman, quite beautiful and quite terrified. My first thought was that she was one of the opera singers, because the dress she wore was definitely not Victorian. With her fur-trimmed sleeves and wimple, she looked like she’d been teleported straight from a medieval illumination. The 1300s, perhaps. Then she said something nearly incomprehensible, her eyes wide with terror.

Sophie made a noise. “What the hell is she saying?” She faced the stairs. “Speak English, girl, we’re in London!”

“Shut up, Sophie,” I said. “It is English. Middle English.”

The woman spoke again and I listened carefully. “She wants to know where she is. One moment she was in the palace and the next she was here.”

“The palace?” Sophie’s forehead wrinkled. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“There was a palace here centuries ago,” Henry said slowly. “The Savoy Palace.”

Oh no.
I felt the need to slump to the floor as I realized what was happening.

Henry’s voice was uncharacteristically hesitant when he spoke. “Is she…a spirit?”

I didn’t have the energy to lie to him and deal with this crisis. Fines be damned. “She’s as real as you or me. But she’s from another time.”

When the storm had entered through the portable platform, it had created a thin space—the kind exploited by Victorian mediums. Except, instead of a window, it had created something more like a doorway, bridging different eras and sucking in unlucky natives who happened to wander through the location of the temporal disruption.

The problem was that, while Sophie and I had received basic temporal crisis training, this level of problem was a situation for the experts. For the Bureau.

I so did not need this kind of thing associated with me, even if I was completely innocent.

The woman from the Middle Ages was properly crying now, clutching the railing and babbling incoherently about finding the lord of the palace. “Shh,” I told her. “I promise that we’ll get you back home. Somehow.” My doubt must have permeated my rusty Middle English because she looked not at all reassured.

“Quid accidit?”
someone demanded from behind me.

I spun around. Sophie shrieked. A Roman soldier stood with his hand on the hilt of his short sword, his red cape fluttering around his bare calves.

“Quis es tu?”

“We are so screwed,” Sophie moaned.

“There’s that
we
again.”

“Quis mihi quid agatur,”
the soldier insisted. Wimple-lady started crying harder.

“Everyone just calm down,” I said. The soldier’s grip tightened on the sword. “Calm down,” I told him in Latin. “You are dreaming.”

“I am not dreaming,” he said stiffly. “I was on watch. If I was dreaming, then I would be asleep and I’ve never fallen asleep on watch and I never will.”

Great. Now I’d insulted his pride. I swiped through my mental file of Roman soldiers. Surely there was something that would placate him, even for a moment, so I could try to figure this out.

“I think it is a vision from Mithras himself.” I schooled my face into a piously confidential expression. “The Bull-slayer only chooses the worthy to reveal his secrets to.”

“But we are not in a temple. There was no ceremony tonight.”

I shrugged. “I for one do not dictate the workings of the gods. The god of light may work whichever way he wishes.”

He narrowed his eyes, but years of faithfulness to the mystery god of the military won out. “Perhaps you are right.”

I held out my hand. “Sophie. Brooch. Now.”

She handed it to me and then both she and Henry leaned over my hand to watch it. It glowed brighter now, surrounded by a palpable haze of tachyons, and it felt not quite hot but stinging in my hand, like it was charged with static electricity.

“The jewel in the center is the activation switch,” Sophie said. “But it’s not working.”

I tried pressing it and, alas, Sophie was right. Nothing happened. If anything, the golden mist in the lobby seemed to spread even faster.

“We have to call it in,” I said.

Sophie’s chin quivered. “Emilia, no.”

I shook my head. “Sorry, but there’s no other way. If that mist spreads, more and more apparitions from the past are going to surface. And if it gets strong enough, then the doorway will start to work both ways, pulling people from 1888 into the past and into the future. The Bureau has to get in here and contain it.”

“But I’ll be suspended from travelling.” She sniffled a little.

“It’s not like you need the money.”

“Maybe I don’t do it for the money,” she shot back. “Have you ever thought about that?”

“Whatever.” But I did feel a little bad. Even for Sophie, who would have an army of well-paid lawyers to wrangle her suspension down to the minimum of three months, it was still not a comfortable prospect to be in trouble with the Bureau. But if I didn’t call it in then I’d be in the same boat and there was no way I could risk that. I didn’t have the money or the lawyers and I needed a spotless record if I had any hope of being tenured someday.

“Can someone explain to me exactly what’s going on?” Henry asked pleasantly.

“Sophie and I are time travellers and Sophie’s brooch can open a doorway between times,” I said. At this point, exposing a native to future knowledge was the least of my worries. If I didn’t get this taken care of, all the natives here would be exposed to God only knew what.

I pulled my skirt and petticoats up, up past the top of my silk stockings to where I kept my emergency transmitter strapped to my thigh. I slid it out of its holster and let my dress drop, looking up to see Henry’s eyes dark with lust.

“Wherever you are from, I think I would like it there.” His voice was light, but his expression was something else entirely. I felt that tugging at my core again.