Guardians of Time (10 page)

Jane stood up. Carl had taken Shane in his
arms for this part of the trip, and he stood too. But even though
the bus had stopped and the hospital was only a stone’s throw away,
he hesitated.

Dafydd canted his head. “What else do you
need from me? Just name it.”

“Nothing.” Carl shifted Shane more to his
left shoulder so he could stick out his right hand to Dafydd.
“You’ve done more than we ever—” he stopped, his voice choked with
emotion.

Dafydd clasped his hand. “It is the least we
could do.”

Carl looked around the bus. “I want to say
this to all of you. The others may not be grateful. They may think
they deserve more than you’ve given them, but every one of you
risked your lives for Shane, and I want you to know that we will
remember you forever. I’m only sorry we may never see you
again.”

“You never know.” Meg stood up and hugged
him, kissed Shane’s cheek, and then hugged Jane.

“If you find yourselves in trouble, call
us,” Jane said as she held Meg’s shoulders and looked into her
eyes. “We might be able to help.”

“Thank you.”

The other women hugged her, and then the men
shook hands all around. Math eyed the hand Carl offered him before
accepting it for what it was. He didn’t understand how the custom
of shaking hands instead of clasping forearms had started. The
whole point was to know if an enemy—or a friend—had a weapon up his
sleeve, not whether or not he could break the bones in your hand if
he squeezed hard enough.

When Carl reached Llywelyn, he surprised
Math—and maybe even himself—by giving him a real bow. None of the
bus passengers had ever been very good at bowing, worse even than
the Americans, who found obeisance amusing more than anything
else.

“Sire,” Carl said. “Good luck. Seven hundred
years on, everyone here in Gwynedd would be rooting for you if they
knew what you were trying to do.”

“Thank you,” Llywelyn said.

They left. Dafydd followed them down the
steps and stood in the doorway until they had crossed the parking
lot and entered through the front doors of the hospital. Then he
came back up the steps.

“All right.” Dafydd clapped his hands
together once. “How we doing? Dad?”

Llywelyn waved a hand at his son. “Don’t
worry about me.”

“Math?”

“Other than being nearly killed, all I’ve
seen so far of Avalon is the inside of a bus where everyone speaks
a language I understand,” Math said. “Ask me later.”

Anna nudged Math and said in an undertone.
“The King of England is back, and he’s running a meeting.”

Math suppressed a smile.

“Callum?” David said.

Callum had looked up at Dafydd’s initial
query to Llywelyn and now answered him. “You might be interested to
know that three days after the new year both Wales and Scotland are
voting on independence from England.”

Rachel’s mouth fell open. “Really? How did
that happen? They weren’t even talking about it a year ago.”

“In the aftermath of the bombings and,
apparently, riots this last year, the movement has gained
momentum,” Callum said.

Llywelyn smirked. “The people of Wales have
finally had enough, have they?”

“Took them long enough,” Math said.

Dafydd shot an amused look at both Math and
his father before turning to Mark. “What have you found?”

Mark’s fingers had been flying all over the
letters on his laptop from the moment he opened it. “Working on
it.”

Math didn’t ask what he was working on and
neither did Dafydd.

“Moving on, we need to figure out what we’re
doing first. Now that we’re here, do we split up or stick together?
I just don’t know how much time we have before we’ll be tracked
down.”

“We need new phones,” Darren said,
“especially since I left mine in the vehicle Callum and I abandoned
in Cardiff a year ago.”

“I agree,” Callum said. “We should buy some
spares too.”

“What we shouldn’t be doing is riding around
Gwynedd in a Cardiff bus,” Rachel said. “We stand out.”

“Thus, the aforementioned international
incident,” Dafydd said.

“My father’s clinic is just down the road,”
Rachel said. “How about we go there, and while my father sees to
Meg, the rest of you buy what we need. I’ll ask my father if it’s
okay to borrow some of his equipment to take back with us. That’s
probably easier than trying to buy it.”

Cassie laughed. “Borrow permanently, you
mean.”

Dafydd nodded. “That works. We’ll leave Mom,
Dad, Anna, Math, and Rachel at Rachel’s dad’s clinic.”

“Who’s going to drive? I’m afraid that won’t
be my contribution to this endeavor,” Math said dryly.

“I’ll do it.” Cassie moved around Dafydd and
plopped herself in the driver’s seat. “What does this thing run on,
anyway?”

“Petrol,” Callum said, “but it takes a
special nozzle. We can’t simply fill it at any station.”

“Good thing Wales is a small country, then.”
Cassie buckled the seat belt and shifted gears. “Left hand manual
drive is always fun.” She glanced back at Rachel. “Point me in the
right direction?”

Dafydd moved aside and sat down in Cassie’s
vacated seat, while Rachel took his place behind Cassie’s chair in
order to direct her to Abraham Wolff’s clinic. Dafydd looked past
Anna to Math. “I’m really glad you’re here, Math, because I’m
counting on you and Dad to keep Anna and Mom safe.”

“I don’t know what good I’m going to be,”
Math said. “I don’t understand this world at all.”

“There are forces that could be working
against us—powerful forces that include governments and
mercenaries,” Dafydd said. “Not to belabor the point, but every
time I come to the modern world, I’m reminded of my ninth grade
education and relatively young age. All anyone sees when they look
at me in an overgrown kid.
The King of England? Don’t make me
laugh.
I have no more authority than you do. If we’re going to
leave you and Dad at the clinic with Mom and Anna, you need to keep
your eyes open. Act as if we’ve taken an enemy position, and we
don’t know what their next move is or the resources they have to
counter us.”

Math nodded, surprised and also pleased at
what Dafydd was asking of him. “I will not fail you.”

“You never have.” Dafydd sat back in his
seat and closed his eyes for a moment.

When Math had made the impulsive decision to
board the bus, he’d assumed he would be an appendage to
Anna—useless, really—and good only for holding her hand. But he
still wore his sword, and he knew how to use it. He had no qualms
about using it.

Anna nudged Dafydd, who still had his eyes
closed. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

Dafydd opened his eyes to look at his
sister. “We are. It was the right thing to do.”

“Exactly,” Anna said. “Don’t worry so much.
Everything’s going to be okay.”

Math thought Anna was being just a wee bit
optimistic, but he had to admit that so far things had gone more
smoothly than they had any right to expect. The drive to the clinic
from the hospital was short—not so much in distance, but because
the road was so smooth and the bus could go so fast that what would
have taken an hour in his world took minutes here.

Math deliberately hadn’t paid attention to
the scenery passing outside the bus because he became nauseated
every time he looked out the window. Then Cassie slowed the bus and
turned into yet another parking lot. She killed the engine and
doused the lights, and then everyone exited the bus.

As Math stepped off the bottom step and
helped Anna down, even though she didn’t need his help, he looked
around with interest. He even went so far as to bend to the road,
sweeping away the layer of snow to get at the hard black stone
beneath. It was so smooth it explained instantly why the bus could
maintain the speed it had without jarring the passengers’ teeth out
of their heads.

They stood next to a two-story building.
Lights shone all around it—not torches, he understood, but light
glowing from within glass bowls and powered by electricity—an
endless source of energy upon which everything in this world
depended.

Cassie had parked the bus alongside the
stone walkway that surrounded the building. Low cut grass, covered
today in snow like everything else, filled the space between the
walkway and the side of the building.

Math looked up into the sky and blinked his
lashes against the snow that continued to fall. It was the only
thing in the scene that was in the least familiar to him, and it
was comforting to know that it still snowed in this world.

Anna squeezed his hand. “You’ll be able to
see the landscape tomorrow. The mountains and the sea will look the
same, even if nothing else does.”

Then a vehicle many times smaller than the
bus—even smaller than the ‘car’ in which Bronwen had driven David
and Ieuan into Wales—turned off the road and parked beside the bus.
A man of small stature with hair and beard shot with gray opened
the door. He stood half-in and half-out of the vehicle, gazing at
Rachel, who took several steps towards him.

The man then closed the car door with a
clunk and stepped onto the sidewalk in time to catch Rachel in his
arms as she threw herself at him. “Dad!”

Abraham Wolff rocked back and forth, holding
his daughter and crying himself while she sobbed into his shoulder.
Some of the others looked away, studying the trees surrounding the
clinic, as if by watching they would be interfering with the
reunion, but Math observed them closely. He’d known, from Anna,
that the love between a parent and a child in Avalon was no
different than Math’s love for his sons, but he was interested to
see it for himself.

After a minute, Rachel collected herself and
relinquished her tight hold on her father. She wiped at her eyes
with her fingers, while holding out the other hand to Darren. “This
is my friend Darren, Dad.” And then she introduced everybody
else.

Abraham Wolff eyed Darren, and Math didn’t
think Rachel’s father was confused for a single heartbeat about who
Darren was to his daughter. Still, he greeted him cordially enough,
with a firm handshake.

“Let’s get inside.” Abraham walked towards
the front door of the building, a white square held in his
hand.

As he swept the square across a black box
beside the door, a high-pitched wail sounded in the distance, like
a donkey screaming but far higher and more piercing. Math spun
around, his hand on the hilt of his sword. “What is that?”

“Sirens,” Dafydd said.

Abraham held the door open. “Are they for
you?”

“Could be.” Dafydd tipped his head at Math.
“Get them inside and let Dr. Wolff work. We’ll take care of
this.”

Llywelyn gripped his son’s upper arm. “What
are you going to do?”

Dafydd glanced over at the others, who
remained outside the building. “I’m pretty sure we’re about to lie
through our teeth.”

David

E
veryone gathered
around Callum to await his instructions, which David found both
amusing and interesting. He was glad he had a big enough ego to
withstand what he could have perceived as a slight. In the Middle
Ages, he was the focus of any conference, but in the twenty-first
century, Callum was their leader—and David was completely happy
with that fact.

“What are we going to tell them?” Cassie
said.

Mark Jones held up his phone to get their
attention. “I’m already seeing talk in some of the chat rooms of
the more fringy conspiracy groups. The Welsh Nationalist site is
going crazy.”

“What are they saying?” Callum said.

“They use a lot of code, but there’s a
definite reference to
him
.”

“And who might that be?” Darren said.

“The man who is the return of King Arthur,”
Mark said, with an eye on David, “who will unite Wales against the
Saxons. Who else?”

“Nobody is going to take such a claim
seriously,” David said.

Mark made a
maybe
motion with his
head. “Regular citizens aren’t likely to give credence to something
like that, but there are people in the Security Service who
actually know what’s going on. They know about you and your
father.”
The Security Service
was the official name for
MI-5. Sometimes Callum and the others also referred to it by its
in-house name, Box 500.

The sirens came closer and resolved
themselves into a single echoing screech emanating from one car. It
came around the corner from the direction Abraham Wolff had driven,
turned into the parking lot, and braked to a halt sideways across
the back of the bus. The driver seemed to be under the illusion
that the placement of his minnow of a car would stop the whale of a
bus from going wherever it wanted to go.

Two officers got out of the police car. One
was a short, stocky gray-haired man in his fifties, not dissimilar
in appearance to Abraham, though without the beard. He headed
towards the front door of the clinic where David and his friends
waited. His partner, who’d been driving, was closer in age to
David, and he walked around the far side of the bus, disappearing
for a moment from David’s view.

Callum held his MI-5 badge in readiness and,
instead of waiting for the older policeman to reach him, stepped
out in front of the others and held it up.

In the United States, Callum would have said
federal agents!
but here the appropriate words were, “We’re
with the Security Service.”

Darren, Mark, and Cassie flashed their
badges too, while David tried to look inconspicuous, staying in the
shadow of the shelter over the front door of the clinic. It was
still snowing, and he was cold in his sweater, woolen or not. He
wanted a parka like Anna had.

His attempt to hide was unsuccessful,
however, since the patrol officer latched immediately onto him,
nodding his head in David’s direction. “Who’s he?”