Infinityglass (6 page)

There was nothing there. My toes were whole and perfect, not a scab or a scrape to be seen.

“What the hell?” I stared at the stained wool in my hands and sorted through all the layers before doing the same with the cotton. I’d always healed fast.

But never this fast.

It was in line with everything else that had been wrong lately. I wanted to talk to Poe, and I’d texted, but he wasn’t answering.

I pushed up off the floor and headed for the shower, stripping my arms out of my leotard before I shut the door.

I couldn’t sleep. Or eat. I didn’t need to. My vision had sharpened. The simplest of sounds echoed inside my brain like monosyllabic earworms. When I practiced changing my body, I could hold shapes without tiring. At all. I’d even been able to manipulate my vocal cords.

I stared at my God-given body in the full-length mirror. Hours of dance kept me thin, but I’d finally gotten past the awkward side of it, thanks to muscle tone. Smooth, fair skin, even though there should’ve been scars on my shoulder and my leg. Dark brown hair and hazel eyes, like my mother.

I turned away from the mirror and stepped into the shower.

When I got out, I had a new text. Dad, requesting an audience.

I avoided looking at the bench as I crossed the courtyard. No little girl, but the lullaby still hung in the air, floating on the cold autumn wind.

The Chronos offices occupied a full square block in the Central Business District, just off Canal, in a building designated for Girard Industries. Heavy security discouraged most visitors, and if anyone managed to get through, two floors of apparent telemarketers would’ve bored them away. Most days, my dad worked from that building. But today, I’d been called to his home office.

I liked to call it the throne room. He didn’t like it at all.

“Poe is
where
?”

“Tennessee.” Dad wore his usual poker face. “ICU at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He was hurt, badly, but is expected to recover.”

“How—”

“I don’t know how, Hallie. Just that he had a terrible knife injury and almost bled to death. But he didn’t.”

I blew out a deep breath. Dad’s words rolled through my brain like the crawler at the bottom of a news broadcast.

“When’s he coming back to New Orleans?” I asked.

Dad’s eyes closed briefly, and he pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger.

“Dad?”

“No idea.” He dropped his hand. “But if I let him come back, things are going to change.”

If
. I wanted to let loose, like Godzilla on an unsuspecting city, but people crossed oceans to avoid Paul Girard’s anger. Not a good idea to cause more if I wanted to get Poe back.

“No one else has the same skill he does,” I said, trying to reason. “Are you really willing to let him walk?”

“Possibly, yes.”

“Can we talk about
why
?”

My father went to the mahogany liquor cabinet, took a few ice cubes from the ice bucket, and dropped them into a glass. He poured a glass half full of amber-colored liquid. It was only on the rocks because lunchtime hadn’t rolled around yet. After that, it was straight-up.

“Poe’s loyalties have come into question.”

“Who would he be loyal to besides us?”

Dad set his glass down firmly and wiped his mouth with his thumb. His hands went to his hips, pushing back his suit jacket, exposing the lines of his holster.

“No,” I said. “No way. Not Poe.”

The cutting edge of betrayal overrode the feeling of dread
she
usually conjured up.

My mother.

“How did you find out?” I asked.

“She called. As a courtesy.”

I could imagine how courteous that conversation had been.

Dad and I didn’t talk about her, and only in business terms when we did. She’d done a bunk when I was ten, though she’d stayed at Chronos. I rarely went on jobs for her and had started to refuse them altogether, so a couple of years ago, she’d “made things easier for all of us” by choosing to operate out of her own office. She’d only made things easier for herself.

Teague Girard might be able to give up her family, but she’d sure as hell stick around for science.

“Why? Why would Poe do that?”

“I think you should sit down,” Dad said.

My head came up sharply.
Weakness
wasn’t in Paul Girard’s vocabulary, yet he sounded unsure.

“You know I’m about business. Always have been.” He filled
his glass a little higher than halfway this time. “That’s why your mother pursued me, because of my connections and business sense.”

Not because she loved him.

“She brought Chronos to me.” He took a drink. “This much you know.”

I nodded.

“Chronos had chosen to be esoteric instead of savvy, and she wanted to change that. Time is money, and things were going downhill. There are people with special time skills all over the world. I didn’t know about those talents until your mother. Once I believed, I threw my backing behind Chronos. It didn’t take me very long to see the benefits, so I got involved.” He swirled the Maker’s Mark whisky in his glass. “There were people who didn’t agree with the way your mother wanted to handle things. One is the head of the Hourglass.”

“The ones who do the squeaky clean jobs?”

“The perfectly legal ones, yes.” He took another drink, a long one. “Your mother has recently been involved with them.”

“If they’re into legality, why would they hook up with her? Don’t they know who she is?”
How
she is?

“I don’t think they had a lot of choice in the matter.”

Mom had sacrificed our familial relationship, and now she’d ditched our business one, too. She couldn’t cut us out any more clearly if she’d used an X-Acto knife.

“And as far as Poe is concerned, I believe your mother persuaded him to help her instead of us.”

The hits just kept coming.

“He wouldn’t betray me like that.” He couldn’t have. He was my only friend.

“I hope not, Hallie, but I’m not sure what to expect from anyone anymore, and until I know exactly what your mother is up to, I’m going to hire extra security.”

“Come on, Dad,” I whined in protest. “What are you going to do, put a guard on every inside door?”

“Just yours.”

I put my face in my hands to stifle the sound of my groan. “You can’t—”

“I can. I’m making my final decision this afternoon.” He set his jaw. “Whoever I choose will start tomorrow. Prepare yourself.”

My phone rang just as I reached the top of the stairs.

I didn’t want to answer, but I always did. I stopped in front of the window seat in the upper hallway that looked out over the street. “Hello, Mother.”

“Good morning, Hallie.”

“It’s already afternoon.” I wondered if she was in a different time zone. I strained to listen for background noises on her end of the line.

“Why must you always split hairs?”

“What do you want?” I dropped down onto the red velvet cushion and watched a dragonfly repeatedly crash into the window. I figured they’d all have taken to the swamps with the recent cold snap.

“You’ve usually hung up by this point in our conversations. What’s stopping you today?”

Poe. The fact that my mother always had me on a hook. The endless pull between wanting her approval and wishing she didn’t exist at all. It tore at me constantly, leaving my insides busted up and oozing. “I know you want something. Might as well find out what it is now.”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“Please.”

She sighed. “There’s something you and Poe retrieved for your father. I need to know its location.”

“Oh. That’s why I rank a phone call.”

“You rank a phone call because you’re my daughter.”

“Don’t.” I knew it was wrong to roll around in all my upper handedness, but damned if it didn’t feel good. “You know my involvement ends after the jobs are done. I’m not privy to the location of things, and I seriously doubt Dad would leave whatever you’re looking for lying around for some idiot to come across.”

The implication that she was the idiot remained unspoken, but I rolled around and got dirty in it, too.

She paused. “It doesn’t have to be this way between us.”

I stared at the dragonfly, still bumping against the glass. You’d think it would’ve given up by now.

“Yes, it does. Maybe you should call Dad. Maybe he’ll accidentally pick up, and you can try to weasel the answer out of him.”

I knew she’d already tried. The Poe information had been offered up to try to grease the wheel, and when she hadn’t gotten anything from Dad, she’d bounced to me. Good thing Dad and I could always see her coming.

“Don’t hang up on me, Hallie.” It was said in a definite “mother” tone.

“You almost sound like you’re pulling the parent discipline card. And I
know
that didn’t just happen.” My grip on the phone was deathly. I breathed in through my nose, down to my stomach, like Gina taught me. When I exhaled through my mouth, I loosened my fingers. “Can we be done now?”

“Did you tell your father that you were seeing ripples?”

How did she know?

“I’m not a traveler,” I said cautiously. “Why would I see rips?”

“You aren’t the only one. So am I. It’s impacting everyone with the time gene. Poe, too.”

The mention of Poe sparked my anger, but I didn’t show it. Giving her the satisfaction of knowing how much it bugged me would burn me from the inside out. I wanted to ask her where he was, but held back on that, too. It wasn’t like I could trust her answer, anyway.

“I talked to Amelia and Zooey,” she continued, and I could
swear I heard a tinge of smug. “They both tell me the usual rules don’t apply anymore. They used to be able to talk to a rip when they saw one, singular. Now they see multiples, and the rips don’t acknowledge them.”

Someone was going to need to get on the horn and tell A. and Z. to keep their traps shut when it came to my mom.

“Thanks for the info.” If she thought I was giving her anything in exchange, she’d cracked. “I’ll take it under consideration.”

“Seeing rips isn’t all that’s happening to you, is it, Hallie?”

So sly. Trepidation coiled in my gut. “What do you mean?”

She paused for a minute, and I could see her pacing as she considered what to say, looking out a window onto an unknown city.

“Your cells are regenerating faster and faster. All your faculties now operate at optimal performance. You’re getting stronger every day.”

I sniffed. “I hope it’s after five wherever you are, because you sound like you’re three sheets to the wind.”

“You aren’t sleeping. Your mouth can’t keep up with your brain. I can help you, Hallie.” Her voice was soft, but there was nothing gentle about it. “I’m your mother, and you can trust me.”

I bit back a laugh.

“Say the word. All you have to do is say the word and I’ll be there.”

“Here’s a word. Good-bye.”

“Remember the bedtime stories?” she asked before I could hang up.

I stilled, my grip on the phone tightening again. She was persistent. I’d give her that.

“The ones I used to tell you about an object with abilities that couldn’t be imagined. The Infinityglass had power that could change worlds. You used to believe in that power.”

Our bedtime ritual had been my one constant when Mom lived with us. From the time I was a preschooler until I was ten, every night, I had my bath, a cup of chamomile tea, and story time with my mama. Then she left.

To this day, the smell of chamomile gave me a stomachache.

“Turns out it wasn’t an object, Hallie. It was a person. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you? You can feel it.”

“I can’t feel anything.” I meant it, just not in the way she was referring to.

“When you decide you want to know the truth, I’m a phone call away.”

“If I wanted the truth, Mother, I most certainly wouldn’t get it from you.”

I disconnected, and dropped the phone on the red velvet cushion.

Chapter 4
Dune

W
hen the cab dropped me off in front of the Georgian Apartments, I asked the driver to double-check we were at the right address. A brown portico extended over the entryway, and deep green ivy covered the entire facade. I stepped onto the sidewalk, finally understanding how huge the southern live oaks were.