Interesting Places (Interesting Times #2) (13 page)

“Excuse me?” Oliver asked. “What is
this? Who are you?”

The little girl nodded at him. “Mr.
Jones. It is agreeable to see you again after all this time.”

“All this time?” Oliver took a step
forward but his legs suddenly felt weak and he nearly tripped. “We’ve never
met,” he said, bracing his hands on his knees for support.

“Of that you are mistaken,” the girl
said, “but you are forgiven for being unable to remember. You will probably
want to sit down for what is about to happen.” The werewolf took Oliver by the
arm and led him to one of the chairs. Oliver sat down hard, his head beginning
to spin.

“What’s happening?” Oliver asked.
“What did you do?”

“Nothing at all, Mr. Jones,” the girl
replied. “It is rather this house that is affecting you. It exists in its own
timeline, you see, and is now restoring you to yours. The correct timeline,
that is. I fear the process can be somewhat unpleasant, though.”

For a moment Oliver thought he saw
the walls of the house starting to melt, and then his vision snapped back into
focus. One moment he was sitting in the chair and the next the chair was gone,
but he was still sitting as if it hadn’t moved at all. And then the chair was
back. For a brief moment he caught sight of another woman, a redhead with a
stern expression, who marched down the stairs and then out the front door,
slamming it behind her. A moment later he saw another little girl who could
have been the first one’s twin, but this one was wearing a Girl Scout uniform,
and then she vanished as well.

He heard a rustling and looked at the
stairs. A small cat ran down the steps and made a beeline for him, leaping onto
his lap and purring with wild enthusiasm. Oliver couldn’t remember anyone ever
being so happy to see him before. “Hi there,” he said, scratching the cat
behind the ears.

“Hey, boss,” the cat said. “I sure
missed you.”

Oliver stared at the cat in
disbelief. “Aw, hell,” he said. Werewolves and vampires were hard enough to
deal with. A talking cat was where he drew the line.

Then his vision filled with stars.
The last thing he remembered before passing out was seeing the werewolf
reaching for the teapot, only to have the little girl slap its paw away.

Chapter 14

Oliver had, to the best of his
recollection, had only one dream in his life. It had been while he’d been on
the run from the Kalatari, when his entire life had been undergoing a radical
change. He’d assumed that his brain had needed to dream in order to cope with
what was going on back then.

He was aware that people often said
that everyone had dreams all the time and just forgot them, but prior to that
one time he didn’t have a single memory of dreaming at any other point in his
life. He’d asked a doctor about it once during a routine physical, wondering if
maybe something could be wrong with him. His doctor had told him not to worry
about it. At the time, Oliver had doubted the doctor actually believed him.

Now he was dreaming again. That much
he was certain of. He dreamed that he’d been in his office at the hedge fund
six months ago when a man claiming to be an investigator with the SEC had
visited, asking to interview him about some government matter. That man had
turned out to be an assassin hired by the Kalatari to kill him. His life had
been saved by Tyler Jacobsen, who had arrived with only seconds to spare. Tyler
was a tall man with a fondness for Hawaiian shirts, who just happened to be a
werewolf. He’d met and been punched by Sally Rain, a fiery redhead who was as
deadly with her two pistols as anyone Oliver had ever seen. They both worked
for Artemis, who physically appeared to be a ten-year-old girl. She’d been
wearing a Girl Scout uniform the first time Oliver had met her. Artemis was not
ten years old, however. Nobody on the team knew how old she truly was, but
Oliver was willing to guess it was somewhere in the thousands of years.

When the episode with the Kalatari
was over, Artemis had offered him a job, and he’d taken it. He’d simply seen
too many things to go back to his old, boring life. He’d known then that he’d
never be the same.

And then there was Jeffrey, his cat.
Jeffrey had been a stray that Oliver had taken to feeding. Through means he
didn’t understand, Oliver had given him the power to speak. Jeffrey could be a
bit of a pain, but Oliver loved him. He wasn’t just a pet anymore; he was a
friend.

In his dream his friends had been
searching for him, knowing that he was a prisoner of the cyborgs. Artemis had
promised to find him, and Artemis was the kind of person who took promises very
seriously. She would have given up at nothing to keep her word.

Oliver opened his eyes. He was still
in the living room of the house the werewolf had carried him to, but now he
recognized his surroundings. This was the house in Russian Hill where time
stood still. It couldn’t even be seen from the outside if you didn’t know how
to look for it. The only explanation Oliver had been given was that the house
existed at a fixed point in time. It would always be here, unchanged,
regardless of whatever was happening outside it.

Tyler sat in another chair, no longer
in wolf form. He’d changed into one of his myriad Hawaiian shirts. Oliver had
wondered in the past how many of those shirts Tyler owned. Every time he
“wolfed out” whatever clothes he was wearing at the time were torn apart. He
suspected Tyler shopped in bulk.

Tyler perked up when he saw Oliver
awake. “How are you feeling, buddy?”

Oliver had a splitting headache.
“Like I got blackout drunk last night.”

“Yeah. I get that.” He took a sip
from one of Artemis’s teacups. “It wasn’t pleasant for me, either, but you had
it worse. You had longer to catch up on.”

“Catch up?”

“To the right time.”

Oliver shook his head. He’d been
offered LSD once in college and turned it down. If the effects had been
anything like this, he was glad he had.

Artemis entered the room carrying a
tray with a bowl of steaming hot soup on top. Jeffrey followed her closely,
watching the tray with barely-disguised intent. She put the tray down on the
table next to Oliver while Jeffrey hopped up onto his lap. “You should eat, Mr.
Jones.”

“I’m not really hungry. I think I
might be sick, actually.”

“I can imagine you don’t feel like
eating, but you need your energy.”

“I’ll help you eat it,” Jeffrey said.
“It has chicken and shrimp.”

Artemis took a third chair and
studied Oliver’s face. “Tell me. What do you remember?”

That was a question Oliver had been
struggling with for the past few moments. “I remember another life.”

Artemis nodded. “Let me be more
specific. What is the very
last
thing you remember?”

“We were in the office. I had a
hangover. There was a…
timequake
, you said. That’s what you called it.”

“Very good. And what happened then?”

Oliver looked around. “I woke up
here. In this chair. But…I have
other
memories. There was a cyborg
invasion. They took me prisoner and ran tests on me. Maria showed up and broke
me out.” He looked at Artemis. “Did I just
imagine
all of that?”

“No, not at all. That happened.”

“But I also remember it
not
happening. I met you six months ago. There were no cyborgs. Not until that one
in the parking garage who wanted to kill Sally.” He looked around. “Where the
hell
is
Sally?”

Tyler grimaced. “If she is still
alive, she’s back on her world,” Artemis said. “While her deception of you was,
in some respects, quite clever, her plan on the whole was remarkably stupid.”

“Her plan?”

“She tried to change the past,” Tyler
said.

“Changing the past is bad news!”
Jeffrey intoned dramatically. “It is the one thing you must
never
do!”
Oliver stared at the cat in surprise. “I’ve been cooped up in here for weeks,”
Jeffrey said. “I learned all about this stuff.”

“Weeks?” Oliver asked.

“It is a bit of a long story, Mr.
Jones,” Artemis said. “In some respects, I am a bit like this house. Time does
not affect me in that same way it affects other things. However, I do know when
time is
wrong
. I recognized the timeline fracture when the cyborgs
crossed over and I activated our contingency plan, which was for all team
members to come to this house in order that they would be restored to their
correct timelines.”

“Okay…”

“Being a fixed point in time, the
house is unconcerned with what goes on outside. It only cares about its own
timeline, which happens to be the same as ours. When you came inside, your
memories of the correct timeline were restored, even though that timeline does
not currently exist.”

“Are you saying the house is
conscious
?”
Oliver asked.

“Not in any sense you would
understand consciousness,” Artemis said.

“Are you confused yet?” Tyler asked.

“Yes,” Oliver said.

“Try to keep up, boss,” Jeffrey said.

“You’re the expert now?” Oliver asked
the cat.

“Compared to you I’m the Doctor.”

Oliver was beginning to rethink
Jeffrey’s television privileges. Letting an intelligent cat watch
Doctor Who
might not be the best idea. He might start getting dangerous ideas. He looked
back at Artemis. “So what’s going on outside? Are the cyborgs gone?”

“No. At this very moment they are
attempting to locate you and Mr. Jacobsen. They should lack the capacity to
discern the existence of this house, however.”

“But what if they do…
discern
the existence of this house?”

Artemis shrugged. “I truly do not
know. In the house’s timeline they never existed on this planet, so they might
simply cease to exist if they cross into it. Or the entire universe might
explode. I am fairly certain it would be one or the other.”

“Oh,” Oliver said. “Of course.” He
looked around. “Where’s Seven?”

“Dead,” Tyler said. “They got him
when Santa Fe fell. The rest of us barely made it out of there.”

“But I thought you came straight
here…”

“We were not
in
San Francisco
at the time of the invasion,” Artemis said. “Getting here took a great deal of
time and work, and was not without significant losses.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” Seven hadn’t been
the cuddliest person Oliver had ever met, but he’d liked the man. The others
had worked with him for far longer, of course.

“It is no matter,” Artemis said. “He
will be restored when we correct the timeline. Everything will go back to the
way it was.”

“And the others come back, too,”
Tyler said. “Maria. God, we really could have used her.”

“So you brought her here?” Oliver asked.
“She knew who I was, so obviously you did. How did you recruit her?”

“She was on a one woman, or I guess
one
vampire
mission to destroy the cyborgs after they killed John
Blackwell and the others,” Tyler said.

“They got the vampires,” Oliver said
quietly.

“Oh, yeah. They went down fighting,
though. Blackwell’s group took an entire battalion of cyborgs with them but in
the end they were just too outnumbered. Maria got away and was still out there
ripping heads off every night. We brought her here and she got her memories of
the world where Blackwell didn’t die. She said she’d do anything for us if it
meant fixing the timeline and getting her master back.”

“And I was there, too,” Jeffrey said.

“You were with the vampires?” Oliver
asked, surprised.

“No,” Jeffrey said. “I was a few
blocks away hunting for mice. Those damn robot people never throw anything
away, so leftover food got pretty scarce. That dog,” he nodded at Tyler,
“scooped me up and brought me in here. I don’t mind telling you I was pretty
freaked out when I found out there were human dogs.”

“He scratched the shit out of me,”
Tyler said.

“But then once I got inside here, I
got my memories back and I could talk and think again. It was pretty great.”

Oliver scratched the cat behind the
ears. “Good job,” he said. Jeffrey purred.

“Good job?” Tyler asked. “I’m the one
who found him. And he never apologized for scratching me.”

“Did someone say something?” Jeffrey
asked. “I can’t hear it when dogs talk.”

“So what was Sally’s plan?” Oliver
asked Artemis. “I know she felt pretty bad about what she did to the cyborgs
after the war. So…she went back in time and
didn’t
kill them?”

“That would have been problematic
enough,” Artemis said. “It appears that she took the time machine back to a
point before the mirror here had been destroyed, so that she was able to return
home. But from Seven’s analysis of the cyborgs we managed to capture before his
death, we know that not only were the cyborgs not destroyed by the nanobot
virus, but that the cure was never deployed, either. This leads me to believe
Sally removed her sister from the research facility where she had been working
on it.”

“The facility where she died,” Oliver
said.

“Yeah,” Tyler said. “With no cure,
the cyborgs won. They probably took over the whole planet.”

“And found the mirror there?” Oliver
asked.

“We believe the mirror on their world
was destroyed,” Artemis said. “At some point before the invasion here we found
we could no longer use ours to travel and assumed they’d lost the war. Besides,
if the cyborgs had used it to get here, they would have been contained in Vault
3. However, if they analyzed the remains of their world’s mirror, they may have
incorporated some aspects of it into their developing teleportation
technology.”

“Which explains why they can move
world-to-world but not place-to-place,” Jeffrey said. “See? I really have been
paying attention.”

Oliver nodded. “It makes sense. Well,
as much sense as any of this makes. They got close to us, like the cyborg that
attacked Sally in the garage.”

“
Indeed
,” Jeffrey said. Oliver
blinked at him in surprise. “That was my Artemis impression,” the cat whispered
loudly.

“If you’re done?” Artemis asked.

“He’s done,” Oliver said. “So how do
we fix any of this?”

“There is only one possibility,”
Artemis said, “as much as I detest it. We must stop Sally from changing the
past. Once the timeline is set right in her world, ours will revert to normal.”

“And how we do that?”

“It’s kinda complicated,” Tyler said.

Oliver resisted the urge to laugh.
“More complicated than any of this?”

Artemis nodded. “We must go back in
time, Mr. Jones. If we are to save our world, it is the only option open to
us.”

“We have to get back to Vault 3,”
Tyler said.

“You guys are screwed,” Jeffrey said.