The Devil's Due (2 page)

“He's not the same, I'm afraid,” Simon said. “But I'm not the same man either.”

He eased her around to look at him. “I pushed you away then and now I can't imagine letting go.”

Exactly as she had that first time, Elizabeth steadied herself on Simon's shoulder and leaned up to kiss him. It was just the barest caress on the corner of his mouth at first before pulling away to look into his eyes. There was nothing tentative or unsure in the man who looked back at her this time. He was hers and she was his. And that was how it was meant to be.

Simon collapsed onto the bed next to Elizabeth and pulled her into his arms. He felt the hot, quick brush of her breaths across his bare chest as she laid her head on his shoulder. They'd stayed in bed for a truly indecent amount of time over the last two days. He didn't remember ever having been so damn happy or, frankly, exhausted in all of his life.

Elizabeth sighed happily. “I think that was a record,” she said still a little breathless.

Simon laughed and pushed his head back into the pillow. This was bliss. He'd never really understood the meaning until now. Lying in bed with his wife in his arms, breathless, that was truly bliss.

Elizabeth's arm rested on his chest and he knew she could feel the pounding of his heart. He covered her hand with his and wondered why they couldn't just stay like this forever.

He closed his eyes and was just giving himself over to the fantasy when the doorbell rang downstairs. “Damn it.”

Elizabeth pushed herself up onto one elbow. “Expecting someone?”

“If that's Jack…” Simon said, his bliss long forgotten.

Elizabeth started to slip out from under the covers. “I'll go.”

Simon caught her arm. “Not looking like that, you're not.”

She laughed and turned back. “I was going to put on a robe.”

“I should hope so,” Simon said with a quirk of his lips, “but that's not what I meant.” He gently urged her to lie back down. “I know I have to share you with the rest of the world, but this,” he said as he caressed her face. “When your cheeks are flush with desire, your lips swollen from my kisses,” he added as he gently traced the outline of her mouth, “I want this to be mine alone.”

Elizabeth's slowing breath quickened. She nodded as she reached up to touch the back of his neck and pull him toward her. The doorbell rang again. This time, followed by a loud knocking.

Simon grunted and rolled out of bed. He put on his robe and strode downstairs.

He yanked open the door with such ferocity the deliveryman yelped in surprise. Simon's expression must have been as thunderous as he felt because the deliveryman actually took two steps back before muttering something about England.

Simon frowned and glared at the two workers on the path to his house, crates in mid-dolly. He'd nearly forgotten that he and Elizabeth had made arrangements for much of his grandfather's collection and books to be shipped from Hastings.

Simon tightened the sash on his robe and stepped aside. “All right. Put them over there.”

The men wheeled in two large wooden crates and deposited them in the living room. Simon found some money in a drawer in the hall table, tipped them and sent them on their way as quickly as possible.

He looked at the crates as he made his way toward the stairs and hoped they might hold the answers to some of the questions that plagued him about his grandfather. Simon and Elizabeth barely had time enough to go through one tenth of his grandfather's things when they'd been in England. Now that they'd arrived, he felt the urge to explore again.

“Simon?” Elizabeth's voice filtered down from upstairs.

There were, however, other mysteries far more worthy of exploration at the moment, he thought with a smile. Crates temporarily forgotten, Simon started up the stairs again to return to his wife.

The next morning after breakfast, Elizabeth's curiosity led her from the kitchen into the living room. She ran a hand over the rough wood of the crate and felt Simon come up behind her. “Should we?”

They were scheduled to leave on their honeymoon tour of Europe tomorrow. When they'd get back, the new semester would start and life would be normal again. She felt a strange pang at the idea. Normal was so…normal.

Simon came to her side. “Perhaps we should wait until we return.”

Elizabeth fingered the edge of a crate. It was like putting out Christmas presents and saying you should wait until New Year's. “We could just go through this one. I'm practically packed.”

Simon frowned; she knew he understood what practically packed really meant. But, she also knew he wanted to explore it as much as she did.

She looked up at him hopefully and he nodded. “I'll find something to open them with.”

Simon found a hammer and used the claw to pry off the lid of one of the crates. He set it aside and Elizabeth reached into the shredded paper used for cushioning and pulled out one of Sebastian's treasures, a wooden carving of a tiny giraffe.

Simon came to her side and she handed him the small figure. “This all feels a little familiar, doesn’t it?” he said, gesturing to the open crate.

“I'll say.” It was more than familiar. One night more than a year ago now, Elizabeth had walked up to Simon's house to deliver a stack of graded papers. A set of Sebastian's things had arrived that day, too. In one of the boxes was the watch, the watch that sent them back in time, the watch that brought them together.

Simon's grandfather Sebastian, they'd discovered, was a time traveler who worked for something called the Council for Temporal Studies with a specialty in the Occult. It had been a lifelong secret until she and Simon had discovered his pocket watch, his time machine, and accidentally sent themselves to 1929 New York.

After surviving that trip, barely, they'd traveled twice more - once to 1906 San Francisco to save a man's life, and Simon's in the bargain, and then again to 1942 London to help a friend and fellow traveler, Evan Eldridge, lost in time. That's where they'd met Jack.

After completing their mission and dropping off Evan in 1906, Simon and Elizabeth returned to present day Hastings. Once there, arrangements were made for the contents of Sebastian's study to be sent to California. Getting themselves back to California wasn't so simple. Not being able to travel via conventional means due to Jack's complete lack of any modern-day ID, the three traveled directly to Santa Barbara, thanks to the watch and key Teddy Fiske had made for Elizabeth. And now, finally, the contents of Sebastian's study had caught up with them.

Inside the crate on the top level they found several books by Flemish alchemist John Fontaine, a stone bound with fine gold twine, and a Cleromancy kit. Elizabeth opened the small leather pouch and poured the contents into her hand. She set aside the dozen or so black and white beans and studied the two bone-carved dice with various runes on each side.

The divination by casting random lots was an ancient practice that transcended geography. From the Chinese I-Ching to ancient Rome, many cultures practiced some variation on the theme.

Elizabeth put the beans and dice back into the bag and dug into the crate. “Sebastian really got around, didn't he?”

Simon wrapped the small African fetish he'd been holding in a rough, colorful cloth and set it on the table. “Yes,” Simon said. “So many different times and places.”

Sebastian's adventures must have been incredible, Elizabeth thought, as they unwrapped one mysterious item after the next. She'd read some of Sebastian's papers on the occult, but they couldn't capture the feeling of holding an actual mystical artifact in your hand. She started to open a small ivory box, but stopped and looked to Simon when she heard him let out a short, quick breath.

He sat forward on the sofa, elbows coming to rest on his knees, a worn red leather book in his hands.

“Simon?”

He looked up and his eyes were bright with excitement and emotion. He held up the book. “His journal.”

Elizabeth scooted down the sofa to sit at his side. “Have you seen that before?”

He shook his head and turned the book over in his hands. It was well-worn red leather with faded gold lettering that read: Chronicles. Simon picked up a dust jacket and handed it to Elizabeth. “It was hidden inside this.”

“Just So Stories,” Elizabeth read. “Kipling?”

Simon smiled at a fond memory. “He used to read them to me when I was very small, years before he started telling me his other stories.”

Sebastian's “other stories” were wild accounts of things like his brunch with the Death Eaters of Peru and fighting zombies in eighteenth century Paris — fanciful tales that just happened to be true. Stories that had led to the amazing collection they had in front of them.

Sebastian's watch had let them travel through time, but the origin of the Council and its true purpose and even Sebastian's involvement remained a mystery. Elizabeth looked down at the book in Simon's hand. Until now. Maybe.

“He must have meant for you and no else to find it. Why else would he have put that dust jacket on it?”

Simon nodded, but kept his eyes on the book. Elizabeth knew memories of his grandfather were bittersweet. Sebastian died saving Simon's life and it was a guilt Simon carried with him to this day.

Elizabeth inched closer to him and rested a hand on his back. She could feel the tension in his muscles. “We don't have to do this now.”

Simon huffed out a breath, turned to her and offered a reassuring smile. “It's all right. As you say, he meant for me to find this. Now, let's find out why.”

Elizabeth tucked up her legs underneath her as she settled into the sofa and listened to Simon's deep, rich voice read Sebastian's journal. They spent the next few hours going through it. The book chronicled most of Sebastian's adventures in wonderful detail. He was a vivid storyteller and his passion for his work bled through every page.

“Despite all I have seen in my travels,” Simon read, “I am still staggered to my very core at that moment when the impossible becomes real. The rabbi folded the piece of parchment upon which he had written the word '
shem
', a truncated version of one of the Kabbalistic names for the divine, and placed the paper into the Golem's mouth.”

Despite the fact that this had happened years ago, hundreds of years ago according Sebastian's journal, Elizabeth still shivered at the image of the large, clay human figure of the Golem waiting to be brought to life.

“The rabbi spoke words so softly to the creature, I could not hear them, but the Golem did and he lurched forward, the inanimate animated.”

Elizabeth felt herself leaning in, enraptured by the story.

“Under the rabbi's careful guidance, the Golem performed menial physical tasks, cleaning and carrying heavy objects and the like. The creature was well under his control, until that fateful night he forgot to remove the parchment from its mouth. It was a miracle the rabbi wasn't killed. He surely would have been had I not been there that night.”

Simon peered over the top of the journal and caught Elizabeth's eyes. He arched both eyebrows in surprise and pleasure and then resumed reading. “To this very day, no man has dared set foot in the attic of that synagogue in Prague again.”

After Simon read the last entry, a visit to ancient Mesopotamia, he closed the book and rested it on his knee. “He told me some of these stories when I was a boy,” he said. “If only I'd known then that they were true.”

“He certainly was far from the silent observer in some of those,” Elizabeth said. There had been several adventures where Sebastian had consciously interfered. In fact, in some of them, the reason he'd gone there in the first place appeared to be to save someone's life.

“Yes, the non-interference edict he mentioned from the Council doesn't appear to always apply, does it?”

She reached for the book. “May I?”

Simon turned and the book slid off his knee and onto the floor.

“I'm sorry.” Elizabeth moved forward to retrieve the book. “Is it okay?”

Simon picked up the book and surveyed it for damage. “No harm done.”

Elizabeth let out a sigh of relief and as she moved back into the sofa, she noticed a piece of paper had fallen out from between the pages. She reached down and picked it up. “This fell out,” she said as she held it out to Simon.

He took the paper and unfolded it. The air in the room went suddenly still.

Elizabeth leaned closer to see. It was a list with a dozen or so names with dates and locations. The first entry on the list made Elizabeth's blood run cold.

Manchester Arms, New York City, 4 PM August 20, 1929 - Simon Cross.

“What is this?” Elizabeth asked, a feeling of unease welling inside her. “Why on earth is your name on this list?”

Simon stared down at the piece of paper as shocked as she was. “This is just a few days before he saved my life.”

“Saved both of our lives.”

Simon pushed himself off the sofa. Pacing was a good idea. Elizabeth was tempted to join him, but seeing this list ripped open an old wound for Simon and now he would need his space. Simon strode back and forth, reading and rereading the list.

When she and Simon had gone back to 1929, the gangster King Kashian kidnapped her. Simon rushed after her and would have been killed if Sebastian hadn’t come to his rescue at the very last second. Sebastian had died saving Simon, died in his arms, and the memory of that day still haunted him.

But Sebastian hadn't been there for Simon. At least that's what he'd told him. Elizabeth tried to reason it aloud. “When Sebastian found you, he told you he was there to study King.”

“Yes, that's what he said.”

The pain in his voice at the memories cut right to Elizabeth's heart. She stood and came to his side. He looked down at her and she could see he was trying hard to rein in his feelings. She put a supportive hand on his back and they both turned back to the paper in his hands.

At the top of the handwritten list in the left hand corner was the name “Cross” and to the right of that above the names, “
in absentia luci, tenebrae vincunt
.”