Time for Eternity (3 page)

Frankie exhaled. Okay. Okay, she could do this. She didn’t even need to refer to Donna’s note. She’d memorized it long ago.

She crossed the marble mosaic floor to the altar at the far side and peered behind it.

Merde!
Uh, maybe she shouldn’t say that here. Or even think it, no matter how surprised she was at the gaping aperture at her feet. Donna was right. A stairway led down. Frankie was having difficulty getting enough air. It wasn ’t that the Baptistery was stuffy. Three breaths. Okay. She started down into the darkness. The air rising from below was cooler. A warm, if faint, glow increased as she descended. Bending to peer out before she took the last three steps, she saw a wide, empty room lit by a single lamp standing on a kind of altar in the middle. Donna said it always burned there. Marble coffins lined the edges, the profiles of their owners trapped in stone. The floor was made of heavy marble slabs with worn lettering. The place smelled like a basement. But there was also an aroma of dust and stone that somehow combined to convey age.

One slab was not inset. Frankie chewed on her lips. Just as Donna had said.

Below that slab were catacombs. She knew what that meant. Decaying bodies. Maybe rats. Crap in a hat. Could she do it? Just to see that a stupid machine wasn’t there? Frankie should just turn right around and run up these stairs as fast as she could.

But she didn’t.

It was impossible to undo what had happened to her. Even if the time machine was there (which it wasn’t), even if it could take her back (which it couldn’t), she might not be able to bring herself to kill Henri, or he might kill her instead. He was certainly stronger than she was. But if she didn’t try, she would live forever half-drowned in a river of isolation and regret, hating what she was, with even escape into suicide impossible. She’d probably go mad, just as Donna had said.

So she had to try. And that meant lifting up the slab with the strength of a vampire and going down into the catacombs.

A nervous giggle escaped her and echoed against the sarcophagi. What was she afraid of? She was a vampire, for God’s sake!

She couldn’t die. She’d heal a rat bite. Was she afraid she’d catch death from some moldering corpses? Not possible. But if it was, so what? She’d
welcome
death if she could escape eternity as a vampire. And the truth was, she herself was way worse than anything down in those crypts.

She strode across the floor to get the lamp and set it down next to the slab. She crouched and heaved the stone to the side.

Echoes reverberated from the stone arches as she set it down. The angle of the hole revealed only darkness. Still she picked up the lantern and started down the worn stone steps. The walls of the stairwell were dry, surprisingly, and when she got to the bottom, the shadowy niches that surrounded her seemed to contain only dust. Not so bad. She held up the light, just to face her fears. Dust and some crumbly bones. Okay, there was one where the skull was pretty much intact. And here and there some primitive crucifixes, some scraps of leather were evident. There was a feeling of fullness and … timelessness in the air.

She could deal. No sign of rats yet.
Save the best for last.

She opened up the little map Donna had drawn. The catacombs formed a maze and she had to get to the other side. Kinda like the first computer games she’d played. Hope she didn’t run into any gobbling ghosts. She muttered directions to herself as she turned corners. Left, right, right … Finally she came to a long straight corridor.

Bingo. She strode down between the niches stacked four high to the wall at the end. She knelt. Tenth brick up from the bottom.

Push.

She wasn’t sure if she was surprised or not when a portion of the wall swung open. Maybe this was an elaborate hoax to see just how far she’d go. Maybe someone inside that darkness was waiting to pop up and make a funny home video.

It was a mark of her desperation that she didn’t care. She stepped over the threshold.

Two

Her gasp sounded loud in the silence.

A huge machine towered over her. Giant gears and levers interlocked with smaller ones in some crazy pattern that was … well, beautiful. The metal gleamed golden, shiny with oil. Probably bronze. At points in the mechanism were set what looked like jewels the size of her fist, red and green and blue. Those couldn’t be real. Could they? From the center of the machine thrust a three-foot rod topped by a glittering, clear stone.

Merde.
That was a diamond.

She stood, transfixed. Slowly the whole thing began to sink in. She was in a secret room hidden in the catacombs beneath a cathedral in Florence looking at a time machine built by Leonardo da Vinci that could be powered only by his friend who was a vampire.

And Frankie. She could power it too. She just had to draw her power like she did to run out her fangs and feed, or when she had appeared inside that hospital supply room. Only more. Way more.

It was so unreal that it felt very real. She was a vampire who couldn’t exist, but did. So why not a time machine to take her back and correct the very thing that had made her vampire?

Uh-oh. Bad thought. What if she changed the world by going back?

If she was never made vampire, the Frankie who had lived two hundred years would cease to be. But she’d never done anything important. She’d slinked along the shadows of life, trying not to be noticed. No one would miss her if she were successful and died after a single lifetime. And she’d probably only deprive Henri of a few weeks or months until he was guillotined. Who would miss a slimeball like that? Besides, Donna had gone back and corrected her mistake and the world hadn’t ended.

She stood there, breathing hard. Her life in the eighteenth century washed over her. Not great. The hooped skirts, the restrictions on women. Hated those. Hell, the head lice in those damned wigs everyone else wore or their ratted natural hair were pretty horrible. Even the first time around, she’d refused that fashion. People didn’t bathe often. Their clothes couldn’t be sent to the dry cleaners either. A bastard daughter of the Vicomte d’Evron and his opera dancer, she’d never known her mother, and she didn’t belong in her father’s world. At twenty-one she’d had no prospects, living in genteel poverty in Paris, attendant and dependent upon a kind woman with no prospects herself. She’d been an outcast even before becoming a monster. Bread riots, starvation.

And of course there was the Reign of Terror. People were denounced and guillotined for just thinking things that weren’t sufficiently revolutionary. More than a hundred thousand died during those awful years. She and Madame LaFleur had lived in constant fear.

When Henri saved her from the mob, it had seemed a miracle. No wonder her childish crush had turned to deeper feeling for him. He might have been callous and devil -may-care, but he was also fearless. That was awfully attractive to someone who felt powerless.

But she’d been naïve then. When she went back now she’d have two hundred years under her belt. The eighteenth century would be a piece of cake. She wouldn’t think about the deed she was going to do. It was the price of saving her soul. Henri ’s death should make her mortal again. Then she wouldn’t have the power to run the time machine. So the modern world would be lost forever unless she could just ride along when it returned to the present day. Eighteenth century or twenty-first? It didn’t matter.

She’d be human again.

She was already thinking about going back in time as if it were possible. Yeah. Well, no time like the present to find out.
Just do
it, girl.
Frankie stepped forward and grabbed the diamond. She pulled.

Nothing happened.

Oh, the power part. She pushed the lever back up.
Companion!
she called, as though she needed it to run out her canines.

Power surged up her veins like throbbing desire. Red film descended over her field of vision. To anyone watching her, her eyes would have gone red.
Companion, more!
The throbbing became almost relentless. A whirl of darkness seeped up around her ankles. Uh-oh. She wanted her power directed to the machine, not to disappearing. She pushed down the darkness and concentrated on the machine. Her body tightened. She pulled the lever. Beyond the throb of power in her ears she heard the machine creak.

Still nothing happened.

This was going to take some doing. She called for more power, focusing all her attention on the machine. The giant gear in the center of the machine began to slowly grind, setting all the smaller wheels in frantic motion.

Bingo.
Companion!
Her body arched as the power sang in her veins and the song shrieked up the scale.

The gears whirred so fast they were almost invisible. She should think about the instant she wanted to land in. Before the time Henri had cut himself on that stupid breaking glass. Just at the time she’d been taken into his household, so she’d have easy access

…

God! A luminescent glow began to seep outward from her body, forming a blinding white corona. She ’d never known she had so much power. The tension in her body, the shriek in her veins, were almost unbearable. Could she survive this?

Then the gears slowed. Everything slowed, even her thoughts. Had she failed?

Power still hummed in the air. It smelled like the ozone left in the air after lightning. She grimaced in a rictus smile. She couldn ’t escape ozone even here. She pushed for more power.

It didn’t matter. The gears all stopped.

She’d failed. She strained toward the eighteenth century, trying to imagine it, the dirty streets, the roaming mobs of Paris. Poverty and ugliness. What a contrast with the luxury of Versailles that Henri had showed her …

Everything snapped back into motion and she felt herself being flung like a stone in a slingshot into more and more and more speed. The jewels lit up. They magnified the power into colored beams that crisscrossed, swinging in arcs across the stone ceiling.

Pain surged into every fiber of her body.

Then, blackness.

Frankie raised her head and wished she hadn’t. “Shit, howdy,” she moaned. Vampires didn’t get drunk. How could she have a hangover? Something hard poked into her shoulder. She wasn’t where she expected to be. Unless she had rocks in her bed.

She cracked open an eye.

Merde. Merde. Merde.
Above her in the dimness loomed the great golden machine, its gears still and silent against a ceiling of uneven rock. She was in some kind of a cave.

She pushed herself up on one elbow, groaning, and blinked to clear her vision. Reddish afternoon light filtered through the entrance to the cave. Outside, green trees fluttered leaves in the breeze. Was it a cave? Some of the walls merged into bricks.

Where the hell was she? And when the hell was this?

She got to her hands and knees and pulled her skirts up around her thighs. She didn’t trust herself to stand yet She half crawled toward the entrance. It was partially blocked by a huge marble statue. It appeared to be a naked man surrounded by six nymphs.

She gasped. She knew this place! It was the grotto built for the statue of Apollo in the gardens at Versailles, long gone in the twenty-first century.

Tears sprang to her eyes as she struggled for breath. The damned machine had actually worked! She blinked back the tears of shock and surprise. Could … could it really be? Was she really in 1794? It didn’t seem possible.

The first time she saw this statue and its two companion pieces of Apollo’s horses was when she’d been to Versailles with Henri.

A flashing cascade of images from that night threatened to overwhelm her. The feel of his flesh, the gleam of passion in his eyes seemed so real, so near. That night had been her downfall. She must avoid it this time around.

She had meant to come back to Paris. The machine must have gotten lost somehow. Was it the summer of 1794? Or did the machine mistake that too?

But maybe the machine hadn’t made a mistake. She ran her hands through her hair and tried to think. At the last minute, just when she’d given up hope that the machine would move, she’d thought about Versailles.

Okay, okay. This wasn’t a disaster. Versailles was only twelve miles from Paris. And one of her gold coins would probably buy a hundred coach tickets to get there. The village of Versailles was used to supporting the court of Louis XVI. Surely she could change her gold coins there for sous she could actually spend in 1794.

She felt the sun set, as her kind always did. She must act quickly in the gloaming that would follow. She gathered up her leather bag. She pushed out into the grove around the grotto and down the little incline, past the marvelous marble horses that looked as though they might spring out into the intricate formal gardens of Versailles just ahead. The grand palace façade itself was far away to her right. Its creamy austere stone and a fortune in glazed windows caught the sun in the upper stories. Around the gardens, members of the Gendarmerie Nationale in their blue uniforms herded people toward the main gates. Ever since the court had been forcibly moved back to Paris so that they might be accountable to the people, the grounds had been open to the public. The hoi polloi dressed in the working-class fashions of 1794—the men in wide-legged trousers and clumsily made boots, the women in aprons and caps with coarse fichus thrown about their shoulders, roamed the grounds. But it wouldn’t have taken the clothing to tell her it wasn’t the twenty-first century anymore. No smell of diesel from tour buses or hot asphalt from parking lots. The crowd chattered and laughed. Children screamed because they were tired but there were no ring tones insisting on attention, no angry car horns.

Frankie took a breath, blinking. She’d done it. Or rather Leonardo’s machine had done it. She was in 1794.

A feeling of nausea cascaded over her. Her knees felt weak. She put her hand out to the marble basin of the fountain to steady herself and hung her head, breathing slowly and deeply. What was the matter with her? She almost chuckled.
I mean, besides just
having traveled through time? Besides being in revolutionary France, where being an aristocrat is grounds for beheading?