The Time Weaver

Perhaps it wouldn't have been so troublesome had she not been sleeping alone for so long. Zane had been gone for three months, eighteen days, eleven hours. None of the clocks in the apartments were ever wound precisely and so none would ever chime in unison; she didn't know how many minutes to add to her tally.

Zane had been gone too long. But it always felt like that.

It seemed to her that she managed to muddle through her days well enough. She had a household to run, however unusual it might be. She had servants and shopping and even lent her hand in the kitchen from time to time, although this tended to silently enrage Mateo, the cook. When she'd had enough fuming, sidelong glances and burned soup with supper, she retreated back to her own domain.

Plaster and gilt. Gemstones and silk. A missing husband, and a daughter whose growing absences were no less worrisome.

In her darker, grimmer moments Lia would ponder the notion that she wasn't entirely sure what she was about, what any of them were about. She'd set her little family on this path because the dreams told her she would. She'd had Zane steal Honor because the dreams revealed Honor was stolen by Zane. She'd moved them all to Barcelona because in the dreams they were in Barcelona. She'd even put her husband at risk because the dreams had him with the sanf , and those were the worst dreams of all. Thank God they were short; she'd never once had to suffer through more than a few minutes of Zane immersed in his own very dark moments, surrounded by those who plotted to eliminate her kind. Becoming one of them.

And he was good at it. Naturally he was, the infamous Shadow of Mayfair, a man still with a bounty of over four hundred pounds on his head back in London—she checked the foreign periodicals at the circulating library, which were refreshed every other month—a man like that was going to be very, very convincingly wicked.

A few spoken exchanges. No sight, of course, in the dreams. The words were enough.

—like this, see? You hold the knife the other way, they're going to have time to Turn.

Yes, I see.

It's the small ones you need to worry most about. The females. Remove the head, or remove the heart. It's a lot of blood if you—

Whenever Lia awoke from one of these dreams, these particularly nasty glimpses into that Other World she'd sent him to, she would have to leave her bed, and sometimes her room. And sometimes the apartments entirely.

More than once she'd discovered she'd Turned to smoke the second her eyes had opened. She'd be halfway to the moon, a wisp of almost nothing material, before she felt safe enough to Turn again.

Up there in the sky, she was protected. Nothing was going to harm her there. The city below was a smeary fretwork of light, and no man or bullet or arrow could fly as high as she. Even the dreams couldn't chase her if she ventured high enough; they died without the thick miasma of the earth to support them.

At least, that's what she wanted to believe.

On especially bad nights she'd fly far, far over the sea. She'd imagine what it would be like if she kept going. If she just didn't turn back. If she managed to hug the curve of the globe she might one day end up back in the Antilles, and if she landed there, he might be there too, waiting for her. He might be standing on the white sand crescent beach that had backed against their home, with coconut trees shading the roof, and the enormous turtles that swam, undisturbed, in the warm shallows close to shore.

Every year, sea turtles were born on the beach. They would hatch and crawl toward the water as quickly as they could, and there would be Zane, that dread wicked Shadow, guarding them from the stray dogs that wanted to come, or the gulls, his island trousers rolled up and sand sprinkling his calves and his hands out as he coaxed them forward, as if by his voice he could herd them more quickly to the safety of the waves. And then Lia would walk out in her bare feet past the deck, and all the little baby turtles would scramble faster.

If she just kept flying, she might see that again.

But that was not where her future lay. Not yet.

Zane was in France. She knew that because he'd taken great pains to keep her informed of where he might be next, and what he might accomplish. They were both excited about the fact that he'd finally broken through to the upper echelon of the sanf inimicus , that he'd finally been invited to hover in the orbit of their leader.

Their excitement had, naturally, taken different courses. Zane had delivered the news over tea, his voice an unaffected murmur, his eyes a feral gleam in the cool civility of the Blue Parlor of their palace suites, which had been done up in aquamarine and azure, and had the turquoise rug from Morocco spread at an angle across the civilized floor.

They'd made love on that rug, back in the beach house. Too many times to count, she'd been on her back on that rug, or he on his, perspiration and kisses and slippery limbs and laughter. She'd stared at it as he told her, found the swirl in the corner that always reminded her of a rose, though it wasn't, and kept her gaze there as he talked.

Because when his eyes shone like that, yellow and fierce, it shook her to the core. It reminded her of all that he was and was not: human, not drakon. The entire sum of her soul, and just a man. Who, despite the force of her ferocious, monstrous love for him, was never going to have an armor of scales or the elusive trick of smoke.

Who was in mortal danger because of her.

Stupid, selfish Lia.

She'd sent him straight into the mouth of the beast. And he had only sipped his tea and smiled at her when she lifted her stricken eyes to his. He'd leaned over the tea table and kissed her quickly, before she could voice any of the useless protests that were ready to come.

She had begged him to join the sanf inimicus. And now she was begging him to get out. She'd never wanted him so close to their center.

He wouldn't do it. All this time invested, all this hatred, and he would no sooner leave now than he would leave Lia forever, because her cause had become his, just as everything in their married lives had done.

He could find the leader, he told her. He could get close. And then ... he could do what he'd been known to do back in the days before they'd wed. Mad King George's hair-raising bounty wasn't entirely without cause.

But he'd been gone now for three months, eighteen days ... twelve hours. And she didn't like to sleep without him.

Her dreams were twisting. New endings, shorter interludes, more often snippets than entire scenes. They were losing their cohesion as well. Or at least her understanding of their cohesion.

Yet Darkfrith was a corpse, over and over.

Different causes. Fire. Desertion. Ambush. Poisoned wells. They all amounted to the same deathly conclusion, including the new one she'd had tonight. The one that wrapped around her in slow creeping horror. The one that had felt so,so real.

An old man talking, his accent thick and coarse. A girl, better bred. The smell of grass overwhelming again, of rocks and dirt. The buzzing drone of a horsefly or a wasp.

Lia'd actually felt the heat of the sun beating down on her head as they spoke.

Watch it, luv. You don't never want to go in there.

I wasn't.

The girl was quick, defensive. She sounded young enough to feel guilty at her trespass, old enough to be sly.

Yeah? 'Cause it looked to me like you was just about to scale that fence. Can't you read the sign, girlie?

What sign?

That one there. The one wot says 'Danger, Influenza' in them big red letters. You blind?

A silence. Then the girl spoke more slowly. Is that what happened to them? Influenza?

Aye. Every single one of 'em, dead as a doornail. Whole village wiped out. Manor house too, buggering marquesses and earls. The man spat, very clearly. Cursed