Adam of Albion (7 page)

The
stable at Blackthorn Manor was very different than the rough wooden barns Adam
was used to in Montana. It was low and ancient looking, made of fieldstones
covered with vines, and had arched double doors with small ornamental windows.
But as he followed Artemis inside, he caught the same familiar, comforting
smells of hay and big warm animals, now turned out to pasture but the feel of
them still lingering.

He
closed the doors behind them, just to be careful. They should be completely
alone by now, with the maid gone home and Barry chained to his Xbox, but there
was still a chance that someone else like Rainy Jane might come wandering by,
or that Reg was too hung over to realize he had the day off.

The
stable was dark inside anyway and the closed doors made it darker, but it was
quiet and private, perfect for their talk. The kids peered around for a place
to settle down and found a couple of hay bales to sit on. Then, as Artemis was
lifting Orpheus out of her purse, a sudden rustling sound in the deep shadows
made all three of them turn nervously.

A
scrawny, one-eyed albino cat came trotting toward them proudly, with a mouse
hanging limp in its mouth. They all sighed with relief.

“I
call her Pallas, because of her color,” Artemis explained. “It’s a play on
Poe’s poem,
The Raven
—you know, the pallid bust of Pallas. She’s a
stray—just wandered by one day and moved into the stable. But she’s no trouble
and good at keeping the vermin down.” That made Adam feel another notch at
home. There were barn cats on the ranch, too, and when they caught a critter
they liked to show it off, to let you know they were on the job.

“Okay,
let’s try to come up with a plan,” he said.

But
he’d guessed right—stubborn little Artemis had her own ideas about that, and
she wasn’t about to give up.

“Orpheus,
first take just a moment and explain how you do the time travel, won’t you?
It’s so fascinating.” She’d obviously been thinking about her pitch and she was
starting out casually, like she was just curious about it—but Adam could tell
where she was headed.

Orpheus
sighed, like,
Where do I even start?
“Let’s just say that time and space
form a near-infinite matrix in which progress is ordinarily linear—but with
some very fancy math, you can alter that and re-route a vector to a particular
target point. Say you threw a baseball from left field to home plate at Yankee
Stadium—but on the way, it suddenly took a dimensional hop and ended up giving
Plato a black eye instead.”

That
sounded like
wormholes,
Adam realized excitedly, just like he’d been
thinking about last night.

“But
as to the specifics of how I do it,” Orpheus went on, “I’m afraid you put your
finger on my Achilles heel, so to speak. There’s a lot about my own inner
programming that I don’t have access to. I can
use
the information, but
I can’t actually see the nuts and bolts—those files are locked. Maybe someday
I’ll find someone who can get into them. But for now, I just know the general principles
and how to operate the mechanism.”

That
seemed strange—although when you thought about it, humans didn’t consciously
know how they kept their hearts beating or other body parts working, either—or
for that matter, their brains.

Artemis
jumped up and started pacing restlessly through the straw.

 “All
right—I’ve been keeping quiet and listening to everyone else,” she began. “Now
it’s my turn to offer a few thoughts.”

Adam’s
jaw practically dropped. Keeping quiet? Between her and the blowhard little head,
he’d
hardly had a chance to shoehorn a word in.

But
she plunged right on. “Orpheus, I’m quick to admit that Adam and I are far from
ideal. But you’re so weak you don’t have much time left. What are the odds that
someone better’s going to come along?

“We
can try to find Jason’s people, but making inquiries is like throwing a pebble
in a pond—there are bound to be ripples, and those thugs are bound to be
watching for us. There’s no telling who you can trust—even people who mean well
might say something that reaches the wrong ears. But you can trust us.

“And
there’s more. If adults see a couple of kids, they’re not going to pay any
attention unless we’re misbehaving. We can get away with lots of things simply
by not being noticed, or by acting helpless or too simple to understand what’s
going on. We can hide in places where bigger people won’t fit. I may look puny,
but I’ve trained in martial arts all my life—while other girls were playing
with dolls, I was studying
tae kwon do.
Plus there’s my sneakiness, and
my knowledge of lore and history, and Adam being so—so generally handy . . .”
Her voice trailed off—she obviously couldn’t think of any more glowing way to
advertise his talents, which stung. Adam slumped a little.

But
then she added, “And, of course, there’s his stellar bravery.”

He
perked back up.

“Anyway,
I think you should strongly consider us,” she finished.

Orpheus,
his head cocked to one side, looked impressed and touched. “Rhetoric to put
Demosthenes to shame! If ever I need someone to argue my case in court,
Artemis, you’re my first choice. After myself of course. Look, it’s very sweet
of you two to offer, and I don’t doubt your sincerity or capabilities. But the
answer is still no. I can’t risk your lives—”

Just
then, Pallas the cat—who’d been hunkered down over her mouse, crunching
contentedly on its feet—looked up and let out a
rrrrrrr
sound deep in
her throat, somewhere between a growl and a yowl. She dropped the mouse and
stared at the stable’s closed doors.

“There
must be another cat out there,” Adam said. That was usually what that kind of
sound meant—a fight was brewing.

Artemis
looked puzzled. “There aren’t any others around, unless it’s another stray.”

He
hurried to the doors and peered outside, trying to spot the trespasser. Artemis
followed, with Orpheus perched on her shoulder.

There
wasn’t any cat that they could see. But a small delivery-type truck—a lorry, as
they were called in England—had pulled into the driveway. The logo on its side
read: RELIABLE PEST CONTROL.

Three
men had gotten out and were unloading toolboxes from the rear. They were all
wearing overalls, dark stocking caps pulled down low, and big sunglasses in
spite of the morning fog.

Artemis
frowned. “Strange—we’ve never had this sort of thing before, and my parents didn’t
say anything about workmen coming by,” she murmured.

Adam
kept watching them. He was nervous, maybe just because of the cat acting weird.
Then he noticed that while two of the men were big and burly with tough-looking
jaws, the third was much smaller and slimmer—and what he could see of the face
didn’t look like a man’s.

Not
only that, but there was something vaguely familiar about her sinuous,
controlled movements and the taut hard set of her mouth.

In
fact, she looked a lot like the woman he’d seen at the old church last night,
who’d been driving the car—and who’d shot the man with her!

No
way!
Adam thought desperately. She
couldn’t possibly have tracked him here—he was just on edge, feeling spooked in
general, and his imagination was working overtime. Still, he couldn’t help the
sick feeling that they weren’t really here looking for wasp nests and moles.

And
the imagination theory blew up completely when she opened a toolbox and he got
a glimpse of its contents—a wicked-looking parabellum type pistol.

Electrified
by fear, he stared as the three of them started fanning out across the manor
grounds, moving slowly and scanning the area carefully—all carrying those
toolboxes, and all moving with the same menacing precision as the gunman last
night walking through the graveyard, swinging his rifle from side to side.

Artemis’s
eyes widened with concern when she saw Adam’s face.

“What
is it?” she whispered.

“I—I’m
afraid—that’s the woman I saw last night,” he stammered.

Her
gaze turned incredulous. “But how—?”

“Never
mind how! They’ve got guns in those toolboxes—we’ve got to get out of here!”
But they couldn’t use these doors—that would put them in plain sight. “Is there
another way?”

She
shook her head tensely—but she was keeping her cool, he had to give her that.
Adam looked around for a place to hide, but except for the few bales of hay,
the stable was barren.

They
were trapped—and the woman was moving in this direction! Not only that, one of
the men was heading toward the house, looking like he was going to walk right
in—and Barry, who would definitely be plugged into something noisy, would be
caught completely by surprise. Adam had to warn him, and calling Barry’s iPhone
was the only way he could think of.

“Behind
those bales, come on,” he hissed, hoping against hope that the woman would just
glance inside the stable and move on—although with the thugs searching so
thoroughly, it was a very faint hope.

Girl,
boy, and head scurried to the screen of hay and dropped down behind it,
crouching close together. Adam yanked open his pack, groping for the trak phone
he kept in a zippered pocket.

But
his fingers couldn’t find the phone’s hard flat shape. In fact, they couldn’t
even find the pocket.

Then
he remembered—this was Jason’s pack, not his.

And
then,
the awful, unbelievable truth hit him like a sledge hammer—he hadn’t even
thought about it until right this second because there’d been so much going on.

He’d
left the phone in his own pack when he’d traded with Jason, at the church
graveyard last night.

Which
meant that the woman had found it—and she must have tracked the numbers
programmed in there and made the connection to Blackthorn Manor.

The
blood drained from Adam’s face. This was
all—his—fault!
—an idiotic
mistake that had led the thugs right to their door, just like a burglar leaving
his wallet at the robbery scene.

He
would have given anything in the world to just melt away, right then and there.
But he remembered another thing his father often said—words that Adam tried to
live up to:

Don’t
compound your error.
You’re going to
make mistakes—everybody does, whether or not they admit it. If you’re smart,
you will admit it, and instead of blundering ahead and making it worse, you’ll
figure out what you did wrong, go back and fix it, and learn from it. But don’t
go to the other extreme, either, and blame yourself so much you just cave in.
That doesn’t help anything—it’s just another way of compounding the mistake.

And
with that, a sudden, strange calm came washing over him. He wasn’t scared any
more, and he knew exactly what to do.

“Artemis,
I need your phone,” he whispered—but even the whisper had a tone of command
that surprised both her and Orpheus. She hurriedly pulled her cell phone from
her purse, and he punched Barry’s number.

Like
some evil cosmic joke, it rang with the dark wild tones of Dearth music.

“What’s
the problem, dorko?” Barry answered lazily. “Don’t tell me you’re tired of
shoveling poop already.”

“There
are people here with guns—they want to kill us!” Adam hissed. “Hide someplace
good and don’t make a sound!”

Barry
snorted in derision. “Oh, sure, nice try—is
that
the best you can do?”

“Barry,
don’t be stupid! Look out a window if you don’t believe me, but do it fast—a
guy’s going in the door right now!”

Adam
clicked off the phone and gave it back—he’d done all he could, and it was up to
Barry from here.

“Orpheus,
there’s no choice now,” he breathed. “We’ve got to do the time travel.”Artemis
nodded vigorously, setting off a chain reaction in her hair.

“You
could just hand me over,” Orpheus pointed out. “Maybe they’d let you go.”

He
was met by two stubborn teenaged glares of refusal.

“You
know they wouldn’t, and we’d never do that anyway,” Artemis declared.

For
a few more seconds, his gaze searched their faces. Mainly, he looked like an elephant
trapped in quicksand and depending on a couple of ants to haul him out.

But
there was something else, too—like he was starting to admit that they’d been
smart about taking care of him, they’d kept their cool in danger—and maybe,
just maybe, they wouldn’t be such a bad choice, after all.

“Reminds
me of when I was with Caesar in the Gallic wars, and we came to the Rubicon
river,” Orpheus sighed. “‘This is it, Jules,’ I told him—‘if we cross, there’s
no turning back.’ All right—Artemis, open the panel.”

Her
fingers quickly touched his scalp, found the right spot, and the little door
slid aside to reveal the triangle of glowing symbols.

“The
code is a musical harmonic,” Orph said. “You have to use those symbols to
reproduce it. Listen.” A sound began to emanate from him, quiet but clear—like
a vibrant, haunting chord played on an unknown instrument.