Capturing Today (TimeShifters Book 2) (26 page)

A knock at the door makes me jump, but it’s a welcome interruption. Not caring that this is my mother’s room and she should probably be the one answering the door, I pull it open.

A young woman waits in the hallway. Her ancestry is Indian or Middle Eastern. Either way, she’s the most gorgeous person I’ve ever seen in the flesh. Dense, swooping lashes hood her eyes, and her complexion begs for a skin care commercial contract.

“Yasmine?”

She bows her head. “If you’re ready, I’ve come to show you to your room.”         

“Oh, I’m ready.” I step into the hall and close the door. The muscles across my shoulder blades and down into my arms are vibrating, and a sharp heat radiates from where I banged my back against the desk. I take a few deep breaths, attempting to calm down. I want to hit something.

Yasmine eyes me. “Did you wish to tell her goodbye?”

I roll my shoulders and glance back at Rosa’s closed door. She chose to not be a part of my life. She chose to let Dad suffer. Chose to destroy my future before I was ever born.

If there's one thing rejection teaches you, it's how to reject. How to cut a person out of your life and run away.

I jostle around Yasmine and head down the hall. “Is this the way out?”

Yasmine’s sandals slap the cold floor. “Slow down.”

I spin around, adrenaline tingling through my body. “No. I want out. Now. Take me out of Mónatos.”

“I’m sorry.” Her eyebrows gather together. “It’s not that easy.”

The steady hum of music from the club pulses through the hallway. Don’t they ever stop?

“Make it that easy.” My ears pound. “I came for my mother. She doesn’t want me. I’m done. Done with her. And done with this place.” I can’t stay near Rosa. Not after what I know. I was a helpless baby growing inside of her and she already despised me.

It hurts to swallow. “Erik said he doesn’t hold anyone against their will.”

“Gab—” She reaches for me.

I sidestep and brace my legs to run. “He clearly isn’t keeping my mother against her will.” My voice takes on a hard edge. “So take me out of here.”

“Calm down.” She raises her hands in surrender. “You need to listen to me. About what’s really going on here. But we can’t stay outside Rosa’s room. This will be the first place he’ll look.” She puts her hand on my upper arm and squeezes as she brushes past. “Please, follow me. Time is short.”

My track record of blindly following people—Michael, other Shifters, Erik—isn’t too stellar. Why should I go with Yasmine? Well … besides the fact that Mónatos is built like a mouse maze. I could wander for days without finding the grand entrance again.

“Not unless you’re going to take me outside.” Roaming the world, not belonging anywhere, will be better than sharing breathing space with my mother.

“I will. But I can’t walk you out the front door. He’ll come after us. Don’t you see that?” She heads into the darkness of the hall, and I follow. What choice do I have?

“You have to listen to me.” She speaks evenly. “I’ll explain once we’re closer to the surface.”

Unlike Erik, Yasmine leads me through tunnels and up dark access ladders that make me feel like I’m in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot. Muggy air floods my lungs, and my hair sticks to my neck. We reach a cement area near a heavy door with a wheel on it that looks like it could belong to a nuclear fallout shelter.

Yasmine turns around and holds up her hand, signaling me to stop. “Did your mother tell you Erik’s plan?”

I open my mouth but then close it just as fast. Erik said Yasmine is part of the Mónatos security team, which translates to … Team Erik. At the moment I’m only Team Gabby, so we could be at odds.

“I don’t care about Erik’s plan. Just get me out.”

“You can trust me.” As if able to read my thoughts, Yasmine smiles. “Although, I realize I’ve given you no reason to.” She looks up and to the left for a moment and then snaps her fingers. “The Shade that helped you rescue Michael Pace, his name is Carl. He’s my boyfriend. Could you be open to the possibility that if a Shade was willing to help save a Shifter’s life then perhaps we are not all evil?”

“I don’t believe you’re all evil any more than I believe every Shifter is all good.”

“That’s a start.” Yasmine presses her hands to the small of her back and paces away from me. “How was your mother?”

She’s asking me to rip a Band-Aid off a bullet wound. To let her poke around. Dig out the shell. I will not talk about Rosa. I clench my teeth.

Yasmine pivots on her heels and raises one eyebrow.

I close my eyes and press my hands against my neck.

I have to take a chance on her, don’t I? My stomach knots. Besides, I’m at a loss. Being stubborn isn’t going to help me right now. I need all the information I can get if I’m going to figure out how to survive on my own in the shifting world. Every single thing I’ve worked toward is pointless. I left Keleusma to save my mother, but she doesn’t need saving. Which means I crossed my friends for nothing … well … nothing other than to salvage my pride where Michael’s concerned. I can’t return to Keleusma. I can’t stay in Mónatos.

I belong nowhere.

“She doesn’t want me.” I work the words out through my locked jaw.

“After what she did … it’s understandable if you hate her.”

“Hate?” I shake my head. I can’t hate her. Hate is a feeling. Hate demands processing everything. And I don’t want to feel anything when it comes to her. If I do, I’ll splinter into a million pieces, and there is no one in my life willing to put me back together again. I can’t afford a breakdown. Not now. Probably not ever.

Yasmine resumes her pacing. “She’s not the woman you would have met eighteen years ago.”

“Apparently she didn’t want me when she was still a Shifter, so …” My voice breaks.

“I’m sorry.”

I rub the heel of my hand against my collarbone. “It’s not your fault.”

“Even still, I’m sorry for everything.” She takes a deep breath. “If I’m unable to get you out of Mónatos, you must know how to protect yourself here. You must understand. This place is built in a way where the deeper you go, the more your memories and desire to do anything beyond pleasing Erik disappear. So stay near the edges.” She lays her hand on the cement wall. “If you do that, you’ll remember your father and Keleusma and all your friends. But leave the perimeter, and any attachment you have to them will fade.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I ask but at least the conversation has moved away from my mother. I need to focus on surviving.

She licks her lips and speaks rapidly. “Erik would have you believe otherwise, but some of us—like Carl and I—secretly regret switching sides. Although it’s not possible, we wish we could go back. We don’t want to forget the families we left behind or the Shifters we used to know.”

“You wish you hadn’t become a Shade?”

Her eyes narrow slightly. “That’s a more difficult question. Carl and I were both Shifters, so we couldn’t be together—couldn’t be in love—if we hadn’t become Shades. So while we long to find a way to return, we would never give up being together to do so. Besides, once someone becomes a Shade, it’s not possible to transform back into a Shifter. It’s just not.”

I shuffle closer to her. “Tell me what Erik wants.”

She angles her head and whispers, “Are you aware that Shades can’t reproduce?”

I nod. “He mentioned something about that.”

“The only way for a Shade to be created is for a Shifter to choose to become one. That chafes Erik. When your mother … when Rosa was injected, Erik thought he’d discovered a loophole. He believed you might be born a Shade.”

I didn’t realize I could hurt more. I can. “Oh.”

“But Erik had to wait until you got your shifting bracelet to find out.”

“He was willing to wait seventeen years?”

A few feet away, a pipe running above our heads drips liquid onto the ground. Each small
plink plink plink
hits me like the ticks of a metronome. Counting seconds off my life. 

Yasmine frowns. “Time moves differently for him. Seventeen years to see if he can create a Shade is a very small sacrifice in his world. But you know how that went. You know what you became.”

I rub my bracelet. “I became a Shifter.”

“Yes. So he altered his plans.”

“Then he’s done this before … to more pregnant women?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “You’re the first.”

“Lucky me,” I mutter.

“For starters, it’s difficult to find a Shifter willing to experiment on her child. But beyond that, he had to be cautious. No one knew what you would become. What if, in trying to produce a Shade, he ended up with a super Shifter or something along those lines?”

Thank you for not letting me be born a Shade.

I nod, letting her know I’m still tracking.

She purses her lips. “He couldn’t afford to create a bunch of you without testing out the premise first. He’s tried for many years to find a loophole. I wager he’s willing to go slow and make certain he does everything correctly.”

“Many years … he doesn’t look that old.”

“Oh, he’s old. He dates back to when Nicholas first set up shifting. Erik uses his power to make it look like he’s twenty.”

He’s some old man? And I called him a twelver. “Yuck.”

“That’s not the worst of it. See, he believes he’s found another loophole.”

Loophole? To creating Shades? “How?”

“Through you.”

He said he didn’t want me to become a Shade. “But I—”

“He’s going to make you his brood mare, Gabby. He’s going to see if you and him … if because you have both Shifter and Shade within you … if you’re able to—”

Ohgross. Ohgross. I clutch my stomach. “No. No, I won’t. I won’t let him touch me.”

Yasmine frowns, and she focuses on a crack in the ground. “Erik’s powerful, and he usually gets what he wants.”

“He tricked me, didn’t he?”

“He deceives us all.”

Heat blazes through my chest. Every word, every conversation … they were crafted—like dew glistening on a spider’s web—to pull me in. Here I was upset with Michael, when I fell for the biggest duplicity of them all. And Michael warned me, again and again, that Erik is a liar.

I really suck at choosing people to trust. “… I fell for it so easily.”

“We all did.”

I need to get away. Alone. Now. But where can I run?         

The wheel on the door creaks loudly and begins to spin, and the door scrapes against the ground, opening. A moment later Erik steps over the half foot lip, grinning all the way. “Well, there you are. I was beginning to think you’d run off on me.”

Erik holds a large, clear cup filled with iced coffee. The ice cubes make little clinking sounds as he swirls them around before taking a long swig from the straw. Then he tips the cup my way. “Want some?”

Want a fist to the throat?

My nails bite into my palms. Pain registers as it travels the length of my arm. The feeling lets me know I still have power over my actions and, oddly enough, breathes courage into my soul. “I will never touch anything you give me. Ever. Understand?”

He shoots a look at Yasmine, silently asking her,
What’s her deal?
But Yasmine has already crept to the far end of the tunnel and stands with her back to us. As if she’s giving privacy out of respect for Erik. Maybe that’s normal protocol.

We’re in some sort of air access. A loud humming sound begins, and light wind stirs hair across my face. I catch the wayward strands with my fingers and tuck them back behind my ears. The sickly sweet aroma from the dance club swirls around me.

I can’t meet Erik’s eyes. A sour taste fills my mouth, but I swallow it down. Run. Get away. But there’s nowhere to go.

Erik quirks an eyebrow. “Don’t you realize by now? I never force people to do anything. Everyone in Mónatos? They’re here by choice. I don’t trick. That’s Nick’s game. I save people—people like you—from being used as pawns. Isn’t that what you want? Your own life? Not to follow a set of inane rules that make no sense?”

Gah. There. Like a master weaver, he twists words and ideas together in such a beautiful and convincing way. He’s spoken to me like that all along, hasn’t he? And I was so desperate to have someone, anyone, reinforce my thoughts, I listened to his warped logic. Lapped it up like a runaway dog. The Shifters warned me, and I didn’t listen. There’s only me—my stubborn head—to blame.

“You. Lie.” I lift my chin.

He pauses for another long drag of coffee. “I take it things didn’t go well with your mother?”

“You knew.” I bunch my hands together because if I don’t I’ll hit him. “You knew she didn’t want me.” I skewer him with a glare. “You made me believe—”

“Ah, ah, ah, Gabriella.” He leans close, and the smell of coffee emits from his mouth. “I gave you the opportunity you wanted.” His blue eyes pierce me. “I never promised she’d want you.”

I draw in a slow, steady breath to combat the dizzy feeling in my head. “Everything you said was to make me think she missed me.”

“I allowed you to believe what you wished to believe. That’s what I do.” He occupies himself by pulling the straw in and out of the hole in the lid. It makes a terrible plastic-on-plastic sound. “It’s called encouraging hope. And it’s generally considered a good thing.”