Shadows Fall Away (35 page)

Genie was on the floor!

The Ripper was bent over, still carving away, oblivious to me easing inside. I hobbled up behind and hit him with doubled fists. He fell onto the corpse and I hit him again and again then ran to Genie. She looked okay, uncut.

“Genie, wake up. Please.”

She came around, her eyes fluttered open. “Mother,”

“No, it’s Mark.”

“Mother! Mother, don’t!”

I whipped my head around. It was Mrs. Trambley? Jesus. She lunged at us. I shoved Genie away and dived forward, hitting her mother in the knee. She crashed to the floor and I grabbed for the knife. She was closer and grabbed it first, scrambled to her feet.

I pulled myself up and she kicked my bad leg out from under me.

“Oh Mary…”

“Genie, don’t look.”

Mrs. Trambley booked out the door and Genie was hunched over, dry heaving, wracking her body. I crawled to her held her. “We have to get out of here.”

“We must find Mother.”

“That, too.”

We caught sight of her and followed. The crazy old lady knew every back alley and empty street in this place. We found the jacket in the gutter a block away, the vest a while after that. Last were the pants, the legs sliced so she could pull them off without having to stop long.

She was heading to the river. I pulled Genie to a stop. “Go home, get help, just go.”

“I can’t. She’s my mother!”

“That is not the mother you know.”

Genie pulled away. “Don’t make me kick you, too.”

“Aw hell.” I grabbed her hand again. “Come on.”

My ankle gave out before we caught up to her and Genie turned this way and that wanting to stay with me, but wanting to find her mother.

“Go if you have to, just be careful. Please.” I gritted my teeth against the pain. “I’ll send a cop.”

She ran off but came back a minute later, a pair of constables in tow.

Mark

The insane night morphed into a Tim Burton film as written by John Grisham. We were hauled into the police station. Ian was not happy about being dragged out of bed but Genie and I didn’t feel comfortable telling the crazy story to anyone else. Genie’s dad showed up not long after, which was awfully strange in itself. He and Ian went off to have some super-secret talk. When they came out, Ian cut us loose.

It was a shock and a half when Dr. Trambley insisted I go home with him and Genie and I was actually afraid he might try to kill me off to keep me quiet. But then I figured that might just be my semi drug-fogged wild imagination talking. I was hauling my butt out of bed later that afternoon when Sarah knocked on my door to deliver the news that Mrs. Trambley’s body had been found near the Thames. She’d been stabbed so badly on her arms and legs that she’d bled to death. The police weren’t sure if it was related to the horrible murder that happened in Whitechapel.

***

So, there I was still stuck in the not so good olde days with a jacked up ankle that would probably never heal and no plan for the future. But there was one thing I knew I had to do and that was come clean once and for all.

I told Genie and her dad where I really came from. I couldn’t explain how I’d actually gotten to 1888 beyond “lightning go boom and Mark go bye bye,” but if Dr. Trambley thought I was a raving lunatic at least he didn’t toss me into a cell in a dank deadly Victorian madhouse. He offered to let me stay until after the funeral, which was to be a private affair with no reception after.

Genie remained quiet about the whole thing. She didn’t accept or deny my story, at least not to me, but she did give me a lot of far off looks and weird head nods as if having some silent questions answered to her satisfaction.

Once the funeral was done and I figured it was time to shove off. Genie insisted on having Harry drive me back to my place at the tea shop. Almost to my place at the tea shop. She had him stop a couple streets away and sent him home then slipped her arm through mine so we could walk the rest of the way.

“You aren’t a very good nurse are you, making a poor crippled guy walk on a bum ankle.”

“You’re the one who said it wouldn’t mend if you keep it immobilized.”

“Yeah, but walking twenty miles isn’t the best rehab either.”

“Rehab?”

I waved it off. “American term, pretty out there.”

“Out there?”

“Oy! Young Mr. Stewart!”

A big black coach slowed to a crawl on the street beside us and out popped the grinning face of Sir Cedric Hawkesmythe.

“Hello, my dimension riding friend!”

“Um, hi,” I gave a quick glance around to see if anyone heard him.

He opened the carriage door. “Come in, come in. You as well, Miss Trambley.”

I gazed at Genie. “You know him?”

She scoffed. “Of course. Sir Cedric is one of the charity ward’s most generous supporters.” She waited while the coachman got down and helped her up. “How are you, Sir Cedric—oh. Hello. I’m Eugenia Trambley and you are…”

“Mark’s aunt. Agatha Swinden.”

“Agatha?”

Okay, so now we had the Tim Burton flick scripted by John Grisham and edited by the
Punk’d
crew. Great.

“Will you stop gawking and get in here? It’s freezing,” Agatha snapped.

* * *

It turned out there was a reason for the time traveling, at last a plausible explanation. Apparently Sir Cedric was onto something with the crystals and vibrations and clockworks and such. It turned out that his house, country estate, and the part of Regent’s Park where I got zapped all rested on some “ley line,” one of a bunch of invisible energy bands that crisscrossed the Earth. Agatha had a physicist friend from our time who played the game, made a time watch, and laid out the scenarios for her and told her to have at it if she dared.

Agatha dared and ended up right in Sir Cedric’s country house library at teatime on a foggy Saturday afternoon.

I compared the antique watch she’d given me to the modern version her friend made. They were identical down to the metal and crystal clockwork parts. “So you think this will get us home if we wait for the right tilt of the Earth and phase of the moon and shit?”

“Language!” Agatha cleared her throat. “It will get two of us back, hopefully to Percy’s drawing room from whence I came.”

I smirked. “Provided we don’t take a cosmic left turn at Albuquerque and end up facing a band of H.G. Well’s Morlocks or Dr. Who’s Daleks.”

“Well, I guess I’m game. I don’t imagine I have anything to lose.”

A weird little squeak sounded and Genie jumped up and ran from the room.

“What’d I say?”

***

Genie

It was totally insane and yet it made perfect sense. No wonder Mark was so different than other men. He was a modern man with modern ideas of what was proper behavior for a woman.

And soon he would be gone forever and I would be the one with “nothing to lose.”

“He’s as thick-headed as the day is long, but he does have a good heart.”

I dried my eyes and turned to face Mark’s maternal aunt. “You’re certainly correct about the thick-headed part.”

She laughed and stood beside me. “When I said two could go back, I didn’t mean I wanted to be one of those two.”

“I don’t understand.”

Agatha smiled. “Apparently my great nephew isn’t the only thick-headed one around here today.”

“What? Do you mean I should go with him, to the year 2011? That’s an entire new century. Two centuries almost!”

She took hold of my hands. “And you’ll love it. Girls have so much freedom—perhaps too much but that’s neither here nor there. You should go. He wants you to.”

“Oh I don’t know. What if it doesn’t work? What if we run into those Morlecks he mentioned?”

“Daleks and Morlocks,” Mark quipped from the doorway. “Get your creatures straight or the deal’s off.”

My heart pounded and my head fairly swam with the possibilities. “You want me to go with you? To your time?”

Smiling, he limped his way toward me. Agatha let go of my hands and he took them in his. “The way I see it, it’s time for you to put up or shut up. You want to be an independent, free thinking woman who does what she wants when she wants then the twenty-first century is the place for you, Miss Trambley.”

I gave him a feigned pout. “I thought we’d progressed to a given name basis.”

He let go of my hands and slipped his arm around my shoulder. “I do believe you’re right, Genie. Now what do you say?”

My body went clammy despite the warmth his hug gave me and I wrung my hands. “I shall have to find a way to explain to Father. I suppose.” I pulled away. “I don’t know. I can’t decide.”

“The planetary alignment moves out of position in thirty-six hours,” Agatha said. “It’s now or never.”

Clamping my eyes shut I pressed my palms to my face as a war of heart and head took place within me.

My foolish heart won out. “Yes, I’ll go with you.”

Kit Forbes has been a lover of books, history, and all things paranormal for as long as she can remember. She lives in Western Pennsylvania with her youngest daughter and an assortment of cats who give new meaning to the world bizarre.

BRANDED

INTO THE FIRE

PREDATOR

CROWN OF ICE

ENDLESS

PRAEFATIO

THE LOOKING GLASS

OF BREAKABLE THINGS

A MURDER OF MAGPIES

LIFER

A SHIMMER OF ANGELS and A SLITHER OF HOPE

SCION OF THE SUN

CALL ME GRIM