The Day Before Forever (2 page)

ONE

“WHAT'S HAPPENING?” I
heard Henley say.

Henley's—well, Richard's—eyes went wider than I had ever seen them. I knew a lot of strange things were happening, like the fact that Henley was now somehow inside Richard's body, which had been lying on a bed in fifteenth-century England just moments before, but nothing could have prepared me for Henley starting to shake uncontrollably.

Henley clutched first at his throat, then his chest. “I-I can't breathe.” He took a few stumbling steps toward me. “My chest—”

In his panic, Henley's other arm shot out, trying to reach me.

I grasped his hand. “What's happening?”

Henley looked as if he were drowning in air.

“I—” he began, but it sounded as though his throat closed up, and his weight started to slump toward me.

“Henley!” I tried to keep him up. His eyes were starting to roll back in his head. “Look at me!” His weight was too much for me to hold up, so I tried to gently lower him down.

He hit the floor with a muffled thud.

Henley's skin was flushed and sweat poured down from his hairline. There was a bit of blood on the corner of his lip, and I realized he had bitten down on his own tongue.

I used my fingers to slacken his jaw. All his muscles seemed to be clenched, and his body began to jerk on the floor. I felt under the side of his jaw like I had seen doctors on television do, but I couldn't tell if I was feeling his pulse or my own heart beating erratically.

“Don't you dare do this to me,” I said. I tried to open his shirt to feel for his heart, but my fingers were fumbling. His body continued to lurch beneath my touch.

There. I slipped my hand under his shirt and held him down, while trying to listen for his heart and quiet my breathing for just a minute.

Henley's heart was still beating. Thank God.

Tears prickled my eyes. I didn't know what was happening, but worse than that, I didn't know how to stop it.

“Henley?” I called, as if he were far away and not practically resting his head on my lap. “Henley, dear. Stay with me.”

All I could do was beg and hope that this was just a fit, that it would soon pass.

I clasped his hand in my own. I couldn't lose Henley. I had fought for him. I had even thought I had already lost him once before. I couldn't lose him like this. It wasn't supposed to be like this.

I gripped his hand tighter, as if that was going to do any good.

We shouldn't have tried to travel in time after Henley had somehow “fallen into” Richard's body. I understood that Richard had been dying and Henley was just trying to help, but we—I—should have known it couldn't end well. Henley was half-immortal (whatever that meant or entailed) due to being the sixth Miss Hatfield's son, and getting sucked into Richard's body might have made Henley more mortal than immortal. There was really no way of knowing. But of course traveling in time this far into the future couldn't end well for him. I should have seen that. It rarely had for me.

Henley's fingers twitched in my hand. At first I thought it was the seizure. But I looked down to see Richard's—Henley's—eyes staring back at me.

I shuddered. I forgot Henley was in there.

“Henley?” I said his name purposely, as if to remind myself who he was. “Are you all right?”

He made to sit up, but I put a hand on his shoulder. “You shouldn't get up so quickly.”

He turned away from me and puked.

I rubbed his back.

“All right?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“You scared me.” I paused. If a full mortal traveled this far into the future, past his own life span, he wouldn't exist. He would be essentially killing himself, because he would be dead this far into the future. Maybe his being still alive had to do with Henley being half-immortal? “Do you remember much?”

“I think I lost consciousness partway through talking to you,” Henley said. “Then it was just waking up on the floor and feeling nauseated. . . . My head hurts too.” He instinctively touched the side of his head, but as soon as he did, his hand recoiled and he groaned. “I'm not a fan of Richard's haircut either.”

Henley looked serious, but I couldn't help a small smile that had crept onto my lips. The quiet smile grew into a giggle I had to hold back as Henley turned his strange hands over, taking in the bizarre sight of being able to control someone else's hands. This was such a crazy situation.

A laugh escaped.

“What?” Henley pouted at me.

But his sticking his bottom lip out just made me laugh harder.

“I go into some seizure or shock and you just sit there laughing.” Henley shook his head, but he was smiling too.

I doubled over. The pinpricks of tears I had been holding back came pouring down my cheeks. Tears of relief. Laughing from relief. Relief all around.

“Thank God. Thank God you're all right.”

“I'm as all right as I could be, with you here by my side.” Henley poked me. It was all so strange—laughing and joking like this, as if he hadn't almost died a second ago. And not only that—Henley was finally here. In the flesh. Right in front of me. I had waited so long for this that I hadn't imagined it could ever happen. Maybe this was some sort of nervous response?

He touched the side of my face so carefully. My cheeks hurt so much from smiling when I felt the warmth of his hand. His touch was so careful, it was as if he were scared he would break
me or otherwise shatter this perfect dream we were in.

I shook my head. It wasn't perfect. We didn't have time to be doing this.

Henley's laughter quieted as if he had realized the same thing.

We had used the clock to travel in time, not only to save myself from the effects of staying in one period for too long, but also to run from a killer who seemed to have set his sights on me.
Miss Hatfield's killer
, I reminded myself.

Miss Hatfield—incidentally, Henley's mother, as I had recently found out—had been my mentor, the only one I could really talk to about being immortal. Sure, she had been the cause of my immortality, as she had been the one who had slipped water from the Fountain of Youth into my lemonade that fateful day, but she had helped me since then. Each Miss Hatfield had created the next Miss Hatfield after her. Why? Was it out of loneliness—the idea of spending an eternity alone? Was it out of a strange feeling of duty? I didn't know. But the first Miss Hatfield had turned the second, the second Miss Hatfield had turned the third, the third had turned the fourth, and so on . . . until I became the seventh Miss Hatfield. I was determined that this curse would end with me. There would be no eighth Miss Hatfield.

There were all these rules to abide by as a Miss Hatfield. Sometimes I was convinced the sixth Miss Hatfield had made up half of them. I was taught to be inconspicuous, not to make eye contact with people on the street, and to look “normal” at all costs. There were other skills I had to learn too. Miss Hatfield had taught me how to blend in to a given time period—to talk
like they did, wear what they did, look like they did. Miss Hatfield had also taught me how to constantly move in time, using the golden clock she had hung on the wall of her kitchen.

The clock!

I frantically looked about. The clock lay glistering on the floor just a step behind me. Another wave of relief.

After murdering Miss Hatfield—in front of me, no less—the killer had tried to come after me. I remembered the day Miss Hatfield had told me that immortality did not protect against bodily harm or accidents. An immortal can't die of illness or old age, but a murderer . . . that would do it. Miss Hatfield had said the previous Miss Hatfields had always died in accidents—a ship fire, the Salem witch trials, being locked up in an asylum—shortly after they found and turned their successor. The idea of a murderer on the loose—that made me begin to question everything.

When the murderer first attacked me we got into a struggle, resulting in the clock's hands being turned and both of us being sent to 1527—the farthest the clock could move in time, and the exact year the clock had been made. After realizing the clock had yet to be invented, it had been a real feat to get Henry VIII's court clockmaker to craft it for me.

I took a step and picked up the clock.

Of course, it hadn't even been me who convinced the clockmaker to make the clock in the end. It had been Richard.

Richard was a number of different things. He was charming, that was for sure. He had a way of making me feel as if I were the only one in the room. He would mutter witty things under his breath during feasts at court. He would look at me and
really
see me. I loved Richard.

Richard was also dead.

He was sick from the start. Consumption, they said. But Richard never told me till the end. He had a faint cough, but I didn't think much of it. I was an idiot. Not that there was anything I could have done. I tried. In the end I asked Henley for help, and look where that got us—Henley sucked into Richard's body when Richard died.

I really should be sadder about this—his entire death, I mean. I did love him. That never changed. I loved him. Yet I felt like I couldn't really mourn him when Richard was still here.

“Where are we?” Henley asked.

I stared into Richard's eyes.

We had been in Henry VIII's court about three minutes ago, and now we were . . . wherever this was.

I looked around at our surroundings closely for the first time. I had been in such a state of panic, I hadn't noticed much.

The floors were smooth stone, cut into perfect squares. Pillars, decorated in lavish gold and a grayish blue, shot straight up, supporting a beautiful painted mural.

“All those angels looking down at us,” Henley muttered.

There was an echo as his voice carried in the large room. The ceiling was so high that I felt dizzy from tilting my head up to look at the mural.

There were ornate crests and Greek-looking scrolls—definitely not Tudor-like—along the edge of the ceiling. The gold seemed to drip down the sides of the walls.

Something else echoed then, and I swung to look at Henley.

“What is that?” I whispered, not wanting my voice to carry.

It sounded like a distant tapping, echoing from the other side of the big room. Yet the taps had no pattern.

“Footsteps,” Henley said.

And he was right.

Trying to think quickly, I put down the clock I was holding and stepped next to it, arranging my long skirts so it was hidden.

The reason I couldn't make out the footsteps was that it sounded like more than one person. Many more.

I stood close to Henley, flattening my back against the wall, trying to disappear.

Henley found my hand and squeezed it.

“And please watch your step as we enter this next room.”

I held my breath, but there was no way we wouldn't be found. There was one door on the other side of the room—the side from which the voice was coming. There was no way out for us.

“Here we have the Painted Hall—”

A woman with an absurdly bright-red scarf walked backward into the room. At least fifteen other people followed her in, gripping tightly onto little booklets and what appeared to be folded maps.

With one glance, I could tell we were in the time of ripped jeans and baseball caps.

Though the people who followed the woman in openly stared at us, she seemed too busy talking to notice.

“This wing was built just prior to 1694 and was donated by William III to become the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich. The hospital was closed in 1869.”

Two little girls had come to the front of the crowd. They
were playing tag and obviously not listening to the woman in the red scarf.

“You there,” the woman barked, singling out one of the little girls. “What did I say about running in these old buildings? You could break something, heaven forbid!”

The little girl was wearing a large pink fleece jacket that almost went down to her knees. Her big eyes looked up at the woman before she suddenly ran back into the crowd, presumably to find her parents.

The woman with the red scarf continued. She was lecturing almost forcibly to the crowd, harshly punctuating her words. “From 1873 to 1997, this was the site of a training establishment for the Royal Navy.” The woman's face was almost as red as her scarf. I wondered if it was tied too tightly around her neck.

I looked to my side to mention this to Henley, but when I turned, he wasn't next to me. I hadn't even noticed that he'd let go of my hand.

I scanned the crowd for Henley. He couldn't have gone far.

I was right. Henley was standing at the back of the crowd. What was he doing there?

Squinting, I tried to make out if he was talking to someone. No, that wasn't it.

Henley was easy to spot, as he was still wearing his Tudor-era nightshirt, as Richard had been on his deathbed only a moment ago. I shook my head at how confusing that sounded. But oddly, no one seemed to pay Henley any heed, as he stood just a few steps behind everyone.