The Forgotten Locket (22 page)

And I had unwittingly handed over the most vulnerable part of Dante to the one person who could do him the most harm.

“Why didn’t you keep it with you?” I asked, trying not to let my voice tremble. “It would have been safer that way. If you had kept it, I wouldn’t have had it when Zo asked me for it. I wouldn’t have given it to him, and he wouldn’t have broken it—or you.” I took a deep breath. “What
did
he do to you, Dante? He hurt you, but I don’t know where or how, and so I don’t know how to help.”

“First of all, you didn’t
give
it to Zo. He
stole
the locket from you in order to hurt me. It’s not your fault; you’re not to blame.” A deep cough racked through his chest, his breath catching hard at the end. “Second of all, what he did to me was the same thing I did to him. The part of me that was tied to the locket—and the part of Zo that was tied to his guitar—is gone. Broken, and unrecoverable.”

I pulled my eyebrows together in a frown. “He didn’t seem very broken to me.”

“The wound may be in a different place from mine, but trust me, Zo is not functioning at full strength anymore.”

“But you said that damage done to a Master of Time
by
a Master of Time is permanent. That’s why your eyes . . .” I shook my head, still finding it difficult to think of Dante being blind forever. “That same rule doesn’t apply to this kind of wound, does it?”

“What’s done is done,” Dante said, looking down and away.

I forced him to face me again. “What part of you has been damaged?”

His eyes were dark and his face paled as though he saw something horrible waiting for him in the distance.

My heart froze in my chest. I suddenly didn’t want to hear the answer to my question. But I had never shied away from the truth, no matter how difficult it was to bear. I had to know. How could I help Dante if I didn’t know what was wrong with him?

Dante licked his lips. “Do you remember when I was trapped with Tony between doors—” He hesitated and I saw a shadow cross his face. “After the darkness took him . . . after he was . . .”

I covered his hand with mine, silently encouraging him to continue.

He cleared his throat, and his next words were steadier. “I told you that I felt like there was a sudden concentration of time. Almost like time accelerated around me.”

“I remember,” I said quietly.

“When the locket broke, it felt like that. Like an enormous amount of pressure had settled inside me. Here—in my heart.” He touched his chest again. “But this time, it feels like there is a hole as well.”

“The part of you that Zo damaged.”

Dante nodded. “And all this pressure—all this accelerated time that is flowing through me—it feels like it’s draining away through that little hole.”

“Well, maybe, once all the pressure is gone, we’ll be able to figure out a way to patch that hole,” I suggested, feeling a touch of hope.

“Except Zo is responsible for the hole. Which means it can’t be patched.” Dante looked down again.

A sinking feeling dropped all the way to my toes. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I bit down on an inhalation, feeling like a sharp knife had cut a hole in my chest that matched the one in Dante’s. Even though I was frozen in place, I felt like I was falling; I could almost hear the sound of wind rushing past my ears.

“But you’re a Master of Time,” I started. “You’re not bound to the bank
or
the river. Time doesn’t have any kind of power over you.”

“That’s what I thought, too. But things have changed. I’ve changed. All I know is that now I can feel time slipping away when I couldn’t feel it before. And I don’t know what will happen to me when that time is gone.”

My fist tightened around the locket. I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation. It couldn’t be true. Dante couldn’t be dying.

“Then fix it,” I said desperately. “If you fix the locket, then your heart will be healed, right? Regardless of what Zo did?” I opened my hand and held out the locket to him. “I know you can do it. You created it once; you can do it again.”

Dante gently closed my fingers over the broken heart and pushed my hand back to me. “I don’t think I can fix the locket. At least, not until my eyesight is back.”

But we both knew that was impossible.

Tears of sorrow and loss burned my eyes, even as the bitter taste of hate filled my mouth. I hated Zo for what he had done to Dante, for all the ways he had wounded the man I loved.

Dante still held my hand. “Abby, I gave you the locket as a way to be with you even when I couldn’t be with you. It was a way for me to finally be whole again and feel at peace. And if I had it to do over again, I would do the exact same thing.”

“But you’re not whole,” I pointed out, my voice shaking. “Not anymore. There’s a part of you that’s missing. That’s . . . dying.” I choked on the word.

He didn’t deny it.

His fingers trembled on my skin. “I knew what I was doing when I gave you my heart the first time. I know what I’m doing this time, too.”

“But I can’t fix it.” My words were a whisper. My tears were endless. “I can’t fix you.”

Dante brushed my hair across my forehead, running his fingertips down my cheek and around my ear. He reached down and, lifting my hand in his, he kissed the tops of each of my fingers. Then he pressed my empty palm flat against his chest, right over his heart.

I could feel the exact moment when his broken pulse found a steady rhythm at my touch.

“If anyone can find a way, it will be you,” he said. “You have risked everything to come to this time and this place to help me—to
save
me—and I believe in you, Abby. I know we will find a way to return home, healed and whole. Both of us.”

He leaned in until our lips were almost touching. I could feel his breath move across my open mouth. “I trust you,” he said simply. “I have given you my heart and my soul. I know I can trust you with my future, too.” His lips were so close that they touched mine when he spoke. “We’ll be together, Abby. I promise. Always,” he said softly. “Always and forever.”

His kiss was lightning in a storm, a heat that warmed me to the core, a brightness I could cling to as everything inside me—all my doubts and fears, all the darkness and confusion—whirled away into light.

Chapter 16

Dante?”

I thought at first that I had said his name—he was all I could think about, after all—but my lips still tingled from his touch and I doubted I could have formed a single coherent word.

“Dante?” Orlando cleared his throat, once, then twice. “Abby?”

I looked around and scrambled to my feet, trying to brush my hair back into place and feeling a blush burn in my cheeks.

Orlando leaned against the counter, his arms folded and a concerned frown on his face. “Dante, are you feeling better? Are you both all right?”

I slipped the pieces of the locket into an inner pocket of the cloak I wore, glancing back at Dante as I did so to see if my jostling the pieces caused him any pain.

“I’m fine,” Dante said, pushing himself to his feet and reaching for my hand. He stood straight and tall and looked so much like his regular self that I wondered for a moment if maybe we had been wrong about the dying part of his heart. Then I felt the slightest tremble in Dante’s fingers and knew that it was taking all his energy to mask the pain he was in.

I knew Orlando deserved to hear the truth about the hole in Dante’s heart, but I didn’t know if I had the words to explain it. I could barely wrap my mind around it myself.

“Abby and Dante were k-i-s-s-i-n-g,” Valerie sang with a smile, clapping her hands together on the offbeat.

“I saw,” Orlando said quietly, looking down and away.

“You’re back,” I said needlessly. “How was it?” As soon as I spoke, though, I winced. They’d been to the bank; I already knew how that was.

Orlando didn’t answer, but Valerie’s face brightened. She rushed to my side and grabbed my free hand.

“Oh, it was wonderful!”

I looked a question over her head at Orlando, who shrugged in answer.

“I feel so much better,” Valerie gushed. “I’ve been to that place before, but it was horrible—all flat and full of nothings—but this time it was different. This time it was full of all the people from the stories in my head. I could see all the stories—all the different endings—and it was like magic watching them come and go depending on how the story traveled.”

“Who did you see, Valerie?” asked Dante. “Which stories?”

“Oh, you were there, of course. The River Policeman is in a lot of stories right now. Some of them are scary—I didn’t watch those—but most of them are good. There was even one about the River Policeman’s locket, but I didn’t see how that one ended.” She squeezed my hand with hers. “Oh, and you were there, too. K-i-s-s-i-n-g.”

The blush I thought I had conquered came back to life.

“You all were there. Even him.” She pointed toward the door.

I spun on my heel—and gasped in disbelief.

Leo stood on the threshold of the shop, anger snapping from his blue eyes. The wind gusted through the door, wrapping the tail ends of his coat around his legs and ruffling through his silver-gray hair. “What’s this? What are you doing in my shop?”

The sound of his voice seemed to resonate deep inside me.

I looked from Dante to Orlando to Leo, and the penny dropped.

They looked so much alike—all three of them—the only difference being in height and age. But they all shared the same shape of face, the same posture. They even had similar eyes; Dante’s were gray, but Orlando’s and Leo’s were the exact same shade of blue.

“Father?” Orlando said into the stillness. “What are you doing back? I thought—”

Not Leo, then. Though he looked exactly like the man Orlando would become so many years in the future.

Dante looked to me for confirmation, and when I nodded, he swiftly pulled down his sleeves to cover his gold chains. He turned his face away. I knew Dante didn’t want anyone else to see his injury, but I also knew how much he wanted to be able to see his father.

My heart skipped a beat, sharing his pain and his longing. How long had it been since I’d seen my own dad? My own family? It felt like it hadn’t been that long at all, and at the same time, like it had been an impossible span of time.

Alessandro rocked back on his heels, the bag in his hand slipping free and landing on the floor with a thud. He gripped the door frame for balance. Surprise erased his anger, his whole body relaxing with happiness. Then he smiled, and I saw the echo of Dante in his face.

“Orlando?” he said, awed.

Alessandro stepped forward, and Dante stepped back in an attempt to blend into the background. Alessandro stopped, drawn by the movement. “Dante?”

I let go of Dante’s hand and pulled Valerie aside so we wouldn’t be in the way of the unexpected family reunion. I held a finger to my lips, hoping she would follow suit and stay quiet.

Valerie nodded and pressed both of her hands against her mouth, her eyes shining.

“Hello, Father,” Dante said without looking up, his voice catching on the last syllable.

“My boys. My sons.” Alessandro rushed forward, sweeping both Dante and Orlando into his arms and crushing them into an embrace. “I didn’t know . . . I hadn’t heard you were coming.” He laughed a little. “When did you get here? Have you been home yet?” He pulled away a little, but only so he could hug them individually.

When it was Dante’s turn, he glanced at me over his father’s shoulder, and I saw both worry and relief on his face.

“We just arrived,” Orlando said at the same time that Dante said, “No, we haven’t been home.”

Alessandro laughed again, a wild release of joy. “Oh, your mother will be speechless when she sees you. And I will be the hero for bringing you both home to her.”

Orlando swallowed and glanced at Dante, who kept his face turned away to hide his scar.

I knew what he was thinking—what they both were—because I was wondering the same thing: Should they tell their father the truth? And if so, how much of it? And if not, then what could they possibly say?

“We can’t stay—” Orlando started.

“Nonsense.” Alessandro waved away the very idea. “Let me put a few things away, and we’ll be off.”

“This is where the story changes,” Valerie whispered to me from behind her hands. “If Dante says yes, the story goes one way. If he says no . . .”

“What
should
he say?” I whispered back, wondering how I could get the information to him without drawing undue attention.

“It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “He’s already picked.”

“We’d love to see Mother,” Dante said.

“And there it goes,” Valerie said with a sigh. “Oh, I’m glad he said yes. It makes for a much better story.”