The Shape Stealer (32 page)

“They’ve sprayed her with a paralyzing agent. She’s still alive, but her pulse is weakening. The same thing happened to a colleague on my first mission. There was nothing I could do to save him … I don’t know how to remove the agent.”

The thin blue glaze coated Annick like a rime of frost, as if she’d been the victim of an ice storm. Her green eyes stared sightless from beneath the ice, her lips slightly parted. I touched my hand to her forehead and was shocked by the intensity of the cold.

“It’s the ether of time,” Will said, “I can feel it creeping in my own veins.” He had come to crouch beside me. I glanced at him and saw he had a line of blood on his cheek from the battle. For a moment I wasn’t sure which Will it was, but then I recognized the jacket he’d put on this morning. It was young Will.

The other Will stood, looking down at us. “Yes,” he said, holding up his hand. A thick blue glow surrounded his fingers. “I feel it, too. The stuff of time. It gathers on you when you travel through time, and eventually it freezes your soul. The Malefactors have collected it and turned it into a weapon. God knows what they plan to do with it.”

“What can we do for her?” Jules cried. He was still holding Annick’s hand. I didn’t understand how he could bear the intense cold. Just grazing my fingertips over her skin froze me to the bone. But if he could stand it, so could I. I lay my hand on her forehead, closed my eyes, and listened.

I heard the sound of bells chiming—tiny crystal bells ringing across a vast frozen plain. I was in a snowstorm, Kepler’s six-sided snowflakes swirling around me … no, not snowflakes—
stars
. I was hurtling through outer space, through the vast reaches of the universe … and then I was standing on a spinning atom.

I opened my eyes. “I know what to do,” I said, looking up at Will. “She’s caught in between times. We have to transmigrate the atoms surrounding her. You’ve done that before…”

Will shook his head a little sadly. “I have, but I fear that just in the past few minutes I may have lost some of my ability to do that. I seem to have … er … lost something.”

He looked down at younger Will. “When I sent my younger self back to the future with you, I didn’t realize that, in a certain supernatural sense, I was separating myself into two halves. I thought the ache I felt these last four hundred years was my loneliness for you, Garet, and part of it was that…” He smiled ruefully, and I smiled back.

“But it wasn’t just that, was it? It’s a bit like Good Kirk / Bad Kirk.”

Both Wills—my two loves—looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. And Jules scowled at me. “For Heaven’s sake! My beloved is dying and you’re making analogies to that ridiculous American TV show!”

It’s a good thing Jay’s not here to hear that
, I thought.

“You’re right,” I said to Jules. “But we do have time to spare … or, rather, we have
too much
time on our hands. Annick is frozen in time. The two Wills are split in time. I think—”

I didn’t have conventional time to explain my reasoning even if I had been able to. Perhaps Kepler could have. I reached out my left hand to young Will and my right hand to old Will. Together we formed a triangle over Annick. When they took my hands I felt a surge of electricity jolt through me, cold at first, then burning hot. I felt something else. Both these men loved me: young Will with the passion of first love, the thrill of newness and discovery; old Will with the patient endurance of long-lasting love. Was it ever possible to have both? It was an enigma more mysterious than the mechanisms of time travel.

I pulled my hands away and placed them on Annick’s chest, directly over her heart. The charge I had gathered thudded through her with the force of a defibrillator. It shattered the blue glaze into a million splinters. I felt Annick’s heart slam against my hands. Was the force too strong for her? Would her heart explode? I felt as if mine would, as I waited to see what would happen.

Annick’s heart proved to be strong. She gasped as she took in a breath, and her eyes locked on Jules. “
Mon ami,
” she said in a hoarse whisper. “I am quite sure protocol demands that the leader of the mission stay with his troops and not attend to one fallen comrade—”

He silenced her with a kiss.

I stood up to give them some privacy, but my legs, numb from crouching so long—or perhaps the effect of the time-ice—gave way beneath me. As I stumbled, both Wills reaching for me, I looked up and found myself staring into the crazed empty eyes of a Malefactor, his weapon pointed directly at my heart. As he fired, two things happened at once. Old Will threw himself in front of me, and young Will threw himself in front of his older self. The blue flame struck young Will. Old Will tackled the Malefactor, and I fell to young Will’s side. The blue glaze was creeping across his face, but it hadn’t frozen his lips yet. He smiled at me. “My lady, I seem to be out of time … but it’s all right.” His eyes flicked to his older self, who, having destroyed the Malefactor, knelt beside him. “I will catch up with you anon…”

Instead of freezing as Annick had, he began to glow. I looked up at old Will, whose face was stricken with grief as he grasped his younger self’s hand in both of his. Young Will turned to his older self.

“Take care of her,” he said.

“As well as you would yourself,” he replied.

The blue glow enveloped young Will and then exploded in a flash. Weakened as he was, he apparently couldn’t hold out against it as Annick had.

When it was gone, only one Will remained.

40

The Boy and the Man He Became

Will put his arms around me and helped me to my feet. I didn’t realize until he touched me that I was shaking. Not with cold, but with a sense of absence. My mother told me once that after she gave birth to me she had begun to convulse. The midwife told her that it was because her body was adapting to the loss of heat generated by the baby she’d carried for nine months. I felt that same sense of loss now—as if a part of my flesh had been ripped away.

But then Will put his arms around me, and the warmth from his body took the place of that loss. “He’s here,” he said to me, “inside me now. You see, I was right; he was my better self.”

He steered me toward the opening where the pond had been. Jules and Kepler were helping Annick down through it while the
chronologistes
were finishing cleaning up the battle scene. As I entered the underground entrance I took one glance back. The peaceful grove we had found looked like a tornado had hit it—leaves and branches scattered everywhere. The Malefactors who had attacked us were either dead or had fled.

The flight of stairs down was longer than I’d hoped for and treacherous in places, the moss-slick surfaces suggesting no one used it very often. Twice I started to slip, but Will steadied me with his strong grip. At the bottom we entered a high-ceilinged room that was, at a glance, identical to the one in the institute in Paris, including a pendulum suspended from an oculus, which swept regular circles in a ring of sand. I was struck by the geometric link between these time-evoking circles and the hexagons Kepler had used to unlock time’s mystery to get us here, but I didn’t linger over this connection, as Monsieur Durant appeared to greet us. He kissed me on both cheeks after enthusiastically embracing both Annick and Will. He shook Kepler’s hand so passionately that I realized they must have known each other previously. Only Jules held back from Monsieur Durant’s effusive greeting. He drew himself up stiffly and saluted Monsieur Durant.

“Agent Maupassant reporting, sir,” he announced in a loud, officious voice. “Dispatched from the Paris institute seventy-three hours and forty-one minutes ago to retrieve two civilians from the catacombs. I regret to inform you that one of our agents, Jean-Luc Moran, was killed in the line of the duty, sir.”

Durant’s expression, beaming at our arrival, turned sober. “I am very sorry to hear that, Agent Maupassant. Agent Moran will be sorely missed. His name shall be engraved in the Hall of Time and his memory preserved through eternity.” Durant bowed his head, and all the
chronologistes
in the hall bowed theirs as well. After a moment Monsieur Durant lifted his head and looked at Jules, who still stood at attention.

“I see that you have brought the rest of your team safely through time. We were afraid you would not be able to locate the San Francisco institute.”

“Yes, sir, and as you know, we were followed by the Malefactors, whom, thankfully, your forces have destroyed.”

“Would that we had achieved their complete demise,” he replied, gazing up toward the oculus as an ancient Roman might have at the one in the Pantheon, beseeching any deity who resided up there and in lieu of one, the sky, for ultimate and total victory. “We believe there are in excess of five hundred Malefactors in this universe alone. And there’s no way to tally how many might have slipped off into alternative universes since the organization began, a few decades after the publication of Shakespeare’s sonnets in 1609. However, if you had not led this rogue patrol here, they would have caused mayhem elsewhere. I congratulate you all on your bravery and skill.” He regarded Jules with a gaze damp with emotion. “You have done well, son.” He clamped Jules on the back and drew him in to kiss him on both cheeks. When Jules was released, his face glowed with pride. Monsieur Durant turned to the rest of us and continued.

“Even in San Francisco there would seem to be considerably more than the thirty or so we originally estimated. We are preparing for the worst, for hundreds more to arrive from Europe in the next few days, now that they think they don’t have our Paris presence to worry about anymore. But we will be ready for them here, and in fact are also already beginning reconstruction of our hall in Paris while the Malefactors recklessly exult, drunk with victory.”

Durant nodded at a corner of the room, and I could see a large stack of weapons there, all resembling the ones Jules and Annick had brought to the arboretum. I guessed there was enough firepower there to win a small war if it came to that, though I hoped it wouldn’t. The pile seemed high enough for a force in the thousands.

“Yes, it requires recruiting many new
chronologistes
of military age, hopefully with capabilities like you young people have just displayed,” Durant said, following my gaze. “Our librarians and scholars will not be up to it, even in an emergency. But this is a challenge for another day.

“Let me show you around. Our San Francisco establishment was already spectacular when we refugees from Paris got here, and it is more so now!” He began walking toward the door at the other end of the room, and we followed. The next room seemed similar to the one in Paris also, with endless ceiling-high bookcases, long wooden reading tables at which multiple librarians and scholars sat, and stacks of books, journals, and newspapers piled everywhere else, all over the floor. Then my eye caught a spectacular difference.

The far wall of the room was glass and faced the ocean. It didn’t have an ocean view; it faced its
depths
, dark green water slowly moving, with streaks of salt and the occasional fish visible. Given the depth of the staircase I understood how we could be below sea level, but it was startling, even shocking, to see. I wondered how a pane of glass could be holding back all that water. An occasional shaft of sunlight as the water shifted suggested we weren’t too far down, but the surface was not visible. At intervals some sort of tidal surge sent a crescendo of foam against the window, bubbling and frothing, retreating in a wash of silver.

The longer I looked, the more I noticed living creatures. The head of a seal, eyes wide open, pressed briefly against the glass. The large shadow of something moving just above the window frame: could that be a whale? Then, startlingly, a sand shark about ten feet or so in length glided right along the glass. I knew they weren’t man-eaters, but even so I experienced a momentary fear of the glass shattering, the shark spilling in the room alongside us, jaws wide.

We were looking on raptly and Durant was beaming. “We all come from the sea originally, and these creatures are our cousins. What a privilege to be living so close to them. Our living quarters are off a corridor above this hall, many rooms with smaller but similar views.”

We nodded in a kind of mystic unison at the breathtaking closeness to the sea. Will came to join me at the window. He put his arm around me. “You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?” he asked.

Unable to face him, I looked at Will’s eyes in the reflection. “I know it’s foolish. I know you’re the same person…”

He shook his head and touched his hand to his chest. “He is inside
here
, but we’re not the same. I feel his loss, too, his enthusiasm and passion. I had forgotten how those felt until I met you—then I saw him and I thought I could give you that youthful passion. Now, when I look into your eyes…” He turned to me, and I turned away from the reflection to face him. “I see your love for him, and that youthful self comes alive inside me again.”

As Will slipped his arm around my shoulders and we stood there looking on and on, gazing into the heart of forever, I thought to myself that it wasn’t everybody who got to love the boy and the man he became at the same time.

Tor Books by Lee Carroll

Black Swan Rising

The Watchtower

The Shape Stealer

About the Author

Lee Carroll is a pseudonym for the collaboration between Hammett Award–winning mystery novelist Carol Goodman and her poet and hedge fund manager husband, Lee Slonimsky. Goodman and Slonimsky live in the Hudson Valley of New York State.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE SHAPE STEALER

Copyright © 2013 by Carol Goodman and Lee Slonimsky

All rights reserved.

“Pére Lachaise” by Pui Ying Wong from
Yellow Plum Season
, New York Quarterly Books, 2010, reprinted by permission of the author.