The queen looked up. “Marius, something terrible has happened. It’s Charlie.”
At her side, Harlow felt Marius stiffen, and his grip on her hand tightened with his anxiety. “What happened?”
“Nathaniel and I were here with her, researching how to retrieve Killian’s and Brynhoff’s hearts. We wanted to set their souls free and end their hold on you. Charlie heard us and decided she wanted to help.”
“What are you talking about, Raven? How could Charlie possibly help with my situation?”
Raven pointed to the first of fourteen slices. “She opened a new portal. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t repeat this magic. Charlie went back in time to the last moment we saw the hearts.”
Harlow turned her head to stare at Marius, but the look on his face told her that his niece leaping through time was as surprising to him as it was to her.
Marius seemed incapable of speech, but Harlow had to know what was going on. “I’m sorry, but did you just say your daughter traveled back in time? Are you sure?”
Raven wiped under her eyes. “We watched her. Nathaniel was able to hold open the window long enough for us to see her get the hearts.”
“Wait, are you saying it worked? She has them?” Marius’s excitement was contagious, but if it had worked, why was Raven so upset?
Nathaniel puffed on his pipe. “It seems that Charlie has the power to move through time and between dimensions. The problem is, she has not been able to get back to us.” Nathaniel reached into the model and turned the slices so that Harlow could see a window into a dark place where a child with angel wings carried a satchel Harlow assumed contained the dragon hearts. It looked like the Charlie she’d met at the coronation but older.
“Is that Charlie?” Marius asked.
Gabriel answered, voice strained. “Yes, our daughter appears to have aged with her travels. We estimate three human years.”
Harlow covered her mouth with a hand. What did you say to parents who’d lost their child in time?
“Raven devised a way to see into these dimensions,” Nathaniel explained. “What she didn’t understand is that time isn’t consistent within them. Each dimension is a separate river, and when we leap from one to the next, we aren’t traveling linearly. Where we land depends on the magic, will, and intent of the traveler.
“We watched Charlie enter Eleanor’s ritual room. She knew where to go because she’d been there. She’d seen the hearts as a baby. She pulled them from a pile of collapsed shelving while our mother was distracted with killing the goddess. When Eleanor destroyed the room, Charlie tried to leap back to us, but she was sucked into the underworld with Aitna by Eleanor’s spell. Charlie leaped forward, back into our time, but she landed in the dimension Aitna had landed in back then. The one we resurrected you from.”
“Fire planet,” Marius said.
Harlow’s stomach filled with shards of ice. “The one with the hunters? The place you thought you were when you were strangling me?”
Marius nodded, and she thought she might be sick. That was no place for a child.
Raven wept openly, and her voice came out high-pitched as she said, “We don’t think she knows the way out. We can see her, but she can’t see us. She can’t hear us. She’s scared, Marius. She isn’t spirit. She’s there bodily somehow. She can be hurt and killed.”
“She has to make it to the temple.” Marius’s voice was more dragon than man. “What do you want me to do?”
The queen stood and walked to him, took his hand. “I want you to go in and show her the way out.”
“There is no way he’s going back in there!” Harlow’s voice felt high and tight. Part of her understood she should not be speaking to the queen like this, but the idea of sending Marius back to the place he’d been trapped for three hundred years was too cruel to be a valid consideration. She bared her teeth.
Gabriel growled a note of warning, but Raven held up a hand. “I understand it’s too much to ask, but I don’t think there’s another way.”
Marius pulled Harlow’s back against his chest and wrapped his arms around her. “Easy,” he whispered in her ear.
Her heart pounded but she remained silent, allowed him to handle it. “I don’t know how to get back inside.”
Good. He had no intention of going. Harlow wanted to get the girl back, but…
“You can’t go inside your body,” Nathaniel said. “Charlie is the only creature to ever walk into the spiritual realms body and all as far as we know.”
“Then how do you expect me to help her?” Marius asked.
“Remember how we talked about the levels of Hades and the idea that if you could navigate to the last temple, you could escape, but that Eleanor had cursed you to repeat the levels over and over again?”
Marius’s expression grew darker. “In theory.”
