I know it like the back of my hand. But I have to believe I traveled here for a reason. If I’m going to tap into the ability to travel again and control it this time so I can go back for Niklaus—I need to understand myself, the past, and what is drawing me to these timelines.
“No one really knows,” an older woman to my right says, sipping her hot tea.
“We hear—l-l-lots of screams,” a teenage girl replies.
Screams?
“Why are all of you here?” I ask.
“Got caught sleeping with my neighbor’s husband. The Emerald Wife accused me of—being Vexamen spy.”
“I wasn’tlosingweightinthewomen’s wardoftheasylum,” the teenage girl slurs.
“Same.”
“S-s-same.”
The woman directly across from me sets her cup down. “Homeless. Living in the Bear Traps.”
I look around the room and raise my eyebrows. “Do the women who get called ever come back?”
A few women look down at their gloved hands. One shakes her head.
Fantastic.
I don’t recognize anyone here, so I’m not entirely certain who drew me to this spot? Aurick Demechnef? Perhaps because I left his son behind? I’m not really sure who else I would be drawn to.
“Snow Abatora,” a short old man calls from the cracked doorway.
The fake name I gave when captured.
The women look to me. Pity. Hopelessness. Sorrow.
“Don’t worry about me,” I say, rising from my seat and nearly falling to the ground from the intense vertigo.
But really, I just don’t have a choice. I have two people who mean the world to me that I’ve abandoned in time. There isn’t an option to die here or there. If I die after getting them home? Fine. If I, myself, don’t make it home? Okay.
But not getting back to Uncle Niles and Niklaus? Inconceivable.
As I follow the old man to the next room, my sweaty hand instinctively clutches the IV pole I’m attached to. To brace myself for another cage. A dungeon. A dingy basement.
“You are quite the pretty one,” the old man comments ironically. “Too bad he does not care about pretty.”
He?
The mahogany door he opens does not lead to a basement or damp chamber.
It’s a library.
Less of a room and more of a cathedral for rich bureaucrats and wealthy savants. Oil paintings watch from the mile-high ceilings. The trim of the dark walnut wood gleams beneath its polish. A few rolling ladders trace slow arcs across sparkling shelves. Velvet drapes cocoon the windows. Aged-brass fixtures and a fireplace bigger than the last cage I slept in.
And a young man, fourteen or fifteen, sits in the center of the room.
“Meet your newest guest, Snow Abatora,” the old man tells the teenage boy.
As if moping, he keeps his head down, arms draped over his knees as he sits on the center of a nice table.
“Aren’t you going to introduce yourself, young man?”
