“Why weren’t you covered in blood when you…moved?” the man asks.
I cringe at the way he speaks.
Each syllable is annunciated with surgical care. Slow. Unnatural. His voice is a foreign sound to him. It’s as if he’s forcing his tone to be higher, like when one would read a character out of a book for a child.
“What?” Niklaus blurts out.
“You breathe like your mother,” Strange Man adds. “Same lungs, I expect.”
What the fuck?
“Are you going to answer his question or not?” I cut in.
The stranger moves his head to me slowly, woodenly, like the hand of a clock ticking to the next hour. Those black, shifty eyes inspect me as his cheek twitches. Unblinking stare travels down to my feet, then back up again.
“Do you hear voices like your father did?” Stranger takes a step closer to me, blinking like a reptile.
“No,” I answer coldly.
“Hmm.” He nods, seemingly disappointed. “I don’t either, even though my father also heard them.”
Who the hell is this man?!
“And who is your father?” Niklaus asks.
Bowler Hat Man considers the questions, tapping his index to his thumb as he thinks. I wonder if he’s contemplating lying to us or not.
“I believe your father referred to him as Val. But his full name was Valliticus Bear Edison. And my name is Vrath.”
Val. My blood stops pumping.
“Vrath,” Niklaus repeats.
A sticky dizziness curls around the edges of my vision like a shadow.
“I do not have a last name.”
Val.
“Was your mother’s name…” I hesitate. “Vinaley?”
I didn’t notice it before, but Vrath winces in my direction, though it is subtle through the paint on his face. He’s either disgusted by me or spooked.
“Yes,” he responds. He taps his fingers again. “Did you kill your mother, Sapphire S. Valdawell?”
“What? No?”
“You can obviously time travel too, otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to follow us,” Niklaus interrupts.
I’m still reeling from this new information. This man is Val and Vinaley’s son. The two experiments who came before my parents. The murder-suicide subjects. My mother didn’t tell me they had a child.
Vrath cracks his neck. “Yes, evidently.”
“Can you help us get home?”
I want to pull Niklaus to the side to tell him what I know. My gut tells me Vrath isn’t here to help us. That we shouldn’t show him our cards, or even that I don’t know how to control this yet.
“Why would I do that?” Vrath steps closer, boots mushing through the mud. “I am still observing.”
