“I know. Thank you, Ben.” She rose up on the tips of her toes and kissed his mouth, then pushed him toward the door. “Don’t linger anywhere.”
He smiled, letting her push him along. “I wonder if the watch can send us straight to London. It will save much time.”
“The watch might not,” Lizzie said, standing in the hall outside the door, “but I can.”
Fable startled upon seeing her where Fable was sure she wasn’t a moment ago. “What are you doing here? Are you bringing him back now?”
Lizzie nodded and stepped in front of Fable, blocking her path to Ben as he reached his parents. The old seer didn’t do anything specific but maybe moved her lips around a few words. The air waved as if Fable were looking at Ben in the heat of a desert plain. Her instinct was to run to him, but she didn’t move. They were there and gone in an instant.
Tears slipped down her cheeks. She wiped them. This wasn’t the end of her and Ben. She was gaining a family–something she never had before. Something she rarely missed. What would it be like having a father?
“How are we getting back to the B&B?” Fable asked, turning to Lizzie.
“I’m teleporting. I don’t know about you, dear.”
Fable cast her an icy look. “Fine. I’ll see you later then.”
Lizzie was already gone.
Fable looked around and wondered if she could teleport. She was her father’s daughter, an heir to his powers. She closed her eyes and thought about being at the B&B. Then opened them almost immediately. What if she zapped herself into some other century? She shouldn’t play around with things she knew nothing about. She was thankful she couldn’t see ghosts like her sister.
She left the building on her own two feet, still wondering what she was capable of. Maybe the gifts had skipped her.
“The seer sees.”
“What?” Fable spun around. People came and went. None of them paid any attention to her. She looked around.
“The seer sees.”
Her gaze rose to where the sound was coming from. A streetlamp. More specifically, a pigeon perched on the streetlamp.
Fable’s mouth fell open and she caught her breath as her vision from earlier returned. She was a babe and animals, bumble bees and butterflies hovered around her. She could…communicate with animals like Lizzie and Bernadette. How? “Is Lizzie watching me?”
The pigeon bristled and puffed up on its metal perch.
Fable frowned and looked around, narrowing her eyes. “Why are you spying on me, Lizzie?”
“Seer comes.”
Fable looked up at the pigeon and then around her. Lizzie was coming. How did she know that’s what the pigeon meant? Heavens! She could understand animals. When Lizzie appeared walking across the street to meet Fable where she stood, Fable sighed waiting for her.
“How did you know I was watching?”
“A pigeon told me,” Fable told her candidly and with a touch of sarcasm at the seer who hadn’t seen that coming. “Why did you bother leaving the building instead of staying with me if you were just going to spy? Where do you think I’ll go?”
“I don’t want to mistrust you, child, but you grew up without loyalties.”
“That doesn’t mean I can’t be loyal,” Fable corrected in a quiet voice. “I know that it means staying true to a person or a cause without wavering. I’m capable of it. There just haven’t been any people around me who earned my loyalty.”
“And Benjamin West has earned it?”
“Yes, it is his. I want to trust you, but if you couldn’t find me, how did Lieutenant Colonel West find me?”
“He didn’t. Tess used the pocket watch to find you, otherwise you would have probably died on the streets. You met Ben and captured his heart and filled the empty places in his heart. We knew that once it began beating again, he would be willing to save your father. And see? It is as I said.”
“Lizzie,” Fable said calmly as they walked down 53rd street, “you used me as a pawn.”
“To save your father and set things right.”
