Prologue
Themanstareddeepinto the glowing stone basin, frowning at whatever he saw within.
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” he muttered as he reached inside, brushing glowing strings out of his way as he searched through the basin. “None of it makes sense.”
He had spent the better part of a decade in a magical slumber, shoring up his magical reserves in order to be able to finally do the kind of spells that he needed to in order to find her. Now, as he stared into the basin full of human lifelines, he was having trouble figuring out which string led to the woman he was looking for.
She should have been easy to find. Her lifeline was one that was out of time, just aching to be tugged and put to rights by his nimble fingers. But there were four total lifelines that were unique from the others, as if they didn’t quite fit into the flow of time and space like every other line did.
The man needed to find the woman, the omega, that he was looking for. He also needed to do it soon. The echoes of war were finally booming on the horizon. If the man wanted to fix the future he had foreseen, he needed to bring the omega that was out of time to him or else all would be lost.
“Just pull a string,” he told himself as a nervous sweat dotted his brow. There were only four of them and his magic reserves were now overflowing, so he could risk making a few wrong decisions. His magic sparked at the end of his fingertips as he slid them between softly glowing lifelines, reaching for the nearest oddity. It pulsed warm under his touch. The man closed his fingers around the middle of the lifeline and pulled. Suddenly, a blindingly bright light filled the little cave that he had been hibernating in.
“Let’s just hope this is the right one,” he prayed, closing his eyes and continuing to pull the line until the two ends of the lifeline connected with a loud thunderclap.
Merlin Ambrosius muttered the guttural words of a spell that was as old as time itself, the world shifting around him as he pulled the soul from her own time and hopefully into his.
“Bring to thee, where one’s soul is supposed to be,” his voice boomed, echoing off of the cave walls.
And then, there was darkness.
Chapter One
Boston — 1915
“JuneauElizabethWilde,Iknowyou are not tracking mud onto my freshly cleaned floors,” the sound of Maria, our housekeeper’s, voice echoed through the house as I tried and failed to creep up the grand staircase unnoticed.
I paused, glancing over my shoulder at the floor that I had just traipsed over, and winced because I had indeed left muddy tracks on the polished tile floors. I had snuck out for a morning walk in the rain, and upon my return, I found that my usual re-entry point—the kitchen—was bustling with all of the extra staff that had been hired on to help with the annual Wilde Gala. Because of that I was forced to come in through the large double front doors of the mansion. I had been so sure that I had made it without being noticed by anyone, but my muddy shoes were about to do me in.
I turned, hoping that I could make it the rest of the way up the stairs before Maria rounded the corner, but her voice quickly made me stop mid-step.
“Juneau!’ Maria was standing at the bottom of the steps with her fists perched on her plump hips. The woman was a head shorter than I was with a face weathered by years of hard work, her orange hair wisped wildly out from under the white ruffled cap that she always wore on her head.
“Your dress! What have you been doing, child, rolling around in a mud-puddle with the pigs?” Maria asked, her face flushing with irritation as she took in my disheveled appearance. Maria had been with our family for as long as I had been alive, she was the fixture in our household that had kept things running smoothly even after my father died ten years ago. My mother relied on her heavily. So much so, that when the fad to have all French house servants started last year, my mother had proudly proclaimed in front of all of her snobby friends that Maria could handle the work of ten French servants and was much nicer to converse with. It was one of the few times that I had seen her go against the grain of what was popular in society.
I glanced down at the hem of my blue and white striped walking dress and found the entire thing to be covered in mud. I had tried my best to stay under the various awnings and overhangs on my way to the nearby park, but as I looked down at myself I realized that I had failed utterly to keep myself clean. I should never have gone out today. The rainshouldhave dissuaded me the way that it did every other young lady of my age… but one glance out my bedroom window earlier this morning had filled me with the urge to go out into the misty, wet world and explore.
“It’s raining, Maria,” I pointed out lamely, trying to keep my expression impassive as I slowly started to inch my way up the stairs again.
“Then you shouldn’t have gone out at all, and I’d wager that you didn’t even ask Dorothea to accompany you either. Juneau you are a young lady of the Wilde family, you cannot just gallivant around Boston like a common tramp!”
Dorothea was my ladies maid and was, more than likely, still asleep upstairs. Waking her up, dragging her out of bed, and listening to her complaints were not my idea of an adventurous walk. Especially since Dorothea would have taken one look out at the rain and outright refused to go with me anyway.
“I was fine, I do have two feet of my own,” I told her, the feet in question finally making it up to the top of the landing. “I’ll go and change now, sorry about the floors!”
I whirled around and hurried away before Maria could start in on a lecture about it not being safe for an unaccompanied omega to be out in the city by herself.
We weren’ttechnicallyin the city. Wilde Manor was located on the outskirts of Boston, surrounded by parks, gardens, and other mansions of families of similar social status. My great-grandfather had purchased the land in 1842 and everyone had thought he was insane to build out in the middle of nowhere. But now that the nouveau riche had started to move into the city with their fortunes made during the Industrial age, old money was fleeing to our little hamlet in droves, creating a safe haven from those terrifying newly wealthy people.
It was all so very silly to me. Money spent the same no matter who was spending it. My older brother, Timothy, had snottily told me when I asked about it that it wasn’t about money, it was about class, and the nouveau riche were sorely lacking it.
It didn’t matter all that much to me. My head wasn’t filled with the fight between the rich and the newly rich, no, it was filled with another battle entirely.
I slipped inside of my bedroom, leaning against the closed door and opening my little leather purse. Inside were at least a dozen folded stacks of pamphlets.
This was my true purpose for sneaking out of the house this morning. Never would pamphlets about omega or women’s rights ever cross the silver tray that the butler used to carry our correspondence into the breakfast room. No, if I wanted to really learn what was going on out in the world, I would need to go out and collect the information myself.
I snuck out once a week to go and collect the latest from the causes that I cared about. I grabbed them from the criers in the park who held their pamphlets aloft only to be ignored by most of the passing people who were out for a morning stroll. I stopped at each one, taking the pamphlet and thanking the person profusely before moving on to the next.
