“There’s a way to find out.”
March straightened his shoulders, went to the other side of the table, behind Levana, and reached for the teapot.
I jumped to my feet. “No.”
“Yes. We’ll divide the hour and see what happens. We’re not getting out of here otherwise, are we?”
“Do it, do it, do it,” Reggie whispered under his breath. “Home, I want to go home, I want to go home…”
Again, that echo of something breaking shook me from the inside. It irritated me, but I was already moving toward the middle on my side of the table and stopped behind Seth to look at March.
“There’s a chance it won’t work.”
“Then I’ll just gain a couple wrinkles,” he said.
Below him, Levana wailed under her hands.
“March,” I said, his name familiar on my tongue, sliding easily as if it had spent a whole lifetime there.
He paused for a split-second, and I noticed. It wasn’t my imagination—he paused.
Then he poured the tea.
He moved to the sides and poured that smelly tea in his own cup, in Reggie’s, Anika’s and Erith’s. They all pushed theirs closer, and when he was done, he grabbed the sugar, a small spoon, and poured two spoonfuls in, too.
That dinner not having come out of my stomach already was a miracle. I had gripped the back of Seth’s chair so tightly my fingers hurt for real, and my instincts wanted me to grab the knives, too, but what could knives do against whatever kind of magic was being used here?
Wicked, wicked magic.
And then the table vibrated. As it did, March began to age.
Gasps, but no screams. The hair around his temples turned gray just slightly. His hands changed a tiny bit, and I noticed when he raised them up to inspect them.
Even Levana had stopped crying, and Russ had raised his head to look.
The table no longer shook. Erith, Anika, March and Reggie had aged, but only by a few years, and each had only lost ten minutes from their Life Clocks.
A grin. The colors in March’s eyes hadn’t changed a bit. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t eventhatold, possibly in his late twenties if I had to guess.
He was very much alive, and he seemed to be in good spirits, too.
“Right again, Spade. You were right again.”
They stood up, started talking, all at the same time. Erith and Anika weren’t crying, and they only looked like they’d matured—not a single grey hair on their head, and that made Levana scream again. Reggie was still the same, still with his head down, still chanting,do it-do it-do it…
“I’ll do it,” I said—because words seemed to have this nasty habit of just falling out of my lips at the most inappropriate times. Not all thoughts were meant to be spoken, and I would have rather keptallof mine inside.
But this body.Mybody seemed to obey a different set of thoughts sometimes. Like it did…before.
They all stopped. They all looked at me.
The teapot steamed again. The tea from the cupsfelltoward the canopy. The game was reset.
The Hands waited. March crossed his arms in front of his chest and watched me like he was preparing to witness something wondrous.
I pulled the sleeves up to my elbows, cursed myself in my head for having said those awful words, and I got to work.
Twelve cups. A teapot worth seven tea-hours, and a bowl worth about three sugar-hours. I took that logic to mean something when I divided them in my mind as evenly as I could.
