Ava wheeled away for a moment. Her tone was disappointed as she said, “I can’t touch any of the flowerpots— or anything else here, for that matter. The ground is solid, but it doesn’t look like anything else is. I think people from this period can see my wheelchair, but not touch it, because we brought it here from our time.”
I explained what Oberi had said, and Kallie groaned. “So we’re intangible if we time travel outside of our own time period. Great.”
Ava huffed. “We’re going to have to think of something else— dammit, where thefuckis Danny?”
I whirled around, but I couldn’t feel the pulse of his magic anywhere.
“He’s fucking ditched us!” Ava sneered.
“We need to find him!” Kallie cried. “If he changes anything, he compromises reality!”
“I’m right here.” Danny’s voice came from around the corner, followed by the sound of footsteps. “And I brought a friend.”
Though I couldn’t touch anything outside of my timeline, my Elven magic could sense the vampire in front of us.
Kallie smacked Danny’s arm. “Youidiot! You know you can’t change anything!”
“Weneedthat key,” Danny insisted. “I came along to make sure you got it this time. If we can’t touch him, we can at least talk to him.”
Ava’s wheels inched closer to the vampire. “Chancey?”
“I don’t know anyone by that name,” the vampire said. I didn’t recognize his voice, but I sensed something in him that reminded me of our friend. He still spoke with a New York accent, which was nearly odd. “Though, I believe I understand why you would call me that.”
“I explained everything to him,” Danny said. “He’s going to give us the key.”
“Fucking hell, Danny,” I growled. “You used your powers on him, didn’t you?”
Danny could see people’s weaknesses by tapping into their desires. He was abusing his power.
“Look, everyone’s got a weakness, all right?” Danny said nonchalantly. “And I’ve got my strengths, so I’m gonna use ‘em. This guy needed to be convinced, so I told him what he needed to know.”
The rules of time travel weren’t clear, and it made my head spin. Outside our own timeline, we could be seen and heard, and my magic still worked to sense the world around me, but it was like we weren’tcompletelyhere in the flesh. Danny’s powers worked through perception, so I guess his powers were still good, too.
“I’m not gonna hand over the key without proof I can trust you,” Frank said.
“You can trust us,” Ava promised. “I’m Ava-Marie, and this is my husband, Charlie. You don’t recognize us, but we used to be your friends in a past life. I was Lucille, and Charlie was Lawrence. We died in a car accident trying to get a special key away from Masci Taurus. Our friend is Kallie— she has the ability to time travel— and she brought us here so we could get the key before anyone else could steal it from us.”
“I don’t know if I believe you,” he said skeptically. “You’re gonna have to give me more than that.”
Something sparked inside my mind. It was a memory, buried deep in my subconscious. I knew it had to be something from my past life that my soul had carried with me into this one. I’d never recalled it before, but the memory ran smoothly off my tongue. “The night before I died, you told me you didn’t want to go on that job to steal the vampire key. You thought it was a bad idea, and you had somebody back home you were sweet on. You wanted to go into hiding. But I promised the pay was good, and we had to, so I made you promise not to back out. You swore on your lover’s life that you’d see it through. Irene, wasn’t it?”
Frank’s voice was thick with a combination of shock and emotion. “Yeah, I remember. I never told anybody else about that night and what was said, and I didn’t tell anybody I loved Irene but Lawrence. He would be the only one who knew. I guess I believe ya. Not like I got anything more to live for, anyway.”
“What do you mean?” Ava asked.
“Irene is gone,” Frank rasped out. “The wrong people knew what we were doing with the key and went back to Brooklyn to take her out. Slaughtered her in a club right in the middle of her song. If I find out who did it… but it doesn’t matter now, does it?”
His coat rustled as he pulled something from his pocket.
He’s got a box, Oberi told me.The same one we found in the vault.
“This key was meant for you, and I made a promise to ensure it got back to you. It’s yours,” Frank offered.
I pocketed my fake illusion key, because it was no use to us anymore, seeing as we were outside our own timeline. It was nothing more than an image here, the same way we were.
“Keep the box,” I told him. “You need to put it in the vault as if it held the key, because we need to keep things as similar as we can to the way they originally played out. If you don’t make the deposit, we won’t go looking for it, and we won’t come back here to get the key from you. We have to do everything the same as it happened the first time, except we’re taking the key.”
“I can’t say I get it, but I figure you know what you’re doing. Lawrence always had some kind of crazy plan. Just wish they didn’t go so wrong as often as they did,” Frank said.
