Hourglass

Michael shook his head in disgust. “You’re both insane.”

Jack was quiet for a moment, his eyes calculating. “Are we really? Don’t we all have things we’d like to change in our pasts? Wrongs to right? Why wouldn’t one change devastating experiences, horrible history, if one had the choice? You know how that feels, don’t you, Emerson?”

I couldn’t speak. He’d hit too close to home.

The blue of Jack’s eyes had faded a bit, and it seemed as if his hair was no longer just blonde, but somewhat gray at the temples. “I always thought I could appeal to Grace to travel back and change things for me, if the opportunity presented itself. Kaleb dealt with so much; surely she would be sympathetic, understand my plight.”

“But she didn’t,” Michael said.

“She argued. Then she connected me to Liam’s death. I had to take action.”

My face went numb as I struggled against the nausea rising in my throat. “It was you. She didn’t try to commit suicide, or Kaleb would have felt it coming. He felt nothing. You tried to kill her.”

“I did not,” he protested politely. “I simply used my ability.”

“Your ability?” Michael asked. “Do you even have one?”

Jack laughed, a doubled-over, out-loud belly laugh. “Not an ability you’ve ever seen me use. Or rather, not one that you remember. I’ve not been allowed to use it since an unfortunate choice many moons ago. But I carry the same time-related ability gene as the two of you. Just not the travel gene.”

“Which one do you carry?” I asked, hating the weakness I heard when my voice shook. “What can you do?”

His answering smile was wide, and the creases in his face were deeper than I remembered.

“I can steal time.”

Chapter 54

How?” Michael asked. “How do you ‘steal’ time?”

“By stealing memories.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It was so easy to take Grace on a walk down memory lane. As she thought them, I took them, but only the ones keeping her alive. When she had nothing left to live for, there was a handful of prescription sleeping pills right there.” He laughed. “It’s been rather easy to keep her incapacitated. Such a waste of ability to end her life.”

“You stole Grace’s good memories. Did you steal Ava’s memories, too?” Michael pointed at Landers. “Her blackouts. You were responsible for those.”

“Yes.” He looked pleased, as if his star pupil had solved a particularly difficult problem. “I stole Grace’s memories, and Ava’s memories. And yours, Emerson.”

My nausea turned to cold dread and coated my throat.

“Mine? What do my memories have to do with this?”

“Everything, really. Grace was out of commission. I needed someone else who could travel to the past. My search for information led me to the files. The files led me to you.”

I looked up at him in disbelief. I didn’t speak. I couldn’t.

“My love, you were quite a different girl when I first found you. You mainly existed to drool and breathe, and you relived each moment of those terrible experiences every night in your dreams.” His expression took on a gracious quality, as if he was ready to accept praise. Or worship. “I took the memories of what really happened and I kept them as collateral.”

“I don’t—what do you mean, what really happened?”

“Not only were you on the shuttle bus that killed your parents and all those other people; you were the sole survivor of the accident.”

The room seemed to tilt, and the dread in my throat slid down to my gut.

“The grief and the guilt, your multitude of serious physical injuries—it almost ruined you.” Jack shook his head. “You never fully recovered.”

“No, that’s not true.” I backed up, hitting the edge of Liam’s desk.

“You were institutionalized for a while, and then you went to live with your brother and sister-in-law. They felt guilty, you see. It put quite a damper on their lives.” He looked down at me with false pity. “Such a waste for everyone involved. I knew I could change it, so I did. I found you, and I took all those terrible memories. You weren’t lucid enough for anyone to notice, and I knew they’d come in handy.

“Then I changed your history. Thanks to that one bottle of pills, Cat and her exotic matter, and a couple of other key elements, I traveled back in time. I ran into you in the hotel lobby, stopped you from getting on the bus. Then I raced up the mountain to make sure it went off the road in just the right place. It needed to be submerged in the lake to slow any rescue efforts. Everyone had to perish.” He said the words so casually, dismissing countless human lives. “I knew I was taking a chance, but I believed if I spared you the trauma of your physical injuries and the memory of the accident—and it was truly horrific—you’d recover from that black dog of depression that claimed you so fully.”

Michael’s breathing sped up. But I couldn’t look at him. My eyes were glued to Jack.

“Then I made sure to guide your path through the next few years. I even created a scholarship to your boarding school for someone with your specific needs when life in Ivy Springs became too difficult. When you’d recovered to my satisfaction, the scholarship went away.” He beamed and clapped his hands together like a child. I could almost smell the madness. “You came back. To think that thanks to Cat, I did all that work, changed all those years, in just one day.”

“No, no, no, no.” Black spots formed in front of my eyes as my lungs threatened to explode with the effort of holding back sobs. “You’re saying … my parents are dead because of you.”

“Not at all. I’m saying you are alive—truly alive—because of me. You aren’t looking at this logically. Fate claimed your parents, not me. You lived because I chose for you to live. I simply intervened in your circumstances. I saved you.” He took a step toward me, reaching out. “This ties us together.”

“I’m not tied to you. My whole life is a lie because of you.”

“But Emerson, love—”

“Stop calling me that.” A moan started in my throat, low but persistent. I clamped my hand over my mouth.

“I was so very close to convincing you to trust me. Then I could have shared our history with you under much different circumstances. But I was traveling too often, using too much of the compound too fast. I ran out before I got what I wanted. I ended up stuck in the bridge.”

Cat finally spoke up, her voice wrecked with anger. “That’s what did it? That’s why you ended up stuck in that hole? Making sure some little girl’s life was … sunshine and kittens, just so you could convince her to do what you wanted?”

“I’d hardly say her life was sunshine and kittens—”

“But taking the risk was needless. You don’t need her. I have information about another alternative,” Cat said pointedly. “I was planning to tell you yesterday, until Kaleb burst through the door and told us you were missing. Until I thought you were dead.”

He stared at Cat for a long moment. I noticed that he no longer stood straight, but slightly hunched over, as if he needed support. “Another alternative?”