Stolen Time Read online

  Finders keepers.

  Ash stared, feeling ill. The Black Cirkus took people at night. The city had a curfew to protect against it, but Ash still heard rumblings of friends disappearing on the way to the market, neighbors vanishing while walking around the block.

  No one knew what they did with the people they took, but Ash had a feeling it was something along the lines of searching their pockets for valuables and ditching the bodies. Give or take a gunshot.

  His mind spun. “You can’t know it was her—”

  Willis lifted his hand. A small silver locket dangled between his fingers. “I found this, just over there.”

  Ash bit back a curse. He recognized that locket. Dorothy had been wearing it.

  It’s her own fault, he thought, scuffing a boot over the still-wet paint. She shouldn’t have left the bar, shouldn’t have gone off on her own . . .

  But hadn’t he baited her? There’s a window in the bathroom over there. Promise me you’ll look outside. Hadn’t he known she wouldn’t be able to resist a peek? She probably only went outside in the first place to get a closer look, never dreaming of the danger that was waiting for her. Ash hadn’t bothered mentioning the Black Cirkus when he’d dropped the time-travel bomb. He hadn’t bothered telling her much of anything about this strange new world she’d landed in.

  Damn it to hell. If she died, it would be on his head.

  “What do you want to do here, Captain?” Willis asked. He still held the locket. It twisted between his fingers, catching the moonlight.

  Ash chewed on his lower lip. Son of a bitch. This wasn’t going to be fun. “We have to get her back.”

  Willis blew air out through his teeth. “That’s a suicide mission.”

  Ash met Willis’s eyes. He was right. No one came back from the Black Cirkus. Their headquarters was in the old Fairmont hotel, which they’d turned into a fortress. Guards at every entrance. Bars on the windows. Once they had you, you were as good as dead. But . . .

  He thought of Dorothy standing in the woods beyond the churchyard. Please, she’d begged him, I just need a ride.

  He’d been right to leave her behind then. But if he left her behind now it was almost like killing her himself.

  He might be an ass. But he wasn’t a murderer.

  “On the other hand,” Willis added, squinting down at the smudged words. “It might be fun to take something of Roman’s for once.”

  He paused, smoothing his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. When he spoke again, his voice was deliberate. “I have a friend who used to run deliveries for the Cirkus. He told me about a parking garage that leads to the hotel’s basement entrance. Isn’t guarded.”

  Ash tensed. “Why haven’t you ever mentioned that before?”

  “Figured I’d save that information for an emergency. Didn’t want you storming in all willy-nilly just because you could.”

  Ash bristled. He wasn’t sure what bothered him more: the idea that he would do something so dumb, or the use of the phrase willy-nilly.

  “This enough of an emergency for you?” he asked.

  Willis cracked his knuckles. The sudden pop of his joints seemed a solid answer.

  11

  Dorothy

  Dorothy opened her eyes. The ceiling kaleidoscoped—first fracturing into a dozen dancing gray shadows, and then shifting back into place. She blinked, and pain flared up the front of her skull. With a groan, she pressed a palm to her forehead.

  That’s a gun, she heard herself say. She remembered the small black object in the man’s hand, the soft click of metal as he cocked the hammer back.

  No. She jerked the hand away from her face, nervous fingers running over the body beneath her loose-fitting clothes.

  No bullet wounds, no blood, no pain. She hadn’t been shot, then. She let her arm drop back to her side, fingers still. Well. That was something to be happy about, at least. It was important to appreciate the little things in life.

  She opened her eyes again and, this time, the ceiling stayed put. Another small victory. She gingerly lifted her head, blinking hard against the fresh wave of pain. She was lying on a white quilt that had started to yellow around the edges. There was another bed next to her, covered in an identical, yellowing quilt, but it was empty.

  This is a hotel, she realized. She and her mother had stayed in hotels on their way west. Hotels were nice, normal places, with doors and windows that any fool could open. There was no reason to panic.

  Dorothy breathed in, her nose filling with cigarette smoke, and sat bolt upright, coughing. The scent brought memories with it, hateful memories that she’d tried hard to forget. This wasn’t the first time she’d been kidnapped. Years ago, a drunken man had grabbed her while she’d been working a con with her mother. The bar that night had also reeked of smoke, the smell of rotten fish churning through the air beneath it. It’d been crowded, the sounds of laughter and shouting crackling through the air. Dorothy remembered screaming for her mother as the man dragged her out of the bar, her voice lost in the jeers.

  “Real men take what they want,” the man had growled, leering at her. He’d squeezed too hard, his fingers bruising her skin. He clearly had no intention of being gentle.

  Beauty disarms, Dorothy had thought. She’d only been twelve at the time, but her mother had already drilled that lesson into her head. She wasn’t strong enough to fight, so she’d looked up at the man and flashed her best smile, the one Loretta had made her practice until her cheeks cramped. Eventually, his grip had loosened.

  Dorothy couldn’t remember exactly how she’d gotten away. She seemed to recall landing a particularly well-placed kick to the man’s nether regions and then running as fast as she could manage in her heavy skirts and tightly cinched corset. Her mother had been waiting at the bar when she returned, and she’d glanced up when Dorothy pushed through the door, her expression unreadable. Dorothy had still been breathing heavily when she took the seat next to her.

  “Why didn’t you come for me?” she’d asked. It had been the thought that circled her head as she ran back to the bar, anxiously glancing over her shoulder to see whether the ugly man was still following her.

  Loretta had lifted a tiny glass of brandy to her mouth. “How did you know I wouldn’t?”

  Dorothy hadn’t answered. She’d simply known, the way most children knew their mothers would be in to tuck the covers under their chins before they drifted off to sleep at night. She remembered screaming for her mother as the man dragged her away. Hadn’t she heard?

  Loretta placed the brandy back down on the bar, a drop of amber liquid slopping over the side. She pressed a finger into the spilled drop, and then lifted it to her lips. “There will always be men who want you. I had to know you could take care of yourself,” she’d said. “Our world has no place for cowards.”

  There will always be men who want you. It was the first time Dorothy understood her beauty for what it was. A bull’s-eye. A curse.

  Now, she forced herself to focus on the room around her, to breathe past the smell of smoke and the memory of her mother’s finger wiping at the drop of brandy. She felt powerless and alone and angry.

  And something else, something that made her feel not quite human, but like she was a thing capable of being possessed. Like she was inanimate, an object that could be moved around according to someone else’s will.

  It was a hateful feeling. She promised herself that, one day, she would become strong enough that no one could just take her ever again.

  For now, she had to get out of this room.

  There were four doors in the room, two to Dorothy’s left, one on the far wall, and one to her right. She crawled off her bed, nearly tripping over her own feet. She tried the door to her right—bathroom. The second was a closet. The third and the fourth were both locked. Of course.

  Dorothy swore under her breath and turned in place. The room was intentionally nondescript. White walls, white bedspreads, blue chair, blue curtains. A dresser stood direct
ly in front of her, its surface covered in a layer of dust. Hands trembling, she began yanking open drawers, not bothering to close them again when she saw they were empty.

  In the last drawer, she found a small book bound in leather, the pages edged in gold. She picked it up and opened it. The journal didn’t seem to know which page to open to, and flopped somewhere in the middle. Dorothy picked her way back to the beginning.

  Blocky handwriting covered the creamy white page.

  I built a time machine.

  In the last year, every single theoretical physicist and mathematician and engineer on the planet Earth has tried. Every day there’ve been new stories detailing their failures, their loss of funding, their embarrassments.

  But I’ve actually succeeded.

  Time machine. For a moment, Dorothy forgot her plans to escape. She carefully turned the pages of the journal, finding sketches and jotted notes and scribbled numbers. And, though the handwriting was small and careful, there was a yearning to it. Want leaped off of every page. It left her breathless. She imagined crawling into the hotel bed, devouring every word.

  The journal itself was tantalizingly elegant, all soft leather and heavy pages, the kind of book she would expect to contain delicious secrets. She would’ve wanted it even if the topic hadn’t immediately caught her interest.

  Dorothy flipped to the front cover, reluctant to put it down. A name had been written inside the leather.

  Property of Professor Zacharias Walker

  She touched a finger to the smudged ink. Then, making a quick decision, she tucked the small leather book into the waistband of her pants, pulling her shirt over the bulge to hide it from view. She wanted to find someplace quiet and spend hours poring over the pages. It gave her the same feeling that wandering through the city had: the sense of wonder and fear and amazement. Like something exciting was about to happen. She stumbled to the window on the opposite wall and tore the curtains aside. Crude iron bars had been fastened over the glass. She wrapped her fingers around one of the bars and tugged with all her strength. It held tight. They meant to keep her prisoner inside this tiny room. Like an animal.

  No, she thought, jerking on the bar again. There would be a way out. There was no such thing as a room that couldn’t be broken out of. She took a step away from the window, pressing two fingers to her forehead.

  “Think, damn you,” she muttered, tapping the space between her eyebrows.

  She fingered the sleeve of her shirt, exhaling heavily when she felt the hard silver points of the hairpins she’d tucked inside the fabric. All was not lost.

  She slid a pin from her shirt and knelt on the floor in front of the first door. The lock was odd. Instead of a keyhole, she saw only a narrow slit. She threaded her pin into the slit and wiggled it around but didn’t feel a catch. She sat back on her heels, frowning.

  There was one other locked door. Dorothy crawled over to it, and tried the handle. It didn’t budge, but at least it had a normal lock. She squinted into the keyhole, and then slid her pin inside, her breath a solid lump at the back of her throat. She twisted to the left, and to the right. Something caught—

  The lock clicked. Dorothy slid the pin back up her sleeve and pushed the door open.

  It led to another room, exactly like the one she’d just broken out of. Two beds covered in white quilts. Blue chair. Blue curtains. Four doors. Dorothy quickly tried them: Bathroom. Closet. Locked.

  “Blast!” she shouted, slamming a hand against the final, locked door. It had the same strange slit that the one in her room had. She dug a fingernail into the narrow opening, but it was no use. She had no idea how to work it. She was trapped. Really and truly trapped for the first time in her life.

  Dorothy had never been inside of a room she couldn’t find her way out of. It made her claustrophobic. The air felt thinner, and the walls seemed to creep closer whenever she blinked. She hurried across the room. She needed fresh air. She might be able to force the window open, even if the bars kept her from climbing out. She tore the curtains aside—then froze.

  There were no bars on this window.

  Dorothy squeezed her hands into fists, swallowing a scream of pure delight. She wedged her fingers into the edge of the window and pulled—it slid open an inch.

  “Come on,” she muttered through gritted teeth. She pulled again—

  The door behind her clicked. Dorothy spun around in time to see a light above the odd lock flash green. She ducked on instinct, crouching behind one of the two beds. The door creaked open.

  “. . . why you even care what she does.” The voice was a low purr, like the lounge singers Dorothy had tried so hard to emulate when she was little. She ducked farther behind the bed, heart hammering. Shoes crunched against carpet as someone entered the room.

  “Don’t be jealous, Little Fox,” came a second, deeper voice. Dorothy stiffened, recognizing it.

  “God, Roman, you know I hate when you call me that,” the first voice said. The mattress next to Dorothy’s head creaked, rustling the blankets beside her ear. Dorothy tilted her face up. She felt her jaw go slack.

  A girl sat inches from where Dorothy hid. Dorothy shifted, angling herself so she could see the girl’s head and the tops of her narrow shoulders from her hiding spot at the side of the bed.

  The girl was a slip of a thing, with pure white hair falling in tangles down her back. Dorothy had never seen such perfectly white hair before. It was like something out of a ghost story.

  “Fine then. Quinn,” Roman said. He sat on the bed beside her. Dorothy couldn’t see much of him from her position, but she saw his arm as he draped it around the girl’s shoulder.

  Despite her better instincts, Dorothy kept her head lifted, staring at the back of the girl’s head. Quinn. There was something magnetic about her. She seemed . . . regal. Small though she was, she took up space and energy. The room seemed to shrink as she moved through it.

  Dorothy thought of her mother and a still iciness flooded through her. Loretta had the same effect on a room.

  “Better,” Quinn purred.

  Roman cleared his throat. “Did you know they’ve written a song about us?”

  Quinn tilted her head toward him.

  “I don’t recall the words exactly.” Roman hummed a few notes, and then sang, “‘Close your windows tight, little children, the fox and crow are scratching at the glass. . . .’ And then something about being disemboweled. What rhymes with disemboweled?”

  “Charming,” Quinn said, her voice joyless. She stood, letting Roman’s hand fall to the bed. She touched her neck with one pale finger. “Is everything ready?”

  Dorothy lifted her head a fraction of an inch. She could see Roman’s hand now. He curled his fingers toward his palm and then released them again. Dorothy had the impression of a chastened lover.

  Roman murmured, “Stop worrying. . . .”

  “Answer the question.”

  “Everything’s ready.”

  “Good,” Quinn said. She stared at the wall in front of her, and Dorothy stared at the back of her head. She narrowed her eyes, studying all that white. She’d heard of women dying their hair different colors, but this girl’s hair seemed to grow straight out of her head that way.

  Quinn flinched, like she could feel Dorothy’s eyes on her head. She started to turn—

  Dorothy ducked back behind the bed so quickly that a burst of pain shot through her neck. She bit into her lip to keep from crying out loud. Blast. Had she been seen?

  For a long moment no one spoke. It seemed that they didn’t even breathe. Dorothy felt too scared to blink. She pressed her throbbing lips together. Waiting.

  “What about our newest guest?” Quinn asked, after a long moment. “Have you checked on her lately?”

  A pause. Then, “No.”

  She tutted. “Best make sure she’s comfortable. Bring me whatever valuables you find, and get rid of the body. We need the room empty again by tonight.”

  There were more footsteps,
and the creak of a door swinging open and closed as Quinn left the room. Alone now, Roman stood, the mattress creaking with the release of his weight.

  Get rid of the body. Dorothy’s ears filled with static. Quinn might not have seen her, but Roman would discover her missing the second he checked her room. She curled her fingers into the carpet, pushing herself into a slight crouch. She heard a shuffling sound as he moved toward the door that led to her room.

  She wanted to leap out from behind the bed now, but she forced herself to remain still. She could feel blood pumping in her palms.

  A door opened. Closed.

  Dorothy raced for the window, her heart beating like a drum in her ears. She yanked the curtain aside with one hand, grabbed for the glass with the other. Muscles screaming, she pulled.

  The window slid open and cool air swept into the room, blowing the hair back from her face. She stuck her head outside and looked down . . .

  . . . and down and down.

  Eight rows of sleek glass windows separated her from the ground below. Eight stories. From up here, the surface of the murky, brown water seemed hard and unbreakable. She’d die if she jumped from this far.

  “Our world has no place for cowards,” she muttered, lips numb with fear.

  Her mother had left a moment after saying those words to her, crossing the bar to flirt with some businessman foolish enough to keep his wallet in his front pocket. She’d left her drink on the bar, and Dorothy had picked it up, throwing back the remains of her brandy in a single swallow.

  Dorothy could taste that alcohol burning at the back of her throat now. She’d hated her mother then, but she couldn’t help admiring her as well. Loretta wasn’t the type of woman to be kidnapped. Men never looked at her and thought she could be possessed.

  She would’ve been horrified to hear that her daughter had been taken again. That she’d trusted some man with a nice smile, even for a second. She’d taught her better than that.