Jace nodded, letting his thoughts drift to the strange girl with the beautiful hazel eyes – the girl he’d loved ever since the third grade. The girl whose kind, quiet laugh lit up any room. She’s not dangerous, he reminded himself, even as a twinge of pain shot through the ankle he’d almost broken two weeks ago. All we have to do is find her – then everything will be fine again.
Stanley gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze as they began their trek into the woods, as if to say, I hope so, kid. I hope so.
Chapter 24
Bones
Lilah was getting frustrated. For one, she kept losing her backpack, which would only stay on her shoulders if she clutched a bare hand to the strap. Otherwise, it would unravel to shreds as time churned the wrong way. As frustrating and tedious as it was to keep track of, she ended up abandoning it beside a tree after snatching her flashlight and Jace’s penny from the side pocket. Another aggravation was that she could only affect a limited amount of space, and she had a lot of ground to cover if she was to find clues from her birth mother’s disappearance sixteen years ago. After all, she knew the exact place the van had been found, but she didn’t know what direction Willow and her mother had walked after abandoning it – for all she knew, they might have simply gotten in another car. And lastly, she had to keep scanning the same patch of forest multiple times, as she could never be certain that she was in the exact timeframe that she intended to be in – not in the beginning, at least.
At the very least, it was a fascinating hike, with plenty of interesting items that kept emerging as Lilah combed the forest: a single running shoe, a rack of deer antlers, a tattered mitten. Even an expensive-looking gold watch that was lost nearly two decades ago popped up from the soil as she walked past a large rock for the third time – in both senses of the word. The inscription on the back read, To Mark, with all my heart; certainly not a clue relating back to the Mayweathers, but a lovely find nevertheless. She buckled it to her wrist, just above the watch her father had given her for her last birthday, and was pleased to see that it stayed there even when she shifted to a different time.
Which gave Lilah an idea. Taking the Indian Head penny from her pocket, she turned it over in her fingers to examine it. Even within a time-frozen bubble, the coin was tarnished and eroded, dulled by a century of passing time. But when she dropped it on the ground, some of the rust and stains dissipated. As she concentrated on moving her immediate surroundings farther and farther into the past, the penny got cleaner and cleaner – until the copper appeared shiny and brand-new, with the Indian head and date – 1863 – clearly etched into the freshly-minted metal. Her eyebrows furrowing in deep thought, Lilah reached into her pocket to retrieve the old mitten she had found – relatively certain it was too large to have belonged to Willow – and placed it over the coin on the ground. She carefully wrapped it around the penny, making sure not to touch the metal directly, then momentarily let the bubble disappear. To her delight, the penny remained in its pristine state, even when she touched it. Quite pleased with her impromptu experiment, Lilah tucked the restored treasure into her sock, then continued on her temporal trek.
Along with the numerous discarded items she stumbled upon, there were plenty of animals that momentarily appeared – some she had never seen up close before, like red foxes and even a snowy owl that appeared from the soil. The latter didn’t fly away but cocked its head in her direction as though tethered to the ground, its black, glassy eyes gazing up at her with great interest before it returned to the soil as she passed. She mourned the animals each time they disappeared, but somewhere deep down, she accepted that the passage of time was both inherent and inevitable; it was her influence that was fracturing the natural order of things.
As she swept the forest, adjusting and re-adjusting time around her as she did, her internal clock appeared to be getting more and more attuned; somehow, she could feel the decades as they passed, could differentiate between one year and the next. It didn’t take long before she could sense the passing of months, weeks – even days. It was as though she was learning a new physical ability, like doing a handstand or juggling. With every fresh attempt, she was able to calibrate that clock ever more precisely, until she could eventually navigate to the specific date she was looking for. It was the hours and minutes that she continued to struggle with; that type of precision might take a lifetime to hone.
As twilight fell inside the vortex for the umpteenth time, she wiped the cool sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her jacket, catching a glint of gold from the corner of her eye. She regarded the impressive new watch on her wrist; it had a shiny, royal blue dial with four smaller sub-dials embedded within. They gauged everything from the time of day, to the month, to the lunar cycle, to the calendar day – a true perpetual calendar watch. Mark’s inamorata clearly had expensive taste – and deep pockets.
As she gazed at it, another idea struck her. She spent the next quarter-hour winding the watch to the correct month, day, hour, and minute, then unclasped it from her wrist. Kneeling beside a large rock, she carefully balanced the watch on top of it and let go, holding her breath. The dials spun wildly, landing on the exact date she’d been abandoned at the fire station. But the timing was wrong. She’d have to navigate to the specific period of time she was looking for – in this case, the minutes leading up to the discovery of Celeste Mayweather’s van.
She buckled the watch back to her wrist, which immediately pivoted back to the present date. But that was alright; she could hold the age of the distortion steady without it. With such an advantageous discovery, her biggest challenge in finding clues was not when, but where. But she was determined to find something – a wallet, a hair tie, a bracelet – anything that might have pointed her in the right direction. Whatever she was hoping to find, she knew it wouldn’t be much, and she conceded that she would likely have no way of knowing whether it had belonged to either Willow or Celeste. And so, when she stumbled upon a small, wooden rattle after three hours of traipsing through the forest, she didn’t hold her breath – until she saw her own name painted on the side of it.
Goosebumps erupted across her skin as she traced her fingers across the letters. Could this have been… mine? She gazed at the rattle for a long moment, willing some distant memory of it to come to her. The purple paint was worn and faded as she gazed at it in her hands, but when she set it back on the ground and shone her flashlight on it, it appeared fresh and crisp, as though the letters had been hand-painted yesterday. Of course, standing inside a distorted time bubble, they very well might have been.
As Lilah knelt to pick the rattle up again, a twig snapped behind her, nearly causing her to drop it. She whipped around and raised her flashlight, trying to find the source of the noise. From the corner of her eye, she saw something red dart behind a tree. She held her breath, expecting another fox to appear.
“Come on out, little buddy,” she coaxed softly, shining her flashlight on the tree.
It was only when the light caught two green irises that she realized it wasn’t a fox.
A young woman with limp, auburn hair was staring at her from behind a thicket of huckleberry bushes, her hollow eyes framed by dark stamps of fatigue. Lilah recognized her face instantly – it was the same face that had been following her around, day and night, beckoning for Lilah to find her.