“He doesn’t deserve your sympathy,” I interrupted. “Or your pity.”
“I have no pity for Zo,” Dante said. “No, what I was going to say was that if what he felt was anything like this, then it’s a wonder he survived at all.”
“How did he survive?” I asked. “I mean, when you collapsed, I thought you were . . .” I swallowed, unwilling to say the word.
Dante was braver than I was. “Dead?” he finished. A hint of a smile crossed his face. “Not yet.”
“How did this happen, Dante?” I asked quietly. The locket felt like shards of rocks in my hand. “I don’t understand. Why are you linked to the locket? What made you do it?”
Dante slowly pushed himself up on his elbows. I slipped my arm around his shoulders and helped him sit all the way up. He crossed his legs and took a deep breath. Wincing, he pressed his hand to his chest again, rubbing a small circle over his heart. He exhaled slowly.
“Dante?” I asked, worried that the color in his cheeks came from pain and not from his strength returning. “What can I do?”
He shook his head. “Give me a moment.”
“You can have all the time you want,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.
He laughed, but there was no trace of humor in it. He looked at me. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about this before.”
“Had you planned to tell me someday?”
He nodded.
“Then tell me now. Tell me everything.”
He was still for a moment, gathering his thoughts. “The year after I came through the door was . . . difficult.”
I touched his arm, moving closer. “Leo told me. He said you almost didn’t make it.”
“I don’t think I would have made it except for two things. You”—he brushed his fingers over my wrist—“and the locket.” He covered the shattered silver in my hand with his.
I looked down at our hands. Though his skin was still a little pale, I could feel the energy returning to his body the longer we touched.
Dante spoke quietly, his words slowly gaining speed and strength as he told me the truth of the one last secret he had kept from me.
“It started the night of the Poetry Slam at the Dungeon. That was the first time I had tried to use a poem to help alleviate the pressure weighing me down—to do what Zo, Tony, and V were doing with their music.”
“I remember,” I said, conjuring up in my mind the memory of Dante standing on the stage, his poem rolling out over us like a wave, or a blessing. He had used the same poem to heal me on the bank and restore my memories. It was a poem I would never forget. “You were amazing. I still remember how your voice made me feel.”
The night of the Poetry Slam had been the same night Valerie had won an invitation to the Valentine’s dance with V, taking her first step down a path that would ultimately lead her into insanity. But that had also been the night that Leo had made me a Midnight Kiss and I had made a wish. So much had happened that night. So many small threads that were only now coming together to form a complete picture.
“The poem worked, but barely,” said Dante. “And it came at a high price. After Leo closed the Dungeon, he found me collapsed by the back stairs. I was barely alive. At least, that’s what he told me. I don’t really remember what happened.” He drew in a tight breath. “Well, that’s not exactly true. I remember feeling like I was drifting between the river and the bank. Like I was being pulled in two different directions. Torn in half.”
I deliberately didn’t look at the broken halves of the heart-shaped locket in my hand, though I felt the points and edges pressing into my palm.
“It felt a lot like when I was trapped in the darkness between the doors of the time machine,” he finished. “Before you called me back into the light.”
I squeezed his hand, trying to send all the strength I had inside of me to him.
Dante cleared his throat. “Leo helped me recover, though it took some time to find my balance again. That was when he told me about something he had learned that might help. He knew of a way to link a small part of yourself to an object in order to help stabilize the whole. That way, the object could serve as a kind of anchor, a touchstone that would be easy to find wherever you were and easy to hold on to. He said he had taught the process to the others who had been through the door and it had seemed to help them. He believed it would help me too.”
“Others?” I echoed. “You mean Zo and his guitar.”
Dante nodded.
“What about Tony and V? Did they have touchstones too? Did Leo?”
“If they did, I didn’t know about it. It’s possible they didn’t feel like they needed one. Or wanted one. It was a personal choice; Leo wasn’t going to force the decision on anyone. He said if I wanted to try it, having a touchstone might help me maintain my balance until I had mastered it by myself. More, he said it could help protect me from drifting like that again.” Dante lifted his hand to reveal the locket in my palm. “It was an easy choice to make.”
“You chose the locket,” I said.
Dante shook his head. “I chose you.”
The broken bits of silver suddenly felt like ice.
“I followed Leo’s directions. I crafted the locket. Shaped it. Poured my heart into it. And then I gave it to you. I wanted you to be my anchor, my touchstone.”
I remembered the night Dante had come to my house to give me the locket. He had placed it around my neck with a kiss and said that it held the key to his heart. I hadn’t known then that the key inside the locket would open the black hourglass door or that the locket itself was part of Dante’s heart. I wondered how much of what had followed would have been different if I had known the truth.
The hollow of my throat felt strangely exposed. I thought back to all the times when I had drawn comfort or strength from having the locket around my neck. Every time I had touched the shape of the heart, it had reminded me of Dante. It had linked me to Dante as surely as it had linked Dante to me.
And I had unwittingly handed over the most vulnerable part of Dante to the one person who could do him the most harm.
“Why didn’t you keep it with you?” I asked, trying not to let my voice tremble. “It would have been safer that way. If you had kept it, I wouldn’t have had it when Zo asked me for it. I wouldn’t have given it to him, and he wouldn’t have broken it—or you.” I took a deep breath. “What did he do to you, Dante? He hurt you, but I don’t know where or how, and so I don’t know how to help.”
“First of all, you didn’t give it to Zo. He stole the locket from you in order to hurt me. It’s not your fault; you’re not to blame.” A deep cough racked through his chest, his breath catching hard at the end. “Second of all, what he did to me was the same thing I did to him. The part of me that was tied to the locket—and the part of Zo that was tied to his guitar—is gone. Broken, and unrecoverable.”
I pulled my eyebrows together in a frown. “He didn’t seem very broken to me.”
“The wound may be in a different place from mine, but trust me, Zo is not functioning at full strength anymore.”
“But you said that damage done to a Master of Time by a Master of Time is permanent. That’s why your eyes . . .” I shook my head, still finding it difficult to think of Dante being blind forever. “That same rule doesn’t apply to this kind of wound, does it?”
“What’s done is done,” Dante said, looking down and away.
I forced him to face me again. “What part of you has been damaged?”
His eyes were dark and his face paled as though he saw something horrible waiting for him in the distance.
My heart froze in my chest. I suddenly didn’t want to hear the answer to my question. But I had never shied away from the truth, no matter how difficult it was to bear. I had to know. How could I help Dante if I didn’t know what was wrong with him?
Dante licked his lips. “Do you remember when I was trapped with Tony between doors—” He hesitated and I saw a shadow cross his face. “
After the darkness took him . . . after he was . . .”
I covered his hand with mine, silently encouraging him to continue.
He cleared his throat, and his next words were steadier. “I told you that I felt like there was a sudden concentration of time. Almost like time accelerated around me.”
“I remember,” I said quietly.
“When the locket broke, it felt like that. Like an enormous amount of pressure had settled inside me. Here—in my heart.” He touched his chest again. “But this time, it feels like there is a hole as well.”
“The part of you that Zo damaged.”
Dante nodded. “And all this pressure—all this accelerated time that is flowing through me—it feels like it’s draining away through that little hole.”
“Well, maybe, once all the pressure is gone, we’ll be able to figure out a way to patch that hole,” I suggested, feeling a touch of hope.
“Except Zo is responsible for the hole. Which means it can’t be patched.” Dante looked down again.
A sinking feeling dropped all the way to my toes. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I bit down on an inhalation, feeling like a sharp knife had cut a hole in my chest that matched the one in Dante’s. Even though I was frozen in place, I felt like I was falling; I could almost hear the sound of wind rushing past my ears.
“But you’re a Master of Time,” I started. “You’re not bound to the bank or the river. Time doesn’t have any kind of power over you.”
“That’s what I thought, too. But things have changed. I’ve changed. All I know is that now I can feel time slipping away when I couldn’t feel it before. And I don’t know what will happen to me when that time is gone.”
My fist tightened around the locket. I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation. It couldn’t be true. Dante couldn’t be dying.
“Then fix it,” I said desperately. “If you fix the locket, then your heart will be healed, right? Regardless of what Zo did?” I opened my hand and held out the locket to him. “I know you can do it. You created it once; you can do it again.”
Dante gently closed my fingers over the broken heart and pushed my hand back to me. “I don’t think I can fix the locket. At least, not until my eyesight is back.”
But we both knew that was impossible.
Tears of sorrow and loss burned my eyes, even as the bitter taste of hate filled my mouth. I hated Zo for what he had done to Dante, for all the ways he had wounded the man I loved.
Dante still held my hand. “Abby, I gave you the locket as a way to be with you even when I couldn’t be with you. It was a way for me to finally be whole again and feel at peace. And if I had it to do over again, I would do the exact same thing.”
“But you’re not whole,” I pointed out, my voice shaking. “Not anymore. There’s a part of you that’s missing. That’s . . . dying.” I choked on the word.
He didn’t deny it.
His fingers trembled on my skin. “I knew what I was doing when I gave you my heart the first time. I know what I’m doing this time, too.”
“But I can’t fix it.” My words were a whisper. My tears were endless. “I can’t fix you.”
Dante brushed my hair across my forehead, running his fingertips down my cheek and around my ear. He reached down and, lifting my hand in his, he kissed the tops of each of my fingers. Then he pressed my empty palm flat against his chest, right over his heart.
I could feel the exact moment when his broken pulse found a steady rhythm at my touch.
“If anyone can find a way, it will be you,” he said. “You have risked everything to come to this time and this place to help me—to save me—and I believe in you, Abby. I know we will find a way to return home, healed and whole. Both of us.”
He leaned in until our lips were almost touching. I could feel his breath move across my open mouth. “I trust you,” he said simply. “I have given you my heart and my soul. I know I can trust you with my future, too.” His lips were so close that they touched mine when he spoke. “We’ll be together, Abby. I promise. Always,” he said softly. “Always and forever.”
His kiss was lightning in a storm, a heat that warmed me to the core, a brightness I could cling to as everything inside me—all my doubts and fears, all the darkness and confusion—whirled away into light.
Chapter 16
Dante?”
I thought at first that I had said his name—he was all I could think about, after all—but my lips still tingled from his touch and I doubted I could have formed a single coherent word.
“Dante?” Orlando cleared his throat, once, then twice. “Abby?”
I looked around and scrambled to my feet, trying to brush my hair back into place and feeling a blush burn in my cheeks.
Orlando leaned against the counter, his arms folded and a concerned frown on his face. “Dante, are you feeling better? Are you both all right?”
I slipped the pieces of the locket into an inner pocket of the cloak I wore, glancing back at Dante as I did so to see if my jostling the pieces caused him any pain.
“I’m fine,” Dante said, pushing himself to his feet and reaching for my hand. He stood straight and tall and looked so much like his regular self that I wondered for a moment if maybe we had been wrong about the dying part of his heart. Then I felt the slightest tremble in Dante’s fingers and knew that it was taking all his energy to mask the pain he was in.
I knew Orlando deserved to hear the truth about the hole in Dante’s heart, but I didn’t know if I had the words to explain it. I could barely wrap my mind around it myself.
“Abby and Dante were k-i-s-s-i-n-g,” Valerie sang with a smile, clapping her hands together on the offbeat.
“I saw,” Orlando said quietly, looking down and away.
“You’re back,” I said needlessly. “How was it?” As soon as I spoke, though, I winced. They’d been to the bank; I already knew how that was.
Orlando didn’t answer, but Valerie’s face brightened. She rushed to my side and grabbed my free hand.
“Oh, it was wonderful!”
I looked a question over her head at Orlando, who shrugged in answer.
“I feel so much better,” Valerie gushed. “I’ve been to that place before, but it was horrible—all flat and full of nothings—but this time it was different. This time it was full of all the people from the stories in my head. I could see all the stories—all the different endings—and it was like magic watching them come and go depending on how the story traveled.”
“Who did you see, Valerie?” asked Dante. “Which stories?”
“Oh, you were there, of course. The River Policeman is in a lot of stories right now. Some of them are scary—I didn’t watch those—but most of them are good. There was even one about the River Policeman’s locket, but I didn’t see how that one ended.” She squeezed my hand with hers. “Oh, and you were there, too. K-i-s-s-i-n-g.”
The blush I thought I had conquered came back to life.
“You all were there. Even him.” She pointed toward the door.
I spun on my heel—and gasped in disbelief.
Leo stood on the threshold of the shop, anger snapping from his blue eyes. The wind gusted through the door, wrapping the tail ends of his coat around his legs and ruffling through his silver-gray hair. “What’s this? What are you doing in my shop?”
The sound of his voice seemed to resonate deep inside me.
I looked from Dante to Orlando to Leo, and the penny dropped.
They looked so much alike—all three of them—the only difference being in height and age. But they all shared the same shape of face, the same posture. They even had similar eyes; Dante’s were gray, but Orlando’s and Leo’s were the exact same shade of blue.
“Father?” Orlando said into the stillness. “What are you doing back? I thought—”
Not Leo, then. Though he looked exactly like the man Orlando would become so many years in the future.
Dante looked to me for confir
mation, and when I nodded, he swiftly pulled down his sleeves to cover his gold chains. He turned his face away. I knew Dante didn’t want anyone else to see his injury, but I also knew how much he wanted to be able to see his father.
My heart skipped a beat, sharing his pain and his longing. How long had it been since I’d seen my own dad? My own family? It felt like it hadn’t been that long at all, and at the same time, like it had been an impossible span of time.
Alessandro rocked back on his heels, the bag in his hand slipping free and landing on the floor with a thud. He gripped the door frame for balance. Surprise erased his anger, his whole body relaxing with happiness. Then he smiled, and I saw the echo of Dante in his face.