Timepiece: An Hourglass Novel

  “Who knows what Jack’s thinking,” Em said.

  “There’s so much information about the Infinityglass on the Skroll that you can’t access it all.” Nate stood up and disappeared into the kitchen, grabbing a drink from the fridge. “Who put it there?”

  “I’m not sure.” Dune picked up the stylus and clicked a tiny button to turn it into a laser pointer. He used it to highlight documents as he explained. “It holds years’ worth of information, and it’s all about the history—the very ancient history—of not only the Infinityglass but also Chronos. I’ve skimmed it, and I haven’t processed a quarter of it.”

  “The history of Chronos?” Em questioned.

  “Wait,” Michael said. “The Skroll has information about the Infinityglass and Chronos. It doesn’t belong to Chronos, or Teague should’ve been able to open it. So who does it belong to?”

  “There’s another answer,” Dune said. “But I don’t like it.”

  Em looked at Michael, and then me. “Jack.”

  I stood. “It’s time to tell my dad about the Skroll.”

  Chapter 41

  I

  ’d been keeping so much from Dad. Jack’s appearances, Lily’s ability, the Skroll. I was going to be in a world of hurt when I spilled my secrets. Since I was pretty sure Dad was going to kill me, Em offered to take Lily home. I left her at the pool house.

  After a few good-bye kisses, of course.

  He wasn’t upstairs or in his office. I finally spotted him in the sunroom, his back to the glass doors. When I opened them, he jumped and clamped his fingers down on the edge of the blanket he’d wrapped around himself.

  Something was way off.

  Not just the stoop of his shoulders, or the way he sat still, especially without a book in his hands. Since my dad had come back home, one thing had been constant. His ache for my mother.

  It was gone.

  I wanted to run. Instead, I stepped around the front of the couch.

  “Dad?” I asked cautiously. “What are you doing out here?”

  He remained still, his expression blank. I focused on his face.

  Saw that he wasn’t in there. What was left sat on the couch in front of me, fingertips picking at the threads of the blanket. I could barely breathe, barely move. I dropped to my heels and put my hands on top of his.

  A seeping black hole of nothing. It was what Em must have been like after Jack Landers took her memories and left her to recover in a mental hospital—what my mom would be if I could break through the wall that separated us. So empty and so, so dark.

  Jack had robbed my father, and he hadn’t put anything in place of what he’d taken.

  I fought to keep my voice steady. “Dad?”

  He blinked a few times. “Kaleb?”

  He knew me. A tiny spark of hope flashed under the surface. “Yeah, Dad, it’s me. What happened?”

  “You’re so … big. I don’t know how you got to be … you’re a man, not a child.” His voice was frail, more like an eighty-year-old man’s than my father’s. How would I take care of him? How could I fix this?

  “It’s okay, Dad,” I lied. “It’ll all be okay.”

  “Nothing looks like it’s supposed to. I know this house, but not why I’m in it. It’s like my world stopped, but the rest of you went on … your mother. She’s upstairs in a room … there are machines. She won’t wake up.”

  I swallowed the tears that burned in my throat. “What’s the last thing you remember, Dad? About me?”

  “Middle school, your first day. It didn’t go well. I talked to Cat about starting an Hourglass school—even if there were just a few students and private tutors at first. For you. For kids who’d struggled the way we did.”

  The first day of middle school had ripped me wide open. It had started the second I stepped on the school bus in the morning until I got off it again in the afternoon. It had been so important to me to attend school with my friends. The earlier grades had been easy— my mom was kind to my teachers and they gave me a little extra room when I got too emotional. They were always so impressed with how much sympathy I had when someone’s feelings were hurt, but less so when I latched on to someone’s anger or fear.

  The middle school had twice as many students as the elementary school, and way more hormones. I’d done all I could on that first day, determined to make it work, but the second I’d seen my house come into view, my mom waiting anxiously at the end of the driveway, I’d lost it.

  I’d managed to hold off the worst of the crying until the bus had pulled away. She held me there until I stopped.

  She applied for homeschool status the next morning.

  A month later, we’d all moved to Ivy Springs, and the Hourglass had been born.

  “Five years, Michael. He’s lost five years.” I stared out the window into the cold, gray morning.

  Usually by this point in the fall, my mom had cut back the monkey grass lining her flower beds, pruned her rosebushes just so, and mulched every plant in sight to help them survive the winter. All I saw this year were frostbitten petals and wilted leaves.

  I’d called Michael for help, and he’d dispersed the crowd and come up to the main house by himself. We’d spent all night trying to help Dad remember anything, but we’d only upset him. Finally, he’d yelled, told us both to go away. Locked himself in the bedroom with Mom.

  I’d sat outside their closed door, listening to him cry himself to sleep, my knees pulled up to my chest like I was a little kid. I’d wanted to call Lily, just to hear her voice. But I couldn’t. What would I tell her? What would I tell everyone else?

  “We’ll make it better,” Michael said, breaking into my thoughts. “We’ll fix—”

  “Don’t tell me we’ll fix this. I don’t know how we can. I can’t make Jack give them their memories back.” If Jack had wanted to break me, he’d succeeded. I had no family left. I was alone. I fought against the desolation that threatened to overwhelm me. “Even if we do manage to find Jack before Chronos does, we’ll have to turn him over. Mom’s and Dad’s memories go with him.”

  “We’ll find the Infinityglass before Jack does, use them both as leverage,” Michael argued. “We’ll hold him, make Chronos leave him with us if we hand the Infinityglass over, and we’ll find a way to force him to restore your parents’ memories.”

  “We might as well accept the truth.” I spun around to face him. “Jack’s beaten us. He’s won.”

  “You still have options.”

  My lips stretched over my teeth in a grim smile. “I can’t ask Lily. There are reasons.”

  It would put her in the direct path of danger. Abi had said people were watching. I believed her.

  I didn’t want to lose anyone else.

  “I don’t think you have a choice.” Michael started to lower himself into my dad’s empty office chair, but he stopped and stared at it. Not willing to take Dad’s place. “Lily’s going to have to be involved, whether it means she looks for Jack or for something else.”

  “What else?”

  “Lily could look for the Infinityglass.” Michael walked around the desk and sat down in the armchair. “You need to talk to her, Kaleb. Tell her what’s going on with your dad. That things have changed. If she finds the Infinityglass … Poe said it could help set the continuum right without any consequences. Maybe it can fix all of this.”

  I was so sick of false hope and almosts. So tired of Jack screwing with my life.

  “I’m supposed to pin my hope on something that could be fictional?” I grabbed one of the hourglasses from Dad’s shelf and slammed it to the floor. “Something made of sand and glass?”

  “Kaleb.”

  “No. I want my parents back. I can’t make it happen. An object can’t make it happen.” I swept my arm across the shelf, knocking every hourglass over, breaking two more. “All of these represent a failed attempt. All the hourglasses in Teague’s office represent a failed attempt. What makes you think we’ll find the Infinityglass when al
l these people haven’t?”

  “Faith. Stupidity. I don’t know.” Michael folded his hands over his chest and considered me. I felt his concern and love, and for the first time in a long time, it was welcome. “But there’s so much to lose. I’m on your side, brother. I’m here for you. It’s just the two of us now.”

  “Not just the two of you,” Em said, from the door of the office. “We can do this, Kaleb. We can do it together, I know it. But I agree with Michael. You’re going to have to talk to Lily. She’s on your side, too.”

  Chapter 42

  L

  ily’s grandmother was in North Carolina, meeting with an organic coffee supplier. Unhappy about leaving Lily alone, she’d insisted that Lily lock the doors and stay inside. “I don’t think she understands that locks don’t keep someone like Jack out.” Still, she secured all three and leaned back against the door. Then she reached out to hook a finger into the collar of my shirt. “Why are you all the way over there?”

  I let myself sink into her warmth and the taste of her lips. Her kiss told me I didn’t have to explain anything. That she already knew the question, and she had the answer.

  “Let me help,” she whispered, with her mouth still on mine.

  I pulled back slightly. “I can’t.”

  “I told you once that you aren’t like Jack.” Frustration. “I was right, but I was also wrong.”

  Now I stepped back a full foot. “How were you wrong?”

  “Let me explain why I was right first.” Taking my hand, she led me to the couch. “You don’t take advantage of people and use what they have to benefit yourself.”

  “You say that knowing I need your help to find Jack. Putting you in danger, going against your grandmother’s rules. That’s taking advantage.”

  “Not to benefit you,” she said, disagreeing. “To benefit people that you love. I know that’s your desire, and that’s the thing that comes first. You don’t have to ask me, Kaleb. I’ll do whatever it takes to help you.”

  “But your grandmother, and the men and the fact that they could be watching—”

  “Focus,” she said. “I have a point to make.”

  I kissed her on the forehead, breathing in the citrus scent of her hair. “I’m focusing.”

  “On what I’m saying.” She pushed back and took my hands in hers. “As for how you were wrong … I think, in trying so hard to be different from him, you missed some really important similarities. In doing that, you’ve missed some answers.”

  “Explain.”

  “I’ve been thinking about this since the night we talked in Memphis. Jack takes memories hostage. You take terrible emotions and keep them away from the people they hurt. How tied are emotions and memories?”

  I stared at her.

  “You can’t separate the two. Jack keeps telling you killing him would be a mistake, that the two of you are alike. He’s telling you the truth. If you kill Jack, you kill your mother’s memories with him, and now your father’s. If he goes, so do they.”

  “Are you saying he’s the key to restoring my parents?”

  “No. I’m saying you are.”

  “How?”

  “The memories Jack took were the ones that were most important to your mother.” Lily spoke slowly. “Her love for your father and you, all the personal moments that tied you together. If those memories aren’t tied in emotion, I don’t know what is.”

  “Finding their memories, their emotions, inside him? Taking them back, and then transferring them over?” I shook my head. “It’s impossible. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

  “That’s why you’re going to practice on me.”

  I followed her to her bedroom. It was on the small side, with clean white walls and photographs everywhere. Built-in bookshelves lined one wall, crammed full of every kind of book and organized by color. It looked like a perfect rainbow. She sat down on the edge of her double bed, leaned back on the red duvet cover, and held out her foot. I stared at it, and then looked at her.

  “Knee boots?” She grinned. “Can you help me out?”

  “Oh yeah.” I pulled the right boot off while I was facing her, but for the left, I turned around to give her a view of my backside.

  “Are you kidding me?” she asked, laughing.

  “I enjoy yours all the time. I just figured I’d give you a chance to enjoy mine.” I gave a little wiggle before I faced her again. “What’s with the socks?”

  They were lime green with pink stripes.

  “I think what a girl wears under her clothes is just as important as the clothes themselves. And I like a little spice underneath.” She looked directly at me as she peeled off the socks in a striptease fashion, swung them around in a circle, and threw them over her shoulder. One landed on the bookcase, the other in a corner.

  “You’re trying to kill me. No, correction, you are going to kill me. And how can you make me laugh like this in the middle of all hell breaking loose?”

  “It’s a gift.” Lily scooted to the middle of the bed and sat cross-legged. “I’m ready when you are.”

  “I told Abi I wouldn’t let you put yourself at risk, and I meant it. Don’t act like what your grandmother wants doesn’t matter when it does.” Still, I sat down across from her.

  “Looking for memories isn’t a risk. It’s my memory,” Lily argued. “If we can do this, you can figure out exactly what to look for with your parents. It should be even easier with them, because the three of you shared most of those emotions and memories.”

  I sighed, and then put my hands on her hips and slid her toward me. The movement threw her off balance. She gasped and grabbed my forearms to keep from toppling over. I stared down at her fingers on my skin for a second before meeting her eyes, and then leaned forward to touch my lips to hers.

  Our combined heat gathered in my chest and radiated out through my skin. She put her arms around my neck and pulled me closer.

  “This isn’t why we came in here,” I whispered.

  “I know,” she whispered back. “But it’s a nice side benefit.”

  “Are you procrastinating? Changing your mind about letting me inside your soul?”

  “No.”

  “It’s intense for me when I take emotion. I know it’s not going to be easy on you to give it.” I frowned. “And it’s going to be even more intense this time, because I’ll be concentrating on the memories that go with the emotion, too. What if I do something wrong? What if I hurt you?”

  “You won’t.” She touched my cheek. “I’m not afraid of anything when I’m with you.”

  This time, I put my hands on her knees instead of her hips.

  “Before you do anything, I think the memory you look for needs to be significant.”

  “You’ve thought about this.”

  She nodded.

  “What do you want me to take?”

  “The day I left Cuba.”

  “Lily. No. What if I can’t give that back to you? And do you really want to relive it, twice more? Because if I take it and give it back, I’m pretty sure you will.”

  “I want to relive it.” She bit her lip. “I’ve pushed the memory away for so long. But I think I could do with some remembering. What do I need to do?”

  “I guess … focus on that day, the way you felt, anything you can remember about it. I know you were young, but even one specific detail would be good, what you were wearing, the weather, something like that.”

  She took a deep breath. “It was sunny, after about a solid week of rain. My mom was always super protective of me, but this day … I was so happy to be outside, free. She was hanging clothes on the line. I stretched out on the grass for a minute, just to feel it against the backs of my legs. Everything after that gets kind of …”

  “That’s enough.” I could see the day on her emotional time line. It was a big one. “Promise me you’re sure.”

  “Yes.”

  I leaned forward, took her face in my hands, and looked into her eyes.
r />   Emotion flooded through my system almost the second I touched her. Visuals I didn’t understand made her feel trapped, and then there was pain. Happiness and a swing set. White clouds and flapping sheets. Worry, anxiety. Shiny black car, feet, the ground. So much fear.

  Hope. Hope and a red crayon, a lined piece of paper. Crude drawings and … pain.

  A doll with black yarn for hair.

  Then everything clicked into sharp focus, but it all moved in slow motion.

  Brake lights.

  A woman who looked like Lily, but rounder, with brown eyes instead of hazel. Whispers. Love, forgiveness.

  Words. I knew they were said in Spanish.

  The pain of the memory was jagged around the edges, grief like broken glass, and I was dragging Lily through it, slicing open fresh wounds. I heard her sobbing, felt her cries in my chest, in my bones.

  The sharp focus faded and everything began to move quickly again.

  Then there was only emptiness.

  I knew I was falling backward, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  Blackness.

  Silence.

  Chapter 43

  “P

  lease, please wake up.” Lily was shaking me. I wanted to open my eyes. I tried, but all I got was a flutter. Her fear was fresh, and it was already too much for me to manage. “I’ll be right back,” she said, scooting to the edge of the bed. “I’m going to get help.”

  “No. Stay.” I tried to wrap my arms around her, but I couldn’t lift them any higher than half an inch.

  “Kaleb?” She threw her body across mine and curled around me like a cat. “One second, you were fine, the next, you went pale and fell back on the headboard. You have a huge knot on the back of your head. I should call someone.”

  “No.” The pain in my body was way worse than my head, and different from any I’d ever experienced. My joints ached, and I thought I could feel my blood moving through my body. Too slow. “Just … stay.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Intense. It’ll pass.” My voice was ragged, like it had been run through a thresher.