Page 72 of Killing Time

Sure enough, the odd ticking I’d heard a moment earlier stopped and the clock began to tick normally again, signaling that I’d dropped back into time’s regular current.

The clock told me it was eleven forty-eight.

Perfect.

I put my hand on the doorknob and turned it, then peeked out into the hallway. Down toward the stairs, I spotted the rapidly disappearing form of a sturdy-looking woman in a plain black dress. No doubt Jasper had told her to drop off the tray and leave, knowing the door would re-lock itself as soon as I picked up my lunch and brought it into the room where I was being held.

Which it had.

But since I knew what it was going to do, it was easy enough to slip into the hall even as I pushed the tray into the bedroom. Once there, I allowed the door to close behind me. Yes, I’d be leaving all my clothes in the closet, but I couldn’t worry about that now, not when the most important thing was to get the hell out of there as quickly as I could.

Although I knew where the main staircase was located, I still did a quick inspection of the hallway, hoping I might find a second stairwell, maybe one that went straight down into the kitchen like the one we’d had in the old house where my family had first lived before we relocated to the Walnut Ridge neighborhood when I was around seven.

No such luck, though. I supposed it was possible the house had been built with a servants’ entrance and it had been boarded up over the years, but still, there wasn’t one now, which meant I had to go down the main staircase.

All was not lost, though. While I couldn’t turn myself invisible, it seemed I’d gotten enough control over my power that I thought I could just pop myself ahead in time until it was the middle of the night and everyone should be safe in their beds. At least that way, I’d have less of a chance of bumping into the housekeeper.

Or worse, Jasper himself.

No clock to look at here, but I told myself I didn’t need it, not when the light coming through the stained-glass window at the end of the upstairs corridor should be enough to tell me whether I’d been able to jump ahead twelve hours.

Time moving forward, flowing past noon and sunset, to a moment when the house would be quiet and no one would be able to see me drifting down the staircase, silent as a ghost.

Everything went dark, so quickly that I had to reach out a hand and place it against the wall behind me so I could get my bearings. A blink or two, and then I found my eyes beginning to adjust, letting me see the faint glow of a streetlight coming through the one window at the end of the hall, and the even fainter illumination filtering up the stairs, probably from a lamp that had been left on in the foyer or maybe the front parlor.

Either way, I could see just enough to find my way to the stairs and begin to inch down. My fingers clung to the banister, and I prayed I wouldn’t trip over a toy or even my own feet.

Actually, I doubted I’d find a toy here, since what I’d seen of the house told me it was far too tidy for that. But as the heel of one shoe caught on the edge of a step and I had to hang on to the banister to keep myself from stumbling, I thought my feet just might be the ones to do me in.

When I reached the bottom, I saw that the glow I’d noticed from upstairs was a small lamp sitting on a table in the foyer, one of those old-fashioned types I’d only seen before in movies,the kind where you could turn on either the top or the bottom portion, or both of them at once if you needed that much light.

In this case, only the rounded bottom had been switched on, providing just enough illumination for me to see my path clear to the front door.

Still, I hesitated for a moment. What if Jasper had some kind of ward set on the door, a sort of magical alarm system that would let him know the second someone opened it? I thought that seemed like the sort of thing he might do, especially with a young child who might have a notion to wander in the middle of the night. My brother Patrick had been like that, always crawling out of bed to roam the house when everyone else was asleep and seriously freaking out my parents on more than one occasion.

Well, even if there were wards, I had to hope that all they’d do was send a signal to Jasper and not actually lock down the door itself. And if that happened, well, I wasn’t above picking up a chair or table and throwing it through a window now that I was safely on the first floor of the house and wouldn’t have to worry about dropping more than twenty feet to reach solid ground.

That seemed to decide things.

I still hadn’t been able to tell how much snow had fallen, but in the end, I couldn’t allow the weather to be the reason why I didn’t try to escape. The low-heeled pumps that were part of my 1940s ensemble weren’t the most practical thing in the world, and yet I knew I’d walk barefoot through snow drifts up to my hips if it meant getting safely away from Jasper Wilcox.

After sending a furtive glance around me and determining that I was still alone, I sucked in a breath and walked over to the front door, then placed my fingers on the knob. It turned easily.

Thank God.

Outside was a freezing night with a thin scrim of snow on the dry grass of the front lawn, although the sidewalk in front of thehouse looked clear enough. It seemed my worries about inches of snow hadn’t materialized.

Just as I began to step across the threshold, though, a hand grabbed my arm and pulled me back, and the door slammed shut, the deadbolt sliding into place.

“I suppose you think you’re very clever.”

Jasper Wilcox, looking far too dressed for the late hour in black slacks, a white shirt, and a black cardigan, his het-hued hair perfectly combed.

Adrenaline had flooded my body the second he grasped my bicep, but I did what I could to ignore the electric zing of anxiety along all those nerve endings and face him as calmly as I could.

“I don’t know about ‘clever,’” I said. “Determined, yes.”

He was silent for a moment, shadowed eyes surveying my face. “Your talent is time travel.”

---