Page 106 of Once a Villain
Joan swore. At least the tear had been tiny this time. Barely noticeable.
“There’s an emotional trigger,” Aaron said, realizing. He’d always been sharp.
Joan had had the same suspicion—she’d been deep in her feelings when she’d torn a hole at the colosseum, and again at the pub. And now here. “I—I think so. I don’t know how to control it.”
“An emotional trigger?” Nick tilted his head, frowning.
“She tore a hole in the timeline when you died,” Aaron said tightly. “At the colosseum.”
Nick’s mouth opened slightly; he hadn’t expected Aaron to say that. He turned to Joan, searching her face. There was something buried in his expression that she couldn’t read.
For a long moment, only the grinding engine of the van filled the silence.
Aaron spoke first. “Listen,” he said heavily. “We need to figure out how to get out of here. If we don’t, we’re all going to die today.”
Nick’s shoulders dropped. “At least we wouldn’t have to finish this conversation,” he said wryly, and Aaron acknowledged that with a soft huff of breath.
Joan thought again of their counterparts—they’d been together, despite the horrors of this world; they’d been in love. What wouldtheythink if they could see themselves like this?
She took a deep breath, trying to push away her stiff misery enough tothink. Aaron was right. If they didn’t escape, theywouldn’t survive the night. “We need to get these cuffs off,” she said.
“Can you unmake them?” Nick asked her.
“I tried. It didn’t work.”
“It wouldn’t,” Aaron said. “Court tools are resistant to family powers.”
“Howdothe cuffs work, then?” Nick asked him. Like Joan, he’d forced himself into a thinking headspace—he’d always been practical. She knew him, though. All his feelings were still roiling underneath.
“There’s a mental component—the controller responds to the wielder’s thoughts. It’s not easy, and the farther away the captive, the more difficult it is to maintain contact.”
“So if we can get far enough away, we can run?” Nick said.
“Ifwe can get far enough away. There’s no particular proximity limit, though. It depends on the wielder’s strength of will. And that guard driving us has to beverystrong-willed to control all three of us at once.”
“So it requires focus?” Joan said.
“A lotof focus. I honestly didn’t think it was possible to control more than one person at a time.”
“What if we break that focus, then?” Joan said. “What if we divide her attention? Would she lose control of us?”
“Perhaps.”
“We need to make a distraction,” Nick said.
Aaron looked thoughtful. “We might not need much of one. Right now, she’s expending energy by forcing us to sit here. She’ll be strained by the time she has to walk us into the guardhouse.I think any single external distraction might be enough. Even splitting her line of sight could do it. It might be as simple as making sure she can’t see us all at the same time.”
“All right,” Joan said. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was something.
Joan felt Aaron’s breathing quicken as the van made its way inexorably to London Bridge. She was scared too. More than that, though, her chest was still tight from their unresolved conversation. Nick hadn’t met her eyes since they’d finished fine-tuning the plan to escape.
They passed through Covent Garden, then Blackfriars and the City. After that, the funereal buildings of the new skyline gave way. Joan drew a breath as London Bridge appeared. On the far side of the bridge, spiked heads swayed on the turrets of the guardhouse, a macabre field of flowers. Joan shivered, forcing her gaze from the horror of it.
Instead, she found herself seeking out another building,one that she’d avoided for weeks. She’d deliberately looked away from it when they’d first arrived in this timeline and crossed the bridge. Now, though, she turned toward it, searching for it. The home she’d once lived in with Eleanor and their family. The home she didn’t remember.
She heard herself make a soft sound at her first sight of it. The Grave house was a tiny, exuberant mansion in the middle of the bridge—a child’s idea of a castle, with square turrets and cupolas shaped like piped meringue, all in crayon colors of yellow and red and green, gilded to catch the light.
A pressure of emotion rose now. This timeline existed because of the people in that house. The Graves had been erased from the timeline by the King, and Eleanor had been ruthless in her mission to bring them back. Eleanor had created this timeline where monsters reigned so that her family would be safe, forever.
