Page 120 of Once a Villain
Tom waved a hand.Don’t worry about it.“I don’t have thatpower myself, but I’ve seen it. So maybethat’show you did it,” he said to Nick. “Maybe you had a Hathaway friend.”
“I don’t think he had any monster friends,” Joan said. Except for Astrid Liu. Joan bit her lip. She wished Astrid were here. Astrid would have known how Nick had traveled. She might even have known how to get to the gate. But the Lius were missing from this timeline. Only Jamie was left of them here.
Joan had imagined Nick using a scientific gadget, but now, looking at this ring, she wondered... She rubbed her thumb over the scratches at the edge of the signet. They seemed deliberate—an etched number: 317. Andthatwas why she’d asked about time travel, she realized. This ring looked like a travel token.
“When you were a monster slayer,” she said to Nick, “you wore a ring just like this—on a chain around your neck.”
“Did I?” Nick said with a frown. “I’ve only ever known it to belong to my sister.”
Joan swallowed. In that timeline, his sister had been murdered by Eleanor, along with the rest of his family. Nick had been forced to watch.
“There are two versions of this ring in this timeline,” she said slowly. “When we visited your family, your sisterwaswearing it. But we had an identical ring inourpossession—this one we’d found in Aaron’s bedchambers. There were two versions of the same ring in the same room that day.”
“What are you getting at?” Mum asked gently.
“I don’t know,” Joan said. “But Nick’s and Aaron’s counterparts had a plan to get to Eleanor. And Nick’s message to Aaronwas,You have what you need. And... the timeline reacted when I touched the ring—the first time, and then again when I took it from Nick’s neck at the Argent house.” The timeline had jolted as if it had been surprised by this ring somehow. As if it wasn’t supposed to be here.
Joan had felt that same jolt when she’d touched the book used in the cipher—The Riverside Chaucer.
And how could that book even exist in this timeline? she wondered suddenly. Hadn’t Aaron been reading that exact edition in the previous timeline too? She’d seen it in his bedroom.... It didn’t make any sense for the sameexactbook to exist here, the same publisher in this diverged world, printing that same book, with the same cover....
The hairs rose on the back of her neck as a thought occurred to her. “This is going to sound mad, but... Could this ring be Nick’s ring—from the timeline when he was a monster slayer?”
“No,” Jamie said. “Objects can’t traverse timelines.”
“I don’t know if that’s true,” Mum said to Jamie, and Jamie blinked at her, surprised. “The Graves have stories of objects passing through windows in the timeline. Not people,” she said, anticipating Jamie’s next question. “Just objects.” She started to frown then, as if something disturbing had occurred to her.“May I see that?” she asked Joan.
Joan passed the ring to her, disquieted by her tone.
Mum squinted at it in the darkness. She spotted the secret compartment almost immediately and slid it open, finding the tiny scrap of bloodied cloth. She gasped, and—even in the insipid light—it was clear that she’d gone pale.
“What’s wrong?” Joan said.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Mum said, but she looked at Nick with a kind of horrified sympathy that made Joan’s stomach drop. Why was she looking at him like that?
“What is it?” Aaron said.
Mum returned the ring now not to Joan but to Nick, handling it so carefully that Joan’s disquiet increased. “It’s a travel token,” Mum said.
So Joan’s instinct had been right. Or had it? Because Mum was still staring at Nick as if she’d realized something terrible.
“A travel token that humans can use,” Mum clarified.
“But... humans can’t travel of their own volition,” Tom said.
“That’s not quite true,” Mum said. “In our very oldest myths—our most secret myths—there’s a way.”
Jamie made a soft sound; he’d realized what Mum was talking about. He’d gone pale too—so much so that Tom put an arm around him.
At everyone’s unspoken questions, Mum said to Nick, “When you were a monster slayer, Eleanor had an underling murder your family.” She hesitated. “You have a large family, I believe....”
Nick swallowed visibly. He was disturbed by how Mum was looking at him; Joan was too. “Seven of us,” he said.
He didn’t remember those murders, but some part of him still carried them inside, Joan knew.
Mum said gently, “The monster who killed them stole all the remaining years of their lives from them. And when he did, he carried that life in his blood.” She hesitated again, as if she didn’t want to say the next part. “In the myths, if a close human relativekills a monster before that monster travels again, the human can create a special kind of travel token using the monster’s blood. With that token, they can travel on their family’s lost time. They can travel until they use it up.”
Horrified, Joan pictured the blood-soaked scrap of cloth in the ring. It was blood from the monster who’d killed Nick’s family?
