Page 33 of Only a Monster

‘Just think,’ Aaron said. ‘Why?’

‘Why?’ Joan took a breath. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know, okay? I just did. I like history.’

‘You like history.’

‘Yes,’ Joan said impatiently. ‘Aaron, they’re coming.’

‘You liked the re-creations of history at the house,’ Aaron said.

‘Yes. I—yes.’

‘Holland House showed you another time,’ Aaron said. ‘And you were drawn to it. It wasn’t the real thing. It was just a cardboard cut-out, but it was as close as you could get to being in another time.’

Joan stared at him. She remembered the first time she’d walked into the house. She’d loved it—immediately and irrationally. It had been restored to its Georgian heyday, and Joan had felt as though she’d stepped into another time.

‘Travelling to other times is your birthright, Joan,’ Aaron said. ‘It’s in your blood. You’ve been stuck here a long time, but you don’t have to be. Remember the feeling you had? When you first walked into the house. Do you remember?’

Nick’s people were almost upon them. Joan saw the shine of a knife.

‘Do you remember?’ Aaron asked.

Joan felt it again then. The yearning she’d felt when she’d first arrived at Holland House. Her heart wrenched with it. ‘I remember,’ she whispered.

The knife slashed toward her.

And the world shifted.

EIGHT

For a long moment, Joan couldn’t hear anything but her own harsh breaths. Nick’s people had vanished. She pressed her hand against her throat, where the knife had been about to slash her. She turned her palm over. Her skin felt strangely tender with anticipated pain. But there was no blood.

Nick’s people were gone. The knife was gone.

No. She was gone.

Buckingham Palace seemed unchanged. People were still jostling for position to see the guards. The great statue of Victoria still sat on her throne.

But the man beside Joan had an old-fashioned camera, its thick strap looped around his neck. A second ago everyone had been holding up phones. Now no one was. And there were other differences too. Clothes were looser; hair was bigger.

Joan took a breath. She was breathing air from another time. She was standing with people from another time.

The sounds of the world came back in a rush—the drums, the trumpets, the marching footsteps of the guards. The ceremony was on top of them. No one seemed to have noticed that two people had arrived out of nowhere.

‘We did it.’ Joan could hear the muted shock in her voice. ‘We travelled.’

‘I travelled,’ Aaron said dryly. ‘Dragging you along.’

A woman nearby gave them both a curious look. Joan realised she was still holding Aaron’s hand at the same moment he did. He tore his grip from hers as if she’d burned him. Joan rolled her eyes.

The Changing of the Guard was ending now in a last thunder of drums and trumpets. And it was suddenly all too loud. A lifted camera made Joan flinch. She was safe, but her body didn’t believe it. Not yet.

She needed to breathe clear air. With effort, she pushed her way out of the crush, until the crowd finally yielded and she found herself in open space.

And then her breath stopped in her throat. Here, the past lay all around her. Cars circled the memorial in an unbroken stream, wide and boxy and low to the ground as she’d only ever seen in movies.

She was in the past. She turned a slow circle, following the cars. She was in the past. On the horizon, there was an empty space where the London Eye should have been: a missing tooth on the skyline.

The last turn brought her face-to-face with Aaron. He was watching her with an unexpectedly soft expression that disappeared as she focused on him. ‘Have you finished staring?’ His voice was studied boredom. This is nothing. I do this all the time.

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