Page 65 of Only a Monster

For the first time, she looked for cameras, avoiding them like Aaron always did. Nick had pointed out the cameras in the café, and Joan was sure that was how he’d found her. She was beginning to understand why monsters hated cameras. If your enemies could travel in time, you never wanted to leave a record of where you’d been.

The market was bustling with people. Joan wanted to scream at them: The hero is here in this time! But she’d have sounded mad—like screaming that Superman was here.

She stumbled up the wrought-iron staircase to the landing. To her relief, she could hear Ruth and Aaron arguing through the door of the flat.

‘—the only family without allies,’ Aaron was saying. ‘That’s how much you’re despised.’

Joan pounded on the door and Ruth opened it mid-sentence. ‘I don’t know what the Mtawalis see in your family,’ Ruth said. ‘They’re too—’

‘Stop,’ Joan said. She’d had it with their fighting. She slammed the door behind her and took a deep breath. ‘We have to stop this,’ she said. ‘Nick is here.’

They stared at her—not frightened, but confused. ‘What do you mean?’ Aaron said.

‘Nick is here!’ Joan said. ‘He’s here in this time!’

There was a longer silence. ‘He can’t be,’ Aaron said. ‘He’s human. I saw him with my own power.’

‘Humans can’t travel,’ Ruth said.

‘I don’t know how he got here!’ Joan said impatiently. ‘But I’m telling you, he’s here!’

‘Are you sure?’ Aaron said. ‘Are you sure it was him?’

‘He took the necklace,’ Joan said.

Aaron looked at Joan’s bare throat and went pale. ‘Why would he do that?’

Joan could guess why. Sometimes it felt as though she knew Nick as well as she knew herself. He was going to use the necklace to get to the Monster Court. To get to the same device that they were after. He was going to change the timeline.

Aaron had said it last night. The human hero is the end of days for monsters.

‘You told us the myth,’ Joan said to Aaron. ‘You said that in the end of days, the hero kills the ancestor of monsters.’

Nick’s plan was as clear to Joan as if he’d told her himself. He was going to use that device to change the timeline. He was going to kill that ancestral monster. And when he did, no other monster would ever be born. Every monster would be erased from the timeline. Nick’s purpose as the hero would be fulfilled.

Aaron didn’t say anything, but Joan had seen that expression on his face before. He’d had it in the maze—when he’d looked down and seen the symbol of the hero on the back of a man’s neck.

‘No.’ Ruth shook her head.

She didn’t want to believe it. Joan knew that feeling well.

‘Gran told me about the hero that night,’ Joan said. ‘Ruth, she knew about him. She was expecting him, but . . .’ She remembered what Gran had said. I was supposed to have so much more time to prepare you. I thought I’d be fighting beside you. ‘I think he came at the wrong time. She wasn’t ready for him. She tried to tell me more, but she was too weak. She gave me the necklace. And now Nick has it. We have to stop him. We have to.’

‘What are we supposed to do?’ Aaron said. ‘If he can travel, he’s probably left this time already.’

‘We know where he’s going,’ Joan said. ‘We know what he wants. We just have to get there first.’

‘The Monster Court.’ Aaron breathed it out like a fearful prayer. He looked toward the windows. The middle two were cracked open, allowing glimpses of white sky amid the rippling blue of the stained glass. ‘Listen . . .’ he said. ‘If you’re right, then every monster is in danger. We need to trust the Court to stop him. I think it’s time to seek an audience.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ Ruth spat. ‘I realise that you’re an Oliver, so your instinct is to lick boots, but the Court can’t be trusted. Court Guards have been hunting down survivors of the massacre. And you know as well as I do that only the Court can have altered the family records to conceal what the hero has done.’

Aaron had glared at lick boots, but now he started to frown. ‘I can’t make sense of it.’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Ruth said. ‘This is the King’s timeline. Every event is how he wishes it to be. Or so the Court says. The King protects us from humans discovering us. Or so the Court says.’

‘You’re perilously close to blasphemy,’ Aaron said.

‘Then let me say it clearer,’ Ruth said. ‘The hero is proof of the limits of the King’s power—a failure in the King’s purported control of the timeline. If the King could have stopped the hero, he would have. Instead he can only conceal him from us. How’s that for blasphemy?’

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