Page 81 of Only a Monster

An animal padded into view, tiger-like, with enormous arcing fangs. It was as big as a horse, and solidly built. The huge muscles of its legs shifted as it walked.

Joan gasped, and the animal turned as if it had heard. It looked right at Joan, seeming as shocked as she felt. Could it see her? She got her answer a second later. It snarled at her and leaped.

Joan heard herself shout. She twisted to run. But there were no claws or fangs. Instead, someone had caught her and steadied her. Aaron. ‘Careful,’ he said shakily. ‘Or you’ll fall.’

The creature circled back, snarling, tail lashing. Joan shuddered.

‘That’s a sabre-toothed tiger,’ Aaron said disbelievingly.

‘That’s not just winter in there,’ Ruth said, sounding just as shaky. ‘That must be a hundred thousand years ago at least.’

Tom reached into his pocket absently and took a gulp from a flask. ‘Shhh,’ he said as Frankie yapped frantically under his arm and squirmed, trying to get at the tiger. Frankie subsided to a low growl.

As the tiger padded out of sight, Joan put her hand out again. The barrier seemed slightly rounded, as if it was shaped like a sphere. She pictured this slice of winter as the thick wall of a bubble that surrounded the archive completely.

‘It’s like a moat,’ Ruth said. ‘A piece of another time standing between us and the archive.’

‘You really didn’t know this was here?’ Aaron said to Tom.

‘I would have told you,’ Tom said, annoyed.

‘What are we going to do?’ Ruth said. ‘We can’t travel through that. It would be a hundred thousand years just to walk into the Palaeolithic period, and then another hundred thousand years to walk out.’

‘I think that’s the point,’ Aaron said. ‘It can’t be traversed.’

Joan hoped no one had ever walked through it. Because a round trip—through the moat to the archive and back—would cost four hundred thousand years of human life. Had the King ever stolen that much? She felt ill at the thought.

‘We need to go back,’ Aaron said.

‘No,’ Joan said. ‘No. Wait.’ She needed to think.

‘There’s no way in. We need to cut our losses,’ Aaron said.

‘The new guards will be here soon,’ Tom said.

Joan could see the archive’s door across the strip of snow. It was so close. She could hardly bear it. Behind that door, there was a device that could bring her family back to life. The transformatio, Gran had called it. And Joan was standing a few feet away, unable to even touch the door. She couldn’t leave.

‘Joan,’ Aaron said.

Joan shook her head.

‘Look,’ Aaron said. ‘Even if it were possible to steal that much human time, we still couldn’t travel through that thing. We’re on a mire.’

A mire. Joan had forgotten about that. Monsters couldn’t travel here—their powers didn’t work in this place. Except . . . that clearly wasn’t quite true.

The King’s powers still worked: this bubble of another time was proof of that; the whole palace out of its time was proof. Maybe the family powers would still work here too. Maybe the Hunt power would work.

‘Ruth,’ Joan said. There was a twig on the floor, tracked in from the garden. Joan bent to pick it up. The thought was still half-formed as she straightened. ‘Ruth, do you think you could put this in there?’

‘What do you mean?’ Ruth said, sounding confused.

Joan’s own family power had diminished over the years. As a child, she’d been able to hide and retrieve things just like the rest of the Hunts. But as she’d gotten older, retrieval had become less and less reliable. She’d lost things that way. A jade bracelet that she’d been given as a baby. A cameo brooch that Mum had once owned. A few years ago, she’d stopped trying to hide things at all. Ruth’s and Bertie’s Hunt power had gotten stronger as they’d gotten older, but Joan’s had faded away as if it had never really been hers.

‘How does the Hunt power actually work?’ Joan asked Ruth.

Tom interjected with a soft cough. He showed them the wristwatch he’d taken from the guard: eleven thirty-five. ‘Next change is twenty-five minutes away.’

So they had twenty-five minutes. No . . . Joan calculated. Fifteen minutes, unless they wanted to run right into the new guards.

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