Page 138 of Never a Hero

Between them, Aaron stood shakily. As he settled, Joan saw his feet freeze too. He shuddered. The bare skin of his neck was a pale line above his shirt collar. He turned that collar up now.

Joan was halfway through flipping up her own collar before she recognised the unconscious need to protect her neck too. Looking down the line, all the others were doing the same thing. Did they all feel it? The spine-prickle of primal danger from the King? Joan’s body thought she was too close to a predatory animal. She could almost smell a musk scent. And she couldn’t run.

‘Sweet Eleanor,’ the King said, and Eleanor stared back at him defiantly. She seemed more able than Joan to look the King in the face, but her feet were glued to the ground just like everyone else’s. And that sent another pulse of fear down Joan’s spine. Eleanor was the most feared member of the Curia Monstrorum. She’d brought allies here with the power to freeze the world around them, to wield the rare Ali power like a weapon, and who knew what else. And yet just a few words from the King had subdued her.

‘Did you truly think that your sister needed to send for me?’ the King said. ‘I see every event on the timeline, every fluctuation. I knew the moment you sought to betray me.’

Sister?

For a long, long moment, the word didn’t make any kind of sense. Joan had sent for help. Why had the King referenced Eleanor’s sister?

Eleanor saw Joan’s confused expression, and her lips pressed until they whitened.

And then Joan could only stare at Eleanor’s pretty face, her waves of golden hair, her cornflower-blue eyes. Why wasn’t Eleanor contradicting this? They couldn’t be sisters. They looked nothing alike. And … some part of Joan would have remembered her. Surely.

‘I rewarded you for your loyalty once,’ the King said to Eleanor. ‘I granted you life. I granted you membership in my Court.’

‘You call that a reward?’ Eleanor said. ‘Keeping me alive after you erased my family from existence? Bestowing me with this sigil? The Graves were the most powerful family in London, and now no one even remembers our name.’ She turned to Joan, and her expression was so full of emotion that Joan couldn’t look away. ‘My own sister doesn’t remember me,’ Eleanor said hoarsely.

‘I’m not your sister,’ Joan blurted, and Eleanor took a visibly shaky breath, as if Joan’s words had actually hurt her.

They really couldn’t be sisters. Eleanor had done things Joan would never understand. She’d tortured Nick and Jamie. She’d hurt the people Joan loved most. She’d trained Nick and set him loose on the world. He’d massacred hundreds and hundreds—maybe thousands—of monsters. Joan’s own family included.

Eleanor had taunted Joan about it. She’d locked her up in a cell.

‘We grew up together,’ Eleanor said to Joan. Was there a shake in her voice? ‘You’re only here because I am.’

Joan was aware of the others listening—even the King. But she could only look at Eleanor. Stuck fast in place like the rest of them and dwarfed by the King’s bulk, Eleanor seemed smaller than she had before. The world was still frozen around them, and without any breeze, her straight-cut medieval dress hung limply.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Joan said honestly, and again Eleanor looked as if Joan had hurt her feelings.

‘The King rewarded me with life,’ Eleanor said. ‘To grant me that, he had to preserve my entire line—every ancestor down to my mother. Our mother.’

‘My mum was Maureen Hunt.’

‘Our mother was Maureen Grave! She was marked for assassination as soon as I was born. But …’ Eleanor’s voice faltered for a moment. ‘Mum was always clever. There were rumours that she’d escaped—that a Nightingale had saved her. That she’d gotten out through a series of safe houses.’

Joan found herself turning, shaken, to Aaron. His mouth parted slightly, and his eyes widened. His mother had been a Nightingale, and she’d been executed for helping someone like Joan. A member of the Grave family, Joan knew now.

Aaron’s mother had had a safe house in Southwark … Had she saved Joan’s mother? Joan pictured the two of them cowering there in the dark, knowing the King was hunting them down …

‘Mum must have found your dad again after she escaped,’ Eleanor said to Joan. ‘They’d belonged together in the zhenshí de lìshi, and so the timeline would have brought them back together. And then … I suppose she sought refuge with the Hunts. I should have guessed. Or maybe I shouldn’t have—she and Gran never really did get on.’

‘Gran?’

‘Dorothy Hunt,’ Eleanor said. ‘She’s my grandmother too. To be honest, though, I never got on with her either. Mum used to say we were too alike. Spiky peas in a pod.’

She didn’t sound like she was lying, but Joan couldn’t process it. Nothing about Eleanor was familiar. Not her precise, mannered way of speaking; not her doll-like features; not her casual cruelty. And at the same time, Joan had a flash of Nick introducing himself as if they’d never met. Of herself standing in that little airless room with Aaron, begging him to believe that he’d once known her.

We grew up together, Eleanor had said. And she’d known things about Joan—she knew how Joan thought. And … ‘You knew how Gran planned jobs,’ Joan said slowly. ‘You said it was a ten-day minimum.’ How could Eleanor have known that? Gran didn’t share secrets like that with anyone but her own blood.

Sisters. Could it be true? Joan shook her head, trying to clear it.

As Joan stood there, blankly, the King turned toward the north bank and waved a casual hand. Around them, London leaped back to life, the water of the Thames lapping again at the foreshore, a ship’s horn faintly sounding. On the other side of the river, the steamship pulled farther from the wharf. The buggy-like cars and unwieldy buses of 1923 rolled along the bridge.

With the King’s back to Joan, the sensation of staring into the sun wasn’t as pronounced. Even so, her perceptions of him were still shifting from moment to moment. Who was he? What family had he originally been from? What abilities must he wield that Aaron and even Eleanor’s allies—with all their powers—were staring at him half-fearful, half-worshipful?

Joan had been experiencing the timeline as a force lately. Now, though, it felt more like a great beast, leashed by the King’s presence but not tamed. Aaron had once told her that the King and the timeline were one and the same. But, in the King’s presence, Joan sensed some stubborn core of rebellion from the timeline. It didn’t like being tethered and, every now and then, there was a faint jolt in the air, as if it were tugging at its leash.

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