Chapter 15

Walter Wolfe's phone is a block of ice. He must have been about to make a call when I went off, because the phone is in his hand, but he's frozen like everyone else. He didn't even have time to look up before he died. Whatever I did, it happened really fast. It felt endless inside me, but it must have only taken the space between one breath and the next. His death was instantaneous and painless while Jasper struggled to breathe outside. The unfairness of it chokes me.

Wolfe is in a home office. The antique desk is made of heavy wood, covered in a film of frost like the rest of the apartment. There's a small statue on one corner, a howling wolf carved out of stone. My heart races as I pick it up and swing it. I scream out loud this time as the wolf collides with Walter Wolfe's frozen head and smashes it into shards. Bits of him fly off in a wide arc. I do it a couple more times, basically smashing him to dust. This is his fault. Not mine. He's the reason Jasper was in this situation at all. In another life, I'd have gone on a date with Jasper the med student and we might have had a great night. Instead, we wasted so much time because of his debt to Wolfe, and now Jasper's gone and I can't bring him back.

When there's none of him left—and not much of the wolf sculpture either—I stand there for a second, examining my work while I wait for my breathing to settle. If I could hurt him more, I would. But I'll have to be satisfied with this. I drop the lump of smashed stone to the floor.

The penthouse has its own private elevator, so I ride down alone. But I must scare the hell out of the kid walking down the sidewalk, because he yelps and jumps out of the way as I step out of the building's revolving door. Can't blame him. My shirt is covered in blood, and I'm sure the rest of me isn't much better.

But I only have a few seconds to apologize and reassure him I'm not on some homicidal tear before a sleek black sedan pulls up to the curb and the window rolls down.

"Morgan. Get in." The authoritative order that comes from inside will not be denied, and I only have a second to catch a glimpse of horn-rimmed glasses and tightly braided cornrows before the window slides shut again.

April. Fuck. The last thing I need tonight is a run-in with SPAM's official agent liaison.

But what choice do I have? I'm not even wearing shoes or socks, much less have a phone or wallet. Not like I can call a cab. Who would pick me up, anyway, looking the way I do?

I get into the car and it's pulling back into traffic before I even have my seat belt done up.

"Looks like you've had a night," April says dryly. I don't answer. I haven't spoken to April since I left SPAM. Not that we were ever buddies. But there's a strong chance that if I try to say anything I'll burst into tears and throw myself in her lap, and we're definitely not close enough for that.

"How did you know to come?" I ask weakly, staring at my hands. The palms are crusted with blood. Jasper's blood.

Her laugh is a short, hard thing, like a shard of ice in my chest.

"You think we don't know where you are all the time? That you walked out of the SPAM doors and into obscurity?"

Oh, look. Here's a fight no one would blame me for having. They've been tracking me for years. That's such a gross invasion of privacy.

"It's for your own protection," she says, no doubt knowing exactly where my thoughts are leading. "You made it very clear you wanted nothing to do with us, and I can't say I blame you. But I owe it to your mother to watch out for you, and when I saw you headed to Wolfe's building tonight, I knew you wouldn't have done that on your own."

"What if I did?" I ask, bitterness creeping in my throat like ice. "Walter and I could be very close. He could have been fucking the living daylights out of me, and then you'd be pretty embarrassed right now." The very idea of being in bed with Wolfe makes my skin crawl. I want to smash him to shards all over again. Jasper is the only one whose bed I want to be in, and he's gone. Please don't let it be for too long. I send up a silent wish to whoever or whatever keeps making me do this awful day over and over that they find a sinkhole or something to plummet me and April into so I can get back to Wench ASAP.

No such luck, though. April's watching me with thin-lipped concern. I think about swinging the car door open and tumbling out into the street, but the odds of it killing me are slim, and road rash will only make this night extra painful for no reason.

"What were you really doing there?" she asks.

I should tell her. All of it. Jasper and I probably should have gone to SPAM instead of going to Ezekiel the other day. But they're sneaky, April most of all. If I showed up with a wild story about a not-so-super blind date time loop, she'd have us both shut up in a lab or protective custody. If I tell her about what happened in Wolfe's penthouse, what with the screaming and the freezing and the everyone dying, she'll never let me walk away again. That much power with no training is dangerous. I shudder at the very thought. I've suddenly become everything my mother could have ever hoped for, and I don't want it. I want Jasper.

A tear runs down my cheek and I slap a hand over it, hoping to catch it before April notices.

I'm in so much trouble. More than I can handle on my own. But I can't make it SPAM's problem. The consequences are too high.

"I'm safe," I say, wiping my face. "That's what you were worried about, isn't it? That I was in some kind of trouble? Well, I'm not." I stare at my palms. The tear has wiped away some of the blood, which means it's probably smeared on my face now. Not doing a great job of convincing April I'm okay.

She watches me silently for a minute longer before she says, "I'll take you home."

"No," I say too fast. I can't go home. I can't show up looking like this and scare Ezekiel. He won't remember in this version of today. I'll have to explain it all over again and I just can't. Not tonight.

"To the office?" April says.

I shake my head. Not SPAM either. Instead, I give her an address, and pretty soon we're pulling in front of a nondescript house in a nondescript suburb.

"You can always call if you need anything," April says as I climb out of the sedan. It's probably the kindest thing she's ever said to me. When I quit, her words were much more of the "Where the hell else is someone like you going to go?" variety. We were all hurting back then.

At the last second, right before I close the sedan door, I whirl and stick my head back inside.

"Walter Wolfe is dead," I say. The immediate shock on April's face is very satisfying. "And a bunch of his crew. And..." I stutter over the last part. "And a friend. He was innocent. You'll find him outside on the patio. If you could..." The last part doesn't come out as more than a strangled gasp, but April nods. I don't want to be part of SPAM, but that doesn't mean I can't use their resources to help Jasper. I can't leave him lying out there. April will send some agents, or maybe place a discreet call to the police to take care of it.

I close the car door quietly so as not to wake the sleeping family inside the main house and walk up the stairs to the garage apartment. My clothes, phone—the battery is dead, and when I try to boost the battery, all I get is a half inch of frost on the bottom of the screen—and keys are still by Jasper's bed. I can't bring myself to use his shower again, even though I need to get clean more than I need almost anything else right now. Instead, I strip out of his bloody clothes and throw them into a backpack hung by the door. No sense leaving them here where they'll raise questions for his family. I borrow another T-shirt and slide into my pants.

The sun won't be up for a few more hours, and Jasper's mom and sisters must still be sleeping off their movie night, because the house is quiet as I climb into my SUV. As I put my foot on the brake, I glance at the empty windows behind me, and my eyes tear up. They'll wake up sooner or later, and sometime after that, they're going to wonder where he is. The lie of weird hours at the hospital might keep them from worrying for a while, but eventually they're going to start asking questions, and when Jasper's body is found with a bunch of dead mobsters, it won't give them the answers they need. But I can't face them. All I can do is add them to the list of people I've let down.

For the first time in forever, I take the day off. I'm exhausted. Numb. I shower until the water goes cold, which, given the undoubted size of the hot water tank at Ziro Hall, is a while. I try not to cry as Jasper's blood washes down the drain. No one sees me when I don't succeed.

I sleep for hours. I dream about Jasper and my mother. Mother tumbles off the roof as I rush after her, but this time she flies. She has my hand in hers, and Jasper glides along beside her. I try to explain that there's no way they'd know each other, but they don't seem worried about the logistics. Then they fly off together, leaving me on the side of the road. I think my mother tells me to take the bus, but I'm half awake by then and possibly editorializing.

When I wake up for real, the shadows are heavy outside, and my first thought is this is the longest I've ever made it, so maybe the solution was that it was Jasper who needed to die after all. The idea makes my throat tighten. I can't sit with that reality. It can't be the answer. There has to be a solution where we both survive.

Downstairs, a door slams, and I'm contemplating burying my head under my pillow when Ezekiel calls my name.

"Morgan? Morgan, are you here?"

His voice has a nervous edge to it I don't recognize, and it's enough to pull me out of bed. I put Jasper's clean T-shirt on, along with a pair of jeans.

"Ezekiel?" I say as I come down the stairs. He's standing in the front hall, still dressed from work, and his shoulders slump when he sees me.

"Oh, thank god. I was really starting to worry about you."

"I'm fine." I'm anything but fine. Even after all that sleep, I'm still exhausted. I feel stretched too thin and the sensation gets worse as I try to figure out what I can tell Ezekiel.

"You didn't come to work. You weren't answering your phone. Clarissa tried calling you too. She said you had some kind of date last night. I thought—" He frowns when I laugh.

"You thought I went on a date with an axe murderer?" It's so far from the truth and yet so close I can't help my laughter. What's the worst-case scenario most people would think of for a blind date? I guarantee it's not sixty-four straight days of death and destruction with zero explanation.

"Are you sick?" He's still watching me like I might keel over at any second, which, given my disheveled appearance and my uncontrolled giggling, is probably not an unreasonable concern.

"I'm fine," I say. "I'm fine. I—" I... don't have a good way to explain what's happened, but maybe it's time to stop keeping secrets. I let out a hiccupping sigh. "Jasper died."

Ezekiel frowns. "Who?"

"Jasper. The guy... the one from my date. You met him, remember? We came to your office."

But Ezekiel shakes his head. "When did you come to my office?"

"Last night, we—" Oh, I must still be asleep after all, because that wasn't last night. That was before. The thought that Jasper has ceased to exist in Ezekiel's version of reality is crushing. This is what Jasper meant, isn't it? That being stuck in this loop by yourself is fucking lonely. Anyone you try to explain it to will automatically assume you're off your gourd, which means it's easier to tell no one and suffer alone.

"Sorry, I didn't sleep well." I run a tired hand over my face.

As we walk to the living room, he gives me another worried glance. "Have you been asleep all day?"

"Not all day." I should tell him he's lucky I showered, but instead I slump to the sofa, then pop up again, because it's leather like the one at Wolfe's penthouse and I just can't with that.

"Morgan." He looks really worried now. If I don't pull it together, he's going to start calling reinforcements. Either Clarissa or our doctor, and neither of those will be good for me.

"No. No it's nothing. I'm okay." But I'm obviously not, because I'm pacing on the organic Afghan goat's wool rug and fluttering my hands by my face, trying to get the tears to dry before they tumble down my cheeks.

"Sit," Ezekiel reaches for me, pulling me gently back down. I perch at the edge of the cushions, ignoring the itch in my palms that says I could send the leather subzero if I wanted to. I don't know what's happening to me. Why now? There's been nothing more than a spark my whole life. What changed? And how am I going to explain it to Ezekiel?

"Sorry." I sigh, rubbing my hands together. "It's been... I had a long night."

Ezekiel's face is all soft compassion, and I'm having terrible déjà vu from so many conversations we had here after Mother died, but then again, my life is all déjà vu these days, so why should this be anything different?

"Something happened to your friend?" he says.

I pull on the neck of the T-shirt. A puff of Jasper's sawdust scent wafts up to my face, making it hard to breathe evenly.

"Not my friend. He..." Not my boyfriend either. Partner in crime? Sidekick to my sidekick? If you need henching... "We met a couple months ago," I say. "He was a really good person, but he was working for some bad people, and..." I can't say it. Not all of it. Jasper's secrets aren't mine to tell, even now. And I can't stand the thought of Ezekiel making the same wrong assumptions I did, so I skip over the details."It caught up with him. They caught up with him. And now he's dead." On the last sentence, I pull the shirt up around my nose, inhaling slowly to keep the panic at bay. Doesn't stop the memories, though. The way Jasper gasped in my arms as he died. His uneven grin and that one annoyingly imperfect tooth that made him charming. Who am I kidding? He didn't even need the tooth. He was charming from minute one.

"Do you need to call the police?" Ezekiel asks.

I shake my head. "They can't help."

But he won't be put off. "Do we need to call our lawyer? Are you in some kind of trouble?"

Talking about this in mundane steps is comforting. Police. Lawyers. Like the world makes sense and if we follow the procedures, we'll get predictable and reproducible results.

"No. It's fine. This won't come back to me." April will make sure any possible traces of my presence in the penthouse are erased. "I miss him. He had a good heart, and I wish he'd had a chance to use it the way he wanted to."

Ezekiel puts his arm around me, letting me sag against his shoulder. He's not my father, but he's the closest thing I can ever remember having, and we've done well together.

"You have a good heart," he says, which only makes me swallow back new tears. I've felt broken for such a long time, and with the power simmering beneath my skin, I feel more fractured than ever. "I know the last few years have been hard. If I could change it, I would. But you remember what I said when your mom died?"

I do. It's the thing that's kept me going. "That the best thing we could do was help the people who are still here?"

He squeezes me, and I'm getting tears and snot on his suit jacket, but he doesn't seem to care. "Exactly. And we can do that for your friend too. What was his name?"

"Jasper."

"Jasper." Ezekiel gives me a reassuring pat. "If he was a good person trying to help others, then we can do that for him too. Our work is going to change the world."

"It's going to save it," I say, heaving a big sigh as I sit up again, grounding myself in the speech we've given each other over and over.

"It is." Ezekiel smiles. "How about I order in some food and we can talk about the presentation?"

I roll my eyes. "We've been over the presentation."

"Maybe." He pulls off his jacket and loosens his tie. "But it can't hurt to look again."

"Clarissa will be pissed if we make any changes," I say. My smile feels false, but that happened after Mother died too. Eventually you get used to it.

We order sushi. We go over the slides. They're fine. The colours, the wording. I talk through my introduction, and Ezekiel paces the living room like a ringmaster, telling anyone who will listen—just me and my ghosts in this case—about how the Ziro Machine will accelerate our recovery from the effects of global warming and save at-risk communities around the world. It feels good. Normal. I applaud when he's done and he winks his appreciation.

Except I'm not normal. Somehow, only a few hours later, I'm back in bed, because it's night and that's what normal people do at night. They sleep. But I can't. Maybe it's because I slept all day. Maybe it's because my mother hardly ever slept, so our house was never quiet. Hard to fight evil if you keep nine to five hours, she'd say.

But I can fight evil now. I press a fingertip to the nightstand. At first, nothing happens, just like it always does. I think back to the penthouse, trying to recall the sequence of events. What was different that time? It was real, for one. Truly life or death. Most of the time, I'm focused on the object I touch. A laptop battery. Power cables behind a monitor. Last night I thought instead about the man touching me and somehow that meant not only could I push the energy out of me, I could channel it. Direct it. I kept it away from me and Jasper, even though the flow from the man standing above me and through my body was like an overflowing river.

I open my eyes, and a tiny ring of frost has formed around my finger. I gasp, pulling my bottom lip between my teeth. As I imagine the river, the little ring gets wider and my pulse picks up. I have to breathe through my mouth to stay calm. If I stay focused. If I keep thinking about the man above me and Jasper's desperate gasping next to me, then?—

Something like a shock zaps through me and I yelp as I pull my hand back. The frost recedes, disappearing on the mahogany veneer. My phone is lying face down next to the ring of small water droplets that remain. It's been on the charger all day, so I unplug it and turn it on. There are about a half million emails and missed calls from Ezekiel and Clarissa. They start with polite cheery requests for proof of life and get increasingly frantic the longer I don't reply.

As I clear emails, a notification pings on the screen.

New text message from unknown sender

I go to delete the text, but my thumb falters when the screenshot of Jasper's face appears where words should be. He's the unknown sender. Of course he is. Just over twenty-four hours ago, I was waiting to meet a stranger for a blind date I was sure would be a disaster. Why would I have saved his number in my phone?

My hand shakes as I get the video to play. The shaking gets worse in the first few seconds as Jasper looks at me from the screen. He's in bed, shaggy hair in his face, head nestled in the pillow, looking relaxed and a little self-conscious.

"Hey," he says, glancing to the side for a moment before he comes back to the screen. "You're in the shower right now, so I'm hoping you can't hear me. I don't know if you'll actually ever see this since I'm going to set it to send twenty-four hours from now. If you don't, I guess it means we screwed up and the day started over. Sorry about that. Hope it didn't hurt too much. But if you do see this, then maybe we survived. That's what it would mean, right?"

My throat hurts because he can't have known how wrong he'd be.

"Anyway, there's some things I want to say to you, and if I say them to your face, you'll get flustered and pick a fight rather than hearing what I'm trying to tell you."

I wrinkle my nose, the instinct to protest strong, but he's not here for me to argue with, and aren't I proving his point anyway?

"I need to tell you that I see you. I see how hard you're trying, and how brave you think you have to be all the time. Even before you remembered our dates, I could see it. I remember, trust me." His smile softens. "I know there's things you haven't told me about who you are. And I know you don't like me and the choices I've had to make. But Morgan, I think you're amazing. You're so smart and so dedicated to what you do. I wish I stuck to what I thought was right as much as you do."

He did, though. That's the thing. He gave up everything to protect his family. That's so much more than I've done.

Jasper rolls over, the pillow wrinkling under his head. I'm still in his T-shirt, and his lumber scent makes me want to curl up in a ball and cry until I'm all dried out. Instead, I hold the phone close and listen as he says, "I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm glad we got stuck here. Obviously not the dying part. But even when we're fighting, I'd rather fight with you than be with pretty much anyone else. There are so many things I need to tell you, and there are so many dates that I remember that you don't, and I want to tell you about those too." He sighs, running his free hand through his hair, pushing it out of his face. I have to smile because I miss his scruffy persona so much and it's only been a day. "Anyway, I'll probably be super embarrassed when you see this, but if you do see it, that means we found a way out, and that's the important part. I'll get over the embarrassment. But if we did find a way out, I hope you'll let me take you on another date. I promise it will go better than this one."

I cough on a sob that is fifty percent laughter as he grins at the screen. Jasper glances to the side again. "You turned off the water, so you're probably coming back out. I'm sure you've been thinking of ways to start an argument while you were in there, so I'm going to sign off. I'll see you soon, okay?"

Then the screen shifts, showing the blank wall next to the bed, before the video freezes.

Well, shit. I slide the phone under my pillow, like if I sleep with it there and wish hard enough, I'll wake up in the morning to find Jasper next to me. Or we'll be back at Wench. Either way is fine.

But as I stare into the darkness of my room, wishing won't cut it. It's going to take action or bust. The time for half-baked plans and trial runs is over. I'm going to figure out who is responsible for this time loop and how we escape it for good.

And then I'm going to get Jasper back.