Chapter 28

Phillip looked at himself in the mirror—a startling thing in and of itself—then regarded the drawing lying on the table near him. Heather had left him the same, presumably so he didn’t make a complete arse of himself by putting things on in the wrong order.

He was wearing jeans, a plaid shirt, and a leather jacket. He’d had to consult the drawing several times until he’d become familiar with the terms he should apply to what he was wearing, but he was fairly sure he’d gotten them right. The boots were a bit dodgy to start with, but he’d managed to get them on his feet with an acceptable amount of cursing.

He also had learned that his phone was of a particular kind that allowed him to obtain more apps than an android—Heather had said so in her note—which he supposed could only be a good thing, though the lad downstairs at the front gates had had a differing opinion on the desirability of apple products. What an apple had to do with apps and why he cared about any of it, he surely didn’t know.

By the saints, he felt as if he had dropped onto a different planet.

He knew about planets, he supposed, because he’d overheard Montgomery and Pippa talking about them. Or had it been Jake and Amanda? For all he knew it had been Nicholas and Jenner. No wonder their children were such terrors. He had no doubts that Theo and Sam had spent more than their share of time eavesdropping at their parents’ doorway. He didn’t want to speculate on what those lads might know.

He paused and looked carefully over his shoulder. He wouldn’t have been at all surprised to have found they had followed him to the Future. The chamber was empty save his own poor self, so perhaps he had eluded them. He was certain that wouldn’t last and pitied the soul who found those two lurking behind a modern tapestry.

He rubbed the spot between his eyes briefly because it pained him in a way he wasn’t accustomed to. He’d passed far too much of the night before watching videos on the computer Heather had left for him. She had left him instructions to simply turn the beast on and it would see to itself, which he found to be the case. To be honest, the contents of the little movies marching across the screen had almost been less startling than pushing the button as directed and having the bloody screen spring to life.

He suspected he’d eaten at some point when someone had brought him food, though he genuinely didn’t remember tasting any of it. He’d been fixated on that flat sheaf of computer, fashioned from the same material as his phone only quite a bit larger. He’d initially been almost as curious about it as he had been what it had been revealing to him, though that had changed very quickly as he’d focused on what he was being shown.

The history of the world.

He was fairly certain that he’d crossed himself many times until he realized that what he was seeing wasn’t evil.

It was mind-blowing.

That had taken up half the night. He’d watched souls who had lived centuries after he had died but centuries before Imogen had been born march across the world’s stage, having their turn for good or ill. He’d seen death, destruction, war with weapons he simply couldn’t wrap his mind around, fear on a scale he honestly couldn’t believe was possible.

He’d also seen the inventions that had revolutionized life on earth, art that had left him dumbfounded, music that had left him weeping. He wasn’t sure he would ever stop shaking his head.

As the sun had been rising, he’d finished with the initial offerings. Heather had put little boxes on his homescreen labeled intriguing things like Top One Hundred Vacation Destinations for Men with Time on Their Hands and All the Cuisine You’ll Regret Not Having Eaten. It had been torture to turn away, but sleep had called him relentlessly. He could only hope he would have time later that day to explore those and the other things he hadn’t been able to uncross his eyes to read.

But first, Imogen.

He hadn’t had the opportunity to talk to her the night before as he would have wished. First, he’d owed it to the man who thought he was there to help to actually be of some use. Second, and much more unsettling, he hadn’t dared interfere with what seemed to be happening between her and her parents. He understood how things went when souls were cooped up in the same keep for months at a time, so he wasn’t entirely surprised to see the jostling going on in her family. Where she fit into the whole thing was something he would need to determine.

His phone sang at him. It was a pleasing tune with a man who at one point during it stated proudly, “I’m sending you back to the Future.” Heather might have been an opportunist and, it had to be said, a thief of the first water, but she had spared no expense to see him kitted out properly.

He tapped the green circle on the face of the beast, then put it to his ear. “Aye?”

“You learned to use the phone.”

The pleasing mix of his vintage French, modern English, and all of it spoken with a Lowland accent was surprisingly comforting. “It would seem so.”

“And to think my father thought you were an idiot. You’re a rather clever lad, all things considered.”

“Careful, woman. I’m your elder.”

Heather snorted. “Not by much and I’m the one with the keys to your keep, my lord. Show some respect.”

She might have had the keys to his keep, but he realized at that moment, in an inn that found itself hundreds of years out of his time, that there was another who had the keys to his heart. And he had Heather of Haemesburgh to thank for bringing her into the path he’d been doggedly marching up, never stopping long enough to note if there might be souls he was about to march right over.

He could, as Kendrick reminded him with alarming regularity, be a bit of a bastard sometimes.

“I’m curious about something,” he said without preamble.

“Unsurprising,” she said, “and predictable. The YouTube videos weren’t enough?”

“I want to know about Imogen,” Phillip said. “How did you find her?”

“You already asked and I already told you, ’tis a tale better told at another time. I don’t want to overtax your feeble wits.”

“I’m a de Piaget. We don’t have feeble wits. But if you won’t answer that, then tell me where your brother is.”

She sighed gustily. “Meet me at Haemesburgh in a se’nnight’s time and we’ll have speech together.”

“Why then?”

“I’m giving neither answers nor a sword to a man who can’t win a woman and discover a few things on his own.”

“You are an evil wench.”

She laughed. “Aye, most likely. But I have a very lovely car, a driver when it suits me, and modern food, which I suppose makes me less evil than clever. My driver is downstairs waiting for you, by the way. He has instructions to teach you how to drive, if you care to learn. A car, not a cart. Think on the possibilities of that, my lad.”

“Wait—”

There was silence. He looked at his phone but she had left the parley.

A car?

He checked himself in the mirror to make certain he was covered where he should have been and not looking like a fool everywhere else, then put his phone in his pocket, the key to his room in his other pocket, and a wallet with all sorts of things he certainly hadn’t provided for himself inside in the back pocket of his jeans.

He was beginning to suspect that in her own way, Heather was trying to be nice to him. It was for her own nefarious reasons, of that he had no doubt, but the results were at least the same.

He left his chamber, bid a good late morning to the innkeeper, then left the hotel to find Heather’s driver waiting for him. Phillip shook the man’s hand.

“A fine day for a turn in a car,” he said pleasantly.

The man looked unconcerned, but then again, that one had apparently been ferrying Heather around for several years. “My lady wishes that you be taught to drive.” He looked as if he anticipated a day that merited no more than a yawn. “She claims you already have a license. Not sure how that came about if you can’t already drive, but I’ve learned not to question her ladyship when it comes to these things.”

“Wise,” Phillip said.

“We’ll need to take a bus to where we’re going. The city isn’t the place for this.”

Phillip imagined it wasn’t. He nodded, then went with Heather’s man to a contraption that was the length of Haemesburgh’s stables, a fraction of their width, and had wheels. A bus. What an oddity. It would carry him where he wanted to go though, so he wasn’t about to argue with its looks.

After a fair bit of a ride, then quite a bit of walking, he arrived with Heather’s driver at a car park that backed onto a derelict structure that had him for not the first time in the past day reaching for his sword. If her man—Bruce, he discovered was the fellow’s name—noticed, he was too jaded to say anything.

A door was opened to reveal several automobiles.

“I say,” Phillip said, feeling a little breathless, “what is that?”

“Nothing you’ll be driving, my lord.”

Phillip looked at the man archly. “I’m a very fast learner.”

“And that Porsche Spyder is always going to be faster than your learning, if I can be so bold. It is also her favorite car. If you ding it, she will make you wish you were dead.”

“Did she say that?”

“In exactly those words. We’ll start with that little gray Ford over there.”

Phillip realized there were five cars there, all parked in a tidy row. He could only assume they were Heather’s given that one of them was the beast that had belched him out onto the street—admittedly with help—the night before. Phillip looked at the tiny little car on the end of the row and wondered how he was going to fit himself into it, much less force it to go anywhere. He would likely have better luck pushing the damned thing.

“If you’re a very good student—if—the lady Heather says you may choose one of these.” Bruce looked as if he thought that might be a very bad idea indeed, but the man was nothing if not courageous apparently. “She has a nice Mercedes in here as well. That might suit you best.”

“Which one is the most powerful?”

“That depends on how many things you hit today.”

Phillip imagined it did and vowed to be very careful with the little car that he might try a more powerful one, just as he’d done with the first horse he’d had for his own.

Perhaps things were not so different in the Future after all.

He looked at Bruce. “I need to make a text.”

“Feel free.”

He pulled his phone from his pocket and looked for Imogen in his contacts. Given that he only had two of them—Imogen and Heather—his task was accomplished quickly, he wrote his message and sent it in French before he thought anything of it. He was tempted to translate it, but he was sure she would understand what he’d been getting at. If he could spend a single day learning her Future ways, that would surely make a better impression than presenting himself as a rustic who had no idea where the airplane mode switch was on his phone.

The saints preserve him that such a thought might be rattling around in his head for the rest of his life.

His phone chirped at him. She had sent him a single K. Not exactly verbose, but there you had it. Perhaps her parents were watching her too closely for her to say anything else.

He put his phone back in his pocket, made certain his wallet was where he’d put it, then looked at Bruce.

“What first?”

The man took a deep, steadying breath, then held out the most delicate set of keys Phillip had ever seen. “Take these.”

Ah, but the Future was a marvelous place indeed.

···

It was very late that night when he finally stumbled into his temporary bedchamber, tossed keys to a Porsche Spyder on the table there, and shrugged out of his jacket.

The day had been a success.

He would be the first to admit it had initially been a dodgy business indeed, that business of driving a car instead of steering a horse. In his world, he had come to understandings with the most powerful beasts in the stables of various kin and certainly collected his own share of steeds that no one else dared ride. It had been profoundly disconcerting to try to make a connection with the mind of that damned Ford and have it completely ignore him. He didn’t want to think about it overmuch, but the truth was, he’d almost plowed them into several shrubberies before he’d realized that his foot was going to have to do the speaking for him.

Once he’d mastered that, things had gone very quickly for him. The other drivers on the road were rather sensible, all things considered, and he wasn’t unaccustomed to having a very clear picture of the lay of the battlefield, as it were.

Bruce had made him wait until after dark before he’d allowed him to take the Spyder out of its lair, but take it out he had.

“Don’t speed,” had been Bruce’s only suggestion. “Germany’s the place for that.”

Phillip didn’t suppose he would have the time for a journey to the Continent, so he assured Bruce that he would most definitely not speed, he would watch out for the local sheriff and his lads with flashing lights, and he wouldn’t turn Heather’s prized possession into a heap of scrap metal.

His phone rang. He picked it up immediately, hoping for Imogen. It was Heather.

“Aye?” he said.

“How goes the wooing?”

“I thought I might present myself more successfully with a Porsche wrapped around me.”

“If you destroy my car, Phillip de Piaget, I will hunt you down in whatever century you hide and put you to the sword. Slowly.”

“By the saints, woman,” he said with an uneasy laugh, “priorities.”

“If you knew how much it had cost, you’d agree.”

“Master Bruce made that very clear.” Phillip didn’t want to add that he hadn’t believed the man at first. So much money for such a small thing.

Then again, it went rather fast.

“I won’t ruin your car,” he promised. “And I appreciate the gear you left for me.”

She was silent for a moment or two. “I’m willing to do quite a few things to secure my peace.”

Considering he was willing to live out a goodly portion of his life in Haemesburgh for the same reason, he thought he could understand.

“Good e’en to you, Heather.”

She snorted at him and hung up.

He had a wash, trying not to feel as stunned as he still did by the luxuries he was currently enjoying, then crawled into bed. He spared a wish for his other sword that he assumed was now in Jackson’s tender care, made certain his knives were by his head, then reached for his phone. He was tempted to text Imogen again and ask her what she planned for the morrow, but perhaps it would be better to seek her out in person. He put his phone on the little table next to the bed and turned out the light.

Perhaps in sleep he would stop wearing what he was certain was an expression of absolute astonishment.