Timebound(107)
Mayor Harrison walked over to talk to the men, shaking their hands and clapping them on the shoulders as he spoke. I couldn’t help but wonder how this incident would affect him, just hours away from the moment when an assassin would show up on his doorstep, requesting a word. Would he be less inclined to let a stranger into his house without having someone at least do a quick frisk for weapons? Or was this type of scare a pretty routine occurrence in a Chicago that was only slightly tamer than the Wild West?
I spun around again, still searching for Simon, but there was no sign of him. Saul was holding a handkerchief against the side of Katherine’s head. I could see a bit of blood on the white cloth, but it didn’t look as though she was badly hurt.
Kiernan had now spotted me and was running toward the platform. I held up one hand and motioned for him to wait on the bench—the last thing I wanted was for him to be in the middle of all this. He nodded but flicked his eyes behind me in a worried fashion.
As I turned back toward the platform, I came face-to-face with the reason Kiernan looked so concerned. Prudence was directly in front of me, her eyes intense enough to burn a hole through the lenses of her wire-rimmed glasses. “I had this covered, Kate,” she said in low whisper, grabbing my upper arm and squeezing hard. “Katherine would have been perfectly okay and we would have avoided a spectacle. You’re meddling in things you don’t understand.”
I fought down the urge to laugh—she sounded like the villain in a Scooby-Doo episode. “What do you mean you had this covered?” I asked. “You’re the one I’m trying to protect her from—you and your Cyrist thug. I need to find him…”
“Don’t bother, you silly little cow,” she said. “Simon is gone.” She jerked her head toward the two large security guys who had spoken with the mayor. “I had men in place to grab the idiot. He would never have gotten near her. And if I had ever gotten two minutes alone with Katherine, she would have been back in her own time by now, with Saul none the wiser, and I might have actually had a chance to lure Simon over to my side.”
I was thoroughly confused. “You’re trying to save Katherine? But your group is the one—”
“You think this is for her sake?” Prudence asked with a harsh laugh. “Oh, no. This is personal. Did Saul really think I would give him that much power? Over me? All he has to do is yank hard on this damned medallion and I’d go out the same way she did.”
“So you’re going to help us fight them?” I asked. Having Prudence on our side would be an incredible advantage, and I could only imagine the joy on Katherine’s face and my mother’s if—
Her lip curled in a sneer, bringing my fantasy to an abrupt end. “I’m not fighting the Cyrists,” she said. “I am the Cyrists. There would be no Cyrist International without me. I was willing to share power with my father, but if he thinks he can push me aside without consequences, he is sadly mistaken. This ends here.
“And you need to listen well, my little niece,” she said, her eyes once more drilling into mine. “I’m letting you go for one reason only—your mother. Deborah had nothing to do with any of this, and it’s possible that she values your life more than my mother valued mine, so—”
“That’s not true, Prudence. Katherine tried to find you, but she can’t use the medallion any more than Saul can.”
Prudence’s expression made it clear that she wasn’t buying it even before she spoke. “You can drop the pretense, Kate. I know about the bargain she made with Saul. The funny thing is that I got the better end of the deal. Poor Deborah had to stay with her.”
Prudence shot a glance back over her shoulder. The train was pulling away from the platform and several of the passengers were craning their necks to look out the windows, just in case the excitement wasn’t really over. Katherine had gotten to her feet and Saul was leading her away from the platform, back toward the main fairground. We couldn’t have planned it better if we had tried, since the minor injury gave Katherine a plausible excuse to terminate the jump early.
Prudence let go of my arm. “Damn it,” she said. “I have to go. I haven’t had a chance to talk to her.”
“Wait,” I called, running a few steps after her. “Don’t bother. She knows—she’s going back to HQ.”
Prudence turned back toward me as I continued. “Katherine will skip the next jump,” I said. “She understands what she needs to do—and not do—over the next few weeks in order to keep the timeline intact.”