Timebound(123)

He stared into my eyes for several moments before he spoke. “It took me a long time to put the pieces together, Kate. You were always there, at the back of my mind year after year, but I never knew for certain whether you made it out of the hotel. I went back that night, after taking Katherine to the Wooded Island, and the place was in full blaze—the firefighters said there couldn’t be anyone alive inside. There wasn’t anything I could do but go home.

“I did as you told me. I never removed the medallion. I even kept my hand on it when I bathed. We moved back to the Cyrist farm—there really weren’t many options once my mother took ill. I let them teach me to use to the CHRONOS key. I’m not as good with it as many of the others, but that never mattered much to Prudence,” he added with a bitter laugh, “and she generally determined who would be given privileges.”

“She didn’t—” I broke off, hesitant to say what I was thinking. “You were so young.”

“Oh, no. Nothing like that. She wasn’t that much older than me most of the times she came to the farm. About your age, maybe, the first time I saw her as a young woman. I was only sixteen—it’s very hard to say no to a willing girl at sixteen, Kate.”

“Didn’t you know that she was—well, that you knew her when she was older? And when you were younger…” I shook my head and then winced as the bandages shifted against the burn. “I mean, you seemed convinced that she had something to do with your dad.”

“Yeah… but that was Pru when she was older, y’know? I don’t know what she did later—I still don’t have any proof one way or the other—but none of that had happened for her when she was eighteen.”

“Christ, that makes my head hurt,” I said. “It doesn’t make you crazy? Thinking of an older Prudence knowing you when you were younger and then the two of you, together as teenagers?”

“I keep forgetting that you’re—how do you say it—a ‘newbie’?” Kiernan said with a teasing grin. “You’ll get used to the twists and turns soon enough. At eighteen, Pru was just a confused kid, not entirely sure of what Saul wanted her to do or of her place in all of this. She wasn’t a bad person, then, from what I could tell. After a while, I decided it wasn’t fair to judge her on the basis of something she wasn’t—or at least wasn’t yet. Does that make sense?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, I understand, but I can’t say it makes any sense at all. None of this does.”

“I’m not proud of that relationship,” he said. “I’m not sure I would say that I used Pru—at least not any more than she used me—but my feelings were complicated by my past. I mean, if I never looked at her eyes when we… well, she reminded me of you. I was just a kid when we were here together, but I never forgot you, Kate.” He paused for a moment, tracing my lower lip ever so softly with his finger, and a shiver ran all the way through my body. No, Kate, I thought, no, no, no. You’re exhausted and grateful and… yes, damn it, incredibly attracted to him. But no.

“Then, a year later when I was seventeen, you were there, Kate—not you, not this you, but a different Kate. My Kate. A little older than you are now—so beautiful, so intent on convincing me to fight the Cyrists. We were so much in love, Kate, but you had no memory of an eight-year-old boy, no memory of the Expo. I could never understand that.

“And now, even though I understand why, it’s hard to imagine a Kate who doesn’t remember that year we spent together. I think you were in Boston 1905 more than you were in your own time and place. It’s a miracle you didn’t collapse from exhaustion—you’d tell Katherine you were going downstairs for coffee and then jump back to spend all day with me, popping back in ten seconds after you left. They were always so much easier on you, the jumps. They… drain me, and we had to be careful to hide things from Prudence.”

“You were still… with Prudence?” I asked, wincing a bit as I pushed myself up to sitting. I tried to keep the totally irrational note of jealousy out of my voice, but the pleased little smile on Kiernan’s face told me that I had failed.

“No, Katie. Never again, not that way. Not after I found you.” He sat in front of me and took my hands in his.

“Pru was madder’n hell when she found out, and that’s when she swiped Dad’s key. Well, not her directly, it took three of her Cyrist goons to get it off me, but they had no idea about the spare you gave me. Pru gave the key back a few months later after they’d made the changes, and I played along—she’s never realized that I know the whole truth.