A Rip Through Time (A Rip Through Time #1)

by Kelley Armstrong

I get two blocks before I turn to Findlay. Time to get this over with. “I know I have done something to upset you,” I say. “The blow to my head means that I do not remember what it is. I must ask you to tell me so I might apologize.” “I do not wish to discuss it.”

“I believed you when you said you were interested in my work. You only wanted information you could pass on to your friends.” Goddamn it, Catriona. Just when I think you couldn’t stoop any lower, you need to prove me wrong, contrary wench that you are. So that’s why she flirted with Findlay. Not for his trinkets. Not for the hope of a wedding band. For information she could sell.

When I heard you had been hurt, I silently vowed that I would bring your attacker to justice myself. I started asking questions, poking about the Grassmarket, and what do I hear? How you were selling my information the very night you were attacked.”

When McCreadie said Archie Evans lived in a house with other young men, I pictured the modern arrangement, where a bunch of guys rent a place together. Which is silly in Victorian times. If there isn’t a woman in residence, they’ll starve to death, dying in a bed that hasn’t had its sheets changed in a year.

It’s a Victorian frat house. When I walk in, all six turn to look at me. All six mentally undress me, and the one reading the porn doesn’t even bother to hide the cover. In fact, he lifts it to make sure I see it. Yep, definitely a frat house.

“The rumor is that poor Archie was tortured. It was not a random murder. His killer wanted something from him.” I pause for effect. “Information.” There’s an audible shift in the room, and a palpable one in the air.

“That is the rumor,” I say. “Though I can’t imagine what anyone would want from poor Archie. I do know he wrote about local crime for The Edinburgh Evening Courant. I can only guess some ruffian thought he knew too much and killed him for it.” The young men exchange a look. “That must be it,” Henry says smoothly. “We always told Archie he needed to be more careful in such a dangerous line of work. He had quite the habit of talking when he ought to hold his tongue.”

What I see in that box is the Victorian equivalent. Pamphlets screaming about the “foreign menace invading proud Scottish lands.” I jerk my head up before anyone notices where my attention had gone, and I turn toward the young men. My expression is blank. That’s a skill I learned on my first case dealing with white supremacists. Don’t let them see how disgusted you are,

Thomas wheels, advancing on me so fast that I do step back this time. “You brought him here.” “Wh-what?” “We should have seen it straightaway. Just look at her yellow hair.” He grabs a lock before I can get out of reach. “She’s German. Maybe Russian.” Thomas sneers. “Russian, I wager.” “Do I sound Russian?” I see the slap coming.

With no room to escape, I block instead, my arm flying up to stop his, the pies falling to the floor as someone gasps. I think they’re gasping because this guy is attacking me. Or maybe even because I dropped the damn pies. But then I see faces turned my way, the shock on them, and I catch a glimpse of myself reflected in a glass cabinet door, and I see me. Mallory. Oh, it’s Catriona’s body, but the expression is my own, a cold rage that stuns everyone except the guy attacking me.

“What’s this all about, lass?” “I-I-I pushed him into the table, ma’am. I am so terribly sorry. I came to pay my respects for poor Archie. This young man accused me of being a foreigner and tried to slap me, and I dropped the pies, and then he tried to hit me again, so I pushed him.” “Foreigner?” she says, as if this is the most important part of my recitation. She glares at Thomas. “Are you daft? How does this poor lass look like a foreigner?”

They haven’t seemed too torn up over Evans, and her words prove they aren’t. Together with Thomas’s comments about Evans not knowing when to keep his mouth shut, I have a reasonable theory about why Evans was tortured. Someone identified him as the weak link in this group, the one most likely to talk.

Thomas’s apology is half-assed. He does pay, though, and I try to give the coins to Mrs. Trowbridge for the table. That wins me brownie points I can use later,

it seems when McCreadie called the young men radicals, it wasn’t because he misunderstood the nature of their campaign. To him, a radical is anyone trying to cause trouble, for both worthy and despicable causes. The positive ones fight for things like sanitation. The negative ones fight against things like immigration.

Findlay lowers his gaze again. “I-I could be mistaken, sir, but I thought perhaps the pigeon could signify a stool pigeon. An informer.” McCreadie smiles. “That is brilliant, my boy. Excellent insight.”

“Let us abandon the charade where we both pretend to have no idea what happened to my locket. Where we pretend you have been a saint since Detective McCreadie brought you to me. I did not expect sainthood, Catriona. I fancy myself more worldly-wise than the charitable matron who gives a ha’penny to a beggar child and is shocked to find her pockets picked.

I am tired, Catriona, and I am frustrated, and I am trying to explain something that you already ought to know, because you are not a ten-year-old child. I know you have stolen from me. I know Mrs. Wallace has caught you and not told me. Little goes on in this house of which I am not aware. My point is that I know you stole my locket, and I will no longer dance around the accusation. You have it, and I want it back.

“I…” I take a deep breath. “I do not doubt that I stole it, ma’am, and I have upturned my room searching for it. I do hope to find it. Only I cannot remember that I took it and where I put it.”

“I have long suspected you may have lied about your ability to read and write, Catriona. This is Scotland, after all. Your excuse always seemed exactly that.”

Once, when we were children, I thought to play a delightful trick on him. Each day, I’d move something in his room at night. I planned to blame ghosts. Except my brother didn’t mention the moved objects until I pulled his dresser into the middle of the room, and he banged into it in the night. While he had noticed items had moved, until they inconvenienced him, he presumed some logical cause and carried on. Hugh joked that even if Duncan had discovered it was ghosts, he would only have processed the information and carried on, so long as they did not cause him any trouble.”

Is it possible you had a change of heart? A near-death turning point? Yes, but you are presenting us with an almost unrecognizable Catriona. One who is well mannered yet not fawning. Confident yet not haughty. Intelligent. Hardworking. Respectful to Mrs. Wallace. Kind to Alice. And instead of your usual disgust at working for an undertaker, you are greatly interested in his studies, even reading a thirteenth-century translated work on it.”

“You have been here long enough to assess what type of young woman we’d most like in our home, and you have called upon your upbringing and education to become her.”

I’m taking Isla at her word on this. Like her brother, she strikes me as a fair dealer. She says she’ll drop the matter if I return her necklace, and I believe she will. That doesn’t mean she’ll accept that I’ve turned over a new leaf, but she will allow me the space I need to prove that.

There’s a garden here, one that I’d first dismissed as “just a garden” and later, realizing it didn’t have any flowers or vegetables, decided was an herbal one. Now, knowing Isla is a chemist, I pause at the garden for a closer look. That’s when I notice the skull and crossbones engraved oh-so-discreetly on the locked gate. Okay, well, that just got a whole lot more interesting.

I find one of those pamphlets tucked into the pocket of Catriona’s coat. It’s an old one, telling the story of a horrific murder from four years ago, when a serving girl was attacked in her workplace, her throat slit and her body trampled by her killer.

“I need to know where I pawn my wares. I sold something I ought not to have taken, and my mistress demands its return.” She lets out a cackle. “The kitty got caught stealing the cream, did she?” She holds up the gold coin, flipping it between her fingers. “Perhaps I did sell myself too cheap.” I should have known better than to admit vulnerability. No honor among thieves. How often had I relied on that to turn one suspect against another?

Stereotyping again. I saw this shop, which would fit in any period drama, a pawnbroker down a dark alley. I expect to walk in and find a dusty and grimy wonderland, shelves and cabinets overflowing with an antique dealer’s dream. The owner will be a wizened old man with a monocle for peering down at Great-Aunt Gertrude’s ruby ring, which I must sell to buy food for my sick baby. Nope. The guy’s maybe thirty-five. Portly and red-cheeked with sideburns that put McCreadie’s to shame.

“Now what did you sell me that you need back?” he asks. “A locket. It’s rather unique.” “Ah, the one with the rod of Asclepius. You’re lucky, Catherine. I had a student from the medical school in here eyeing it. Said he’d return when he had the money. Offered me a pound for it.”

“Unless you are still willing to sell it to me for less than he offered. It is a firm sale, payable this very night, not reliant upon a poor student’s return, a student who, might I guess, was here because he lacked money?” Dover smiles and dips his chin. “You have a point, Miss Catherine. A very fine point. So rare to see a pretty girl with such a sharp mind.”

Another whimper, one that sounds like a child, and when I hear it, dread creeps down my spine. I have been here before.

Even as I hesitate, the snuffling continues, punctuated by whimpers and soft cries. It could be an actual child in danger. It could be a rip into another time, maybe even my own. It could also be a trap. Hell, in Victorian Scotland, it could be an actual child faking danger to trap me.

That’s not what stops me. It’s the paper pinned to the fabric, the word on it, in block letters. CATRIONA

Unreal. Impossible. Therefore, not happening. Cannot be happening, and so it is a dream, and if it is, then it is the door back. Let that rope fall over my neck. Let that rope tighten around my throat. Let it steal my breath. Let me sink into unconsciousness, and I will rise in twenty-first-century Edinburgh, alive and well.

My heart bleeds for that little girl, the most scared and powerless part of me. But she is the voice of fear and cowardice and desperation, and to listen is to surrender. To say I would risk death rather than live this life.

something falls from his coat and flutters to the cobblestones. A bright blue feather with a distinctive eye pattern. A peacock feather. “You are shitting me,” I whisper. I look at him. “Seriously? You’re the bastard who killed Archie Evans?” My gaze flits over his outfit. All black, including a mask and what I now realize is a cape. “Raven, my ass. You’re just a damn turkey vulture.”

I’m his next victim, not because I’m a threat, but because I’m a message to the men stalking him.

Yet as soon as I spoke, with my modern words, my modern attitude, combined with my modern fighting, he came to the same realization I just have. I’m not Catriona. I’m the woman who’d followed that voice into an alley. We’re both here. We both jumped through time.

“Wh-what’s happening?” I manage, my head throbbing. “Where is he? He’s the killer. The raven killer.” “Raven killer?” Peals of laughter. “There’s a feather,” I say. “A peacock feather. There on the ground. Look.” The constable does look. So do I. There’s no feather.

I have no idea what to expect from cops in this era. Hell, while I’d never admit it aloud, half the time I don’t know what to expect from cops in my own era.

Gray’s mother … who was not Isla’s mother. I remember the inscription in that book, and I kinda love Mrs. Gray for that. Her husband brought home his child by another woman, and she raised him as her own, recognizing that the baby had nothing to do with the situation. A good woman indeed.

While I’m sure Gray endures prejudice on account of his skin, it’s even more significant for the fact it signals his illegitimate status.

The constables are leading me through when one of the exiting men stops short. “You again?” he says. “I thought you were dead.” I glance around, but he’s looking straight at me. “You’re Gray’s maid, aren’t you?” he says. “The one that got herself strangled a week back. Last I heard you’d been given up for dead.”

My younger escort rolls his eyes. “Oh, don’t tell me she’s tried this before. Said she was attacked by a man in an alley?” The other constable rocks back on his heels. “She was attacked all right. I’m the one who found her. You can still see a bit of bruising around her neck and on her temple.” “Thank you for finding me,” I say. “However, as I said, I have been attacked again.” He shakes his head. “Cannot stay out of trouble, can you?”

When something bites my leg, I look down to see a flea. I leap up, smacking at it, to the delight of the drunk woman. Within an hour, I stop panicking at every flea bite. Within two, I am huddled in the corner, knees drawn up, shivering with cold and disgust and fear that threatens to crystallize into full-blown terror.

I can’t. I try, and I cannot form a single coherent thought, all my awareness consumed by the horror of my surroundings. I am in jail. I am alone. I don’t even have the damned locket, the very thing I took all these risks for. The officers confiscated the locket along with my knife and leftover coins, and I doubt I will see any of them again. All this, and I still lost my chance to make things right with Isla.

The man who strides into the prison today is different. He is spotless in his attire, as impeccably dressed as McCreadie. Wavy dark hair tamed and styled. Clean-shaven and cold-eyed. The last is the worst. Even when he’s only half present, there’s a glitter in Gray’s dark eyes, a sign that his brain is spinning in twenty directions. Now his gaze is shuttered,

I glance down the hall to see two more officers, both in plain clothes, standing outside their offices, watching. Another clomps down the stairs and hovers there. They’ve come to see the spectacle. Only the spectacle isn’t me. It’s the doctor who cuts up corpses and calls it science, but we all know what it really is, don’t we? Sick bastard.

“Are you sure you want to go with him?” he asks. “You don’t need to. You might find this cell more to your liking.” His gaze cuts in Gray’s direction. “I would like to leave with Dr. Gray, please,” I say. “Well, then, come on out. I hear some girls fancy that sort of thing. Got a bit of the ghoul about you, too, I’ll wager?” His gaze goes to the blood on my dress. “Take care the doctor does not run out of corpses to practice on. You’d make a pretty little cadaver for carving.”

When the constable is gone, I say, “I did ask for Detective McCreadie, sir. I hoped he could resolve this.” “He did.” Gray’s words are brittle and sharp, his gaze on the door. “He convinced them that, as you had been attacked before, carrying a knife in the area was a reasonable precaution. The fact that the man fled made it a very difficult case, and the procurator fiscal chose not to pursue it.”

This is a man who has been humiliated because of me. Humiliated in front of the very people he’s trying to help, who demanded his presence so they could sneer at him and mock him.