Page 18 of A Spark in Time (A Knights Through Time Romance #21)

T he first Spartan ram hit the Nereid like a fist from Poseidon himself.

Things that definitely meant I should have stayed below: the ship tilting at a forty-five degree angle, men screaming, and the delightful smell of burning tar. Things that got me on deck anyway: someone crying for his mother in broken Greek—and the memory of Kassander’s promise that he’d never die.

Bebe burst through the hatch into pure chaos. The world had gone red—Spartan cloaks, blood, fire crawling up the rigging like orange serpents. The deck tilted crazily as the Nereid struggled to break free from the bronze ram buried in her side.

“Push them back! PUSH THEM BACK!”

Kassander’s voice cut through the mayhem, and she saw him—a golden god dealing death with terrible precision. He moved through the Spartans like a scythe through wheat, his blade singing that particular note that meant someone’s son wasn’t coming home.

Achilles, her mind supplied helpfully. He fights like Achilles before the walls of Troy.

Except Achilles died. They all died, these bronze age heroes. Every last one.

A boy—gods, he couldn’t be more than sixteen—crawled past her, clutching his stomach where red bloomed like poppies through his fingers.

“Mother,” he gasped in Thessalian. “Mē?tēr… eípe tēi mētrí mou…” — Mother… tell my mother… She dropped beside him, her dagger forgotten, pressing her hands over his, trying to hold his life in. “She knows. She knows.”

But his eyes were already going glassy, fixed on some distant shore she couldn’t see.

Damn it. Damn it all to whatever hell these people believe in.

Fire arrows shrieked overhead, trailing smoke like party streamers from the devil’s birthday. One caught in the sail, and suddenly the air tasted of burning canvas and imminent doom.

“The wounded!” someone shouted. “Get the wounded clear!”

Bebe looked around. Bodies everywhere, some moving, some not, some caught in that terrible in-between. Her dress was already ruined—what was a little more blood?

She quickly removed a tunic from one of the fallen men, tearing strips with practiced efficiency—and went to work. A Thessalian with his arm hanging at an impossible angle. A boy with an arrow through his thigh, screaming as she snapped the shaft.

“Hold still,” she ordered, pressing cloth to wounds, tying tourniquets with hands that had once only worried about how rings looked against her skin.

The battle raged around her—bronze on bronze, the sick-wet sound of blade meeting flesh, men grunting and cursing and dying. She ignored it all, focused on the one thing she could control, keeping pressure on wounds, keeping men from bleeding out, keeping death at bay for just a few more minutes.

She didn’t see the Spartan until his shadow fell over her.

Red cloak, bronze armor, dead eyes above a beard. He raised his sword, probably saying something heroic in Spartan, but she was too busy scrambling backward to appreciate his rhetoric.

The dagger—Kassander’s dagger—was in her hand before she remembered grabbing it. But what good was six inches of iron against three feet of bronze?

This is it. This is how Bebe Merriweather dies. In the past, wearing a ruined dress, about to be shish-kebabbed by someone who probably thinks democracy is a communicable disease.

Then Kassander was there.

He came from the side like a hurricane in human form, his sword taking the Spartan high across the chest. The man fell, gurgling something that didn’t need translation.

But Kassander didn’t stop. He flowed into the next movement, catching another Spartan’s thrust on his blade, twisting, driving his knee into the man’s groin before opening his throat in one efficient motion.

He was magnificent. He was terrible. He was everything the ancient world worshipped and feared.

And he was looking at her.

Time slowed, the way it does in car crashes and first kisses. Across the burning deck, through smoke and chaos, their eyes met. She knelt in blood, someone’s life under her hands. He stood in destruction, death made flesh.

Something shifted in his expression—surprise, maybe, or recognition. Like he was seeing her for the first time. Not the oracle, not the kidnapped girl, not the flapper from nowhere. Just her, Bebe, stubborn and terrified and trying desperately to matter.

“DOWN!”

She dropped without thinking. The arrow passed through where her head had been, so close she felt the feathers kiss her cheek.

Kassander’s blade was already moving, deflecting a second arrow with a ring of metal on metal. A third caught his shoulder, punching through leather, but he didn’t even stumble. Just yanked it out and kept fighting, using the bloody shaft to stab a Spartan in the eye before retrieving his sword.

He’s going to die protecting me, she realized with horrible clarity. This beautiful, terrible man who just offered me everything—home, love, a future—is going to die because I couldn’t stay below deck.

“Párte tin! — Get her out of here!” he roared at someone, anyone.

But there was nowhere to go. Fire had caught the main sail now, raining burning canvas like confetti at the world’s worst party. Spartans poured over the rail in waves. The Nereid was dying, and they were all going down with her.

Then—miraculously, impossibly—Thessalian war cries from the east.

“The Revenge !” someone shouted. “Captain Dmitri comes!”

A second ship, black-sailed and bristling with arrows, crashed into the Spartan vessel’s exposed flank. Thessalians poured across, and suddenly it was the Spartans who were outnumbered.

The tide turned faster than a Charleston beat change.

Kassander never stopped moving, but his eyes kept finding her—when he gutted a Spartan captain, when he kicked another into the burning rigging, when he stood on the rail itself and challenged their general to single combat.

She kept working too—bandaging, pressing, holding—but her eyes tracked him just as religiously. The way he favored his left leg. The blood—his or others—that painted him like war itself. The way he fought not for glory or country but for the sheer, savage joy of being alive.

The general accepted his challenge. Of course, he did. Spartans and their honor.

It lasted thirty seconds.

Kassander didn’t fight fair. He fought to win. Sand in the eyes, a knee to the kidney, using the man’s own cloak to tangle his sword. When the general fell, Kassander didn’t make a speech or claim victory.

He just turned, found her again across the deck, and smiled.

Not his sharp smile. Not his dangerous smile. Something softer, more surprised, like he’d discovered something unexpected in the middle of all this death.

The remaining Spartans surrendered or died. She wasn’t sure which. She was too busy trying to save a boy who looked like her cousin back home, pressing cloth to a wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding, whispering lies about how he’d be fine.

When the fighting finally stopped, when the fire was controlled and the Spartans were dead or captured, she found herself sitting on the deck, covered in other people’s blood, shaking like she’d never stop.

Kassander dropped beside her, equally bloody, favoring that left leg.

“You were supposed to hide,” he said.

“You were supposed to not die heroically.”

“I didn’t. I died practically. Much more profitable.”

She laughed, or maybe sobbed. Hard to tell the difference anymore.

“You saved them,” he said, nodding to the wounded men she’d bandaged. “Four, maybe five who would have bled out.”

“And lost three others.”

“That’s war.”

“War is stupid.”

“Yes.” He reached over, brushed something from her cheek. Ash, probably. Or blood. Or tears. “But you’re not.”

“I’m not a warrior.”

“No,” he agreed. “You’re something more dangerous.”

“What’s that?”

He was quiet for a moment, studying her with those Agean eyes that had seen too much.

“Someone worth fighting for,” he said finally, and there was wonder in his voice, like he was still surprised by the truth of it. Like the girl who’d fallen through time had become the center of his world without either of them noticing.

Before she could respond, before she could process the weight of those words, Alexios appeared.

“Captain, we need to move. More red sails on the horizon.”

Kassander stood, all business again. “Get us moving. Transfer the worst wounded to the Revenge . Strip the Spartan ships of anything useful and burn them.”

He offered her his hand. She took it, let him pull her to her feet.

“You should go to the Revenge ,” he said. “Dmitri’s ship is faster, safer.”

“No.”

“Bebe—”

“No.” She met his eyes, steady despite the trembling. “I didn’t agree to come home with you just to abandon you at the first sign of trouble.”

Something flickered across his face—surprise, pleasure, worry.

“That’s a dangerous choice, silver girl.”

She looked around at the burning deck, the bodies, the blood. Then back at him—scarred and bloody and absolutely alive.

“They’re all dangerous choices,” she said. “Might as well make them interesting ones.”

“Tha eisai pántote hē epilogí mou, argyrí kóri. — You will always be my choice, silver girl.”

His laugh was wild as the wind that caught their surviving sail.

“You’re going to be the death of me.”

Probably, she thought. But what a way to go.

The Nereid limped away from the burning Spartan ships, wounded but not broken. Behind them, smoke rose to heaven, carrying prayers and curses in equal measure.

And Bebe stood at the rail, watching Kassander command his men, knowing she was falling, had fallen, would keep falling until she hit whatever bottom waited for girls who loved boys who fought like gods.

At least, she thought, it’s my choice.

The ring at her waist pulsed warm, like approval.

Or warning.

With her luck, definitely both.