Page 4 of A Spark in Time (A Knights Through Time Romance #21)

T he first thing Bebe noticed was the pain.

Not the sharp, clean pain of the rake’s punctures, but a deep, bone-level wrongness, as if every part of her had been taken apart, shaken vigorously, and reassembled by someone working from a very poor translation of the original instructions.

Her teeth ached. Her fingernails throbbed.

Even her hair hurt, which shouldn’t have been possible.

The second thing she noticed was the heat.

Not the humid, greenhouse heat of the conservatory, but something drier, harder, stronger.

It pressed against her skin like a living thing, carrying smells that had no business existing in Long Island—dust and donkey dung, olive oil and unwashed humanity, the sharp tang of bronze and the sweet rot of overripe fruit.

The third thing she noticed was that approximately three dozen people were staring at her.

She was draped across the shallows like some shipwrecked offering, the tide lapping at her silver-beaded dress until every shimmer turned to liquid light.

Sunlight fractured across the wet silk, dazzling as if she’d been spun from the sea itself.

The beads pressed into her skin like scales, marking her body with the bruised geometry of a siren cast ashore.

If I survive the next five minutes.

She pushed herself up slowly, her body protesting every movement. The crowd—and it was definitely a crowd—took a collective step back. Someone dropped what looked like a clay pot, which shattered with a sound like her mother’s disapproval.

“Τ? στο δι?ολο!” shouted a man in what appeared to be a bedsheet.

No, not a bedsheet. Some kind of draped fabric that looked like every terrible sword-and-sandal picture she’d been forced to sit through at the Rialto, except this wasn’t a picture, and that wasn’t a costume, and the sword at his hip looked very, very real.

The words... she almost understood them.

They sounded like Greek, but not quite the Attic Greek that Madame Dubois had drilled into her at Miss Porter’s.

Father’s Grand Tour stories had filled her head with temples and emperors.

This was rougher, more guttural, like hearing Shakespeare performed by dockworkers.

What in the devil, her mind translated sluggishly. He’s asking what in the devil.

“Join the club, pal,” she croaked in English, then tried her schoolgirl Greek: “Συγγν?μη... πο? ε?μαι;” Excuse me... where am I?

The crowd erupted. Women fell to their knees, babbling prayers. Men pointed and shouted. Children—barefoot, sun-brown children who looked nothing like the pale, pampered offspring of Long Island—peered at her from behind their mothers’ skirts.

She caught words—“ θε??” (god), “σημ?δι” (sign), “ουραν??” (sky) —but the accent made everything slippery, hard to grasp. Like trying to catch mercury with her bare hands.

A woman pointed at her dress, crying out: “Η Αργυρ? Σειρ?να! Η Αργυρ? Σειρ?να!”

The Silver Siren.

Bebe squinted against the brutal Mediterranean sun—because it had to be the Mediterranean, no other place on earth burned quite like this.

Her silver-beaded dress, soaked and ruined, still flung shimmers of light across the water like scales.

She pushed herself upright, blinking at the sight of her bare feet sinking into wet sand.

Her silver T-strap shoes—her favorite shoes, the ones she’d danced half the night in—were simply gone. Just… gone.

Perfect. She’d lost her shoes and possibly her mind.

Her platinum bob, plastered in damp waves, probably gleamed silver too. No wonder the crowd was gawking, whispering about sirens. She almost laughed, except her throat was too tight.

She turned slowly, searching for something, anything to anchor her spinning thoughts. The buildings were wrong—low stone walls, whitewashed and hand-cut, windows nothing but open slats with wooden shutters. No cars. No wires strung above. No trace of the modern world she knew.

And then she saw it. Rising above the city like a crown of marble and paint?—

Her breath hitched. “No,” she whispered, the word torn sharp from her throat, disbelief edged with dread.

The Parthenon.

But not the Parthenon she remembered from photographs or guidebooks, not the graceful ruins tourists elbowed each other to capture on film.

She’d stood there once before, on the Acropolis with her father, roped in with the rest of the well-heeled travelers.

She remembered the dust of Cairo, the ruins of Rome, the postcards of Athens that littered her mother’s writing desk.

This was nothing like that.

This Parthenon blazed with color, its columns striped in reds and blues so vivid they made her eyes water, its pediments crammed with statues so lifelike they seemed poised to descend into the crowd. The whole of it pulsed with presence, not memory.

Her stomach flipped. This wasn’t ruin. This wasn’t history. This was alive.

Athens. Ancient Athens.

And if that was true, then none of this could possibly be real. The storm musts have brought the conservatory down on her head.

“Κ?ντε χ?ρο! Κ?ντε χ?ρο!”

Make way, her brain translated automatically, the lessons flooding back. The crowd parted like the Red Sea, if Moses had been a warrior who looked like he’d stepped off a Grecian urn—the kind her mother kept in the parlor and never let anyone touch.

He was... well, “handsome” was inadequate.

He was what handsome wanted to be when it grew up.

Bronze armor that fit like it had been poured over his body, a red cloak that managed to look dramatic rather than ridiculous, and a face that would have made Valentino weep with envy.

Dark hair, dark eyes, skin the color of honey, and a scar along his jaw that somehow made him more attractive rather than less.

Of course, Bebe thought hysterically. I travel through time and immediately meet the ancient Greek equivalent of Clark Gable.

He stopped three feet from her, those dark eyes taking in every detail—her impossibly short flapper dress, her short hair, her pale skin, the blood still drying on her palm.

When he spoke, his Greek was cultured, educated, the Attic dialect she’d actually studied, though his pronunciation was nothing like what she’d learned.

“Τ?? ε ? ; Π?θεν ? λθε?;” Who are you? Where did you come from?

She understood him. The relief was so intense her knees almost buckled.

“Εγ?... εγ? ε?μαι...” I... I am... She faltered, trying to remember the right words, the right grammar. “Χαμ?νη. Ε?μαι χαμ?νη.” Lost. I am lost.

His eyes widened slightly. “You speak Greek, but...” He switched to heavily accented Latin. “Latina? Romana?”

“No, I mean, yes, sed non sum Romana .” Her Latin was even worse than her Greek. “American. I’m American.” Though that would mean less than nothing to him. America wouldn’t exist for another two thousand years.

Two thousand years.

The impossibility of it hit her like a physical blow as she swayed, the water rushing over her feet. She was twenty-four hundred years in the past. Everyone she knew hadn’t yet been born. Her world, her life, her entire existence—none of it had happened yet.

The ring pulsed cold on her finger, hidden now under the dirt and blood, as if saying: You wanted escape. You chose this.

Not sure why she did it, Bebe discreetly slipped the ring off, of course, it slid right off, and put it in the hidden pocket of her dress. It was very valuable and she would need it.

The warrior—because what else could he be—circled her slowly, the crowd watching in breathless silence. He reached out as if to touch her dress, then pulled back, saying something to the crowd about “θα?μα”—miracle—and “θε ? ν”—of the gods.

“Πο? ε?μαι;” she asked desperately. Where am I?

He stopped in front of her and pointed to himself. “Λυσ?α?.” Then he gestured broadly to the city around them. “ ? θ ? ναι.”

Lysias. Athens.

The words hit like physical blows. This was real. Somehow, she was really here, in ancient Athens, twenty-four hundred years before she’d been born, in a world where women had no rights, where slavery was normal, where she had no money, no connections, no identity.

What have I done?

“Ο ? δυνατ?ν,” she whispered. Not possible.

Lysias caught her arm as her knees gave out—not roughly, but firmly, with the casual strength of someone who’d spent his life training for war.

He smelled of leather, bronze polish, and olive oil, nothing like the pomaded dandies of her time.

His hands were calloused from sword work, marked with small scars that told stories of violence.

“Μ ? φοβο ? ,” he said, and she understood. Don’t be afraid.

But she was afraid. Terrified. She’d wished for escape, but not this. Never this.

“Ο ? καδε... βο?λομαι ο ? καδε.” Home... I want to go home.

His brow furrowed at her pronunciation—too formal, too perfect, like someone reciting poetry instead of speaking. “Π?θεν ε ? ο ? κο? σ??;” Where is your home?

How could she answer that? New York, 1926? The Jazz Age? The world of automobiles and airplanes and women’s suffrage?

The crowd was pressing closer now, reaching out to touch her dress, her hair. Someone grabbed a handful of beads, and she felt the dress tear slightly. Panic rose in her throat.

Lysias barked something sharp, and the crowd backed away immediately. He was clearly someone important, someone with authority. He spoke to them at length, and she caught enough to understand he was claiming her— “ ? π ? τ ? ν ? μ ? ν ? σπ?δα”—under his shield. Under his protection.

Or ownership. In ancient Greece, is there a difference?

He turned back to her, and there was calculation in those dark eyes. Not cruelty, but assessment. She was a puzzle, an asset, a problem to be solved.

“Come,” he said in badly accented but recognizable Latin. “You... safe... with me.”

Safe. The word was almost laughable. She was who knew how many years from home, likely over a thousand or more, wearing a ruined dress, with no money, no identity, and no idea how to get back to her own time.

The ring that brought her here was silent now, just cold metal and stone, offering no hints about how to go back.

But what choice did she have? Stand here until the crowd decided she was a goddess to worship or a demon to stone?

She took his offered arm, feeling the solid warmth of him through the linen tunic under his armor. As they walked through the streets—and they were definitely streets, not the paved boulevards she knew but packed dirt that would turn to mud in rain—she tried to process what she was seeing.

The Agora—the marketplace—sprawling and chaotic, nothing like the orderly shops of Fifth Avenue.

Vendors hawking everything from fish that had seen better days to pottery that would probably end up in a museum.

Women with their hair bound up, wearing chitons that left their arms bare—scandalous by 1926 standards.

Men arguing philosophy in the shade, their voices carrying that particular Greek passion for debate.

And slaves. She recognized them by their short hair, their simpler clothes, the way they kept their eyes down. Human beings owned by other human beings, and no one seemed to think it was wrong.

This is going to be so much worse than I imagined.

As they climbed toward what had to be the wealthy section—the houses were bigger, the streets cleaner—Bebe caught her reflection in a polished bronze shield propped against a wall.

She looked like she’d been through a war. Her dress was torn, wet and molded to her body, her bob was a disaster, but her eyes...

Her eyes were bright with something that wasn’t just fear.

It was exhilaration.

She’d done it. She’d escaped. Not the way she’d planned, not to Paris, Egypt, or Rome or any of the other places on her list. But she’d gotten out. Away from Alistair, away from her mother’s bitter wisdom, away from a future that had been planned before she was born.

The cost might be everything. She might die here. She probably would die here.

But she would die free.

The ring pulsed once in her pocket, as if in agreement, and then fell silent.

You wanted an adventure, she thought as Lysias led her toward an uncertain future. Careful what you wish for.

Behind them, the crowd still buzzed with excitement. The Silver Siren had come to Athens. Surely it was a sign from the gods.