Page 61 of Once a Villain (Only a Monster #3)

Mum parked the car on a balding patch of dirt at the edge of a field in Kensington around eleven p.m.

Joan stepped out. It was a cold, black night. Even with the headlights on, she could barely make out the field’s sea of overgrown

grass and the pale glint of wildflowers. The other side of the road was a line of cypress trees, with another road beyond

it.

Joan felt disoriented. She knew Kensington well. She’d volunteered at a museum here over the summer holidays; it was where

she’d met Nick and Aaron. But this empty stretch of land was unknown to her.

She shuffled back as Aaron drew up in a borrowed car. With seven of them—plus Frankie and Sylvie—they’d had to take two vehicles.

Aaron parked beside Mum and climbed out with Jamie and Tom. “Where on earth are we?” he said.

Ruth peered over the low wooden fence separating the road from the field. “Why is the Court manifesting here ? I thought it always manifested in old buildings.”

“There was a castle here once,” Mum said. “It burned down in the 1800s, and this has been a field ever since.”

“A castle?” Aaron said, puzzled. “Here?”

But Joan saw it then—lines of raised grass in the field, the remnants of a once-formidable foundation. They stretched on and on; this estate must have been huge in its heyday.

“You know...” Mum pulled out a pocket watch. “I thought there’d be guests here waiting by now....”

It was cold enough that their breaths came out in white puffs. They were all wearing long black coats to stay hidden in the

darkness, and Joan pulled her lapels tighter, trying to ignore her unease. “I guess we’re early.”

But an hour later, and several degrees colder, they all knew they’d gotten this wrong. Midnight had struck, and the gate to

the Court hadn’t opened. They were still alone here.

“Damn it,” Mum breathed. “Eleanor’s not opening the gates this year. The assassination attempt must have rattled her.”

“It’s okay,” Aaron said. “There are more opportunities, aren’t there? You said the gates always open onto the same party.

So we just need to go to a time when they are open.”

“They opened fifty years ago,” Mum said, “but...” She shook her head. “That jubilee isn’t accessible via time travel. It’s

blocked off—you’d have to reach it the slow way, by living. The only way to travel directly to the gate is by invitation to

the jubilee party. The invitation allows you to bypass the block, and travel to the time when it opens.”

Joan looked up at the clouded sky. The tears were still up there, she knew. She pictured them growing and growing until they

breached the containment of their seals and consumed the whole timeline.

Would Nick’s and Aaron’s counterparts have fixed all this if they’d been here? Had they really intended to reach Eleanor at the arena? What if they’d actually planned to come to this party instead?

How would they have gotten through the gate?

The words in the ring came to Joan again. You have what you need.

In all the chaos and relief of Nick’s return from death, Joan had forgotten they’d originally gone to the Argent house for

the ring.

She retrieved it from her pocket now, remembering how she’d found it, wrapped up with Nick’s faked execution notice, in Aaron’s

bedchambers. It was a plain thing—chunky and black, with a square signet, the hidden compartment completely invisible.

“You know,” she said to Nick, “you used to be able to time travel—when you were a monster slayer. I never learned how.”

Nick looked both curious and puzzled by the non sequitur. To be honest, Joan was too. She wasn’t quite sure why she’d said

that.

She remembered him appearing unexpectedly in a café in 1993. Only monsters can travel , Joan had said to him. And Nick had said, Only monsters and me. And I travel in a different way. I don’t steal time.

“Humans can’t travel unless they’re cuffed by a guard of the Court and dragged,” Ruth said.

“The strongest of the Hathaways can transport humans,” Tom said. “Like pets.”

“What?” Nick said to Tom, disconcerted.

Tom waved a hand. Don’t worry about it. “I don’t have that power myself, but I’ve seen it. So maybe that’s how you did it,” he said to Nick. “Maybe you had a Hathaway friend.”

“I don’t think he had any monster friends,” Joan said. Except for Astrid Liu. Joan bit her lip. She wished Astrid were here.

Astrid would have known how Nick had traveled. She might even have known how to get to the gate. But the Lius were missing

from this timeline. Only Jamie was left of them here.

Joan had imagined Nick using a scientific gadget, but now, looking at this ring, she wondered... She rubbed her thumb over

the scratches at the edge of the signet. They seemed deliberate—an etched number: 317. And that was why she’d asked about time travel, she realized. This ring looked like a travel token.

“When you were a monster slayer,” she said to Nick, “you wore a ring just like this—on a chain around your neck.”

“Did I?” Nick said with a frown. “I’ve only ever known it to belong to my sister.”

Joan swallowed. In that timeline, his sister had been murdered by Eleanor, along with the rest of his family. Nick had been

forced to watch.

“There are two versions of this ring in this timeline,” she said slowly. “When we visited your family, your sister was wearing it. But we had an identical ring in our possession—this one we’d found in Aaron’s bedchambers. There were two versions of the same ring in the same room that day.”

“What are you getting at?” Mum asked gently.

“I don’t know,” Joan said. “But Nick’s and Aaron’s counterparts had a plan to get to Eleanor. And Nick’s message to Aaron was, You have what you need . And... the timeline reacted when I touched the ring—the first time, and then again when I took it from Nick’s neck at

the Argent house.” The timeline had jolted as if it had been surprised by this ring somehow. As if it wasn’t supposed to be

here.

Joan had felt that same jolt when she’d touched the book used in the cipher— The Riverside Chaucer .

And how could that book even exist in this timeline? she wondered suddenly. Hadn’t Aaron been reading that exact edition in

the previous timeline too? She’d seen it in his bedroom.... It didn’t make any sense for the same exact book to exist here, the same publisher in this diverged world, printing that same book, with the same cover....

The hairs rose on the back of her neck as a thought occurred to her. “This is going to sound mad, but... Could this ring

be Nick’s ring—from the timeline when he was a monster slayer?”

“No,” Jamie said. “Objects can’t traverse timelines.”

“I don’t know if that’s true,” Mum said to Jamie, and Jamie blinked at her, surprised. “The Graves have stories of objects

passing through windows in the timeline. Not people,” she said, anticipating Jamie’s next question. “Just objects.” She started

to frown then, as if something disturbing had occurred to her. “May I see that?” she asked Joan.

Joan passed the ring to her, disquieted by her tone.

Mum squinted at it in the darkness. She spotted the secret compartment almost immediately and slid it open, finding the tiny

scrap of bloodied cloth. She gasped, and—even in the insipid light—it was clear that she’d gone pale.

“What’s wrong?” Joan said.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Mum said, but she looked at Nick with a kind of horrified sympathy that made Joan’s stomach drop. Why was

she looking at him like that?

“What is it?” Aaron said.

Mum returned the ring now not to Joan but to Nick, handling it so carefully that Joan’s disquiet increased. “It’s a travel

token,” Mum said.

So Joan’s instinct had been right. Or had it? Because Mum was still staring at Nick as if she’d realized something terrible.

“A travel token that humans can use,” Mum clarified.

“But... humans can’t travel of their own volition,” Tom said.

“That’s not quite true,” Mum said. “In our very oldest myths—our most secret myths—there’s a way.”

Jamie made a soft sound; he’d realized what Mum was talking about. He’d gone pale too—so much so that Tom put an arm around

him.

At everyone’s unspoken questions, Mum said to Nick, “When you were a monster slayer, Eleanor had an underling murder your

family.” She hesitated. “You have a large family, I believe....”

Nick swallowed visibly. He was disturbed by how Mum was looking at him; Joan was too. “Seven of us,” he said.

He didn’t remember those murders, but some part of him still carried them inside, Joan knew.

Mum said gently, “The monster who killed them stole all the remaining years of their lives from them. And when he did, he carried that life in his blood.” She hesitated again, as if she didn’t want to say the next part.

“In the myths, if a close human relative kills a monster before that monster travels again, the human can create a special kind of travel token using the monster’s blood.

With that token, they can travel on their family’s lost time. They can travel until they use it up.”

Horrified, Joan pictured the blood-soaked scrap of cloth in the ring. It was blood from the monster who’d killed Nick’s family?

Nick looked like he wanted to be sick. “That ring has my family’s life in it?”

“I believe so,” Mum said, still gently.

Joan thought of the original Nick she’d known. I travel in a different way , he’d said. Joan had had no idea he was traveling on his own family’s time. That his ability to travel would have been limited

by his family’s lifespans.

He’d come back to see her at the end, she remembered. He’d used decades from that ring to come and see her. “ Nick ... ,” she breathed, and his expression, when he looked at her, was so raw that she wished he wasn’t having to process all

this out in the open, in front of everyone.

“But why would our counterparts have wanted it?” Nick said. “If it’s just a travel token?”

“Human-made travel tokens aren’t like monster ones,” Mum said. “They’re more responsive to the user—as if the blood knows