Page 7 of Out of Time (The Ice King Chronicles #3)

Ethan

Damn it, I was kissing him again. What the fuck was wrong with me? When I’d grabbed him I had every intention of choking him out or maybe tossing him across the room. But the moment I touched him, it turned into something else entirely. Suddenly I wanted him so badly I couldn’t think straight.

I wanted him in every way I could have him for the rest of my days. I wanted him to cry out my name as he gasped and moaned and begged and lifted those legs up for me and cried out for me to make love to him. I wanted to suspend time so I could take him straight upstairs to my bed and keep him there naked in my arms for days, for weeks, for months—forever.

When our lips touched, it was like an electric shock ran right through me. God, this had to be a spell, because nothing else explained it or even came close. I pulled my head back a moment to look down at him, and he opened those gorgeous eyes and gazed up at me like he was in a daze.

“Why are you so fucking beautiful?” I asked softly, hoping he wouldn’t hear it. He was conceited enough as it was. “I hated it when that guy was flirting with you.”

And that’s when he angled his chin up, closed his eyes and puckered his sweet lips, asking me to kiss him again.

I did. A slow, dangerously captivating kiss that succeeded in invading every corner of my body, staking claim to everything he had to offer, including the parts of him I’d tried to pretend I didn’t want. I felt my body trying to melt into his, heat and pressure built up to an almost unbearable level until something had to give. And all at once, it did. All the lights on the ceiling suddenly exploded and rained down sparks and little shards of glass on my head and my back.

I instinctively pulled Glori close under me and hunched over him to protect him, and I heard the customers screaming in panic and Dee frantically calling my name. But I couldn’t stop holding him. I couldn’t stop wanting to be inside him. Heat was curling in my belly and wrapping around my spine, and it wasn’t until the sprinklers went on, and the cold water hit and soaked us both that the spell finally broke.

Because it had to be a spell. Nothing else made sense. I reeled away from him and shook my head to try and clear it. Then I came fully back to myself and saw all the confusion and panic around me and the water still pelting down everywhere and ruining my stock. Destroying my store.

“ Prohibere! Nunc!” I shouted, and the water instantly stopped. Time stopped too and everyone around me froze. “ Redde quae sunt in via. Oblivisci haec omnia et non esse,” I cried, waving my arms all around. The water dried up so fast it was like it had never been there at all, and all the damage it had done, even in that short time, was instantly gone along with it.

I stood there shaking all over. With a loud pop, time resumed, the spell shattered, and Dee laughed like nothing at all had happened and turned her attention back to the customer in front of her.

“Now what was I saying? Oh yes, I was about to grab a shirt for you. Hold on just a minute and I’ll get your size.”

The woman and her children were blinking, the kids rubbing their eyes too, but the lady only nodded and said, “Yes, thank you. I think …” Her two little boys had already gone back to struggling with each other over a toy, and the mother finally bent over to look inside the display case at the shirts.

I hadn’t used that much magic for a while, and I felt a little weak. Part of it had to be from shock too. I gazed back down at Glori, and I jumped when I realized I was still holding him in my arms. He realized it at the same time I did, and we both reeled back away from each other with a guilty start.

“What the fuck was that?” I asked him in a fierce whisper.

“How should I know? I didn’t do it.”

Giving him a suspicious look, I grabbed him by the arm and began hauling him back to my office. I had things to say to him that shouldn’t be overheard, and I couldn’t keep using magic on my employees and customers to solve my problems with him and cover up his mistakes and mine. I’d already used more magic in this realm than I had in years. But I was determined to get to the bottom of this thing.

I’d almost made it to the office when Dee called to me from the front of the store.

“Oh, Ethan, Ethan, can you help me out, please?”

I sighed heavily, but turned back around to go check on her, dragging Glori with me. I couldn’t seem to let go of him just yet, and what the hell was that about?

“I’m having trouble getting a payment to go through. Can you help me?”

“Of course,” I said.

I leaned over and whispered fiercely in Glori’s ear. “Go sweep or something. Maybe clean the bathrooms. Just keep busy and stay out of trouble. I’ll talk to you about all this later. Stay out of trouble. I mean it.”

****

Glorfindel

If I’d understood him correctly, he’d actually asked me to clean the little public toilet rooms we had downstairs for customers, like the private one I had upstairs.

He must be crazy.

Since I had no intention of doing anything of the sort, I moved as far away from him as I could toward the back of the store. Out of sight, out of mind, or so they said. If he weren’t watching me all the time, maybe I wouldn’t irritate him so.

I was puttering around, killing time and pretending to straighten things on the shelf, when a female voice behind me said, “Excuse me.”

I realized they were talking to me and turned around. Two women, who were probably in their thirties, were standing there giving me a hopeful look.

“Are you talking to me?”

“Yes,” the one in front said. She had long, red hair that she wore pulled behind her head and tied off with some kind of tight band. She looked bad-tempered. With her was another lady of about the same age. She was blonde and wore her hair down around her shoulders. She looked to be of a sweeter disposition and was wearing some of those extremely short pants I’d seen on many of the customers that day. Her thighs were quite plump, and they rubbed up close together, no doubt trying to hide themselves from the world’s scrutiny.

They both kept looking at me expectantly and I realized they wanted something. “Oh, did you need me to get someone for you?”

“Well,” said the redheaded one. “We were both hoping for a reading. Could you do that for us?” They looked at each other and giggled excitedly. “The others are all busy, and there’s even a line, but we’re kind of in a hurry to meet some other friends for dinner, and we saw you back here and...we hoped that maybe you could do it. My friend Patty has been here before, and she said everyone in the shop is really talented. Would you help us?”

“Help you do what?”

“Give us a card reading! Would you? We asked the man up front, and he said no one was available, but I’ll bet you can do it.” She gazed at me admiringly. “You look so interesting. Handsome, too, like a movie star or something.”

I admit I preened a little. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure what she meant by movie star, but it seemed like something she admired, and perhaps finally, someone in this crazy realm saw me for how valuable I truly was. Still, I knew that if I did what she wanted, Ethan wouldn’t like it, just like he didn’t like most of anything I did. I opened my mouth to say no, but she broke in. “I asked him about it, the tall, good looking one at the front of the store, and he said, ‘Oh no, out of the question. You have to wait. He has no idea what he’s doing.’”

“Oh, he said that, did he?” I raised one eyebrow at her, and she nodded.

“He was quite mean about it too.”

Of that, I had no doubt. Suddenly, I had a wonderful idea. I could do this and show Ethan just how capable and how brilliant I was. And when these women told him about my great card reading skills, he’d have to admit he was wrong. He might even need to apologize to me and grovel a bit. It was all too delicious for words.

“I suppose I could do it,” I said. “Why not?”

“Ooh,” they both squealed at once. “Wonderful! Let’s find a quiet corner somewhere and then you can give us a reading.”

I shrugged. Again, why shouldn’t I? I was very insightful. And I could read perfectly well. Ethan said it was for entertainment purposes, so why shouldn’t I be just as good at it as Marcy or Dee? Much better even!

“I need money,” I told her, and she fished out one of the green bills the mortals used here and handed it over.

“A hundred, right?”

I nodded. Sounded good to me, though I had no idea what this mortal money was worth.

“Follow me,” I said and led the way to the back left corner in the store, the one that was the best hiding place from the register, or so I’d recently discovered. I stopped and turned to face them, and the red-haired woman crowded up close to me and held out her hand. I looked down at it and she shook it at me.

“Well? What are you waiting for? Read my palm,” she said, almost giddy with excitement.

I gave her a look of cool disdain. “I don’t read palms , madam. I understood you wanted your cards read. Hand them over or go away.”

“But…” she looked at her friend questioningly. “But I don’t have any cards. Surely you must have some.”

“Of course, I do, but mine won’t help you. Why did you ask me to read your cards if…” I broke off with a sigh. There was no rhyme or reason with these people.

“Very well. If you don’t have your cards with you, then you may ask me questions, if you like, and I’ll give you the answers.”

She brightened considerably. “Oh, you’re a psychic. All right then, even better. My husband passed a year ago. Can you contact him and ask him some questions for me? See if he’s all right?”

Was she asking me to do Necromancy? I frowned at her dubiously and started to tell her I didn’t do that, but then I thought about her telling Ethan how wonderful I was, and I decided perhaps I could lie about some things. That had to be what Marcy did. What harm could there be, really? What could go wrong?

“He’s not all right, no. He’s actually very sad.” I was making that up, but I figured I’d be sad if I were dead—I felt pretty safe in telling her that her husband was.

“Oh,” she said. “Why is that?”

“He misses you.”

“Oh, he does, huh? Really? Can you ask him if he misses me so much, then why did he ask me for a divorce not an hour before the fatal car crash?”

I coughed to hide my surprise, but she was relentless, leaning forward and pressing me for more.

“Um, he says perhaps you misunderstood him.”

“No way,” she replied, flattening out her already thin lips. “No way I misunderstood what he was saying. He was adamant about the divorce. I thought you were a real psychic, and here you are wasting my time. Where was he going that night? We had been arguing and he stormed out, yelling that he never wanted to see me again. He took off going way too fast, and he crashed his car a few miles away.”

I considered her carefully. I didn’t like her attitude, but I had tried to lie to her. It’s not strictly true that Fairies can’t lie. Most of us have been so interbred with other species—I was half Elven, in point of fact—that we didn’t have much of a problem with it. I just wasn’t all that good at lying and never had been. I decided I should try again and give it a real try this time.

“I see. Had your husband done this before? Storming out and indicating he wanted out of your marriage, I mean?”

She shrugged. “For the month before he died, he said it more and more often, yes. Sometimes he wouldn’t come in at night until after midnight. When I confronted him, he said he was worried about getting fired, so he’d been putting in long hours, and I should get off his back.”

“I should think it’s obvious he was having an affair.”

“What?” she shrieked.

“Madam, please keep your voice down,” I said, looking nervously back toward the front of the shop.

“I’m sorry,” she hissed at me. “But what do you mean, an affair?” She gripped my arm and took a step closer, her eyes burning. “Give me a name.”

Seriously, was that how this woman thought things like this worked? This wasn’t some kind of information bureau for the recent dearly departed, and I couldn’t just spit out some random name at will. I opened my mouth to tell her so, and a name suddenly popped out.

“Judy. Judy Tellino.”

I had no idea where that had come from—it was like it was dredged up from deep inside me.

Both women in front of me gasped. Then the redhead turned to face the blonde with blood in her eye. “You!” she cried out. “It was you all along! Judy Tellino! My best friend!”

The blonde was slowly backing away, holding out her hands in front of her. “Now, Melinda, it’s not what you think. He talked to me some, yes, but he and I...we never…we only kissed a few…”

Suddenly, the blonde broke and ran for the front door. Her friend shrieked and went after her, catching her just before she made to the exit. She yanked her back by the hair of her head, hurling her to the floor and knocking over an entire display shelf filled with candles and books of spells. Judy came up swinging and planted one squarely on Melinda’s nose, which immediately started spurting blood. Melinda squealed and grabbed a huge glass jar to smash it down on Judy’s head. I stood by frozen and watching in fascinated horror.

Of course, all the commotion alerted Ethan, along with everyone else in the store, and he came charging over to break up the fight. He cast me one wild look, as I stood by wringing my hands, before he grabbed the jar out of Melinda’s hands.

“What are you doing?” he shouted at her, diving into the melee and trying to separate the two screaming women. I wondered why he just didn’t use the wave thing, but the store was packed with customers, all of whom seemed to be converging on their little group, most of them with their little square phones out and pointing toward the action. “ Sell phones ,” Dee had called them when I asked about them earlier.

I had seen her with her own device, doing something to it with her thumbs and when I asked her what it was, she said it was her sell. When I still looked blank, she said, “Wow, where do you come from Finn?”

“A long way from here,” I’d answered and then pretended to be really busy.

Anyway, some other men in the store finally pitched in to help Ethan with the two ladies still screaming and kicking and practically foaming at the mouth to kill each other. Then after a few more loud minutes of chaos, the police came and took them both away. The redhead glared at me on her way out. “I want my money back!” she yelled.

Ethan, his shirt torn in the fight, and blood from the redhead’s nose splattered over what was left of it, pivoted slowly to look at me and pointed his finger at my face.

“I’m going to kill you,” he said, and I turned and ran as fast as I could to the back and up the stairs. He caught me before I made it very far.

****

Ethan

I hustled him into my office and closed the door. Pointing at a chair for him, he stubbornly shook his head, and I waved a hand at him to make him sit. His butt hit the seat, and he glared back up at me. I suspected a full-blown snit was coming on, but I began to pace up and down in front of my desk, trying to head it off and calm myself down.

“I can’t believe you took money from that woman and then tried to give her some kind of half-assed reading.”

“It wasn’t half-assed. I tried very hard to give her a real one. And she asked me , you know.”

He stopped and glared at me. “What possible difference does that make? I told you it was out of the question. Did you understand me?”

“Yes,” he admitted grudgingly.

“So you admit you just ignored me?”

He shrugged. “Maybe a little bit.”

I made a sound of rage and frustration and reached for him, hauling him up into my arms. I intended nothing good. Maybe a throttling or just a simple beating—I wasn’t sure. But the moment I laid hands on him and caught a whiff of his sweet scent, all I could think of was kissing him. I made a noise that was halfway between a growl and a moan as he met my hunger with his own. Our tongues dueled. He tasted…like honey. I couldn’t get enough of his sweetness. I wanted him. I wanted to hurt him, to shake him until his teeth rattled, to kiss him until he passed out. I needed him.

The wrongness of those words reverberated through my brain. Roughly I pushed him away. He fell back in the chair, his chest heaving as much as mine.

“What kind of spell have you put on me? Is it some kind of love spell? Because, if that’s it, I swear to God…”

“Love spell? No! No, I haven’t!” he shouted. “I didn’t .”

“Stop lying to me.”

“I’m not lying. I swear it on my life.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He threw up his hands and jumped up to face me. “Call Drogheda. Get her here now! This isn’t working for me.”

“How the fuck do you think I can call her? She doesn’t exactly carry around a cell phone that connects to the future, you know.” I rolled my eyes and blew out a long breath. “I can’t ‘call’ her, Glorfindel. I can conjure a portal but not right this minute, because it takes time and I’m trying to run a business here. Tonight, I’ll do it and get her here. Make no mistake, I’ll tell her to take you back where she found you.”

He jumped to his feet. “Yes, good. Fine! That’s what I want. Do it.”

“Don’t bark orders at me. You’re not in charge of anything here.”

“Well, neither are you! You’re not in charge of me anyway.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said, looming over him to intimidate him and make him sit down again. “You’ll do exactly as I say as long as you’re on my property.”

“Then I’ll leave your property!”

“Go ahead.”

“I will! I’ll really go!”

“What’s stopping you?”

“Ooh, I hate you!”

“Right back at you.”

He jumped up, stomped his stupid little foot, and then turned on his heel to flounce out the door and slam it behind him.

When he left, I immediately wondered uneasily if I should go after him. After all, he had no identification at all, and he knew absolutely nothing about the century he now found himself in. Not only was he from a hundred years earlier, but from the Fae realm, which was a place out of time and space altogether. He was only going to get himself in some major trouble with that truly terrible personality and temper of his—it was inevitable and simply a matter of time. Then the police would throw him in jail because of course he’d smart off to them. Let him spend a night in jail and see how he liked it.

The thought of him stuck in a miserable jail cell and crying his little eyes out was really satisfying to me— for about ten seconds. That’s when it occurred to me that he was way too pretty for jail. That little ass of his wouldn’t last an hour before some big biker dude would have him bent over a bunk bed or splayed out against a wall. Which he would probably love, come to think of it, because he was such a little trollop.

Unless and until he would most likely turn that mouth of his loose on them and then they’d beat the hell out of him. Or, even more likely, he’d turn them or somebody else into a frog or a rat or whatever. Or he’d turn a lot of somebodies, including the arresting officers.

Damn it, I was going to have to go after him.

Not because I was worried about him—not at all. Not in the least. Worried? Not by a long shot. But it did seem a shame to release such a menace on an unsuspecting public. I charged out of my office and called out to the ladies in the shop to man the fort.

“I need to go find somebody.”

“Okay.” Dee gave me an arch look. “But if it’s Finn by any chance, he asked me where he could get something to drink, and I told him about The Rooftop .”

The Rooftop was a little bar on the top floor of a building only three doors down. On the lower level, it was a souvenir shop, but you could take an elevator to the top floor if you liked, after noon or so, and you could go up to the fairly upscale bar and restaurant. There they served both food and alcohol, but it wasn’t exactly cheap fare. It was one of the more expensive little places in all of Salem, in fact, and Finn had no money. Or at least I didn’t know how much. The redheaded woman had yelled at him about taking some of her money.

Still, it was also a disaster waiting to happen. Dee looked over at me and raised one eyebrow, but I didn’t have time to get into it. I knew she’d seen me kissing Glori, but part of the panicked spell I’d called out had been to forget what had happened that afternoon, so I didn’t think she remembered. I hoped not anyway. Women’s intuition, though, was a force of nature, and I tried never to discount it. Dee knew something was up with Glori, but then again, who wouldn’t? Neither of us had been exactly subtle.

“Look, it’s almost closing time. You and Marcy go ahead and lock up when the last customer leaves. I need to go check on Finn, I guess. He’s uh...not from around here.”

“Yeah, no kidding. He didn’t even know what a credit card was, Ethan. How is that possible?”

“He’s Amish.”

She tilted her head in confusion. “Really?”

“Yes, but don’t mention it to him. He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“But how did he wind up here?”

“My uh, my grandmother knows his family.”

“Huh. Amish.”

Yeah, it was lame as fuck, and I knew it even as it came out of my mouth. But it was the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment. I’d originally planned on spending time with him after he arrived to gauge how much he knew about this century and how much I’d have to teach him. I hadn’t counted on having such an immediate visceral reaction to him the moment I saw him. I never should have allowed him to come into contact with Dee and Marcy so soon, but then I hadn’t been thinking straight since the moment he arrived. I wondered again if this was how my grandfather had felt when he first encountered my Fairy grandmother.

Immediately, I tried to push the thought away, but it refused to go. My grandfather had never spoken of it, even to me and I had been one of his favorite people. He’d left me his desk, an old-fashioned, heavy mahogany piece that I used in my office. In one of the cavernous bottom drawers, I’d discovered an old handwritten and unfinished manuscript he’d been working on. I knew he was a published author and co-author. Most college professors are, though usually on scholarly subjects. He’d been one of the co-authors of a textbook on British Literature that was still used in colleges and universities today and was on something like its fourth edition. This one was different though, and I knew it from the title. He’d called it A Guide to Faeries.

I remembered being excited when I saw it, thinking I might be getting some insight into his actual experiences with my grandmother. When I’d asked Drogheda about her, she’d told me my grandmother had disappeared and left my grandfather after becoming involved with a Selkie. She claimed she’d lost contact with her and that she didn’t know what happened to her, but I found that hard to believe. To this day though, I had never encountered her in my Timeroaming.

The book turned out to be a disappointment too, covering mostly a dry “history” of how the Sidhe had retreated to hills called “Fairy mounds,” having been driven underground when the Gaels successfully invaded Ireland. Since the Fae Realm was not exactly of this world but more or less adjacent to it, I wondered if he’d been caught up in the old legends and stories, still trying, I supposed, to make sense of the strange turn his life had taken. The only personal note was a few words written in the margin of one of the pages.

The only way to deal with a Fairy is to keep them too well-fucked to cause much trouble.

I’d been shocked at first to read the graphic words, until I remembered he was a young professor during the early 60s when the American counterculture was alive and well. Sex, drugs and rock and roll was the magic elixir for so many. He’d been a young man when he wrote those words.

And his idea about Fairies wasn’t all that bad. It would be a perfect way to deal with Glori, and one I was sorely tempted to try.

I charged out of the store and headed down the square to the bar. It had only been minutes since Glori left, so he couldn’t have gotten into too much trouble yet. Right?

Wrong. When I got off the elevator, I could hear the raised voices coming from the bar area. As I turned the corner I saw him, perched on one of the stools, yelling at the bartender, who had already pulled out his cellphone and was punching in numbers. No doubt he was calling the cops from the angry expression on his face.

I rushed over and grabbed his wrist. “You really don’t want to make that call, do you? Everything here is under control.” I said, trying a little compulsion on him.

His first reaction had been one of outrage when I leaned across the bar and touched him, but after I spoke to him softly enough that no one else could hear, he put his phone back down on the bar. It helped that the place wasn’t too full. It was still early and there were only a few customers. The closest ones were at a table maybe fifteen feet away, but they were looking at our little tableau curiously.

“Well, I…” the bartender said, looking confused. “No. I guess everything’s okay.”

“Why don’t you get me a beer? Whatever you have on tap will be fine.”

“All right. Are you starting a tab?”

“Yes, please.”

He turned to get a glass and I whipped around and glared at Finn, speaking to him in a fierce whisper. “Can you not stay out of trouble for five minutes?”

“Can you not stay out of my business for five minutes? Because he started it,” he began, and I cut him off by holding up my hand. His words died in his throat, and he put a hand up to it with his eyes wide and shocked, making little choking noises.

My beer came and I took it in one hand and Glori’s elbow in the other to drag him along beside me to a table that overlooked the square below. I shoved him in a chair, releasing his voice because he’d begun to make gagging sounds like he was dying. God, he was such a drama queen.

“Oh, stop it. You’re fine. All I did was stop you from talking.”

He sputtered a few times and made a big deal of massaging his throat while his eyes shot daggers at me. “How dare you?” he said hoarsely in that princely way of his and far too loud.

“Either lower your voice or I’ll do it again, and this time I won’t release it for a week. Your choice. Fight me on it and see what happens.”

The look I got should have been enough to kill me on the spot, but he kept his mouth shut and spoke with his eyes instead. The looks he gave me were fierce and I smiled at him. He looked outraged and kept glaring though. It occurred to me that I should have threatened him with this the first time I met him, if this was what it took to keep him quiet.

“Good boy,” I said, and I couldn’t help grinning at him just to piss him off. “Now calmly tell me what caused the argument.”

I could see that his real need not to speak to me at all was warring with his other need to tell his side of things. That was the side that finally won out, and he opened his mouth to start shouting again. I put my forefinger over his mouth and shook my head. “Calmly or you won’t speak for a week. I’m serious.”

He inhaled sharply about three times and huffed out the breaths even more sharply. Then he hissed at me. “I despise you.”

I nodded. “I know. And I don’t care. Tell me what caused the argument.”

“He kept insisting I show him my eye.”

“What?”

“That’s what I said. ‘What?’ He said he needed to see it before he could serve me alcohol. I said, ‘Okay, go ahead and look then.’ And he said, ‘Well, then take it out for me.’” He shook his head. “He’s crazy, Ethan. How was I supposed to take out my eye?”

“No, that’s not what he said at all. He wanted to see your ID . Your identification. Which, of course, you don’t have, but he can’t serve you without seeing it. It’s the law.”

“It’s a stupid law.”

I spread my hands to show him I might agree in this case, but there was unfortunately nothing to be done about it.

“You can’t get an ID because you don’t have a birth certificate.” I sighed. “We need to talk to Drogheda about this. See what she can come up with. Until then, you need to stay in the shop. It’s too risky for you to be walking around out in public.”

“Or I’ll just go back home. Like I said.” I knew he didn’t mean the bedroom upstairs at my shop. He was talking about going back to the Fairy Realm, and he was watching me closely to see my reaction. Did he want me to beg him to stay? I wasn’t sure what Drogheda was getting out of all this, because she sure as hell hadn’t offered me anything but her thanks. But whatever it was, it wasn’t enough.

If I took him back myself, I’d never have to see him again. He wouldn’t be waltzing around my shop pretending to sweep in his tight jeans, twisting his ass and tossing his blond hair out of his eyes and getting in my way—getting in my hair and in my thoughts all the time, where he had no business being. It would be a relief.

“Is that what you want to do?”

“Is that what you want me to do?”

I rolled my eyes at him. “Can’t you just answer a simple question?”

“Can’t you?”

“You’re such a child.” I sighed and caved in. As much trouble as he was, the truth was I didn’t want him to leave. And I didn’t want to look at that too hard either to figure out why.

“Okay, no, I don’t want you to go home. You only just got here.”

“You’ve made it clear since I arrived that I’m nothing but a bother to you. That you dislike me. Except for those times when you were kissing me.” He looked up straight into my eyes. “Why is that? Why do you keep kissing me, Ethan?”