The Hourglass Door (37 page)

“And the river Styx,” finished Jason.

“It’s okay,” I told them. “I didn’t know who he was either, the first time I saw him.”

Dante shot me a dirty look and bumped my shoulder with his.

“Careful—you’ll muss me.” I pretended to pat my hair into place and we all laughed.

The music kicked up a notch, a wild beat that thankfully wasn’t from a Zero Hour song. Jason pulled Natalie to the dance floor; Dante glanced at me.

“May I have this dance, fair lady?”

I gave him my answer in a grin and we spun onto the floor that was already filled with light and color.

We danced song after song, filled with endless energy and laughter. We switched partners at one point—me dancing with Jason; Dante with Natalie—and then back again. The music took a breath and then released the soft melody of “Time after Time.”

“I love this song,” I said as we slowed our steps to match the languid pace of the jazzy cover by J. J. O’Hare. Dante enfolded me in his arms and I rested my head against his chest, lulled by the steady beat of his heart next to my ear.

As we turned in a circle, I heard someone approaching.

I knew it was Zo even with my eyes closed because the world tightened around me. It was like when Dante kissed me, but instead of a close and comfortable cocoon, it was a sharp-edged trap poised to snap shut.

Dante, ever graceful, stumbled a little as we slowed to a stop.

“Ah, so sorry,” Zo purred. “I’ve interrupted the lovebirds.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” Dante said. He deftly turned so I was behind him, still keeping me close to him but keeping everyone else at bay.

“That’s sweet,” Zo said. “Still trying to protect the weak and the helpless.” His eyes roamed over my face, intent and hungry.

“I’m not weak,” I said, proud that my voice held firm. “And I’m not afraid of you.”

Zo laughed, a vibrant roll of music. “There’s no reason you should be. I’m no threat to you.”

Dante narrowed his eyes. “I won’t let you have her.”

“I don’t want her.” He shrugged, a sly smile on his face. “She’s useless to me. But please, Dante, if
you
have found some use for her, then by all means,
you
should enjoy her.”

Dante, already on edge, tensed. I think he would have swung at Zo had I not been holding his arm.

Zo noticed. He leaned back on his heels, confident and strong, and folded his arms across his chest. The billowing sleeves of his crisp white shirt were folded back to display his chain tattoos. A bandanna covered his dark hair and a small gold hoop earring dangled from his left ear.

He must have seen me looking because he extended a bow in my direction. “The Pirate King, at your service. I just love costume parties, don’t you?”

The effect would have been comical on most men, but Zo wasn’t most men.

“Let me guess, Dante—you’ve come as Charon? Why am I not surprised that you stuck to the classics. I do find it rather appropriate, though. Charon was enslaved to the river, endlessly traveling back and forth on a meaningless, uninspired errand. While I am free to travel wherever—and whenever—I wish. Ah, the life of a pirate is truly liberating. I’d recommend you try it sometime, but unfortunately, there is only one key that can allow you passage to that life, and something tells me you don’t have it anymore.”

“Give it back,” I blurted, feeling my anger rising. “It doesn’t belong to you.”

“Ah, the rose has thorns after all,” Zo said, showing the points of his teeth in a feral grin.

“The door you seek won’t open for you,” Dante said quietly.

Zo’s eyes lit on me and I shrank back against Dante’s shoulder. “I don’t need it to. I just need it to open for her.” Zo turned, extending his hand, and pulled Valerie to his side. She squeaked a little as he tightened his hold and nuzzled against her neck. “My saucy little pirate wench,” he said, nipping at her earlobe.

I hadn’t seen Valerie standing behind him in his shadow, and I barely recognized her in the flickering light of the dance. She wore a black sheath dress, form-fitting and curving in all the right places. Elbow-length gloves encased her hands and forearms in black silk. She was a shadow in the night except for the sparkling necklace encircling her throat; I wondered if Zo could afford real diamonds.

“I’m not a wench,” she pouted. “I’m your
belladonna.
”

“That’s right, love,” Zo agreed. “My deadly nightshade.”

Valerie wriggled closer to him, placing her gloved hands on either side of his face and kissing him passionately.

I turned away, feeling physically ill to see them together like that. I wondered if she even knew I was there or if she only had eyes for Zo now.

“You wouldn’t dare,” Dante said. “You don’t know how.”

“Don’t I?” Zo asked, caressing Valerie’s arm draped around his neck. “Are you sure about that?”

“Don’t do this, Zo. Please.”

“What other choice do I have? You forced me into this, Dante. You and your accursed machine. I’ll die before I let you take this from me as well.”

“What if it’s not you who dies?” he asked quietly.

“Zo’s told me the risks and what might happen,” Valerie said, running a finger along the side of his neck. “And I’m willing to do it. It’s my choice.”

I highly doubted she had made that choice on her own.

“Why else would I have done this?” she asked, stripping off her gloves. Her pale skin flowed smooth and unmarked to her wrists, where she was cuffed with matching black chain tattoos complete with red lines of fresh pain.

“Isn’t it amazing what some focused attention and the right song can do to a person?” Zo said, a laugh bubbling underneath his words. He reached for Valerie’s hands and kissed her wrists, right then left. “She is the best thing to come along in a long time. I don’t know how I’d do this without her.”

“Zo—” Dante started, but Zo’s laughter cut him off.

The Pirate King gathered up his belladonna, turning on his heel. “I’d say I’ll see you soon, Dante, but if I have my way, I’ll never see you again.”

The shifting crowd swallowed them up, leaving Dante and me isolated in a pocket of disbelief.

I managed to find my voice buried beneath a tumbling mountain of fear and uncertainty. “Why was Valerie like that? It’s like she was someone else entirely. Like she was on drugs or something.”

“An apt comparison,” Dante said. “She’s been spending months with Zo and his friends. I fear she’s not the Valerie you once knew.”

“When do you think he’ll try it?”

“I don’t know,” Dante said. “It depends on if he really knows how to get her to the bank. If he does, then he won’t wait long.”

One song ended and another one started before I spoke again.

“Will she be okay?”

“I hope so.” Dante quietly wrapped his arms around me as the music thundered around us like a storm. “I hope so.”

Chapter

25

After seeing Zo at the dance, neither one of us felt like staying any longer. We said our good-byes to Jason and Natalie and bolted. The cool spring air felt like a soothing balm on my fevered skin. My mind kept repeating a dangerous couple of facts: Zo sounded like he knew how to take Valerie to the bank, and Valerie was willing to go despite the danger. The one fact I held onto was that Zo still needed the key. We could still stop him as long as he didn’t get his hands on the key.

Dante suggested we stop at Helen’s Café for a late-night breakfast, but I was too wound up to eat.

We drove home in silence, and he pulled Leo’s Mustang into my driveway.

“Dante?” I asked, my anxiety tasting like copper. “What has Zo done to Valerie? What was all that stuff he said about ‘the right song’?”

Dante rubbed his thumb against the back of my hand.

“They’re breaking rule number one: They’re deliberately upsetting the balance.”

“How? Why—?”

Dante gently interrupted my questions. “Do you remember what I told you about the pressure we feel? About how when there is too much, we have to go to the bank to burn it off? I’ve suspected for some time that Zo and his friends have found a way to . . . channel . . . some of that pressure so they don’t have to go back to the bank as often.” Dante’s eyes were serious.

“How is that possible?”

“Time may be fluid, but it still follows rules. I think Zo has figured out a way to channel the pressure through something structured—like a poem or a song. I think it has something to do with the rhythm of the words, the cadence of the voice, the counting of the beats.” Dante shrugged. “I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but there is a lot about this that seems impossible.”

“Can you do it?” I asked, my mind tumbling with hope.

“I’ve only tried it once. At the Poetry Slam back in February. Just to see if I could. Just to see how Zo did it.” He looked away. “In some ways, it was worse than just going to the bank. I don’t know how he stands it.”

“How could it be worse?” I asked. “I mean, wouldn’t it be a good thing if you didn’t have to go to the bank all the time?”

Dante shook his head. “The balance is set for a reason. It’s to protect us as much as it is to protect the river. What Zo’s doing . . . when he’s redirecting the pressure—the time—back into the river, it’s like he’s creating a little whirlpool of emotion. The people who are caught up in the whirlpool feel a sense of heightened emotions—usually whatever emotion Zo is feeling at the time.”

I felt like a living cliché as a light went off in my head. “So when Zero Hour played at the Dungeon, Zo was feeling excited and energized by being able to channel away the extra pressure through his songs—through Zero Hour’s songs. And so we all felt excited and energized too, right?” I remembered so clearly that night when I’d first met Zo and what he’d said to me:
“I thank you for your acceptance of me tonight.”
Only now did I realize that what I’d accepted was a dose of his excess emotion. “And then on Valentine’s Day, he was angry with you after your fight, so then the crowd was angry too.” I shook my head. “No wonder everyone broke up that night.”

It all seemed so clear to me now.

Dante looked at me with a strange expression on his face.

“What? Did I say something wrong?”

“No, you’re exactly right. It’s just . . . every time I think I have you figured out, you surprise me.”

“I’m not that complicated,” I said, blushing slightly.

“Yes, you are, Abby. It’s one of the things I appreciate about you.”

“So if you knew what Zo was doing with his music, why did you let them play that first night at the Dungeon?”

Dante grimaced. “We didn’t know. Not until later. Not until it was too late.”

“And now it’s too late for Valerie,” I murmured. “She’s changed and it’s all Zo’s fault. He’s been dumping his”—I frowned in distaste—“
leftovers
into her for months. It’s no wonder she’s completely in thrall to his wishes.” I sighed. “He’s not going to let her go, is he?”

“Maybe he will,” Dante said, but he didn’t sound entirely convinced.

~

“So tell me how it works,” I said the next night as I sat with Dante at the bar of the Dungeon.

“How what works?” he asked, his attention focused on the papers in front of him. Leo was on the bank and the Dungeon had been closed all day. It was just the two of us at the bar—me munching on peanuts from a shallow bowl, Dante working on his history report: the inventions of da Vinci. I’d spent hours at the library researching for my report on Edison; he was writing his report from memory.

“It. You know—the time machine.”

Dante’s hand paused midword, the end of his “t” making a sharp line instead of its usual curved tail.

“Why do you want to know?” he asked quietly.

“Because you said you helped build it. I’ve never met anyone who’s built a time machine before. I’m interested.”

Dante set down his pen and closed his notebook. “You shouldn’t be interested.”

“Are you kidding me?” I dropped my handful of peanuts back into the bowl and shoved him hard on the shoulder. “The most important invention in the history of the world and the guy who worked on it is sitting right next to me and you tell me I’m not supposed to be interested?”

A grin stole across his face. “I don’t know if it was the
most
important invention.”

“It brought you to me,” I said. “I think that’s pretty important.”

Dante’s skin turned a dusky rose; he was even more handsome when he blushed.

“Tell me what you miss most about home,” I said propping my elbows on the bar, resting my head in the palm of my hand.

Dante shuffled the papers into a loose stack, his fingers fidgeting restlessly. The low glow of the Dungeon’s lights caressed his dark curls. He selected a blank sheet of plain white paper and rolled a pen between his fingers for a moment before setting the tip to the paper and beginning to draw. “The quiet,” he said finally. “It’s so noisy here. So much rushing around. Everyone is in such a hurry. Back home . . .” He cleared his throat. “Back home, the pace was much slower. There was more time for quiet. For thinking.”