Avenging Angels (Bad Times Book 3)

see lights in farmhouses and the dark shapes of trees. The moon cast shadows from set stone walls around farm fields making them appear to be outlined in black.
Stephen slept in her arms where she sat in the back seat of the Audi. She wanted to stop and buy a car seat, but Samuel said that this was out of the question. She was in what she suspected was a stolen car driven by a man she knew next to nothing about toward a destination she wasn’t certain of and away from a threat that had not been fully described to her. Child safety laws seemed low on the list of priorities to worry about. Still, it gave her something practical to focus her anxiety on.
Samuel drove without speaking, a French-language pop station playing low on the radio. The traffic was light at this time of night. There seemed to be nothing ahead of them all the way into infinity. It was as if the world only became real as their headlights illuminated it and then receded again into nonexistence behind them.
The only stop they had made was at a roadside truck station. Samuel went into the brightly lit store alone. He returned with a paper sack of sandwiches, plastic bottles of milk, a tub of sanitizing wipes, and a small packet of diapers. Caroline noted a clean white bandage visible beneath the blood-caked tear in his coat. He must have done some first aid in the restroom. She also saw a dull metallic sheen about his wrist. Something like a wristwatch, but with a broader band.
“Can you tell me where we’re heading?” she asked.
“The White City.”
“Chicago?” she said, confused. “We’re going to fly?”
“Paris. I mean we’re going to Paris.”
“I’ve heard it called the City of Lights,” she said. He did not reply, and she left it at that.
They drove in silence for a while. Stephen slept, his breath a gentle current on the skin of Caroline’s sheltering arm.
“You drive with gloves on,” she said. “You do everything with gloves on.”
“I try to avoid physical contact with my environment as much as possible,” he said without turning, without even meeting her eyes in the rearview.
“That’s a practical consideration, right? I notice you avoid touching anything. Is that a health concern? Are you being cautious about catching some illness?”
“Most people live in time,” he said as if not hearing her questions. “They are born and live and die in a linear timeline. A few, a very few, live through time.”
“Like me,” she said. “And the Rangers. And you.”
“Yes. Except for me. I live without time.”
She waited for him to explain further. “What does that mean precisely?” Caroline asked at last.
“Because of the peculiarities of my birth, I live outside the normal constraints of time. I can more easily adjust to changes in my chronological location in that way. I do not live a life described in a linear fashion.”
“You’re unstuck in time,” she said. “Like Billy Pilgrim.”
“Who is that?”
“Nobody. A fictional character in a book I read a long time ago.”
Samuel said nothing.
“When we met in Menton on the beach at the hotel?” she said.
Samuel still said nothing. She glimpsed a flash of those extraordinary green eyes in the mirror.
“You were older then.”
“Was I?” he asked.
“A good twenty years older than you are now.” He said nothing at first. The fine hairs stood up on her arms.
“If you say so.”
“Then this sudden urgent ride has nothing to do with that?” she asked.
“No. This is about your son.”
“Stephen? What does any of this have to do with my baby?”
“One of my parents was like you, a time traveler,” Samuel said. “Your child is the product of two parents who visited a time period not their own. Several, in fact.”
She put aside the surreal nature of their conversation. She locked down her emotional reaction to learning that her child was “different” in an unanticipated and unwelcome way. The scientist emerged. Her intellectual curiosity took over.
“You mean traveling through the chronal field altered our genetics?”
“No. Not your gene structure. Something deeper. Something simpler yet more complex.”
“Samuel, are we talking string theory here?”
“I’m not as familiar with the study of physics in your era as I should be. We may be talking about the same thing, but I do not have your terminology for it. The scientific language is different.”
“String is an area of theoretical science that seeks to explain how the basic particles of existence relate to one another,” she said. “It can be used to theorize about everything from the causation of gravity to the existence of other dimensions.”
“It sounds like Trivenchy’s thesis called Mica Prima,” Samuel said. “In it, he explains that all matter comes from a single source and all relates back to the first piece of matter in creation, the remnant that holds the answer to the existence of everything.”
“The God Particle.”
“That is an evocative way of stating it.”
“More romantic than Higgs boson, certainly,” Caroline agreed. “You’re saying that because one of your parents was displaced in time, you are significantly affected on a sub-atomic level.”
“Yes. That is the simplest way to phrase it.”
“Which of your parents?’
“My father.”
“Do I know him?” She already knew the answer before he said it.
“Yes. Richard Renzi.”
Stephen was startled awake and began crying. Caroline cooed and rocked him as they rode through the night, holding him to her, absorbing his warmth into her to fight the sudden chill she knew had nothing to do with the cold outside the car.

23


A Stolen March
The cold desert sky was clear above them the night of their first camp.
Lee Hammond was able to take a reading from the position of the stars.
“We’re late,” he announced to the others. Except for Jimbo, who was on overwatch somewhere out in the dark.
They were cold camping. No fire. They didn’t see a single human being once they passed out of the last orchard beyond the walls of Caesarea. A few wild goats were spotted but no sign of settlements or