“And you wouldn’t like that here,” Daisy said, through two of his fingers. “Then you’d sparkle, too—”
“Sparkle?”
“—and I might have to eat—ummph.”
“She’s eating ghosts?” I asked, looking up at Dad. Who shoved overlong blond bangs out of his eyes and glared at me some more, but the expression had an edge of panic to it.
“She doesn’t know what she’s saying! She’s old and a little—” He tapped the side of his head. “Or she was. And she drank a lot—”
“Mmump, mummh!”
“—in life and it affected her. Terrible memory—”
“That’s a lie!” Her lips pushed through the back of his hand, until they protruded out past his knuckles. “Sharp as a tack,” they assured us.
“You are not!”
“Am, too.”
“Then where did we meet?”
She thought about it.
“Under the Forty-fourth Street Bridge,” I said, and they both turned to look at me.
“Oh no. That’s not it,” Daisy said.
“Yes, it is,” Roger said slowly. He frowned. “How did you—”
“You told me,” I said. “Or you will. You didn’t mention the city, but I assume—”
“What do you mean, will?”
“We become friends. In the future. Where I’m from,” I clarified, because he was looking confused. Which was a little odd, considering that he was a time traveler himself, if an illegal one. “Look, I know we got off to a bad start—”
“A bad start? You’re the reason I’m in this mess!”
“The reason you’re in this mess was your decision to try to blow up Parliament and save Guy Fawkes the trouble!”
Before he met my mother, Roger had been part of a guild of time-traveling utopians, trying to improve the world by tinkering with the past. Thankfully—since they screwed up more than they helped—they mostly sucked at it. Time travel, that is, because the spells they used tended to blow people up more frequently than not. But Roger had somehow managed to get back to 1605 anyway, intending to do some meddling for reasons I was still kind of hazy on, maybe because he hadn’t bothered to explain them much.
That was just as well, since when Roger did explain anything, it mostly didn’t make sense.
And, right now, I had bigger problems.
“Agnes caught yo
u and brought you back here—”
“With your help!”
“—and you’ve been rotting in here ever since, and now I’m in the same boat. And I have to get out of here. I need your help.”
“Help yourself,” he said spitefully. “If you got in trouble with that damn Pythia, that’s your problem. Maybe now you know what it feels like!”
“You have to help me!”
“I don’t have to do anything!”