Only a Monster(Monsters #1)(30)

Nick’s people were almost upon them. Joan saw the shine of a knife.

‘Do you remember?’ Aaron asked.

Joan felt it again then. The yearning she’d felt when she’d first arrived at Holland House. Her heart wrenched with it. ‘I remember,’ she whispered.

The knife slashed toward her.

And the world shifted.





EIGHT




For a long moment, Joan couldn’t hear anything but her own harsh breaths. Nick’s people had vanished. She pressed her hand against her throat, where the knife had been about to slash her. She turned her palm over. Her skin felt strangely tender with anticipated pain. But there was no blood.

Nick’s people were gone. The knife was gone.

No. She was gone.

Buckingham Palace seemed unchanged. People were still jostling for position to see the guards. The great statue of Victoria still sat on her throne.

But the man beside Joan had an old-fashioned camera, its thick strap looped around his neck. A second ago everyone had been holding up phones. Now no one was. And there were other differences too. Clothes were looser; hair was bigger.

Joan took a breath. She was breathing air from another time. She was standing with people from another time.

The sounds of the world came back in a rush—the drums, the trumpets, the marching footsteps of the guards. The ceremony was on top of them. No one seemed to have noticed that two people had arrived out of nowhere.

‘We did it.’ Joan could hear the muted shock in her voice. ‘We travelled.’

‘I travelled,’ Aaron said dryly. ‘Dragging you along.’

A woman nearby gave them both a curious look. Joan realised she was still holding Aaron’s hand at the same moment he did. He tore his grip from hers as if she’d burned him. Joan rolled her eyes.

The Changing of the Guard was ending now in a last thunder of drums and trumpets. And it was suddenly all too loud. A lifted camera made Joan flinch. She was safe, but her body didn’t believe it. Not yet.

She needed to breathe clear air. With effort, she pushed her way out of the crush, until the crowd finally yielded and she found herself in open space.

And then her breath stopped in her throat. Here, the past lay all around her. Cars circled the memorial in an unbroken stream, wide and boxy and low to the ground as she’d only ever seen in movies.

She was in the past. She turned a slow circle, following the cars. She was in the past. On the horizon, there was an empty space where the London Eye should have been: a missing tooth on the skyline.

The last turn brought her face-to-face with Aaron. He was watching her with an unexpectedly soft expression that disappeared as she focused on him. ‘Have you finished staring?’ His voice was studied boredom. This is nothing. I do this all the time.

‘Yes,’ Joan said. Her eyes returned to the piece of sky where the London Eye should have been. ‘No.’

The world felt infinite. She could go anywhere. Anywhen. She could travel back to the Regency. To the Restoration. To the Roman Empire. She could see Pompeii before it fell. She could see— Then she remembered how they’d gotten here. She shuddered. No, she could never do that.

Tourists strolled around them. Girls and boys snuck Aaron a second look. Even with his hair all messed up, he was good-looking enough to turn heads. If these people only knew what he was, what Joan was—what she’d just fantasised about doing—they’d run screaming from them both.

Joan took a step toward the road, and then realised that she’d started for the Tube, to get to Gran’s house in Kensington. She stopped, disoriented.

Gran moved every year. Here, in this time, Joan had no idea where the Hunt family lived. She had no idea where anyone was. When she’d imagined going back in time, she’d imagined going back a few days to warn everyone. Now she was decades in the past, before she was even born.

She wished suddenly that she could go home—not to Gran’s. Home home, to Dad’s, in Milton Keynes. She’d tell him everything, and he’d make a big pot of rice porridge with lots of ginger, like he did when she was sick. They’d scoop it into the little bowls from the top of the cupboard. Dad would crack an egg into Joan’s bowl, and he’d tell her that everything would be okay.

But there was no home in this time. Right now, Dad was still living in Malaysia—he hadn’t moved to England yet. If Joan went home to Milton Keynes, a stranger would answer the door.

‘Are you about to lose it?’ Aaron sounded more curious than concerned.

‘No,’ Joan said.

‘Because you look like you’re freaking out.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m not,’ Joan said. It came out as embarrassingly emphatic.

She expected Aaron to mock her, but his eyes turned back to the clumps of tourists. ‘We can’t stay here,’ he said. ‘We just appeared out of thin air. Someone might have noticed.’

No one was even looking at them. Around them, people were either following the marching guards or peeling away. But of the two of them, Aaron knew this world. Aaron knew people here. Joan needed him. She hated that she needed him.

Aaron turned toward St James’s Park. The relieved guards were marching back down the long red stretch of the Mall. Thinning streams of tourists followed them, still taking photos with those big boxy cameras.

‘Wait,’ Joan said, and only realised she’d spoken when Aaron turned back to her. ‘Where are we going?’ she said. ‘We can’t go to your family.’