Only a Monster(Monsters #1)(38)

‘Aaron?’ The man looked Aaron up and down, mouth twisted in a sneer. ‘Does the head of our house know that his son is slumming at the Serpentine Inn with a Hunt? Or have you fallen even further than we’d imagined?’

Aaron’s hand shook slightly as he went to adjust his shirt cuffs. He seemed to remember the state he was in—jacketless and still soaked, his shirt painted to his chest. He lowered his hands.

The man opened his mouth to speak again, but Joan interrupted. ‘For God’s sake, listen to me!’ she said. The clawing feeling had risen to her throat. Nothing mattered but what Nick was going to do. ‘You need to listen to me! You need to tell everyone that a human is coming—a human who kills monsters!’

The man jerked his sleeve from Joan’s grip. He straightened his own cuffs. ‘Get this mad bitch out of my way,’ he said to Aaron evenly.

‘Aaron, tell him!’ Joan said. But to her shock, Aaron took her shoulder and pulled her firmly aside so that the man could pass.

Joan was vaguely aware of Aaron corralling her up a short staircase.

‘What are you doing?’ she demanded. ‘Let go of me! We have to go after him! We have to go back down there!’

And then they were in a suite with big windows looking out onto the stormy street.

Aaron slammed the door behind them, and Joan rounded on him. ‘You didn’t even help me!’ she said. ‘Why did you drag me away? We have to warn him!’

‘It doesn’t work like that!’ Aaron said.

‘Of course it works like that!’ Joan said. ‘If we warn people, they can stop Nick! Everything will go back to how it was! We won’t even have stolen that time. Everything will be undone.’

‘God, you are so fucking . . .’ Aaron’s voice went hoarse. ‘So fucking raw. We can’t change what happened, Joan!’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The timeline protects itself,’ Aaron said. ‘It corrects itself.’

‘What does that even mean?’

‘Those letters you sent will be lost or misdelivered. Victor will ignore what you said. No matter what you do or who you tell, that massacre will happen.’

Joan shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, you’re wrong.’

‘You can’t stop your family from dying,’ Aaron said. ‘You just can’t.’

‘You’re wrong, you’re wrong!’ Joan barely knew what she was saying. She felt as though she were choking. ‘You didn’t even talk to that man downstairs! You could have convinced him!’

‘Can’t you feel I’m telling the truth?’ Aaron said. ‘You must be able to feel it—the resistance of the timeline. It’s all around us.’

Joan couldn’t feel anything. ‘We came here to help them!’ she said. ‘That’s the whole reason we came back!’

‘That’s the reason you came back!’

‘What are you talking about?’ Joan demanded. ‘What are you . . .’ But their conversations were coming back to her. Aaron had never said that he’d help her undo the massacre, she realised slowly. It was Joan who’d talked about saving their families. She stared at him. ‘No.’

‘We had to run,’ Aaron said. ‘If we’d stayed there, we’d have died. Would you have left just to flee?’

‘I don’t believe you,’ she whispered. She couldn’t. ‘We have to undo it. We—we stole so much time.’ More than sixty years of human life between them. ‘We have to undo it together.’

‘Well, we can’t,’ Aaron said, ‘because it doesn’t work like that.’ And the words were cold, but he sounded as upset as Joan felt. He turned and stalked to the bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

Joan stared out the window onto the monster street below. Rain was still pouring down. The cobblestones were shiny and black. Aaron had to be wrong. He had to be. This couldn’t be how it was—Joan’s family dead, those people in the Pit . . . Joan couldn’t really have shortened their lives.

Through the window, movement caught her eye. Across the street, the post office door was opening. A man stepped out into the rain, carrying a sack of mail. Joan’s breath stopped.

The man hefted the bag, clearly struggling with it in the wet. Then he took a step and vanished, bag and all.

Now, Joan thought. She knelt on the window seat, trying to get a better look. Now. Aaron had been wrong. Those letters would be delivered. And it would be all over now.

Five seconds passed. Ten seconds. Joan was still kneeling on the window seat in her wet clothes. Twenty seconds.

There was something on the ground where the man had been standing. Joan pressed closer to the window, trying to see through the streaming rain. There were two things. Two white envelopes.

You must be able to feel it, Aaron had said. The resistance of the timeline. It’s all around us. Now, in the back of Joan’s mind, the word resistance snagged. With the same sense with which she’d felt the yearning of time travel, she could feel something in the world. Aaron had made it sound like a natural force. A resistance. But Joan’s sense of it was more of a great beast stirring. Something that when pushed would push back.

As rain continued to fall, Joan watched the two envelopes slowly take on water. She watched them discolour and distort with the weight of it. Then she watched them fall apart until they were no more than pulp in the gutter.