Odette Speex: Time Traitors Book 1 Read Free Page A

had established The White Swan Theater less than a year earlier. 
    Their stated mission was to bring ballet to a wider audience by staging smaller productions that the city’s poor could attend. Left unsaid, was that these ballets would be different. A new form of dance and expression, they would be a mixture of classical and modern.
    Suspicions swirled around the actual purpose of the theater. Anything that smacked even vaguely of social advocacy was immediately repressed. Layers of bureaucratic paperwork, city, municipal, and borough were needed to approve its formation. But such was Adelphia Montagu’s exalted position in society, nobody interfered. Yet still they had to be careful. Anything too obviously radical and they would be shut down in a heartbeat.
    Odette looked up from her reverie and found herself on a street of run-down old brownstones. Scraggly trees lined the sidewalk, and neglected flower boxes hung from several windowsills. She mounted the steps of number twenty-eight and pulled keys from her cloak pocket.
    Odette occupied the topmost apartment, but she didn’t mind the climb. It was cheaper and more spacious than the bottom floors. With access to the roof from her window fire escape, she had planted a small herb and vegetable garden there to supplement her meager food budget.
    She could have shared rooms with other dancers in a more fashionable part of town. But this way she could afford some privacy and avoid at all cost the Earl of Westchester. He wouldn’t be caught dead in this ramshackle part of the city.
    “The perks of being poor,” whispered Odette with a crooked smile.
    The next instant she stopped, still as a hunted rabbit. Her door stood ajar, and she could hear movement on the other side.
    Suddenly it was flung wide, and a beautiful vision materialized before her.
    “Cara!” she cried and threw herself into the other woman’s arms.

Chapter 2
    “Darling, I had the devil of a time tracking you down.”
    The vision sat at Odette’s tiny kitchen table and held a cup of tea. Her head was cocked charmingly to one side as she blew on the hot liquid.
    Odette looked at her fondly. Cara was somewhere in her mid-forties but looked ageless. In the fifteen years Odette had known her, not one new wrinkle had emerged to mar her perfect complexion. More amazing still was her long mane of thick auburn hair. It retained a youthful sheen and was miraculously free of the gray that typically plagued redheads. Cara insisted it was all natural. Odette had never found any evidence to the contrary but was still unconvinced.
    “How did you find me?” Odette asked nervously. She had taken up residence only a few weeks before and was especially cautious with her new address.
    “Odell, bless him.”
    “And just how did you find him?”
    Odell had a cramped room at the university, but he was notoriously hard to locate. “And how does he know my new address? I haven’t seen him in weeks.” She sighed. Used to the fact that her enigmatic twin brother had a habit of knowing everything.
    Cara set her teacup on the table and replied a little severely, “Your brother knows better than to leave me in the dark as to his whereabouts.”
    She was right. Odell would never fail to give Cara the means of contacting him. They owed her too much.
    “Unlike you, my dear,” she admonished.
    “I’m sorry, Cara,” Odette apologized. “But I only recently moved in and had no idea you were back in town. In fact, I had no idea you were even back in the country.”
    Odette furrowed her brow and scrutinized her friend. “Why are you here? You were supposed to be gone for months. It’s barely been six weeks.”
    Cara glanced hastily down at her lap and smoothed the soft fabric of her skirt. “Darling, why do you insist on wearing those dreadful trousers and that ugly cape?”
    Odette smiled knowingly at her evasion. “You’ve argued with Emile.”
    “Emile! Blast that man!” Cara sat up straighter, her cheeks