Warden of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book 8) Read Free

their need to forge new lives and refused to even try to make the best of it.
    During the time these discontented passengers had spent under my mother’s watchful eye, Lee, for the most part, had been an enigma to her. With every day that passed, however, Mike had grown more combative. He was a large man, taller than I, and he outweighed me by forty pounds, which made him dangerous when he was drunk. In turn, Noah, Mike’s partner in crime, had spent those same six months at Mike’s right hand, drinking him under the table despite being one-third smaller. Noah had a narrow face and pointed chin—and a wolfish way of looking at a man like he was assessing whether or not to eat him for dinner—or like a rat inspecting a particularly dubious piece of cheese.
    Their drinking and carousing had reached a point where my mother demanded that I either throw them into a dungeon, as my father wanted, or try to make something of them. Last May, I’d chosen the latter, in hopes that seeing more of this new world they lived in might assuage their discontent. In truth, I felt guilty about their continued presence in the Middle Ages, knowing that I could take them back to the modern world if I was willing to risk all of our lives to make that transition one more time.
    But it was a risk I wasn’t willing to take. It might be the one time it didn’t work. And I certainly wasn’t willing to risk my mother or sister on that chance. What made my decision all the harder was that they all knew it—from the very beginning we’d been honest about who we were and what we were capable of—and it was an honesty we all had to live with, Mike, Noah, and Lee included.
    Thus, also at my mother’s urging, I’d taken Lee, the only other single, male bus passenger staying at Caerphilly, into my court too. Within a day of the trio’s arrival in London, however, Mike’s and Noah’s behavior had reached an epic low. In a drunken stupor, the pair had climbed onto the wall-walk and peed off it onto the head of the captain of the garrison. They’d spent two nights in a cell simply to sober them up.
    On the third day of their incarceration, with me showing no signs of letting them out, Lee had come to me to speak for both of them. Mike had only ever given me bravado and monosyllabic answers, and the less volatile Noah had risen to a certain degree of sullenness, still without much in the way of forthcomingness. But that day, Lee showed himself to be perfectly polite, sharply intelligent, and in possession of a keen sense of humor. He didn’t smile often, but when he did, it lit his pale face. He’d reminded me of Callum’s friend and confidant, Mark Jones—not in looks, since Lee was six feet tall and thinly muscular—but in attitude.
    Lee had sworn to me that from that day forward Mike and Noah would live a reformed life, and if they didn’t, I could conscript them into my newly-established navy. So I’d given the pair one more chance and been rewarded because they had reformed. Or so it had appeared. I couldn’t help thinking now that Mike, Noah, and Lee, like the Three Stooges, had been running rings around me the whole time. Except these three weren’t funny.
    Instead of rescuing Mike and Noah from my (and the garrison captain’s) wrath out of the goodness of his heart, Lee had made himself the ringleader of the three men, and their reformation had been only on the surface.
    To my credit, I hadn’t entirely bought the idea that they were completely reformed. I’d brought all three with me on this journey to Canterbury out of a growing belief that something wasn’t quite right about them. There had been an innate brutality about Mike and a slyness in Noah that had worried me, and I’d been afraid to leave them alone in London under less watchful eyes. My intuition, unfortunately, hadn’t revealed to me any specifics, or that it was Lee I had to be most wary of, not the other two.
    It looked as if my father’s suggestion to toss