“Who else knew what she did?”

  “Just a few people. A woman who worked for her. My father. But he was away when it happened, so he didn’t find out for a long time. The woman helped her keep a journal of everything. I think they knew we’d have questions when we were older. Thank God, they did, too. By the time I was a teenager, my mother’s ramblings were barely coherent.” Maddox stared at his hands, tracing the lines in his palm with a finger as he spoke. “After she…” He closed his eyes and swallowed. “After she was gone, I read her journal over and over again, trying to make sense of things. Apparently, as babies, Laith and I were inseparable. We’d cry if we were apart for even a moment. But as we grew older, things changed. By the time we were five, we couldn’t be in the same room together for more than a few minutes without trying to hurt one another.

  “Our mother grew afraid we’d harm each other like the witch said, so she decided to send one of us to live with our aunt in the south. It broke her heart to be separated from either of her children, but she didn’t know what else to do.” He didn’t say which of them she’d sent away, and I didn’t dare ask. I did notice neither of them seemed to have a Southern accent.

  I wanted to understand their strange relationship, why Maddox’s brother hated him so much. “So you and Laith grew up separately?”

  “Yes.” His face was devoid of emotion, as if the weight of his disclosure had stripped it away.

  “But you know each other now, so you must have reunited at some point.”

  He nodded. “After our mother died, I grasped onto the journal like a lifeline. I read it from cover to cover so many times the pages were tattered and worn. I memorized the contents as a small child might a favorite book. I didn’t believe anything she’d written down, mind you. Like you, I couldn’t imagine things like witches and curses existing. I grew up believing she was insane, so anything she’d written in her journal could only be the ramblings of a woman out of her mind. Once I became of age, I set out to find my brother.”

  “But you knew where he was, right?”

  “I had a good idea. I just had to track him down.” He chuckled darkly. “But when I found him, he wasn’t happy to see me. He’d grown up believing our mother had sent him away because she couldn’t handle two boys, and she’d chosen to keep me rather than him. It didn’t matter that he was raised in a happy, loving household. He was well cared for, even loved, whereas I grew up surrounded by lunacy and anger.”

  My heart broke for him. My fingers itched to reach out and touch him, but he was too wrapped up in telling his story, and in my own need to satisfy my curiosity, I didn’t want to interrupt.

  “Our relationship became exactly what our mother feared, especially after she entered our lives.”

  “She?” An uncomfortable sensation twisted my stomach, and I squirmed where I sat.

  “Our soul mate.” He shifted his attention to his palm again.

  I sucked in a breath, the pieces suddenly falling into place. “You mean me.”

  He lifted his eyes to meet mine. “No, Ava. This happened way before you.”

  “What?” As if the romantic soundtrack looping in my head had come to a screeching halt, I sat up straighter and shook my head. “You’re not making any sense at all. How could you have met your soul mate way before me? That’s impossible. That would mean you’d met her before I was even born.”

  He watched me cautiously as he nodded. “It was the spring of 1675.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Time seemed to grind to a complete stop. Even Maddox had frozen in place, eyes wide, as if staring down a dangerous predator—as if I’d been the one who’d claimed to have been born over three hundred fifty years ago. He seemed to be waiting for a reaction from me, but I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think, not after the grenade he’d just detonated.

  I waited for him to laugh—to say, “Gotcha!”—but that never happened. And the discomfort in his expression spread through his body like Ebola. He was a spring, wound too tight and ready to snap. I heard the rapid hammering behind his ribs as his pulse raced out of control.

  My own heart ceased to beat, and I refused to breathe until he put an end to the insanity and told me the whole thing was all a horrible joke. In my head, I heard my mother’s ridiculous clock, ticking off the seconds until my lungs burned, and I had no choice but to suck in a breath. “No,” I murmured, still unable to move.

  “I was…” His voice came out hollow, as if I was hearing it from the end of a long tunnel. “Laith and I… we were born in England. In 1655.”

  I scrambled from his lap and backed into the rough texture of the curved wall. “Stop!” He had to be lying. 1655. Hundreds of years before my parents—my grandparents—had even been born. My head turned from side to side of its own accord, as if it were trying to detach itself from my shoulders.

  “Please, hear me out.” His voice cracked, and he seemed to be on the verge of crying.

  “No!” Tears stung my eyes as I gripped the railing, easing my feet backward until I reached the next step. Then the one after that. I was prepared to take them one at a time until I reached the bottom.

  Maddox wiped the moisture from his eyes with the back of his hand and moved slowly toward me. “Ava, you’re gonna fall. Please, sit down, and let me explain.”

  “It’s not possible. That’s… you’re talking about centuries ago. You’d be long dead by now. Unless you’re immortal. Oh my God, are you immortal?” My tears flowed freely as the realization sank in. “Of course you are. You were cursed to a life of immortality so you could keep finding and losing your soul mate forever, right?”

  “No, that’s not it.” He shook his head vehemently. With every step I took, inching my way down the stairs, he followed, keeping just two steps behind me. “I promise that’s not it.”

  “Then what? How can you be from the seventeenth century? How can you not be a bag of bones blowing in the wind? If you’re not immortal, why do you look my age?”

  We’d only made it one full revolution on the spiral stairs before he grasped my hands in his, slowing my descent. “Because every time we jump, it resets our clock to the same age as the day we first jumped.”

  My mind raced as I tried to process the information. “How old are you?”

  “We’d turned twenty that June.”

  Not so much older than me in physical years, but in actual time… “But I don’t understand.” I’d gotten so tired of that phrase. I wanted to understand just one thing—one thing in this crazy, messed-up situation I’d found myself in. “Normal people can’t travel through time.”

  “I did.” His lips curved up in a sad smile. “Laith did. For you.”

  My heart jumped, stealing my breath and sending my head into a dizzying flat spin. Every word coming out of his mouth overwhelmed me. “But it wasn’t really me, was it? I wasn’t around back then. I’m not the girl you lost. I’m not from another time. I’m from the here and now, twenty-first-century America. And if you’re telling the truth—if you’re not both delusional sociopaths who need to be locked up for your own safety—you’re from seventeenth-century England.”

  There must have been something seriously interesting about the tops of his boots, because he couldn’t tear his eyes away from them. “Your soul is an old one. When it, uh, ceases to exist in one time, it comes back in the next. It’s still you. Just a little different.” He raised his eyes to mine. “If it makes you feel better, I like this you best. You’re smart and feisty, and you might be young and inexperienced, but you aren’t weak.”

  Every ragged breath I sucked in burned my chest and made my lips tingle. If I had to listen to even one more bit of information, my head would surely explode. Did he not understand how utterly insane it all sounded? “This is crazy. Too crazy to be true.”

  “Too crazy to be a lie,” he said with a bitter smile.

  A cold laugh burst out of me. “No, I think it’s just the right sort of crazy for a lie or a paranoid delusion. Mine or yours, I’m not entirely sure which.”

  “But you feel it.” He reached out to me, and the prickle flared, proving his point. “You feel the pull of the bond. I don’t have the power to make you feel something you don’t.”

  A million different scenarios floated through my brain like helium balloons. “How do I know you haven’t drugged me? Maybe… maybe I’m not even here. Maybe I’m tucked into my bed dreaming right now.” I snapped my fingers and pointed at him, feeling the first few balloons popping in my head.

  He took my hand in his and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “Ava, you know better.”

  “I don’t know anything anymore.” Part of me wished I could go back in time to when I first saw him. I would have avoided making eye contact. Hell, I would have stayed away from that damn window altogether. But the instant the thought formed, I knew it was a lie. Even after hearing his outrageous story. And even though I was half sure he was as nuts as his mother, I would have done it all the same—pursued him every bit as relentlessly. “This is a lot to take in. A day ago, I was an ordinary college freshman with a normal boyfriend. Today, I’m some kind of splintered soul, tracked through time by a pair of identical time travelers. It’s like the plot of a bad movie, and I still don’t really understand it all.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” He sat on the step and tugged me down beside him. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  What did I want to know, besides how I factored into the whole thing? “For starters, how do you—what did you call it—jump through time?”

  “You don’t go for the easy questions, do you?” He chuckled. “Time jumping is… complicated. I don’t know how to explain it, not in a way anyone would understand. Can I think about that for a little while, and you ask me something else?”

  “Fine… if you can travel anywhere in time, why can’t you just go back to before your mother made the bargain with the witch and stop her?”

  He shrugged. “Because we can’t jump into a time where we already exist.”

  I shook my head as another wave of confusion shot through me. “What does that mean?”

  Maddox took my hand and traced the lines in my palm, the way he’d done with his. “It’s complicated, but basically, Laith and I existed in 1654. We weren’t born yet, but we existed. If we tried to jump into that time while our younger selves were there, the jump wouldn’t go through. Essentially, time would reject us.”

  “Time would reject you?” I blinked at him, completely stunned by what I was hearing.

  He didn’t explain. He simply nodded. “Now, if we try to jump into a time we’ve already been to, but maybe didn’t stay very long, we’d go into what I call a holding pattern. Sort of like being stuck between floors in an elevator. We’d have to wait until we weren’t there anymore to jump in. So when we’re talking about the time before we initially jumped, there would never be that opening. We existed there until early autumn of 1675 when we made our first jump, so we can never go back to any time before that.”

  “So there can never be two of either of you in one place?”

  “Exactly. So if I wanted to, say… go to June of 1855, but back in 1743 I made a jump there from the fifteenth until the twenty-third—this actually happened, so I’m using that example—the jump would put me in the elevator until the other me jumped out again.”

  My head spun with the intricacies. “So that’s what you meant when you said you were stuck in an elevator?”

  “Yes. When I got home Sunday morning, Laith was waiting for me. He grabbed me and jumped to a place I’d already been. I got caught in the elevator and had to wait.”

  “But Laith?”

  “He’d never been there, so he went straight in and was able to come straight out again. Well, after the recharge period, but that’s another story.”

  “You could potentially be trapped for years if you forgot you’d already jumped into the same place?”

  He laughed. “No, not years. Time is a giant temporal fold, so it happens all at once. And time doesn’t move at the same pace inside that imaginary elevator. Waiting for a particular time slot to open up could take as little as a few hours or as long as a few weeks. It all depends on how long I was there the first time. So to answer your original question, it wouldn’t work to jump into 1654 before my mother went to the witch. I’d either end up right back where I was, or I’d get rerouted to another time.”

  Mind. Blown.

  “At the risk of sounding like a broken record, do you realize how crazy this all sounds?”

  He squeezed my hand. “Yeah. I mean, can you imagine what it was like for us? Figuring it out along the way? I had no idea what I was doing. I can only compare it to driving at night without headlights. I was totally flying blind. It took me more than a decade to figure out there was a recharge period. A waiting period before you can jump again. I kept thinking I’d broken time. The first time I jumped, I thought I was permanently trapped in the middle of the French Revolution. Then I realized I just had to wait to recharge. Still, it was years of sleeping in stables and stealing food to survive while I figured everything out.”

  I tried not to think about him having to survive that way. “If it was so horrible, why didn’t you go home?”

  “After everything that happened, going home didn’t seem like an option. There was nothing left for us there. Especially after…” He looked away, and I suspected he was thinking about her again.

  “What happened to her?”

  He swallowed and played dumb. “Who?”

  “The girl with my soul. You never mentioned her name.”

  “Elizabeth. She, uh…” His shoes suddenly became of vital importance again.

  “Did she… die?” I regretted the words the instant I’d spoken them. It was clear he wasn’t ready to talk about her.

  He nodded.

  Sensing his discomfort, I changed the subject, knowing I’d circle back to it later. “You keep saying you have to recharge, but what does that mean?”

  “It means we can’t go from one jump directly into the next. I honestly don’t know why, but I have a theory.”

  “Well?” I motioned for him to continue.

  His mood did a complete one-eighty, reminding me of Josh when the subject of video games came up. “When we travel through time, we’re surrounded by this massive static electric charge—like a bubble of current. Anyone standing too close at the exact moment we jumped would probably even feel it. So I figure this bubble creates a ripple, like when you throw a rock into still water.”

  “And you think you need time for that ripple to smooth out before you can create a new one?” Finally, something I understood.

  “Exactly!” He lit up. “I mean, it’s just a theory, but it makes sense.”

  “Does jumping through time work like it does in the movies? Do you show up crouched down naked in an alley?”

  He laughed. “No, thank God. In fact, we can bring more than just our clothes with us if we’re careful. I started picking up little trinkets from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and stashing them so I could dig them up and sell them to antique dealers in the twentieth. I bought stocks when they were new and sold just before they peaked. I picked up my motorcycle brand new in 1969 and rode it right through time to bring it here.”

  “You’re not only a time traveler, but you’re rich too? I guess I hit the boyfriend lottery, didn’t I?” I didn’t know what else to do but joke about it. He’d lived an amazing life, and I couldn’t imagine him wanting someone as inexperienced as me.

  He smiled. “I have enough to get by without working, if that’s what you’re asking. I even own a house. Once I’d tracked you to Maine, I went back to the seventies and bought the house down the block. It was destined to sit vacant for decades, so I bought it and locked it up tight before jumping here to move in.”

  “I guess you can see tomorrow’s lottery numbers.” The minute the words passed my lips, I felt my cheeks flame. The last thing I wanted was for him to think all I cared about was the money.

  He reached up and coiled a lock of my hair around his fingers. “I could, if I was so inclined. I actually think that’s how Laith gets by. He plays the lottery, bets on sporting events. He likes to live on the edge a bit more than I do.”

  Laith. Just thinking about him opened up a new line of questioning. “Can you tell me how Laith enters my dreams?”

  He nodded. “Aside from the obvious drawbacks of having your brother haunt your girlfriend, it’s actually pretty cool. While we’re in that imaginary elevator, we can break through time by entering into your dreams—or occasionally your subconscious. I don’t think it always works, but it’s a way to communicate when we can’t get to you.”

  “You said my dreams. Just mine?”

  “Just yours or each other’s. We all share a soul connection.” He grinned. “I sat in on a lecture back in the 1970s—seventy-four, I think—where the professor was talking about Plato’s theory on soul mates. But he called them ‘twin flames.’ And though I have to say, I think he was totally off the mark where the original material was concerned, he had his own little theory about twin flames being able to reach out over space and time to connect with each other. It was all very New Age. The guy was probably dropping acid—it was the seventies, after all—but I think he might have been onto something. And I kind of like the term ‘twin flames.’ It seems slightly more apropos than simply ‘soul mates.’”

  “So this, whatever it is…” I waved my hand as I struggled for the words. “This soul-mate connection, twin-flame mumbo jumbo, is real? You’re not just making up some elaborate story to draw me into some kinky relationship with the two of you? You know, polyamorous couplings, ménage à trois, the stuff of Penthouse Magazine… ”