Glassford Girl: Boxed Set (Complete Series) (Time Jumper Series) Read online

  The tingle in Emily’s spine crept up to her shoulder blades, confirming what she already knew—the countdown had started.

  “Shhhhh,” she said, covering Junie’s mouth with her hand. “I hear voices outside.”

  “Are they coming in?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t sense them. The walls must be blocking.”

  They listened. There were muffled voices just outside the door, at the top of the stairs where the dumpster had hid their escape route. Emily’s pulse started to pound even more, thumping in her eardrums. The tingly feeling shot up to her neck. She took a deep breath, trying to focus her thoughts away from the ticking bomb inside of her. She had to do something with Junie, and fast. She only had minutes.

  “We have to get out of here,” she whispered. “We can sneak out through the upstairs—it’s a restaurant, and they close early. I doubt anyone is there this late, but we’ll probably set off the alarm when we leave.”

  “Alarm?”

  “Do you remember my friend Parker that I told you about? The busboy?”

  She nodded.

  “He disabled the sensors on the back door so I can sleep here whenever it’s raining, or when he leaves food out for me. Nobody ever comes down here except him when he takes the trash out, so he leaves food for me whenever his boss leaves early. I never go beyond this basement. That’s our deal. But we don’t have a choice this time. Just stick close and we’ll be fine. If I run, you run. Got it?”

  Junie’s eyes widened. She looked scared, but she nodded.

  They got up and made their way across the room as shouting rang out from the alley above. They froze. Emily heard a police siren chirp twice, then an amplified voice that sounded like it was coming over a loudspeaker. Shit. Cops. Definitely cops.

  Thump! Thump! Thump!

  “The Locos are trying to kick the door in!” Junie said.

  Thump! Thump! Crack! The door at the top of the stairs to the alley slammed open, and one of the West Siders came tumbling down head over heels. He fell through the door at the bottom and landed on his side in a heap, just inside the entrance of the storeroom. His eyes were closed and his head was bloody. He started to moan.

  Junie screamed.

  Emily covered her mouth.

  “Flaco?” a Latino voice called out from the top of the stairs. “Flaco? You okay?

  Emily held a finger to her mouth, reminding Junie to be quiet.

  The same voice spoke again. “Send Derek down to check.” A few moments later, footsteps pounded the wooden steps, getting louder with each beat.

  “Run!” Emily whispered in Junie’s ear, shoving Junie across the room toward the door that led to the kitchen upstairs. Junie opened the door and ran up the steps. Emily was about to follow her friend, but stopped when she heard another person breathing heavily behind her. Something told her to turn and look at him. It felt like curiosity, but it was more than that.

  He was young—too young. Maybe a little younger than she. The red glow of the exit sign made it difficult to be sure, but his spiked hair looked to be jet-black, with triangle sections cut down to the scalp above his ears. His eyes were either blue or green. She hoped blue. Tattoos covered both of his forearms like a sleeve, and a single gold earring hung down below his left ear. She didn’t recognize its unique shape—maybe it was a symbol, or something that he’d made. He was two inches taller than she, with high cheekbones that perfectly offset his narrow, aquiline nose and full lips.

  Emily couldn’t help herself. She stared into the eyes of the pretty boy. A thought came unbidden into her mind: he’s way too cute to be part of this.

  “Damn girl, you’re smokin’,” he said, with a voice much lower than she had expected. His eyes moved down across her figure, then back up.

  She smiled when he made eye contact with her again, sensing that he wasn’t going to shoot. He was calm and quiet on the inside. There was no malice in his thoughts, just a growing feeling of desire that excited her.

  He lowered his gun.

  She relaxed.

  Then a voice came flooding down the stairs, as did more footsteps, breaking the calm. “Derek?”

  Derek bolted across the room at her. Emily came to her senses and lashed out with her right foot, just like Master Liu had taught her. The lightning-fast front kick struck him in the groin and he fell back to the doorway and landed on top of Flaco, temporarily blocking access for the rest of their crew.

  Emily ran upstairs and shut the door behind her, jamming a metal garbage can under the doorknob to slow the gang down.

  Junie stepped out of the shadows in the dimly lit kitchen. She was holding a stainless steel skillet cocked by her ear, ready to brain whoever came up the steps.

  “It’s me!” Emily hissed, taking the weapon from her friend. She put it on the counter next to the prep station. “Hurry, out the front. This way.”

  She ran past Junie through the double swing doors where the dining room of the elegant restaurant was waiting. Lights from the street cast shadows across the empty chairs, wooden tables, and the bubbling lobster tank. The tables were covered with white tablecloths and folded linen napkins, wineglasses, and elegant cutlery. The floor was spotless and shiny, and there was a fresh scent of pine in the air.

  Emily felt a tremor rise up through her body. What had begun as a tingle in her spine was now an overwhelming, full-body sensation. She felt electrified and alive, like she always did right before a jump, meaning that her senses had now been supercharged, allowing her to have visions of the immediate future. Normally, she would use this ability to know where to hide until the jump came and she could disappear. But this time, she couldn’t just use her abilities to protect herself. She had to make sure Junie would be okay before she vanished.

  She knew that another thug was about to start kicking at the door to the kitchen behind her, and then bolt through it and find his way into the dining area, where he’d start shooting his machine gun. She could sense his plans, and felt the anger boiling inside his chest. It wasn’t the pretty boy that she’d kicked in the basement. This one was itching to kill.

  She waited a few seconds for what she knew would come next. It did—the extra strength that hard-charged her muscles, allowing her to become stronger and faster, but only for a short time. It would fade from her body the moment time began to slow down, which was the last step in the process right before the jump.

  She scooped Junie in her arms like a rag doll, ran across the dining room in a flash, and dove over a low wall that separated the foyer from the dining room. Junie sat in a ball, clutching the backpack to her chest, holding onto it for dear life.

  “You know they don’t serve peanut butter in a place like this,” Junie mumbled.

  “What?”

  “My mom used to be a hostess, so I know. Your friend must have brought it from home. I think he likes you.”

  She took Junie’s head in her hands and looked her in the eyes. “Listen to me. We don’t have much time. As soon as I’m gone, wait for the glass to break on the front window. Then go through it and run outside. Hide the backpack somewhere safe and go find the cops.”

  “Cops? We don’t like cops!”

  “This time we do. They’ll protect you. They’re holding back now, but they’ll be here in a few minutes.”

  “When do I run, again?”

  “After I’m gone, you’ll hear gunfire, but don’t be afraid. The bullets won’t be coming at you. A man will scream, and then glass will break. That’s when you run. After the glass breaks. Got it?”

  Junie gulped as tears began to flow, but she seemed to pull it together. She sniffed and nodded. “Thank you, Em.”

  “You should use a tablecloth so you don’t get cut,” she said, helping Junie put her backpack on.

  “When will I see you again?”

  “It might take me a while, but I’ll find you. Now cover your ears, and don’t scream when you hear gunshots. He won’t be aiming at you. Just wait for the glass.”

/>   Emily heard the double doors swing open and smash against the walls on either side of them.

  Emily took a breath and steadied herself for what she was about to do. The closer she got to a jump, the more it happened: time got slow and she got fast, but only for about fifteen seconds of her time immediately preceding a jump.

  She felt the blue energy rise up through her body, telling her that it was time to act.

  She sprang over the wall and ran at the gunman in a cloud of blue. She could see three bullets just leaving his gun, hanging in midair, with smoke trails behind them. She touched the bottom of each bullet with her finger as she zipped past them, then grabbed the wrist on the man’s gun hand and added a twisting force to it.

  She turned her attention to the second villain who had been frozen in time, stepping through the double swing doors. There was another man in the kitchen behind him, but she didn’t see the pretty boy, Derek, anywhere. She grabbed the second man’s shoulders and spun him around so that his gun was facing the third man, who was not far behind. She gently touched the trigger finger of the second gunman, then moved to the third Loco and did the same with his trigger finger.

  She dashed out of the kitchen and into the dining room, where she applied pressure to the underside of a table built to seat eight people, calculating the trajectory of its flight in her head.

  She knelt on the ground, then curled herself into the fetal position and waited for the last second of the countdown to tick by. It did.

  The jump pain hit as her body began to sizzle with blue lines of energy, like tiny lightning bolts crisscrossing her skin. A searing bolt of agony shot from the back of her skull to the center of her forehead, just as she was consumed by the blue fire and vanished.

  * * *

  Junie heard things happen just as Emily had described: first there were three shots of gunfire that tore through the ceiling panels above her, then a man screaming in pain, then more gunshots, then more screaming, then glass breaking, and a second after that, the alarm system began to wail.

  She took a deep breath and ran to the front window, seeing a man on his knees holding his wrist, and two bodies a little further back lying on the floor, bleeding from their chests. She snatched a tablecloth, stepped on the wooden chair closest to the broken window, spread the tablecloth over the bottom of the frame, and climbed out. She heard sirens coming from the right, but she decided to go left instead, running as fast as her feet could take her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  August 11, 2013

  4:23 a.m.

  Emily woke up after her time jump from the restaurant, feeling as though her entire body had been squeezed through a sausage press and stuck in an oven. Every inch of her skin was burning from the inside out, and her bones ached. The pressure inside her head was intense, making her skull feel every thunderous beat of her racing pulse. She licked her lips and tried to swallow, but there was no saliva to force it down. A twinge of pain hit her stomach, highlighting the endless flip-flops going on inside of it. She wanted to vomit, but didn’t. She held it together, somehow.

  The aroma of freshly turned soil, pine needles, and her own sweat filled her nostrils. The time jumps were always accompanied by a massive adrenaline dump, which left her completely spent, as if she’d just run a marathon. Jumps also left her naked. She’d learned quickly that the blue fire consumed whatever clothes she was wearing and sent only organic, living matter through the time travel process, adding to the misery of it all.

  Then there was the issue of her spotty, irregular period that she assumed was caused by the genetic changes taking place inside her body. Only twice had she been in the middle of it when a time jump occurred, but somehow jumping through time put an end to the menstrual flow. This revelation confirmed what she’d already suspected: time travel was the result of a biological transformation process and not a technical achievement. On those rare occasions when she needed to deal with it during normal time, most of the homeless shelters provided the necessary hygiene products.

  She felt hard-packed dirt and pebbles digging into her side, and her head was resting on something rough and scratchy. She took a couple of slow, deep breaths, consciously trying to lower her heart rate using the breathing control exercises Master Liu had taught her years ago in a previous time period. She’d learned the hard way that it’s best not to rush herself right after a jump. Never sit up or try to walk right away. Not if she wanted to avoid the puking and a day-long migraine.

  Breathe, center your thoughts, get your bearings, and go from there.

  One step at a time.

  She peeled her eyes open, rolled to her back, let her arms flop out to her side, and enjoyed the beauty of the night sky, knowing that it would take time to let her body acclimate. Far above the pink glow of the city lights, thousands of stars twinkled in a rhythmic pattern, partially obscured by the low-hanging branches of an evergreen tree. Had she come out in another park? The odds of that were low, with stellar drift involved in the equation, constantly changing the destination point of each jump. However, her last couple of jumps had been different than all those that had come before. Each of the recent jumps featured shorter times forward and smaller distances covered, as if the jump process was winding down—heading for some type of fundamental change. But what? The pain was getting worse, too, which told her that as the jumps got shorter, the pain escalates in reverse proportion to the lessor time traveled forward.

  The fact that she had landed at night was good, though. Not just because it protected her from the blistering daytime heat of Arizona, but because it’s much easier to come out unnoticed under the cover of darkness, especially when you’re naked. She closed her eyes and slowed her breathing, focusing on each thump of her heartbeat. She knew this would help taper the pain and get her moving sooner.

  Emily had been jumping for almost two years, in her timeline of days. For the rest of humanity—for the normal people—it had been decades. The first jump had been terrifying—a bad ending to an even worse three days that ultimately took her mom, her childhood, her friends, and her future away. One moment she’d been living the relatively normal life of a teenager in high school, then, in a flash of light on the eve of Easter in 1985, it was all taken away.

  When it first happened, she’d jumped two and a half years forward in time. She woke up in the middle of the day, naked, scared, and alone, curled in a ball in the parking lot at the edge of Metrocenter; a bustling shopping mall in central Phoenix. Now that same shopping center was a ghost town, covered in gang signs painted on its cracked, aging walls—nothing more than a distant memory for those wide-eyed investors who’d built the place.

  She’d been through fifteen excruciating jumps, covering almost thirty years of calendar time for the normals. She was an unwitting expert, memorizing every detail of the process and every nuance of pain. The process started out predicable, like clockwork. She could bank on the pre-jump process and its countdown, knowing the order and timing of each step exactly. But now it was changing, leaving her to rewrite the protocols she’d grown to depend on in order to keep some level of sanity in her existence. Granted, none of this was something that she wanted to learn, but she had no choice. Not if she wanted to survive another day.

  Her mind drifted past the pain as she lay still, thinking of the first time that she had come out of a time jump.

  * * *

  October 11, 1987

  2:41 p.m.

  Emily woke from her first jump in a daze. She had no idea what just happened. She was lying on her right side, feeling dozens of sharp objects digging into her body, and dizzying pressure all around her. Her skin on the left side was cooking. She was incredibly thirsty and she smelled—tar. Tar?

  The previous three days had been something out of an episode of the Twilight Zone. The nightmare had started on Easter Sunday, when she and her mom were walking to midnight Mass at their local church, and then—she could barely bring herself to say it—abduction, torture, pain—her life twist
ed inside out and sideways.

  “Hey, kid, you all right?” A male voice penetrated her mental fog, and she felt something kicking at her ribs. A foot. Someone was nudging her in the ribs with their booted toe.

  She opened her bleary eyes and saw a spider crawling up the base of a small tree that had been planted only a few inches from her face. Beyond that was a concrete border and the silhouette of a man. The sun was blazing behind him, but she knew by the silhouette that he was in some kind of uniform. A cop?

  “I . . .” she said with a weak, trembling voice. “I don’t know . . .” She tried to move, but her muscles wouldn’t react.

  “You need help?”

  She hadn’t gathered enough strength to answer.

  “Listen, I don’t know what’s going on here, but you can’t sleep here. Not in the parking lot. Not without clothes. There are laws, young lady, and the sun is going to burn you to a crisp.”

  Emily looked at her body and discovered that she was, in fact, naked. Not a stitch of clothes. The revelation sent a charge of adrenaline into her system. She squealed, sat upright, threw up, then hugged her knees to her chest. She looked around, trying to gain control of her senses. It took a minute, but it worked.

  She was in a six-foot-wide landscaped area with a concrete border around it. Inside of it was a tree, a neatly-trimmed bush with red berries on it, a layer of pink-colored rock, a smattering of gum wrappers, a crushed soda can, and a few cigarette butts. Beyond that, there was an acre of black asphalt with painted lines stretching all the way to a multi-story building that was painted in a southwestern theme. There was a small collection of parked cars near the building, where a crew of men with ladders and a crane were lifting a sign off of the building. It said Falconio Fashions. Her eyes were stinging, making it difficult to focus for more than a few seconds. She got to her feet with wobbly knees. She threw up again, and her head started to ache.