Kiss Across Chains (Kiss Across Time Series) Read online

  Kiss Across Chains

  by

  Tracy Cooper-Posey

  The

  Kiss Across Time Series

  Book III

  About Kiss Across Chains

  When dying becomes an act of love.

  It is four years since Taylor and Brody almost lost Veris during the First Crusade. Now they know how to control time jumps, they have settled into a very nearly perfect, nearly human life, raising their daughter Marit.

  When Brody defies Queen Tira to protect Marit, the three of them jump back three days in time to collect evidence the queen set up Brody for a drug bust in retribution. The jump sends them back to Brody’s personal nightmare: Fifth century Constantinople.

  While Brody survives as a flogged slave, Taylor masquerades as the wife of an aristocrat and searches for Brody to release him. They must wait for Veris to find them before jumping home and Taylor watches each brutal chariot race, wondering if this will be Brody’s last. Brody once died in the Hippodrome and he is human this time, too….

  Contents

  Front Page

  Title Page

  ___

  Contents

  ___

  Author Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  ___

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  ___

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ___

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  Copyright Information

  Author Note

  In Sixth Century Constantinople, the chariot races held such power over the city and its citizens, it influenced the military, politics and religion. The Emperor himself was drawn into the eternal question of whether the Greens (Prásinoi) or Blues (Vénetoi) would win.

  Chariot races became the source of cheating, bribes, curses, mechanical tampering, gang warfare, street violence and murder until they finally culminated in 532 AD in five days of riots and burning, known as the Nika riots, when the Blues and the Greens worked together in a failed attempt to usurp the emperor himself.

  Chariot racing fell into decline after the riots, never again to achieve the huge popularity and influence it had held for the centuries since Greece and Rome had pushed it to the fore.

  But the Nika riots don’t take place until forty-three years after the events in this book.

  Chapter One

  For eight years Taylor overlooked the fact that Veris and Brody were not absolutely immortal. A near-perfect human life kept getting in the way. On their daughter Marit’s third birthday, though, death walked through the door. Taylor didn’t recognize because it arrived by limousine.

  Alexander was bouncing the copper-headed, smoky-eyed, slender and bubbly Marit on his knee while Brody cut up her barbecued lamb chop. Taylor ate her meal before it went cold. Veris scraped the barbecue down. The swimming pool behind the safety fence lapped peacefully at the brickwork, already glowing eerily blue with the underwater lights.

  Around the deck, toys and bikes lay scattered like flotsam.

  The sun was setting over the hills in a spectacular range of reds, golds and pinks, promising more heat tomorrow. It was a rare hot day in early December, a warm snap when it was nice enough to sit outside and soak up the sun. At this time of year, the sun didn’t blaze and sizzle, which would have made it too uncomfortable for the non-humans around the table, as it would have in mid-summer.

  Domestic sounds and sights. A perfectly normal family if one overlooked the fact that Marit had two fathers and neither of them was human.

  Veris put the barbecue tools away, then sat on the bench next to Taylor and pushed her champagne glass toward her. She swallowed her mouthful and took a sip then turned her head toward him for a kiss. He was smiling as he ran the tip of his tongue over her lips before plunging it inside and making her breath hitch. “I love you, Mrs. Gallagher-Gerhardsson,” he murmured against her lips.

  “Back at you, Väinämöinen,” she said in Norse.

  “Old Norse sounds like such a tongue twister,” Alexander observed clinically, wiping off Marit’s chin with the damp cloth always kept close by for such occasions. “I wouldn’t want to have to learn it without the advantage of acquiring it as you do, Taylor, when you arrive in the appropriate time and location.”

  Taylor forced her gaze away from the heat and promise in Veris’ eyes to look at Alexander. “I have to work on keeping the language once I get back. It’s not that easy. I have to let some of them go, unfortunately.”

  Brody handed the small fork to Marit. “Here you go. Now try again. They’re smaller pieces this time.”

  Alexander stopped his bouncing so that Marit could eat.

  “Thank you, Daddy,” Marit said happily in old Gaelic, gripping the fork in her fist. She smiled at Brody, showing a row of small, even teeth, then focused on her plate and eating.

  “She’s a replica of you, Veris,” Alex said softly. “For all she has Taylor’s hair and eyes, she looks like you and she has your drive and relentlessness.”

  Brody stroked Marit’s head as she bent over her plate with a gentleness that spoke volumes.

  Alexander let out a breath. “Perhaps you should take her?” he suggested to Brody.

  Brody shook his head. “Unless she is a burden, you’re welcome to keep her for now,” he said.

  Alexander stroked Marit’s hair in an eerie echo of Brody’s movement. “You know I never tire of Marit.”

  “We know,” Veris said.

  Alexander looked up quickly. “I’m sorry. It isn’t resentment. Or envy.”

  “We know that, too,” Brody said. “Or you would not be sitting there.”

  Alexander breathed out. “You see much,” he agreed.

  “As much as you did,” Taylor added. “All those years ago.”

  Alexander smiled. “I also see that Veris neatly sidetracked the conversation by putting a lamb chop in front of Marit and creating chaos.”

  Veris grinned. “Guilty as charged.” He dipped his finger into Taylor’s champagne glass and licked it. “It’s not a subject we’re used to talking about openly, Alex. And the little one absorbs way too much.”

  Alexander looked down at Marit on his knee. “How good is her Arabic?” he said, speaking in Arabic.

  “Why are you changing languages again?” Marit asked, looking up at him with her big dark grey eyes, her mouth liberally daubed with barbecue sauce. She had spoken in Arabic.

  Brody laughed out loud.

  Alexander rolled his eyes, then kissed her forehead, the only part of her he could reach that was clean. “To test my language skills,” he told her in English. “Finish eating. Then we have birthday cake.”

  She grinned at him and went back to eating, content.

  Alexander gave a weak smile at the others. “Open allusion will have to do. You said the first few times you went back, nothing of consequence happened. It wasn’t until you we
nt back for an extended stay that dire consequences occurred. Why?”

  Taylor glanced at Veris. They had explored the facts of their time travelling in depth. Veris had spent hundreds of hours working on the physics theory of what they did and was their resident expert.

  Now Alex was asking why the first few times they had travelled back in time there had been no dire consequences to history. It wasn’t until they had travelled back to the first crusade that they had realized that their time travelling was creating ripples that actually changed history.

  Veris shook his head. “That wasn’t the first time we changed anything,” he said. “The first time was further back. Four-sixty-two,” he added softly.

  Alexander’s eyes widened.

  “How do you think the little one was conceived?” Taylor added.

  Alexander’s mouth rounded into a silent “oh.” Then he added, “But there were times, you said, when nothing happened. The first few times.”

  “We weren’t interacting with anyone from those times,” Brody said. “We were there for a few short moments only, in most cases. We were barely controlling the travelling then. There were a couple of flips that were absolutely in the mind. Personal memory only. The first Taylor and I experienced was one, because that was Camlann.”

  Alexander frowned. “I don’t quite follow.”

  Brody rubbed the back of his neck, looking suddenly uncomfortable. “In my real timeline I was only thirteen when Camlann took place, yet we both flipped back and experienced it as adults and I was a warrior. But in my real time line I was—” He glanced away. “Well, I wasn’t a warrior.”

  Veris straightened up, pushing Taylor’s champagne glass across the wooden table with a damp squeak. “I think that trip was exactly what the queen was talking about. Shared personal memory. Only Brody was sharing something that his father used to talk about all the time. Talk about, sing about, write about. The glory of Arthur’s court. That was what Taylor was at the concert for – to find Arthur’s bard, Inigo Domhnall. They both tapped into the source and that’s what they got, a flip back to Camlann.”

  “Finished!” Marit declared, dropping her fork onto the plate and wriggling onto the deck, ready to take off and run.

  Veris was faster. He caught her around the middle and snagged her up and onto his lap. “First, let’s clean you up, missy.”

  Taylor handed him the damp cloth and he washed her hands and face clean as he continued to talk, even as Marit wriggled and tried to get free. “Then Taylor tried to flip back with me,” Veris continued, not at all distracted by Marit’s squirming. “She’d already been primed on how to flip back from her experience with Brody. So we flipped, but when I thought about Camlann, I was thinking about when I left Norway to join the Saxons to sail to the Hyperborean wastelands and how much I didn’t want to go. So we flipped back to Norway.”

  “I want to go ride,” Marit told Veris. She spoke Old Norse.

  “Let me see your face,” Veris told her, using Norse, too.

  She held up her face for inspection.

  “Hands.”

  She held up her hands.

  “Kiss your mother, then you can go.”

  Marit grinned, kissed Veris, then Taylor, then walked over their laps and leaned over to kiss Brody. Then she jumped to the deck and ran over to a plastic molded tricycle, jumped onto it and pedaled off across the deck.

  All the adults watched her for a moment.

  Alexander stirred and turned back to the table. “I want to learn how you do it,” he said simply.

  They stared at him. Brody snorted. “You’ll have to cut Taylor open if you want that secret. We don’t know how she does it. She just does.”

  Veris drew a circle on the wood with the dregs of Taylor’s champagne. “After witnessing the horrors of our last flip back in time, you really want to risk it yourself?”

  Alexander sat up. “You mean…you’ve not travelled since then? It’s been over three years!”

  “Tiny trips,” Taylor told him. “Now we know how to control the flips. Short trips, where we knew we would not meet anyone. A cottage in the Welsh mountains. A villa in Tuscany. But they’re hardly time travel if you can’t mix with the people. So we just...stopped.” She glanced at Marit, who had already moved on to super-sized Lego building blocks. “We didn’t want to be away from Marit for too long.”

  Alexander laid his hands flat on the table. “I understand the consequences. I want to learn how.”

  “You want children that badly, mo chara?” Brody asked.

  Alexander blew out a breath. “It’s not just children,” he said. “If it were, I could find a wife and adopt dozens of children so badly in need of love and care, the matter would be solved inside months.” He waved a hand in dismissal. “Yes, I would like my own children. There is a difference, but the difference is infinitesimal and beyond dispute, as you well know, Brody.”

  Brody inclined his head.

  Alexander sighed. “I want to dip back into the past again. To sample it.”

  “You have your memories for that,” Veris said sharply. “They’re virtually perfect.”

  “They’re not the same as being there.”

  “Being there will change them,” Veris replied. “Einstein’s theory of relativity doesn’t go on a holiday just because you’ve lived through it once already. You go back there, you stand a real chance of fucking up your own future.” He sat up and forward. “We were dumb lucky. Maybe not—Taylor held us together when Brody and I were going to walk away from each other and screw up all our futures, and our child into the bargain, because we were playing out our lives all over again.” He shook his head. “It’s not worth it, Alex.”

  “Marit isn’t worth it? Taylor isn’t worth it?” Alexander asked softly. “You got both of them because of it.”

  Veris remained silent.

  “He has you there,” Brody said. “Personally, I’d do it all again to be sitting right where I am.”

  “Fuck,” Veris said, with a sigh. He grimaced. “Me, too.” He picked up Taylor’s hand, the one with the split-and-combined engagement ring with the left and right sweeping half spirals of green and blue gems. Now the ring was nestled on either side by a split wedding band. One side was studded with blue gems, the other with green. Veris kissed the back of her hand and sat back again. He looked at Alexander. “Good luck to you, my friend,” he said. “I don’t know how it works, despite years of study. Taylor is the key. That is all I can tell you. Brody and I provide the direction, she provides the...power. Drive.” He shrugged. “Magic. Whatever. If you can find another Taylor, then you can have your time travel.”

  Alexander nodded. He showed no signs of disappointment. “Where there is one, there may be another.”

  “The queen certainly seemed to think so,” Taylor said.

  “She thought it was a mental quirk,” Veris said, with a sneer.

  “She remembered it as a memory sharing,” Taylor reminded him. “But if she had never stepped outside the room she travelled to, she wouldn’t know it was real.”

  Alexander held up his hand, a making-peace signal. “This sounds like an old argument.”

  “It is,” Brody agreed. “Please help me change the subject and get these two off time travel before they hit Einstein and Newtonian physics and before I reach the point of wanting to shoot my own brains out.”

  Alexander laughed.

  Marit ran over to Brody’s side and tugged on his arm. “Someone’s coming. Big cars.”

  Brody swept Marit up into his arms and stood up. “Did you go all the way up to the side fence again, Marit? We told you not to.”

  She nodded. “Lots of cars,” she said urgently, tugging on his arm.

  He frowned. “How many?”

  She held up her hand with all fingers spread.

  Brody exchanged a look with Veris.

  “On a Sunday?” Taylor murmured. “Either she miscounted, or something is happening.”

  “Band business?�
�� Veris suggested, keeping his tone light.

  “There is no business at the moment,” Brody said. “After the tour, we’re all taking a deep breath, perhaps even a permanent one.”

  Mia emerged from the sunroom, the white highlights on her black Chucks glowing in the last of the sunlight. She wore black jeans and a tight black tee-shirt and her hip-length hair was tied back in a leather band. She looked so utterly unlike a cook and maid that sometimes Taylor was caught by surprise when she saw Mia around the house. But there was no mistaking Mia’s efficiency, or her loyalty toward Taylor’s family. Taylor had been happy to find out Mia also held a black belt in at least two different forms of martial arts. She was utterly devoted to Marit and the pair of them spoke Spanish nearly all the time.

  Mia was frowning as she strode over to the table. “There’s some folk in the library, demanding to speak to the three of you,” she said in her husky, had-too-many-cigarettes voice. “I told them it was a family occasion, but they were insistent. I’m sorry.”

  “How many people, Mia?” Veris asked.

  “I couldn’t count them all in the time I had in the room. I got up to eleven before I had to turn and leave.” She grimaced and shifted her feet.

  Brody tilted his head, studying her. “What is it?”

  “They’re vampire,” she said simply.

  Taylor was the only one to react. She drew in a sharp breath. “How long have you known?” she asked.