Sword in the Stars (Once & Future #2) - Cori McCarthy Page 0,116

into his waiting arms. “I feel a sudden, intense need to make out with you.”

Merlin felt a smile breaking through, bright as the glint of Ketchan sun. “Righting the wrongs of the past again, are we?”

“Something like that,” Val said, pulling him close. Suddenly Merlin was glad they’d brought new lamps into the library, because they made it easy to see the dramatic dips in Val’s smile, the dark starburst of lashes above his amber-brown eyes.

Their lips touched, and just as Merlin left the world behind, Val pulled back and pointed at the dust motes that had stopped falling halfway to the floor, the curtains that were no longer rustling in the breeze.

“Kai,” Val whispered. “You froze the universe again.”

“That does seem to happen when we kiss.”

They pushed toward each other, slower this time, and to be honest Merlin didn’t mind if they altered the fabric of reality with how good this felt. Maybe reality could do with some altering. At their sides, their hands swirled around each other and then locked. They kissed for so long he couldn’t tell if it was measured in minutes or hours. When they eventually pulled apart, because the universe rudely had to keep existing, Merlin knew they would be back at it soon enough.

Finally, a cycle worth getting caught up in.

Merlin didn’t ask Val to come with him to the cave where Error was hidden, for obvious reasons. The empty sandstone loomed around him, the ship sitting idle since its dramatic entrance in the battle of CamelotTM.

Merlin had an idea. A gift for Ari and Gwen. It was their three-year anniversary, and he figured that their love child was on the hook for a top-notch present after all they’d been through.

It was going to take a great deal of magic. The first step in the plan was to page through the past until he found the right moment to steal a few specific items. But when he opened a portal, that wasn’t where his feet and his whims had carried him.

He emerged into a small home on Ketch. He padded down the hall and peeked through an open archway into the living room, where Gwen was sitting with her feet tucked up on a bright couch. Ari was on the floor, slashing around a foam sword.

They were both older, Ari covered in tattoos and Gwen’s curves back at full strength. They were laughing, waiting. Ari held out the sword, paused, and then a tiny girl burst into the room on the shoulders of a slightly older Merlin. She held Kairos aloft, her little hands just big enough to clutch the hilt.

“Do you have that, baby?” Gwen asked, leaping up to help her. “It’s heavy. And sharp.”

“She’s got it,” Ari said, showing her how to hold it, and then sliding seamlessly into the role of a knight in the arena. Merlin—thirties Merlin—roared and steered the girl forward.

Gwen stood up on the couch just as the girl’s hold on the sword wilted and shouted, in a plummy royal tone, “Avalon is the winner! Ari comes in a close second! Now the queen says it’s time to feast!”

“Mama! Queen Mama! Kai Dwagon!”

Slightly older Merlin roared once more, politely, and put her down as Ari grabbed the sword in a bit of seamless family choreography. Avalon rumbled into the kitchen unexpectedly, caught sight of Merlin, and shouted, “The ’nother dragon!”

Merlin slipped out of the future, and back into the cave. This wasn’t the first time he’d checked up on his soon-to-be sister. They were still ten years away from her arrival, and sometimes it was hard to wait. Avalon was too perfect, and Merlin liked knowing that Gwen and Ari would get the baby that he’d never go back to being for them.

But this moment wasn’t his gift to them. Some truths people had to come to in their own time. After all, you couldn’t just tell someone they were going to have another magical baby. Not that he’d seen her do magic yet, exactly. But she could pick up the sword. And her name was Avalon.

“Back to the real plan,” Merlin said crisply. He closed his eyes, cast his mind outward and hummed, looking for just the right time to steal from the past.

“Not stealing,” he corrected himself. “Borrowing.”

Merlin had put blindfolds on both of them. Ari managed to get hers pushed up so that she could see a sliver below the bottom, a great shot of her boots, but then Gwen elbowed her until she