the burn of pain. The room dissolved into white light and blood.
Finally, Mac said, “Enough.”
Ash struggled to stay conscious. He couldn’t see past the blood in his eyes. His breath was uneven, his heartbeat sputtering.
Crouching, Mac pulled a wad of paper napkins from his pocket and began cleaning the blood from Ash’s face.
“Hey, look, I’m sorry I had to do that,” he said conversationally. “But you see where I’m coming from, right? You came into my club, waved a gun around, demanded things. I’m respected around these parts, son. I can’t let you get away with that.”
Ash closed his eyes. Well, he closed one of them. The right one was already swollen shut.
“You should consider yourself lucky.” A grunt, and Mac wiped the blood from Ash’s eye with his thumb. “If you were anyone else, I’d have shot you back at the docks and been done with it.”
“Do you expect me to thank you?” Ash laughed, spitting up blood.
Mac frowned, and Ash got the feeling he didn’t have a lot of experience with sarcasm.
“Why keep me alive at all?” Ash choked out. “You’re already working with the Black Cirkus, and they’re the ones with the time machine. You don’t need me.”
Mac studied him, the tip of his tongue peeking out from between his lips.
“Let me tell you a story,” he said after a moment. “About a month ago, my contact with the Center offered me a boatload of money if I could get them a time machine.” A shrug. “I guess their fancy scientists still haven’t been able to figure it out. Between you and me, I’d never given much thought to time travel. But, well, this amount of money could’ve had me sitting pretty for years. I would’ve been able to expand my little operation, take over Aurora, live like a king.”
Mac grinned, revealing nicotine-stained teeth. “It was enough to start me wondering whether this place was even worth it. Twice in recent memory, an earthquake has come damn close to wiping New Seattle off the map. I had to ask myself: Did I really want to build my empire without some sort of guarantee that it wouldn’t happen again?”
Ash blinked at him, his eyelashes still thick with blood. “That’s why you’re suddenly so interested in time travel? You want to know whether an earthquake’s going to destroy your whorehouses?”
Mac held out his palms: What do you expect? “What can I say? I like to think ahead. And, when I got to the future, I saw that I had a pretty good reason to be worried. This next earthquake isn’t just wiping out the city, it’s wiping out everything, the whole coast. Anyone still living out here is gonna die.”
For a moment Ash couldn’t hear anything over the blood pounding in his ears.
Anyone still living out here is gonna die.
It was just as they’d feared. The next earthquake was going to kill them all.
“I’m not keeping you alive out of the goodness of my heart,” Mac said. “I have a feeling that Roman and Quinn aren’t going to play nice once they find out I took over their precious Black Cirkus. I have a plan to take care of them, don’t you worry about that. But once they’re gone, I’ll need someone else to fly my new time machine.” Mac sniffed. “I’m thinking I’ll go back in time. Use my money to set up a tech company in Seattle in 2015 or play the stock market in 1980. You know, something fun. I just need someone to fly the time machine for me.” He took Ash’s chin in one hand, grinning gleefully. “That’s where you come in.”
Ash swallowed, tasting blood. “I’d rather die than help you,” he said.
Mac shrugged. “That can also be arranged.”
41
Dorothy
“Mac is busy right now. What do you need?”
Dorothy had been standing in the hallway with her back to the hotel room door, studying a water spot on the wallpaper—and she turned around at the voice. Eliza was leaning head and shoulders into the hallway, the door held close behind her.
Dorothy glanced from the girl’s face to the new cloak hanging from her shoulders to the shiny boots on her feet. “Those are new,” she said, shocked.
Eliza grinned. “Mac asked me to do him a favor.”
“You’re working for Mac now?” Roman asked.
“Don’t look so surprised. You were the one who gave me the idea,” Eliza said innocently. “Or don’t you remember our conversation back at the Dead Rabbit?”
A choked scream issued from inside the hotel room.