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“Oh, come on! I’ve been to school, same as you.”
“Yeah, sure!” The words were just spilling out of me. “If you’ve been trained for your life as a time traveler only half as thoroughly as Charlotte, then you’ve had no time to make any friends at all, and your opinion of what you call average girls comes from observations you made when you were standing about the school yard alone. Or are you telling me that the other kids at your school thought your hobbies, like Latin, dancing the gavotte, and driving horse-drawn carriages, were really cool?”
Instead of being insulted, Gideon looked amused. “You left out playing the violin.” He leaned back and crossed his arms.
“The violin? Really?” My anger had gone away again as fast as it had come over me. Playing the violin! Honestly!
“At least you have a bit of color back in your face. You looked as pale as Miro Rakoczy.”
Definitely. Rakoczy. “How do you spell his name?”
“R-a-k-o-c-z-y,” said Gideon. “Why?”
“I want to Google him.”
“Oh, did you fancy him so much?”
“Fancy him? He’s a vampire,” I said. “He comes from Transylvania.”
“He does come from Transylvania, but that doesn’t make him a vampire.”
“How do you know?”
“Because there are no such things as vampires, Gwyneth.”
“Oh, no? If there are time machines, why wouldn’t there be vampires too? Ever looked into his eyes? They’re like black holes.”
“That comes of drinking belladonna. He’s experimenting with it,” said Gideon. “A plant poison said to expand the consciousness.”
“How do you know that?”
“It says so in The Annals of the Guardians. In their pages, Rakoczy is known as the Black Leopard. He saved the count from two assassination attempts. He’s very strong and extremely skilled with weapons.”
“Who wanted to kill the count?”
Gideon shrugged. “A man like that has many enemies.”
“I can see why!” I said. “But I kind of get the impression that he can look after himself.”
“Oh, he certainly can,” agreed Gideon.
I wondered whether I ought to tell him what the count had done, but I decided not to. Gideon wasn’t just a polite acquaintance—the way it looked to me, he and the count were bosom buddies.
Trust no one.
“You really traveled to see all those people in the past and take blood from them?” I asked instead.
Gideon nodded. “Counting you and me, eight of the twelve time travelers have now been read into the chronograph again. I’ll find the other four, too.”
I remembered what the count had said and asked, “How can you have traveled from London to Paris and Brussels? I thought the length of time we can spend in the past was limited to a few hours.”
“Four hours, to be precise,” said Gideon.
“You couldn’t possibly get from London to Paris in four hours back then, let alone with spare time to dance the gavotte and collect a drop of blood from someone.”
“Quite right. So we traveled to Paris with the chronograph first,” said Gideon. “And then I went to Brussels, Milan, and Bath on separate occasions. I was able to track down the others in London.”
“I see.”
