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“Charlotte’s afraid of heights,” I explained. “I knew she’d never come up to the roof because of her vertigo.” I took the heavy bundle out of the chimney, balancing it carefully in my arms.
Gideon jumped up. “Don’t drop it!” he said nervously. “Please!”
“Don’t worry!” I had to laugh at his horrified expression. “Look, even standing on one leg I can—”
Gideon let out what sounded like a tiny whimper. “This is no joking matter, Gwenny,” he gasped. Obviously all that instruction in the mysteries had gone deeper than I thought. He took the bundle from my arms and cradled it like a baby. “Is that really…,” he began.
I felt a cold draft of air behind us. “No, dummy,” crowed Xemerius, putting his head through the hatch. “It’s an old cheese that Gwyneth keeps up here in case she feels peckish in the middle of the night.”
I rolled my eyes and signed to him to go away, which to my surprise, he did. I suppose Tinker Bell was so exciting that he had to go back to it.
Meanwhile, Gideon had put the chronograph down on the roof, and now he began carefully unwrapping it.
“Did you know that Charlotte was phoning us about every ten minutes, trying to convince us that you had this chronograph? In the end, she even got on Marley’s nerves.”
“What a shame,” I said. “And the two of them might have been made for each other.”
Gideon nodded. Then he removed the last of the wrappings and audibly took a deep breath.
I carefully stroked the shiny, polished wood. “There it is, then.”
Gideon said nothing for a moment. For more than a moment, to tell you the truth.
“Gideon?” I finally asked uncertainly. Lesley had begged me to wait a few days longer, until we could be sure that he was really to be trusted, but I’d dismissed the idea out of hand.
“I simply didn’t believe it,” Gideon finally whispered. “I didn’t for a second believe Charlotte.” He looked at me, and his eyes were dark in this light. “Do you realize what would happen if anyone here knew about this?”
I didn’t bother to point out that quite a number of people did know about it already. Maybe it was just because all of a sudden Gideon seemed so bewildered, but I was suddenly afraid. “Are we really going through with the plan?” I asked. I had a queasy sensation inside me, and this time, it was nothing to do with the beginning of a journey through time.
It was one thing for my grandfather to read my blood into the chronograph. What we were about to do now was something else again. We’d be closing the Circle of Blood, and there was no way we could foresee the consequences. To put it in as positive a way as possible.
My memory went through all those horrible rhyming prophesies with lines ending death and last breath, and dredged up a few more rhyming slain and pain. The fact that I was apparently immortal was no consolation whatsoever.
Oddly enough, it seemed to be my own uncertainty that brought Gideon back to his normal self. “Are we going through with it?” He leaned forward and dropped a little kiss on my nose. “Do you mean that seriously?” He stripped off his jacket and took the loot we’d lifted from Dr. White’s room out of the backpack. “Okay, here goes.”
First he put an elastic band around his left upper arm and tightened it. Then he removed a syringe from its sterile plastic pack and grinned at me. “Nurse?” he said in commanding tones. “Flashlight!”
I made a face. “That’s one way to do it, of course,” I replied, shining the beam of the flashlight on the inside of his elbow. “Typical medical student!”
“Do I hear a touch of scorn in your voice?” Gideon cast me an amused glance. “How did you do it, then?”
“With a Japanese vegetable knife!” I said, a little boastfully. “And Grandpa caught the blood in a teacup.”
“Ah, I see. That cut on your forearm.” All of a sudden, he didn’t sound amused at all. He plunged the needle of the syringe into his skin, and blood began flowing into the cannula at the other end of it.
“Are you sure you know exactly what you have to do?” I asked, jerking my chin at the chronograph. “That thing has so many different flaps and little compartments, you could easily turn the wrong cogwheel—”
“Chronograph Studies is one of the exams you have to pass to become an adept, and I did all that ages ago.” Gideon handed me the syringe with the blood in it and undid the elastic band on his arm.
“Makes me wonder how you had any leisure time left to watch masterpieces of the silver screen like Tinker Bell.”
Gideon shook his head. “A little more respect would do no harm. Give me that cannula. Now, turn the flashlight on the chronograph. Yes, that’s it.”
“And the occasional please and thank you would do no harm either,” I remarked, while Gideon began dripping his blood into the chronograph. Unlike Lucas, he did it with hands that didn’t shake in the least. Maybe he’d make a good surgeon someday.
I was biting my lower lip in excitement.
“Three drops here, under the head of the lion,” Gideon murmured, concentrating hard. “Then to turn this cogwheel and switch the lever over. There we are.” He lowered the cannula, and I switched off the flashlight in a reflex action.
