Time for Eternity Read Online Free PDF

-first century to use Donna’s time machine and come back to prevent herself from becoming vampire. That was what she hated about time travel stories. You couldn’t avoid the inherent circular logic. All that hadn’t seemed to bother Donna. Frankie held to that.
    Frankie hefted her leather bag, tossed a sou to a vendor in return for a bun filled with unknown meat, and struck out into the sultry night, munching on dinner.
    She hurried past cafés where men shouted their political views over the hum of laughing diners, and taverns where others drank their dinner. Paris had never gone to bed early.
    As many times as she had imagined killing Henri, the prospect of actually doing it was much different. She set her lips and hurried over the Pont Neuf across the Seine, striding down the Quai de l’Horloge toward the Marais, her heart pounding. Lord knows why Henri still lived in the Marais. In the seventeenth century it had been the height of fashion, but the aristocracy now lived across the Seine in the Faubourg St. Germain. He was just contrary enough to avoid trends. Or maybe, being so old, he held to tradition. For whatever reason, she would find him in the faded grandeur of the Marais, the only place Madame LaFleur could afford.
    She smelled the smoke. Her heart skipped. An orange glow over the Place Royale told her that she’d arrived on the exact night she joined the wicked duc’s household. Some part of her was relieved. It was perhaps a week before the fatal moment when she had been made vampire. She had time to kill Henri. But was she in time to save Madame LaFleur? She turned into the huge open square. The beautiful façades of the houses across the park were in flames. Or rather one house. She broke into a run, her heavy leather bag banging on her hip. A shouting crowd threw rocks at the blaze not buckets of water.
    She staggered to a halt. Madame LaFleur was already being loaded into a black beetlelike carriage, bars at its windows, by gendarmes of the Committee of Public Safety. She was too late! A woman stood on a box under one of the arches of the covered arcade that ran around the ground floor of the entire square, shouting the crowd into a frenzy. Madame Croûte. Frankie couldn ’t hear the words but she knew the sentiment. Aristocrats were an infection. They must be rooted out lest they poison the Revolution.
    Madame LaFleur was a devout Catholic, in spite of churches and priests being declared illegal. She could never bring herself to enter one of the new Deist churches the government had created. Maybe it was that which brought Madame Croûte and her rabble of sans-culottes, the most rabid of the revolutionaries of the third estate who spied for Robespierre and his committee, to Madame LaFleur’s house.
    Robespierre, first member of the Committee of Public Safety, looked on as the mob pushed over the stone urns on either side of the doorway under the arcade, shouting. A small smile lit his face. Flames flapped from the windows like orange bedsheets snapping in the wind.
    As she approached the scene, she slowed. There had been nothing she could do the first time around and there was no way to change things now. Madame LaFleur’s life was forfeit at the guillotine. It hit her harder than she would have expected. Somehow she thought that two hundred years of experience with the world’s evils would make a single woman’s death hurt less.
    The gaoler’s wagon moved off. That meant that in a moment …
    She turned. Bingo. A carriage with elegant lines and a defiant crest on its doors trotted up the street toward the flames. Four matched black geldings sidled in the harness, made nervous by the smoke. A driver liveried in black and gold stopped the carriage well away from the crowd. A postillion, likewise liveried, jumped down and opened the carriage door.
    Henri stepped out. He stood, surveying the chaos through a quizzing glass, his expression bored and disdainful as always.
    The roaring mob, the crack of