Time for Eternity Read Online Free PDF Page B

flames, the smoke all receded. Frankie stood, transfixed.
    He was even more beautiful than she remembered him. He looked thirty-five or forty though she knew he was centuries older.
    His hair was black—he eschewed powder—and brushed back from his face in a long queue. He wore no wig. Who had need of a wig when you had thick, lustrous hair like that? His eyes were so dark as to almost be black. Their look, as they drifted over the crowd, was as contemptuous as ever. He was tall and powerfully built. He dressed in black, his only nod to the austere fashion of the Revolution. Or maybe he had dressed in black even when the fashion was for wild colors like yellow and magenta. It certainly suited him. His coat fitted his shoulders perfectly. The satin of his breeches hugged his muscled thighs. His cravat and cuffs sported lace though lace was banned. He looked, and was, every inch the aristocrat. How did he manage to flaunt the tyranny of the plebian so openly?
    Perhaps by looking as though he didn’t care.
    She drifted closer to the edge of the crowd, drawn by him. How are you dangerous to me, Henri? Let me count the ways …
    She steeled herself. She must harden her heart to match his. She must commit a sin in the eyes of God and man. She must do unto him before he could do unto her and deprive him of no more than a few months of living that she might live again.
    “What have we here?” he murmured. She heard him clearly with the vampire hearing he had bequeathed her. The curve of his lip was all insouciant condescension. He strolled forward, surveying the crowd of sans-culottes.
    “Monsieur, surely you will help us!”
    Frankie turned at the sound of her own voice. She gasped. There she stood, the she who had been, Françoise Suchet, not Frankie, her face a mask of innocence in distress, a gendarme holding each elbow. It was the face Frankie still saw in the mirror each day, streaked with soot. Her blond hair glowed copper in the red light of the flames licking out the windows above her.
    Frankie knew intellectually she hadn’t changed with all the years, but to know this face was not a mirror image but one that lived two hundred years ago shook her sanity.
    Françoise stretched her arms as far as she could toward Henri in supplication. Foolish girl. The last thing she needed was Henri Foucault. That way lay vampirism.
    Then the young Françoise stilled. Her head turned slowly. Her eyes locked with Frankie’s. Frankie saw the eyes that were her eyes, blue and innocent, grow wide.
    Frankie couldn’t get her breath. Françoise seemed to grow nearer, even as the crowd behind her receded. Frankie dropped her bag, gasping, and bent over, grabbing her belly against the pain there. This was bad. Really bad. She should never have met herself. She felt like she was breaking up. A shriek escaped her. All those time travel books were right, she thought.
    And then she was hurtling toward Françoise. She felt herself disintegrating into a mist.
    Then nothing.
    Three
    Françoise shook her head to clear it. She had seen a woman at the edge of the crowd. The woman had looked like her, though dressed a little strangely.
    But there was no one there now. Françoise felt … full. Her head felt tight and her chest almost burst with … with something. She looked around, dazed. There had been a woman … hadn’t there? She couldn’t quite remember. She must be mad to be daydreaming at a time like this. Everything she owned was in that burning house. The mob seemed bent on tearing down what was left brick by brick. Robespierre had ordered Madame LaFleur arrested and Françoise was about to follow her. That meant prison and the guillotine.
    She glanced to the edge of the crowd. She had seen something there, hadn ’t she? Something that made her uneasy. But she didn’t quite know what. She felt as though all her senses were dulled, somehow. She couldn’t quite see as far as she expected, hear as much as she ought. Something inside her