“Mary?” Helen murmured, half-awake. “Zat you? Time izzit...”

My sister is on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Why am I talking to her?

And I can feel Nessie sleeping on my feet—so what is this right beside me?

She cracked one eye open and looked.

Oh.

Moxie’s small form was curled against her side, breathing deep and even. Which explains why I thought my sister was here. Mom and Dad used to laugh at us and the boys, claimed we played Musical Beds all night long...

Helen spent a few moments thinking of her family: her brothers, John, old enough to drive, and Pat, a preteen who loathed school; her parents, rapidly graying under the influence of their sons; and her just-barely-teenage sister Mary, the only reason said parents had anything but gray hair, as the girl was still contemptuous of boys.

Speaking of boys, isn’t “Master” Alex quite the looker. And polite, too. Still, I have no idea if he’s interested back, or if we’ll turn out to have anything in common. Start as friends, that’s always safest.

She sighed in quiet happiness. Her life, to this moment, had been the most mundane existence possible, interesting only to anyone who might care about the story of an American in London. She had devoured tales of the strange and wonderful since childhood, wishing with all her might that they were true, and now...

Now I have a brownie in my bed and a wizard on my friend’s floor.

Magic is loose in the world, and it seems to need my help.

Her alarm clock made the little warning buzz that came a minute before the ear-shattering beep usually required to drag her out of bed. Rather than wake Moxie, Helen rolled carefully over and shut off the alarm, then slid out from under the covers, collected her day clothes, and headed for the bathroom.

In the most prayerful sense possible, thank God it’s Friday.

The thought started her humming, which changed to full-throated singing as she finished brushing her teeth.

“Tantum ergo sacramentum, veneremur cernui...”

Crushing weight on his chest and a foul odor woke Alex. It was all he could do not to groan.

Not even a full day. I was starting to believe it could be possible, that I could have escaped... instead, I have brought trouble down on good people, people who wanted only to help...

I can at least try to defend them. Keep whatever this is that my father has sent interested in me, instead of them. Perhaps it will forget about searching for Moxie, since it has found me.

The weight began to vibrate.

Is it growling at me? Threatening me? No, somehow the feeling is wrong for that...

Alex opened his eyes.

A small but surprisingly heavy calico cat blinked insolently down at him, continuing to purr.

“Orlando,” mumbled a voice from across the room. “Off.”

The cat did not move.

“Shove her, Alex, she’s used to it,” the voice counseled, ending with a groan. “Oh hell, I should not have mixed that last one so stiff...”

Alex controlled a wild urge to laugh and evicted the cat from his chest with both hands. It grumbled a little but went, the purr replaced by a different sound and another waft of stink.

So this is my grand new world. A few cushions on a dusty floor for a bed, and a flatulent feline for a rooster.

Still, smell and all, I prefer that to some magic-made creature of my father’s, following me through time to wreak havoc on anyone who dares help me, then dragging me home with it. And Jake, sober, drunk, or nursing ale head, is far pleasanter company than my family.

“What will you do today?” he asked the other man, who was up on one elbow now, squinting sleep-bleared eyes to focus on Alex.

“Work.” Jake scratched under the loose shirt he was wearing. “It’s Friday. Work day. Have to work. But then it’s the weekend, and we can get back together, compare notes, figure out where to go from here.”

“Where to go? I thought you said you had to go to work.”

Jake groaned again. “Jesus bloody wept, not another literalist. You’re as bad as Helen.”

The casual blasphemy startled Alex slightly, but he set it aside. Habits of speech were bound to be different after so long. “I apologize if I misunderstood. By ‘where to go’, you meant in a more metaphoric sense, I take it?”

“You take it correctly.” Jake pushed himself slowly into a sitting position, looked at the garish red-lighted display of numbers sitting on the shelf beside his bed, and swore. “I’m late, or going to be. Listen, Alex, I’ll leave some food on the table—help yourself, just don’t eat anything you don’t recognize—you’re not allergic? No, you wouldn’t be, you’d have died by now if you were...”

Alex nodded as if he understood and agreed with every word of the gibberish Jake was spouting. I think while he is gone I shall sing myself a bit more knowledge of this time.

“Good. Great.” Jake got to his feet, grimacing. “Don’t burn the house down if you can help it, and just shout at the cats if they bother you.” He grabbed shirt, trousers, and necktie from the chair by the bed and started for the door, stopping halfway there as if struck by a sudden thought. “Can you read?”

“Of course.” Alex made no effort to hide his offence—what child of a noble, especially one who dealt in magic, would not have learned to read?

“English?” Jake persisted.

“Yes.” That was a point, Alex had to admit. Many who read could read only Latin.

“Perfect.” Jake extracted a book from the litter of clothes, cans, and other detritus adorning a shelf and tossed it towards Alex, who caught it automatically. “Start with that one. The others are all there, they’ve got numbers on the spines, just work your way down the line.”

Alex regarded the drawing on the cover of the book. “This looks rather frivolous for an alchemical treatise.”

Jake snorted. “Just read it. Take the magic stuff with a grain of salt—though you’d know that better than I would—but everything else is just about right. It’ll give you an idea what things are like these days.” He disappeared out the door.

Alex looked at the picture for another few moments. It continued to make no sense. With a sigh, he flipped open the book and read the first sentence to himself.

So they still have marriages in this time, and people concerned above all with how they appear to their neighbors. Encouraging news, on the one hand. On the other... humanity is fallen, and some things never change.

He moved back until he could lean against the wall and continued reading. This time was already beginning to fascinate him.

“Hello? Oh, hi Howard. Can you make this fairly quick? I'm on the clock.” Jake adjusted his headset, wishing for the thousandth time that someone would hurry up and design a Bluetooth one that reliably functioned A: on Linux and B: at distances of greater than about eighteen inches from the dongle.

“This is important. That man your friend Helen met yesterday, who did he tell you he was?”

Jake smiled wryly. “You know, before Alex introduced himself, I would have been really confused about how you know about that.”

“Oh, so it's that one. That's encouraging.”

“I take it the Redstones are known to you, then.” Jake extracted the last screw and began to carefully prise the top panel away from the laptop with a small pocketknife. “God, I hate working on these things... Anyway, I was actually going to call you about this to ask if you thought he was trustworthy. He's also expressed some concern that his old man might come looking for him. Anything I need to know besides the obvious?”

“If Baron Redstone does turn up, you're up to your neck in a sea of shit with the tide coming in. There's very little you can do to protect yourself against what he'll throw at you.”

“I can shoot first.”

“See that you do,” Howard said grimly. “And don't get your knickers in a twist about buggering up the course of human history; causality's a big, grown up ineffable force of the universe and can look after itself, and it's hard to imagine Baron Redstone meeting an untimely end doing anything but good.”

“I'll take that under advisement. Anyway, I've got to run.”

“Alright. You watch out for yourself, lad, all right?”

“I will. Bye.” Jake hung up and took off his headset, then shook his head in weary disbelief at the computer in front of him. “Will someone please tell whoever signed this thing out last that eating fried chicken at the keyboard is really not wise?”

“You told him to read what?” Helen exploded.

Jake leaned away from the shout. “Better than having him sit around bored all day long!”

“He could come up with all kinds of weird ideas about our society out of those things...”

“Considering how he’s grown up, he’ll probably critique them for accuracy! What’s your guest been doing, then?”

“I don’t know.” Helen applied her key to the lock. “I showed her what could hurt her, and how to work the TV, and where I kept... whoa.”

Jake came up the steps behind her and looked over her shoulder. “I’d say that about sums it up. Think she could stay at my place tonight?”

The room was immaculate, down to the detail of the rug having been vacuumed into an attractive pattern. It needed only a vase of fresh flowers to have been plucked from the pages of a women’s magazine.

“I suppose I should have expected this,” said Helen, stepping inside. “She is a brownie, a house spirit...”

“Elf,” Moxie corrected, appearing silently in the hall beside them and startling Jake into shutting the door rather harder than he’d intended. “Not a spirit, merely a creature different than yourself, Miss... Helen.”

“Yes, well, I have some associations with the term ‘house-elf’ that I don’t think you’d care for.” Helen elbowed Jake in the ribs to shut him up. “I don’t know what you ordinarily look like...”

“Not terribly different than this, truly,” said Moxie, examining herself. “Pointed ears, and my body curves more—I am in my seventeenth year, after all.”

“I think what she’s after is, your skin isn’t green and you don’t have great bulging eyes,” said Jake, getting himself under control. “Right?”

“Perhaps your folk have seen one of the servants the Baron transforms out of frogs and mistaken them for us,” said Moxie with dignity. “No brownie was ever green.” Sticking her nose in the air, she marched away.

“She obviously never saw the other girls in my troop getting off a roller coaster,” Helen said, hanging up her coat.

Jake rolled his eyes. “You and your puns. Go get changed so we can head out to my place and find out what the thirteenth-century wizard thinks about the most popular books of the twenty-first century so far.”

Alex was well into the fourth book by the time the door opened downstairs. Despite the sometimes shockingly casual style of the writing and the frequent stops to seek the meanings of words he hadn’t encountered before, the story had entranced him.

A boy who did not know what he was, who thought he was completely ordinary, and found a great destiny awaiting him. The opposite of my own tale—Father wants, or wanted, to force a destiny on me, and I want nothing more than to be ordinary...

A knock on the bedroom door startled him. “Come!”

“How goes it?” Helen asked, looking into the room and grimacing. “God have mercy... never mind, not my place to pass judgment. How do you like the books?”

“They are... most interesting. Unlike anything I had encountered before. Like a minstrel’s tale, but far more complex than any such tale could be, for a tale must be followed by listeners, and this is committed to paper like a law or a scholar’s finding.”

“You’d be surprised what we put on paper around here.” Helen came in and gingerly removed the layer of detritus from a chair before sitting down, as Jake and Moxie followed her inside. “But that’s another story. No pun intended. Are you at a place where you can stop? I think we need to have a serious discussion. About you two, or maybe I should say the four of us, and just where we should go from here.”

Alex slid a bit of paper into the book to mark his page and closed it. “I am ready.”

“All right.” Helen pulled one foot up onto the chair and clasped her arms around it. “People tell me I’m too blunt, but I like to think of it as being direct, so here goes; Alex, Moxie, I like you both, and you intrigue me. I don’t think my life will ever be boring with you around. As long as we can find you something you can do to help pay the bills, I’m willing to be your friends, help you find your feet in this time, and possibly even go beyond that, depending on how things work out among us.” Her cheeks acquired a tinge of pink, but her smile was steady. “Jake? How about you?”

Jake was silent for a barely-perceptible instant as he considered the options. “Count me in,” he replied. “But we need to take precautions. It will no doubt interest you to learn that my landlady's Uncle Howard called me earlier; apparently the Redstone family name is not unknown to him.”

“I should have foreseen something like this,” Alex replied grimly. “This friend of yours must be either a seer or a powerful mage to sense a spell such as that which brought us here.”

“Bit of both actually; he's a Druid, or so he describes himself.”

“He would have reason to remember the name Redstone, then. What the Romans began, the Baron made it his business to finish,” Moxie added.

“Somehow I'm not surprised. At any rate, it's just possible your dad might figure out what happened and come looking for you.”

Alex looked rather crestfallen. “I have placed you all in danger,” he said apologetically.

Jake barked a short laugh. “Do you know what I spend my weekends doing?” he said dryly. “I'm a Special Constable. I spend most of my Friday and Saturday evenings breaking up drunken brawls, chasing housebreakers and generally trying to keep some measure of order in the suburb of Sodom that goes by the name of Wellingborough. You cannot possibly drag me into very much more danger than I was going to be in tonight anyway.”

“That probably wasn't supposed to be a challenge,” Moxie stage-whispered.

“Quite right,” Helen added, looking hard at Alex, who merely laughed. “But of course, my lady,” he replied. “And it seems the duties of the office of Constable have changed very little since my own time, but in what way are you 'special', if I might ask?”

“I don't get paid for it,” Jake replied before Helen could even think of opening her mouth.

Further discourses upon the wonders of the early 21^st century occupied the rest of the evening, with a demonstration of the peculiarly British wonder of takeaway fish and chips provided by Jake. “I could definitely come to like this century,” Alex declared.

This was a slightly unfortunate line for a cheerful, chestnut-haired woman about ten years older than Jake to walk in on, but she seemed to take it in her stride. “Give it time, it's not been on ten years yet,” she quipped. “Hi Jake, hi Helen. Friends of yours?”

“Yep. Alex, Moxie? Meet Jessica Wood, my landlady. Jess, meet Alex Redstone and... what did you say your full name was?”

“Mari Silvas,” Moxie replied, barely missing a beat and putting on an impressively convincing little-girl voice. Nice save, Jake thought admiringly, taking a sip of his beer.

“Silvas? That's funny, Uncle Howard thought you were Alex's daughter.”

Helen thumped Jake on the back a few times, trying to restrain her laughter. “You did that on purpose, didn't you?” he grumbled once he'd got his breath back.

“I don't know why you're surprised he told me,” Jess replied primly, nonchalantly stealing one of his chips. “Even the New Age Revivalists remember the Redstones, and in any case I learned to spot his wind-ups years ago.”

Jake shook off a feeling not unlike the moment after he'd attempted to break down a door with an Enforcer ram just as the allegedly deceased little old lady inside finally got it open, though at least this time round he'd avoided ending up in plaster. How did my life get this weird all of a sudden?

Though let's face it, it beats the hell out of how it used to be.