2:20

  The Timeless Trilogy

  Book 1

  By

  Holly A. Hook

  KINDLE EDITION

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Holly A. Hook

  Copyright 2016 Holly A. Hook

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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  2:20 (#1 Timeless Trilogy)

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  2:20 (#1 Timeless Trilogy)

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  I am falling.

  The frigid night air whips around me. Stars twist and spin overhead, mocking me. I try to howl but the night sucks it out of my lungs.

  Time slows.

  A boy falls with me, within arm's reach, and a flash of light behind him shows his thick eyebrows, raised in terror as he reaches out to me. I catch a glimpse of his earth-brown eyes before the abyss swallows us again.

  "Julia!" he screams. The air rips it away.

  I lunge for him and my fingers brush his, only to be pulled away again by the rush of air. If these are my last moments, all I want to hold onto is him.

  But then another light explodes behind him.

  Only this one is brighter, golden, from somewhere other than this frigid night.

  It sucks him back, pulling him away from me as I keep falling. I reach again, but his hand disappears into the portal, which swallows him whole.

  It closes as quick as it came, leaving me in this place, falling through the dark alone.

  I try to cry out again, but my throat is raw and closed.

  The impact comes--

  Chapter One

  --and I wake to rain and soft night.

  I'm propped up against the brick of a house. A deep chill lingers inside me as if someone's rescued me from a blizzard and delivered me to this concrete porch. I can tell from the cold and the numbness in my bottom. Rain patters against the shrubs, barely missing me and plinking against the awning above. The street shines yellow and wet under the lamp. Everything smells damp and muddy like the start of spring. I breathe in. Strange. For some reason, I expected to smell the salty aroma of the ocean nearby. There's none of that here.

  I can't recall a single thing that happened to me before I wound up here.

  Except for falling. And the boy, reaching for me and screaming my name.

  Julia!

  That must be my name. I sit up taller on the porch and laugh. At least I know something. And more, laughing must be what I do when I get nervous.

  Because I’m very nervous.

  The rain beats down harder like it's pressing me to remember more. I sit up, blinking, grabbing for the rest in the back of my mind. A name. A place. Anything.

  There's something glowing on my wrist. My heart leaps.

  Black numbers stand out inside a green rectangle. 2:20 a.m. I grab at the light and feel a strap wrapped around my wrist. My eyes adjust and I calm down. This is some kind of watch, some fancy type I've never seen before. It's not burning me. I shake my head and breathe out. Watches aren't electric...are they? But this one must be.

  That's not my biggest worry right now. I'm sitting by a strange house in the middle of the night and I'm freezing. It's not supposed to be good for a seventeen-year-old girl to be out alone like this. Even now, I hate that sentiment. I can take care of myself.

  I shake my head and my hair sticks to the brick of the house. I grab a handful and toss it to the side. It's a red-blond mess, stringy and wet. I must look like a flood survivor.

  I rise, alone. Names wade around the shores of my memory, then dive into a vast sea of nothingness before I can reach them. My stomach turns and flattens. I want to yell for someone, run to them, hug them, but I have no idea who it even is. I stand there, grasping in the maze of my mind and coming up empty.

  Tears start welling up. Why am I crying? I'm tougher than that. I suck them down in case anyone sees. I won't make myself appear like an easy victim in case something happens.

  I blink and the streetlights leave pink, pulsing blobs behind my eyelids. The afterimage dim, dulling from pink to yellow and to a brownish gray. I give up reaching for names and take a deep breath of the moist air. I can breathe easier. My body doesn't feel as numb. I stomp my feet and study them. I'm wearing jeans. For some reason, that seems strange, like I've never worn them before.

  A single car rolls past, showing lines of rain cutting in front of its headlights. The car doesn't seem right, either. It's too smooth and round, with a closed top. The front yard turns to night again. I'm in a subdivision, lined with small brick houses that all look the same.

  Is this one mine?

  I turn in a circle. A huge raindrop plops off the awning and onto my forehead.

  There's something across the street.

  My heart stops. A pair of eyes--glowing, golden eyes--stare at me from the neighbor's yard. A dark figure stands there. I back up. The screen door makes a loud thud. What--

  They're gone.

  The eyes have disappeared, leaving pure night in their place.

  I let out a breath and sag against the door. I'm seeing things. Did I become intoxicated? That's why I can't recall anything.

  I should knock on the door. Ask for help. Maybe this is my house. But what if it’s a stranger?

  I rehearse my words in case it comes to that. Hello, my name is--

  “Julia.”

  It sounds right. It feels right.

  Yes, that’s my name. I remember one thing, at least.

  Something falls from my hand and plinks to the pavement, jarring me out of the moment.

  It's a coin and a folded paper. The paper tilts on the porch, threatening to blow away. I snatch it and the coin, holding them tight. They're my only clues. My only links to whatever lies on the other side of my waking.

  The coin is bronze. Ancient, almost. It lies heavy in my palm. It's got a man's head on the front, every feature worn down by time.

  I pick it up and turn it. It's worn from passing through generations of hands, so much that it’s almost perfectly smooth when I run my thumb over it. The back has a flat, featureless man riding a horse and a date that's been reduced to four lumps in the metal. I hold the light of my watch up to the coin. Nineteen-something. The last number is nothing but a blur in the yellow-brown metal.

  I pocket the coin. Some loose change, I decide. I unfold the piece of notebook paper instead.

  It has one sentence written in neat pencil on the middle line.

  Remember who you are.

  And then, farther down on the page:

  Your life depends on it.

  A deeper chill flows through my limbs like ice water. I look up, searching every dark shrub, every shadow under every streetlight. I crumple the note and stuff it in my pocket. The rain pours down harder.

  That dark figure with its bright eyes stares at me again. From the corner of the house, just twenty feet away. It's bigger then me—almost six feet tall.

  Terror explodes in my chest.

  I have one option.

  "Hello?" I bang on the door, rattling the screen. "Someone's out here. Call the cops!" I don't care who I wake up. "Hurry!"

  A light clicks on inside. Curtains part. Someone stares out at me and pinches them back together. Footsteps thud through the house. I'm paralyzed, waiting for whatever's coming. Waiting for the eyes to appear again. Waiting for anything.

  The door opens and light pours out, framing a middle-aged woman with curly blond hair. Her eyes widen behind spectacles and my mouth falls open. I'm lost for words.

  The woman sighs. She blinks several times like she's not sure of what she's seeing. Focus comes at last and she manages a smile. "Oh, you must be Julia. Why did the services drop you off at this time of night?" She glances at her watch. "It's almost two-thirty in the morning! You'd better come in. I'm Nancy, your new foster mother."

  Chapter Two

  April 1, 2013

  Nearly One Year Later

  “You might want to put something on under your eyes, Julia. Just sayin'.”

  I turn away from Monica and face the mirror. I can't help but lift my skirt and let it fall back around my legs. The bluish-gray silk reflects a million shades, even a hint of dandelion from my walls and a smudge of galactic violet from the black light in the corner. My arms look creamy next to the fabric of the dress as if I'm wearing the ocean on a cloudy day.

  The
re's no denying it. I look great, right? And Frank Rosenbaum is my date for the Spring Formal Dance tonight.

  But Monica's right that I do have bags hanging under my eyes. They're pavement, not ocean. That's got to go.

  "Let me go check Nancy's makeup stockpile." Monica sweeps out of the room, her yellow dress swishing behind her. Thankfully, our foster mom always has a generous supply and most of the shades on hand match my skin tone.

  Monica returns a moment later, armed with a stick of under-eye stuff. I squint as the brush tickles my skin and she tells me to keep still. "You need to practice with this more," she says. "Especially if Frank asks you out again."

  I slap her arm, definitely not staying still. "Are you implying that I don't look that great?"

  But Monica knows I'm only kidding. "No. But you're going to be competing with the likes of Wendy tonight. You know she's got to be furious."

  "So now you're implying that Frank's shallow." I give her a second slap, once again pleased that the Queen of the Snob Squad got turned down by the hottest junior in school. "Well, I don't think he is. Otherwise, he wouldn't have--"

  "Asked you out." Monica finishes for me, dabbing the area under my eye with a tissue. For a second, she looks like a version of that girl from the Princess and the Frog, especially since she's wearing the same shade of dress. At least, I think that's the film. I haven't seen too many of them yet that I can remember. "Now you're implying that you're not good enough for him."

  I close my other eye as Monica moves the brush under it. "No, I'm saying that Frank and I don't run in the same crowd. It's more that he lives on the east side. You know, that other world? What's the likelihood?" I'm not saying the obvious, the biggest issue. Frank doesn't know about me.

  Monica purses her lips and shoots a breath out the side of her mouth, incredulous. "Are you serious? He doesn't even hang with Wendy and her gang."

  "That's exactly why I respect him."

  Monica finishes working on the bags under my eyes and caps the makeup that I still don’t know the name of. "Julia, is something wrong?”

  “Do you always read my mind so well?”

  “It's a skill I learned growing up,” she says. Monica levels her gaze at me. “I had to, well, read people a lot before I came to Nancy. You're worried.”

  “What if Frank asks about my past? Where I grew up? I can't answer his questions.”

  “Oh,” Monica says. Her face falls for a second. “Well, you can give him the story on your file.”

  The story. Nancy let me read my file the day after I got here. I'd demanded it, hoping for answers. According to the paperwork, my full name is Julia McCready. I grew up in a crappy home like Monica did. My father ran off when I was a baby and I went into protective services a month before they dropped me off at Nancy's doorstep. I have a mother on the other side of the state who's an alcoholic and in jail for being neglectful. I used to go to a school called Ithaca High and I got mostly A's and B's there. But there was nothing about the fact that I remember none of it, or that I feel so out of place in this world. Those aren't exactly things I want to discuss on a date.

  “Okay,” I say. “I'll give him the story if he asks. I suppose it's better than telling him I remember nothing from more than a year ago.”

  “Well, he already knows you're really bad at computers.”

  “He doesn't know how bad.” We head out to the living room. “Come on, Monica. When I first moved here, I couldn't figure out how a mouse worked.”

  I'll never forget those first humiliating moments at Trenton High School. My first class had been computers. I sat there at my desk, thinking the keyboard was some kind of flat typewriter and wondering where to load the paper. Thankfully, Nancy had told Monica to stay with me the entire day to help me adjust. Monica not only turned the computer on for me, but walked me through my first assignment. I felt like she was, in a way, hiding me. She never even asked me why I seemed so technology illiterate. Maybe she assumed that I had lost my memory of that, too. Maybe my mother was too cheap to ever buy a computer, so I never learned how to use one. Or maybe Ithaca High School was run by the Amish. I've never found the town on a map of the state.

  Either way, Monica's the only one who knows about that struggle. I haven't even told Nancy about it.

  Nervous tingles rush underneath my skin as we sit on the couch, waiting for the dance of headlights behind the curtains. It still starts getting dark pretty early, as spring is still practically a baby. I keep rubbing my hand over my hair, making sure Nancy pulled it up tight enough and no stray hairs stick out. They don't. She always does a wonderful job.

  Then headlights peek through the purple curtains of the kitchen, and we both spring up.

  "You two sit down," Nancy orders, marching there in our place. "Your dates need to come to the door."

  I plop back down on the couch. Monica sends me a grimace. I should have expected this from the woman who writes the etiquette column in the local paper every Sunday morning. But things could always be worse.

  I take a deep breath and watch the grandfather clock tick across from me. Frank's not a snob. Far from it. He shouldn't care that I live with a foster mom.

  The knock comes. My heart leaps in anticipation.

  Nancy opens the door and blocks my view, letting only a glimpse of a black sleeve past her. I wish she would move. I love her and all, but I'm dying to see what Frank looks like in a suit.

  Awkward conversation flies for about a minute or so. Something about the weather. Then Nancy moves aside to allow our dates into the house.

  Trey comes in first, shoulders all hunched up as he moves under Nancy's gaze. His suit is a bit wrinkled around the neck, and he smells like some kind of cologne that's probably the Axe brand I've seen in stores. Nancy smiles at him, which is her thank-you for being intimidated at the door. Trey's safe from ending up in one of her columns.

  Frank is as stunning as I'd hoped, and more.

  Calm and relaxed, he strides into the living room in a suit that complements his rectangular body shape perfectly. His semi-longish hair and angled nose make him look like a character right out of those Japanese comics that some people at school read. I still can't believe I'm going to be dancing with him tonight. It's unbelievable, like a fairy tale.

  "Now, don't these girls look amazing?" Nancy asks.

  Trey nods. He's blushing and trying to duck away from her as fast as he can.

  Frank, on the other hand, responds with a simple "Yes," without taking his eyes off me once. "Ready?" he asks, extending an arm to me very formal-like, which earns another smile from Nancy. He's officially won her over, which is no easy feat. It's like he's read her mind, because he sure doesn't act that way in school. Nowhere close. I have a feeling that if Nancy ever sees his punk band T-shirts or his talent at throwing pencils and getting them stuck in ceiling tiles, she might change her mind a little.

  I stand and take his arm, eager to be out of there. The sleeve of his suit doesn't even wrinkle in my grasp, but the warmth of his skin radiates right through. Frank's eyes slowly drift from my skirt until they meet my gaze. They're unreadable at the moment, so different from the laugh they had at the end of school today. Maybe Nancy is making him nervous after all.

  "You be careful tonight," she reminds us as we all head for the door.

  Frank places his hand on my back, right at the spot where my dress meets my shoulder blades. His touch is tingly, electric. Above all, borderline hot. "You won't have anything to worry about tonight, Ms. Collins."

  Nancy beams.

  How does he know her last name? I swear I never mentioned that to him. It's not like he's lived in Trenton that long, either--two months less than me.

  Monica and Trey are already climbing into the limo--yes, limo--that's waiting like a chariot in our driveway. Some part of me still can't believe that Frank lives in the same neighborhood as the Snob Squad, but here's the proof. Renting one of these must be expensive.

  I've never ridden in a limo before. Never even come close, if my file’s right about where I came from. I don't belong in this rolling symbol of wealth, not even while I'm wearing this dress.