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“Oh, nothing there, actually.” I placed my palm on it. “It just reminded me of Old Magnus.” I spiraled my hand around. “Old Magnus, remember, Zach? Have you heard about him, Quentin?”
Quentin shook his head but Zach said, “I remember you asking me to look him up that day we looked up the history of Magnus.”
“Exactly!” I was exuberant. “And he wasn’t in the listings of family members, but Lizbeth told me he existed, when she was young — Magnus.”
Zach went to the refrigerator and started making us drinks. “So what are you saying? Pretend like I was just sleeping and you woke me up and so far you aren’t making sense.”
“Magnus is in the past. He’s old and he’s in the past. That means he lived.”
“He’s old? Weird.”
“I literally don’t care. He can be seventy for all I care. It’s Magnus.”
They made me sit down at the dining room table.
Zach said, “What if you’ve changed the timeline so much he isn’t there?”
I shrugged. “What if? I’ll time travel back to the castle and I’ll look for him. He might not be there. That’s true. But what if he is?”
Quentin said, “But why? Why not come here?”
I shook my head, thinking, shaking my head more and thinking more. “I don’t know. But I know he looped around. He was old and he went to the past before he was born. I don’t know why. But he did it. And since I’ve been with him he’s never been old and he’s never looped to before he was born, so if he did it, it was in the future and phew! I sound high—”
“You sound like I’m high.”
“But I have to go see if he’s there.”
Quentin said, “I don’t want to go again, I just got—”
“You don’t have to go, as a matter of fact, you shouldn’t go. You would be a liability.”
He feigned disbelief, “A liability?”
“I don’t know if you know this, but you’re blacker than everyone in Scotland in the eighteenth century, the seventeenth century I imagine would be even worse. And Magnus might not be there to vouch for you.”
“As your security guard though, Magnus might be pissed.”
“Magnus is forever grateful to you. He won’t hold anything against you. I promise. And this is of course if he’s there. I’m going. Alone.”
Emma shuffled into the room. “What’s happening?”
“Katie’s going to the 17th century to find Old Magnus and find out—”
Her eyes went wide. She whispered. “Is it Magnus?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I’m going to go see.”
“After a good night’s sleep though, right? We need to help you pack again.”
It was very hard to sleep that night.
62 - KAITLYN
First thing when I woke up I checked the weather. I really hoped that I was wrong and Magnus was coming to the present now.
Because the alternative: What if he was old?
What if Tyler telling me the story had changed us so that our time loop went weird and loopy?
