Free Twilight by Meg Cabot

you’re standing in a spot where he once stood? What do you do then?”
    Dr. Slaski looked annoyed. “You hold the object—that’s your anchor—and nothing else. That’s important, you know. You can’t be touching anything else or you could end up taking it with you. Then you picture the person. And then you go. Easy as pie.” Dr. Slaski nodded at the TV. “Turn it up. Feud ’ll be on in a minute.”
    I couldn’t believe it was so easy. Just like that, I could go back through time and keep someone I loved from dying.
    “Of course,” Dr. Slaski said casually, “once you get there—to where you’re going—you have to watch yourself. You don’t want to be changing history… at least, not too much. You have to weigh the consequences of your actions very carefully.”
    I didn’t say anything. What possible consequences could my saving my dad have? Except that my mom, instead of crying into her pillow every night for years after he died— right up until she met Andy, actually—would be happy? That I would be happy?
    Then it hit me. Andy. If my dad had lived, my mother would never have met Andy. Or rather, she might have met him, but she would never have married him.
    And then we would never have moved to California.
    And I would never have met Jesse.
    Suddenly, the full impact of what Dr. Slaski had said sunk in. “Oh,” I said.
    His gaze—despite the glaucoma that clouded his blue eyes, which otherwise were like a photocopy of Paul’s—was sharp.
    “I thought there’d be an oh in there somewhere,” he said. “Not as easy as you thought, shifting through time, is it? And keep in mind the fact that the longer you stay in a time not your own, the longer your recovery time when you do get back to the present,” Dr. Slaski added not very pleasantly.
    “Recovery time? You mean like… it gives you a headache?” Which was what shifting gave me. Every time.
    Dr. Slaski looked amused about something. His gaze wasn’t on the television screen, so I knew it was something to do with what I’d just said.
    “Little worse than a headache,” he said dryly, and patted the mattress beneath him. “Unless you mean that as a euphemism for losing a host of brain cells. And that’s the least of what could happen to you. Time shift too many times and you’ll be a vegetable before you’re old enough to buy beer, I can guarantee.”
    “Does Paul know that?” I asked. “I mean, about the… losing brain cells thing?”
    “He should,” Dr. Slaski said, “if he read my paper on it.”
    And yet he still wanted to try it.
    “Why would Paul want to go back through time?” I asked. He could hardly be motivated by a desire to help anyone, as the only person Paul Slater had ever been interested in helping was… well, Paul Slater.
    “How should I know?” Dr. Slaski looked bored. “I don’t understand why you spend any time at all with that boy. I told you he was no good. Just like his father, that one is, ashamed of me….”
    I didn’t pay attention to Dr. Slaski’s diatribe against his grandson. I was too busy thinking. What was it Paul had said the other night, in the Gutierrezes’ backyard? That he wouldn’t kill Jesse…
    …but that he might do something to keep Jesse from having died in the first place.
    That was when it finally dawned on me. Standing there in Dr. Slaski’s bedroom, while he fumbled for the remote, found the volume button, and cried, “Damnit, we missed the first category!”
    Paul was going back through time. To Jesse’s time.
    And not to kill him.
    To save his life.

Chapter

seven
     
     

    “Father Dominic?” My voice seemed frantic, even to my own ears. “Father D., are you there?”
     
    “Yes, Susannah.” Father Dominic sounded frazzled. But then, that could be because he still hadn’t figured out how to work his cell phone. “Yes, I’m here. I thought you had to hit the Send button to answer, but apparently—”
    “Father Dominic, something terrible has