by Jamie Hawke
The Shadow of Time
Jamie Hawke
Editors
Diane Newton
Tracey Byrnes
THE SHADOW OF TIME (this book) is a work of fiction.
All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Complete Book is Copyright (c) 2019 by Jamie Hawke (of Double Down Press).
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Jamie Hawke.
Contents
PROLOGUE: Previously, from Lost Pirates Book 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue: Book 3 Preview
Author Ramblings
About the Author
Read Next
PROLOGUE: Previously, from Lost Pirates Book 1
When they had said their goodbyes, Frank stepped through the light of the time travel compass with Esmerelda, Keisha, and his grandmother, Rose. They emerged into that same room with his grandpa’s stuff, the place where Frank had discovered the compass to begin with. Only, none of that stuff was there. It didn’t look the same at all.
Frank glanced around, confused, taking in the desk in the corner with a computer monitor sitting on top of a box for height with fun movie toys all around it. A yoga mat was rolled up half-assedly beside it. On the other side of the room was a worn leather couch with a coffee table and video game books.
“This isn’t right,” Frank said, taking a breath and holding his temples as he tried to clear his head, to understand.
“What is it?” Keisha asked, a hand on his arm.
He turned, looking for any sign of his father whatsoever, but there was none. Rose was there next to him, looking equally baffled.
“The stone, in the compass it said we were coming back to the time you left from…” She turned to him, eyes wide. “Which means…”
“Either what we did in the past has changed my present,” Frank said, finally letting it hit him, “or he’s already been here, managed to travel again, and changed some other point in time.”
“Oh, Frank,” Esmerelda looked at him with such compassion and worry, it only added to the heartbreak and frustration starting to pour through him. He needed a second to process this, to be alone.
“Wa—wait here,” he said, stumbling from the room, barely processing Rose’s protestations.
As much as he’d had problems with his dad before going back in time, now he wanted nothing more than to see the old man. To have a party or go see a movie to make up for lost time—anything, really. Just hug the man, tell him he was sorry for all those missed opportunities.
What he found instead was an African-American woman sipping coffee, reading her tablet at the table. Nothing here looked the same either, aside from the fixtures. Her eyes went wide as they slowly rose to see him, and then she screamed and threw the mug at him. It shattered on the wall to his right, coffee splattering his pirate clothes, and then she started screaming about the cops and finding her gun. Frank flew back through the door, shouting that they had to get out of there, that this wasn’t his house anymore.
They ran out and the woman stared, flabbergasted, then went into a new tirade about orgies and bullshit, calling them freaks, even managing to catch Frank with a swift kick in the ass.
She followed them out to the street, somewhere along the line grabbing a baseball bat and waving it as they tore down the road. They didn’t stop until they reached the park down on Sycamore Avenue and were all hiding inside of the sprawling wooden fort, two kids on the swings watching them curiously.
“Well, one thing’s clear,” Rose said. “We’re fucked.”
Frank nodded, still trying to understand. Maybe things had changed, but that didn’t mean they needed to stay changed. “Except that, if he managed to go back again, that means he found a red stone here—which means he must’ve travelled into the future or far past and retrieved the one we now have, then gone back to change whatever he had to change to do… whatever this is.”
“Where are you going with this, Frank?” Esmerelda asked.
“The compass has to exist in our time, which means we can find it, his version. You said the two were connected, right? Maybe there’s a way to track it, and if we can—and somehow manage to get it back—we use it or the other two stones in this one to fix this.”
Rose was nodding, squatting and taking a wood chip between her fingers as if that helped her visualize this. “Yes, that could work. But to make it final, we’d have to stop him at one of the points in time where he wouldn’t be able to make any of this happen.”
“Meaning?”
“Well, we also wouldn’t want to completely erase him, because someone else might just take his place.”
“Everything else being equal, we go to the point where he was in World War II when he got involved and stop him just before he travels back in time to the eighteenth century.” Frank reached down and grabbed some woodchips, letting them sift through his fingers until he had two, and then he flipped one out of his hand, holding up the other. “We take him out, but that still leaves this one—the one who we fought, right?”
“If we kill that one, the original, it should wipe out any other versions of him,” she said. “Of course, that’s all hypothetical.”
“It’s what happens in the movies,” Frank said with a shrug, then added for those who were with him but had never seen a movie, “We’ll get to that, eventually.”
“Looks like we have a lot on our plate,” Keisha said, grinning.
Frank nodded. “We best get started.”
1
Frank still hadn’t been able to process the fact that he was back home, but that it was completely changed. He should’ve known. Wasn’t that always how it went in the movies? He’d watched his fair share of Sliders, and had grown to hate squeaky gates for the fact they’d always represented when that team would be home, but they kept going on across worlds.
Would he now be destined to repeat that show’s hell, but through time? Or maybe it was worlds in his case, too. It was a theory, one he was starting to wonder about. This didn’t make sense. Frank’s world should have been just as he’d left it. They had changed the past, defeated the fake Pirate King—or the PK, as they sometimes referred to the man. Not anymore, though. Now it was strictly Rick Draper, or as Frank liked to call him, Rick the Dick.
Frank was walking ahead of his group, but glanced back now to see them watching him with concern. They knew he had no idea where he was going. Their plan was to find the other compass in this time, and figure out how to use it to go back and stop the PK. But if this was a parallel world type of time travel, would that do any good?
Mostly, he was trying to piece it together as he walked. If that were the case, maybe it worked like a branching path narrative, with different alterations in time creating different worlds like the nodes that then reconnected with the right path, if corrected. They could still all e
xist in their own time in their version of their own worlds, but the final path wasn’t determined yet.
It was the only way he could make sense of this, and really the only way he could accept it. The alternative would mean changing time and erasing all of the amazing adventures he’d had, and he refused to accept that.
“We’ll find him,” Rose said. While she was his grandma, he still hadn’t gotten used to the fact that she didn’t look much older than him, due to having been lost in time.
Frank nodded to show he was trying, and this time it was Keisha and Esmerelda who came to the rescue. They stood on each side of Rose, dressed in their pirate outfits and looking ridiculous in the modern world. It was enough to make him smile, and their sexiness was enough to bring his mind back to blissful memories of being pressed against their nude bodies. With that in mind, nothing else seemed quite as dreary.
“After what we accomplished back there,” Esmerelda said, “I have no doubts in our ability to pull this off.”
“She’s right,” Keisha said with a grin. “We’re amazing.
“You—” he started to make a witty remark, but quickly lost it as a bus drove by. Or, he thought it was a bus—the top was sawed off, a man in a bandana driving and shouting as he went, and he nearly slammed right into them!
“Watch it, psycho!” Frank shouted, and swore he saw someone in a pirate hat glance back at them from the only occupied seat toward the rear. Maybe a convention?
“You’ll have a lot to get used to,” Rose said to Esmerelda and Keisha, who were both staring after the mutilated bus, and then slowly turning to see a car parked by the side of the road.
“Oh, damn…” Frank said, unable to comprehend what they must be going through. “Imagine when we get to World War II.”
“Even we’ll be in over our heads then,” Rose replied.
They kept walking, passing regular suburbs with the odd tree here and there. A squirrel darted out into the road, looked at Frank, and then kind of hissed before running off.
“What the hell kind of squirrel hisses?” Frank said with a frown. If even the squirrels were going to give him problems in this world, he wasn’t sure what to expect. Now that he thought about it, the shadows in the trees felt too dark, their green not green enough.
Or maybe he was letting his imagination run away with itself.
“You think they’re better off back there?” he said, turning to the ladies. “M&M, I mean,” he added, earning a chuckle from Rose but clueless glances from the other two. M&Ms were among the many aspects of this time they’d have to get ready for—Frank had a bit of an obsession with the candies, especially the kind with peanuts in them. Though, ever since one of his professors had gone off about peanuts carrying mold, he’d been less certain.
“Are we going to fit in here?” Keisha asked, looking down at her clothes. They hadn’t seen many people yet, but he guessed she could tell from the houses and cars in the driveways that they were in for some new experiences.
“Let’s get you all out of those clothes, first of all,” Frank said, only then remembering that he, too, was wearing pirate clothes.
“Frank, maybe we don’t in front of your grandma?” Esmerelda teased, nodding at Rose.
Rose laughed and said, “I think he means you should find other outfits.”
Frank nodded, leading them down a curve in the road and motioning them to stay to the side. They weren’t used to the idea of roads like this, or that cars or busses could go speeding around corners at any minute.
“We’re not exactly in your time,” Rose said. “Or even an adjusted version of it, anyway, but do you think there’s anyone who could help us?”
“Since my family wasn’t in my home, chances of anything being how it should be are low.”
“Still, doesn’t hurt to try.”
“Maybe… it’s a longshot,” Frank said, wishing he had his cell. There was only one friend’s number he could remember—his college roommate. But he had to try. “Follow me,” he said, walking up to the closest house. “I’m going to try to make a call.”
As Rose did her best to explain what that meant, Frank knocked on the door, anxiously. No answer came, but he could see through the window that the T.V. was on. Frowning at the thought that someone was ignoring him in his time of need, Frank was turning to go when he froze, eyes glued to the T.V screen.
“This might be easier than we thought,” Esmerelda said, seeing it at the same time Frank had, apparently.
There on the screen was an image of the fucking PK himself, speaking into the camera as if this was the most natural thing in the world for someone like him to be doing. Oddly, he was wearing a suit that still had pirate flair to it, including a sword at his waist and holstered pistols—although at least they were modern.
But that wasn’t all. Behind him was the Puget Sound with several ships, and a view of the Seattle Space Needle. Both the ships and the needle were sporting the PK’s modified Jolly Roger with the crowned skull and crossbones.
Only, there was something different about it all, too. Something Frank couldn’t quite put his finger on, but that would continue to bother him until he could, he just knew it. For now, he had one major realization—they had found themselves in either the biggest pirate festival he’d ever seen, or they’d stumbled upon a version of the world where somehow the PK had created his pirate empire after all.
He was willing to bet it was the latter.
2
“What the hell’s happening here?” Rose gasped, out of breath and holding up a hand to stop Frank. They had started running, not wanting to waste any more time and hoping to see more signs of what they’d seen on the T.V., only in person this time.
At the base of a tree-covered hill—a hill that, in Frank’s world and time had been covered in houses—they plopped down. He had to admit, he was hungry, tired, and exhausted. Back in the pirate time, they could at least find other pirates or enemies, and therefore ask for help or take what they needed. Here, not so much.
“I think it’s clear,” Frank said. “Somehow, in spite of all we did… we lost.”
“Not possible,” Esmerelda said. “And this is different, if you didn’t notice.”
“She’s right,” Rose chimed in. “It wasn’t just pirate… didn’t you see the Celtic patterns on the sails? It could be coincidence, or it could be something else entirely.”
Frank hadn’t noticed, but now that he thought about it, he remembered seeing something like that. “How does that change anything?”
“It’s not how I remember my America,” Rose answered. “And it’s not the pirate way of our time.”
“You think he went back to another time… an earlier time, maybe?”
“Not Celtic,” Rose said, eyes lighting up in realization. “Nordic.”
“What?”
“The patterns, what if they were Nordic?” She stood, looking around as if hoping to see confirmation right there. “I mean, could he have gone to another time, a time before ours, and set up his empire from there?”
“How…?”
“Easy,” she was pacing up and down now, the other two ladies watching with confused excitement. “He finds another time in history that would’ve made sense and repeats what he tried in the eighteenth century with us, only this time without interference.”
“And without the English,” Frank pointed out.
“He’s figured out how to travel through time,” she countered. “I think working around language barriers would be the least of his problems. Especially if he managed to bring back modern or futuristic—by his standards—tech.”
“And it might not have been only one time period,” Keisha pointed out with a worried look in Frank’s direction.
“Great.” Frank frowned, leaning back on the hill and staring up at the clouds. “But what I really meant was, how would that affect M&M?”
“Ah…” She didn’t have an answer for that.
“Our plan was always to check in on
them when we need their help, right?” Keisha said. “Well, first chance we get, I’d say checking in to see how this time alteration affected them could be pretty damn useful.”
“Agreed,” Frank said. “I wish I could check my own head for reference, but since we weren’t here in the time change, we would be unaffected.”
“You have a guess for how it would work?”
Frank nodded. “Purely speculation, but it’s entirely possible they would remember both sides—the part they lived through, and the version their new world expects them to have lived through.”
“Sounds painful,” Esmerelda said. “Extremely.
“And it’s just an idea,” Frank replied.
“It’s more than an idea,” Keisha said. “It’s a wish. A hope. Because the other version is that they don’t remember us, since that timeline didn’t exactly happen.”
“Or it did, but we showed up and fought and lost, or something—I don’t know, but… yeah, starting to hurt my head.”
Frank held his hands to his temples, lying there and trying to figure out their next move. Meanwhile, Rose took Esmerelda and said they’d check their surroundings, see if they could spot anything that might possibly help them. Frank wanted to shout that this wasn’t their land, it wasn’t some place where fancy futuristic weapons were buried and all that needed to be done was for them to win some battles.
But… maybe he was wrong? For all Frank knew, his world was now transformed into a land of piracy and chaos. Maybe kicking some ass was exactly the right step.