by Mae Clair
Caleb didn’t have the heart or the initiative to argue. “Winston.”
“He’s damn lucky he didn’t get killed,” Rick added, noting his torn shoulder and bloody jeans. His eyes shifted to Arianna. “You were both lucky. Is Ari all right?”
She nodded, still clinging to Caleb. “I’m just shaken up.”
“It’s no wonder.” Wyn scowled down on Seth’s decapitated body. “I can’t believe the bastard’s dead. Should I ask how it happened?”
“Not now.” Caleb closed his eyes and brushed his lips against Arianna’s temple. He could smell her fear and knew delayed shock was catching up to her. Was it any wonder? She’d been abducted, taunted with torture, nearly seen her husband skewered, and then witnessed a beheading. She shivered in the warm summer air, her skin clammy and chilled. Her courage amazed him.
“Any ideas how to get rid of a corpse?” Wyn asked. He muttered something about scientific research.
“Not now,” Caleb repeated. He swept one arm under Arianna’s knees and scooped her against his chest. Nothing was as important as his wife’s well-being. Seth’s corpse, Wyn’s mutterings, and his own wounds could wait. Arianna was all that mattered.
* * * *
Arianna was sleeping, courtesy of a mild sedative from Wyn. Caleb had tucked her into their bed, lying beside her until she drifted off. Earlier, he’d allowed Wyn to treat his wounds, mostly gouges and welts that promised to be painful for several days. He’d lost track of time, but knew the moon had risen, a fraction shy of full in a star-strewn sky. With Arianna sleeping, he wandered downstairs to the office, where he found Wyn sorting papers at his desk.
“Arianna asleep?” Wyn asked.
Caleb nodded. He crossed to the window and pulled the drapes aside to stare up at the moon. After a time, Wyn joined him.
“It must feel strange to be able to appreciate moonlight again,” his nephew observed.
Caleb nodded. The moon wasn’t entirely full, but the lack of magnetic attraction confirmed the curse was broken. After three horrific years, he was free. No more injections or punishing transformations. “Should I ask how you and my father got rid of Seth’s body?”
“Probably not. Let’s just say between Rick’s money and my medical connections, it’s been taken care of–or will be within the next few hours. Body, blood, the entire crime scene swept clean. If anyone does any poking, Seth Reilly will end up a missing person in a database of thousands. Fortunately for you, he was basically nomadic. Other than Daphne–who’s already over him, according to Ari–no one’s going to miss him.”
“You’re a good friend, Wyn.”
“Damn straight.”
Caleb grinned. He might have tumbled into another century, but he had a wife who loved him, a steadfast friend, and–
A fist slammed into his gut. “My father! Where’s my father?”
Wyn hedged. “He–”
“Where, damn it?”
“I’m here, Caleb.” Rick stepped into the room. A trace of sad resignation colored his eyes, but there was excitement too. One glance at him and Caleb understood the conflict. In Rick’s heart, the gut-wrenching trauma of leaving was cushioned by the knowledge he would soon be with the woman he loved.
Caleb’s chest grew tight. No sense evading the obvious. “Does Wyn know?”
“We’ve said our good-byes.” Rick grinned fondly at the doctor. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Let’s take a walk, Caleb. Outside.”
He wasn’t certain where he found the courage to do as his father asked. His heart was pounding by the time they stepped onto the back porch, and followed the footpath toward the barn. A foreign current pulsed under the song of moon and stars, humming with the flow of electricity. White slipper clouds scuttled across the sky, back-lit now and again with the orange stain of heat lightning.
“I feel like I’m waiting for the hammer to fall,” Caleb mumbled. What was wrong with him? Why couldn’t he be happy for Rick the same way Rick was happy for him and Arianna? Why was he being so damnably selfish?
Rick smiled faintly. His hair was blonder than Caleb’s, nearly white in the moonlight. “I walked this way when it happened,” he explained. “I’d been on a date, a night of casual sex that didn’t work out. It ended early and I was on my way home, a little drunk, highly pissed. My car broke down over there–” He pointed past the barn.
“Weathering Rock didn’t exist then, it was just an open field. No traffic, and I couldn’t raise a signal on my cell, so I started walking. The sky was clear, but there was a charge in the air like a storm was brewing. I was cutting across the field when I felt the hair on my neck stand on end. The next thing I knew, I was surrounded by ball lightning.” He looked at Caleb from the corner of his eye. “You know the rest.”
“Yeah.” A gloomy acknowledgement. They reached the barn and continued around the back. Caleb’s throat grew tight with emotion. He stopped walking, forcing Rick to halt at his side. “I don’t know how to say good-bye.”
“It isn’t good-bye.” Rick’s expression softened, and he gripped Caleb behind the neck. “I’m going back to watch you grow up.”
It wasn’t enough. Caleb felt the rough sting of tears behind his eyes and hated himself for being so rigidly selfish. The wind kicked up a notch, raw with restless energy, ripping through the grass at their feet. “I’ll never see you again.”
Rick tightened his grip, brought his head closer, his voice fierce. “I promise I’ll find a way to communicate. I have your mother’s medallion in my pocket, and your wedding picture. She’s going to know you didn’t die, Caleb. I’ll tell Charles too when he’s old enough, but you have to let me go. Don’t you realize the joy it gives me to think of watching you grow up, knowing the man you’ll become?”
Caleb ducked his head. The wind lashed hair across his cheek. He felt a change in the atmosphere, bristling and aggressive. He’d felt it once before when it had hurtled him through time. In a matter of minutes his father would be gone. He understood that as plainly as if time had shifted in front of him.
“When you go back…” He clasped Rick’s arm, propelled by the prickling of hair on the back of his neck. The thrum in the air was audible, growing with each passing second. “You’ll remember this reality? Everything that happened here?”
Rick nodded, his eyes glistening and bright. “Why do you think it’s so special? As I watch you grow through childhood into the officer I know you become, I’ll be thinking about you here with Wyn and Arianna, in the home I built.” He grinned. “Maybe I won’t be so tough on you about West Point this time around.” He hesitated, sobering. “I’ll know about Seth, and the werewolf curse. I could change that. Prevent it from ever happening. You wouldn’t have to suffer three years of agony.”
“No. You can’t change things, Father. I don’t want you to. Altering that or anything else could affect my arrival in this century. I might never meet Arianna or Wyn. I’ll take the bad with the good. I want the future I have now. I won’t risk altering that to save myself pain.”
“Somehow, I knew you were going to say that.” Thunder boomed overhead. Rick’s eyes flicked to the sky. “Caleb…”
“I know.” And still he couldn’t let go. He tugged his father into a fierce embrace, clinging for all he was worth. Rick’s arms went around him, and he squeezed his eyes shut.
“I’ll always love you, son,” he heard his father whisper against his ear.
He made himself let go and stepped back. “I love you too, Father.”
Rick raised a hand to his face, touched his cheek one last time. With a wistful parting smile, he turned and walked into the darkness.
Caleb fought a lump in his throat, watching his father’s silhouette dwindle. It took all of his strength not to run after him and demand he come back. Rick crested the horizon and hesitated at the top. He lifted his hand in a final farewell, and then vanished over the hillside.
Caleb swallowed hard.
He heard the sudden boom of exploding l
ightning. From his vantage point, the flash was weak like the distant echo of a quickly moving storm. The wind died, choked into stillness.
Then the backlash exploded in his head and drove him to the ground with a roar like rolling thunder.
* * * *
“Caleb!”
Arianna bent over her semi-conscious husband. The short-lived explosion of lightning had wakened her from a sound sleep. She’d bolted down the stairs, frantically calling Caleb’s name when Wyn had caught her at the bottom.
“He’s out back, Arianna. With Rick.”
In a heartbeat she understood Rick would be gone by the time she got there. She could accept that. She’d known the time was coming, had sensed it for days. What she hadn’t expected was to find Caleb struggling up from the ground when she arrived.
Heart in her throat, she helped him to his feet. “Caleb?”
He shook his head to clear it.
“He’s just shaken up, Ari,” Wyn said in an attempt to reassure her.
Unconvinced, she roamed her fingers over Caleb’s face, his neck, his hair. “Are you hurt?”
“Other than the racket in my head?” Wincing, he massaged his brow. “I thought I was done with headaches.”
“Maybe after this one.” Wyn extended a hand. “Come on, Colonel. Let’s go back inside.”
Caleb looked toward the horizon and the sloping curve of the hillside in the distance. “He’s gone. My father’s gone.”
Arianna wasn’t sure what to say. His eyes were dry, but his face was tight, strained by exhaustion and tension.
Wyn prodded him toward the house. “Think of all the aggravation you’re going to cause him in the past. Thirty years’ worth. If anyone has the right to a headache, it’s Rick.”
Caleb scrounged up a smile. At his side, Arianna slipped under his arm, thankful when he leaned against her. Together, the three walked toward the house in comfortable silence. It was only when they’d stepped onto the porch that a crease formed on Caleb’s brow.
“He said he’d find a way to communicate with me. He promised.”
Wyn frowned. “Look, Caleb, I know Rick would do everything he could, but don’t bank on all this time travel stuff–”
“No.” Arianna’s mind was scrambling, tripping over itself as she tried to sort through what she’d learned from Seth and Rick. “The attic!” The pieces clicked into place. “Rick hid everything there when you were a child.”
Both men looked at her as if she’d lost her mind.
“Don’t you see?” She swung toward Caleb, gripping his arm in excitement. “If he left something for you, it would be in the attic. He told me that’s where he’d hid everything connecting him to the twenty-first century–his wallet, driver’s license, credit cards, clothes, even the article from the Sagehill Business Journal. When you were teenagers, Seth found all of it. He didn’t take anything, but the knowledge gave him an edge when he ended up in this century. Don’t you see, Caleb? If Rick wanted you to find something, that’s where he’d stash it.”
She watched the realization dawn on his face.
* * * *
“God, I love you!” He scooped her into his arms, kissing her soundly. In the next instant, fatigue and tension forgotten, he raced into the house and bolted up the steps.
When he’d first arrived in the present century, Caleb had gone from room to room, studying the changes in Weathering Rock, looking for anything remotely familiar. He remembered scouring the attic, unearthing Wyn’s old medical journals, college papers, textbooks and forgotten family photos.
Now, as he careened to a heart-thudding stop on the threshold and switched on the light, he knew something was different. The room was mostly as he remembered, but the hodgepodge of items had spread to include a stack of boxes and crates. A single artist’s canvas was propped against the wall, facing inward.
Caleb stepped forward, the floorboards creaking beneath his feet. A tingle of excitement prickled his spine.
“Caleb?” Wyn followed him into the room, Arianna trailing close behind. “For someone who was complaining about a headache, you move like a frigging jackrabbit. I don’t know what you expect to find up here. It’s just a bunch of dust and old books.”
“You think so?” Caleb bent and turned the canvas around. Behind him, Arianna gasped.
“Damn.” Wyn drifted closer, rendered speechless. For a moment all three stared silently at the lifelike image on the canvas. The painting was portrait-sized, meant to dominate wall space. Though aged, it was well preserved with only minimal flaking at the bottom left corner.
“Oh, Caleb.” Arianna leaned against him, pressing her cheek to his shoulder. “It’s beautiful. It’s our wedding picture.”
And it was, to a degree. He was portrayed in full Federal uniform and hat, his arm around Arianna in her sweeping ivory gown. But it was the other two people in the painting that made it complete. His father stood beside him, attired in an immaculate black frock coat, charcoal vest and white shirt. The artist had chosen to paint him as he appeared in his early thirties, a combination of Richard DeCardian and Rick Rothrock, blond, sun-streaked hair and dancing blue eyes. Caleb knew it would always be the way he remembered his father most, when they were as much friends as father and son, nearly the same age.
The woman who stood beside Arianna was simply stunning, a younger version of the mother he remembered. Lustrous honey-blonde hair was pinned into an upsweep, her violet gown echoing the unusual shade of her eyes to perfection. She wore a gold medallion around her neck, suspended on a purple ribbon. It was the same medallion Caleb had sent back with his father.
“We have to frame this and put it downstairs,” Arianna said. “I can’t believe how lifelike it is. How could anyone…how could Rick have commissioned someone to do this?” Bewildered, she looked to Caleb for an answer. “He couldn’t possibly have explained our wedding picture to a nineteenth century artist, much less photos of himself when he was younger.”
“I think I know.” Caleb crouched to study the artist’s signature, tucked in the bottom right corner: C. DeCardian, 1864. Something sad tugged at his heart. “He told them when it was time, like he promised he would. My brother painted this.”
“Charles?” Arianna was shocked.
Caleb stood, a smile flirting at the corner of his mouth. “He was the softer soul. He never understood how I could go off to war when he was content with books and art.”
“He was incredibly talented. I can’t believe you never mentioned it.”
“I never stopped to appreciate his gift. I thought wasting time with paints was as productive as he deemed my drilling with a sword. We were…different.”
“Caleb, look at this.” Wyn had wandered away to inspect several crates stacked beneath the eaves. “I don’t remember seeing these before.” He lifted the top of the nearest crate, scrunching up his face when the lid came loose with a small cloud of dust. “Looks like books, maybe journals.”
“Journals?” Caleb stepped closer, watching as Wyn rifled through a slim volume with leather binding. Even from a distance he could see the parchment was old, yellowed and crinkled with time.
Wyn stopped flipping at random and read aloud.
March 23, 1843
You turned ten today, Caleb, and damn if I know what to do about the mess you made. You couldn’t wait to try out the fishing rod I gave you, no matter three weeks of storms have turned Hunter’s Run Creek into a bog. Your mother is still shooting daggers at me over all the mud you boys tracked into the house. She insists the kitchen floor will never be the same, and that she’ll be picking worms off the counters for days. I don’t know if I ever told you, but your mother can work up a healthy steam when she sets her mind to it. At least where I’m concerned. It’s your birthday so, of course, she wouldn’t blame you.
I was uncomfortable letting you and Charles go, not because you were fishing, but because Seth Reilly was tagging along. I have a hard time juggling him, smiling and being polite, knowing t
he demon that bastard becomes. But I promised you I wouldn’t alter the past, and I intend to stand by that. I find myself noticing things about Seth I didn’t before, like the envious gleam in his eye when he spied your new fishing rod. I wish I could say he was your friend, Caleb, at least now during this time of childhood and innocence, but I’m afraid he’s using you. I have to bite my tongue when I see how friendly you are with him, how generous, open and trusting.
Wyn flipped the page, glancing up at Caleb. “It goes on.” He fanned the book. “Pages and pages with day after day of entries.”
Caleb’s eyes drifted to the crate, noting the slim volumes tucked inside. He counted a total of five crates. “He must have written me every day. He promised he’d communicate and he did.” The enormity of what Rick had done struck hard and deep. Despite being separated by time, his father had found a way to share his life in the past. Reverently, Caleb ran his fingers over the nearest crate. The gift would bring him weeks, even years of enjoyment. Sharing, remembering, living each day and experience through his father’s eyes.
Arianna picked up an envelope from the floor. “This must have fallen out when the crate was opened.” She wet her lips, looking from the heavy brown envelope to Caleb. “It’s addressed to you.”
His mouth grew dry. Somehow he knew it was the key to the painting, the books and everything he would find in the crates.
“Well don’t gawk at it,” Wyn prompted when he stood staring down at his name in heavily scrawled script. “Open the damn thing.”
Caleb took the envelope and slipped his thumb beneath the seal. It gave easily, the brittle wax crumbling like so much dust. Moving to a small table, he spilled the contents onto its surface. His wedding photo tumbled out, yellowed and cracked, along with the gold medallion that had belonged to his mother, Rick’s driver’s license, a few credit cards issued to Richard R. Rothrock and a yellowed copy of Rick’s front-page article from the Sagehill Business Journal. The last item was a single sheet of parchment, folded in half.