by Amy Vansant
“Very funny.” Catriona ducked down, eyes peering over the stainless steel countertop as she called back. “What do you want?”
“Can I look around this corner without catching a knife in my forehead?”
“Maybe. No guns.”
“No guns. See?”
A man’s empty hands poked through the curtain, followed by a face. The man was tall, with a shaved head and sharp jawline. Catriona didn’t find him familiar.
As the man moved a little farther into view she thought his features leaned Slavic. He had an oval face and a nose a little too long for his face.
Overall, he didn’t look like a whimsical guy.
“What do you want?” asked Catriona. “Who are you?”
“My name is Volkov. I’m here to ask you to go home. That is all.”
“Couldn’t you have done that without the guns in the first place?”
“You were already asked once and here you are.”
Catriona scowled.
Alain.
Alain had asked her to go home and this man knew it.
She huffed. “Nobody really gave me a chance to go home, did they? I was barely off the phone with Alain before you and your thugs showed up waving guns around like maniacs. You work for Alain?”
The man laughed. “He might think so, but it is the other way round.”
Catriona frowned.
That confirms it. Alan and this guy are in cahoots.
Alain wasn’t the sort of guy who worked for other people. Catriona suspected he’d gotten himself in over his head with someone. The Russian mob, perhaps, based on the look and sound of the face poking through the red beads.
“He sent you?”
“No. Our mutual interests sent me.”
Another voice spoke from behind the wall and Volkov’s face disappeared behind the curtain. His hands, still thrust through the beads, held up a finger.
“One moment please.”
Catriona heard him talking to someone.
Volkov’s face appeared once more. “I guess today is your lucky day.”
Catriona nodded. “I was just thinking I should buy a lottery ticket.”
He flashed her a toothy grin. “I like you. You have fire. We are going now. Do not follow us.”
With that, the man disappeared behind the curtain.
Catriona remained still until she heard the bell on the restaurant’s front door jingle.
She looked at Broch. “That was it? Just like that?”
Broch frowned. “How come did he leave?”
“I don’t know. Everyone keeps letting us off the hook today and I don’t like it. Things aren’t supposed to be this easy.”
“It means it’s going tae get worse.”
“Exactly.”
Brock kept his knife and the two of them crept to the doorway. Broch held up a finger, asking her to wait, and dropped to his hands and knees. Dipping low, as if doing a pushup, he stuck his head through the beads and into the hallway before retracting it to stand.
“It’s clear.”
Catriona stared at him. “What the hell was that? An impromptu push up?”
“Ah lik’ tae keek aroond corners that wey. Na yin ever haes thair gun trained tae shoot someone’s foot. By the time thay keek me and adjust, ah’m gaen.”
Catriona squinted at him. “And if they run after you, you’re on your hands and knees scrambling away like a raccoon?”
“Ah’m a very fast crawler.”
Catriona rolled her eyes.
“Okay, forest critter, let’s get out of here and get to the warehouse. I’m suddenly very inspired to find out what Alain is up to.”
Chapter Thirteen
Sean opened his eyes to find himself staring at a gray-blue sky. Something felt very wrong. He couldn’t discern what until a nippy breeze ruffled his hair. Goose pimples arched their heads and waddled down his arms. They’d been desert geese for decades and the chill had sent them scurrying.
Sean spotted a dull glow behind the thick clouds above him.
Definitely daytime.
Southern California never felt chilly in the daytime.
Cold damp spread across his back, tickling his neck and making him shiver. He rolled a little to his left and heard the ground squish beneath him.
Cold and wet. Very unlike Southern California.
He heard the sound of people talking not far from where he lay. Something about their language didn’t seem right, but he attributed it to the voices being too faint for him to make out the actual words.
Okay. One thing at a time.
He strained to sit up and then stopped, out of breath.
Och. My chest hurts.
He chuckled that he’d said och. Broch was rubbing off on him, bringing back the Scottish accent he’d spent so long correcting.
Sean lifted his right hand. It felt as if he were underwater, or as if Lilliputians had tied him to the ground, and every movement he made dragged the little people with him, clinging to the ropes.
I am not firing on all cylinders here.
Crawling his fingers across his ribcage like a spider, he felt for the spot that pained him the most. His fingertips located something hard just below his left pec. He traced its edges with his finger.
What could be so hard in the center of my chest?
A little voice in the back of his head answered him.
A bullet.
No. That’s crazy.
Why would I think there’s a bullet in my chest?
And yet... There was a bullet in his chest. He couldn’t see it, but he felt certain.
That bastard shot me.
Even as he said the words, he wasn’t sure whom he meant.
Who shot me?
He closed his eyes and tried to remember the last thing he could. He’d been driving. In the road, a tall, thin man stood, his arm raised.
He had a gun.
Rune.
The image of Rune grew larger and clearer by the second.
I’m going to run him down.
The gun fired. Sean saw the hole appear in his window, closer to the passenger side than his side.
Not the Jag. First the back window, now the front—
He could hear the air whistling through it.
The gun fired a second time. Another hole. His first thought had been thank god he’s destroying the window over and over and hasn’t hit the engine block or the body.
But then...he did hit a body, didn’t he?
It felt as though someone had pointed a blowtorch against his breastbone and flicked on the searing flame.
He remembered now. Rune shot him.
I must have hit him with my car?
Groaning, Sean pushed himself into a sitting position. The wind iced him as it molested more of his body. He wanted to lie back down and hide from it, but he needed to move before he froze in place.
He curled his left fingers and felt the dirt give beneath them. Wet. Thick. Spongy.
I must have been thrown from the car. Maybe in a soggy ravine?
Fifty yards ahead of him people milled around low stone buildings with thatched roofs and a cluster of ramshackle booths. The scene reminded him of a California farmers’ market, but no one wore yoga pants. The colors were all wrong. Everything was some variation of black, brown and green. Muted earth tones. Much like the land around him...green and black, wet and clumpy. The air smelled fresh, though he wished it would stop assaulting his flesh with its frigid claws.
He took a deep breath.
I know that smell.
The smell told him one thing for sure.
This isn’t California.
Sean heard a whistling noise.
What is that?
The noise stopped and he resumed sniffing the wind.
There it is again.
He cocked his head.
A wheezy, bubbly—
Oh.
He tucked his chin and peered down. The hard object he’d felt earlier sat there, like a tiny sherif
f’s badge glinting through a hole in his shirt.
The bullet hit my lung.
He fingered the bullet again and realized it protruded from his chest far enough he could grab the edges of it with his fingers. It had been deeper at one point. Of that he felt sure. But somehow it had popped back up again like a buoy.
This is going to hurt.
He dug his nails around it and braced himself.
One, two—
He pulled it out with a sucking pop. A searing pain radiated across his chest and he gasped, falling sideways, his elbow pushing deep into the mud.
He closed his eyes as the pain slowly subsided. He’d have to be careful, because now he knew there would be no antibiotics for this wound. The pain had helped him realize the truth.
I jumped.
He’d been blocking the possibility from his mind, but only time travel explained the weather, the damp, and the way a bullet had punctured his lung only to pop back out far enough that he could pluck it up like a lucky found penny.
His body had healed enough to live—the bullet had been pushed out of his lung—but he didn’t feel reborn. He felt ragged and sore.
He took slow breaths, each deeper than the last, until the wheezing subsided. It became easier to breathe. The lung had sealed, but the area still ached.
Sean rolled off his elbow and sat staring at the people. A little village sat maybe five hundred yards from where he’d landed. From where he’d appeared? He wasn’t sure what it had looked like when he arrived, but apparently, no one had seen.
The peasants didn’t notice him even now, but he watched them and chewed on the awful truth. Unless he’d awoken on the outskirts of a renaissance festival, he could safely assume he’d gone back in time hundreds of years.
No medicine. No Jaguars.
No Catriona. No Broch. No Luther.
He’d only just been reunited with his son and now he was gone from the boy’s life again. Catriona still needed time and training—
He set his jaw.
No time to dwell.
He needed to find somewhere safe to heal. He wouldn’t last an evening half-soaked, lying on the cold peat.
Peat. It was peat surrounding him.
Could I be back in Scotland?
Groaning, he climbed to his feet. He stared a moment at his sneakers, worried what his new neighbors might think of his strange footwear, and then shrugged. It didn’t matter. He could make up a country from which he hailed and they’d believe him. Their education of the world stretched only as far as their eye could see. He could tell them he’d come from a country called New Balance.
But don’t be too strange. Next thing you know, they’ll be claiming you’re a witch.
That never ended well for the witch.
Hand on his chest, he stumbled down a shallow hill and entered the small crowd of people. A few villagers cast curious looks in his direction before hurrying on their way. Apparently, he hadn’t bumped into anyone in charge yet...anyone who felt they had the right to demand to know who he was.
He tapped the arm of a man pulling chunks of bread off a loaf and stuffing them into his mouth as he stared into the distance.
“What day is this?” he asked.
Please speak English. Some of the conversations he heard around him sounded English, but others didn’t. His head still felt jumbled. He wasn’t sure if they were speaking funny, or if his muddled head hadn’t yet found a way to process what he heard.
The man snapped from his trance and looked at him. He eyeballed Sean’s modern shirt, his attention falling and lingering on the sneakers before returning to his face.
“Whit day? Tis tenth October.”
Sean shook his head. “I mean what year?”
“Whit year?” The man laughed. “Tis year o’ our laird seventeen twenty-yin.”
Judging from the peasant’s accent, filthy tartan and leggings...
“Scotland?” he asked, wincing at how silly he sounded.
The man squinted at him. Sean could tell amused ridicule had turned to uneasy suspicion. Only a man with something wrong in his head wouldn’t know the year, month, day or country. This man had no interest in talking to a lunatic.
“Aye, Glen Orchy,” the man mumbled as he wandered away, clearly unconcerned his sudden departure might be read as rude.
Sean nodded and tried to appear as pleasant as possible.
October tenth, seventeen twenty-one, Glen Orchy.
Sean felt his skin crawl.
No. It couldn’t be.
The day his wife had been killed by Thorn Campbell.
Sean glanced at his wrist and realized he hadn’t worn a watch. He’d gotten tired of constantly checking it—it was like having a second boss, wrapped around his arm, nagging him.
Shoot. The one day I could really use one…
He stopped a passing woman. “What time is it?”
The woman gave him the same odd look as the last man, but raised her hand to peer at the sun. “Tis early morn.”
“I still have time,” he said aloud. The woman left him without asking what he meant.
Sean scanned the surrounding moors, trying to find a way to orient himself.
It couldn’t be an accident.
Why would I come back to this time, this place, if it wasn’t to save my wife?
He’d been given a second chance. His young self was out there, somewhere, on his way to battle Thorn. But he could go to his home—the place he should have stayed—and stop Thorn’s men from murdering his wife.
Surely, he must have been to this village a million times. He’d simply forgotten. He’d been in Los Angeles for nearly thirty years.
North.
Yes. He remembered now. This village lay five miles south of his cottage.
Too far.
He couldn’t walk there in time. He didn’t know the exact moment his cottage had been set ablaze, but he knew it was early in the day.
Sean spotted several horses tied to stakes on the outskirts of the ramshackle market.
I can ride there in time.
Sean approached the beasts and stood petting a black one on the neck as he scanned the crowd. No one looked in his direction.
Could his old bones hop on an unsaddled horse the way they used to? Could he even stay on top of the creature?
He pulled the horse’s reins from the stake and gathered them in his hand, along with a clump of mane near the horse’s withers.
Here goes nothing.
With a sharp intake of breath he regretted immediately, Sean jumped and used the horse’s mane to drag his body across its back. His chest throbbed, his breath coming in short, painful gasps. He threw a leg over the horse and sat up.
So far, so good.
Taking a moment to recall the feeling of a horse beneath his weight, he spurred on the beast. The animal broke into a trot, bouncing Sean and sending shooting pains through his chest and groin. Doubling over, he struck his mount a second time with his heels and it began to canter. That gait proved easier on his body.
Okay. Settle in. You can do this. It’s like riding a bike, only infinitely more painful.
He pointed the horse to the north and held on for dear life.
I’m coming, Isobel.
Chapter Fourteen
Catriona gave the address Mo’s mouse had sent them to a new taxi driver and the man turned to look at them through the sliding window.
“This address is way out of town.”
Catriona shrugged. “It’s where we have to go.”
The driver sighed and started the fare.
Catriona tried to reach Alain to ask what he’d unleashed upon them. He didn’t answer. Next she called Sean. When she was unable to hunt him down, she tried Luther instead.
“Hey Luther, have you seen Sean?”
“No.”
“I wanted to let him know Tyler is on his way back. Commercial. Alain decided to let him go with a warning. But the weird thing—”
Luther c
ut her short. “Okay, I’ll let him know.”
Catriona heard the line click dead and scowled at her phone.
“Well that was borderline rude. He just hung up on me.”
Broch shrugged. “Ye dae tend tae prattle oan.”
“I do not.”
She slipped the phone back into her pocket as the taxi pulled beside a large warehouse surrounded by desert.
Catriona leaned towards the opening between themselves and the driver. “I need you to wait for us.”
The driver shook his head. “Nope. I have places to be.”
“You could have told us that before you drove us out here.”
“I’m not a mind reader. I didn’t know you’d want me to wait.”
Catriona huffed and pushed cash through the hole in the plastic separating the front and the back of the car.
They’d barely closed the doors before the taxi headed away. Catriona stood with her hands on her hips, watching him go. Getting a ride back downtown would be tough. Maybe they could catch a ride with a worker. She turned to Broch, who stood stuffing the vest into the waistband of his jeans. The scarf he’d already thrown around his neck.
Back to business.
“We need to get a feel for how this network is set up, so let me do the talking. I’m going to interview the foremen and the workers.”
He rolled his eyes. “Aye. Ah ken my role.”
“It’s not that, it’s just the accent—”
“Aye. Aye. Ah’m juist here to crack skulls.”
Broch released a deep sigh and Catriona could tell he was playing with her.
She tapped him on the chest. “I thought you were really hurt.”
He smirked and put a hand on her cheek. “Ye kin dae a’ the talking, my sweet little lassie. Ah’m juist ‘ere tae support ye.”
She giggled like a schoolgirl and slapped his chest again. “Shut up. You’ve been watching too many women’s talk shows.”
There were three enormous, closed bay doors on the side of the building and one regular-sized entry. She turned the knob on the small portal and found it locked. There was a button next to the door and a camera mounted above, pointing at them.
Catriona pushed the button. “Hi, I was sent here by Mo?”
After a short delay, a voice crackled back at them “Name?”
“Catriona Phoenix.”
She heard a buzzer and tried the knob again. The door opened. She looked up at Broch and found him staring off down the road they’d just traveled. She turned to follow his gaze.