Into the Dim

by Janet B. Taylor

  He struggled to his feet, his hand clutching his side. I glanced away from the dark pool of blood he left behind.

  “It was Eustace,” I said. Once I started babbling, I couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “He hit you from behind. The wind started a few minutes ago. I have no idea if it means what we hope it does. I thought you were dead. Then he . . . he tried to . . . And so I—”

  “Did he hurt you?” Bran’s voice was deceptively soft, but I could see rage glimmer in his eyes as he pulled the edges of my ripped bodice together and tied it closed. “Did that bastard touch you?”

  “No. I mean he hit me, but he didn’t—you know—do anything else. He didn’t get the chance.”

  As our eyes met, the realization of what I’d done struck me. “I killed him, I think. Shoved him into the chasm. He screamed for so long, Bran, but I had no choice. He was going to . . .” I slapped my hands over my mouth, trying to hold in the moan. Bran eased them away and cupped my face, forcing me to look at him.

  “Listen to me. You did the right thing. The only thing. I hope that misbegotten son of a whore is burning in hell.”

  A weird little hiccup erupted from my throat. “Well, he’s on his way. That’s for sure.”

  Bran pulled me to him and held me so tight.

  In his arms, I felt the sense of unbelonging I’d lived with my whole life begin to fade away. The grief at losing my mother. The confusion when I learned she was still alive. It all disappeared as Bran rocked me in his arms while the wind keened and tugged at our cloaks and hair.

  He stiffened suddenly. “The Nonius Stone? That monster didn’t take it from you?”

  “No.”

  We still had no idea if it would take us both back. Or where we’d end up if it did. But I pulled the walnut-size stone from my pocket. It throbbed against my palm, and immediately my skin shimmered in a lavender light.

  I grabbed Bran’s hand and pressed our palms together. The mist crawled up his arm, coating him in purple, and the knot inside my chest loosened.

  “See?” I said. “It’ll work. It’s powerful enough to take us both. Now we just concentrate on where we want to go. Concentrate hard, Bran. Think about Christopher Manor. Hold it in your mind as hard as you can.”

  The wind became a cyclone, and suddenly I could feel pinpricks dancing along my nerve endings. The Dim’s pull.

  He looked at me then, and I felt cold dread pour over me at the regret on his face.

  “Hope,” he said, “Listen, I can’t . . .”

  “No,” I tried to protest, but he stopped me, his fingers soft on my lips. “I can’t let her corrupt Tony. But I swear I will never let her hurt you again.”

  The pain when I realized what he was saying was so exquisite, I couldn’t even touch it. I could feel myself coming apart but didn’t know if it was the Dim or what his words meant. His hand twined in my hair, and he raised my face to his.

  When our lips touched, I murmured against his mouth, “Please.”

  The suction ripped the air from our lungs. We kept pressing the Nonius Stone between our palms and knotted our fingers together, clinging. Desperate. Bran locked his other arm around my waist. As he tightened his grip, I felt no fear. I didn’t even worry where we might end up. Either way, I had lost him.

  “Hope!” Bran called over the roar of the wind. “I will always—”

  But whatever he’d been about to say was drowned out by a sudden roar, and all I knew was the smell of wood smoke and apples as it filled me. As the Dim took us.

  The Nonius Stone. It must’ve been why the journey back was so much easier. At first.

  Sublime joy flooded through me, shoving away the sorrow as we soared forward through time. I felt no disorientation, no pain. Saw no rotting faces. Brilliant colors burst from between our fingers, twining around us in a blaze of rainbow light. It fused us together, and I threw my head back and laughed with sheer exultation.

  Then I felt him slip. Just a bit. But it was enough. The Nonius Stone slid from our joined hands. Bran’s hold on me loosened as he grappled for it. It grazed the tips of his fingertips and dropped away into the shimmering, sparkling ether around us.

  Everything changed. Darkness rushed at us. The faces of the dead crowded in, not one at a time but in a churning mass.

  I tried to hold on, to keep us bound together, but the Dim ripped him away as I twirled end over end, tumbling and whipping like a leaf in a hurricane. I felt each cell as it tore apart, one microscopic particle at a time.

  I landed hard on my shoulder and hip, rolling over and over until my head bounced against stone. My brain imploded in agony, and nausea rolled through me. I forced my eyelids open, but something was wrong. Everything was bleary, as though I was peering through the water of a murky fishbowl.

  I can’t see.

  My lips refused to form words. My mind was sluggish, my muscles as weak as water.

  “Bran,” I croaked.

  No answer. I tried to scrub at my eyes, but lightning bolts of electricity jolted over my nerve endings like my entire body had gone to sleep. My ears felt stuffed with cotton. “Someone! Anyone! Please!”

  Muffled noise. Footsteps pounding across stone.

  “Bran!” I screamed his name with everything I had left.

  A familiar hand grabbed mine. Scalding fingertips traced my cheek for an instant before his hoarse voice croaked, “I’m here.”

  My head fell back in relief, and the indistinct world around me faded to black.

  Chapter 49

  I PERCHED ON THE EDGE OF MY MOTHER’S HOSPITAL BED, my baby sister a warm lump in my arms. While machines beeped quietly around us, I inhaled the baby’s scent. Fresh-baked cookies and newness.

  I still couldn’t believe it. I had a sister.

  “She’s really beautiful, Mom.”

  “I know.” My mother was beginning to get a bit of color back in her wan cheeks after three days in the hospital.

  Misty morning light poured in through the window as the baby stretched out a tiny hand, as though grasping at a dream. She gripped my finger with surprising strength. A wrinkle of concern appeared below the pink-and-white knitted cap. I smiled, recognizing Moira’s handiwork.

  “Lucinda has contacted your father,” Mom said. “All she told him was that you were ill. He’ll be on the next plane out. He knows nothing about me.” Her gaze flicked to the baby. “Or her. He—he’s coming alone.”

  I looked away. So she knew about Stella. In my mind, I saw my dad standing next to the quiet, thoughtful librarian. He and Stella shared roots in the same small-town world, and I honestly didn’t know what he would do. Dad was a scientist. His life revolved around test tubes and logic. I knew he’d loved my mother, but hadn’t recent events proved that sometimes love wasn’t enough?

  “Hope,” she said, “I want you to know that I’m going to tell your father everything. He deserves that. But . . . well”—she pressed her lips together to still the trembling—“I think we both know how that will likely go. I’ve never been fair to Matt, keeping him in the dark this way. In the end, I just want him to be happy. And if he’s found happiness with Stella, I won’t contest it. I hope you understand.”

  The baby let out a squawk when I squeezed her too tight. Her little-old-man features blurred as I nodded.

  “Here.” My mother held out her arms. “Let me have her.”

  I handed her back, then tied my own blue and white hospital gown tighter around me. I’d been admitted for observation the day before, the concussion I’d received still making my head buzz and throb like a nest of angry wasps.

  After the baby was settled, Mom smoothed a finger absently down one downy cheek. “I wanted to tell you so many times about . . . everything.”

  My mind flipped to a snowy forest. To the image of an angel holding me in her arms, and a horrifying journey that my young mind had locked away.

  “You were so sickly when you were small,” she went on. “Fragile. You caught every illness imaginable,
due to your lack of natural antibodies for this time. So I kept you close, thinking it the right way to protect you. Yet I prepared you, as best I could, in case the day ever came. I—I should’ve never kept this from you. Any of it. I’m sorry.”

  I reached out to squeeze her hand and felt one of the hundred cracks in my shattered heart begin to mend itself. A slender thread of forgiveness wove itself between us. It was tenuous, but definitely a beginning.

  When a nurse entered and began fussing with my mother’s IV lines and telling me to head back to my own room for a vital sign check, I stood. “Well, I guess I’d better—”

  “I’ve decided on a name,” Mom blurted out.

  Guilt stabbed me when I realized I hadn’t thought to ask. “Really? What?”

  “Eleanor.” The name whispered through the room, coating me in memory. “Her name is Eleanor.”

  “I think”—my breath hitched—“I think that’s perfect, Mom.”

  As I reached for the door handle, Mom’s voice rose over the beeping. “Bran came to see me before he was transferred,” she called. “He wanted to see you, but you were sedated.”

  I knew Bran was long gone. Transferred by Celia to another hospital within hours of our arrival. No one knew where. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.

  My knuckles whitened on the handle. “He could have waited.”

  “He didn’t have a choice, honey,” she said. “He explained about his brother. And even with that, I think it was a difficult decision for him.”

  I looked back over my shoulder at the tiny bundle in my mother’s arms. What would I sacrifice to keep her safe?

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess it was.”

  “We were sore worried.” Phoebe lay curled next to me on the starched hospital sheets. “When you and Bran just popped in like that.”

  I nodded, though the motion made my head hurt. Still, it was nothing compared with the sharp throb in my chest, as if my heart had been scooped out and replaced with a tangled ball of needles.

  “I was down in the watch room,” Doug, his bulk perched awkwardly on a tiny rolling stool, explained, “when suddenly every line on the monitors turned red. That’s when I knew you must’ve found the Nonius Stone. It was the only explanation. I flew down and powered up the machines. There was this enormous blast that rocked the whole house. Then the two of you just . . . appeared.”

  The glance that passed between him and Collum set my teeth on edge. “What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Collum still looked washed out after minor surgery to repair the damage to his arm. He’d be in a sling for a few weeks, but the doctors thought there would be no permanent damage.

  “There’s a problem with the Tesla device,” Doug said. “The diagnostics show some damage. I can’t know for sure. I think it’ll go for a couple more voyages, but nothing is certain.”

  Phoebe raised herself up on an elbow and looked at me, her small, freckled face so serious. “Cheese an’ crackers, Hope. When you did that—gave up your lodestone—I’ve never been so scared,” she said. “I don’t know that I could’ve done it.”

  “Reckless.” Collum rose and moved to the edge of the bed. “Stupid. Rash.” A ghost of a smile flickered over his mouth as he reached down to squeeze my hand. “And the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Lucinda was waiting for me at the kitchen table when Mac brought me home to Christopher Manor.

  “Sit,” she said. “Please.”

  Strangely numb, I shuffled over and slid onto the wooden bench across from her. Deep purple ringed her eyes beneath a matching plum-colored turban. Her face seemed thinner, the skin tinged yellow and pulled tight across her broad cheekbones.

  Two days earlier, Mac, perched quietly in a straight-backed chair by my hospital bed, had finally told us what was ailing my aunt. “Lu don’t want a fuss made, mind,” he said, “so keep your opinions to yerself.”

  Apparently, while on a trip to the thirteenth century, Lucinda had picked up a blood disorder that had no modern equivalent. Akin to a rare kind of leukemia, it did not respond to any known treatment. They’d researched all they could, but there was little information to find. A dear friend of Lucinda’s, a doctor in Edinburgh, knew all about the Viators and was doing all she could. But at this point, Mac said, only frequent blood transfusions were staving off the inevitable.

  “I want you to know that I was quite impressed with the job you did,” my aunt said. “This mission was a success, in no small part due to your efforts. You protected the members of your team. You brought your mother back. And you’ve kept the Nonius Stone out of Celia’s hands.” I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw pride skim over her features. “In quite a unique fashion, I must say.”

  Frowning, I remembered the moment the Nonius had slipped from Bran’s fingers and tumbled away into the Dim.

  “You must realize, however, that it’s likely the stone will reenter the timeline somewhere,” Lucinda went on.

  I nodded. I’d already thought of that, wondered about it.

  “Celia’s clever,” Lucinda said. “She’ll realize it soon enough. And she’s brought in some hard men who will stop at nothing to locate the stone. Her mind, you see, is warped by jealousy. We tried to help her once, to make her feel part of us, but she just couldn’t accept it.”

  Lucinda sat straighter in her chair. “Our task now is to ensure that the Timeslippers never get their hands on the Nonius Stone. For without our interference, I fear they may alter the timeline in ways we cannot imagine.”

  Silence fell between us as I remembered the little Carlyle girls, lost forever by one thoughtless act. Yes, Celia had to be stopped.

  Lucinda was watching me carefully. “Hope,” she said, “you have proven your abilities beyond anything we expected. I have spoken with your mother, and though it frightens her, she believes it is your right to make up your own mind.”

  “About what?”

  “We could use someone with your knowledge and unique gifts.” Lucinda’s blunt fingers gripped the edge of the table. “I’m asking you to join the Viators, Hope.”

  I stared down at the table. The offer spun before me, tantalizing and horrifying all at once. Could I actually go through that hell again? What kind of insane person would even think of choosing such a life?

  Without waiting for a response, Aunt Lucinda slid off the bench. “I’ll give you some time to think it over.” At the door, she turned. “But might I make a suggestion?” She glanced at the silvery glass of the kitchen window. “The river is especially lovely by moonlight. Perhaps you should consider taking a ride.”

  Ethel and I were breathless when we reined up at the riverbank. All around me, the Highlands looked like another world. In the daytime, the moors and mountains seemed like a fairyland untouched by time. Now the river had transformed into a brilliant ribbon of light, every leaf of heather and gorse frosted in a million shades of glorious silver, like a child’s dream.

  The rush of the river. The perfume of heather. The mist that swirled up from the ground. It all matched how I felt. Ghost-like. Insubstantial. One foot in each time, but belonging to neither.

  I picked my way to the exact spot where I’d first tumbled down the bank and, closing my eyes, wished I had it to do all over again. This time, I’d tell him I knew his face. I’d make him tell me everything. I’d beg him to stay with us. And if he refused, I’d drag him back to the manor if I had to. Anything to keep him safe. To keep him here.

  “Ridiculous,” I muttered, cursing under my breath.

  “Really, Hope.” The voice echoed weirdly in the fog. “Such language.”

  Heart leaping into my throat, I spun in a circle, trying to locate the source. As if I’d conjured him from the mist, Bran Cameron stepped over the edge of the riverbank, leading his horse.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I wondered briefly if I was dreaming. But the smells and sounds and feel of the moist fog against my skin
were too real. Bran led his roan to nuzzle against Ethel and moved toward me, leaving a few feet of space between us.

  “I had to see you,” he said simply.

  When he reached out a hand, I stiffened, and he let it drop. He’d made his choice. And though I understood his reasons, even admired them, it didn’t change how much it hurt.

  “My mother’s agreed to leave Tony in school for now.”

  “That’s good.” I choked back the excruciating ache. “I mean, I’m glad he’s safe. But I don’t understand. Why would Celia agree to take you back, when she knows you betrayed her?”

  I had to look away from the cocky half grin. That crooked incisor. “She didn’t have much choice, really,” he said. “Before I left, I hid all her Tesla research.” He winked. “A little insurance policy.”

  Awkward seconds passed while we stared at each other. He was so close, I could see the condensation from the mist pearling on his cheeks. Yet he might as well have been on the moon. I looked away and began to move toward Ethel.

  “Well,” I said, “good luck with that.”

  Before I could take another step, Bran grabbed me, eyes like a starving man’s as they roamed my face. “When you rode into my village on the front of your grandfather’s horse,” he said, “you were the brightest, most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Like a duchess, with your silks and your little doll.” His fingers tightened on my arms. “No matter what happens, don’t ever forget that.”

  I ripped away, fighting back sobs that slashed at the inside of my chest like shards of broken glass. “Then leave her,” I cried. “Lucinda could protect your brother somehow. I know it. She’s got a lot of influence, and . . .”

  Still gibbering like a maniac, I let him pull me to him. Beneath the snug T-shirt, I could feel the bandage wrapped around his slim waist.

  I breathed in, wishing I never had to exhale, that I could keep Bran’s scent in my lungs forever. My fingers played up the ridge of his spine, memorizing the flex of each muscle, and how the fine hairs on the back of his neck stiffened when my lips grazed his earlobe.