Ragnar: A Time Travel Romance (Mists of Albion Book 2)

by Joanna Bell

  The last thing I wanted to do was approach him, but he had a whip and not moments ago he'd proved himself entirely capable of using it. I stepped forwards, ducking away from the horse's head as the animal sniffed at me, mirroring his rider's haughtiness.

  At once, the man dismounted and I couldn't stop myself from lurching back, away from him. I was afraid. In 2017, you would not have caught me shrinking from any man – not in broad daylight, anyway. But I was no longer in 2017 and something about the caped man's manner told me he felt it was his right to inspect me. I held my breath as he came closer, so close I could feel his hot, stinking breath on my face. I pressed my lips together, sensing it would not be wise to show disgust.

  "You're not from the estate, are you?" He said a few minutes later, a statement as much as it was a question.

  What was this estate people kept talking about? I had no idea. But when I replied no, confirming I was not from there, my interlocutor's face suddenly grew hard.

  "A Northwoman, then, is that it? I've heard the Northmen sometimes use their women for tasks to which women are not suited – some even say for battle. Or for scouting. Is that what you are, lady? Are you a scout?"

  "A – a what?" I stammered, attempting to step away and then gasping as the man suddenly grasped the scarf around my neck and yanked me towards him. "A North – scout? I'm not – I don't know what you're talking about – I –"

  But he jerked the ends of the scarf again and they tightened around my throat enough to almost cut off my breath. A flutter of panic surged up inside me and I snatched at the scarf, trying to loosen it. No sooner had my fingers found their way under the fabric than I suddenly found myself on my knees, and one hand sinking into the cold, rough sand beneath. How had I –?

  "Oooh..."

  That was me making that strange sound. And as I made it a sharp sting on my left cheek brought with it the realization that I'd just been knocked off my feet. I looked up just in time to see a second blow coming my way and only barely managed to duck it. And even then, as it dawned on me that I was going to have to fight back, a small voice in the back of my mind berated me. How stupid are you, Emma? What did you think, that this was going to be some kind of theme park? That you were going to be safe? You idiot. You complete idiot!

  The dark-eyed man was not much – if any – bigger than me, and we were too close for him to wield the whip effectively. Also, I got the sense that he was surprised – that he didn't expect the level of fight-back he was getting. We were fighting over my scarf, he attempting to drag me towards the top of the beach, ignoring my breathless gasps, and me clawing at his hands and, eventually, sinking my teeth into one of them, when he made the mistake of letting it wander too close to my mouth. He screamed, enraged, and jumped away from me, tightening his other hand around the wound.

  "Baint!" He shouted – or at least, that's what it sounded like. It was my first time hearing the word, but I had a pretty good idea that it wasn't a term of endearment. "Aye, a Northwoman through and through! As rough as a wild dog!"

  I didn't – and couldn't – know what the man intended to do with me, if he managed to subdue me. I'm not a violent person. But how could I take the chance? How could I assume he would somehow be open to a conversation after what had just happened? I couldn't. When he paused his diatribe to look briefly down at his wounded hand, I took aim and kicked him, hard and true and square – right in the balls. He went down at once, silently. The last thing I heard before disappearing back into the woods on my way to the tree was a high-pitched moan.

  Without slowing to check if I was being pursued I tore one of my gloves off and threw myself down at the base of the tree, pressing my hand against its bark and welcoming the darkness as it drew me back to the future like a wave dragging an unskilled swimmer out to sea.

  And then I was there, in the woods on the Renner's property, yanking off my scarf as my breath came in quick, harsh wheezes and furious at myself for being so stupid.

  "What were you thinking?!" I screeched at myself, out loud, when I'd recovered enough to begin stomping my way back to the car. It would have been a humorous scene, to anyone looking on. A young women with her hair sticking up in all directions, yelling at herself and kicking at the snowdrifts in anger. But there was nothing funny about what had just happened – about what could have just happened, if I'd missed with that kick, or if the man had seen it coming and blocked it somehow.

  I'm not that person. I'm not that girl. I've never been a risk taker. I can't even fly without dozing myself with anti-anxiety meds! So what the hell was I doing going back to a time when there was no such thing as police or the assumption of personal safety?

  It's not that I didn't know the answer. I did know. I just didn't like it. I didn't like that something had drawn me back there, something more than my need to see my friend again (although that was definitely part of it), something barely conscious that I sensed I didn't quite have control of.

  I jammed my hands into my pockets as I approached the car, meaning to check the time. It was then, at the moment my right hand grasped nothing but an empty gum wrapper, that I realized with a rush of fresh anger that my phone was missing. I checked my other pocket. Nothing. I ripped my coat off and threw it on the car hood, pressing my hands against the pockets on my jeans, front and back. Nothing. Fuck. Fuck!

  It was getting dark by then, too, and without the phone to light the way I wasn't going to be able to see a thing back in the woods. I'd have to come back the next day, when it was light.

  5

  Emma

  Back at the apartment I found my new roommate – Colette, who had moved in to replace Paige – sitting alone at the kitchen table.

  "Hey Em –" she started, and then stopped instantly when she saw me. Her eye got very big and she looked me up and down. "Oh my God," she continued. "Are you OK? You look, uh –"

  "I'm fine. I just need to have a shower and a nap. I went for a walk in the woods and, um, I got a little lost. No big –"

  "Is that what happened? Well you better call your parents and your security guy, because both of them have called here asking why you've got your phone turned off. I told them you said you needed some time alone but I think –"

  "Yeah," I cut Colette off, because the last thing I felt like doing was chit-chatting. "I lost my phone. I'll call them now."

  Before calling anyone, though, I locked myself in the bathroom and undressed, catching my own eye in the mirror and barely able to maintain eye contact with myself.

  What were you doing this afternoon? What was all that about?

  In the shower, I stood under the hot water for almost half an hour, letting the heat and the pressure pummel my shoulders and the back of my neck. My knees still felt a little wobbly, too. I remembered that feeling from a trip to the seaside as a child with grandparents. They'd both fallen asleep in the sunshine and I'd wandered off, eventually clambering up a very steep bluff and only realizing I'd gone too far – and without planning a route back down – when I'd looked down and noticed how small and faraway the people on the beach looked. That feeling of crystal-clear realization that if I put a foot wrong there was a good chance I would die stayed with me for the rest of my life – a lesson learned. That's what I felt standing there in the shower, that jittery sensation from childhood of understanding just how close I'd just come to something very, very bad.

  After wrapping a towel around my wet hair and emerging from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, I flopped onto my bed and used the landline to call my sister back in Norwich. Katie is two years older than me, the rebel to my good girl, and after an adolescence of at times quite vicious sibling rivalry we seemed to have settled into a more adult pattern of sisterly friendship. She knew me probably better than anyone on earth.

  "Em?" She asked when she picked up. "Is that you? Where are you calling –"

  "I lost my phone, I'm on the landline in my flat. I –" I broke off, unable to finish my sentence as everything that had happened over
the past couple of days – and weeks, and months – suddenly seemed to come crashing down onto my head at that very moment.

  Katie knew something was wrong. She also knew how much I hated getting emotional in front of other people – even my own sister – so she spoke up to spare me the humiliation. "I know, Em. I saw what happened online. How awful – mum and dad are furious with the security company –"

  "What?" I asked, before realizing she was talking about the incident on campus – the one that was apparently, as I suspected it would be, splashed across the internet. "Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was no fun."

  "That was no fun?" Katie repeated back me, surprised. "No fun, Emma? It looked fucking awful is what it looked like. All of those people standing about, not doing anything to help you. It made me so feel so helpless to see you like that. You're coming home for Christmas, right? Even if you can't make it by the 25th you could still come for New Year's Eve, couldn't you? Mum and Dad are so desperate to see you, Em. They're so worried. We're all so worried."

  But I didn't want to talk about the campus assault or my Christmas plans. I thought I did – I thought that's why I called Katie in the first place – for a little taste of family and normality. It turned out what I really wanted to talk to her about was the fact that I was pretty sure I'd narrowly avoided being kidnapped by a – who had he been, exactly? Not a peasant, not on that fine horse and wearing that heavy cape, the sound of which flapping in the wind I could almost still hear. And not a Viking – nothing about him said 'Viking.' So who had he been? Some kind of higher-up? He'd mentioned an estate – is that where he –

  "Emma!"

  "Huh? What?" I asked, only then realizing that my sister had been talking the whole time.

  "Are you even listening?" Katie scolded me affectionately. "I asked you where you lost your phone, you bloody scatterbrain."

  "Well if I knew where I lost it, it wouldn't be lost," I joked, repeating something my mother used to say to us when we were kids because I couldn't actually tell my sister – as much as I wanted to – that I thought I'd lost my phone in the dark ages.

  "You sound funny," she said a few minutes later, after we'd been talking about the new paint colors my mother was using in her most recent kitchen redecoration.

  "Uh, do I?" I asked, perfectly aware that I did.

  "Yeah. Are you OK, Em? I know you're not OK but it's something else. You sound like you're being evasive. Is something going on? Something you're not telling me about?"

  I sighed heavily and rubbed my forehead and Katie jumped on it.

  "Something is going on, isn't it? Why won't you tell me? I won't tell mum and dad – you know that, right?"

  "I know. I just – Katie, I can't tell you. Maybe in the future, when things have settled down. But not right now. It's all too... strange."

  I knew, just as I had reacted to Paige's evasions, that my sister would react the same way to mine. And she did, cajoling, promising she wouldn't tell anyone, all of the things I'd said to my friend before going right ahead and assuming she was mad when she told me the truth.

  "I can't, Katie. I want to, but I can't."

  "What does that mean? You want to but you can't? Why can't you? Has someone sworn you to secrecy?"

  I laughed, but it wasn't a happy laugh. "I don't know what to say. I just can't tell you."

  "OK," Katie didn't let up. "Then tell me why, at least. Why can't you tell me?"

  "Because you'll think I'm bonkers, that's why. Seriously, Katie, it won't be good. Just stop pestering me about it will you? It's starting to fucking annoy me."

  I didn't want to snap at my sister, and I regretted it immediately. But what else could I do? She wasn't going to stop. Desperate to make it up to her, I made a snap decision then and there to take the earliest possible flight back to the UK for the Christmas holiday. Social time during my senior year could wait until spring break. I'd pack a bag when I woke up, go find my phone on the Renner's property – and think about what to do if it wasn't there – and then head straight to the airport. It would be good for me to get away, Katie was right about that, and for more reasons than she knew.

  Chastised by my harsh words, my sister cheered up right away when I said I would come home. When we hung up I actually felt a little hopeful, like maybe a simple change of location would be enough to take my mind off – well, off everything.

  6

  Emma

  My phone wasn't in the field beside the road, the one I crossed to get to the woods. It wasn't in the woods either. I stood there beside the tree for a good ten minutes, pondering what to do. No one in the past would know what to do with it if they found it (and the battery would be dead soon enough if it wasn't already), but that phone had – well, it kind of had my life on it. All the messages I'd exchanged with friends and family for the past two years, the passwords to my e-mail and various social media and online accounts, photos I'd stupidly never saved anywhere else. I needed it.

  "Screw this," I said out loud, determined not to waste any more time than necessary. I needed the phone, so I had to get it. That meant being prepared, not like last time. I hurried back across the field to the car and drove to the little sporting goods store in River Falls where I purchased two cans of extra-strength pepper spray and a mallet from a clerk who didn't quite manage to conceal his curiosity at the English girl seemingly preparing to do battle with either a horde of angry bears or a particularly unpleasant ex-boyfriend.

  I left the mallet in the car, of course, when I got back to the field – because what the hell was I going to do with a mallet? Especially with a can of pepper spray in each hand? And then I made my way to the tree, pulled off one of my gloves and lay my hand on its trunk, not even taking five seconds to get over the strange floating feeling when I arrived in Caistley – which I had started to refer to it as in my mind, simply because that's the name Paige had used. What I did do was listen, for a few minutes, for the sound of movement or conversation or any signs of other human beings being in the vicinity. Nothing – only the sound of the wind in the trees and the sea in the distance.

  In the weak winter sunshine I crept along the path, a lot more vigilant than I had been the previous day, nervously peeling my eyes away from the ground every few seconds to look around. There was no sign of my phone in the woods, so I kept myself low – I had not chosen to wear my brightly colored parka that time around – and made my way into the collection of driftwood and clumps of dried, frosty seaweed at the top of the beach.

  Just as I was beginning to feel deflation setting in I spotted something shiny out of the corner of my eye and there it was – my phone, lying not two feet from my right foot. I picked it up and brushed it off, flooded with relief to see that it appeared dry and undamaged, and headed right back into the woods to go back to River Forks, and then to the airport. It didn't quite escape me that I was going to be flying right back to the land I was now in – England, and that this fact was deeply, incomprehensibly weird – but I was still nervous about running into the man on horseback and the priority was to get to the tree and safely home again before I allowed myself to begin pondering any of the mysteries of this new world I now found myself in.

  I stuffed my phone in my pocket and began to jog down the path, one hand clasped tightly around a canister of pepper spray.

  And sure enough, because apparently nothing can ever just go smoothly for me, I heard voices just as I was about to round the last bend in the trail before arriving at my portal back to 2017. Without a second's hesitation I simply threw myself into the undergrowth and crouched down, forcing myself to breathe slowly and calmly after making sure I was obscured from view. Less than 10 seconds later the sound of hooves on frozen ground seemed to fill my ears, so close was the creature.

  It wasn't just two men on horseback, though. No. My life isn't that easy. The men had a dog with them, a fact I only realized when its wet, black snout appeared right in front of my face and I bit back a yelp of surprise.

  The dog, just a
s shocked as I was by the sudden appearance of a human he had not been expecting, made no such effort. He barked, loudly and once, and I squeezed my eyes tightly shut, realizing there was nothing to do in the moment but pray the men continued on.

  It was not to be.

  "Aye!" I heard one of them shout, presumably to his companion who was a little ahead of him. "Dog's got a sniff of something!"

  I listened to the sound of feet hitting the ground as the man dismounted, and, in my left pocket, curled my fingers around the second canister of pepper spray as footsteps approached and someone parted the bushes above my head. I looked up, blinking, as the sound of my own heartbeat hammering in my ears almost drowned everything else out, and saw the face of a man less than a foot away.

  "It's a woman!" He blurted, looking almost as his surprised as his dog. If I hadn't been so terrified I think I might have laughed.

  Soon enough, his companion had joined us and they both loomed over me, looking down at the spot where I was crouched as if they were waiting for me to say something.

  "Aye," said one, when I couldn't possibly think of what I might say to make them get on their way without bothering me any further. "This is where Baldric said he ran into a strange wench yesterday, is it not? Stronger than she looked and in strange dressings – is it her, do you think?"

  The men addressed each other as if I wasn't right there in front of them, listening. Finally, I found my voice. Well, a little.

  "I'm just," I rasped, before coughing. "I'm picking, uh, berries. I'm looking for berries."

  Both men, who I noticed were without the fine capes of the man from the day before – Baldric, I presumed – nonetheless looked better dressed than the two peasants had, and carried themselves with a perceptible air of authority.