Ricochet Through Time (Echo Trilogy Book 3)

by Lindsey Fairleigh

  Nik came barreling down the stairway, taking the steps four at a time and reaching the bottom in barely three strides. “Get into the basement and lock the door!” he ordered as he flew past us.

  Kat and I stumbled backward a few steps, and Kat’s hands latched onto my arm.

  Marcus and Dominic were halfway down the stairs, Neffe and Aset close behind them. The two ancient Nejerettes hauled a distraught Genevieve between them, twisting in their hold and gasping, “I didn’t know! I swear, I didn’t know!” She spotted her daughter clinging to me at the bottom of the stairs and redoubled her efforts. “I swear, Kat! I had no idea!”

  “Now, Lex!” Nik took hold of my arm, practically dragging me to the basement door.

  “What’s going on?” Panic threaded through my words. I didn’t fight against Nik, but I couldn’t help but stare back at Marcus as I passed him. “Is this it? Is it Apep? Is it time?”

  Someone banged on the front door hard enough to rattle it on its sturdy hinges, and I had my answer. Nik had enshrouded the entire house and its immediate grounds in a shell of solidified At, and the only way anyone would’ve been able to get to the door would have been through the At.

  “Yes,” Marcus said, pushing me after Nik. “Now go!” As we’d talked strategy over the past week, Marcus had revealed that it seemed to take the twins’ innate defense mechanism a little while to warm up, especially earlier on in my pregnancy. Our first priority was to buy them time once we knew Apep was here, his threat to me—to the twins—imminent.

  I watched, wide-eyed and gaping, as the shimmering iridescence of At crept across the surface of the door like the deepest of freezes, transforming it into the otherworldly material. A moment later, the entire door dissolved into a glittering dust that floated away in the warm, midday air.

  Carson stood in the open doorway, my old grad school peer. My academic competitor. The adorable, goofy, sweet young man who’d tricked me into believing he was my friend. The Nejeret who’d been in a healing trance just days ago. The one actual living person who I blamed for this entire, hopeless situation.

  When his eyes met mine, an all-too-familiar inky darkness churned just below the surface, and my knees gave out.

  “No …”

  Nik shoved me behind himself, though I would’ve gone willingly. Hell, I was going willingly, but my foot tangled with Kat’s, and we both stumbled to the floor.

  Carson—or rather, Apep—twisted his lips into a cruel sneer, his bright blue eyes laughing at us. At me. “Hello, Mother.”

  “M—mother?” My stomach twisted, and I pressed my palm against my belly to stave off a rush of nausea. Was I looking at some time-traveling version of my grown-up unborn son?

  Some distant, less dumbfounded part of my brain puzzled out his meaning. Carson wasn’t my son. And he wasn’t here to kill me, or to kill my children. He wanted to possess them—to ooze into their still-forming bodies, eject their emerging souls, and hoard their sheuts, their power, for himself. He wanted to become my child. To become the most powerful being in all the universe. And I would be his mother.

  The prospect was more terrifying than death.

  I was on my knees and pulling Kat up with me when a strange, butterfly-like sensation tickled me from deep within. It was closely followed by a gut-twisting cramp. I doubled over but didn’t give up the retreat. I crawled toward the basement door, Kat pushing my rear to propel me ahead.

  Behind me, Kat yelped, and a moment later, the grunts of a scuffle give way to heavy breathing and a whole lot of nothing else. I risked a backward glance, daring to hope it was over and that Apep-Carson had somehow been subdued. Damn hope gets me every time.

  Wearing what appeared to be a glimmering, almost transparent suit of armor, Apep-Carson stood before a trembling Kat. He was holding a pistol, the nozzle pressed against her forehead. Marcus stood just out of arm’s reach of Kat, hands upraised in surrender, Nik stood a few feet away from me, and Dominic lay sprawled on the ground near the missing front door, framed by a seeping puddle of blood.

  I slapped a hand over my mouth.

  Dominic wasn’t moving. I couldn’t even be sure he was still breathing, and with all that blood …

  And Kat—this was the second time Carson had held her at gunpoint. It didn’t matter that he was possessed by Apep this time. I could only imagine how terrified she was.

  “Let me pass or I’ll kill sweet little Kat here,” Apep said, using my former friend’s lips.

  The combination of emotions I felt toward him and Carson at that moment knotted in my stomach, and I groaned under a violent wave of nausea. I gritted my teeth when another cramp throbbed in my belly, and some remote part of my mind realized that maybe it wasn’t the terror of the situation or the fear for Kat’s and Dominic’s lives or the disgust and betrayal that was causing my gut-wrenching discomfort.

  Smoky threads surrounded me in reds and blues and yellows, wrapping around me like a ghostly cocoon. It’s the twins, I realized. They were reacting to the threat, trying to carry me—and, with me, themselves—away to safety.

  Apep-Carson took a step forward—toward me—forcing Kat to step backward awkwardly. Another step. Another.

  “Nik …” Marcus’s voice contained a warning.

  “I know,” Nik snapped. “I’m not fucking blind!”

  The gossamer rainbow surrounding me was growing denser, but it was still somewhat transparent. I was still here. The twins were still vulnerable to Apep. Their built-in defense mechanism was taking too damn long.

  “Don’t you go anywhere yet, Mother.” Apep-Carson was close. Too close. Maybe a couple yards away.

  Nik made as though to step between us, but Apep-Carson tutted him. “I really wouldn’t, if I were you,” the possessed Nejeret said, his tone dripping with condescension. Another step. “You won’t stop me.”

  “Who said anything about stopping you, shit-stain?” Nik growled, lurching to stand before me. A sheet of At sprouted from both of his hands, curving around me until I was locked away in an impenetrable shell, surrounded by nothing but silence and that thickening, otherworldly mist.

  I watched, sealed away, as Genevieve launched herself not at Apep-Carson, but at Kat. She shoved her daughter to the side with the force of her impact.

  Not a second later, blood and hair and bone and other things sprayed from the back of Genevieve’s head.

  It was the last thing I saw before the misty rainbow smoke thickened to opacity, and the world fell away.

  “No!” I screamed. Because I was safe now, but everyone else I’d just left behind might very well be dead. I slapped the inside of my crystalized pod with both hands and howled in outrage, in pain, in desperation. “Noooo!”

  My cocoon vanished between one slap and the next, and I fell forward on my hands and knees. The swirling colors of the At burst to life around me, and I floated there, breathless and terrified for the others. A moment later, an unrelenting black abyss consumed me.

  6

  Lost & Found

  When I came to, I found that I was lying on a forest floor, an unkempt older fellow peering down at me, his face barely a foot from mine. Beyond him, pine trees stretched high overhead, their needles glowing emeralds in the bright sunlight. It looked like home. Aside from the guy standing over me.

  I drew back, as much from his stench as from the surprise, and smacked the side of my head against a tree trunk. I sat up and scurried backward a few feet through the overgrown underbrush. My hair caught in the rough bark, and I lost a good chunk out of my ponytail in the process.

  “Ouch!” I yelped when I felt a string of sharp stings in my palm. I halted my retreat, yanking my hand from the ground and settling on my butt. I glanced down at the line of tiny, bloody pearls beaded on my palm. Damn blackberry vines … they were everywhere, hidden among the ferns and bushes.

  “I thought you was dead,” the stranger said.

  Forgetting about my stinging palm, I looked at the man crouching a few yards away
.

  He wore buckskin from neck to toe, the outfit boasting more fringe than a neo-hippie would know what to do with, and had a long, bushy salt-and-pepper beard. A leather satchel crossed his body, and I could’ve sworn he was wearing an entire raccoon on his head. The thing went far beyond an iconic coonskin cap; the fur of the entire critter was on his head, from the fluffy ringed tail pulled over his shoulder to the pointy little black nose sticking down his forehead and almost reaching his bushy eyebrows. Little forelegs dangled on either side of his face, clawed feet and all.

  There was no doubt in my mind that I was in the past. Still in the Pacific Northwest, though, from the looks of the forest. And if the stranger’s garb was anything to go by, he was a fur trapper. That placed me in the late eighteenth or nineteenth century, well before the small battle that was taking place in my time in Marcus’s foyer. If it was even still going on. If any of them were even still alive.

  I stared at the trapper’s hat, focusing on the raccoon’s little claws.

  Genevieve was dead, that was a sad certainty. Possibly Dominic, too—there’d been so much blood. And the others? Marcus and Kat? Nik? Aset and Neffe? There was no way to know. The horrifying possibilities surrounded me, blocking out where I was. When I was. Blocking out the stranger standing nearby. Blocking out everything except for the terrible prospect that they were all dead.

  The trapper touched his hat, his eyes sliding down to the underbrush. “My summer cap …” His eyes met mine, almost defiantly. “I got me a coyote I wear when the weather turns. Shot and skinned the beast myself.”

  “I—” Barely a crack of sound came out. I cleared my throat. “I have no doubt,” I said cautiously. “You look like a very formidable man.” Something to keep in mind when I let my thoughts stray into the land of ifs and could-bes, when I felt the numbness of shock threatening to creep over me. They might very well all be dead. But they might not be. I simply didn’t know. I wouldn’t know until I made it back to them, however the hell I was supposed to manage that. But their fate wasn’t the most urgent matter right now. My kids were—my kids, and the very real threat this fur trapper could be.

  The trapper narrowed his eyes. “You got a strange way of talkin’.” His eyes slid down the length of my body with only a hint of lechery. “And a strange way of lookin’.”

  “I, um …” I shot a quick glance down at myself. Jeans and a T-shirt—how to explain jeans and a T-shirt to a fur trapper from the Western frontier?

  “You escape from the Indians? Or are you some kind of wandering whore?” His eyes narrowed, drawing the raccoon’s nose down along with his eyebrows. He snapped his fingers, his face lighting up. “I got it—you’re one of them Mercer Girls, ain’t you? I heard tell some of them’ve got a wild way about ’em.”

  “I, um …” Mercer Girls—the term was familiar, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. My mind kept circling back to that foyer … to the blood … “Yes!” I said when it finally clicked.

  The Mercer Girls had been transported to Seattle from the East Coast in the 1860s by one of the founders of the University of Washington to help balance out the population of settlers by bringing in single, reputable young women of a marriageable age.

  “I … wanted to explore a bit,” I said. “Get out of Seattle and experience the true Wild West, so …” I gestured around me with my bleeding hand. “Here I am.”

  The trapper stared at me without speaking a while longer. “You shouldn’t be out here. Where’s your things?” His focus shifted to my hand. “You’re gonna need to clean that, lest it get inflamed. Ain’t no doctors out here.”

  “My things—” I shook my head. “I don’t—they’re gone. Someone took them … after I set up camp last night. I was … washing up on the beach, and …”

  My companion grunted. “Unsavory folks have been known to hide out in these here parts. Not many are too keen to make the trip onto the island—’cept for the Indians and a couple other trappers. We got a ‘live and let live’ deal here, we do, so it ain’t likely to be any of them that done took your possessions …” He coughed and spit something dark and slimy. “What’s your name?”

  I stood there, mouth open but silent for several seconds. “My, uh, name is Alexandra,” I said. “Larson,” I added. “Of Boston.” I was fairly certain that was where the Mercer Girls had originated.

  “Yeah, well, I’m Tex,” my companion said. “Of Texas.”

  I gave a small bow of my head. “Nice to meet you, Tex,” I said, hoping decent manners might decrease the likelihood that Tex would assault, rape, or murder me. Of course, if he intended to do any of those things, I figured he’d have done it while I was unconscious.

  “Why don’t you let old Tex here fix up that hand for you,” Tex said, taking a step toward me. He extended one arm as though to calm a skittish critter. “Then we’ll get you somewhere safe.”

  I held my hand to my chest, curling my fingers over the injury. My palm throbbed in protest. “It’s just a few scratches.” And had my pregnancy not suppressed my Nejeret regenerative abilities, I’d have been well on my way to being healed by now. But I wasn’t, which was a frightening reminder of my current rather fragile state.

  “Inflammation don’t care a thing about that,” Tex said. “A scratch is all it takes.” He took another step toward me while reaching through the front opening of his buckskin jacket. “But if we give it a good wash with this,” he said, pulling out a gourd canteen small enough to be considered a flask, “I think you’ll survive.”

  I uncurled my fingers enough that I could see the four angry, red punctures seeping blood onto my palm. They were small, but the thorns had gone in deep, and just that small motion of moving my fingers increased the throbbing pain. “What’s in there?” I asked, pointing to the flask with my chin. If it would prevent infection, I wouldn’t say no to his offer.

  Tex blinked, and his beard shimmied as he worked his mouth. “Why, whiskey, of course.” He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. The sky is blue. Fish live in the water. There’s whiskey in the flask.

  I cringed. Whiskey would sting like a bitch.

  Tex pulled the cork with his teeth and spat it out to take a swig. The cork dangled by a thin leather cord. “Well …” He cleared his throat roughly. “What’s it gonna be?”

  I extended my hand, trembling not from fear of pain but from the force of my bottled-up emotions. “Alright, go ahead.” I yanked my hand away almost as soon as the liquid touched my skin, burning worse than fire. My eyes watered, and I gritted my teeth. The deed was done.

  Tex’s soulful brown eyes shone with mirth. “I reckon you’ve had just about enough of adventuring and exploring right about now.”

  I nodded. He had no idea just how tired I was of all of my “adventuring.” I just wanted to settle down with Marcus in my own time and raise our kids together to be the ma’at-balancing gods they were destined to be. Maybe spend a few months each year in Egypt or Italy, uncovering the past the old-fashioned way—with a trowel, brushes, and dental tools—rather than viewing it in the echoes.

  Now, I didn’t know if any of that would ever be a possibility, and thinking about it opened up the doors for all the other things that could’ve been but now might never be. My chest ached, and my eyes stung. If Marcus is dead …

  “Well, now …” Tex patted my arm. “This ain’t no place for tears.” He handed me the flask. “Best bolster your resolve. Go on”—he flicked his fingers at the flask—“take a drink.”

  I nodded and brought the flask to my lips.

  You’re pregnant!

  I froze. With shaking fingers, I recorked the flask and handed it back to Tex. “I appreciate the offer, I really do, but I shouldn’t. Spirits go straight to my head.” I flashed him a weak smile.

  “Well, be that as it may,” Tex said, tucking the flask away in his jacket and giving the panel a soft pat, “you know where find this if you decide your resolve is in need of some bolsterin’.”
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  “Thanks.” My eyes met his. “Really, Tex, thank you. I don’t know what I would’ve done if you hadn’t found me.”

  “Aw, well …” Tex hunched his shoulders and made a rough noise in his throat. “I may not be a gentleman, but I know a lady when I see one, I do. You’ve got a kindly way about you, Miss Larson, and with a sweet face like that, well … you don’t belong out here.”

  “Trust me, Tex,” I said, brushing off the back of my jeans with my good hand, “I couldn’t agree with you more.” I just wanted to go home. I needed to know.

  “Well then, let’s get you up to Port Madison—traders come in and out of there every couple of days. One of them is sure to be willing to escort you back to civilization.”

  Port Madison—that was the reservation just across the Agate Passage from the northern tip of Bainbridge Island. You could see the shore from the beach just outside the compound’s walls. If we were near Port Madison, then I was closer to home than I’d thought. The realization spurred a surge of excitement, followed by a deluge of grief. Being “home” wouldn’t do me any good. It was just about the worst case of right-place-wrong-time imaginable.

  Regardless, I had to start looking for Marcus—this time’s Marcus—somewhere. I only had a matter of days before the bonding withdrawals would set in, and based on the almost-nothing Marcus had told me about my pending travels through time, I would find him, each and every time. I figured I might as well start looking in Port Madison.

  I bowed my head to Tex. “I’d appreciate that.”

  He turned and started picking his way through the underbrush.

  “You don’t, by any chance, know of any prominent men in the area with the name Bahur?” I ventured as I followed, making about three times as much noise as him. “Or Horus?”

  “I can’t rightly say I do,” he said over his shoulder. “You hunting for someone? That what brought you all the way out here, Miss Larson?”

  “No, I—well, yes, I suppose I am.” Crouching down, I picked up a several-foot-long stick, intending to use it to push bushes out of my way as we trailblazed. I don’t recommend tromping through the woods in sandals. “How about Heru?”