Guardians of Time

by Sarah Woodbury

  Elisa sounded like she was practically jumping up and down with excitement. “The Black Boar. It’s a hotel in Caernarfon. More of an inn, really. It’s about a thousand years old.”

  Anna gasped, having overheard because of the volume coming out of the phone. “Mom, that’s where the bus passengers ended up!”

  “Elisa, we’re only a few miles away in Bangor.” Meg’s heart had started to pound. “Why are you here?”

  “Christopher has been asking to spend Christmas in Wales since he was ten years old. He’s seventeen now, you know. If we were going to do it, this year seemed like finally the time. The real question is why are you here, Meg?”

  “Medical stuff.”

  “Just a second. I can barely hear you because there’s a ton of people in the restaurant, and they’re talking really loudly. Meg—” Elisa paused and lowered the volume on her voice, “—I don’t know how to tell you this, but we’re listening to some of what they’re saying, and—” She paused again.

  “What are they saying, Elisa? Just tell me.”

  “Something about a bus? Elen’s eyes are the size of dinner plates because we heard David’s name mentioned along with thank God we’re back. Is that about you? What’s going on?”

  Meg closed her eyes. When Math had come back from the interaction with the reporter, saying that Rupert had received a call from the Black Boar Inn in Caernarfon, Meg had been counting the minutes until someone said something that led him back to the clinic. To her. It didn’t sound like that had happened yet, even though Rupert had to have reached Caernarfon by now. Maybe he, like Elisa’s family, was listening, even egging the bus passengers on, trying to get the whole story out of them before they thought better of their frankness.

  Meg opened her eyes again, and her attention was caught by an inspirational poster that showed an eagle suspended in an over-saturated blue sky as it flew among white-peaked mountains. Except that the inspirational quote wasn’t, in fact, inspirational. A rabbit had been caught in the eagle’s talons, and the message, instead of saying something about soaring like an eagle or reaching for the stars, said, “Sometimes standing out in a crowd is the last thing you want to do.”

  She gave a gasp of laughter, and the humor was enough to break through her dismay. “It’s complicated, Elisa. Believe me when I tell you that the best thing you guys can do is not get involved and not talk to anyone. Let me call David and get back to you. Stay where you are. We should be almost done here, and then we will come to you.”

  Meg dropped her hand to look at the screen so she could hang up the phone, but Elisa’s voice echoed out of the speaker, “Wait, Meg!”

  Meg put the phone back to her ear. “What?”

  It was Ted who answered. “Four men in suits just entered the restaurant. Believe me, when I say I’ve seen their type before.”

  “Have they seen you?”

  “No,” Ted said, “or at least no more than anyone else. We’re kind of tucked into a corner here. There are a lot of people between us and them.”

  “Good,” Meg said. “Hopefully, they wouldn’t know you to look at you, though if they get the register from the hotel, I have to believe it’ll take approximately ten seconds for someone at MI-5 to flag your names. Nobody is going to think it’s a coincidence that you’re here at the same time we are.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Have you finished your dinner?” Meg said.

  “Yes. We were just about to go up to our room when you called. It’s one in the morning back at home. Though—” and Meg could hear the frown in his voice, “—Christopher went off to the bathroom and hasn’t come back.”

  If Callum were here, Meg would have passed the phone to him, but since he wasn’t, she would have to do her best. Her first thought was that she had to stay confident if she wanted Ted and Elisa to feel the same.

  “When he returns, smile, get up, and make your way to the door, just like you would any time you leave a restaurant. You can keep talking on the phone if you like because it means you don’t have to make eye contact. Maybe Elisa and Elen can go in front. Kids are a good distraction.”

  “You really think we can walk right past them?” Ted said.

  “Is there a back door?”

  “Not that I can see,” Ted said.

  “Do you have a car?” Meg said.

  “Yes, but the keys are in the room.”

  “You have no choice but to get to your room, then. Nod as you pass them, man-to-man,” Meg said. “I am so sorry to have you guys caught up in this again.”

  “We came to Wales of our own accord,” Ted said, “and you never asked to go to the Middle Ages.”

  Elen’s soprano piped up. “I think it’s awesome.”

  Despite the tension, Meg laughed. She was looking forward to meeting her niece.

  “Elen has been listening to Christopher a little too much.” Ted laughed into the phone too, which Meg thought, as a whole, was a good thing, if distraction and nonchalance were what they were going for.

  Then Ted said, “I really think we need to buy now before the price goes any higher.”

  “Excuse me?” Meg was befuddled by the total non sequitur, until she realized that he wasn’t talking to her at all but to a mythical stock market colleague.

  Ted’s voice normalized again. “Sorry about that. One of them just walked past our table.”

  “Anna’s calling David right now,” Meg said.

  Anna had walked a few paces away and was talking quickly into her phone. She hung up. “They’re on their way. I’ll tell Math and Papa to let them in.”

  Meg nodded to Anna, who disappeared. She herself stood and started getting dressed, trying to put on her shirt while still keeping the phone to her ear.

  “Where in the hell is Christopher—” Ted stopped.

  “What is it?”

  “More men in suits. I really don’t like MI-5’s fashion sense.”

  “The agents aren’t all bad, you know, despite the hard time they gave you,” Meg said. “Callum, the one who came back to the Middle Ages with us, is a close friend and the Earl of Shrewsbury.”

  “We’ve talked to him,” Ted said. “I can’t wait to see you guys, but I need to hang up. I’ll call as soon as we’re safe.”

  “Okay.” Meg hung up, her heart pounding. Then the door to Abraham’s lab swung open to reveal Rachel with her father right behind her.

  Meg faltered. In the midst of the conversation with Ted, she’d managed to forget all about why she was here in the twenty-first century in the first place.

  Rachel saw the expression on Meg’s face and held up both hands in an appeasing way. “It’s okay. You’re okay. The lump is a fibro adenoma, which is not cancerous.”

  Meg sagged against the table, head down, hardly able to believe it. A huge weight lifted off her chest, and she felt like she could breathe for the first time in weeks. Then she looked up. “What do we do about the lump?”

  “Nothing,” Rachel said.

  “What happens if I get another lump?” Meg said.

  Rachel smiled. “Let’s cross that street when we get to it.”

  Meg narrowed her eyes at the two doctors. “You do realize that I’m going back to the Middle Ages, right? It isn’t as if I can return every few months.”

  “We all have little abnormal bits inside us all the time. It’s part of the human condition,” Abraham said. “You just happen to know about one of them.”

  Meg sighed. “I suppose.” Then she studied Abraham for a second. “So, you believe where we’re from?”

  “My Rachel wouldn’t lie to me,” he said, “and, because I have spent the last year trying to find her, I have known for some time that what happened to her was outside the range of normal.”

  “Like me.” Meg gave a mocking laugh.

  “What?” Rachel had turned to her father. “You never said anything about that.”

  Abraham tipped back his head, and a spasm of pain crossed his face. He wasn’t
feeling physical pain, Meg didn’t think, but the achingly familiar mix of fear and love and worry he’d felt for his daughter this whole last year. Meg herself knew that pain very well. Some of it was ever-present in the very fact of being a parent. The rest was a product of having a child go missing.

  “Through my connections at the Cardiff hospitals,” Abraham said, “I tracked down witnesses to the Cardiff bombing and spoke with anyone who would talk to me about what happened. I have a friend who is a detective in Cardiff, and he got me the official—and unofficial—reports. I spoke with reporters at length, and one in particular, Rupert Jones, who has been on your trail since you and Llywelyn came here three or four years ago.”

  “Dad—”

  “He was downstairs just now, I know.” Abraham put out a hand to his daughter. “I would have done anything to find you. You have no idea what it’s been like.”

  “But I do,” Meg said. “I lost David and Anna when they were in their teens, and it was a year and a half before I found them again.”

  “Except you knew where they might be,” he said.

  “Yes, I grant you that. Though knowing might have made it worse because I knew what it was like there, and they were all alone.”

  “Or not, as it turned out,” Abraham said.

  Meg looked at Rachel, who shrugged. “We’ve had time to talk while we prepared the results.” She eyed her father. “Though he didn’t exactly tell me everything.”

  Abraham was still focused on Meg. “Because you understand, it is my hope that you will agree to my request not to be separated from my daughter again.”

  “Dad, I have to go back,” Rachel said. “They need me.”

  “I’m not asking you to stay here,” Abraham said. “I’m asking you to take me with you when you go.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Christopher

  Christopher had been seven when David had disappeared ten years ago. The afternoon it happened, he remembered playing at his friend’s house long after he normally got to stay. When David and Anna didn’t pick him up in time for dinner, his friend’s mom fed them corn dogs, which he’d never had before, and he’d eaten two because they were amazing.

  The fact that his cousins had gone missing, followed a year and a half later by Aunt Meg, hadn’t really affected his growing up. They’d lived on the other side of the country anyway, and since David and Anna were so much older than he was, it wasn’t as if they’d been friends.

  When David had shown up nearly three years later, at almost the same age Christopher was now, however, he’d heard the real story about their disappearance for the first time. Christopher would have traveled to the Middle Ages in a heartbeat then, and he’d do it today if he could. He’d thought about crashing his car into a tree himself, but even if he shared a lot of the same genes as David and Anna, he figured he’d just kill himself, rather than time travel. Even if his girlfriend had dumped him last week, he wasn’t depressed enough to do that.

  This trip to Wales had been his idea because he’d heard from his mom about how Aunt Meg had tried to return to the Middle Ages tons of times, even coming to Wales to try to get it to work. His parents didn’t know he was hoping that being here might spark the time traveling in him too. But they’d been here three days already, and Christopher hadn’t gotten any kind of time travel vibe from any of the places they’d visited. The old castles were cool, but he wanted to walk into one where people were actually living.

  Which was why when he caught the words, ‘David’, ‘bus’, and ‘Middle Ages’ from people at the bar as he passed by them on the way back from the bathroom, he stopped and edged closer to listen, hardly able to believe what he was hearing.

  “Nobody is going to believe us, Darla,” one older man was saying. “There’s no point in taking this any further.”

  “I tell you, if we talk to the press, we can make a lot of money selling our story,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if people believe us, really. What about the blokes who go on about UFO’s. We’ve got something way better than that. Look—” Darla opened her purse and showed the man what was inside it.

  “Gold, Darla? I thought you told David you didn’t have any money?”

  Darla shrugged. “What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him.”

  Christopher didn’t think that was necessarily true, but he looked away to study the calendar tacked to a post by the bar in case either of the people realized he was listening.

  Then a third voice spoke. “I can write your story.”

  Christopher glanced around to see a tall man in a suit and trench coat lean his hip against the ancient, polished wood bar. He was holding out a black wallet, the writing on which Christopher couldn’t see from where he was standing, but he didn’t dare move closer.

  “Rupert Jones, The Guardian.”

  “Let me see that.” Darla took the man’s credentials and studied them, her face screwed up in concentration. Then she handed them back. “Okay. But we want a fee.”

  Rupert gestured around the bar. “I’ll buy you a drink, and if I think there’s something to what you’re telling me, then we’ll talk about money.”

  The man with Darla tipped his head. “Sounds fair.”

  Darla didn’t look thrilled, but she picked up her drink and followed the two men to one of the few empty tables in the restaurant, which was too far away and nestled amidst other tables for Christopher to get close without calling attention to himself. Frustrated, he looked around at the twenty other people who were at the bar or near it. These people knew something about David. Christopher had to find out what that was.

  “There you are, son.” His dad’s hand came down on his shoulder in a strong grip. “We have to go.”

  “Dad—we can’t go. These people know something about Dav—”

  His father cut him off. “I know.”

  “You know? How?”

  “Your Aunt Meg just called. They’re here. All of them.” His father’s eyes were lit up as bright as the Christmas tree in the corner, full of excitement and something Christopher rarely saw in them—almost recklessness.

  “She called—”

  “We have to get out here now.” His father directed Christopher’s attention to four men in suits, two of whom were conferring near the front door, and the other two who were moving casually among the diners. “MI-5.”

  “Holy sh-crap,” Christopher said, changing what he was going to say at the last minute for his father’s benefit.

  “Exactly.” His dad beckoned to his mother and Elen, and they wended their way towards them from their table.

  “Are they looking for us?” Christopher said.

  “We don’t know,” his dad said, “but if you’ve heard what we’ve heard, most of the people in here were on the Cardiff bus, which Aunt Meg just brought back from the Middle Ages. Hopefully, they’ll keep the agents busy so they won’t think to check the register until later for other names they might recognize.”

  “They might recognize you on sight, Dad,” Christopher said. Some of the excitement he’d been feeling was giving way to a cold ball of fear in his stomach. His dad had been questioned by MI-5 for hours a couple of years ago. If they were arrested, it might mean that they lost their chance to see David and the others. “There’s a back way out of here.” He grabbed his dad’s arm. “It’s on the way to the bathrooms.”

  It wasn’t easy for a family of four to look inconspicuous, especially when three of them—Christopher, his sister, and his dad—were Americans with bright red hair, but nobody followed them into the narrow hallway that led past the bathrooms and then through a narrow supply room that opened into the hotel part of the inn on the other side. The hotel’s corridors were twisty and made it hard to see anyone until they were already upon them, but nobody stopped them from leaving the restaurant. Maybe MI-5 wasn’t yet as organized as they could have been.

  As they trotted up the narrow staircase to the second floor, his dad said, “The inn is so old, this wing was p
robably added on after the original part was built, and they wanted a way for servants to come and go easily.”

  Christopher glanced at his father, completely unsurprised that he would take the time to comment on the architecture of the inn while running for his life.

  “Our rooms are this way, aren’t they—” Christopher cut himself off, turning on a dime and shoving his family back down the stairs they’d just come up.

  “What are you doing?” his mom said. “We need the car keys.”

  “Two men in suits just went into your room,” Christopher said.

  His father didn’t object anymore to Christopher preventing him from going up the stairs, but he stopped on the landing and ran his hand through his hair. “What do we do, Elisa?”

  “I need to see Meg,” she said.

  “There’s a fire door down there.” Elen tugged on her mother’s hand and pointed to the end of the hallway.

  “Let’s hope we don’t set off the alarm when we go through it,” his father said.

  “I honestly don’t care if we do,” Christopher’s mother said. “We’ll be outside, and that’s what’s important.”

  “No car, though,” his dad said.

  “Meg said she’d come to us,” his mother said.

  “What are we going to do in Caernarfon in the dark on Christmas Eve?” his dad said.

  “I know where we could go,” Christopher said. “There’s a fish and chips slash Chinese restaurant slash grocery store down the block. I saw it when we came past the castle earlier.”

  “You just ate,” his mom said.

  “I didn’t mean that we should eat there, but it might be open,” Christopher said. “As Dad said, where else are we going to go at this hour?”

  “Good idea, son,” his father said. “Let’s do it.”

  As it turned out, the alarm did not go off as they pushed through the door, and the snow was still falling, maybe even heavier than before. Christopher was from Pennsylvania, so he knew snow, and this wasn’t even enough to cancel school. It was pretty, though, and made Caernarfon look like a postcard of Christmas in Wales. White, green, and red Christmas lights were strung across the cobbled streets and around the windows of the stores, though all but the grocery store he’d seen were closed at nine o’clock on Christmas Eve.