“Yeah, oh.” Caleb mimicked. “What kind of crap are you on, anyway, that takes you down so far nobody can reach you? I’ve never in my life seen anything like it. Christ! You look…looked like a shadow.”
I jerked away from him. A distraction—that’s what I needed. “What are you talking about? Do you mean you think I’m taking drugs?”
His lip curled in derision. “Miss Innocence, I suppose, trying to say you’re not?”
I saw Scott smirking at me from behind Caleb’s back and I snarled at him. “Why did you let him in? Didn’t you see I put the closed sign out?”
“Sorry, sis,” he said, sounding anything but sorry. “Last I heard you weren’t too anxious to even look at Doc’s gun. In my opinion, he has the right to at least talk to you. I didn’t know you’d be off in one of those fits of yours. And look on the bright side—for once, there’s no blood.”
“No, no blood,” I agreed, glad I wouldn’t have to try and explain that to Caleb. I’d got by once with ignoring his questions. I doubted I would another time. Speaking of time, I sneaked a peek at my watch.
About twenty minutes had passed since I’d unwrapped the blunderbuss.
How long had Caleb and Scott been standing over me? I didn’t even know what I looked like when I was deep within a trance. Faded, they’d told me. A shadow, according to Caleb Deane. Maybe I even drooled.
“Blood? What blood?” Caleb turned his glare on Scott. “As for you, I must say you’re pretty cool about finding your sister in this state.”
“Oh, I’m pretty well used to Boothenay and her quirks,” Scott said, refusing to take offense at Caleb’s tone. “Although last time it got kind of hairy. Remember yesterday when you came in and thought someone had been shot?”
“You mean she’d taken something then?”
“Nah. I’m not talking about drugs. I’m talking about blood.” Scott grimaced. “What the hell am I doing, making all the explanations? You could ask her yourself, Doc. She’s standing right here.”
“I don’t think Mr. Deane is going to believe a word I say,” I said sharply. “In fact, if you don’t watch out you might get judged, convicted and hung, just like he’s condemning me—on absolutely no evidence. You know, guilt by association.”
“Doc won’t do that, Boothenay. He just doesn’t understand.” Scott stood by making excuses for Caleb’s behavior, not that Caleb seemed to appreciate the effort.
“I suppose it would be beyond anyone’s capabilities to tell me what’s going on,” he said, going all stiff-necked and rigid.
“Why should I?” I asked at the same time as Scott said, “I’m sure Boothenay will be glad to explain.”
Caleb’s head ping-ponged between Scott and me. All of a sudden, he grabbed my chin and turned my face into the light.
“What…?” I reared back, knocking a roll of silver solder off the workbench as I slapped at his hand.
He dodged the slap with ease, taking his time as he stared into my eyes before shoving up the sleeve of my sweater and examining the skin for needle marks. Finally, he let me go, bent to pick up the fallen solder and replaced the roll on the bench.
“Okay,” he said. “So maybe you aren’t on drugs. Your eyes look all right, and you don’t smell like you’ve been smoking dope. If you say you haven’t indulged, I’ll believe you—this time. Just don’t try to tell me everything is perfectly normal.”
If I’d been shooting drugs, I thought angrily, I’d sure as hell stick the needle in somewhere other than the crook of my arm. I took a deep breath and let the anger fade. In all honesty, I’d probably have come to the same conclusion Caleb had if I’d caught a new acquaintance in as deep a trance as I’d been in.
So how much should I tell him? My mouth opened and blurted out a literal answer. “Paranormal, actually,” I said. “I told you the other day, don’t you remember?”
He did. I could see him thinking about what had happened, recalling the sensation we’d shared. “Do you mean that was for real? That weird feeling I had where we were…well, I’ve kind of lost it now. Are you saying you’re a telepath or something?”
“Or something,” I agreed. “A bit more than a telepath, if you want to be real accurate.”
“Prove it,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“Hoo, boy,” I heard Scott say, as he backed toward the door. “I’m out of here.”
Caleb made a token acknowledgment to Scott, but he spoke to me.
“I said, prove it. You can levitate, can’t you, or move stuff—what’s that called? So show me.”
“I can’t levitate,” I said. The situation struck me as funny and I couldn’t suppress the giggle that slipped out. “I don’t know that I want to. I’m not telekinetic either. Sorry.”
“Let’s see,” he drawled, his southern voice softer than ever, but with overtones of hammer-struck steel. “Let’s just reconstruct the scene. Yesterday, I remember, I touched you on the arm…”
He took my arm. I tried to draw away, but he ignored the motion.
“Then I touched this,” he said, and while I tried to tell him he shouldn’t, he set the tip of his finger on the barrel of the blunderbuss.
Light faded, swayed. I saw his greatcoat again and smelled horse. I looked up into his eyes and tried to speak. From somewhere I heard a command; a sound that rushed in and out of my ears like ocean surf.
Bring Ethan. This wasn’t right. Not yet. I knew this wasn’t right, not complete. Caleb, Ethan. Ethan, Caleb. Something is missing.
Understanding flooded over me.
“Stop!” I cried. The power charged, stinging in my veins, white lightning through my nerves. I gathered the surge to me, dampening its strength with my body. A word, a magical word of confinement popped into my head and I spoke it aloud. The word circled the power, held in stasis for the time being. “Not yet,” I entreated. “Not…Quite…Yet.”
And we were back. I have never felt so triumphant in my life, knowing, finally, what it must feel like to turn a tornado.
Caleb clutched at the workbench, staring blindly at a vision beyond his comprehension. “Jesus H. Christ!”
“A bit unnerving, isn’t it?” I asked. My insides quaked, and only by the greatest self-control did I hold my own voice steady.
“What was that?”
“Part of the history of your gun,” I said. “In the service of the king, like the writing on the banding around the muzzle of your blunderbuss says. Only in this case read service of the queen. Charlotte is the queen.”
Caleb swallowed. “I felt almost as if…were we there?” He answered his own question. “No, couldn’t be,” but then he saw me nod.
“Is that what you do?”
“Not quite levitation, is it?”
“Or else super levitation, right out of this world. Where…” He looked thoroughly confused.
“Where were we?” I finished his unspoken question. “In England, in Queen Charlotte’s court.”
“Queen Charlotte? Funny, I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of her.
What time frame—when, exactly, is this supposedly taking place?”
Supposedly, huh? Caleb must think his own reason was playing him false. “The historical period is around 1810 to 1812. Sometime before the war. It’s the major time of activity for your gun.”
“Say what? 1810! I don’t believe…” Caleb seated himself on a stool placed handy by the workbench. Settling down, I thought warily , until he got some answers that made sense to him. Or maybe his legs just wouldn’t hold him any longer.
“George III is king,” I said, trying to be helpful. “Mad King George.” I didn’t think Caleb had studied up on British royalty because his face remained puzzled.
“Mad?” He gave a short laugh. “Well, I don’t know about King George, but for sure, I must be mad to think you’re serious.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked, with a mocking smile at his doubt.
“You may not trust me, but don’t you trust
your own senses either?”
He threw up his head and sniffed deeply of the air, like Gabriel hound dog casting for scent. After a moment he muttered, “Nope.
Nothing there.” Then louder, to me, he said, “I thought maybe you—
we—got a whiff of some mind-bending glue or something. I guess not.”
I pulled up the second of the stools and perched beside him. Poor Caleb. He looked so shaken I almost felt sorry for him, until I remembered the alacrity with which he’d presumed me to be on drugs.
“No glue,” I said. “We’re clean as a whistle in here—except for the wood stove. Don’t you want to check the carbon monoxide levels, just in case?” I gestured to a small fixture attached to the ceiling. “I trust the alarm will go off if there’s any danger, but you never know.”
Caleb shook his head, hard. “All right, all right. No drugs, no glue, no abnormal substances of any kind. I’m sorry—I wish I’d kept my big mouth shut. What the hell does it matter anyway? What I want to know is how you did that.”
At this, I faltered. How was I to explain when I didn’t really know myself? “I can’t tell you. It just happens.”
He didn’t believe me. His lips tightened. “Well, I can see you might not want to give away any of your secrets. It’s a pretty good illusion after all. Actually, it’s a damn good illusion.”
Why didn’t I take the opening offered when he decided to reject the evidence of his own perceptions? I should have. I should’ve palmed him off with the excuse that what he’d felt and seen had been a hallucination, rather than a real manifestation of magic. And yet, I couldn’t bring myself to the point. Forget that the power inherent in the blunderbuss demanded Caleb’s presence as well as my own; to deny the magic was to deny my own life’s blood.
“Not illusion,” I said. “Magic.”
“There’s no such thing as magic. There is only illusion. All the magicians on TV say so.”
I grimaced. “I know, I know. I believed that story, too—until I got to be twelve years old and discovered I was able do things nobody else could.”
He couldn’t seem to stop himself from arguing. “Blackstone, Copperfield, Burton—they all say the things they do are just tricks.”
“Do you think what you experienced was a trick?”
Caleb propped his elbows on the counter and ran agitated fingers through his wavy dark hair until the front stuck up in rooster tails.
“Okay,” he said. “Maybe I asked the wrong question. Maybe what I ought to ask is why? Why do you do that? Why did you do that to me?”
Now he had me messing with my own hair. Soon we’d both be sitting here, looking like a pair of demented chickens.
“Your blunderbuss is a catalyst,” I said, spinning a curl around one finger. “What I see—what you glimpsed—are events in the history of your gun. There is a power within the gun that wants to take me into that history, and evidently, since you saw the same thing I did, you’re needed as well. If you want to, of course. Nobody is making you.”
He caught my hand and pulled it away from my hair, then sat holding it loosely in his own. “What can a gun be trying to say?” He looked with suspicion at the blunderbuss which, while laying in passive isolation in the nest of blankets, looked as innocent as a gun ever can.
“I don’t know yet. Every time I start into the story, I get pulled back. This time,” I added, still feeling the triumph of winning over the magic, “I pulled out on purpose.”
“Because of me?” he asked.
“Yes, but not for the reason you might think. What did you see, Caleb? What kind of message did you get during the spell?”
“Message?” he asked. “Spell? Is that what that was?” He chuckled helplessly, still in denial.
I overlooked his reaction. “Well, what did you feel? Did you feel as if you belonged there?”
“Me! Was that me?” He stared straight ahead with muddled eyes, thinking hard, trying to work a way through the puzzle. “I guess it was,” he said slowly. “Only…You’re kidding, right? You’re a hypnotist and just gave me a powerful suggestion, that’s all.”
That is certainly the explanation he wanted me to give.
“Were you frightened?” I asked, a low blow if ever I heard one. I knew it was unfair to force him into a corner, but I didn’t take it back. I think I was still a little angry with him for suspecting me of drug abuse.
“Hell, yes, I was scared,” he said. “Is this what you do when you…”
His voice trailed off and I knew he remembered how he’d felt when, just for an instant, he had actually been someone else. Maybe he remembered the blood he’d seen on me, too, and thought about the nature of guns.
Caution or curiosity? The answer depended on Caleb’s character, his very essence.
“Why was I there?” he asked. “I mean, Queen Charlotte and my blunderbuss? Come on now, Boothenay. What has that to do with me?”
I shook my head and gave him a half-smile. “That’s the question I always ask myself before the magic takes me. What has this to do with me? And I’ve got to admit, I sometimes ask again when the magic is done.”
“You mean you go through all that—the blood and so on—and still don’t find any answers?”
“I guess the gun’s magic is satisfied when someone finally knows the story. The spirits, or whatever they are, can finally be put to rest.”
“Bizarre,” he said, half laughing. “Have you ever shown your Dad or your brother how this works?”
I know he hoped I’d say yes. “Nope. Neither of them has ever felt the slightest pull or desire. For what it’s worth, I don’t think I could make them a part of the spell if they didn’t already belong.”
“You mean I do belong? I’m supposed to be there with you?” He sounded doubtful, as if he had a bit of a problem believing that could be true.
“I think so. Do you want to find out? You have to be willing to give yourself over to the power.” I wanted him to hurry up and figure everything out. Even with parts of the puzzle missing, didn’t he feel the basic rightness? I knew he had to be with me on this one. Until he agreed and allowed himself to be absorbed by the power, the magic would keep throwing me out, the purpose lost. I’d never know what had been done, or what should have been done with his blunderbuss back in the winter of 1811. But I couldn’t make him join with the magic. He’d have to have the desire for himself.
His hands worried the tools on the workbench. He picked things up and put them back down. I rescued the dial calipers just before he messed up a setting calibrated for the barrel bed on an old Winchester I’d started restoring, and then moved a bottle of bluing into the cupboard before he spilled it.
And I waited.
At last Caleb sighed, straightened his shoulders, and flashed a wry grin in my direction. “I must be crazy to believe any part of this.” He sighed. “Oh, well. What the hey? I guess your magic is calling me, right? Must be fate. So let’s take a look.”
I let out the breath I’d been holding and smiled in return. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disturbed when he agreed, although I probably shouldn’t let him think about it for too long. “Maybe not just this second, if that’s all right with you. This time, I’m—we’re—going to be prepared. And there are one or two other things I oughta bring up, too.”
“I knew there’d be a catch.”
Caleb tried to make me think he’d gotten over his fright, but I could tell he hadn’t. Far be it from me to look down on him. I’d been there myself. He’d have to be rather dim not to have second thoughts.
“Oh, it’s not a catch, just a precaution. You told me you have a set of pistols that belong to the same time period. Are they anywhere handy?” If he kept them in a bank vault, as I would have if I’d been in his shoes, he’d have to wait until Monday to get them.
He took me by surprise when he said, “Yeah. They’re at home. I got everything out of storage when I decided to have you look at them. I didn’t expect anything besides a look
, and maybe a restoration in the case of the blunderbuss,” he added, somewhat plaintively. “I sure as the devil didn’t expect this. Why? Do we need them?”
I nodded. “So I believe. At least, I know I have to bring you with me, back to Queen Charlotte’s time. It’s meant to be, or you—or someone who looks just like you—wouldn’t keep turning up there.
Something keeps nagging at me, though, trying to say we need all three guns to make the magic work. Otherwise, the story isn’t complete. I don’t know what might happen if we don’t have all the pieces when we go. Things might not turn out right.”
“Do you mean we could get killed?”
“Dad asked me the same thing,” I said, making a wry face as I remembered how angry he’d been. “And as I told him…I just don’t know. Probably not, because those people you just saw weren’t really us or our bodies—or not quite anyway. The action is actually happening on a different plane.”
“But?” Caleb’s green eyes narrowed. I’d never before met a man who could tell what I was thinking, one who read me well enough to know I hadn’t revealed all the ins and outs of this to him. “What else?”
“I imagine it is feasible to get stuck wherever the magic takes you. I suppose a person could be lost in that other world, not able to get back.” I had to tell him.
His lips twisted. “You mean sit around the rest of your life as a veg?
Your mind in one place and your body in another?”
I shrugged. “I just don’t know. That is a possibility, I suppose. I don’t believe it will happen. Only…”
“Only?” he asked, with a decided reluctance. “How do you get back, Boothenay?”
It wouldn’t be right to be less than truthful, I told myself. Possibly, deep down, I wanted to scare him off. All of this flipping back and forth—maybe it had been sent as a warning. I had a choice this time.
My power, my control, had developed in an unexpected rush until I thought I could say no to this adventure if I wanted. Maybe.
But if this was true, why did the compulsion grab and bend me until I felt driven to follow Annabelle Winthrop into whatever life had held for her two hundred years in the past? Yes, and drag a helpless bystander along with me. Well, maybe not completely helpless. He’d have his blunderbuss after all. But there were a couple of things he couldn’t do anything about, and I didn’t know if I could either.
In The Service Of The Queen (The Gunsmith Book 1) Page 8