"You don't miss home?" Karen asked, feeling strange about the idea of this woman simply leaving her whole life behind. "You don't miss… the future?"
"I miss my family," Kay said straight away, shaking her head. "It's awful not knowing what happened with me — knowing that they probably think I died. That's the worst part… but I'm working on it. We all are. Trying to figure out a way of leaving a message for our families, somehow… preserving letters to them that can tell them what happened. It's a long shot," she shrugged, "but given that our parents won't be born for hundreds of years, we've got time." She smiled, the expression lifting the somber atmosphere. "And I miss the hell out of the Internet. What I wouldn't give to Google song lyrics I've forgotten, sometimes…"
Karen couldn't help but laugh at that. "I've got a pretty good memory. Give me a call if I can ever help out with anything."
"Thank God you're here," Kay said, and the two of them laughed. But there was an odd tension to Kay's body — the way she kept shooting glances at her, as though trying to figure out how to tell her something. "You… you know, right?"
"Know what?"
"The Burgh. The Sidhe, bringing you here… you know the deal with all that, don't you?"
"Not even slightly," Karen said blankly. "All I know is that I'm here, and that magic was involved, and that it's definitely not a dream. Unless I've gotten really good at dreaming," she added, hoping to win another smile from Kay — but the woman's face had grown solemn. A little worried, Karen glanced over toward the bar, where Connor and Liam were deep in conversation. It seemed Kay was about to get to the meat of what she wanted to tell her. That was sending a shiver running down her spine… but she didn't know why.
What grim news was Kay about to break to her?
Chapter 11
“So how did you get here? How much do you remember?" Kay was leaning forward, a serious look on her bright face.
"Not a lot." Karen shrugged. "I mean — the last I remember I was in the hospital." Kay's eyes widened and she leaned forward even further clearly interested in this particular detail. Why did she look so serious? "Nothing that bad." Karen laughed, waving a hand. "We were in Tunisia — me and my team, I mean, a deployment from the NIH to investigate a new disease that was spreading pretty quickly over there. Quickly enough to be of concern, at any rate."
"Tunisia," Kay murmured, her eyes wide. "I wish I'd been there. I hate that I never traveled outside of America."
"It was a beautiful place. I didn't spend much time actually seeing it, though. Busy working… and then I caught the damn disease."
"You caught it. That explains it," Kay said heavily, reaching out to squeeze her hand. "Sorry. That must have been… horrible."
"It wasn't so bad." Karen shrugged, a little taken aback by the depth of Kay's sympathy. Was she missing something? What was going on? "I mean, it had similar symptoms to cow pox, actually. Fatigue and a fever… plus some upper respiratory symptoms that were pretty unpleasant. About ten percent of cases were serious enough to warrant hospitalization, but the majority were comparable to a nasty cold."
"And you were one of the hospitalized ones."
"Well, yeah, but only because there were spare beds. I probably would've been fine to recover at the hotel if they hadn't decided it was a good idea not to risk infecting the staff there."
Karen was looking at her closely. "What is the last thing you remember?"
She thought back, trying to work through those bleary, feverish days to dig up some information that would satisfy Kay, who seemed determined to extract this information from her. Why was she so interested in her last few hours back in the future? Was she trying to figure out how the time travel worked, maybe? "Well, I was pretty sick," she said with a shrug. "Couldn't sit up without feeling dizzy, kept falling asleep… pretty wretched stage of the disease. I must've been close to a turning point, though, because when I woke up here, I was completely better."
"About that," Kay said softly, and her face was full of dismay. "You don't remember anything between falling asleep in the hospital and waking up by the Loch?"
"Nothing," she said blankly. "I figured I just … fell asleep and the Sidhe took me through their… interdimensional portal, or whatever." God, it was handy to have had a little brother who was obsessed with science fiction. All of this felt slightly less utterly mad than it could have.
"It's not quite like that, I'm afraid," Kay said with a sigh. "Look… when I came here, the last thing I remembered was getting run off the road by a truck driving home from a job. I lost control when I swerved to avoid the truck, plunged through a paddock and straight into a lake. I remembered the car filling up with water… then I was here."
"That's awful," Karen said blankly. "I guess it was good timing from the Sidhe."
"Yeah, it was," she said softly. "But it was more than that. When Anna came here, she was being attacked by a stalker ex with a gun. Elena had fallen down some stairs in a flooded building… Nancy was trapped in an underwater cave-in… Helen had had the brake lines on her car cut —"
"What are you saying?" Karen said blankly. "Everyone was in danger when they came here? I was just lying in a hospital bed —"
"Not just danger," Kay said. "Fatal danger. Between the five of us, we've worked out that… well, the Sidhe brought us here for a reason, that's one thing. We've all been able to make a happy, comfortable life here — none of us would go back to the future, given the choice. But it's more than that. By bringing us here… the Sidhe were saving us from certain death."
Karen let that sink in, staring at the woman across the table from her, who was biting her lip, clearly worried about how she was going to react to all this. "Death," she said blankly. "So… I was going to die of that illness?"
"I'd assume so," Kay said softly. "From what I understand, the Sidhe don't intervene unless there's no other choice. It was death… or coming here."
"I didn't even feel that sick," Karen said faintly, trying to process this. It seemed impossible. She'd always been in such good health… and the disease hadn't felt all that bad. Like a nasty cold, maybe a little worse… but she was being taken care of, she was resting… was it possible? Could she have been at death's door and not even realized it? Surely someone would have told her… but then she bit her lip, thinking of how she'd always treated patients who were at high risk of losing their battle with their illness. Telling them they were in danger was never a good idea — she'd always stay cheerful, encouraging them to keep fighting… she could feel the color draining from her face as the realization set in. Kay, seeming to see this, reached across the table to take her hand and squeeze it, a comforting gesture that drew a half-smile from her even as her mind raced to catch up.
"I know it's a lot to take in," Kay said softly.
"I don't understand. If I was so ill… how am I better now? It's only been a day and I don't even have a cough," she said faintly, one hand going to rest on her clavicles as if to detect any problems in her lungs. "I was completely well when I woke up in the grass by the lake."
"Same reason I wasn't half-drowned or bleeding when I got here," Kay said with a shrug. "The Sidhe have considerable healing powers, from what I can gather. You'll understand if you ever see Old Maggie at work. And time passes differently in their world to ours. It may have felt like you woke up straight away, but it's possible they kept you for… well, much longer than that."
"I don't remember anything." She frowned, biting her lip.
Kay sighed. "I know it's confusing."
"But — if I was about to die there and they snatched me up to heal me… why didn't they just put me back once I was better?"
"I don't think it quite works like that," Kay explained, a heavy look on her face. "In this time and place… you can be well; you can live a new life. But in our time… in our time, you and I are both dead. And if we go back there…"
"If we go back there, then we'll die?" Karen said softly, hardly daring to believe what she was hearing. Kay
nodded.
"That's what Maggie says, at any rate. And she knows more about it than anyone."
Karen stared down at her hands on the table, finding it difficult to take this in. "I can't go home."
"No," Kay said softly. "But you can make a home here. We'll help you."
She reached deep for the reserves of strength she called on when she was stressed, biting her lip as she hoisted a smile into place on her face. "Thank you," she said softly, meaning it. "Thanks for — being here, for helping me understand."
Kay smiled, but Karen could tell she was worried.
"I think — I might need a bit of time to process," she admitted, feeling a little crowded in the noisy inn.
Kay nodded, getting to her feet. "Liam and I ought to be heading home, anyway. You do what you need to do. But I'll be in town plenty over these next few weeks, dealing with this outbreak — we can talk whenever you want to, okay? And I'll introduce you to the others when I can, too."
Before she left, she pulled Karen into a tight hug — she'd never been much of a hugger, but the physical contact felt good. It seemed to help ground her, at least for a minute.
But as Kay and Liam left the inn, she knew she needed to be alone with her thoughts for a little while.
Chapter 12
Karen climbed the stairs slowly, lost in her thoughts, which were spiraling wildly. Suddenly, this whole strange adventure felt a lot more real. In a way, she'd been hanging onto the prospect of getting back home… as though all of this, real as it was, was just a momentary diversion, an odd little journey back in time that would eventually be over. A big part of her, she realized, had been nursing the quiet hope that all of this was imaginary, still, somehow. But what Kay had told her about how she'd gotten here — and why, had dashed that hope.
The more she thought about how she'd felt lying in that hospital bed, the more worried she'd gotten. They'd been giving her a slight sedative, she remembered, thinking back to the drip in her arm — it had been best practice to give patients something to calm them down a little, as it suppressed the coughing, which at a certain point began to do more damage than good as the lungs were affected. Had that sedative disguised how serious the illness actually was? She'd certainly felt a lot stronger than she actually was… it had always shocked her when she'd reach for a glass of water and feel her hand trembling, for example.
She'd nearly died, she realized with a shock as she sat down heavily on her bed. The reality of that set in, making her heart pound and her mind spiral dizzily with shock. She'd always known her job was a little dangerous — being a health-care professional always carried some risk, more in the times of disease outbreak. But the idea of actually dying at her post… of never returning home, never seeing her parents or brother again…
But wasn't that the situation she was in here, now, regardless? There was no way to go home… the Karen Frakes of the twenty-first century had died in that hospital bed, presumably. She looked down at her hands, biting her lips. Was there a body there, lying in that bed? Had she been… cloned, somehow? Or had she just gone missing? That would be a mystery that would plague the department for years, she thought, shaking her head. Impossible to know. Impossible to ever go back there.
This was her life now, she realized, staring around at the little room as though seeing it for the first time with proper clarity. This wasn't a fun little daydream, or a holiday, or a visit… this was where she lived. These were the materials she had from which to build a new life… from which to start over completely. What was she going to do here? How could she practice medicine in the sixteenth century? She'd have to utterly rebuild her practice to be more in keeping with whatever was available to her here… it would take years. That was if she could even practice medicine at all. Didn't women with too much knowledge tend to get burned at the stake around these times? God, she wished she'd taken a few medieval history electives in college…
She was panicking now — she took a few deep breaths, trying to still her racing heart, and reached for a sip of water from the pitcher that sat by her bed. There was a candle burning, a tall, slender taper that had presumably been lit by the innkeeper, or someone who worked for him… she was never going to be able to turn on a light switch again. Never have a hot shower… never browse the Internet to kill time… never watch TV again…
Her spiral was interrupted abruptly by a gentle tapping at her door. She called for whoever it was to come in, almost on autopilot, and looked up to see Connor's face in the doorway, looking slightly worried. He had a tray in his hands with two plates on it — meat and vegetables, a hearty-looking meal, and Karen realized with a start that she hadn't had dinner yet and her stomach was growling protest after a long day of physical exertion.
"Thought you might want something to eat," Connor said softly. "But I can leave you to yourself if you'd prefer to be alone."
"Don't be silly," she said automatically. "Please, sit down." There were two chairs at the little table in her room — she got up to join him, thanking him for thinking of her as they sat down to eat. Her mind was still reeling at the new revelations Kay had brought to her, but it quieted a little in the interests of getting her meal down. It was amazing, how quickly the body overrode the mind when it came to basic needs like food. And it was nice to have Connor there. Another person's presence could do wonders for halting the relentless creep of overthinking.
"I walked with Kay and Liam back to the horses," he told her. "They're both quite impressed with you. They're glad to have you here."
"Good," she said with a smile. "I'm glad I could make myself a little useful, at least. Can't imagine what kind of debt I'm going to be in to Thomas by the time this is all over."
"There's no need to think like that," Connor said firmly. "Thomas knows full well what you've been through. You were brought to us by the Sidhe — anyone with any sense knows that means you're important. We're more than willing to look after you, Karen." He hesitated, nibbling at his food, clearly trying to find the right words to bring something up. "Kay mentioned… she talked to you about — why the Sidhe brought you here."
"Because I was about to die?" She couldn't help but smile, though it felt like a bitter, broken thing on her face, and Connor didn't smile back. "Yeah, she told me. It's… it's a lot to process. I mean, I'd been thinking of explanations for what's happening to me nonstop, but… well, being rescued from certain death by faeries didn't really come up, for some reason."
"I can't imagine what you must be going through," Connor said softly. "I was born and raised here — I can't imagine traveling to another country, let alone another time. The shock you must be feeling…"
"It's a lot," she agreed, shaking her head. "I think a lot of it's still sinking in."
"I admire you," he said abruptly.
She looked up, blinking in surprise at the force in his voice.
"I admire your courage, Karen. To be dropped in such a strange place to you… and not only to be so kind and friendly to everyone you meet, but to offer to help with the problems in a town that's unfamiliar to you?" He smiled. "You're a formidable woman, Karen. I'm looking forward to knowing you better."
She blushed to the roots of her hair. Usually, she was completely fine with taking compliments — she'd had her share, especially professionally speaking. But when they were coming from one of the most handsome men that she'd ever seen… well, it was harder to keep her cool. But she managed it — thanked him for his kind words. They spent the rest of the evening talking about where she'd come from, about what Tunisia had been like, and by the time he bid her goodnight and headed back downstairs, she was feeling a lot more settled… and the exhaustion of the day was well and truly settled on her shoulders. She put herself to bed, yawning hugely as she settled into the warm embrace of the bed.
She had a lot to process… a lot to work through. But as her mother had always said, all of that could wait until she had a good night's sleep under her belt.
Chapter 13
&n
bsp; But it seemed the night had more in store for her than just a night of sleep. She was out like a light within minutes, but her sleep was troubled by dreams that seemed to stalk her through the night, waking her up every few minutes with a start — just brief images at first, snatches of impressions, memories of her hospital room, of the early days after her diagnosis, when her only symptoms had been a lingering fatigue and an elevated temperature she wouldn't have even noticed if it wasn't for the regular temperature scans that were being carried out on the healthcare staff at the hospital.
In her dream, she found herself in that hospital bed again… but this time, she was as healthy as she'd ever been, frustrated by the blankets that seemed to hold her down against her will. She stirred and thrashed against the restraints, staring up around her as her friends and colleagues bustled in and out of the room, writing notes in files, fussing with the medical equipment, straightening her straitjacket blankets again and again and never making eye contact with her. She found herself begging them to talk to her, to look at her — her voice went from a cry to a scream as she desperately tried to get some acknowledgement, any at all, that she was still here, that she was still alive, that they could see her here…
The dream wore on and grew nightmarish. Her hands and feet were tethered to the bed with thick straps, stopping her from moving. She thrashed and writhed, screaming for help until her head was tied down, too… then they forced a ventilator into her mouth… what was happening here? Why were they doing all this to a healthy patient, a patient who was breathing fine on her own? The shock drove her out of her sleep entirely and she sat up in bed in the inn, shivering in the cold of the night, her heart pounding with the horror of the dream. Grim realization set in. What she was dreaming about wasn't real… but in a way, it was. The treatment that she was experiencing in the dream… that would have been what they'd have done to her body as her health declined… a respirator to breathe for her, a series of tubes and drips to keep her hydrated and alive as her body began to fail… was that how she'd died? Trapped in a bed, desperate for air that she could no longer breathe herself?
Troubled By The Highlander: A Scottish Time Travel Romance (Highlander Forever Book 6) Page 5
