by Carolan Ivey
He knew a lead ball had made the bloody groove across the top of her shoulder. He had seen bullet-inflicted wounds before, and this was one of them.
He had a good idea who had shot at her, too. He dragged both hands through his hair and clenched his muscles against the urge to smash a fist into the wall. He should have killed Harris when he’d had the chance, borrowed body or not. He could easily have done it, if he hadn’t remembered right then that Harris, along with the rest of the men, were really Taylor’s friends, possessed by spirits of the dead.
She wouldn’t have thanked him for “saving” her by killing one of them.
On his knees on the hard floor, frustration tightened his jaw as he watched her. Her elbow propped on the back of the commode, she swallowed often and forced deep breaths through her open mouth. Her eyes were closed, grey shadows under them matching the grey of her uniform. She was drained. Of blood, and in spirit. He wondered how much of that drainage was due to physical fatigue, and how much to the emotional sacrifice she’d made to help him. Jared swallowed against a lump in his throat. This woman, who only hours ago hadn’t known him from Adam, had risked everything, her very life, for him. He’d clung to her like a child as she had reached inside him and smoothed down the raised spikes of pain. As a man, he knew he ought to be ashamed of his weakness. But he couldn’t find shame anywhere in him. In the aftermath, he found only the peace that came from touching her.
And curiosity—he wanted to ask her about this power she had, but wasn’t sure how to phrase it. Back in his time, women like her kept very quiet about such things for fear of being labeled a witch. He had sensed her reluctance to touch him before, and figured it must be the same these days. Best to let her tell him in her own time.
What he had left of it.
He lifted the wet cloths off her shoulder, took the scissors he’d found and gingerly snipped her undershirt along the top of the shoulder. Thankfully, she didn’t move, because his hands were none too steady. Battle fatigue. Lack of sleep and food, he supposed. Cleaning up this mess wasn’t going to be pleasant for her.
He’d realized the minute he’d taken off her uniform coat, that the wound wasn’t serious. Most of the blood had dried, and there didn’t appear to be much new bleeding as he peeled the shirt away from the purple bruises on her skin. The bullet had plowed a shallow furrow in her flesh, but it would heal. As long as it didn’t fester. Sickness had killed more of his friends than bullets. That knowledge must have shown on his face.
“That bad, huh?”
He looked, surprised, into her glazed eyes.
“No. Just a flesh wound.” He forced himself to smile. “You’re lucky Harris fares poorly with moving targets.” He took up another clean cloth and briefly closed his eyes. “Very lucky.”
He’d had ample opportunity to see what a Minié ball could do to human flesh. If Harris’s hand had been a hair steadier, she wouldn’t have had an arm or hand to reach out with, as she was doing now, to grip his wrist.
“You mean Stephen shot at me?”
She wasn’t going to like this. Jared couldn’t meet her eyes, but gently disengaged her hand, laid it in her lap, and kept working on her shoulder as he spoke. “After he called the charge, the only man behind you with a loaded weapon was Harris. And this bullet came from behind.”
“How do you know that?”
He refused to meet her eyes. “I know.”
If possible, she seemed to deflate even more and her head rolled on her shoulders as she tried to hide her face from him. “Why would Stephen want to kill me?” her voice came high, quivering. “He was Troy’s best friend. My God, he practically lived with me for the first few weeks after Troy died, he was so worried about me…” Her voice trailed off in a rush of shallow breathing.
Frowning, Jared reached up with both hands and turned her face toward him. Her skin was white and cold, and her pupils huge. His heart dropped. He had seen this happen before on the battlefield. Men otherwise not seriously wounded often sickened just like this.
And often, they died.
Swearing softly, he climbed to his feet and limped into the bedroom. He yanked off the bedspread in one strong motion, grabbed the top sheet and tore strips out of it as he returned to the bathroom.
Not one other person should have to die.
Forcing Ethan out of his mind, he focused only on her shoulder as he worked to bind the wound. His mother had, indeed, taught him well. But her lessons didn’t quite fit in this case. Her lessons never took into account what one had to do to save a life. Taking up the scissors, he took a deep breath and cut her shirt until it lay open to the waist.
Under it he found a tightly wound bandage of some stretchy material, also blood-soaked. Apparently she’d used it to flatten her breasts under the Confederate uniform. That would have to come off, too. He swallowed, reminded himself he was a grown man, not a nervous youth; that this was only a woman, not a superior officer. Though Taylor would probably argue about the “superior” part. Quickly he snipped through the material, and the bands fell away.
Correct that, he thought. Challenging a superior officer was child’s play compared to this.
“Antibiotic…”
Jared nearly jumped out of his skin.
“What?” he croaked, remembering to close his mouth after speaking.
“First aid kit. In the bag. Salve…stops infection,” came her dry whisper. Her mouth moved, but the rest of her body seemed too heavy for her to deal with. “Wash your hands,” she finished with a weak half-grin, oblivious to her state of undress. A good thing, because he was anything but oblivious to it. Her skin would be flawless, if it weren’t for the ripped flesh at the top of her shoulder and the puffy bruises that bloomed from there to her waist. He congratulated himself that he felt no untoward sexual urges at the sight of her bare breasts, small and perfect, a beautiful sight under any other circumstance. But now, seeing this beauty marred by a man like Harris unearthed emotions he’d never felt for a woman, not during his real life in the 1800s, nor during his non-life as a wandering soul.
Damn it, I should have killed that bastard.
He’d had his chance, back at the skirmish. Harris had leveled his Colt at Taylor’s back as she charged away with her comrades. White rage blotting out all else, Jared had lunged for the Lieutenant, cursing the soft sand that sucked at his feet, costing him precious seconds. His arms had closed around Harris’s shoulders just as the pistol had barked and set his ears ringing. Harris had hit the ground with a cry and twisted in Jared’s grasp like an oiled snake. But Jared had already slipped the Lieutenant’s own knife from his boot and had it poised over the man’s throat.
“Now, you bastard,” Jared had snarled in Harris’s ear. “Now you’re mine.”
His chance had come, the chance he’d waited for. But something stayed his hand. Something that reached out to him through the red haze. Taylor’s voice… and Troy’s.
“These are my friends. They’re just occupied territory right now.”
“Let it go, Beaudry. Can’t take baggage like that through the gates of Heaven.”
He had stared into Harris’s eyes and cold realization hit him hard.
He couldn’t do it.
Harris’s expression changed from that of a man facing death to that of a man ready to laugh in his face. Jared had raised the knife and buried it to the hilt into the sand next to Harris’s head. Then he’d drawn back his fist and cold-cocked the Lieutenant, leaving him limp and unconscious on the beach.
Jared realized his hands were poised, shaking, over Taylor’s wound. Angrily he gave himself a good, hard mental kick and forced his mind to work.
He found what she asked for. He washed his hands in the miraculous running water. He ruthlessly shut out the sounds she made as he cleaned the wound and wiped the blood off her, and treated and bound it with more supplies from the first aid kit, and with the torn strips of sheet. Glancing worriedly at her pale face, he decided not to waste time trying to find another shirt
to cover her. She was fading before his eyes, shivering with deep inner cold.
He ignored the stings and aches in his own body as he carried her to the bed and covered her with every blanket he could find in the house, pulling them off of beds and out of closets. He knew nothing else he could do for her, except stand helplessly at the foot of her bed, clenching and unclenching his fists, and watch her pale face, watch for her next breath.
Except…
He could try to do for her what she had done for him.
He drew a ragged breath and shoved his hands through his hair, sifting out a shower of wind-driven sand. He didn’t know if it would work. In fact, it might backfire. He had little idea about such things, and how they worked, despite the fact that some force beyond his comprehension had kept his soul prisoner all these years, entombed in a nothingness between heave and hell.
But whenever she had touched him before, he’d felt his long-empty soul drawing from hers. Drawing strength and peace. God knew he didn’t deserve her gift. He had taken enough from her already, and it showed on her shadowed features. And if he touched her again…
If he touched her again, he might just finish the job Harris had started. And kill her.
Her body shivered, so painfully thin it barely made a bump under the layers of blankets, and her breath sounded harsh and shallow in the starkly furnished room. The day’s light faded behind the drawn blinds, and she seemed to fade right along with it.
His hands went to the buttons of his uniform, but stilled when he looked down at himself. And realized he would do her no good at all until he took care of himself first. He stepped to the doorway and paused, staring. Her blood was on his hands, and his own blood soaked the leg of his trousers. Streaks and puddles of it marked their progress from the front door, down the hall to the bathroom. Shutting out the sight, he finished stripping off his clothes as he limped back to the little room, then cleaned and bandaged his leg using the salve from the yellow-colored tube.
He was running wet cloth over the rest of his skin, shivering as he wiped away several days’ worth of sweat, salt air and sand, when his fatigue-fogged brain picked out voices echoing in his past.
“Mama, I’m scared.”
The echo had been caused by the sandstone walls of a deep ravine.
“Don’t worry, Sarah child. Old Mrs. Reynolds is no one to be fearing of.” His mother had sounded calm enough, but her pounding heart under his ear told him different. At eight years old, he wasn’t a light load, but her arms never slackened as she carried him deep into the hills beyond the family property. “But don’t you dare tell your daddy.”
He couldn’t hear Sarah’s reply through the fit of coughing that gripped his chest, but his mother’s musical laugh told him Sarah had said something funny.
“Now that’s something I’d like to see! Broomstick, indeed. Why, if she could do that, I’d be the first one to buy one from her to clean my house.”
“Then why are we going up there after dark, Mama?” Sarah was trying hard to be brave, but fright glittered on her voice. She stumbled over a root, and the light from the lantern she carried swung crazily, casting spooky shadows high up into the bare, bony branches of oak and hickory trees.
“Because,” Mama had said reasonably, “some people just wouldn’t understand. That’s why Hattie Reynolds lives way out here alone. The doctor in town doesn’t seem to know what to do, but Hattie knows the old ways. In fact, if it hadn’t been for her, this boy would never have been born.” Her arms had tightened around him as another spasm of the painful, high-pitched cough shook him. “She won’t just tell us to take him home and keep him ‘comfortable’.”
Jared peered through the cobwebs of time and remembered the rough logs of a tiny cabin, and a wizened, toothless old face that had scared the daylights out of him. The old woman had made him drink some awful-tasting tea, had rubbed his body down with something that made his skin tingle, then forced his head under a blanket draped over a steaming pot of pungent herbs.
In the end, she had laid her gnarled hands on his chest and said words over him that could have come from the Bible, but he’d never heard in church before. On the rare occasions he’d listened, that is.
When finished, Hattie Reynolds had let her hands linger a moment longer, leaned close and looked curiously into his eyes. Apparently satisfied with what she saw, she tucked up his blanket and handed him back to his mother.
“He’s a strong one, Missus Beaudry. Mos’ times it’s the human touch that does the job, ye know. Little ’uns just need a lovin’ touch.”
Jared let the washcloth drop into the sink. So. Taylor wasn’t the first woman who had healed him with a touch. There must be something within him that was open to an ability like hers, even if he didn’t understand it himself.
He cupped his hands and took several long swallows of water from the running tap. It didn’t taste like the cold, clear well water from home. It had a curiously soft quality to it, slightly salty. But it was wet, and he realized Taylor could probably use some, too.
Naked, he went off in search of a kitchen. Surely, houses still had kitchens, didn’t they?
They did. They didn’t have lanterns or candles, though, and the light was growing dim enough that it took fishing around in several cabinets before he found a glass. He found another of the running-water fountains, like the one in the little room down the hall, and filled the glass. He couldn’t help himself, and turned the water off and on a few more times before shaking his head and heading for the bedroom. He found himself wishing he had a little more time to look around this modern world before he had to leave it. He’d seen it, sure enough, during his sojourn as a ghost, but he’d never experienced it, cut off as he was in his own limbo.
He rounded the corner and nearly dropped the glass. Taylor sat on the edge of the bed, limbs shaking like a rail fence in a high wind, looking as if she wished she’d stayed lying down.
“Hold!” he commanded. In two long strides he reached her side, set the glass on the nightstand and pressed her shoulders back toward the pillow. She gave in far too easily.
“We have to get moving. Harris is probably hot on our tails right now.” A shiver vibrated her shoulders as he tucked the blankets around her. “Why do I feel so bad?” she muttered, shifting uneasily under the covers. “I don’t have time to be sick.”
“You are exhausted.” He picked up the glass and slipped an arm behind her head to help her drink. “You’ve lost some blood, and you haven’t slept or eaten properly in at least three days. Probably quite a bit longer than that, if the number of ribs showing is any indication.” He forced her to drink slowly, but she drained the glass. He was relieved she didn’t ask him how he knew how many ribs she had.
“But what about—” Her eyelids drooped.
“Harris is probably still trying to round up his horses and his men. After that, remember they’re as tired as we are. He’ll find a place to hole up and rest a while. We’re safe for a few hours.” Jared stroked the short locks of her hair away from her forehead as he talked, as naturally as if she belonged to him. He also noticed that this time she didn’t flinch away from his touch. At least for now. He touched her forehead again, experimentally, gently rubbing the pad of his thumb over the tense creases between her eyebrows. Her only reaction was a perceptible softening of her features as she slipped into sleep.
Encouraging. Maybe, this time, he could help her recover as she had helped him. They had a few precious hours, maybe less, to rest, eat and store strength for what was to come. For as bad as the last eighteen hours had been, the final hours would be infinitely worse. Suddenly he wondered if he ought to just leave her here, sleeping, and head out on his own for Hatteras. That would be best. He’d be waiting when Harris arrived to finish him off. But what then? He frowned. Who would keep Harris from again slicing his throat and shooting him in the back?
Only Taylor, among her unit of possessed re-enactors, retained sense enough to prevent it from happening.
Only Taylor could make sure his soul went on to rest in…what? Peace? Jared laughed at himself. As if he deserved it. If anything, he deserved to go straight to hell and have Ethan’s soul slam the door behind him.
No, much as he hated to admit it, he still needed Taylor with him. And in order for her to do what he needed of her, she needed strength. He could only try, in his own fumbling way, to give back to her some of what she had lent him.
Asking his long-dead mother to please, just this once, refrain from rolling over in her grave, he lifted the layers of blankets and slid underneath. He gathered Taylor to him, careful of her wounded shoulder. A small noise rose from her throat as her body melted willingly against his, something he was sure she wouldn’t have done if she were fully awake. Any fatigue remaining in his body was quickly erased as her cold skin drew warmth from his, drawing forth another reaction from his groin that made him swallow and stare hard at a small spot on the wallpaper.
Well, of course. What man—even a ghost of one—could lie down with a woman like her and not be affected? What she definitely didn’t need from him was animal lust, and if the best thing he could do for her was keep his hands off her, then keep his hands off he would.
But the kiss they’d shared on the foyer floor still smoked where it was branded into his memory. It had been so long, so damned long, since he’d touched another human being. He had never realized the importance of touch until it had been taken away. He’d spent all these years in a cold, empty void, and when he’d come out at last, she was the only one who had touched him without intent to hurt him.
But it wasn’t just that. He was sure, as the lines separating their skins began to blur, that he would have felt this completeness whether he’d met her in 1862 or in 2062. Trying to redirect his mind, he tried to imagine her in his time. She and Sarah would have made a pair. Taylor was every bit as strong-willed as his mother and sister, and the three would have had a time adjusting to each other.
He frowned slightly, aware that he’d automatically pictured him and Taylor together.
