Sarah kicked the crude mannequin that Liv had her practicing on. The ancient manuscript had been pushing Sarah to the point of exhaustion. Sarah was frustrated. “I don’t,” Kick. Slam. Slap “understand why I have to, argh… practice… umph… in human form!” She jumped in the air, swinging her leg in a powerful roundabout kick, pounding the hay-filled practice dummy, which promptly exploded. Hay flew everywhere—in the air, on the floor, covering the simple wicker furniture and all the bedsheets and pillows, blanketing Sarah’s hair and her clothes. And that, of course, was when Kusaila decided to visit.
“Sarah? Sarah?” Kusaila stood politely outside his fiancée’s tent. His powerful sense of hearing had picked up on his wife-to-be’s physical exertions and frustration. Actually, most of the camp had heard Sarah’s practice screams and muffled curses. He called out again. “Sarah, are you well?”
No answer but grunts and groans and heavy breathing. “Sarah, I can hear you. Can I come in?”
She was about to yell No, not now, when the large desert chieftain walked into the hay-covered room. He looked at the shattered practice dummy and the clouds of hay dust still tumbling down from where she had kicked it, and in the calmest of voices said, “Well, I’ve seen worse. At least this time you left the tent standing.”
He caught the pillow before it hit him, but then missed several more as a storm of hay and hay-covered pillows and shattered dummy parts assaulted him. He was laughing so hard he didn’t notice that he also was covered in hay and pillow feathers. He groaned and bent over laughing. Sitting on the ground, he held his head in his hands. “I can’t breathe…” gasp, “I can’t breathe!”
Sarah slipped into her default dialect. Her grandmother would have been appalled. “Hell of a time to come courtin’, Kusaila. You really know when to show up, don’t ya? Makes a girl feel real special!” She laughed and then spit out a piece of straw that had somehow managed to find its way into her mouth.
When her breathing had returned to normal and Kusaila only snickered every other word, he said. “Sarah, as funny as this is, it’s not the reason I came to visit. I don’t know if you remember me saying that dragon people radiate their feelings on occasion?”
A startling thunderclap burst close by. Jumping, Sarah ran past Kusaila, stuck her head out the tent, and gawked. A dark cloud had settled over the part of the camp that held her tent. Everywhere else was bright and sunny.
Kusaila’s eyes twinkled as he slowly churned out, “I sensed? Heard? Ran for cover?” Another pile of straw came hurtling in his direction. He ducked, never missing a word. “Your frustration.” He didn’t add from all the way across the camp. “When you are not happy, my Sarah, neither am I.” He didn’t add but thought, Neither is anyone else, including the camels, donkeys, children, and dogs. “So, what troubles you?”
Sarah sighed, this time exhaling without blowing hay around, and plopped back into a pile of intact feather pillows. She cast a sideways glance in Kusaila’s direction and frowned. A single tear rolled down her cheek. “Would you believe me if I said I don’t know?”
Kusaila nodded. A gentle smile crossed his lips. “Yes, I would, my Sarah. I believe you do not know.”
He paused and she spoke up. “But you know, don’t you?”
Kusaila nodded once. “I have had more dreams about the dragon rider, Harry Ferguson.”
Sarah noticed that change in his phrase from your dragon rider to the dragon rider. She leaned forward, her attention fixed on Kusaila. “Tell me.”
“He is headed into a trap, and the world of his day depends on him facing it and battling through it. I think you are also because of your… bond with him sensing the same thing and you feel helpless, and if the truth be known you feel like you have betrayed him.”
Tears streamed from Sarah’s eyes. She rubbed them with the back of her sleeve and blew out an angry breath. “Why am I always crying? Are all dragon women this emotional?”
Kusaila paused. Starting to answer, he realized there was no answer that would help her and not get him in trouble. So he said, “Hard times cause all people to need release, my Sarah, whether through slashing a practice dummy or laughing until your sides ache… or weeping.”
An eyebrow moved subtly upward. Oh, he is good. “You know me well.” Which might or might not be a good thing, she pondered, then added, “And will make a wonderful husband. But what do I do? Are you saying you want me to leave you and go help Harry?”
Kusaila glanced down at the rugs that covered the floor and thought, My world dies or his, and you are key. What a horrible decision. But answered, “I think what would help the dragon rider now is to be warned. Can you still write a message and send it by the sword?”
This time a long-silent voice answered her thoughts. “Yes, Sarah. I am still available to give your messages to Harry, and any encouragement or warning you could send him might be just what he needs to press through this time.”
Jolted by the voice, Sarah said, “Where have you been, Speaker? I tried to reach you many times and you weren’t there!”
“Well, I didn’t think you needed me anymore, since you seem to have your own embedded friend. I’m sure her wisdom sufficed.” The tone was cold and jealous.
Sarah’s eyes widened at the contempt in the ancient sword’s voice. Wow! Who would have thought centuries-old AIs could be so petty.
“We can debate my attitude or we can write… please choose!” the speaker huffed.
Chapter 11
Surprisingly, there was plenty of room in the treehouse at the back of the Huslu property for five kids and a very large dog. The children claimed to have built the mansion among the limbs of the two-hundred-year-old oak. But they had help. Brian Huslu was a mechanical engineer, his father, Brady, a woodworking craftsman. Their talents and brawn combined with Shani’s badgering and two boy’s worth of restless energy had produced, over a month of weekends, a treehouse that was more like a playroom in the sky than a thrown-together slapdash fort. It had hand-sawed cedar siding, glass windows, and running water courtesy of a cistern camouflaged to look like a large hollow limb hovering over the roof. It was a masterpiece, a culmination of Sasquatch ingenuity and grandfatherly sweat. Shani had wanted her men to install a bathroom, but they all balked at that, even the three boys. Bradley and Easton and Ryan had said if they needed to go they were already in a tree and it would just look like rain, might be a bit yellow but nonetheless. When Gracie and Maggie became frequent guests, the boys realized what Bradley’s mom had intended, but it was too late.
The little party sat disgruntled in their castle in the great oak along with their huge escort, Raleigh, after Shani ruined Lizzy’s tour of it by drawing her away into the main house.
“We invited her over, and they just stole her away and shoved us right out the door. That ain’t right!” Easton huffed, sitting in his child-sized rocker, arms across his chest.
Ryan the little cowboy was in the process of pulling off one of his boots because Maggie was fussing about his spurs shredding the carpet. “Yep, that’s the way it is sometimes, Easton ole buddy. Grownups like to talk grownup and we’uns get told to go play and don’t come back till dark. Unless of course we’re bleedin’, and only then if it’s gonna require stitches.”
Gracie laughed and pranced over to the miniature simple bake oven that her parents had contributed to the treehouse. She gingerly opened the oven door, her hands covered in oven mitts just her size, and carefully took out the chocolate muffins. Bradley hovered over her, barely able to keep from drooling.
Maggie said, “You know, guys, there is a good side to being run out of the house. Nobody is going to be counting how many of these muffins we eat!”
Ryan was about to comment when Raleigh’s ears perked up. His nostrils flared, sniffing the room. Bradley also jerked, running toward the back door of the treehouse. Suddenly the room shifted, lurching and shaking, swaying like a sapling in a tornado.
****
Lizzy walked into the la
rge entrance hall of the old house. It was paneled with native East Texas woods, and the faint, pure scent of cedar and sassafras wood produced an atmosphere of cleanliness that she was sure had not been either the intent or imagination of the Huslu men.
Shani noted Lizzy smelling the house and said, “When you live with two and a half extremely hairy men, not to mention a huge white wolf, and when one of those knuckle-walkers likes to smoke cigars and run around in his droopy old drawers… Well, a woman has to do something to keep the smell out!”
Lizzy snorted, embarrassing herself. She heard Brian laugh and Grandpa Brady start grumbling under his breath.
Grandpa Brady shuffled over to his daughter-in-law. Lizzy thought, He is deliberately shuffling just to aggravate Shani.
The huge man looked down on his elegant daughter-in-law and puffed his lip out. “Just tell her everything you know, why don’t ya?”
Tilting her head back, Shani raised a cast iron skillet and looked up at her towering father-in-law, threatening him with a you better get out of my kitchen before I use this on you look.
Her husband rescued them all by saying, “Lizzy, would you like some coffee or a glass of sweet tea? I’m sure Dad and Shani will have things sorted out momentarily. Wont y’all?” He looked over at them and grunted in a very mild but highly alpha tone.
Brady, who didn’t miss a beat, retreated from his make-believe confrontation with Shani and sat in a rocker that seemed to be his semi-permanent place of residence while haunting the kitchen. “Lizzy, I am sure you have a thousand questions, and I am available to answer as many as I can. What I don’t know I will pretend to know and just make things up till ya get so confused ya quit asking. By the way, are you comfortable with me in my Sasquatch form?”
Shani’s voice lumbered through the kitchen in a cross between a growl and a respectful chirp. “Grandpa Brady, you got clothes on, right?”
The grand old swamp ape looked indignantly back at his daughter, a heavy frown and high raised eyebrows answering her embarrassing question. “Well of course I do, Shaneee… what do you think I am, some kind of hairy-assed pervert?”
In a milder tone Shani responded, “Of course not, Grandpa Brady, I just know that sometimes you forget.”
“Hummph!” the old Sasquatch grunted.
Lizzy interrupted, “Grandpa Brady, I would be honored if you would just stay as you are. True to your very best self. You are my father’s best friend, and to be honest I am a little overawed at being in the same room with you. And yes, I do have a whole lot of questions for you. But the first is if you are here and even Raleigh is here, then where is my dad? And where is Sarah?”
Brady settled back into the huge old rocker that looked like it had rocked a thousand miles and never left the corner. He stretched to open the glass humidor that sat on the nearby cabinet and picked out a cigar. He eyed Shani and grinned, then bit off the end of the cigar and stuck it into his mouth, never even thinking about lighting it.
Lizzy leaned back against the kitchen island and looked at Brady. I am in an old Victorian mansion straight out of Gone with the Wind, sitting across from an eight-foot Sasquatch, waiting on him to tell me where my time-traveling father and his dragon-shifter love are. What could be more natural?
Brady scratched his hairy chin and gazed down his long nose at Lizzy. “Well, the truth is, Lizzabeth, I’m not sure where your dad is… right now. I do know this though: he was always writing in his journals. He took them everywhere. I told him one day they were going to get him in trouble. Belle Rodum would find them or someone worse, and every thought he ever considered and every word he wrote would be held against him. Like the good book says, we will give account for every idle word.”
Brian nudged his wife and mumbled, “There he goes.” They looked at each other and then back to their father.
Brady pretended not to notice but did change the tenor of his lecture. “But.” He glanced back at his children, who were pretending to work on dinner. “To make a very long story short, let me ask you a question. Did you ever find any of those diaries?”
Lizzy’s answer was immediate. “Yes. I summarize them and tell the story to the kids at library time. I am sure they have filled your ears with those stories.”
“Yep, they have, but I was just making sure. So next question, where are you, as in what date, what place are you, in the reading of those journals? And here is why I ask… the diaries change. Your dad’s journals are records of different timelines. And when an event changed for better or,” here Brady’s voice got quieter, “or for worse in some cases, then what your dad wrote would change.”
Lizzy jumped and Brady was sure she was about to have a jerking spell. “Yes, yes! I saw that. One night I read his journal and then the next it had completely changed. Sarah was mentioned, I was mentioned, and I went back and looked over the entries I had already read and discovered they had also changed.”
“Okay then… you know better than I do. The current timeline that your father is in will be reflected in those journals. So, where is he in the journals?”
Lizzy paused, her eyes shifting toward the upper left-hand quadrant that is somehow linked to where memories are stored in the brain. She blinked and then answered, “He had just been given the thorn by a carrier that died in his arms. You were there, Brady.”
The old Sasquatch had been leaning in toward Lizzy, listening intently. He quickly sat back and released a breath he had been unconsciously holding. “So that’s where he is… at the beginning. Oh, Harry… to watch you go through that again.” The old man’s body began to shake, his voice tremble. Tears started rolling down his cheeks. He blinked and shivered like a large animal shedding water. “The worst is coming for him, Lizzy. He is going into it again. We fought, Raleigh and I fought and bled almost to death, but in the end they took him.”
Lizzy dropped back in her chair like a rock. She shook her head and frowned, finally saying, “I don’t understand.” She looked at Shani and Brian.
Brian could see his father was in a bad place and knew that a change of subject would be a very good thing. “You’re wondering how reading the diaries would determine where your father is in the timeline. You’re also wondering if,” he whispered, pointing toward his aging dad, “if perhaps my dad is confused?”
Lizzy’s eyes grew large. She glanced at Brady, noticing his eyes had developed a thousand-yard stare and he was definitely not seeing her. She looked back at Brian and shook her head quickly.
“I do not consider myself to be a great scientist, but I can read and am fairly competent,” Brian, the man who held two PhDs in physics, said. “But I am aware… and now possibly even more so… that for the physical universe as we know it to be folded into a material form, it must be observed. When it is not being observed, it exists in a dematerialized wavelike state, but as soon as it is observed, the wave pattern mysteriously collapses into particle state.”
Lizzy scrunched her eyebrows and frowned.
Shani elbowed her husband. “Which being interpreted and applied, my dear, means… means, oh shoot, I had it and lost it. It’s really simple quantum mechanics involving the numerical coding of the golden mean.”
This time it was Brian’s turn to smile at his beautiful wife, who was also struggling to reveal one of the strangest mysteries in the science of physics.
Brady looked up, his eyes focused, and interrupted his children. “They mean well, Lizzy Beth, but they are both too smart to talk sometimes. It’s like the words bunch up and then they can’t get all that conglomeration out their little bitty mouth hole.”
Lizzy snorted and swatted the giant hairy man on his leg. She was joined by his daughter-in-law, who reached back to her cast iron skillet as though to pop her aggravating father-in-law on the noggin. “In a nutshell, baby girl, your daddy and Sarah and a whole universe or trillion of ’em are kinda stuck in a revolving door with a billion exits. And your daddy has this peculiar ability to run down a bunch of them all at once. It’s
kinda confusing to us. And terrible confusin’ to him. But the good Lord has given him the ability to forget, so each time he plops down in a different time stream, well, he don’t know it.
“And what makes this even more peculiar is that when you read what he wrote, it kinda ties him to you and this particular time stream, or truth be known, this time river with a bunch of currents that we live in.” He pointed around the room to Brian, Shani, and himself. Shani cleared her throat, bringing the old man back to the point. “Annnywayy… when you read his diaries the word becomes alive… and anchors him. He is pulled back to where he belongs, and can get home.” The old Sasquatch paused, exhaled, and continued in a whisper, “Eventually… if he lives through this next part.”
Chapter 12
Lizzy reached out to Brady, who grasped her hand and held it. She was about to ask Brady what he meant by “lives through this next part” when several hair-raising shrieks tore from the children’s treehouse.
Lizzy was aware that Sasquatch could alter rapidly when called upon. But she had never seen them shift. One second her hosts were calm scientists explaining the wonders of quantum physics. As soon as their children’s soul-wrenching cries hit their ears, their images distorted, flickered. The whole room burst into a thousand swirling sparks, causing Lizzy’s stomach to churn and her equilibrium to turn on end. Before her stunned eyes, her peaceful hosts shifted into the strongest predators the wild had ever produced. She had barely registered her munchkins’ screams when both parents and their elderly grandfather were out the door and dashing toward the huge tree that held their kids.
Lizzy shook herself and ran after them. Two large dark flying griffins, each with two eaglelike heads and long, lean bodies, were screeching out fire. The roof of the treehouse had been torn away as the creatures smashed limbs and vomited flames down on the children. Lizzy could not tear her eyes away. Raleigh had placed himself between a griffin’s claws and the kids. Streaks of blood ran down his side where a claw had found its mark. Ryan and Easton had long broken tree limbs in their hands, trying to hold one of the griffins at bay while Bradley and the girls threw dishes and parts of the rocker at their attackers. The girls also seemed to flicker in and out of focus like they were trying to shift but couldn’t quite manage it. The flames spurting from the griffins beat down on the children, then stopped like water from a fire hose slamming against a stone wall, bending like they had run into an invisible shield. Lizzy didn’t understand and couldn’t take the time to ponder.
The Harry Ferguson Chronicles Box Set Page 54
