“How are you feeling today, Mr. McTavish?”
“Quite well. Aren’t you looking bonny today, mistress.”
The woman giggled, and Connor decided he would ask her in a few days to help him escape. There must be a better hell. For he had not seen any warriors he knew from his time in battle, none of his family or friends. None of them were here.
Or was that what hell was? The ones he loved and cared for would not be with him in hell. They would be in heaven or a different hell? If that were true, would not his enemies be here with him? And yet he had seen none, not a soul he knew. All of the people talked strangely—English, yet their accents were unlike any he had ever heard. Perhaps this was what he deserved, to be sent to an English hell when he was Scottish.
The pills made it hard for Connor to think. Every day he broke his fast with oatmeal and fruit, which he found delicious. Many of the patients complained about the food, and several smeared it around on the table, or in their hair, while others threw it on the wall. Connor sat by himself and quietly ate, watching the guards, nurses, and workers come and go, searching for weakness.
Once in a while, one of the other men would join him—the small, wiry man with gray hair that stuck straight out. His name was Fitz. As if thinking of the man conjured him, he sat down across from Connor in the great hall where the small box played.
“Did you see the sign today?”
Connor tried not to roll his eyes. The man was always seeing what he called “signs and conspiracies” everywhere. He was convinced the government was experimenting on them—for what he didn’t know, only that they were. But at least he spoke to Connor, and, truth be told, he was lonely for conversation with another person. And so he listened to the man, let him ramble on. The addled soul had been here for twenty years.
“Nay. Tell me, Fitz, what is the sign today?”
Fitz glanced around, making sure they were not overheard before he leaned across the table, lowering his voice.
“You see, we’re getting out of here. You and I.”
Connor cocked a brow. “How do you know this? Did someone tell you that we will escape?”
Fitz shook his head. “There was a bird at my window today, pecking on the glass, and he told me that we would escape next week.”
Connor’s brief glimmer of hope evaporated.
“Aye, birds are good tellers of truth and of the future. Did this bird perchance tell you how we might escape?”
Fitz startled Connor, for the man’s gaze was clear, no longer cloudy, and Connor leaned across the table.
“There is a door. It is unguarded for thirty minutes every day. The man goes with the female doctor, and they go into the closet and make grunting noises. They’re trying to make babies.” He cackled away.
“The door at the end of the B hallway?” Connor shook his head to clear it. He grabbed Fitz’s hand. “You’re not taking the pills. How?”
Fitz cackled again, gesturing in the air. “You’re right, laddie—I’m not taking them and I’m not crazy. They’re trying to make me crazy, and almost succeeded for a good seven or eight years. I think I did lose my mind during that terrible time. But I’m back and we’re getting out of here together.”
The tiny ember of hope inside Connor’s heart sparked and caught flame. But a guard stopped by the table.
“No contact, McTavish.”
Connor sat back, stuck his finger in the oatmeal, and licked it off his finger. “The sky is green,” he said, and the man made a face and wandered away to threaten some of the others. The men in white had quickly learned he was not to be trifled with, even when they did make him take the pills. The only way they could subdue him was to stick him with the tiny knife, which he knew now was called a needle. It held powerful medicine, and when they stabbed him with it, it put him to sleep for hours, or sometimes for a day or two.
He was careful not to anger them overmuch, for he did not wish to be stabbed with the needle again. All throughout the day and over the next several days, Connor would seek out Fitz whenever he could, and they would plot their escape. Fitz had showed him how to hide the pill so that when they checked, the nurse would not see it. And then later he would dispose of it by hiding it deep within the center of the mattress. Fitz had shown him how to remove the stitches at the corner and to burrow deep within the stuffing and place the pills within. Then he kept the mattress turned to the wall and pulled the thread tight.
Never in all his years had Connor done women’s work, but he was becoming an expert at tying and untying the fine thread at the corner of the bed to hide the pills every day. It had taken a se’nnight for his head to clear. The man in charge told him it had been thirty days, but that he would have to stay much longer, perhaps several months or more. And that was when he knew…he was not dead. Was not in hell. This place was for sick people, dolts, and he was imprisoned against his will. There was a plot afoot. Mayhap this place was given gold to keep them here—Fitz said it ’twas so. He told Connor many of the people were not witless, but had no one who looked after them, no one who cared they had disappeared, and so the facility, as Fitz called it, could do whatever they wished.
Fitz told him many of the patients had been experimented on, the ones that drooled or had marks on their skin that looked as if they had been burned, and there was a room no one went near. The terrible screaming could be heard late at night.
Fitz said there were many places where people who truly did have problems, what he called mentally ill, and Connor called witless, that were much nicer places where they took care of the people and tried to help them, but Mint Hill was not nice, did not care.
Connor recognized power and corrupt power, and so he believed Fitz. He had found out Fitz was a brilliant scholar, and when he had questioned the powerful men of the country, he found himself taken in the middle of the night to this place, and that had been twenty years ago.
With a sad face, Fitz told Connor he knew he would never get out, had tried several times to escape, always failing, but he thought this time he could, for while he was incredibly smart, he was very thin and wasn’t very strong, and he needed strength.
Connor was strong, yet did not know how to escape. Fitz chuckled when Connor called Mint Hill hell; said ’twas fitting. He chuckled and said it might as well be hell, though it was called a “psychiatric institute.” A place for the mentally ill, the criminally insane, this facility took all kinds of patients, and he told Connor something disturbing.
TWELVE
Mellie leaned against the sofa, legs stretched out on the floral rug, trying not to look at the innocuous rectangle of metal. But it taunted her, lying there within tantalizing reach. “Here I am. One little peek won’t hurt.” Eyes closed, she chanted, “Nope. Not going to look.”
Feeling righteous, she caught up on a few gossip magazines, straightened the yarn in the basket by the end table, and repainted her toes, this time a pale mint green. It went well with her summer glow.
But…after the first glass of Moscato, her resolve faltered and she watched, disconnecting from her body as her hand inched closer to the laptop.
“No, I can’t. I don’t want to know.”
She shook her head. After the second glass of wine, her stomach grumbled and she padded to the kitchen, standing in front of the refrigerator, the amber light illuminating the tiny kitchen.
There, on the top shelf, front and center, sat a three-layer, triple-chocolate cake with chocolate icing that she had made from scratch for him. Well, it wasn’t like Greg was going to eat it. The generous slice threatened to topple on its side as she carried it to the living room and relaxed, leaning against the blue denim cushions.
“Now that is good cake.” The second bite tasted even better. “Screw you, Greg. You’ll never taste cake as good as this. Melinda probably orders her cake from a bakery. Doubt she even knows where the oven is in her apartment.”
Before she knew it, Mellie found herself eating another slice and then, somehow, between th
e time she’d finished the fourth piece of cake and third glass of wine, her resolve gave way.
The laptop booted up in record time, and the small voice within wondered why she hadn’t unfriended him when she’d obliterated every sign of him in the apartment. Every picture, his favorite pillow, the shirt of his she always slept in, even the brown towels he’d picked out—all removed.
The new turquoise towels looked much cheerier than boring brown. Though if she was honest with herself, she missed his ratty old t-shirt, the one with the holes from his favorite alma matter, but nope, it too went in the garbage.
For some reason unbeknownst to her, she’d left all social media active. And, of course, he hadn’t removed her from anything. She’d thought it was so mature of him, when they first started dating, to know he was friends with all of his exes. But now she knew the truth—he liked the exes to see what was happening with the current woman in his life. Jerk.
Six glorious months they’d been together. If anything, she’d expected the day they’d planned at the antique market in celebration of six months together to be the day. The perfect place where he got down on one knee and pulled out the pretty little box as she worked on her surprised face and said yes as everyone around them clapped.
But it wasn’t to be. Instead of a ring, all she’d gotten was a breakup. Via social media, of all things. And the jerk hadn’t even had the guts to tell her. Mellie hiccupped as she clicked over to his Facebook page, saw the status update and the picture of the two of them smiling and happy as his new profile picture. Melinda and Greg. In all the time Mellie dated him, Greg had never set a picture of the two of them for his profile. It hurt more than she’d thought it would.
Scrolling down, she felt the knife twist. There they were hiking up Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina, staying in charming bed and breakfasts, doing all the things she had planned for them to do. But now he was doing them with her.
Mellie hiccupped again, ate another piece of cake, and clicked through the pictures one by one, so very careful not to hit like or comment on any of them as white-hot pain sliced through her gut, so severe she couldn’t tell if the pain was from all the cake she’d eaten or from the knowledge she was alone again.
Could a person die of a broken heart? She typed in the question to check, then decided no, she wanted to see what else was on his page, get it over with now, and hopefully in time she would heal. Or he would come to his senses and, after the appropriate amount of groveling, she’d take him back.
It was Friday night, and Mellie should have been at a charming bed and breakfast, gazing at Greg adoringly across the table. And all the while she’d have that smug look of satisfaction women wore like armor whenever they were secure in a relationship.
But instead, here she was, sitting in her apartment eating cake straight from the plate and drinking wine from the bottle. She’d decided a fork took too much time and used her fingers to scoop up pieces of cake. Why bother with a glass when she could drink from the bottle?
As she clicked over to his Instagram page, the hurt intensified. There they were, happy and smiling, each picture slicing like a thousand paper cuts, making her wince as she scrolled through. The pictures blurred. Looking down, she licked her finger and dragged it through the crumbs and the frosting on the now-empty plate.
Hold the door. Had she really eaten an entire cake? How was that even possible? Mellie looked around the apartment. It was neat as a pin, she hated anything out of place, but was it possible? Could she have a mouse?
She peeked under the sofa, looking for a twitching nose or another sign to explain where all the cake had gone. A fresh bout of hiccups rolled through her as she stumbled to the kitchen, found a lemon wedge, cut it, dumped a packet of sugar on it, and bit into it.
The hiccups were gone, but standing up hadn’t been a good idea. Not at all. She was wobbly as she made her way back to the living room, and instead of sitting on the floor, Mellie grabbed the laptop and plopped on the sofa, one bare foot dangling off the cushion.
Was this what their generation had come to, breaking up by simply changing your status on social media or posting a picture of the new person in your life? She remembered last year when Amy had gotten dumped via text, and thought that was bad. At least the guy texted her. Good old Greg didn’t even have the decency to take five seconds to do that.
Mellie’s finger hovered over the unfollow button, but her willpower was depleted. She tilted up the bottle, shaking it to get the very last drop. The empty bottle slipped from her fingers, rolling across the rug to come to rest against the leg of the coffee table with a clunk.
The laptop rested on her stomach. The hole in the knee of her black leggings grew larger as she picked at it, contemplating the state of her life. She thought they’d been so happy together. Greg had completely blindsided her. Was it possible Mellie had completely missed the signs?
She’d been so sure they were going to get married, had been looking at cute little houses on the outskirts of town to get them out of the city. They both said they were tired of living in the city, tired of the summer tourist traffic, ready to move to a little cottage where they could have a yard and a garden. Now it would never be.
To torment her further, a ping sounded, and she looked down at her phone to see the real estate app she was using taunting her with the perfect cottage. Mellie longingly scrolled through each picture. The images blurred, tears falling, turning the perfect cottage that should have been hers into some kind of abstract art.
Damn Melinda and damn Greg. With a snap, she shut the laptop, tossed the phone on the sofa, stood up, tripped, and hit her knee on the edge of the coffee table as she went down on her hands and knees.
Devoid of energy, she crawled the rest of the way to the bedroom. Her stomach heaved, and with a groan she wobbled to the bathroom and fell to her knees over the toilet, one hand holding her hair back, but nothing came up. Even her stomach was refusing to cooperate. As awful as it was, if she threw up, Mellie knew she’d feel better. It had been years; not since her twenty-first birthday had she gotten this smashed.
Too tired to wash her face or brush her teeth, she lay on the cool floor as a tear ran down her nose, splashing onto the pretty blue tiles.
“Pardon? What year is it?” Connor must be going deaf.
“It’s 2017.” Fitz frowned at him.
He was in the Year of Our Lord 2017. And Connor had been trying to think all this time of all those future girls he had met. He should have known he had traveled to the future. Everyone here talked like the Thornton women. He was a dolt.
How had he traveled through time? Why had he not found out more from the future girls? All he knew was they did not know how ’twas done. But they were there and had never traveled back to their own time, so Connor had to believe he could not return home. For wouldn’t the future girls have gone back to their own time if they could?
Once he escaped, he could see this future land. A snort escaped as Connor remembered saying he would sooner wed a pig than a future girl. ’Twas fitting; the fates must be laughing at him for his boldness, for if he were truly stranded in the future, he must wed a future girl or he would be alone the rest of his life.
While Connor enjoyed the favors of many women, there was a secret he kept deep within, one he never told anyone and never thought about…he wished to be married. To have a wife and babes to cherish above all others. To slay whatever enemies would threaten them. He would keep his woman safe, give her the protection of his body, his name, and make certain she knew he loved her more than anything in the realm, even more than himself.
THIRTEEN
“Tracy is the only woman for me,” Fitz declared as the small box showed animals wearing clothes. A few of the people watched while others ambled back and forth across the room.
“The one who cleans?” Connor looked at Fitz, who was smiling so wide he looked like he belonged here.
“Yes, and she’s going to help us escape.”
Glad tidings indeed. For Connor would not spend a score of years locked away. In his time at Mint Hill, he had learned many things, needed the knowledge to fit in when he escaped, for he would never give up his freedom again.
Connor took the knife he had fashioned from the plastic spoon they gave him to eat with. He had watched a great deal of television. At first he couldn’t understand how the tiny people lived inside the box, until Fitz told him they weren’t real people, only a reflection, like on a loch. Though Connor occasionally found himself touching the screen and talking to them. He’d heard other residents talk to the small people as if they could hear and understand, but they never spoke back, only to each other.
Electric light fascinated him. There were two switches the patients were permitted to control, and he turned them on and off until some of the people screamed and tore at their hair, beseeching him to stop. The rest of the light switches were covered with clear boxes, so he could not make them go on and off. He had been learning the names of things and the proper way to speak so he would fit in and no one would ever send him back to a place like Mint Hill. Connor would sooner die than spend his days trapped in this hell.
The men in white were called orderlies. There were other places like Mint Hill, but most people lived their lives never seeing the inside of such a terrible place. Every day Connor asked Fitz questions, learning more about this place and the time he now called home. After looking around to make sure the orderlies weren’t watching them, Fitz motioned him over. Connor turned the lights back on, and a few men clapped as he bowed and skipped over to his friend. While he despised acting witless, Fitz said ’twas important so the nurses and others did not find out they were no longer swallowing the medicine every day.
“Did you get the key?”
“I did. Tracy gave me a copy. She says it will free us.” Fitz had smoothed his hair down so ’twas not sticking out from his head as usual.
Beyond Time: A Knights Through Time Travel Romance Page 6
