by Jane Stain
“You can’t tell even me? It’s me, Tavish. We used to tell each other everything, or at least I thought so. I told you everything. I kept on telling you everything for months, even when you never answered my texts or my emails.”
And then, for just a moment, she saw pain in Tavish’s face. Heart wrenching pain just like her own.
“They took my phone away, Kel. I…”
“You what?”
“You have to know I still love you.”
“I still love you too, Tavish.”
“So why are we fighting?”
“Because like I said, you’re keeping secrets.”
But then the moment was over. Twenty-five-year-old Tavish was gone. Her seventeen-year-old boyfriend was sitting in front of her again. The knowledge and the pain had left his face, and he just looked mystified.
“I’m not keeping any secrets from you, Kel.”
“You’re not?”
“Nope.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
The dream got private after that, and she really enjoyed it.
~*~
At the crack of dawn the next morning, she awoke with a pleasant sense that something had been resolved, but she also had this nagging feeling she’d found out something important, but couldn’t remember what it was.
When she opened the trailer door, Scotland greeted her in all its glory. The pink sky cast its light over the fields of heather and the craggy mountains and the rocky shoreline so that for a moment all she could do was stand there and stare. Truly, only the ruins of an age-old castle could promise more delight, and it just so happened there was one right here. She took off running in her hiking boots.
She only got halfway to the third cellar’s trap door before Tavish was with her. And of course he couldn’t just wear jeans and a hoodie, like she was today.
“Do you always have to wear that kilt?”
Oh great. That was the wrong thing to say. He struck a pose, teasing her with it. He knew she thought he looked hot in a kilt.
“Aye lass. That I do.”
She put as much annoyance in her voice as she could.
“Why? That has got to be the most impractical thing a construction worker could wear.”
At first he was smiling, clearly enjoying her grudging admiration. But then a shadow of the pain she had seen in her dream crossed his face, and he relaxed out of his pose.
“Never mind. When is Mr. Blair getting here?”
She held up her phone.
“He hasn’t called back yet, but I’ll be ready when he does.”
She started moving toward the root cellar again.
He fell into step beside her.
“So where are you going?”
“I don’t need to have Mr. Blair with me to go check out the rest of those secret doors, Tavish.”
“But—”
“But nothing. My client told me to go ahead and look around at the rest of the property, and that’s what I’m doing.”
“Well I’m coming with you.”
She made sure he could see her roll her eyes.
“I can see that.”
“Kel—”
“Don’t Kel me. That’s a name my friends use.”
There it was again. Pain showed in his face, and for a brief moment he looked at her pleadingly. And then that hardness came back into his eyes. He held out his hand toward the root cellar door rather formally.
“You’re right, Dr. Ferguson. Please allow me to escort you.”
“Fine. After you, Mr. MacGregor.”
He let her open the secret door inside the root cellar. She blocked his view with her body and tried not to smile at how smug she felt, knowing that he probably didn’t know how to do it her easy way. She went straight back to that old fashioned laundry room where Mr. Blair had found the trinkets, because she was sure she’d seen the outlines of a few more secret doors in there.
When she saw them, she forgot she wasn’t talking to Tavish anymore, she was so excited.
“I knew it.”
“There are more secret doors?”
“Yep, three of them.”
He looked around, but it was obvious he had no idea where they were. He looked right past them. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him what to look for, but then she remembered he wasn’t her friend anymore.
This time she let the smugness show on her face.
“Here, the first one’s this way.”
“You know, Dr. Ferguson, when Mr. Blair gets here, he’s not going to want to go down to the sea. Don’t you think we should go down there and check it out now, before he gets here?”
He was right. How considerate.
She narrowed her eyes at him, mostly playfully. He knew darn well she wanted to go down to the sea. And of course this was something he could take the lead in, having been down there before.
“I suppose you’re right, Mr. MacGregor.” She graciously gestured toward the doorway, the same way he had gestured toward the root cellar door earlier. “Lead the way.”
Her subtle attempt to regain control of the situation had not escaped him. He raised his chin and flounced as only a kilted man can flounce.
“I dinna mind if I do.”
She forced herself into professional demeanor, stuffing her irritation. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to stuff her attraction toward him. Her only consolation was that he seemed to be having the same trouble, cold one moment and warm the next. Would he just make up his mind? Wait a minute, no. She’d already made up her mind. It was like Sasha said: don’t pay attention to what a man does. Wait for him to actually say you mean something to him. Never assume you have his commitment, no matter what he does. Wait until he actually says he’s yours.
The trip was worth the aggravation, though. The farther down they went, the less finished the passageway became, until they were walking through a natural rugged cave. She greatly enjoyed the contrast. She could tell they were almost down to the opening because of the freshness of the air when she saw a large section of dozens of strange vertical grooves carved into the raw cave wall and stopped to ponder what they might be.
“Do you know what those are?” Tavish asked.
“No, but I get the distinct impression you’re about to tell me.”
She looked at him then, and he looked smug.
“They held bows, and quivers full of arrows, for guarding the docks down there.”
Now that he said so, it made sense. She could see where the bows would go, and the quivers.
“How do you know all this, Tavish?”
He shrugged and then smiled at her over his shoulder, taking off at a run.
“Come on. The cave mouth’s just a little farther.”
She followed him, and then of course there was the Irish Sea.
Ireland herself greeted them from across the sea—far enough away that they couldn’t make out any details, but close enough to be within reach, to make Kelsey curious what lay over there in those lush green hills.
Tavish sounded as excited here as she’d been up in the rock-hewn storage room full of artifacts.
“They’ve docked boats here in the past. See the tie spots?”
Sure enough, long ago someone had pounded crude iron rings into the cave wall near the water’s edge next to natural stone docks where you could climb aboard a boat. The boat would be sheltered from the waves by the cave, but there wouldn’t be far to go at all before you would be out at sea. You could probably motorboat over to Ireland in less than an hour.
Unable to help herself, she smiled up at him in pure delight.
“Don’t you wish we had a boat now?”
“I really do. I’ve been trying to get Mr. Blair to bring one so he could, you know, check out his portion of the coastline—and maybe motor on over to Ireland.”
They laughed.
“You mean so you could.”
He nodded with a smile.
She looked over at Ireland, along the
coastline, and then back at the tie spot.
“This is the most awesome dock I ever saw.”
“I knew you’d like it.”
She looked back across the water at the Irish shore where she could see two distinct cities complete with ports, one of them very large.
“Yeah, we need a boat here.”
“We?”
“Yeah, we.”
“Kel—”
“Mr. MacGregor, now that there is so much more to the estate, so many artifacts to document and catalog, my client will ask me to stay on for at least a month, probably three.”
Tavish took in a deep breath like he was going to lecture her—but then he grabbed her hand and ran for the passageway up.
“Let go of me.”
“They’re coming, Kel.”
“Huh?”
She looked over her shoulder and then tugged on his arm and dug her feet into crevices in the rock, trying to stop him from dragging her back up.
“Tavish, that’s the most gorgeous old Celtic boat I could ever have imagined. Let me go.”
“That’s danger, Kel.”
He grabbed her and threw her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and ran back up.
Unable to act on her anger and indignation, she let the professional part of her calmly note how odd the cave looked from the perspective of someone whose head was bobbing upside down. And in that frame of mind, she had a surprisingly calm discussion with the man who was manhandling her.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Back to the trailer.”
“But I want to check out those other secret doors.”
“Never mind those Kel, at least until Mr. Blair gets here.”
“Mr. Blair doesn’t seem the type who could protect me from the kind of danger that would make a MacGregor run.”
At that, he chuckled the tiniest bit.
“It’s complicated, Kel. Just trust me.”
“It appears I have to.”
“You’ll be safe in the trailer, Kel.”
But when they got to the old fashioned laundry room, they could both hear harsh voices coming down the corridor toward them from the root cellar.
“Her presence here is a problem.”
“We’ll deal with it.”
“She’ll distract him.”
“He’ll find it.”
“He’d better.”
“He will. He’s one of our better workers.”
She barely heard Tavish uncharacteristically swear while changing direction and going down the middle corridor, the one they had never discussed. How weird. She’d kind of forgotten all about that middle corridor.
But those voices. They were familiar. She couldn’t quite place where she’d heard them before, but she knew she had. Her mind kept showing her images of who it might be, and she kept rejecting them, one by one, like watching an old movie and being sure you’d seen one of the actors in something before, but not knowing what…
He kept her in the fireman’s carry hold the whole way down to where the middle corridor ended in a nondescript dead-end. And then the walls whirled and blurred in front of her eyes as if she were seeing them from the bottom of a whirlpool.
Còig
They wouldn’t follow him and Kelsey to the old time. They never did go there with him, even though they were the ones who had given him the ring and shown him how to use it. She would be safe there—at least from them.
He would find what they wanted from this underground castle in the old time. It would pacify them. It had to.
There were so many things he wished he could grab before he took her to the old time, but he could tell by the sound of the approaching voices that he had less than a minute, and he needed to use as little of that time as possible.
He took Kelsey down the guarded hallway and turned the ring on his finger.
The blurring came. He’d learned that if he focused on one thing during the blurring, he was less likely to get dizzy from it. At least he knew there would be no one around when they arrived. He was always careful to time travel only when there was no one in the travel spot.
At last, the whirling stopped.
They were in the old time.
“Here, let me put you down,” he said to her as he did so.
Kelsey spluttered and stumbled a bit when he turned her back over and set her down on her feet.
“Finally. I thought my head was going to pop, it was getting so full of blood. I bet I was just about to pass out. I was getting so dizzy, the walls looked like they were spinning around.” She stood still for a second with a far-off look in her eyes. “Well, whoever was saying it was bad that I was in here must have left, because I don’t hear them anymore. Who was that, Tavish? And what did they mean about you being one of their best workers?”
He sighed and gave her the most sincere bracing smile he could manage.
“Don’t get mad, okay? Please don’t raise your voice, and especially, don’t go down the hall yet.”
Her eyes went down to the opening of the hall and back to him.
“Tavish, you’re kind of scaring me.”
He looked in her nervous brown eyes and tried to project concern and caring. And he took a giant step to put himself between her and the way out of the hallway.
She scrunched up her delicate brown eyebrows and narrowed her now angry brown eyes at him, then reached up to push him in the chest. She barely moved him.
“What are you doing? If this is some sort of game, it isn’t any fun.”
He took a deep breath and let it out, then walked about 10 feet up the hallway toward the opening, turning to encourage her to follow him and then waiting until she had caught up.
“Do you see anything different about the runes on the walls now, Kel?”
She blinked, turned to look where he pointed, briefly looked back at him again with a question in her eyes, and then turned to intently study the runes, running her finger along them and gasping every so often.
“Wow! I didn’t even notice these when we came in. Of course, that’s not too surprising, seeing how I was upside down and bobbing around. But wow. Judging by the relative lack of stone erosion, these runes are at least a five hundred years newer than all the others, probably more like seven hundred years newer.”
Great. She wasn’t getting it. Best to let her figure it out for herself. She wouldn’t believe him if he told her, and that would be dangerous.
“Where are the nearest runes you remember seeing before?”
Wrinkling her brow at him, she raised her hand up and tipped her pointing finger over, which struck him as a quite feminine way of pointing behind him.
“Uh, I looked at some just outside the three-way fork in the passageway when we first came in yesterday, remember? You were looking at everything with me, and then we got to the three-way fork and you asked me which way I wanted to go.”
He swallowed.
“Okay, I’m going to take you out there to look at them again now, to see if you notice any changes. But Kelsey, please don’t go wandering off. Promise me you’ll stay with me.”
She started to say something.
But he held up his hand.
Miraculously, she stopped.
“I’ll explain why soon,” he said. “That, I promise you. Oh, and one more thing. If we hear anyone coming, we need to run back down this hallway. We’re sort of safe down here.”
She smiled conspiratorially at him and narrowed her eyes.
“I knew there was something weird about this center hallway. I mean I knew it was here, but I sort of forgot about it until you took us down here just now.” She looked anxiously down the hall again. “But won’t they be immune to it just like you are?”
She had grown up into such a confident, competent woman. A wonderful woman. He wished he could just take her back to their time before this happened and somehow make her forget all about him so that she would be safe and happy.
But he didn’t have that much control
over his time traveling. He controlled when he traveled, but that was it. They controlled where he had to go in order to be able to travel—and they controlled how far back in time he traveled. Still, controlling when he traveled was a much better deal than his father had, and Tavish was grateful for that.
He sighed. He wished she weren’t, but in reality Kelsey was here, and he intended to keep her as safe and happy as he could while she was here.
But they controlled what he was able to tell her.
“The ‘they’ I’m worried about right now are a different ‘they’ than the ones you heard talking a few minutes ago. But the now ‘they’ are mostly not immune to this hallway’s influence, if that makes any sense.”
She pursed her lips and nodded three times quickly, then smiled at him.
“Actually, yeah, I think I understood what you meant.”
“Good. Alright, let’s go.”
He took her hand so that he could control how fast she walked and keep her behind him as he crept down the hallway—making as little noise as possible, especially when he got close to the opening. He was debating with himself whether he should actually take her out there where the old time people might see her.
He had barely just concluded that she really needed to understand their situation or she wouldn’t stay in this safe hallway anyway, when she gasped.
“I can see the runes from here. Tavish, did somebody… Oh. Did ‘they’ do restoration work on the runes last night?”
He shook his head no.
“You know that’s not it, Kel.”
Her whole body jerked forward as if she meant to run over to the runes across the hallway and put her fingers in the grooves of them and feel how jagged the newer cuts were, compared to how smooth they’d been just yesterday.
But he held her hand tight, stopping her from going out there into danger.
She met his eyes then, and he could see the wheels turning in her mind. Her expression was only a tiny bit fearful, though. Mostly, she just looked really, really smart.
It was all he could do not to grab her in his arms and hold her close and tell her he loved her and that he would never, ever let her go, he admired her so much. And she was so much fun to be with.
“Tavish, I think I know what’s going on, but humor me. I need to see some more stuff. You know, just to rule out the possibility that you’re messing with me.” She held up her hand to stop him from saying anything. “Normally, I would be sure you wouldn’t mess with me about something this… big. But you have to admit,” she gestured all around them, “that this... this is anything but normal.”
