by Mia Downing
We had to get to the bottom of all of this for me to fully trust him, but maybe we were on the way. I could deal with being gifted or whatever he called it. I just had to find out why. Why me?
“Here we go.” Marek returned, ripped off a piece of paper towel, and mopped up the spill. “It’s all good.”
“Thank you,” I murmured and shoved my hands in my pockets.
“You’re welcome.” He smiled and paused in his cleaning. “It’s all going to be okay. You’ll see.”
Was that a reassurance about the spill, or everything odd that we’d shared? “Meaning?”
He froze mid-wipe as if realizing his mistake. “It means…whatever you want it to mean.”
“I don’t know enough to know what I want it to mean.” Okay. If he felt the need to reassure me, maybe there was more I needed to worry about. I cleared my throat. “Like, the bond… You’ve explained that, but it feels like there is much more to the story. I mean, that’s all and good if we decide to date—”
“I’m all for that,” he said quickly.
“Yes, and I am, too.” I bit my bottom lip and worked up the courage to say what needed to be said. “But what if it doesn’t work out? And why even bond to begin with? Does it have some purpose besides the after?”
He cleared his throat and gave me one of his sweetest smiles. “First, I’m optimistic about us working since you’re incredibly special and I’m charming. We could make a great team.”
“That you are.” But the soft sell didn’t settle well with me.
“And yes, the energy has purpose.” But he rubbed the back of his neck as he concentrated on the wad of damp paper towels and getting them to the trash can. “As does the after.”
I stared as those long fingers caressed his nape. He seemed to do that when there was more to the story as if he were picking and choosing what to tell me.
The hairs on my arms rose, and I rubbed the goosebumps away. “What purpose does it have?” We’ll start there. “Can we move things with our minds or talk without words? Because I haven’t been able to do any of that.”
“Uh, no. We can’t do those things.”
“We can’t. But someone can?”
He hesitated a beat. “Yes.”
“And so then what do we do besides have mind-blowing sex?”
He blew out a frustrated sigh. “It’s…complicated, but we have a purpose.”
Oh, if he were frustrated, he’d break and give me what I wanted. I don’t know how I knew that, but I did. “So maybe…this is something that has to do with these people who left me behind? Should I be able to do these things, but I can’t, because they abandoned me? Should I have had more training or something?”
“Skye.”
“Marek. You have to tell me.” I pursed my lips and jabbed my finger in his direction. “I’m at a loss as to what this all means, and you obviously know it all. How does that make us the beginnings of an anything?”
“It means…” He sighed again and stared into his cup. “It means I don’t know what to say without it sounding really weird and out there.”
“Well, you hedging around it is making it worse.” I crossed my arms over my chest.
He lifted his head. “You don’t get how crazy this is going to sound. If you can’t remember. How am I supposed to tell you?”
“Just do it. Try me,” I challenged. “What is this mysterious power that only you and I can do? And does it have anything to do with the fact that I have never felt like I belonged here?”
“Fine.” He drew in a deep breath and sat tall, his fingers drumming on the table in time to my racing heartbeat. “You asked for it.”
“I did.” I steeled my back, gripping the edges of my chair to brace myself for the unknown.
“We use the bond to travel through time. You and I are time travelers. And you’re right. We don’t belong here.”
Chapter ten
Skye
You and I are time travelers. We don’t belong here.
Those words raced through my head as I blinked at Marek from across the library table, my mouth gaping in disbelief. He couldn’t have said what he just said, yet those were the words I heard in his deep voice, bouncing around in my mind.
After a long, dumfounded pause, I managed to ask, “Excuse me?”
“We’re time travelers,” he said slowly, enunciating the words for me so they’d sink in. “We don’t belong in this time.”
“Then where do we belong?”
“The future. About five hundred years from now…give or take.”
The future. I blinked again and sat back in the chair as the numbness melted into my bones, under my skin. I’d had a lot of horrible conversations, ones that had left me homeless numerous times or ended in me defending my honor. I’d always felt numb as the news hit me. The therapist had said that was a coping mechanism, one that protected me from the feelings until I could process them.
And I had no clue how I’d ever process this information. I’d always felt like I didn’t belong. I’d always wanted to wear skirts and had been traumatized when my foster mother had made me wear leggings. I remembered the fear, that it was improper.
The silence except for the grandfather clock ticking off the long, long seconds made me nervous. I wet my lips and asked, “What is that time like?”
He sat a little taller, hope lighting his handsome face. “So you believe me?”
I barked out an astonished laugh. “No, Marek, I don’t believe you. You just fed me a crock of shit that there’s no way I can believe, but I’m going to humor you. I’m going to be insightful and ask questions and see exactly how you craft these outrageous lies before I walk out.” I crossed my arms over my breasts and glared.
“You’re not going to storm out now?” His brows flew up in surprise.
“No.” I cocked my head. “Is that what you’re used to?”
“My wife wasn’t patient.”
“Well, neither am I, but you knew about the energy and the after, so I’m going to listen. For now.” I swallowed, my heart still racing. “So what is that time like?”
He closed his eyes again, rubbing his temples with his hands. Maybe his headache had grown worse. “It’s… The closest equivalent in time is the late Victorian era. There was a huge war that decimated a lot of the population, erased the power grids and fossil fuels. People had to go back to learning trades and raising crops to survive. They use solar and hydroelectric power. Wood. The small government systems now work together, and the language you knew was our base language after the war. It’s called Uptari. English is our second.”
“I didn’t know English when I came here.”
He shrugged. “You did at one point.”
“And how do we use the bond to time travel?” This would be interesting.
“Well.” He stood and went to the desk, getting out the same box that held the Rai necklace and setting it on the table. He opened it, withdrawing a watch with a wide, leather cuff and several dials. “My energy runs this watch, and the different dials tell me things, like where we are in time, and how much energy I have in the bank.”
Fascinated with the depth of his lies, I leaned in to look.
He pointed to a small dial, the hand pointing to the red. “This is where I am now for energy. Last night, I had just about run out until you bonded with me and the after replenished some of my supply. You saved my life.”
Through the numbness, growing horror raised its head. “Are you an incubus?”
“What? No!” He shrank back as if I’d slapped him. “I’m not a demon, and neither are you. So stop that line of thinking.”
“Well, incubus feed off a woman’s energy during sex, and it seems like that’s what the after does.” I remembered his comments now. “I’d asked if you could get an after if I blew you, and you’d said it didn’t work that way. I get the orgasm, and you get an after.”
“Yes, that’s right, but I’m not a demon.” His brows dipped with disapproval. �
��We’re a team. I steer the ship, so to speak, and you power everything.”
“I power everything.” My eyes ached from all the rapid blinking. “So I’m nothing but a…furnace. To fuel your noble ship steering.”
“Well, it’s more glamorous than that. I can only travel about two hundred years without you.” His gaze became earnest as he held out the watch for me to view, pointing to the large dial. “But with you, we can go five hundred at a time. We can skip the great war and get into the better decades, like the 1950s. The 60s. The Victorian era.”
“That’s…crazy.” I shifted my gaze to the box, giving myself something else to look at for a moment. The box held a little miniature frame face down and some jewelry. A masculine ring caught my eye, and I leaned forward. Delicate vines wound around the thick band, the silver tarnished. But I knew that ring.
I sat back and wiped my damp palms on my thighs, staring at that silver band from a distance. I’d dreamed about rings like those, had drawn them on a masculine hand that held a more feminine one in sort of like a wedding pose. Why did he have one, and where was the other?
I leaped to my feet and paced the library, unable to stand the numbness laced with nervous energy. With that ring and the tattoos and the weird flashes of dreams, a little voice inside my head asked if maybe, possibly…he could be right.
Nope. Nope. Nope.
“Skye. You okay?” Marek asked softly.
“No, I’m not okay.” I rounded the sofa at the far end of the library and stalked back. “You just told me I’m the equivalent of a time-traveling battery from the future Victorian era. Why would a group even come back this far? Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Yes, it’s dangerous. There are a lot of issues that can go wrong. Even though we were taught about that…accidents happen.”
“Then why risk it?”
“It was our job.”
“I was two. How could I have a job?” I paused, my mind working through things he’d told me as I snapped my gaze to his. “Was your wife a time traveler, too?”
He swallowed. “Yes.”
He’d never mentioned how she’d died. And he’d just said that time travel was dangerous… “Let me guess. An accident happened.”
“Yes.”
“And now you’re recruiting me? Because we have compatible energy and a connection with the same, weird group from five hundred years in the future?”
“This isn’t a recruitment.”
“Isn’t it, though?” I laughed bitterly and paced back down the rug to the far sofa. “Your wife is gone, you’re low on energy for some reason, so you recruit me to fulfill your needs?”
“Skye.” His brows furrowed as he frowned. “Think about the image you saw with your eyes closed, right before our bonding. You’d seen blue and yellow, and what?”
“Green. A small strip of it,” I muttered.
“What do you think that meant?”
I tossed my hands in the air, unable to process anything. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”
“It meant we were already fully bonded before. We had a partial strip left.”
I sighed and stopped at the end of the table, staring at his expectant face, his knuckles white as he gripped his hands together in front of him. This bonding meant something to him. Well, it meant nothing to me. “So?”
“We were bonded before.”
Those rings flashed in my mind, bright and brilliant, as if telling me something I really didn’t want to hear. If I was bonded before to him…what did that mean? I had all those memories of places I’d never been and things I’d never seen. Hell, I’d dreamed of someone like him in leather pants, making love to me just the way he had last night. Was this a connection…from another life? Another time?
I laughed wildly, sounding a bit crazy to my ears. I grabbed the back of the closest winged back chair to steady me as my mind flew to the most outrageous outcome. “So now you’re going to tell me…what? You only bond once for life? Let’s go out on the wacky limb and say…I don’t know. Maybe I was your wife in a different time?”
“Skye…” His gaze pleaded.
“What’s your middle name?” I blurted, crazed. Why that mattered, I didn’t know. But something inside said I had to know. “You lied before when you said you didn’t have one. What is it?”
“Skye.”
“What?”
“No. My middle name is Skye.” He sighed and rose, going to the desk again. “It was Lucas before I was marked as gifted, and then, they erased it. Your middle name becomes your bond partner’s name at the ceremony. That’s why I didn’t tell you, because it would sound crazy. But it’s true. It’s a way of enforcing the bond, the value of team.”
“No.” I blinked back tears.
“My name became your middle name as well. Didn’t you wonder why you didn’t have one on your paperwork?”
He was right. I didn’t have one. I gulped and dashed the tears that now fell to my cheeks. I felt nothing—no anger, no shock, no fear. The tears just flowed.
“Skye. You were my wife before we came here.”
I stared at him as I turned away and sank into the winged chair, my knees no longer able to support me. What the hell was I supposed to do with that? There was just no way…
Marek
Skye sank down to the chair in the library, dumbfounded, her back to me. Her feet disappeared, and I pictured her drawing them up to her chest as she often had. Her elbow flashed around the edge of the chair before disappearing in a tear-wiping motion.
My heart ached for her. I had expected her to be angry, full of disbelief, maybe a little mocking. For her to crumple and cry… That wasn’t my Skye.
I had no clue what to do, so I tossed my traveling watch into the box and went to my desk to grab the bourbon she liked and two glasses. I poured us both healthy servings and took one to her.
Wordlessly, she took it and belted it down, her eyes closed as the last fiery drops dripped into her mouth. Finished, she lifted the glass in my direction so I could take it, her gaze never wavering from the back bookshelf.
I went and poured her a second serving and carried it and my glass over to the little sitting area. I plopped down in the chair opposite her, leaning to hand her the fresh glass. She gave me a side-eyed glance and took it, but she set it on the little table at her side.
“What are you feeling?” I asked.
“I’m not feeling anything,” she whispered. “I’m numb.”
“Oh.” Stupidity washed over me, and I had no clue what to say next. “What do you want to feel?”
“This is unbelievable. I should be angry and outraged. I should feel used.”
“Okay. Those are valid emotions.” I took a healthy swig of the amber liquid, relishing the burn down the back of my throat. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” She wiped her eyes again with her sleeve. “Telling me a crock of shit?” She turned to me, a glare shimmering through her tears. “I was abandoned at age two, Marek. Left by some guy who wouldn’t keep me. I’ve always wanted a family. I’ve dreamed of finding these imaginary people and having them tell me why they left me behind. And to maybe take me back. But what I get from the first person who has answers is that I was his wife” —she laughed and wiped tears again— “in a different time, and there was an accident, and I ended up here? How is any of that rational?”
“Because it’s true.” I scooted to the edge of my seat, yearning to take her hand or pull her into my lap and hold her as she cried. If only I could feel her energy, I would get a better gauge on what she was feeling. I’d know what she needed. “There was an accident, and I jumped in time to save your life. And when we arrived…you were you.”
“But I was two.”
“Accidents— horrible accidents— happen. Fractions happen. Time travelers can splinter in time and become pieces of what they were. Some survive like you did as a regressed version of themselves.”
“So I’m…a fraction? I’m not even a whole former wi
fe? I’m a piece of your wife?” Her laugh grated out, wild and uncontrolled, and I cringed. “I can’t even.”
“You weren’t a piece. We were bonded when we came to this time,” I reminded her. “You had all of your memories when we came here. I couldn’t keep you with me if I went forward in time, and you knew that. You helped me decide what to do.” I reached for her hand, and she allowed me to take it. “I didn’t want to leave you here.”
“And are you a fraction, too?”
“No.” I didn’t want to tell her she’d been injured when we jumped, and that’s what had caused pieces to splinter from her, making her regress. That would be a bit much.
“How can one fracture and not the other?”
“I don’t know. It has happened before, but it’s rare.” In our training, they had only taught us how to avoid this catastrophe, not what to do if it happened.
“And where is the rest of me?”
“Trapped in the past.”
The grandfather clocked ticked the long seconds as I waited for her to believe I wouldn’t want to hurt her, that I never wanted this life for her. Ironic that I could command time, yet I couldn’t get time to hurry up and give me what we both needed— her to believe me.
After an agonizing minute, she gasped. Eyes widening, she turned to gape at me. “So you are the man from my memory, the man in the long coat.”
Fates, what could I say but the truth? She might believe me, but she’d never forgive me now. Swallowing, I admitted, “Yes.”
Staring in horror, she snatched her hand away. “So if you’re right, then the one memory I have of you is…you leaving me? Leaving me here, with these strangers who wouldn’t understand me?”
“Yes.” My voice broke. “We made that decision together, though. I didn’t just dump you on some stranger’s porch. You made lists. Pros and cons. I have them. I’ll be right back. They’re in your office. Just…don’t leave until you see them.”
