Page 62 of Stolen Time

Our lips touched, and it was as if a bolt of lightning had suddenly struck me. My entire body zinged with energy that shrilled along every nerve ending, and at the same moment, Seth stopped backward, his face white with shock beneath his summer tan.

“You’re awitch?” he exclaimed.

18

WITCHY WOMAN

Seth had imaginedtheir first kiss in so many ways. Maybe it would have been stolen as they walked along a secluded street in Jerome, or possibly he would have leaned over to touch his lips to hers as they got into his car after an evening of dancing or laughing. Perhaps that first embrace would have happened in the very spot where they now stood, with the dark pine forest crowding them on all sides.

What he never, ever could have imagined was the unmistakable tingle he got at the back of his neck whenever he met a strange witch or warlock — to be fair, always an unknown cousin from Payson or Wickenburg, since no other magical folk would have any reason to set foot in Jerome — only this time amplified a thousand-fold, so strong that it almost felt as though he’d stuck his finger in a light socket.

He staggered backward, reeling. “You’re a witch!”

Deborah was absolutely white-faced, although she stood her ground as she stared back at him, her expression equally shocked. “I — ”

“Don’t try to deny it,” he said, knowing he needed to cut in before she could offer any excuses. There was nothing she couldsay to justify the way she’d misled him — and the rest of the McAllister clan — for the past two weeks. “I felt my telltale. There’s no way you could be anything other than a witch.”

She swallowed. The cloche hat she’d been wearing looked as if it had been knocked askew, and she impatiently pulled it off, revealing a mess of tangled waves that might have been endearing if he hadn’t been so angry with her.

How in the world could she have concealed such a thing from him? It was well known that everyone in the witch world had some kind of tell that would signal they were in the presence of an unknown witch or warlock, whether it was a ringing in the ears or a tingle at the back of their neck, or sometimes a quick flash of light or an odd blurriness in their vision. Not once had anyone ever told him it might be possible for a witch or warlock to hide their true nature.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded, knowing even as he asked the question how angry, how rough he sounded.

Deborah didn’t flinch, though. No, she continued to stand there and stare back at him, and then her chin went up and her lips pressed together, as if she knew she couldn’t avoid answering the question but still didn’t much look forward to it.

“You’re not going to believe me,” she said.

He wanted to respond that no, he probably wouldn’t, not when she’d been misleading him and everyone else for the past two weeks. But he also realized saying such a thing to her wouldn’t exactly invite her to share the truth.

“Tell me anyway,” he said.

Her chest rose and fell as she released a breath. “My name isn’t Deborah,” she told him. “It’s Devynn.”

Bewildered, he could only stare back at her. “I’ve never heard a name like that before.”

“No, you wouldn’t have.” Another of those long, heavy pauses. “And that’s because I’m from the future.”

His first impulse was to laugh, to tell her of all the lies she could have come up with, that one was surely the most ridiculous.

But then he noted that even though she looked much paler than she had a few minutes earlier, she didn’t try to look away…and didn’t try to instantly defend herself the way a woman who was trying to convince someone else that her lie was true might have.

No, she only stood there and waited to see what he intended to say.

“Is that your gift?” he asked. “Time travel?”

“Sort of,” she replied. “That is, it allows me to move in time, but I can’t control it at all. I don’t have any idea why I ended up in 1926 when I fell and hit my head in the mine shaft.”

“That’s what happened?” In a way, it felt better to seize on the mechanics of how she’d gotten here rather than dwell on exactly where she’d come from.

A small nod. “I was knocked unconscious, so I don’t know why my supposed gift decided to kick in right then. I just know what when I woke up the next day, I realized I was in 1926.”

And then she’d decided to present herself as someone with amnesia as a way of hiding her ignorance of the current year from those around her.

Now some of those small bobbles and inconsistencies began to make a great deal more sense. While he couldn’t quite prevent himself from being angry with her for the way she’d hidden the truth from him, he also couldn’t pretend to guess how he might have felt if he’d ended up decades or more from where he’d started, all without any way of knowing how he’d ever get home.

“But…you were here in Jerome when it happened,” he said, and Deborah — Devynn, he reminded himself — nodded at once.

“My gift only allows me to travel in time, not space.”

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