Page 8 of Stolen Time

About all I could do was stare back at him in response. I knew I’d never seen him before, because I would have remembered the cleanly chiseled, almost boyish features, the head of wavy brown hair…the clear blue eyes that seemed to focus on me like laser beams. He was dressed kind of oddly, in a white linen shirt and brown trousers I thought might be wool, with suspenders to hold them up. It definitely wasn’t the sort of outfit I’d expect someone to be wearing in Jerome in June, not when we were right at the beginning of the hot season.

And he was a warlock. The twinge I experienced as he entered the room told me he couldn’t be anything else.

“You’re awake,” he said, his voice a friendly baritone, and I blinked, forcing myself to focus on him and not his clothes.

“I am,” I said. “Was I out for long?”

“A whole night and then some,” he replied. “I’m Seth McAllister. Who are you?”

Seth McAllister. Seth McAllister. Had I met a Seth during the almost month I’d been living in Jerome?

I didn’t think so. No, I couldn’t pretend that I knew every single McAllister in the world, not when they were scattered all over the Verde Valley and even out in Payson or over in Prescott, but….

For some reason, my gaze slid past him to a calendar mounted on the wall, not too far away from the window. It had a black and white picture of an old-fashioned truck on it, with a fancy border that went all around the picture and down onto the section that displayed the date and year.

June 1926.

It was like a punch to my gut, and I could only be glad that I hadn’t stood up yet after all.

No, that date had to be wrong.

Except….

I looked back at Seth McAllister, standing there in those clothes that made him look as if he’d raided a vintage store or something. He appeared completely natural in them, not like he was wearing a costume.

And I’d never seen him before or met anyone in town with that name.

My screwy “talent” for playing with time had messed with me before, but nothing on this scale. Somehow, though, when I’d fallen and hit my head, it had gone wild, sending me back into the past.

Well, that or I was having the mother of all nightmares.

Seth didn’t seem like someone out of a nightmare, though. No, his expression was worried, even as he stood a careful distance away from the couch where I’d been lying, as if he didn’t want to frighten me by getting too close.

Oh, I was frightened, all right, but not by him. It wasn’t just that I’d catapulted myself back in time by more than a hundred years and had no clear idea how the hell I’d ever get back to where I came from.

The world of the Arizona witches in the 1920s was very, very different from the one I lived in. Back then, the McAllisters and the Wilcoxes had been mortal enemies. True, they seemed to have mostly stayed out of each other’s territories, but that didn’t mean awful things might not have happened if they’d crossed paths for whatever reason, magical duels or sideways-flung curses or God knows what else. Any public displays of magic like that would have been disastrous, considering how hard we all worked to make sure the civilian population had no idea who we really were.

I was half Wilcox.

But…I didn’t really look like a Wilcox. I wasn’t as dark as they usually were and instead favored my father in looks, with medium-brown hair and blue eyes.

And I didn’t bear their name.

Seth McAllister was still staring at me, a certain wariness beginning to creep into his expression, and I realized I’d been sitting there without replying for way too long. Sure, most people would have excused me for being utterly gobsmacked, but I knew I needed to say something.

“Dev — ” I began in answer to his question, then realized “Devynn” wasn’t a common name even in my own time, and therefore definitely unheard-of back in the 1920s. “Deborah,” I said quickly. “Deborah Rowe.”

There. It was close enough to my real name that I was pretty sure I’d respond to it without too much hesitation, and I also guessed there wasn’t any problem using my actual last name, not when it wasn’t even a witch clan name. My paternal grandfather — whom I’d never met, since he’d remained in the past with the rest of my father’s relatives — had been a civilian, while my witch blood on that side came from my grandmother’s family, the Winfield clan. They were located on the other side of the continent in Massachusetts, and there was a good chance the McAllisters had never heard of them. There hadn’t been a lot of contact between the various clans back then, and even in the modern world, the friendliness among the three clans in Arizona — and the Castillos in New Mexico, where Angela McAllister’s daughter Miranda was theprima— tended to be the exception rather than the rule.

And thank God and the goddess Brigid who the McAllisters prayed to that I’d inherited my father’s gift for concealing my witch nature. For me, just as it was for my father, that talent was pretty much a “set it and forget it” kind of thing, which was probably why it had continued to function even while I was passed out after my descent into a different time, because I had to consciously turn it off.

Otherwise, Seth surely would have known right away that I was a witch.

He couldn’t know. He couldn’t know anything about me except my name.

“Well, Miss Rowe,” he said politely, “I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance. You gave us all a good scare.”

“I did?” I replied, doing my best to look doe-eyed and utterly guileless.

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