Page 6 of Borrowed Time

Why 1884? Had I come here before or after my mother’s journey to the past to save my father’s life?

“What month is it?” I asked, my tone urgent. If we’d appeared here before my parents had even met, what would that do to the past?

To my future?

Seth looked a little puzzled, but he answered easily enough. “Early November. The seventh. We actually arrived here on the sixth, but you slept all last night and most of the day today. It’s just now a little past six.”

I released a breath and let myself relax a bit more against the pillows. Then we should be safe. My mother had always told me that she and my father had escaped a few days before Halloween, so that meant they would have left almost a week before Seth and I showed up. As crazy as the current situation was, at least I wouldn’t have to worry about any overlap.

“No wonder it felt so much chillier than I was expecting,” I said, and he shot a worried glance over at the little stove against the far wall.

“I can try to add more coal — ” he began.

“It’s fine,” I cut in. “I’m not really cold. I just thought it would be warmer because I didn’t realize we weren’t in summer anymore.”

“No summer,” Seth agreed, and sent a worried glance toward the window. “I saw snow on the peaks when Jeremiah brought us over here in his carriage, but it didn’t look as if there was any snow in town.”

Probably not. Sure, Flagstaff had snowstorms this early in the year, but they weren’t common.

That didn’t mean they weren’t coming. And while I’d always had fun in the snow, it was one thing to enjoy astorm that blanketed everything in white when you had nice modern heating systems and vehicles with all-wheel drive, and something else entirely to be stuck in places without real insulation and had to use horses and buggies…or your own two feet…to get around.

I knew these negative thoughts were only me assuming we’d be here for a good long time because I had no idea how the hell I was supposed to get us back to 1926, much less my own twenty-first-century world.

“Are you hungry?” he asked next, an abrupt change of subject. “Emma said your appetite would probably come roaring back once you were awake.”

Hmm…was I hungry? I hadn’t really thought about it, mostly because my brain was too busy wrestling with the insanity of somehow ending up in Flagstaff in 1884. But maybe it was the water or possibly just my body starting to settle into itself after the witchy equivalent of major surgery, but I realized then I was hungry…almost ravenously so.

“I could eat,” I said.

“Okay, good,” Seth replied as he rose from his chair. “Then I’ll go downstairs to the dining room and order some food to be brought up here. Emma said you should stay in bed until tomorrow, possibly more, depending on how you were feeling.”

The thought of having to remain bedbound for another day didn’t sound all that appealing. Now that I’d been awake for a good twenty minutes, I was starting to feel more and more like myself.

“Oh, I don’t think I’ll need anything more than another good night’s sleep,” I assured Seth, but he only gave a small hitch of his shoulders.

“We’ll see,” he replied, then headed to the door and let himself out.

With him gone, the room felt very quiet. Sure, I thought I heard footsteps in the hallway from time to time, and a man and woman speaking in low enough tones that I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but still, I was more alone right then than I wanted to be.

But Seth had had to go downstairs. It wasn’t as if you could pick up a phone and call for room service, not in 1884.

How in the world had we ended up here? Why had my crazy talent thought it would be a good idea to send me back to a world where my great-to-the-sixth-power uncle ruled over the Wilcox clan?

Not that it had been a huge family back then the way it was now. No, it had just been Jeremiah Wilcox and his sister and brothers, and their assorted spouses and children. After that, they married civilians, and then married cousins once they were distant enough to be deemed safe, and the clan kept growing and growing.

But right now — in 1884 — it was just one smallish group of people.

And as to why we’d traveled in both space and time…well, I had absolutely no explanation at all for that.

Seth returned sooner than I would have expected. He had a waiter in tow, someone who trundled a cart carrying several plates covered in silver domes, presumably to keep the food warm while it was transported up here. A brief, secretive movement that I thought was Seth handing a couple of coins to the man, and then he pushed the cart over to the bed.

“Do you think you can sit up now?” he asked.

In answer, I pushed myself upright and arranged the pillows so they’d provide a bit more support. Maybe it was a little weird to be sitting there in front of him in my nightgown, but honestly, it showed a lot less than the knee-length dresses I’d worn around 1926 Jerome.

Seth also didn’t seem too perturbed by my attire, or maybe he was just trying his best to act natural since the whole situation was utterly bizarre. He removed the dome from the plate in front of me and set it on the bedside table, then did the same for the second plate.

Underneath was what looked like roast chicken and green beans and mashed potatoes. Nice and normal, which was fine by me. I seemed to remember reading about some pretty odd foods served at fancy Victorian banquets, like peacock and cock-a-leekie soup and other oddities, but clearly, they were all about the basics in this frontier town.

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