Page 28 of Borrowed Time

If they were going to be experimenting at all.

“Seth,” the other man said — startling him a little, since he’d been sure he would address Devynn first — “how old were you when your talent began to emerge?”

“Twelve,” he replied promptly. That was easy enough to remember, since they’d had a party at his Grandma Dora’s house, and when he got home, he found himself thinking about how much he liked her friendly, old-fashioned backyard with its hollyhocks and hydrangeas and spikes of gladioli. Because hisbirthday was in July, everything had been in full bloom, and he’d wished his own home — a two-story flat above his parents’ store — had a garden like that…and also wished he could be back at his grandmother’s house.

In the next instant, he’d been standing in that very same yard, where some flattened grass and a few stray pieces of ribbon told the tale of the party that had been held there only a few hours earlier.

Grandma Dora always said the yell he’d let out might as well have been the steam whistle going off at the mine, and she’d rushed downstairs to see what in the world was going on. Seth knew he hadn’t been very coherent in that moment, but after a few stumbling explanations of what had just happened to him, she’d realized that his talent — a powerful, useful one — had come to him on the very anniversary of the day he’d been born.

He recounted the story to Devynn and Jeremiah, both of whom were smiling a little by the time he was done.

“And you, Devynn?” Jeremiah asked, and a flush touched her cheeks.

“It wasn’t anything nearly as fun,” she said. “It was winter, a couple of weeks before my eleventh birthday. I was thinking about how my talent hadn’t shown up yet, and what it might be when it finally appeared. And I was also thinking about the birthday party my parents had planned, which was supposed to have a mermaid theme.” A pause, and then she shook her head, as if amused by her ten-year-old self. “I guess I was really into mermaids when I was that age, although with as landlocked as Flagstaff is, I’m not sure why I got that particular obsession in my head. Anyway, my mother was keeping most of her plans for the party a secret, since she wanted me to be surprised, and I was thinking about how much I wished I could see them. And then….”

“You traveled in time,” Jeremiah supplied for her, and she smiled a little, even though there wasn’t much humor in her expression.

“Yes,” she replied. “I saw our living room all decorated with glittery streamers in shades of blue and green, and there were pictures of mermaids attached to the walls. Because my birthday’s at the beginning of March, we always had to hold my parties inside, and I could tell my mother had done her best to make the space look magical. But I was only there for a few seconds before I snapped back to my room.”

Theprimus’sdark, saturnine features were thoughtful. “Did you know what had happened?”

“I thought I did,” Devynn said. “My mother had always been honest about her talent, so I was pretty happy to find out that I’d gotten the gift for time travel, just like her. But it wasn’t exactly the same, unfortunately.”

“You traveled much farther than five minutes,” Jeremiah observed.

“About two and a half weeks,” Devynn said. “So my parents could tell right away that this was very different from just being able to give myself an extra five minutes whenever I wanted them. But because I’d been alone in my room when I traveled, no one noticed when I’d left…or how long I’d been gone. It wasn’t until I sent myself into the future again about a year later and disappeared for two weeks that we realized how problematic my talent really was.”

She’d made comments about her time-travel gift causing problems, but this was the first time Seth had heard the whole story about her first experience with it. Her parents must have been frantic when she’d disappeared for weeks, most likely thinking they’d lost their daughter forever.

No wonder she’d done whatever she could to avoid using her talent.

“So I stopped using it,” she said. “Because I couldn’t control it, I decided to just pretend it didn’t exist. Most of the time, I did a pretty good job of that…until I tripped and fell and somehow landed in 1926.”

“Where the two of you met,” Jeremiah responded.

“Yes,” she paused there. “I still have no idea how it even happened. The only thing I can think of is that the conscious control I’d been exerting on my so-called gift for all those years was suddenly released when I got knocked out by the fall. But that still doesn’t explain how Seth and I came here to Flagstaff. You’d think my mind would have wanted to send me back to my own time.”

For a moment, Jeremiah was silent. Behind him, the fire popped and crackled in the hearth, and overall, the room appeared far cheerier than Seth had ever expected a space in a Wilcox home would be. Despite the relative warmth of the room, though, he couldn’t quite ignore the chill that went down his spine.

What would he have done if Devynn had disappeared from his arms in that terrible moment when the breath rattled in her throat and he didn’t know whether she would last the next five minutes? Yes, he might not have been as utterly startled by her suddenly vanishing as some might have been, simply because he knew she was a witch, but….

If she’d left him in such a way, he knew he would have been forever haunted by the worry that she’d never gotten the assistance she needed, had died alone somewhere, far from a healer or anyone else who could have helped her.

Tone thoughtful, Jeremiah said, “It’s difficult to know what any of us might do in times of extremity. Some — like your mother, Devynn — rise to the occasion. Others…such as my brother Samuel…decidedly do not. It’s possible that somewhere in your subconscious, you feared you might drag Seth alongwith you, since he was holding you during that terrible moment, and that was why you traveled farther into the past rather than taking him into the future, to your own time, even though you knew your clan had a healer who could have helped you.”

“Just as I knew that your sister Emma was a healer as well,” Devynn said slowly, as though thinking over the situation as she spoke. “I suppose that’s some sort of explanation.”

While Seth thought he understood why they would have arrived at such a conclusion, it still didn’t explain one detail that had been bothering him ever since he and Devynn had arrived in Flagstaff.

“Maybe so,” he said. “But why here? It’s my talent that brought us to this place, not hers, since she can’t move in space with her gift.”

Devynn sent a questioning glance at Jeremiah, whose eyebrows lifted slightly. However, he didn’t reply right away, as though he wanted to take a moment to analyze the conundrum a bit more deeply.

“It’s possible that her talent somehow took over yours,” he said. “Subsumed it in a way, a bit like someone leaning over to grasp the reins of a horse team pulling a runaway wagon. Not the best analogy, I suppose, since you were far more in control in that moment than she was. Still, while most of us have learned how to guide our magical gifts and make them second nature to us, that doesn’t mean they might not still flare out of control in an emergency.”

Although Seth didn’t quite like the idea of Devynn’s gift overwhelming his — especially since she couldn’t keep it in check unless doing her best to pretend it didn’t exist — he supposed that was as good an explanation as any for what had happened. And while he’d always been proud of his magical talent, knowing it to be a useful and relatively rare one, he also had to admit that traveling in time probably was much more difficult than movingin space, even while the power used to do so was unpredictable at best.

“For now, though,” Jeremiah went on, “I’d like to work with both of you individually…if you don’t mind. That would give me a better idea of the scope of the situation.”

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