Page 72 of Borrowed Time

Again, not very much. However, I wasn’t about to get cocky.

No, I held the image of his pocketwatch in my mind, of the big hand on the twelve and the small hand on the two.

Another blink, and this time both men were standing, as if Seth had gotten tired of sitting down and needed to move around a bit.

“Three minutes after two,” Jeremiah said after another glance at his watch. “A bit of slippage that time.”

“I don’t think three minutes matters all that much,” Seth remarked, then looked over at me. “That’s really impressive, Devynn.”

Maybe three minutes mattered…and maybe it didn’t. Although we were still in the early stages of testing my talent, I couldn’t help thinking that the more I got away from the original five minutes that had been the hallmark of my mother’s talent for traveling in time, the greater the likelihood that I’d miss the mark and overshoot.

Not exactly the sort of thing I wanted to be thinking when I knew I’d need to send Seth and myself ahead in time by nearly a hundred and fifty years.

Jeremiah’s expression was thoughtful, and he didn’t directly respond to Seth’s comment. “I would like to try an hour this next time,” he said. “Do you think you’re up to that, Devynn?”

“Piece of cake,” I said, although I knew I sounded much more confident than I actually felt.

But if Jeremiah and Seth were willing to sit here and cool their heels for an hour while waiting for their timeline to catch up with mine, then I knew I needed to at least try.

“So…five minutes after three?” I added, since I realized a few minutes had ticked past while we were talking.

“Yes,” Jeremiah said. He looked serious enough, although a certain glint in his dark eyes told me he wasn’t worried about me hitting the mark.

Well, that made one of us.

This time, I didn’t need to see the pocketwatch, since I knew its details well enough by now — the Roman numerals, thedelicate filigree at the ends of the minute and second hands…the embossed enamel of the watch face. A practical piece of art from a world that had vanished long ago.

I held the image in my mind.

Five minutes after three…five minutes after three….

For me, it felt like nothing, just a tiny moment where I closed my eyes and opened them once again.

For Seth and Jeremiah, it must have been much more, because they looked visibly relieved when my world caught up with theirs.

“Thank God,” Jeremiah said, visibly relaxing, and I shot him a worried look.

“Am I late?”

“By almost an hour,” Seth told me. He also seemed tense, although he came over to me and took my hands in his.

“Damn it,” I said, then glanced over at Jeremiah. “I don’t understand how I could have overshot by so much when I was only going for an hour.”

“I don’t, either,” he replied. “I was hoping that there might be some sort of logical progression to these misses — adding an extra minute for every fifteen, or something along those lines. But it doesn’t seem to work that way at all.”

No, it didn’t. Then again, what had I been expecting? For all my woes with my supposed “gift” to suddenly vanish just because I had Jeremiah Wilcox helping me?

Maybe I had, deep down. Or maybe I’d thought that now I had the amulet to give an assist, things would go more smoothly.

I’d probably been asking too much.

“So…now what?” I asked.

“We’ll have to keep working at it,” Jeremiah replied at once. “I know this is discouraging, but you can’t give up. One way or another, we’ll figure out a controlled way to get you back to your own time.” He paused there. “But I fear we’ll have to postponeany further experiments — I’m already late for Clay’s birthday party and — ”

“It looks like you’re already having a party,” Samuel broke in, and we all froze.

He stood on the top step of the narrow stairs that led down to the second floor, his expression one of enormous satisfaction.

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