Page 42 of Killing Time

He hesitated again. “Not now,” he replied. Although he managed to refrain from glancing out the window again, he gave the impression of someone who was still worried that unfriendly ears might be listening to their conversation.

Devynn also glanced around, then said in an undertone, “Does the entrapment spell allow Jasper to hear what we’re saying?”

“No,” Adam replied at once, and relief was visible in the way her shoulders seemed to grow a little less tense. “It’s…it’s sort of like flypaper, I guess. It doesn’t even tell him that someone is caught here. A few years ago, a couple of vagrants decided to shelter from the cold in here, and they weren’t found until they’d been stuck in the house for almost a week. Good thing the last family that stayed here left lots of canned food behind.”

Although that wasn’t a very pleasant story, Seth was glad to hear that Jasper wouldn’t be hot-footing it over here to discover who his spell had just caught. But if there wasn’t any kind of alarm attached to the spell, what had Adam been doing out here?

The question was obvious on Devynn’s face…and probably mirrored on Seth’s own as well.

“I volunteered to come out and double-check that there wasn’t any sign that Ruby had stayed here, since some of the cousins wanted to come to the cabin and go deer hunting in a couple of days,” Adam explained, and Devynn suddenly looked triumphant.

“So, she was here.”

“Only for that first night,” Adam said. “Jasper and Isaac and Matthias came and moved her sometime yesterday.”

If only they’d thought of the cabin when they’d first arrived in 1947! He and Devynn could have rushed over here and….

At that point, Seth’s train of thought came to an abrupt end. Try as he might, he couldn’t think of a single way the two of them could have ever overcome Jasper Wilcox, let alone all three men who’d spirited Ruby away in the first place.

Still, he hated to think that she’d been here and they hadn’t even known.

“Are those the two men who came with Jasper to Jerome?” he asked abruptly, and Adam nodded.

“Yes. They’re two of the clan’s most powerful warlocks, so Jasper likes to have them along whenever he’s engaging in some dirty work.” Without warning, Adam pushed himself up from the hard wooden chair where he’d been sitting and walked over to the window. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”

“You’re telling us because you’re a decent person,” Devynn said. “You don’t agree with what Jasper is doing, and you know we’re being truthful with you.”

Adam stared out at the landscape for a moment, at the solemn green of the ponderosa pines and the graceful bare branches of the other trees. “You were at the café earlier.”

“We were,” Devynn replied. “My protection magic was still working there, and that’s why neither you nor Jasper noticed we were witch-kind.”

A grim chuckle. “Good thing. I doubt Jasper would have made a scene at the restaurant because even he knows we shouldn’t attract too much attention to ourselves, but I’m sure he would have tracked you down later.”

No doubt. Seth didn’t want to think about that scenario, not when there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot he could have done to protect the woman he loved…except hope his reflexes were fast enough to get the two of them away before Jasper could hit them with some kind of magical blast or cast some kind of blocking spell that would prevent either of them from using their magic. At least he knew Devynn slept with the amulet around her neck, so even if theprimushad caught them in bed, they would have had a chance.

Maybe a very small chance, but better than nothing.

“Do you have any idea where Jasper and the two others would have taken Ruby?”

Adam went very still then. Seth noticed how Devynn continued to sit quietly, so he did the same, guessing that the other man was wrestling with some pretty fierce inner demons at the moment and that it probably wasn’t a very good idea to disturb him until he was ready to answer the question. The cabin was utterly quiet, without even a ticking clock or a fire whispering in the hearth to break up the stillness.

“A few guesses, possibly,” the Wilcox warlock said at last, and Devynn released a breath, one so small that Seth had a feeling the other man wouldn’t have noticed it at all. No, Adam hadn’t come right out and said he would help them, but it seemed doubtful he would have even said that much if he hadn’t decided to throw his lot in with theirs. “Jasper still has some time to work with.”

“Because he’s performing the ceremony on the night of the dark moon,” she said, and again, Adam appeared more startled than anything else.

“How could you have known that?” he demanded.

“When we were back in 1884 — when Jeremiah was trying to help us figure out a way to get back where we were supposed to be — I had a series of dreams. Nightmares, really,” Devynn said. “They kept showing me a black-haired man and a black car and a black starry sky. After Jasper kidnapped Ruby and we discussed what had happened with the McAllister elders, one of them pointed out that the very darkest magic is performed during the black moon, so that’s how we knew Jasper would be waiting until the twelfth until he…well, until he tried to make Ruby his.”

Adam stared at Devynn as though he’d never seen a witch like her before. Maybe he hadn’t. While the Wilcox clan married plenty of civilians, they wouldn’t have intermarried with other witch clans in his time, not when they were considered pariahs by most of the other magical families in the region.

With her Rowe and her Wilcox blood, she was something special. Very, very special.

And Seth had known that from the very first moment he laid eyes on her, even back before he’d known she was a witch. Some inner essence, some inexpressible quality, had made her the only woman he could ever love.

“You didn’t tell me you were a seer,” Adam said, and she smiled a little.

“I’m not. Believe me, those dreams caught me off-guard. Until I saw Jasper driving away on Friday morning, I had no reason to believe they were anything but ordinary nightmares.”

---