Page 60 of Killing Time

Maybe she didn’t, and yet….

“The elders should strengthen the wards, though,” Seth said, and a brief frown crossed Charles’s face, so much older and more worn than the face of the brother he remembered.

“I was already planning to tell them to do that,” he replied, his tone now curt. “And you, Ruby — I have a feeling it will be some time before you’ll be able to wander around town unaccompanied.”

“Oh, probably,” she said, not looking too concerned. “I suppose that means I’ll just have to pray extra hard to Brigid so I can find my consort soon and will finally be able to stopworrying.” A glance up at Seth, and she added, “Let’s go. I want to let my mother know I’m back.”

A mother who would have had the double worry of a missingprima-in-waiting and a kidnapped daughter at the same time. Yes, she definitely needed to know that Ruby had come home.

It seemed Charles had been thinking about the same thing, because he didn’t try to stop them, only said that he’d let them know when the elders wanted to convene a meeting the next day to ask her about everything that had happened during her captivity.

“They’re not going to learn much,” Ruby remarked as she and Seth headed down the front steps and made their way onto Paradise Lane. “That is, I saw the man coming out of the strange car and knew he was Jasper Wilcox, but then everything went black.”

“He must have used some sort of sleep spell on you,” Seth said, and her shoulders — covered by a fluffy blue mohair sweater — lifted slightly.

“Or he just chloroformed me,” she said, sounding far more cheerful than someone talking about her own kidnapping probably should have. Maybe now she was free, she was already trying to convince herself that the entire episode hadn’t been quite as frightening as she’d originally thought.

On the other hand, Ruby seemed like a pretty tough cookie. It was possible that not much could rattle her.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I woke up in a place in the woods — a cabin, I suppose. Jasper was there, and he told me I had nothing to worry about and that they would treat me like an honored guest.”

“Did they?”

She shrugged again. “They certainly didn’t starve me, and the hotel room you rescued me from was nice enough, I suppose.” A pause, and her nose wrinkled in a sort of contempt. “Allthe same, I don’t know too many people who would think that kidnapping someone is a way of ‘honoring’ them.”

“Did Jasper tell you why he’d kidnapped you?”

Her brows raised, and she shot Seth such an amused glance, faintly tinged with derision, that for a moment, he felt as if she was the elder and he the inexperienced schoolboy, even though he was nearly five years older than she.

Or twenty-six years older, depending on how you looked at the situation.

“Not in so many words,” she said. “But it seemed obvious to me. He must believe that binding himself to aprima-in-waiting was his way to break the Wilcox curse. I suppose I can give him credit for coming up with such a novel solution, although I don’t think it would have worked.”

By that point, they were just about to pass the Connor Hotel, which was dark and not nearly the lively place it had been when Seth lived here in the 1920s. They turned onto Jerome Avenue so they could make their way to Hull Street and down to the neighborhood where both their homes were located.

“Why wouldn’t Jasper’s scheme have worked?”

Ruby again gave him one of those almost indulgent looks. “Because we’re not fated to be together,” she said simply. “You can’t force that sort of thing, even if you’re a warlock as powerful as Jasper Wilcox. If he hadn’t been so desperate, he would have already figured that out for himself.”

She sounded utterly calm and serene, full of confidence that the universe would send her the consort of her dreams. And even though Devynn hadn’t provided a huge amount of detail, it sounded as if everything had worked out for Ruby — sometime in the near future, whether a couple of months from now or well into the spring, she would meet the man who would be her partner for decades and the father of her two sons. Her life would unfold much the way she’d hoped.

Except, he supposed for the part where she’d had to remainprimamuch longer than anyone had planned and had to hold on until Angela was of an age to assume the mantle of responsibility for the McAllister clan.

But he wouldn’t talk about any of that. He’d already meddled with time enough, and he wanted to make sure Ruby could meet her destiny without any knowledge of what was to come.

Sure enough, her house, a big four-square similar to the one his cousin Helen still occupied, was just a bit farther down the block from Seth’s bungalow. In his time, the place hadn’t belonged to anyone in the clan, and had instead been owned by one of his fellow foremen at the mine, a man named Alan Johnston. But he supposed as work began to wind down and everyone had seen the writing on the wall, Alan had probably sold the house and moved on to a place where he could count on work that would continue to provide for his family.

Almost as soon as Ruby reached out to open the front door, it swung inward, and Seth’s cousin Louise — now much older than the last time he’d seen her — rushed onto the porch and took her daughter in her arms.

“I was praying and praying to Brigid,” Louise said, hanging on to Ruby as though she planned never to let go again. “And she answered. She answered!”

Had he been the pawn of some kind of divine intervention? Seth supposed that was probably as good a theory as any to explain how he’d managed to get his cousin Ruby away from La Posada.

“I think it was more Seth, Mama,” Ruby replied, mouth twitching a little.

Louise let go of her daughter and seemed to focus on him for the first time. “Everyone said you’d come back. It’s astonishing — you haven’t aged a day!”

No, he hadn’t, and now someone like Ruby, who’d barely been born when he last saw her, was now much more his contemporary than any of the relatives he’d left behind.

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