Borrowed Time (The Witches of Mingus Mountain #2)

2. Coming Clean

2

COMING CLEAN

Devynn Rowe

Flagstaff, 1884

My eyelids fluttered open. The room where I lay was dim, lit only by a single kerosene lamp sitting on a dresser on the other side of the space.

That didn’t feel right. Technology and creature comforts in Jerome in 1926 were a lot more primitive than what I was used to, but at least they had electric lights.

Come to think of it, nothing felt right. My entire body felt oddly limp, wrung out as a used washcloth. And there was a strange ache in my midsection, although when my searching fingers touched my flesh there as I reached up and under the flannel nightgown I wore, everything felt normal enough, the skin of my stomach smooth against my fingertips.

That wasn’t right, though. Something awful had happened, hadn’t it?

A dim memory of a steep canyon, shadowed by the coming of dusk, flickered at the edges of my mind. Seth and I arguing…his brother appearing out of nowhere…and then that other man.

The one with the gun.

I tried to sit up, and at once, a gentle hand touched my arm. “It’s all right, Deborah. You’ve been asleep for a while.”

Deborah? Who the hell was Deborah?

A blink, and then that part of it came back as well. I’d told Seth my name was Deborah because no one in 1926 was named Devynn.

The room felt as if it had begun to tilt around me as soon as I was even partially upright, and I let myself fall against the pillows again. Or rather, I smooshed them up against the headboard so I wasn’t lying completely flat, although I definitely wasn’t sitting up, either.

From that position, I could see that Seth was seated on a plain ladderback chair that had been pulled up next to the bed. The room beyond him was unfamiliar — striped wallpaper, one of those old-fashioned tables with a mirror hanging between two posts and a large basin, presumably for water, sitting on the tabletop.

An odd little potbellied stove with flames blazing behind the glass. It gave out a surprising amount of heat, but still, I could tell that this room was much, much colder than any space in Jerome, Arizona, in June should be.

“Where are we?” I asked.

Even though the room wasn’t that well-lit, I couldn’t miss the way Seth’s mouth tightened. “In Flagstaff,” he said, then hesitated. “In 1884.”

For the longest second, I could only stare at him, wondering if I was still asleep, trapped in some kind of awful nightmare. I had vague memories of being lost in dark dreams before I’d awoken, but mercifully, the details had fled just as soon as I opened my eyes.

Except this was all too real — the unfamiliar room, the hint of icy air slipping in past the window casings.

The man who sat on the chair nearby, his expression tense and worried.

On my behalf?

I realized then that he wasn’t wearing the white linen shirt he’d had on when we’d last seen each other, but instead a black coat with a blue brocade waistcoat underneath. True, he sported a white shirt now, too, but it had a high, stiff collar partially covered by a black puffy tie.

The whole ensemble looked like something out of a Wild West show.

Then again, if we really had ended up in 1884, I supposed the outfit was the sort of thing he needed to wear so as not to attract notice.

I knew I’d never seen the blue flannel nightgown that covered me up to my chin, which meant someone must have changed me out of my blood-soaked dress.

“What happened?”

Rather than respond right away, he reached for the pitcher of water that sat on the bedside table and poured me a glass. “Do you think you can hold this? Emma said you’d be a little weak for a while.”

Who the hell was Emma?

However, I didn’t tack another question onto the one I’d already asked, and instead said, “I think I can manage.”

He handed the glass to me, although I noticed how he held on to it for a second or two after I’d wrapped my fingers around the tumbler, as if to make sure I wasn’t going to drop the thing. It felt a little awkward, but I was pretty sure I would be able to hold it without any problem.

To reassure him, I lifted the glass to my lips and sipped from it. The water tasted cool and sweet. Probably from a well, even though I had no idea where such a well might be located.

“What do you remember?” Seth asked.

“That man shot me,” I said, and he gave a grim nod.

“Lionel Allenby. He was my supervisor at the mine…and in league with the local bootleggers. Charles knocked him out, but…”

“…but it was too late,” I finished for him, and Seth tilted his head toward me in agreement before he sat back down again.

“You were bleeding all over the place,” he said. “We were going to try to drive you down the hill to see my cousin Helen, but I honestly didn’t know whether you were going to make it. You asked me to kiss you” — he paused there, and I could see the way he swallowed before continuing — “and when we did, it was as if the whole world spun out of control into darkness. The next thing I knew, I was standing on Jeremiah Wilcox’s front walk.”

This revelation only made me stare at him in consternation. “You what? ”

A half smile, although Seth’s expression wasn’t terribly amused. “We appeared in front of Jeremiah’s house. I have no idea how we ended up there. But he went to fetch his sister, who’s the clan healer, and she took care of you.”

I glanced around the room again. It appeared nicely furnished and clean, but it also didn’t seem quite as fancy as I would have expected a room in the former primus’s home to be. “Is that where we are now? In Jeremiah Wilcox’s house?”

“No,” Seth replied at once. “He didn’t think it was a good idea for us to stay there. We waited until Emma said you were recovered enough to be moved, and then Jeremiah got his horse and buggy and brought us over to the Hotel San Francisco. I’ve got the room next door.”

“Oh,” I said, since I wasn’t sure how else I was supposed to respond. Honestly, my head was spinning, and I didn’t think it was just from the aftermath of being healed of such a terrible wound. Maybe there were healers in the world who could just snap their fingers and have you up and walking around in a jiffy no matter how badly you were hurt, but in general, even magical healing required some recovery 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 a storm 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.

And it felt better than I’d thought to get some food in me — no real surprise, considering how by that point, I hadn’t eaten anything for more than a day and a half. It might have been good to have some wine…at least I wouldn’t have to worry about stupid Prohibition here…but I somehow doubted that Emma the healer would have been an advocate for that kind of indulgence so early in my recovery.

We ate in silence for a couple of minutes. Something about the quiet felt overly tense, but I guessed that was just Seth’s worry about our current situation. Yes, he’d had a bit longer to get used to the idea of appearing in a previous century, and yet I knew he wasn’t like me — his talent had nothing to do with manipulating time, so I could see why he might be having some difficulty coming to terms with what had happened to us.

But after I’d eaten most of my chicken and mashed potatoes, and made what I thought was a good stab at the green beans, he finally spoke.

“Are you going to tell me the truth now?”

I blinked. Those blue eyes of his were as clear as ever, but now they were too sharp, focused as lasers.

“Tell you the truth about what?”

His mouth tightened. “Jeremiah Wilcox hinted at a few things. But then he said it was your story to tell and that I should wait until you were well enough to talk. You seem pretty fine now, so I’d appreciate it if you would do me the courtesy of not lying anymore.”

There it was. I suppose I’d been fooling myself if I thought this day of reckoning wouldn’t eventually come.

I set down my fork and made myself meet his gaze.

Yes, he was angry. Controlling it well, but….

He has every right to be mad, I told myself. And there really isn’t much point in trying to sidestep the issue any longer, is there?

Not as far as I could tell. Now we were two people out of time, caught far away from everyone and everything we knew, and we needed to be allies.

“My last name really is Rowe,” I said slowly. “But my first name is Devynn, not Deborah.”

Seth stared at me for a moment. “I’ve never heard that name before.”

“Not so strange,” I replied, then lifted my glass so I could have a few swallows of water. With any luck, they would help keep my words from getting stuck in my throat. True, he knew I was from the future…but there was so much more he didn’t know. “It’s not really that common even when I’m from.”

Thick dark lashes almost obscured his eyes as they narrowed. “The middle of the twenty-first century,” he said, repeating what I’d told him after our first fateful kiss.

“Right.”

Silence then, a silence only broken by the sound of more footsteps going past the door.

And maybe the beating of my own heart.

“But there’s more…isn’t there?”

I nodded.

“If you’re from the future, how in the world did Jeremiah Wilcox ever meet your parents?”

Thereby hung a tale. I didn’t want to tell the whole story — that would have taken far too long — but I knew I had to explain enough to make Seth understand.

“My mother suffered a kind of traumatic experience a long time ago, when she was around the same age I am now,” I began. “So she went to the family cabin to be alone in the woods for a while to try to get her head together.”

As soon as those words left my mouth, Seth frowned, and I couldn’t help smiling a little, despite the situation. All during my time in 1926, I’d done my best to avoid using phrases that wouldn’t have been common back then, but I supposed I could be forgiven for being a bit out of it at the moment.

“To try to figure out what she should do next,” I explained. “While she was there, she saw the ghost of my father and was immediately drawn to him, even though she knew he couldn’t be a Wilcox.”

“Wait a minute,” Seth said. His brows were still pulled together, and I could tell he was doing what he could to make sense of the story. “Why would she be surprised that the ghost wasn’t a Wilcox?”

There it was. I knew I couldn’t dance around the issue any longer, not when the truth would have come out soon enough anyway.

“Because the cabin was the one the Wilcoxes built when they first came to Flagstaff in the 1870s,” I said softly. “That’s our family cabin.”

Seth stared at me. He was too tanned to exactly go pale, but it was impossible to ignore the shock in those bright blue eyes.

“You’re a Wilcox?” he demanded. “So, the part about your father’s name being Rowe was a lie, too?”

I couldn’t help wincing a little at the “too” in that sentence.

Then again, I kind of deserved it.

“No, that part was the truth,” I said. “My father is Robert Rowe. His mother was part of the Winfield clan in Massachusetts, and his father was a civilian — a nonmagical person,” I added hastily, since I still didn’t know for sure whether the witch clans of Seth’s time used that epithet. “But my mother was Danica Wilcox.”

For several long, excruciating moments, Seth didn’t reply, only continued to sit in his chair and stare at me. His expression was now almost blank, as though he wasn’t quite sure what to do with the information he’d just been given.

Then, to my surprise, one corner of his mouth lifted just a little. It wasn’t exactly a smile, but it was a much friendlier response than I’d been expecting.

However, I doubted I could let myself relax yet. We still had a whole lot of air to clear.

“Well, I suppose I can see why you might not have wanted to tell me that part,” he said.

I allowed myself a tiny smile in reply, although it felt tentative, as though I knew we weren’t quite out of the woods yet.

“I’m sorry about the lies,” I murmured, and plucked at the quilt with nervous fingers, not sure whether I should look at him directly. “But I didn’t know what else to do, not when our two clans were still such enemies in your time.”

Something that might have been surprise flitted across his features, which I took as my cue to continue.

“Things are very different in my time,” I said. “In my world, the Wilcoxes and McAllisters are pretty closely connected, and definitely friendly. That’s why I was in Jerome in the first place — I was working at McAllister Mercantile.”

He blinked. “It’s still there?”

“Definitely,” I replied. “The town’s doing great.” I paused there, figuring it probably wasn’t the time to launch into a history lesson about what Jerome went through during the middle part of the twentieth century before it finally started to bounce back in the ’60s and ’70s. “Anyway, my mother’s gift is working with time — she can give herself an extra five minutes whenever she needs it.”

“That would come in handy,” he said, and now his expression seemed almost brooding.

Was he thinking of what he might have done if he’d had an extra five minutes back at the mine? He could have bundled me into the truck and driven away, and that horrible encounter with Lionel Allenby would never have happened at all.

Too bad I couldn’t make my own talent work for me like that.

“Yes, she’s used it quite a bit,” I responded, figuring I should try to keep things neutral for now. “Anyway, she started to wonder if she could use it for more than getting those extra five minutes, and with some training from a Navajo man, a kind of shaman, she actually learned how to travel back in time.”

Seth nodded. “So she came back to Flagstaff in 1884 to prevent your father from dying at the Wilcox cabin.”

Clearly, I wouldn’t have to go into the nuts and bolts of the whole process. I’d always known Seth was smart, but it was moments like this when I saw again how quickly his mind worked.

“Exactly,” I said. “She pretended to be a woman named Eliza Prewitt, who was supposed to be the new schoolteacher but who never showed up. Obviously, Jeremiah Wilcox figured out right away that my mother was a witch, and that’s when she told him she was a member of the Landon clan and had run away to escape marriage to a cousin she disliked.”

“I suppose that story would have made sense back in Victorian times.”

Did his comment mean arranged marriages were no longer a thing in the 1920s? Maybe.

Well, except when it came to primas choosing their consorts, I supposed…a fate Seth had narrowly escaped.

“Long story short,” I continued, “my parents met in 1884 and fell in love. Things got complicated because my father was here on a mission from the Winfields to try to goad the Wilcox clan into using their magic openly. It got really ugly when my father bought a piece of land Samuel Wilcox had been negotiating for, though.”

Once again, Seth inclined his head in acknowledgment. “Jeremiah made some kind of off-hand comment about his brothers. I get the feeling there wasn’t much love lost there.”

“No,” I said. “Samuel kidnapped my mother and took her to the cabin, knowing my father would come to her rescue. Which he did, and that’s when Samuel shot him.”

“But I thought — ” Seth began, then stopped, obviously unsure what to make of all this.

A little shiver went down my back as I thought of how close it had been. If it weren’t for Jeremiah Wilcox, neither I nor my brother or sister would even exist.

“That’s where my father died originally,” I said, making myself say the words without hesitation. “That’s why my mother saw his ghost at the cabin — Samuel ambushed him and shot him in the heart. But this time, she was there, and she and Jeremiah somehow combined their magic to send her and my father into the future, back to her home. They got married about six months later…and the rest is history, I suppose.”

“Or the future, depending on how you look at it.”

I lifted my shoulders. “Yes, I suppose it can go either way. But my father adjusted really well to living in my time, and he’s been happy. Anyway, that’s how Jeremiah knew my parents…for him, all this happened only a week ago or so. They escaped 1884 just a few days before Halloween.”

“Now I understand,” Seth said, and he brushed a hand against the blue silk waistcoat he wore.

I sent him a questioning look.

“These clothes,” he said. “Jeremiah had a trunk full of them, and he got them down out of the attic and brought them along when we came to the hotel. They belonged to your father. And those,” he added, pointing toward a trunk set against the wall opposite the bed, “are your mother’s. I suppose he went to fetch them when they both disappeared so it would look like they’d just packed up and left.”

That made sense. I had no idea what story Jeremiah had given his family — or his fellow citizens in Flagstaff — but I could see why he might have thought it a good idea to get my parents’ belongings out of sight as quickly as possible. And although she’d put on a little weight over the years, my mother and I were almost the same height, and I had to hope the clothes she’d left behind in the past would fit me well enough.

“That was smart of him,” I said, and Seth made a noncommittal sound.

“I suppose he was just doing his best to make the problem go away. But if they left town so recently, won’t people recognize the clothes when we wear them out and about?”

A problem I hadn’t considered until he’d brought it up. However, I thought we could figure out some way to explain the situation — that we’d bought the clothes in a secondhand shop or something.

If they even had anything like that in Flagstaff in the 1880s.

“Possibly,” I said. “But maybe not. I’m sure Jeremiah Wilcox will have some words of advice on that subject.”

Seth’s mouth twisted in a grim smile. “Yes, he does seem to have a solution for almost every problem. Speaking of which, he wants to explain us away by telling everyone that we’re Prewitts come in search of their missing sister…that you and I are Eliza’s brother and sister, so people won’t question too much why we’re spending so much time together.”

On the surface, that sounded like a decent plan. Probably, the general population of Flagstaff wouldn’t have spared much thought for Robert Rowe, since to them, he’d only been visiting to scout for land.

But my mother — in her disguise as Eliza Prewitt — had lived at one of the boarding houses here, had taught their children. Her disappearance was the sort of thing that would have merited further investigation by her family.

And even though that would neatly explain to the Wilcoxes why Seth and I were of witch-kind, I didn’t much like the idea of having to pretend to be his sister. Things were strained as hell between us right now, sure, but I still didn’t think of him as anything close to a brother.

“I suppose that works as a cover story,” I said, doing my best to sound completely neutral.

“I suppose so,” Seth echoed. He reached for his glass of water and took a sip before replacing it on the bedside table. A pause, and he added, “I think the food did you some good. Your color is much better.”

Somehow, I refrained from reaching up to touch my cheek — as if doing so would have proved anything, since I couldn’t see myself. However, I also got the impression that Seth had made the comment because he wanted to change the subject.

It seemed he, too, wasn’t thrilled about having to pretend to be my brother, even if he wasn’t going to admit such a thing out loud.

And that made me just the tiniest bit relieved. We still had a lot to get past, but I had to hope he wouldn’t hate me forever for the lies I’d told.

Before I could speak, he went on, “And something about getting shot triggered your time-traveling gift?”

“That’s what I think must have happened,” I replied. “But that doesn’t really explain how we ended up here. My talent only allows me to move in time, not space.”

“Maybe not,” he said. “Mine does, though.”

I stared at him. Yes, of course I’d known he was a warlock, but I’d had no idea what his exact talent was.

“You can teleport?” I asked.

His brows drew together. “Is that what you call it in your time?”

“Yes.”

He let out a breath and said, “Then yes, I can teleport. I suppose in that moment of crisis, our powers somehow got twisted around each other and brought us here.” A pause, and then he added with a grim smile,

“I suppose the real trick now is to see whether we can do that again.”