Borrowed Time (The Witches of Mingus Mountain #2)

5. Tea and Sympathy

5

TEA AND SYMPATHY

None of this was normal. He shouldn’t be talking to Devynn as though nothing had changed, and he shouldn’t be walking the streets of a Flagstaff that felt like something out of a painting or an old photograph, with the women in their bustle gowns and the men in their wide-brimmed hats and horses and wagons and buggies crowding them on all sides.

And he absolutely shouldn’t have been walking up the path that led to Jeremiah Wilcox’s front door as though he’d done this a hundred times before.

True, this wasn’t his first foray to the imposing house. Just two days earlier, he’d stood on this walkway with a dying Devynn in his arms, not knowing where he was or how he had gotten here.

Of course, back then he’d thought her name was Deborah and that she’d come from a clan far off in Massachusetts.

Well, he supposed a quarter of that was true. She had the blood of the Winfields in her veins, even if she’d been raised a Wilcox.

And although he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge such a thing, he knew he’d found her oddly charming in her dark green bustle gown, which hid far more of her figure than the simple cotton dresses she’d worn during her time in Jerome and yet was still more alluring than he’d expected. He’d noted how her speech sounded casual when they were alone together, and then took on a much more formal tone when speaking to people such as Deborah Prewitt, who’d come in search of her runaway twin sister. That had been a nice touch, he thought, and explained away the similarities in their appearance and their age.

He hadn’t been expecting to discover much on their fact-finding mission, so he wasn’t too disappointed when their conversation with Mrs. Wilson hadn’t produced anything of real use. Maybe Mrs. Marshall, who Devynn had said was the other teacher at the school, might have been able to offer some additional insight, but because school was in session and wouldn’t get out until they were already at Jeremiah Wilcox’s house, they hadn’t gotten the opportunity to talk to her.

Now an older woman who looked as though she might be in her middle or late fifties opened the door in answer to their knock. Smiling, she said, “Mr. and Miss Prewitt? Mr. Wilcox is expecting you.”

Of course he was. At odd intervals throughout the day, Seth had wondered what might have happened if they’d declined Jeremiah’s invitation to tea. Would he have put his foot down? Snapped his fingers and made them appear in his parlor whether they wanted to be there or not?

Since he didn’t have a very good idea of the other man’s powers, it was difficult to say.

Probably better not to find out.

The housekeeper — at least, that was who Seth assumed the woman was, since she was plainly although neatly dressed — led them past the front parlor, where he saw that the settee where he’d lain Devynn down looked new and unspoiled, with no sign at all of the blood that had once stained the damask upholstery.

Clearly, Jeremiah had cast some sort of enchantment to remove the stain, which Seth thought quite a handy trick.

The house was even larger than he’d expected. Their little trio went past the study where the two men had lingered while Emma performed her healing spells on Devynn, and into a larger, less formal space toward the back of the home, where a series of three windows looked onto a large yard. The grass was yellowed with frost and the flowers had been clipped back for the winter, but an oak tree there still had some golden leaves on its branches, making the outdoor area look a little less bleak.

Jeremiah was gazing out the center window when they entered the room, but he must have heard their approach because he turned at once and offered them a smile. In the brighter light in this space, the lines around his eyes and mouth were somewhat more apparent, but he still looked as though he could only be in his middle thirties at the most.

“Thank you, Anne,” he said. “You may bring the tea now.”

She inclined her head and hurried out, presumably to fetch the liquid component of their tea, since a tray filled with small sandwiches and fruit and delectable little pastries already waited on a side table, one that had a magnificent painting of the San Francisco Peaks hanging above it.

“Thank you for coming,” he went on. “I hope you had a pleasant day in town?”

“It was…educational,” Seth replied, and one of Jeremiah’s brows lifted.

“You learned something useful?”

Seth glanced over at Devynn, and she shrugged.

“Not in regards to our sister,” he said distinctly, since Anne had just returned carrying a silver tea set, which she set down on the side table next to the tray of food. “But in getting to explore the town.”

A nod, and Jeremiah said, “Thank you, Anne. I will ring if we need anything else.”

“Of course, sir.”

She went out, and a moment passed while everyone went over to fetch their tea, giving the housekeeper plenty of time to get out of earshot.

“You are looking much improved, Deborah,” he said next, and she shook her head.

“It’s actually Devynn,” she explained. “I used Deborah as an alias because my real name is way too modern.”

Jeremiah absorbed this, then said, “Understandable. Well, Devynn, it is still good to see you up and about. Does the town match what your mother told you about it?”

She smiled. Watching her, Seth noticed as if for the first time how her day walking in the brisk mountain air had brought the color back to her cheeks, and how rosy and full her lips appeared. Yes, she was doing much, much better. Seeing her now, it was hard to believe that she’d been on the brink of death only two days before.

“Some of it,” she said. “But this feels much more real.”

While he didn’t quite smile in reply, something in the primus’s expression warmed, and Seth experienced an odd stab of jealousy. He didn’t like the way Jeremiah was looking at her.

No, not at all.

And he knew that was ridiculous. The other warlock’s expression was friendly, nothing more. After all, even if they hadn’t been related…a tenuous relationship, he supposed, with so many generations separating them…he had to be at least twelve years older than she, maybe more.

“I suppose it would,” Jeremiah replied, then picked up one of the small china plates that had been set next to the tray of tea sandwiches and other goodies, and placed a cucumber and cream cheese sandwich on the dish, along with a miniature scone that looked as though it was studded with blueberries.

Seth had to wonder where they got the produce, since he knew Arizona’s high desert climate could be tricky when trying to grow fruit and vegetables that flourished in much more accommodating sections of the country like the East Coast and the Midwest. Greenhouses, he supposed, and carefully tended gardens nourished with supplements to enrich the soil there.

Or it could simply be that someone in the Wilcox clan had the gift of growing things, and used their magic to ensure they always had the produce they needed.

“Please, help yourselves,” Jeremiah said as he stepped away from the side table. “You must be hungry after walking all over Flagstaff today.”

Yes, Seth realized he was ready to eat something. Their breakfast had been late and large enough that lunch hadn’t seemed to have occurred to either one of them, but his stomach reminded him that he needed to keep it properly fed even if he had been stranded in Flagstaff some twenty years before he was even born.

However, he still inclined his head toward Devynn and said, “You should go first.”

Her mouth curved upward slightly in reply. “Thanks, Seth.”

She went over to the refreshments and prepared a modest amount for herself, just a tea sandwich that looked as though it contained some sort of chicken salad, and a miniature cream puff. It was hard to say whether Jeremiah Wilcox had a cook in addition to the housekeeper, but whoever created the food in his kitchen, they seemed to be very good at what they did.

A theory that was bolstered as soon as Seth took his first bite of his sandwich. The cucumbers were so fresh, they tasted as though they’d been harvested earlier that day, and the cream cheese must have been made right here on the premises.

Devynn seemed to have been thinking the same thing, because she said, “This is delicious. Thank you, Jeremiah.”

No “Mr. Wilcox.” Well, there wasn’t much need to stand on ceremony, not when he was her five or six times removed great-uncle.

“It’s the least I could do,” he replied. “But now that it seems you’ve recovered from your ordeal, I thought we might talk about how it was that you ended up here at all.”

That remark had come right when she was taking a bite of her sandwich, so she had to finish chewing before she could reply.

“I honestly have no idea,” she said, both her tone and her gaze frank. “My talent is really screwy.”

“‘Screwy’?” Jeremiah repeated with a lift of his straight black brows.

She pursed her lips. “Sorry. Sometimes it’s hard for me to know which words became part of popular usage when.”

Was that a twinkle in the older warlock’s night-hued eyes? “I can see how that might be a problem.”

“My gift — if you can even call it that — is supposed to be about manipulating time, just like my mother’s was.” Devynn paused there while Seth studied her expression. She appeared calm enough, but he noted the way the pink of her cheeks had darkened just the slightest bit.

Embarrassment, he guessed. He doubted it would be easy for her to confess her magical lack to a powerful ancestor like Jeremiah Wilcox.

“But I can’t control it,” she went on after taking a small breath, as though to brace herself for the confession she needed to make. “Never could. After a couple of…incidents…my parents and I both decided it was best for me to avoid using it at all. For the past ten years, I’ve pretty much done whatever I could to tamp it down.”

Jeremiah swallowed some of his tea, then said, “And yet it seems it became active during a moment of pure stress, or you would not be here.”

This time, Devynn glanced over at Seth, possibly gauging how much she could say in response to that comment. While he hated to confess that they’d been propelled here after sharing a kiss, he also knew that withholding information might prevent Jeremiah from offering any possible solutions to their predicament.

A very small tilt of his head in her direction, and she answered with an equally subtle nod.

“I think so,” she said. “I’m still trying to figure out what brought all this on. First, I tripped and fell and knocked myself out a few weeks ago, and that was when I landed in 1926 and met Seth. This time, though….”

“This time, you were even more grievously wounded,” Jeremiah replied. He’d kept his attention fixed on Devynn the whole time, but Seth had the feeling that the other man’s mind was churning away at the conundrum, trying to put all the pieces together. “And I suppose your talent for concealing your witch nature is what allowed you to live among the McAllisters for several weeks with no one guessing at your true identity.”

Her blue eyes flared with surprise. “How did you know that?”

“Because some of the magic I’ve felt in you is very similar to what I felt from your father,” Jeremiah said. “And if you were truly living among the McAllisters, it would have been the only way to keep them from knowing who you were.”

A deception that had been necessary, Seth knew, and yet he still hated the way she’d had to lie to him…to everyone. But, alone and afraid, she hadn’t possessed many options.

“Yes,” she said. “Eventually, Seth found out I was a witch, and that was when I told him that I’d come from the future, although I didn’t say anything about being half Wilcox. But then I realized I couldn’t keep hiding my real identity from him, and I went to tell him the truth.”

That was why she had been so urgent, how she’d gone to the extremity of hiding in the bed of the family pickup truck as he was headed to Prescott to do that damned bootlegging run on his brother’s behalf. She hadn’t wanted a single moment more to pass with such a terrible lie standing between them.

And then Charles had shown up, and Allenby as well, and the whole thing had gone to hell.

“She didn’t have the chance, though,” Seth broke in. “Because the man my brother had illegal dealings with showed up and decided she had seen too much and needed to be taken care of.”

“Ah,” Jeremiah said, clearly comprehending at once. “That’s why she was shot.”

One of Devynn’s hands moved to her waist, as if recalling the pain and horror of that moment, even though Seth guessed that any trace of the wound was now completely gone. “It happened so fast,” she said. “I think Seth was trying to get me to the truck so he could take me down to Jerome and to his cousin, who’s a healer. But there was too much blood, and I — ” She stopped there so she could pull in a breath, and then went on, “I knew there wasn’t enough time. The only thing I knew was that I needed to have him hold me before I was gone, and I…I kissed him. That was when everything went crazy. I mean, I was already half passed out by then, but I felt everything tilt, and there was this sort of swirling darkness before everything went black.”

“And that’s when we appeared here,” Seth added. “By that point, Devynn was unconscious, so I suppose it’s not surprising she doesn’t remember anything after that.”

“Nothing at all until I woke up in that hotel room,” she said.

Jeremiah had listened to all this in grave silence, clearly doing what he needed to do to put all the pieces together. “The human mind — and I include our witch talents in that, since it seems they must also reside somewhere in our brains, even if we’re not sure of the location — can do strange things under duress. If your talent, Devynn, was the one for translocation, not Seth’s, then I would say your gift awoke to send you home, even if the year was utterly wrong. But now I am not quite sure what to make of any of this.”

Neither could Seth. Except….

“Do you think it’s possible our talents could have gotten intertwined for a moment, just long enough for Devynn to somehow use my teleportation ability to send us to Flagstaff?”

Jeremiah didn’t respond right away. He still held the delicate porcelain cup with its intricate design of gold leaf and red roses, and one finger tapped against its side, as if the movement might somehow help with his thinking processes.

“I suppose that might be possible,” he said at length. “Magic is far from an exact science, and witches and warlocks can accomplish many unexpected feats. I suppose the good thing in all this is that at least your combined talents sent you to a place where you could get help. My sister is a very skilled healer. I am not sure you would have fared as well, Devynn, if you had suddenly appeared in the office of one of our doctors here.”

No, probably not. Seth wouldn’t pretend to know much about medical practice in the 1880s, but he had to believe it was far behind what they had in the 1920s, with antiseptic operating rooms and sulfa drugs to help fight the spread of infection.

Devynn wore a lopsided smile as she replied, “I suppose that’s possible…although if I really wanted the best medical care, I would have sent myself to my own decade. We’re pretty advanced about those things.” A pause, and then she added, “Of course, hospitals in my time also have to report gunshot wounds to the local authorities. Considering I was shot by a man who would have been dead for decades by then, that might have taken some explaining.”

That was for sure. Seth honestly didn’t know what was more unsettling — to go forward in time more than a hundred years, or to be sent back into a past he’d never had any desire to visit.

Well, he was in the past now, whether he liked it or not.

“Did you not try to take Devynn to your clan’s healer using your gift of translocation, rather than drive her in your vehicle?” Jeremiah asked then, and Seth couldn’t quite ignore the stirring of shame the question had awoken.

Which he knew was foolish. Talents were talents, and witches and warlocks had no real control over how strong they were.

“I couldn’t have,” he admitted. “My talent isn’t strong enough to allow me to carry another person. I learned pretty early on that I could manage to carry an extra thirty or forty pounds with me at the most.”

And Devynn, slender as she was, still weighed a hell of a lot more than forty pounds.

“Ah,” Jeremiah said. “I suppose that would cause a problem. Well, whatever the mechanism that brought you here, it seems it knew it would be sending you to a safe haven.”

Seth’s first impulse was to chuckle at those words, although he remained silent. There was no way in the world he could ever allow himself to think of Wilcox territory as a “safe haven.”

But…Jeremiah had given them a place to stay, had provided a story that would explain their presence here in Flagstaff. How all this would end, Seth had no idea, but at least he knew they were in no immediate danger.

A rustle at the entrance to the back parlor — it was open to the hallway — and all three of them looked in that direction. Standing there was a little boy, probably around eight, whose night-black hair and eyes proclaimed him to be a Wilcox, although his complexion appeared several shades darker than his father’s.

“Ah, Jacob,” Jeremiah said, and went over to the boy so he could place a friendly hand on his shoulder. “How was school today?”

“It was fine,” Jacob said. His voice was clear, each word enunciated crisply and cleanly. “Although I don’t much like Mrs. Pierce teaching our class. I wish Miss Prewitt would come back.”

Something in Devynn’s expression was almost stricken then. Did she feel guilty on behalf of her mother, who had escaped this world and this time without leaving a single word for those she left behind? While Seth doubted anyone would have blamed Danica Wilcox for returning to her own century, it couldn’t be denied that she’d left some significant loose ends behind.

A shadow touched Jeremiah’s face as well, but he sounded hearty enough as he said, “Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to happen. And you know that Mrs. Pierce taking over your class is only temporary. The other trustees and I are looking for a new teacher, and we hope we’ll have someone here by the end of the year. For now, though, have Mrs. Barton get you some cookies and milk, and you can go to the library to work on your lessons. I need to finish up with my guests here.”

A lot of little boys that age would have protested. Jacob, however, only dipped his head, flickered a glance in Devynn and Seth’s direction, and headed back down the hallway.

“My apologies for the interruption,” Jeremiah said. “He does like to check in with me when he comes home from school, and he left this morning before I could tell him I would be having guests this afternoon.”

“It’s fine,” Devynn said at once. “He seems like a sweet little boy.”

“He is too solemn, too quiet,” Jeremiah replied. “But I can’t blame him for that. There has been much tragedy in his life.”

Devynn nodded while Seth did his best to seem sympathetic. He knew that Jeremiah’s first wife had died of a fever and had laid some kind of curse on her husband, but to be honest, he’d never thought much about the situation, except to think to himself it was nothing more than the Wilcoxes deserved.

Now, though…now he was starting to see firsthand the toll that curse had taken on the clan.

More and more, it was beginning to feel as if he — and the rest of the McAllisters — had been wrong about the Wilcox family.

“But you know it will be better someday,” Devynn said quietly, and Jeremiah’s head lifted.

“That knowledge is what has given me strength,” he replied. “It was kind of your mother to tell me things would turn out all right in the end.”

“Even if it might have messed up the timeline,” she said, and this time, his shoulders lifted.

“It is hard to say what affects what. Some might have said that her very presence in 1884 altered the future in ways that could never be completely proven. Surely taking Robert Rowe from his existence here and transplanting him to the twenty-first century had its own ripples that spread out from the splash, as it were.” Jeremiah paused there, and now his gaze moved to Seth, dark, unreadable. “Just as the two of you being here now might also be changing things. Does anyone know you’re missing, or, if you manage to return, will it be as if you’d never left at all?”

Devynn lifted her teacup and sipped from it, as though she thought she needed the caffeine to give her the focus required to answer the question. “I don’t think anyone knows for sure. That is, when my mother came back from 1884, it was the exact same day she’d left. Her location had changed, though — she returned to the family cabin because that’s where the two of you were located when you combined forces to send her and my father through time. But when I tried to travel through time when my gifts first awakened, I could send myself to the future but couldn’t come back. I had to wait for everyone to catch up with me.” She stopped there, and again, she seemed more embarrassed than anything else, her eyes not meeting Seth’s…or Jeremiah’s. “One time, it was two weeks, and my parents almost lost their minds. That was when we decided I needed to lock down my magic as much as possible.”

“I can see why that might have been distressing for everyone involved,” Jeremiah said, expression somber. “And why you don’t have much experience working with your gift. However, I have to believe that you must find some way through to making it work for you rather than being a detriment, or you may never be able to return to your own time.”

Precisely the words Seth hadn’t wanted to hear, even though he guessed that the other warlock was trying to soften the blow just in case they truly did end up trapped in the past.

“And I,” the Wilcox primus continued, “will do whatever I can to help you.”