7. Gifted Individuals
7
GIFTED INDIVIDUALS
Eventually, of course, Devynn had returned to her own room, and Seth had done his best to go to sleep.
Good thing his curtains had been tightly drawn. It wouldn’t have helped their story much to have a passerby on the street look up and see one of the town’s new arrivals passionately embracing his “sister.”
But it had taken a good long while after he’d lain down in bed to get his racing thoughts to slow, for his body to realize that those kisses were all it was going to get.
For now, anyway. He would never do anything to compromise Devynn’s honor…but it would be a lot easier to be pure of thought if biology didn’t keep getting in the way.
But they hadn’t traveled. They’d kissed the first time, and then again and again, and the hotel room had remained steady around them. On the surface, that was a good thing, as at least it meant he could take Devynn in his arms — when they were alone and unobserved, of course — and not have to worry about her unpredictable gift sending them to a time it might be even more difficult to come back from. Here, they had Jeremiah Wilcox promising to help. In other times and places, they might not have any assistance at all.
And when Seth woke up the next morning, it was to find a note slipped under his door.
Please come to the house at twelve-thirty, it said. We will have a light lunch, and then do what we can to determine a way to send you where you need to go.
No signature, but the heavy black hand seemed exactly like the sort of writing Jeremiah Wilcox would have. Seth guessed that the note had been purposely oblique because the Wilcox warlock hadn’t wanted to write anything incriminating in case someone else might peek at the contents of the note.
He had to admit he was somewhat relieved by the prospect of eating at Jeremiah’s house. At least there, he and Devynn wouldn’t have to worry about Samuel approaching them in a public place.
If he even intended to do so again. He’d delivered his warning — because Seth couldn’t construe those words about “wrapping things up quickly” as anything other than an admonishment to get out of town as fast as possible — and probably wouldn’t want to stir up any trouble with his brother over his interference, not when he most likely knew that Jeremiah was trying to help them to the best of his ability.
The shared bath was a necessary evil, but he got ready as fast as he could, figuring Devynn would knock if she needed his assistance again with getting her corset laced.
However, the time ticked by, and right as he was about to head over to her room to see how she was faring, someone knocked at his door.
He hurried over to answer it and was surprised to see her standing outside, fully dressed, this time in a handsome wine-colored gown that made him think of the claret they’d drunk at dinner the evening before.
“Good morning, brother,” she said, her tone arch, and he opened the door a little wider so he could let her inside.
Once he’d closed it again and he knew no one could overhear them, he asked, “How in the world were you able to get dressed on your own?”
Now Devynn’s expression was positively triumphant. “I pulled off the laces on my corset and fiddled with them until I figured out how to re-lace it the way my mother had talked about, with those loops in the middle so I could tighten it myself. And once I got that taken care of, the rest of it was easy. Buttons up the front of all her dresses, remember?”
And Devynn pointed at the row of glittering jet buttons that closed the front of her bodice.
“Very resourceful,” he observed.
She grinned. “I got a note from Jeremiah,” she said as she fished an identical piece of paper to the one he’d received out of her reticule. “Lunch at twelve-thirty.”
“Which isn’t so far off,” Seth replied. “Do you want to skip breakfast?”
At once, Devynn shook her head. “No, I need some caffeine to get me going. But maybe I’ll just have toast or something light instead of going big like I did yesterday.”
In fact, that was exactly what they did — had coffee and tea, and some toast and preserves to go along with it. It was just enough to get the day started but not so much that he thought it would interfere with their meeting with Jeremiah in a few hours.
A meeting, Seth was forced to admit, that made him feel just the slightest bit anxious. Not because he was worried that the older man had any designs on Devynn — she’d put that particular fear to bed the day before — but because he wasn’t quite sure what Jeremiah intended in terms of helping them with their magic. The magic of witch-kind in the real world wasn’t like magic he’d read about in books — which was something almost always performed by means of spells or potions or other enchantments — but rather gifts that had been born within them.
How in the world could they train something that seemed so inherently untrainable?
But Jeremiah knew far more about magic than he or Devynn did, so Seth supposed he should withhold judgment until he had a better idea of exactly what the Wilcox primus had in mind.
The weather that day was cooler, with clouds obscuring more than half the sky. Seth sent a wary eye upward as he and Devynn left the Hotel San Francisco before looking over at her.
Correctly interpreting that glance, she said, “It doesn’t feel like snow. Or at least, the mountains might get some flurries, but I don’t think we need to worry about the weather down here.”
She didn’t add, “yet,” but he knew the approach of winter was on both their minds. Jerome sat about a thousand feet higher than Clarkdale or Cottonwood, so it snowed there more often than it did on the valley floor. However, the weather he’d experienced in his hometown was still far milder than winters in Flagstaff, which had a much higher elevation.
Well, he’d just have to hope that they’d find a way to leave this place before the truly cold part of the year descended.
They walked briskly toward Park Street, where Jeremiah’s house was located. Seth supposed he should be glad that the weather hadn’t been wet recently, since the dirt roads, while heavily rutted, at least weren’t muddy as well. Despite the cooler temperatures, Devynn had only placed a flowered challis shawl around her shoulders, rather than one of the heavy wool cloaks that had come to her as part of her mother’s wardrobe, but he guessed that she, as a native of Flagstaff, was probably far more used to cold weather than most people.
Just like the day before, the housekeeper answered their knock and let them inside. This time, though, instead of going to the back parlor at the rear of the house, she led them to the dining room, where three place settings had been laid out on the long table, which was covered in a white damask cloth.
Jeremiah was waiting for them there and offered a smile of greeting as they entered the room. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “I thought it would be a good idea to have our meal before we got down to business.”
“Thank you for the invitation,” Devynn replied. “Believe me, we’re glad of the help.”
“Mrs. Barton, you may bring in the food now,” Jeremiah said to the housekeeper, and she nodded before heading out to the hallway, presumably so she could go to the kitchen and fetch their lunch. After she was gone, he added, “Once we’ve been served, she’ll stay in the kitchen, and we will be able to speak freely.”
“Good,” Seth said, since he’d been wondering how in the world they were going to keep their conversation private if the woman intended to keep coming and going throughout the meal.
Then again, Jeremiah Wilcox had probably been careful to hire someone who did as she was told and didn’t poke her nose into business that had nothing to do with her. In a witch household, a busybody servant most likely wouldn’t last very long.
“Please, go ahead and sit,” the primus said, and Seth hurried over to pull out the chair at Jeremiah’s right for Devynn, since that way she wouldn’t have to walk to the far side of the table.
She gave him a grateful smile, and he went over to the other empty seat while Jeremiah sat down at the table’s head. Soon enough, Mrs. Barton was back with a pitcher of iced tea, along with a bowl of fruit compote and a large chicken pie with a perfectly golden crust.
It felt a little strange to sit there while she bustled about; no one in his clan employed servants, deeming them an extravagant risk. Seth thought he could give Jeremiah Wilcox a little grace in the matter, however, since he had a child to raise on his own and most likely needed the extra help around the house.
The primus thanked the woman and told her that if they needed anything else, they would ring. For the first time, Seth noticed a small brass bell sitting near Jeremiah’s place setting, presumably so he could call the housekeeper back for assistance if necessary.
A few moments of near silence as Jeremiah cut slices of chicken pie for them all, and then as the tea and the compote were passed around. Eventually, though, everyone had everything they needed, and the warlock gave both Seth and Devynn a shrewd look.
“I heard my brother visited you at the Hotel San Francisco’s restaurant last night,” he said, and Devynn’s eyes widened.
“How did you hear about that?”
“I have my sources,” Jeremiah replied, which didn’t reveal much. Maybe the front desk clerk was his particular spy, or perhaps he had his own magical means of surveillance when it came to his family members. “However, it doesn’t sound as if he caused too much of a scene.”
“It could have been worse,” Devynn agreed, although the glitter in her blue-gray eyes told Seth she was still angry about the way Samuel had interrupted their dinner. “All the same, I got the feeling he’d like us out of town sooner rather than later.”
Jeremiah reached for his goblet of iced tea. “I can see that. Guilty conscience weighing on him, no doubt.”
Seth lifted an eyebrow, and Devynn said, “How much does he know?”
“Very little,” Jeremiah replied at once. “More to the point, nothing useful. He did not deserve the truth of what happened next, not after what he did to your father. I informed him that Robert Rowe died of his wounds and that I buried him in the forest where he wouldn’t be found.”
“And Eliza?” Seth asked, thinking her disappearance would be much more difficult to explain away.
“I told Samuel that I took her in my carriage to Kingman, where she could get on a train bound for Los Angeles. It was too risky to say that she’d gotten on the train here in Flagstaff, where someone might have taken note of her departure.”
That made some sense. Or at least, Seth thought he could see how Eliza suddenly leaving the town where she was supposed to be teaching school might have attracted some unwanted attention.
“And because you’d already moved hers and my father’s things here,” Devynn said, “Samuel didn’t have any reason to suspect that she didn’t take her trunk with her.”
She didn’t seem too concerned that Samuel Wilcox might have recognized one of her borrowed dresses, but then again, the angry warlock didn’t seem like the sort of person who noticed those sorts of details.
“Exactly,” Jeremiah said, then placed the bite of chicken pie into his mouth.
It did seem as though most of the loose ends had been tied off…well, unless you knew what had really happened to Devynn’s parents. And even if something about the situation hadn’t felt entirely right, no one in town — not even his own brother — probably dared to press Jeremiah too closely about what had happened.
“This means that Samuel has no reason to believe you’re anything beyond who you claim to be,” Jeremiah continued. “He dislikes change or anything that might upset the quiet routine of our days here in Flagstaff, which is why he was not happy to learn that Eliza Prewitt’s siblings had come in search of her. As I said, he has a guilty conscience, and although he knows I will cover for him simply because the alternative is unpalatable, that doesn’t mean he still isn’t inwardly squirming with worry that you might find a clue which implicates him.”
If Samuel was so concerned about his conscience, it might have been better for him to rein in his temper and not go off half-cocked, so to speak. However, everything Seth had seen of the man — and everything Devynn had said about his actions regarding her parents — made it pretty clear that Samuel Wilcox was not the sort of man to sit down and carefully weigh the consequences before he acted.
Someone so utterly unlike Jeremiah — in temperament at least — Seth had a hard time imagining.
“But I don’t think you have much to worry about,” the primus continued. “He knows I am watching him, so while he might allow some of his irritation to flare — as it did when he went in search of you at the hotel — I doubt very much that he will act on his annoyance.”
Seth wanted to believe that, and yet, knowing what he did about the way Samuel had shot Robert Rowe in the chest apparently without even blinking an eye, he wasn’t sure whether he and Devynn could quite dismiss him as a non-threat.
Probably the best thing to do would be to make sure they were in public spaces as much as possible. Like most bullies, Samuel probably wouldn’t want to do anything underhanded in front of an audience.
Seth hoped.
“I suppose we’ll have to take your word for it,” Devynn said. Her expression was almost neutral, as though she was doing her best not to reveal her true thoughts on the subject of Jeremiah’s brother Samuel.
Even if Seth could guess that Jeremiah knew well enough that she had very little use for Samuel Wilcox.
“You should,” Jeremiah said mildly. “I think the most important thing to do now — once we’ve eaten, of course — is to see what I can learn about both your gifts, and then try to determine how they became entangled and sent you here. From what you’ve told me, it doesn’t seem as if any of this would have been possible if the two of you hadn’t possessed that precise combination of talents.”
Most likely not. Seth wouldn’t pretend to be an expert on witch powers, except the ones he’d seen used by other members of his clan, but he didn’t think he’d ever heard of a situation before where two individuals somehow had their talents blend together to create an entirely unexpected outcome.
He only hoped Jeremiah would be able to get to the bottom of it.
“Just dumb luck?” Devynn said with a twist of her full lips, and Jeremiah sent her an amused glance.
“I suppose you could put it that way.”
However, he seemed to want to put the subject aside until they could approach it in depth, and instead talked about how they might want to talk to Mrs. Marshall sometime over the weekend, since she wouldn’t be in school teaching classes all day.
“It makes sense,” Jeremiah commented as he poured some more iced tea for himself. “She’s the person your mother spent the most time with, Devynn, and so I think people would wonder why you hadn’t approached her.”
“Do you think she’ll be able to give us any useful information?” Devynn asked, her tone dubious, and at once, Jeremiah shook his head.
“Of course not,” he said. “Your mother was good at keeping secrets. This is more to maintain the illusion of an investigation, nothing more. I’ll give you her address when we’re done here.”
By that time, lunch had mostly wound down, so he lifted the little bell and rang it, and just a moment later, Mrs. Barton appeared, then cleared away their dishes and inquired if they would like any dessert.
“I made an apple crumble,” she said, and Jeremiah smiled.
“Perhaps later. Right now, my guests and I have some matters we need to discuss in my office.”
“Of course, Mr. Wilcox,” she replied, and began to expertly stack the dirty dishes and cutlery.
While she was busy with that, Jeremiah rose from his chair, so Seth followed suit, then went over to Devynn to extend a hand and help her up from her chair. She shot him a grateful look — he imagined that getting up and down in such an elaborate gown couldn’t be easy — and squeezed his fingers ever so gently before she let go and followed their host down the hall.
Even that faint pressure against his flesh had been enough to awaken a flicker of desire, but Seth pushed it away, telling himself this was certainly not the time or the place. He couldn’t pretend any longer that he didn’t care for her…didn’t want her. There might have been one prickly corner of his soul that was still angered by her deception, and yet the far more rational parts of his mind knew she’d had very little option other than to misrepresent who she was.
It certainly seemed as if she was being honest with him now.
He trailed along behind her, doing his best not to step on the dragging hem of her wine-colored gown. Although the train of her wool challis dress wasn’t as elaborate as some he’d seen while they were out and about, he had to believe it was still bulky and clumsy to deal with, and he marveled a little at how quickly she’d become graceful at managing the thing.
Had her mother given her some advice on the subject?
He really had no idea, although he guessed — if the tight-fitting denim pants and gauzy sleeveless blouse she’d been wearing when he first found her were any indication — that clothing in the twenty-first century was even less confining than the garments of his own era.
A fire flickered in the hearth as he entered the room. Devynn had paused a few feet inside the door but hadn’t made a move toward any of the chairs located there, as if unsure whether what Jeremiah planned to do next would require them to sit down.
He must have noticed, because he spread a hand toward the armless chairs placed in front of the desk and said, “You may sit if you like. We are not going to be doing any kind of physical experimentation. Not yet, at any rate.”
Seth wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. Devynn had confessed to him that she had no real control of her gift, and that was why she’d worked very hard to suppress it for most of the years after it had begun to develop.
Judging by the shadow of a frown that pulled at her smoothly arched brows, she’d been thinking about the same thing. However, she only inclined her head slightly before taking a seat in one of the chairs he’d indicated, and Seth decided he might as well do the same.
As much as he wanted to look over at her and try to gauge her reactions, he didn’t know whether letting Jeremiah Wilcox guess that he wasn’t completely thrilled with this sort of experimentation was the best idea.
If they were going to be experimenting at all.
“Seth,” the other man said — startling him a little, since he’d been sure he would address Devynn first — “how old were you when your talent began to emerge?”
“Twelve,” he replied promptly. That was easy enough to remember, since they’d had a party at his Grandma Dora’s house, and when he got home, he found himself thinking about how much he liked her friendly, old-fashioned backyard with its hollyhocks and hydrangeas and spikes of gladioli. Because his birthday was in July, everything had been in full bloom, and he’d wished his own home — a two-story flat above his parents’ store — had a garden like that…and also wished he could be back at his grandmother’s house.
In the next instant, he’d been standing in that very same yard, where some flattened grass and a few stray pieces of ribbon told the tale of the party that had been held there only a few hours earlier.
Grandma Dora always said the yell he’d let out might as well have been the steam whistle going off at the mine, and she’d rushed downstairs to see what in the world was going on. Seth knew he hadn’t been very coherent in that moment, but after a few stumbling explanations of what had just happened to him, she’d realized that his talent — a powerful, useful one — had come to him on the very anniversary of the day he’d been born.
He recounted the story to Devynn and Jeremiah, both of whom were smiling a little by the time he was done.
“And you, Devynn?” Jeremiah asked, and a flush touched her cheeks.
“It wasn’t anything nearly as fun,” she said. “It was winter, a couple of weeks before my eleventh birthday. I was thinking about how my talent hadn’t shown up yet, and what it might be when it finally appeared. And I was also thinking about the birthday party my parents had planned, which was supposed to have a mermaid theme.” A pause, and then she shook her head, as if amused by her ten-year-old self. “I guess I was really into mermaids when I was that age, although with as landlocked as Flagstaff is, I’m not sure why I got that particular obsession in my head. Anyway, my mother was keeping most of her plans for the party a secret, since she wanted me to be surprised, and I was thinking about how much I wished I could see them. And then….”
“You traveled in time,” Jeremiah supplied for her, and she smiled a little, even though there wasn’t much humor in her expression.
“Yes,” she replied. “I saw our living room all decorated with glittery streamers in shades of blue and green, and there were pictures of mermaids attached to the walls. Because my birthday’s at the beginning of March, we always had to hold my parties inside, and I could tell my mother had done her best to make the space look magical. But I was only there for a few seconds before I snapped back to my room.”
The primus’s dark, saturnine features were thoughtful. “Did you know what had happened?”
“I thought I did,” Devynn said. “My mother had always been honest about her talent, so I was pretty happy to find out that I’d gotten the gift for time travel, just like her. But it wasn’t exactly the same, unfortunately.”
“You traveled much farther than five minutes,” Jeremiah observed.
“About two and a half weeks,” Devynn said. “So my parents could tell right away that this was very different from just being able to give myself an extra five minutes whenever I wanted them. But because I’d been alone in my room when I traveled, no one noticed when I’d left…or how long I’d been gone. It wasn’t until I sent myself into the future again about a year later and disappeared for two weeks that we realized how problematic my talent really was.”
She’d made comments about her time-travel gift causing problems, but this was the first time Seth had heard the whole story about her first experience with it. Her parents must have been frantic when she’d disappeared for weeks, most likely thinking they’d lost their daughter forever.
No wonder she’d done whatever she could to avoid using her talent.
“So I stopped using it,” she said. “Because I couldn’t control it, I decided to just pretend it didn’t exist. Most of the time, I did a pretty good job of that…until I tripped and fell and somehow landed in 1926.”
“Where the two of you met,” Jeremiah responded.
“Yes,” she paused there. “I still have no idea how it even happened. The only thing I can think of is that the conscious control I’d been exerting on my so-called gift for all those years was suddenly released when I got knocked out by the fall. But that still doesn’t explain how Seth and I came here to Flagstaff. You’d think my mind would have wanted to send me back to my own time.”
For a moment, Jeremiah was silent. Behind him, the fire popped and crackled in the hearth, and overall, the room appeared far cheerier than Seth had ever expected a space in a Wilcox home would be. Despite the relative warmth of the room, though, he couldn’t quite ignore the chill that went down his spine.
What would he have done if Devynn had disappeared from his arms in that terrible moment when the breath rattled in her throat and he didn’t know whether she would last the next five minutes? Yes, he might not have been as utterly startled by her suddenly vanishing as some might have been, simply because he knew she was a witch, but….
If she’d left him in such a way, he knew he would have been forever haunted by the worry that she’d never gotten the assistance she needed, had died alone somewhere, far from a healer or anyone else who could have helped her.
Tone thoughtful, Jeremiah said, “It’s difficult to know what any of us might do in times of extremity. Some — like your mother, Devynn — rise to the occasion. Others…such as my brother Samuel…decidedly do not. It’s possible that somewhere in your subconscious, you feared you might drag Seth along with you, since he was holding you during that terrible moment, and that was why you traveled farther into the past rather than taking him into the future, to your own time, even though you knew your clan had a healer who could have helped you.”
“Just as I knew that your sister Emma was a healer as well,” Devynn said slowly, as though thinking over the situation as she spoke. “I suppose that’s some sort of explanation.”
While Seth thought he understood why they would have arrived at such a conclusion, it still didn’t explain one detail that had been bothering him ever since he and Devynn had arrived in Flagstaff.
“Maybe so,” he said. “But why here? It’s my talent that brought us to this place, not hers, since she can’t move in space with her gift.”
Devynn sent a questioning glance at Jeremiah, whose eyebrows lifted slightly. However, he didn’t reply right away, as though he wanted to take a moment to analyze the conundrum a bit more deeply.
“It’s possible that her talent somehow took over yours,” he said. “Subsumed it in a way, a bit like someone leaning over to grasp the reins of a horse team pulling a runaway wagon. Not the best analogy, I suppose, since you were far more in control in that moment than she was. Still, while most of us have learned how to guide our magical gifts and make them second nature to us, that doesn’t mean they might not still flare out of control in an emergency.”
Although Seth didn’t quite like the idea of Devynn’s gift overwhelming his — especially since she couldn’t keep it in check unless doing her best to pretend it didn’t exist — he supposed that was as good an explanation as any for what had happened. And while he’d always been proud of his magical talent, knowing it to be a useful and relatively rare one, he also had to admit that traveling in time probably was much more difficult than moving in space, even while the power used to do so was unpredictable at best.
“For now, though,” Jeremiah went on, “I’d like to work with both of you individually…if you don’t mind. That would give me a better idea of the scope of the situation.”
A protest rose to Seth’s lips — he didn’t like the idea of being separated from Devynn, not when he couldn’t be sure that she might not vanish whence she had come and leave him stranded in 1884 Flagstaff — but he kept quiet. Any arguments he made would only have sounded selfish, and he realized that he needed to put his worries aside and hope that Jeremiah knew what he was doing.
Devynn’s worried expression seemed to echo some of his inner turmoil. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea for us to be apart when we’re experimenting with our magic. What if I get lost in time again?”
“You will not,” Jeremiah said. “For I will make sure you are anchored here, and even if you disappear for longer than you might like, you will always come back to this place and time.”
Her eyes widened, and Seth knew he must have looked similarly startled.
“You can do that?” she asked.
An amused quirk touched one corner of Jeremiah’s mouth. “I can do a great many things, Devynn Rowe,” he replied. “Most of the time, I have no need to use the powers at my disposal. At others, however….”
He let the words trail off, but the message seemed clear enough.
Some of the stories about the Wilcox primus just might turn out to be true after all.