Chapter 5 #2
The world dissolved around us, and immediately I knew something was horribly wrong.
Instead of the specific jump I’d intended, my gift seized control and flung us forward through time like a stone from a slingshot.
I felt Seth’s hands tighten on mine as we careened through that other-when, completely out of control.
Time spun around us in a kaleidoscope of images — faces I didn’t recognize, buildings rising and falling, seasons changing in the space of heartbeats.
I tried to regain control, to direct our passage toward our intended destination, but I might as well have been trying to steer a hurricane.
My gift had become something alien and uncontrollable, a force that no longer obeyed my will.
We crashed back into reality with enough force to send us both sprawling.
The impact drove the air from my lungs, and for a moment, all I could do was lie on the hardwood floor and try to remember how to breathe.
The light in the bungalow was different again — dimmer, grayer — and when I struggled to my feet, I could see through the windows that many of the buildings visible from this vantage point looked shabby and rundown.
“Where are we?” Seth asked, helping me to my feet. His voice was carefully controlled, but I could hear the undercurrent of concern in it nonetheless.
No, the real question was when we were.
I stumbled toward the kitchen, my legs unsteady.
Everything felt wrong — the way the light fell through the windows, the musty smell in the air, the sense that the bungalow itself had been changed in some fundamental way.
There was a newspaper on the table — a different one from what we’d seen in 1925, thinner, with not so many pages.
“Jerome News,” I read aloud, squinting at the date. My vision was blurry, and it took several seconds for the numbers to come into focus. “October 15, 1935.”
“The Depression,” Seth said quietly. Although of course he hadn’t lived through it, not with the way he’d escaped the 1920s to the twenty-first century, I knew he’d studied the history of that century, wanting to learn about all the things he’d missed.
He moved to the window and looked out at the town below, his entire body tense. “Damn.”
I joined him at the window and found myself wishing my vision had stayed blurry.
Many of the storefronts were now boarded up, their windows covered with sheets of weathered plywood.
The few people we could see on the streets moved with the defeated shuffle of those who’d lost hope, their shoulders hunched against more than just the autumn chill.
Even from a distance, the town looked hollowed out, like a shell of its former self.
Jerome in the 1940s wasn’t what it had been when I stumbled into 1926, but at least it had seemed as if it was trying to bounce back.
There definitely wasn’t any bounce in the town I saw now.
“Some of the mines must have closed,” I said, remembering what I’d read online about my adopted hometown. The last mine didn’t shut down until the early 1950s, but others had ended their operations long before that. “I know the Depression hit the mining towns especially hard.”
Seth was quiet for a long moment, his expression troubled. “My parents would have lived through this.”
Horribly, I knew he was right. Henry and Molly McAllister, who’d been so happy at Christmas just nine years earlier, would have watched their town slowly die around them.
They would have seen friends and neighbors leave, businesses close, and the very foundations of their community crumble away.
And they would have done it while still grieving their lost son.
“The mercantile,” Seth said, his expression even more strained…if that was possible. “It would still be here, wouldn’t it?”
I understood his concern, but I guessed that was one thing he didn’t have to worry about.
McAllister Mercantile had survived two World Wars, the Depression, and the closure of the United Verde.
The clan wouldn’t give up such a visible sign of its presence in Jerome, even though a lot of McAllisters had relocated down the hill to Cottonwood or to even more far-flung places like Payson and Prescott.
Before I could respond and give Seth the reassurance he so obviously needed, the world lurched again, and I reached out to grab his hands, knowing if I didn’t do so, we’d be forever separated.
My gift had apparently decided one jump wasn’t enough, and without any conscious effort on my part, we were torn away from 1935 and flung forward through time once more.
This time, the sensation was different, possibly less violent but even more disorienting.
We were being pulled through a tunnel made of mirrors, each reflection showing a different moment in time.
I caught glimpses of Jerome changing around us — scaffolding surrounding structures being restored, streets being paved and repaved, the slow transformation from mining town to tourist destination playing out in fast-forward.
This landing was gentler, but when I looked around, I could tell we’d moved farther into the future.
The bungalow looked different – the kitchen had been updated with avocado green appliances that screamed 1960s, and a beaded curtain covered the entrance to the home’s one short hallway.
Music drifted through the open windows, along with voices and laughter.
“What now?” Seth asked, frustration mixing with fascination in his tone.
I made my way to the window and peered out, my legs still shaky from the uncontrolled jump.
The streets were full of people — people who seemed to be in their twenties mostly, with long hair and colorful clothes that would have scandalized the residents of 1926 Jerome.
A guy around Seth’s age, his long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, stood on the corner and played a guitar, and the scent of something that definitely wasn’t tobacco drifted up from the street below.
Bright painted signs advertised art galleries and craft shops, and I could see people carrying canvases and pottery.
“Maybe the late 1960s?” I said, making an educated guess based on the clothes the people were wearing and the song the guy had been playing on his guitar, which sounded like a stripped-down version of “White Rabbit.” “The hippie era,” I added, since Seth still looked blank.
Yes, he’d studied the history of the town, but he probably hadn’t spent much time on the ’60s.
“Jerome became some kind of artists’ colony back then. ”
“Artists’ colony?” Seth repeated as he came to stand beside me. He shook his head. “This is so different from what I remember.”
“Different” was an understatement. The Jerome of the late ’60s had been transformed into something that bore little resemblance to the mining town Seth had known.
The buildings were the same — you could still see the bones of the old structures beneath the colorful paint and hand-lettered signs — but everything else was utterly changed.
“The McAllisters are still here, though,” I said, hoping I sounded at least a little encouraging.
“Obviously, all this happened way before I was born, but from what I’ve read, it sounds as if some of them hung on and then made friends with the civilians who came here in the 1960s.
That’s part of the reason why the nonmagical residents of Jerome know who we are. The trust goes way back.”
And was unique among all the witch clans, at least as far as I’d been able to tell.
But then, Jerome always had been a law unto itself.
Before I could say anything else, my wayward gift kicked in again, and once again, I grabbed Seth’s hands.
At the same time, I tried to fight the magic, to regain some measure of control over our temporal journey.
I hammered my will against the chaotic force that had taken over my abilities, trying to wrestle it back under my command.
But I was too weak, too exhausted, and the effort only seemed to make the jump more violent.
The world spun around us in a nauseating whirl of color and sensation.
Seth’s grip on my hands tightened as we were pulled through another temporal tunnel, this one lined with what looked like television screens showing rapid-fire images of Jerome’s continued evolution.
I saw the 1970s and early 1980s flash by in a blur of change and development, the town’s slow transformation from hippie haven to legitimate tourist destination.
We landed hard in what looked like the late 1980s, judging by the cars parked on the street and the clothes worn by the tourists — and there were definitely tourists now, people with cameras and guidebooks, wandering through Jerome and pointing and gawking as if it were some kind of historical Disneyland.
The bungalow around us had been updated again, although the ghastly white trim remained.
Now everything had been done in Southwest colors of peach and teal, a combination I thought clashed in a particularly hideous way with the Craftsman architecture of the home.
Well, no one had consulted me on the decor.
“Tourism boom,” I managed. My knees might as well have been made of rubber, and I struggled to stay on my feet. My vision had started to blur around the edges, and a constant ringing in my ears made it hard to concentrate.
“Devynn, you need to stop this,” Seth said, even as he continued to grip my hands, his desperate grasp a reminder that we had to stay connected no matter what else happened. “You’re going to kill yourself.”
“I can’t stop it,” I told him. The words came out in a hoarse whisper, and I coughed. “It’s not under my control anymore.”