Chapter Four
Noelle left the coffee shop with her Toasted White Chocolate Mocha.
She was glad he hadn’t tried to kiss her again.
She didn’t like the fact that he was a killer and she was still entertaining him based on his countenance.
She admitted he was better looking than any guy she’d ever seen, and she’d seen a lot living in the city.
But. He. Killed. A. Man! She needed to take this more seriously.
Why wasn’t she running? He had a roommate.
Didn’t killers live alone? She didn’t know him.
She’d watched him on a short piece of footage over and over, but she didn’t know him.
He traveled through time! Yes. Her doubts were fading. Was she crazy? Even so, he’d been a highwayman and he stabbed someone in the back. Or he was stark raving mad. Either way, it was difficult to get past.
She walked out into the brisk air and into a handsome older man with graying hair and piercing blue eyes. Wait. She recognized him. She did a story on his missing daughter. They never did find her.
“Mr. Lancaster? Hello, Noelle Upton from TTN. We meet this past summer. You did a short interview with—”
“Ah, yes, Miss Upton, I remember. It was about my daughter.”
She smiled. “That’s right. How are you faring through all this?”
He gave her a slightly confused look. “Through…?”
“Not finding your daughter,” she supplied, wondering if people got dementia in their late forties/early fifties. How else could he forget—
“Yes, of course!” He laughed at himself and quickly apologized. “Forgive me, I thought you had heard something new.”
Her smiled softened. “I’m sorry if I worried you further.”
She took a step to leave. She’d bothered him enough. “Good night, Mr. Lancaster. I pray you find your daughter and some peace.”
“Noelle.” It was Sebastian. Oh, great. He was leaving the shop. At least he was using the front door this time. “Please, Let me ex—”
“You!” Mr. Lancaster pointed to him and looked as if he’d seen a dead man come back to life. “You’re okay!”
“Sorry,” Sebastian said, turning to him. “Do I know you?”
“I hit you,” Mr. Lancaster explained. “My car hit you about two months ago. You ran off. I didn’t know what had become of you. It’s very odd meeting you here.”
Sebastian nodded and rubbed his chest. “I…ehm…maybe I remember you a little.”
“Were you hurt? Whatever happened?”
“I was in the hospital for a long time.”
Lancaster paled hearing the news. “I’m so sorry. I’ll pay for all your expenses.”
“’Twas good for me to be there,” Sebastian told him.
Noelle noticed the blood drain from Mr. Lancaster’s face. If he paled before because of the news that Sebastian had been in the hospital, hearing that ’twas good for him made Lancaster look dead.
“Where are you from?” Mr. Lancaster asked him.
Sebastian’s gaze flicked to her and then back to the older man. “I need to speak to her. Perhaps we can speak another time.”
“Yes. I’m Charles Lancaster.” He held out his hand.
“Sebastian Alexander.” He accepted Lancaster’s hand and then tilted his head and rubbed his Peppermint Mocha over his chest again with his other hand. When he looked at Lancaster, his eyes were green with golden centers.
Mr. Lancaster saw them and pulled his hand free.
“Are you all right?” Noelle asked him. She wanted to know what was going on here.
“I’m fine. I must be going.” He left, hurrying into Starbucks without another word.
“What was all that about?” she turned to ask Sebastian. His eyes was vivid green again.
“Why do your eyes change color like that?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He looked down at the hand that shook Mr. Lancaster’s. “I felt something when he touched me.”
“Like what?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Like his blood was flowing through mine. It’s like, if I hold your hand—” he reached for her hand and entwined his fingers through hers. “It feels…really pleasant.”
Really pleasant. Did really pleasant kick the world’s axis on its butt?
As she wondered about that, she tried to concentrate on what he was saying, and why she was still here.
Did really pleasant snatch her traitorous breath away by the simple act of holding her hand?
She didn’t know what he felt with Lancaster, but she felt something now.
“But it feels like your hand,” he continued, letting her go. “not you as a whole. When I shook his hand, it felt as if my blood naturally began to flow with his, like two pieces of a puzzle coming together.”
“That’s strange,” she said softly. “Do you think it means something?”
“I don’t know. I also felt angry. Even betrayed. It’s odd.”
Odd. Yes, the same word Mr. Lancaster had used. Not strange or weird. But odd. “Sebastian, do you think you could be related to him somehow?”
“Aye. Somehow, when I was born almost three hundred years before him. A descendant, perhaps.”
Noelle put her hand up to her head. This whole thing was making her head spin.
He looked back into the shop. “Perhaps there is unfinished business between us.”
“You’re not going to kill him, are you?”
He flicked his gaze to her and let his reply dangle there between them for an instant like the peppermint scent coming from his mocha, and his mouth.
She thought about kissing him, about his warm lips on hers.
Then his smile widened into a grin as she admired him.
“No. I’ll remember that I’m here in the twenty-first century, where there are laws against such things. ”
She nodded. “Yes.” Why was she still here talking to him? “Well—”
“Noelle, please listen. Just give me a moment. Let me explain. I don’t think you are rash or condemning. Let me explain.”
She knew she was crazy, but he was right. She wasn’t rash or condemning. She tried to be fair. She might regret it, but…“Go on.”
“Watching you on the news while I recovered helped me. I came from the past that night. ’Twas as if I were newly born in that store.
Everything here overwhelmed me. The lights, the noise…
but your voice was like an anchor, keeping me steady.
After I was hit, I clung to the only thing I knew.
Your face. It delights me. Your kiss haunts me. ”
She almost closed her eyes and sighed in agreement. It haunted her, too. “But you don’t know me,” she argued softly. And she didn’t know him.
“So tell me everything. Spend time with me and let me learn about you.”
She felt a slight smile tug on her lips at the way he spoke. He certainly was a smooth talker. And a killer. “No. You’re a killer. I can’t.” She turned to leave. His hand around her wrist stopped her.
He spoke quickly and passionately. “Preston ordered families killed. He had almost everyone in his pocket. Judges, justices of the peace, all of them. Either he paid them, or he threatened to kill their families. Everyone was afraid of him. When he ordered the death of a woman I cared about, I knew I had to do it. So I did, while he held a blade to her throat. Flinging my knife into his back was the only chance I had to save Charlotte’s life. ”
She stared up into his eyes ringed by thick black lashes and eclipsed by soft, black waves. He did it to save someone he cared about. Did it change things for her?
“I come from a different world than this one,” he told her. “It doesn’t mean I liked it. In my century, you cannot rely on the law to keep you safe. You either kill or, if you came against someone like Preston, are killed.”
He was so convincing. Oh, she wanted to believe everything he said. But there was no real evidence of any of it, except for the riders she’d seen. She had to go on the assumption that he was delusional.
“Goodbye, Sebastian.”
She pulled softly on her wrist and he released her. She took a step and was almost overcome by the smell of apples.
Almost instantly, she felt Sebastian’s hand clamp onto her wrist again. “Run!”
She turned to look at what he was looking at and quickly did as he said.
The two horsemen had returned. Their horses’ hooves were touching down a block away when she saw them.
She let Sebastian pull her, but before she could go anywhere, the Starbucks door opened, and a hand reached out and snatched hers, spilling her Toasted White Chocolate Mocha on her coat.
She was pulled hard enough to sever her connection to Sebastian.
Once back inside, she turned to glare at Mr. Lancaster. “Why did you—”
The door opened and Sebastian stood in the entryway for an instant. His gaze raked over Mr. Lancaster like molten gold, and then he hurried to her side.
“They’re going to find us here,” Sebastian told the older man. “Do you know who they are? They will kill every—” He looked round and his voice faded.
Noelle finally realized it, too. There was no one inside. Not one body was in the store. Where were they?
“Who are those riders?” Lancaster asked. “Do you know?”
The glass around the store begin to shake, almost pulse with power.
Mr. Lancaster held out his arm and stopped Sebastian when he tried to get closer to the waves in the glass.
The two riders were coming closer. This was some kind of magic.
Noelle’s mind didn’t want to admit it. But what other explanation could there be?
She would find out. She pulled out her phone to record the phenomenon.
It was dead. She remembered recording Sebastian.
She hadn’t turned it off. She ground her jaw and fixed her gaze on the quiet man she had interviewed about his missing daughter.
He appeared taller, stronger. Was he the one causing the glass to warble?
Was he some kind of magician? Where were the customers?
The baristas? Why did he think they were safe on the other side of quaking glass windows and doors?
Blinding light shone through the windows for a moment and then she could see them out there.
Their horses were enormous, arrayed in trappings of blue and gold.
They looked like knights. The kind you read about in Arthurian tales.
Just as Sebastian had told her. But weren’t Arthur’s knights the good guys?
She noted that Lancaster was watching intently, holding out one arm, as if keeping everything in place—including the content of their bellies.
When another few minutes passed—along with the riders, Lancaster let down his arm. The pulsing walls and windows stopped, proving him responsible.
“What’s going on?” Sebastian demanded before she could. “Who are you?”
“Which of you are they after?” Lancaster asked instead of answering.
“Me,” Sebastian told him, stepping in front of her.
“Why? What have you done?”
Noelle wanted to know as well. If all this was real, and she was beginning to believe it was, that meant Sebastian might not be crazy. He might be telling the truth. And if he was, then these guys were after him because he stole their brooch. And if they were the good guys, then he was the bad one.
The other possibility was that she was crazy.
“No,” Sebastian argued. “First you tell me who you are and what you just did to keep those men out of here.”
“Those things are not for you to know. Look,” Lancaster said, keeping his distance, which was just fine with Noelle, “whatever you did to piss them off. Undo it.”
“Mr. Lancaster,” Noelle finally spoke. “Did those men have something to do with the disappearance of your daughter?”
His eyes on her blazed with a power she hadn’t seen in them before. “Miss Upton,” he said slowly. “My daughter has nothing to do with any of this, I assure you.”
He was lying.
“And I trust you will not produce anymore stories on these men—or me, else we might all be in great danger.”
“Why?” she demanded.
“That’s all I can tell you, Miss Upton.” He turned away. “Don’t make me regret saving both your lives tonight.”
This was insane! She settled her gaze on Sebastian. He looked just as frustrated as she was.
“What is your involvement in this?” Sebastian asked him, not willing to give up.
“I would ask the same of you,” Lancaster said, turning back. “How do you possibly know them? I won’t tell you another thing unless you answer me. Who are you? What was it that passed between us?”
“All right,” Sebastian said, and glanced at her. “First, I took their brooch and used it to come here from the past. Seventeen twenty-four. I’m Lord Sebastian Alexander, Baron of Surrey, and I also want to know what passed between us.”
Mr. Lancaster backed into a chair and fell into it.
Noelle found it fascinating that he believed Sebastian. No questions asked.
“Seventeen twenty-four…” he echoed. “Did you know Detective Michael Pendridge?”
Sebastian nodded. “’Twas from him I stole the brooch. Though he didn’t want to return. He married my friend, Charlotte.”
The friend whose life he saved, Noelle thought and felt her insides soften on him.
Mr. Lancaster smiled and nodded. It was as if Sebastian were speaking about the most usual thing. But he wasn’t. Wasn’t this guy an intelligent archeologist?
“You believe him?” she asked.
It appeared as if he didn’t want to answer her. He looked out the window instead. Strange, Noelle thought, no one was on the street. “Do you? Believe him?”
“Yes, I do. My daughter, Kes, went back to fourteen eighty-four.”
She stared at him and blinked her eyes. “Are you coming from seeing a doctor at the hospital, Mr. Lancaster?”
He smiled, knowing what she was insinuating. “No. I am meeting someone here for coffee.”
He waved his arm and the customers, and everyone else, returned, talking, ordering, drinking. It was as if nothing had happened.
Noelle’s and Sebastian’s mouths fell open. What? What just happened?
“How did you do that?” Noelle demanded. “Are we being punked or whatever they do these days?”
“I can assure you, Miss Upton, no.” Lancaster sipped his drink and offered them a place to sit. He rested his quite lucid gaze on Sebastian and shook his head. “You are here for a reason. I think I know what it is.”
“What?” Sebastian asked, slipping into a seat.
“To kill me.”