Chapter Twenty #2
“Shit.” Rose covered her mouth with her hands. “I’m so sorry! Do you think there’s a way to get to…well, anywhere?”
“Yes, of course. You have brought us to another century. Traveling over part of England is nothing in comparison. First we must get you to Everly Park, safe and sound.”
“But what if I can’t get back to my time?” Panic tightened her throat. What if she couldn’t see Ryan again?
He gently took hold of her upper arm and looked into her eyes. “You are obviously adept at time travel. Past success is the best indicator of future success.”
She rubbed her forearms. It was freezing out here…though maybe that wasn’t the only reason she was shivering.
“I will build a fire to keep you warm,” Henry said. “As the dawn breaks, we will get our bearings…” An acrid stench made him trail off. “What is that?”
“Skunk.” Rose switched on her phone’s flashlight and searched the thick cover of wild grasses and brush around them. “I don’t see it!”
To her own ears, her voice held a note of panic. She was scared, and not particularly about the prospect of getting sprayed. What if she was stuck here?
Henry asked, “A skunk? The black animal with the white stripe?”
“Yes.” Weird question, she thought.
“And you are certain that this foul odor has been made by a skunk?”
“Of course. I’ve smelled it a hundred times.” Hadn’t he, since he lived in the country? Rose pressed her hand to her chest. She was hyperventilating.
Henry clasped his hands behind his back, looking around him. “In that case, we are not on the moors. I have read of your skunks, but we do not have them in England.”
“No way.” When Henry had said they were on the moors, she’d just automatically believed him. “Then where—”
“Chicago must’ve been small in 1818. You will recall that I’d never heard of it.” He paced a few steps. “Is it possible that your part of Chicago did not exist at all?”
“Oh, shit. Are you thinking we’re in the same spot?
” She vaguely recalled the dioramas at the Chicago History Museum.
“There was an army post by the river, and a guy named DuSable built a cabin there…but I don’t know if there was anything out here.
Maybe Native American settlements?” There was a land acknowledgment on the Art Institute of Chicago website, and she tried to remember what it had said.
Henry looked thoughtful. “Would the native peoples here be friendly to us, in 1818?”
Rose scoffed. “I doubt it. I think the army fought them off their land.” She felt a crushing sense of failure. “Henry, I’m so sorry! I got your hopes up, and—”
“My hopes are not down,” he said firmly. “One rarely succeeds the first time in any endeavor. We must simply…attempt to get back to your time, and reassess.”
She gave a shaky laugh. “I don’t know about simply.” She still felt dizzy. Maybe from the hyperventilating. Or maybe from the hurtling through time itself.
Henry knelt down on the ground in front of the astrolabe and patted the place on the other side.
She leaned the phone, with its flashlight still on, against some brush, and then knelt down.
Her knee landed on a sticker bush, and she grunted and shifted her position.
But as she stared down at the astrolabe, despair washed over her.
“I can’t do it. I don’t have my little Hecate statue or my candles or anything.”
“But we have the astrolabe, and the moonstone in it.” He grabbed her hand. “My dear Rose. You are a powerful witch. Do you need images of your goddesses for them to be present?”
His question distracted her from her fears. “Not really. They help me to feel connected to them. But—”
“Can you not envision the candle you would burn, in your mind’s eye?”
“Uh…that could work.” The candles themselves weren’t magical until she used them. They were a symbol that strengthened her intentions. “But I don’t think I can imagine it and do the incantation at the same time. It’s too much to keep in my head.”
“Then I will imagine it for you.” He still had hold of her hand, and his dark gaze held hers with steady devotion.
Henry was, in general, not great at eye contact. To have him gaze adoringly right into her eyes was an honor. And it made her selfishly glad that she had failed to get him to Everly Park, because it meant they were still together.
Henry asked, “Should it be another black candle?”
Rose nodded. “I would do a pink candle, too.”
Had she told him that a pink candle signified, among other things, romantic love? Would he understand that her desire to bring him back to her apartment might help the spell work?
“A black candle and a pink one,” Henry said. “They are both lit now.”
“But I don’t have an incantation written for this.”
“Take your time. These candles will never burn out.” He cast a wry look at the prairie around them. “At any rate, I have nothing else to do.”
Then the ground fell away and her vision went black.
She hadn’t done anything yet! Were they going back? She continued squeezing Henry’s hand. Even lost in some in-between, she could feel him with her, and it made all the difference.
A solid surface arranged itself below her—or at least, it felt like that. She opened her eyes. They were in her neighborhood, but outside…
No, they weren’t. They were sitting in the middle of a vacant lot.
Several of the buildings were different; shorter.
Wooden signs read Billiards and Cigars. A group of white teenage boys sat on a stoop across from them, smoking cigarettes.
They wore white T-shirts, their hair was slicked back, and two of them wore cardigans. What in the world…?
One of them, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, looked right at them and yelled, “Sakra! Where’d you come from!” Sakra…She hadn’t heard that word for a while, and only from her late Grandma Novak. He was cursing in Czech.
“Shit!” Rose said to Henry, for maybe the dozenth time that night, gripping the astrolabe like it was a life preserver. “This isn’t—”
Then they were floating in nothingness again.
Rose prayed. Hecate, goddess of the crossroads, please take us home…For some reason, she felt the need to clarify. Take us to my apartment.
The sofa seemed to arrange itself underneath her. The floor was under her feet, and the ordinary air trickled into her lungs. She couldn’t seem to get a full breath. She opened her eyes, and both she and Henry pulled their hands away from the astrolabe like it was a hot cookie sheet.
Henry cleared his throat. “Are we remaining here?” he asked politely.
“I hope so,” Rose breathed, and they both waited a few long moments.
“Did that just happen?” she demanded. “We were here, in 1818?”
“And in another time, I believe,” Henry said.
“I think it was around the 1950s. My great-grandma had lived there then. And my grandma, when she was still a kid. But I didn’t mean to go there! I mean then!” The room was spinning. Was she not fully settled yet in this tiny pocket in space-time?
Henry covered their joined hands with his free one. His hands felt so dry and warm. He turned his intense gaze on her. “My love, you are very pale.”
“I…” Oh, Goddess, was it happening again? Everything in her peripheral vision was dissolving into sparks.