Chapter Two #3
“Ah.” He nodded, and something about the way he said it made Anna wonder if tomorrow morning had somehow disappointed him. “So it seems I have a very limited window in which to redeem myself.”
She cocked her head, not following. “Redeem yourself?”
“I wasn’t exactly friendly back there.”
Her lips formed a drawn out, Ohhh. “You weren’t unfriendly,” she offered.
His smile returned, and for a moment he seemed to consider her. “I apologize. I had something on my mind.”
Anna shrugged and smiled, dismissing it politely. “No harm, no foul.”
Ryan looked briefly toward the street and then back at her. “All right, since you’re leaving tomorrow and I apparently have only a few hours to improve your opinion of me, would you have dinner with me tonight?”
Anna blinked, fairly certain she’d misheard, or had misunderstood.
At the same time, she thought rather ridiculously that she was certainly glad she’d spent a little extra time on her hair that morning and, after nearly talking herself out of it, that she’d even applied the false eyelashes she’d bought specifically for the trip.
Mallory had insisted they made her eyes look bigger.
Anna wasn’t entirely convinced, but they hadn’t seemed worth peeling off after she’d gone to the trouble of putting them on this morning.
“Oh, I...” she began, frowning a bit in her confusion. “I would—” the response died in her throat.
Without warning, an icy pressure seized her chest, stealing the breath from her lungs, filling her with a sharp, visceral certainty that something was wrong. Her hand rose helplessly. Was this a heart attack?
Ryan frowned and reached for her.
“Anna?”
The pressure spread outward, rising into her throat and behind her eyes until every instinct she possessed screamed that she needed to run, though from what, she couldn’t have said.
Then the sunlight dimmed all at once, casting gray shadows over everything.
Ryan glanced upward, his scowl fierce—since there wasn’t a cloud in the sky—and then returned his attention to Anna.
The air seemed to thicken, wavering before her eyes like heat rising from summer pavement. The buildings opposite the street shimmered. The colors around her blurred, as though someone had smeared wet paint across the world.
Her chest pounded and she gripped Ryan’s arm.
“What’s happening?” she asked desperately. This wasn’t a heart attack. This was danger—more real and immediate than anything she had ever known.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking more perplexed than frightened. “It’s very strange.”
The pavement beneath her feet seemed suddenly uncertain. It didn’t move or shake but simply felt... less solid.
Her stomach lurched violently as the strange distortion spread outward in a widening circle, rustling leaves that moments earlier had hung perfectly still, and sending a newspaper skittering across the pavement. The hanging baskets outside the bookstore swayed, though no wind accompanied them.
“Let’s get inside,” Ryan suggested tersely, steering her toward the door to the bookstore.
Ryan’s hand on her arm propelled her forward, though she wasn’t entirely aware of her feet moving.
Then the world vanished, became strangely colorless—not black but eerily dark—and Anna felt consciousness slipping away.
***
The passage snapped shut with a sound like a sigh, and Eilidh stared down at the street where two mortals—of the American variety—had stood moments before, but where now stood only one.
She blinked, her ethereal form flickering with the expected drain of moving mortals through the years.
She had aimed at the American—the man!—had gathered her energy, had opened the passage, and reached for the one soul she’d watched for days. But drat, the woman—the anxious, pale-haired one who smiled too brightly at strangers—had seized his arm at the precise moment the magic engaged.
And the passage, hungry and indiscriminate, had taken the woman and not the man.
Eilidh looked down at her own hands, still trembling with the expenditure.
She was an apprentice, barely trusted with crossings. Yikes. This might be why.
“Whoops,” she whispered to the empty street, glancing around with as much guilt as she was capable of feeling.
A pigeon startled from a windowsill, wings clattering against the silence, the small sound seeming oddly loud and accusatory.
She should report this, she thought. She should find one of the elders and confess that she had bungled a passage, and that the wrong mortal now wandered in the wrong time—and oy, without a fated mate.
But the thought of Moireach's dull, unseeing eyes turning toward her, of the great witch's disappointment—or worse, her indifference—made Eilidh's insubstantial chest tighten with something she barely recognized.
Fear, she supposed it was. Or its witch-equivalent, anyway.
Let her go, she told herself, already fading into the mist, already exhausted. He is safe for now. The pale-haired woman will...
Eilidh vanished before she could finish her own thought, dissipating with weakness, leaving York unchanged except for the faint scent of crackling ozone and the swaying of a hanging basket that no wind had touched.