Epilogue #2
There was nothing to find here, and Ryan knew it. Whatever had happened here had left no mark upon the street, no scorch upon the pavement or mysterious fissure in the earth. Thousands of people had crossed this exact spot since Anna disappeared and none of them had vanished.
He pulled one hand from his pocket and turned away, but he had taken perhaps two steps when a faint pressure settled inside his ears, compelling him to stop again.
For several seconds he remained frozen, unwilling to turn around while his mind raced ahead of him.
The sensation was slight enough that he might have dismissed it as the beginning of a headache if not for the peculiar heaviness that followed, pressing against his chest and throat while a metallic taste gathered at the back of his tongue.
The fine hairs along his arms rose beneath his jacket.
Ryan turned slowly toward the bookshop just as the sunlight changed.
It did not fade gradually as it might beneath the passing of a cloud, but changed abruptly enough that several other people in the street glanced upward.
A wind came rushing between the buildings, sending a discarded paper cup tumbling across the pavement and setting the hanging baskets outside the bookshop into motion.
Ryan stared at them, his pulse beginning to pound.
He had seen this before.
The shop windows began to shimmer, their reflections bending strangely before his eyes, and the brick buildings beyond them seemed to waver, their edges losing definition as though he were seeing them through heat rising from summer pavement.
Someone farther along the street exclaimed loudly, but Ryan barely registered the sound.
Three weeks of wondering whether he’d imagined some part of it, whether shock had distorted his memory or his mind had invented details afterward, vanished beneath the certainty of what he was experiencing now.
Whatever impossible thing had happened that afternoon had been real, and it was happening again.
“Anna?” he called, searching the shifting air before him.
He didn’t know why he said her name. Perhaps some part of him expected her to reappear where she’d vanished, deposited back upon the pavement as inexplicably as she’d left it.
Ryan took an involuntary step toward the shop, his gaze darting over the place where he’d last seen her, but the strange vibration beneath his feet intensified and his stomach lurched violently.
Only then did the significance of what was happening extend beyond Anna and settle upon himself.
Ryan tried to step backward, but the pavement no longer felt entirely solid beneath his feet.
The buildings seemed to stretch strangely upward, colors smearing into one another while the wind strengthened around him, whipping his jacket against his legs and carrying voices that sounded increasingly distant despite the people standing only yards away.
He threw out one hand, reaching instinctively for something to steady himself, but found nothing, and then the street disappeared and everything went black.
When Ryan became aware of himself again, cold had seeped deeply enough into his body that he was shivering.
He opened his eyes to bare branches moving against a gray sky and rain touching his face. For several seconds he simply stared upward, unable to reconcile what he saw with the York street where he'd been standing only moments before.
Ryan sat up quickly, and pain flared behind his left temple. He braced one hand against the wet ground until the dizziness passed.
Dead leaves. Mud. Trees.
“What the hell?”
Trees stretched in every direction, a narrow muddy path cutting through the woods perhaps ten yards away. There was no bookshop, no pavement, traffic, buildings or people—nothing at all that belonged to York.
Ryan stared at the woods.
Was this what had happened to Anna?
The thought had scarcely formed when voices reached him from somewhere beyond the trees.
Ryan pushed through the undergrowth toward the track, surprised by a weakness that made him stumble for several steps.
“Anna?”
He emerged onto the rutted road as people came into view, rounding a bend.
There were perhaps eight or nine of them, with more behind and a narrow wagon among them.
Ryan's relief faltered. They were on horseback, and more horses drew the wagon over the muddy ground.
He registered at once long, heavy cloaks, swords, a strange language—nothing before him made immediate sense, and the men on horseback seemed equally troubled by his appearance.
One shouted something he couldn’t understand.
Ryan lifted his hands. “Easy. I’m not looking for trouble.”
Another rider moved toward him. A third reached for his sword.
“Okay. Definitely not looking for trouble.”
A woman’s voice called sharply from behind them.
The men stopped.
The horses shifted, and Ryan saw her.
She sat on the seat of the wagon, wrapped in an old-fashioned deep green cloak, its hood thrown back. Dark hair showed beneath some sort of covering he couldn’t identify, framing a face so striking that for an instant Ryan simply stared.
But it wasn’t only her beauty that held him.
Something inside him went still, a sharp, silent hum of recognition.
It made no sense. He’d never seen this woman before—he would have remembered a face like that, those eyes.
Dressed in clothing from another century, on a path that should not be under his feet right now, she was a total stranger.
And yet, the feeling persisted, a wordless certainty that defied all logic. I know you.
She was staring at him as well, though whatever she saw apparently inspired more suspicion than recognition. Her posture was perfectly straight, one gloved hand upon the reins, her expression composed and assessing.
She said something to him just as Ryan realized a child, a small girl, sat at her side, owning eyes as blue as the woman’s.
Ryan frowned. “I’m sorry?”
She repeated it, more slowly this time, and he caught enough to realize that whatever she spoke was not English.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Where am I?”
Her brows drew together, but then her gaze shifted abruptly to something beyond his shoulder. The cool assessment vanished from her face, and her eyes widened. She jerked upright from the wagon bench, one hand lifting from the child at her side.
“Nae—!”
Ryan had only begun to turn when something struck him hard behind the ear. Pain exploded through his skull. His knees gave way before he understood that someone had hit him. The muddy road rushed upward.
His last clear impression was of the dark-haired woman leaning forward, alarm breaking through her composure.
And the utterly irrational certainty that somehow, impossibly, he knew her.
Then Ryan knew nothing at all.
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The End