Chapter 42
CHAPTER 42
Cally tumbled out of the cold river, holding her breath tight, the grip she’d gotten on Max’s legs as the floodwaters had hit never letting go.
Goosebumps shivered cold through her wet skin, an unaccountable taste of char in her mouth. Mud squished beneath her knees.
The sound of angry water rushed past her in the swollen riverbed.
Quickly, she opened her eyes, looking for that varmint Prince Hugo. The flood had spit her and Max out onto a muddy hillside, the same muddy hillside where she’d first found him seven days ago, the water receding, leaving the two of them behind, wet and muddy, too.
Seeing no sign of the varmint—he’d been struck by the flood as much as she and Max had been—she took a deep breath, opening her lungs to the pine-and-mud-scented air. Beneath her torso, Max’s legs began to stir.
A rush of joy filled her. He was alive.
She wasn’t sure he would be. He’d aimed right at his ancestor’s heart when he’d fired. He’d done it to protect her.
Max coughed once, twice, his body shaking at the effort, then his lungs filled with air. His eyes opened.
His gaze met hers. Slowly, a smile crossed his face, his face taking on more color as he breathed again and again.
She climbed fast up his body, his wet, muddy arms coming around her tight, and he kissed her, Cally kissing him back, as fiercely as her love for him.
A cheer rose behind them.
A cheer?
Lifting her head, Cally turned toward the sound.
A quarter mile back, folks, a great many folks, stood upstream on a low rise above the floodwaters, beside a metal grandstand, near the remains of a wood bridge, the folks clapping and hollering.
More folks—folks in uniforms—ran through the mud toward them, dodging boulders and other uprooted flood debris. A metal vehicle the likes she’d never seen and as shiny bright as a new penny was bumping down the hillside above the grandstand on tall, fat wheels.
“Max,” she whispered with a big grin, her heart beating fast. “We’re in the future.”
His arm tight around Cally’s back, Max lifted himself up on his other elbow and gazed at the cheering crowd, shock running through him that he was alive.
Shock running through him that Cally was here, in the future, with him.
Never, he knew this now, would he ever let her go.
A cold shiver went over him. Sun struck his body, warming his wet, goosebumped skin. Blood rushed hot through his veins. Patting his muddy chest, then his ribs, Max assured himself it was all real, not a dream. He was alive.
But he’d shot Hugo. He could have sworn he’d shot Hugo.
“Prince Max,” the mayor of Mule Stop—the future Mule Stop—shouted, running toward him from the grandstand with Max’s assistant Nelson, her high-heeled cowgirl boots catching in the mud the flood had left behind. Nelson’s leather-soled designer shoes weren’t doing much better. Beyond them, the grandstand—sitting on the low rise where Hugo’s wagon had been—seemed unscathed, but the stage down by the water was gone. The new bridge had lost its railings and a great deal of its planks.
Better shod, Max’s security detail and the local police officers who’d been guarding him ran ahead of the others, the tall local deputy reaching them first.
He dropped to his heels beside Max. “Prince Max,” he said in an authoritative voice. “Don’t move until the ambulance gets” —his eyes had gone to Cally and stuck there— “ Cally ? Cally James ?”
Cally’s mouth dropped open. “Zeb?” Her voice rose with joy. “ Zeb ?” Climbing off Max, she leaped up into Deputy Henderson’s arms, nearly knocking him backwards into the mud.
Deputy Henderson—Zeb Henderson, Max realized, a man as much from the past as Cally and a good friend of the nineteenth-century James family—stood, Cally still in his hugging arms, and Max stood, too, water and mud squishing in his cowboy boots, his body aching from all the boulders and logs and other debris that had struck him—or he’d struck them—during the flood.
“ You’re alive ,” Cally shouted to Zeb. “You’re alive . Max said you were, but…” Her gaze searched the deputy’s. “Miss Melody?”
“Mrs. Henderson to you,” Zeb said and grinned, his authoritative expression dropping away into the likeable, open face of the sort of man Max would like to have as a friend, too.
Cally clung for a moment in Zeb’s arms, then turned to Max. “This here is my prince,” she told Zeb, dripping water. “Prince Maximilian Alphonse Frederick George of the House of Balmont.”
“Am I forgiven, Deputy?” Max said, his arm going around his Miss Calico.
Zeb grinned and shook Max’s hand, mud and all. “Welcome home,” he said, more mud on his khaki uniform from where he’d hugged Cally, and turned back to her. “Damn, I hoped you would make it.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, bedraggled and wet, but her eyes shone with excitement, that beautiful vitality Max loved in her sparkling brighter than the hot sun.
“I might have had a feeling your prince was heading to the past.” Zeb shook Max’s hand again, as if bygones were truly bygones. “I’m looking forward to reading Doc’s or Bart’s letter about this.”
Max smiled. “Take us somewhere we can get a shower and clean clothes, and Cally and I will tell it for ourselves.”
The big four-wheel-drive vehicle that had been bumping down the hill from the parking lot above the grandstand had reached the flood line and was headed their way, the roar of the engine seeming excessively loud to Max after seven days in the more peaceful past. The scent of pine in the fresh air made him feel like he was still in the 1800s. Even the stink of the mud deposited from the receding floodwaters reminded him of that distant century, smelling just like it had when he’d first time-traveled.
Sheriff Larson reached them next, Max’s security team not far behind.
“Uncle Bob,” Zeb said to the sheriff, “this is Miss Cally James.”
A broad grin crossed Larson’s face. “Sheriff Larson, ma’am,” he said to Cally with a tip of his official law-enforcement cowboy hat, his gold, shield-shaped badge glinting in the sun. “Most folks call me Uncle Bob. I’m sure glad to see you. Doc Jannings is my great-great-grandfather.”
“Howdy,” Cally said, a big smile lighting her whole body.
Max realized with a start that Uncle Bob had his ancestor’s round face, and kind eyes.
The sheriff glanced back at Max’s security people, who were sprinting around a particularly dense patch of debris, then at the crowd milling around the grandstand, young girls and boys venturing down to the edge of the water and poking around in the mud as the flood receded more. “Not sure how we’re going to explain to people what you were doing in the water, Cally,” he told her in a low tone, then turned toward Max. “Or your change in clothes,” he said, glancing at Max’s Western shirt and leather vest.
“Perhaps they won’t look any farther than the mud,” Max said.
Stepping past him, Uncle Bob bent and picked something up from a small pile of tree branches that had accumulated against the side of a nearby boulder—more flood debris, Max thought, until Uncle Bob turned and held the object out to him and Cally.
It was her trophy, the one that had sent Max to the past, he recognized the dent in the front above the engraved year. The trophy Hugo had taken to Zalgravia all those years ago, before Max had learned of his ancestor’s misdeeds. Mud covered most of it now, except for the dent and a darkly charred patch of silver—char from the lightning strike.
“I have a safe place for this,” Uncle Bob said, and Max got a feeling the sheriff was the Doc Jannings connection at this end of the time-travel expressway. Uncle Bob glanced at Zeb. “I expect I’ll be getting a letter about this.” He turned back to Max and Cally. “Doc Jannings has a way of communicating with us.”
“We heard,” Max said, wondering like crazy what had happened to Hugo.
And then his security people were there, setting up a protective perimeter and ensuring he was unharmed from the flood.
Cally grasped Max’s hand tightly as he helped her up into the high seat of the marvelous shiny vehicle that had made its way down the hill and along the muddy riverbank without a horse or mule to be seen, Cally a bit dizzy from the tumble in the floodwaters, a bit dizzier still that she was in the future.
Max’s future. And hopefully, her heart told her, their future.
The vehicle’s seat was broad and cushioned and unlike any wagon or buggy seat she’d ever seen. Cold air— cold air —blew around the inside of the covered vehicle, though the windows—dark as smoke—were closed tight.
A feller dressed in a black suit without a waistcoat sat up front on another broad seat, steering them back toward the grandstand and up the hillside with a small wheel that stuck out just beneath the wide front window. The big vehicle bumped and jolted like an unbroke horse, but her gaze was on the trees at the top of the hill where she’d hidden Apollo. Had Bart and Ma found him?
Had the Evil Prince died from Max’s bullet?
Had Max’s fear, that he and his parents and siblings would no longer exist as a result of that death, been wrong?
Or had Max’s gunshot somehow missed his ancestor entirely before they’d all been tumbled by the flood, and even now, the Evil Prince was threatening someone else, like Livie and her unborn baby?
Beside her, Max borrowed a fresh bandana and a tall, skinny container from Zeb, who sat up front next to the feller in the black suit.
Max showed Cally how to open the container’s top. To her surprise, it was a modern-day canteen, made of metal painted green that was decorated with a drawing in white of the Elkhorn Valley, with a green top that screwed off, and water sloshing inside.
He offered her a drink from the canteen, the water warm and pure against that lingering char taste in her mouth, he then poured some over the borrowed bandana and gently wiped the mud from her face, then her hands, murmuring words of love for his Miss Calico, then he washed his own face and hands, sending a half-worried glance her way now and then, and she knew that he, too, was wonderin’ what had happened after they’d left the past.
A pang hit her heart at the thought of those she’d left behind.
Max squeezed her clean hand, as if he’d heard her thoughts.
She squeezed back, wanting to find out his own thoughts on the matter, but he and Zeb had warned her to say nothing of her travel through time in front of the black-suited feller and the rest of Max’s security guards.
Instead, she gaped at the big crowd of folks milling around the grandstand. Ma would have been shocked—Cally was shocked—at the skimpy clothes, men and women both showin’ off their bare legs and arms, and even some chests and bellies.
But the land was the same. The Wind Dance range off to the west. The high ridges of the Walford Peaks a mile beyond the far end of the small valley.
Even the clump of tall boulders high on the hillside at the valley’s other end, where she and Apollo had hidden when the first flood, the one in the past, had hit, near where she’d first met Max.
All landmarks to her time. And that made her happy, that the things important to her hadn’t changed.
Turning in the seat, she glanced behind them to the north, her gaze lingering for a long moment toward her home, a sense of loss rushing through her.
Impatient to get somewhere she and Max could talk privately with Zeb, she turned back to the front as they neared the top of the hill, where more shiny vehicles awaited, her head full of questions for her old friend about the modern-day Sky Top.
Up in the parking lot at the top of the hill, Max grasped Cally’s muddy waist and helped her out of the four-wheel-drive vehicle, holding her close to him when her soggy cowgirl boots were standing firm on the asphalt, afraid that if he let her go she might disappear like a wisp of mist vanishing in the sunlight.
The big vehicle hid them from view of the press and any other prying eyes and cameras, and taking a quiet moment, he kissed his Miss Calico again, slowly, lovingly, full of a gratitude to the time travel gods that she was there with him.
Her heart beat in excited thuds against his chest. His heart felt full of a joy that nearly overwhelmed him. Pulling back, he looked her in the eye. “How did you…?”
“I grabbed hold of your legs right before you were struck by lightning,” she told him. “Hung on like the blazes.” She smiled, love—and tears—in her beautiful eyes. “I never let you go, Max,” she said fiercely. “I told you I’d never let you go.”
The sound of walkie-talkies and nearby voices broke into the next long kiss he gave her. A few feet away, someone cleared his throat—Zeb, Max realized when he opened his eyes, the deputy coming around the vehicle’s front bumper.
Max and Cally stepped apart, Cally blushing.
Still feeling a bit dazed, from the flood, from the lightning, from the fact she was at his side, Max tucked her into the shelter of his arm and glanced around. The parking lot was full of modern-day vehicles, the townspeople and press that had come for the dedication of the wildlife sanctuary being kept down by the river until Max and his security team were back in their high-tech, bulletproof SUV and on their way. Nelson was still down by the water, managing the mayor and the press. Hot sun struck the asphalt.
The storm to the west rose off the hills at the end of the small valley and traveled swiftly back toward the Wind Dance Mountains.
Everything looked the same way as it had when he’d arrived that morning not forty minutes ago, in present time, except… “Where are the protestors?” he asked Zeb, who stood a few feet away, watching over Cally as if he, too, was afraid she might disappear, Zeb as protective of her as her older brother Bart.
Zeb’s brow furrowed. “What protestors?”
Uncle Bob, stepping around to them from the back of the vehicle, where he’d been conversing with Max’s security team, nodded thoughtfully. “More things than we realized must have changed” —he glanced at Cally— “while you were in the past.”
Cally’s bright gaze watched Uncle Bob for a long moment, and Max could practically see her thoughts working.
The head of his security team joined them with the news the road out of the sanctuary was clear and it was time to leave. The high-tech, bulletproof SUV that had brought him from the airport pulled up beside them, its black exterior glinting in the hot sun.
Cresting the top of the trail down to the river, a pretty young woman in a flowered, modern-day dress, with a baby in a carrier on her back, hurried toward them, shock on her face. A familiar face.
Cally caught her breath, then she was stepping forward, out of Max’s arm. “Howdy, Miss Melody,” she called out with a grin as the young woman neared. “Thought I’d come visit for a spell.”