Page 117 of Blood of the Thistle

It was the sort of statement he imagined an innocent man might make immediately before the police decided he was very much not an innocent man.

Worse, twenty-four hours of confusion might have been understandable. Three weeks of deliberately avoiding identification looked considerably less so, and every day he waited made coming forward harder.

So instead he’d done nothing useful at all.

He’d learned her name,, about her family and her job. He’d seen photos of her smiling at a wedding, surrounded by children. Her family had flown to England, pleading for information he couldn’t give. The guilt was a constant, bitter taste. Every return to this spot was a penance, a futile hope that the street might offer up the one answer he couldn’t voice.

She’d disappeared while holding onto me.

Ryan exhaled and looked at his watch. He had been standing here for nearly twenty minutes today.

“This is insane,” he muttered.

A man passing nearby glanced at him, and Ryan pretended to be interested in something inside the shop window until he had gone by.

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?