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Chapter One
Stalking a time traveler is hard work, even if you are one. Especially when said traveler totally has you made. “Can we talk?” I screamed as I dodged behind a column to avoid a spray of bullets.
The woman hunting me through the cellar slung her flashlight beam in my direction. “Sure,” she said amiably. “Hold still for a second.”
Yeah, right.
My name is Cassie Palmer and a lot of people think I’m not the sharpest pencil in the box. My strawberry blond hair, which usually resembles Shirley Temple’s in a windstorm, is part of the reason. My blue eyes, slightly pudgy cheeks and tip-tilted nose might be another, except that most men’s gazes never make it up that far. But dumb blonde or not, even I wasn’t buying that one.
My own weapon—a new 9 mm Beretta—was crowding the waistband of my jeans and poking me insistently in the hipbone. I ignored it. Year
s from now, the woman with the gun would leave a little message that would save my life. I kind of wanted her to be around to write it. Not to mention that shooting people is a good way to ensure that they don’t want to talk to you, and we really needed to have a chat.
“When did the Guild start employing women?” she demanded, getting warmer.
I stayed utterly still, pressed against the back of one of the wooden columns holding up the roof. As hiding places go, it pretty much sucked, but there weren’t a lot of alternatives. The cellar’s walls were stone, except for areas that had been patched with brick. The ceiling was wood and flat, I guess because it served as the floor of the building above. And that was it, except for a few old barrels, some mildew and a lot of dark.
Even empty, the place was big enough that she’d have trouble finding me if I stayed silent. On the other hand, it was going to be tough for us to have a conversation if I never said anything. “Look, you’ve obviously mistaken me for—” I began, only to have the wall behind me peppered with bullets.
Stinging particles of brick and old mortar exploded out at me, and a few must have grazed my cheek because I felt a trickle of blood start to slide down my neck. The stillness after the gunfire made my ears ring and my nerves jump, and my hand instinctively closed over my gun. I dragged it back. I wasn’t here to shoot her, I reminded myself sternly.
Although the idea was growing on me.
“I thought you guys were a bunch of misogynistic assholes with delusions of grandeur,” she taunted.
I stayed stubbornly silent, which seemed to piss her off. A couple bullets thwacked into the wood at my back, shaking the column. I bit my lip to stay quiet until I felt something like a firm pinch on my left butt cheek. A second later, the pinch blossomed into white-hot pain.
My searching hand came back damp and sticky with streaks that looked black in the almost nonexistent light. I stared at it incredulously. I hadn’t been here ten minutes yet, and I’d already been shot in the ass.
“You shot me!”
“Come out and I’ll make the pain stop.”
Yeah—permanently.
She paused to reload and I scurried behind a nearby barrel. As cover went, it wasn’t much of an improvement, forcing me to hunker down against the cold, filthy floor to stay out of sight. But at least vulnerable bits of my anatomy weren’t poking out past the sides.
I explored the gash in the back of my jeans. The bullet had only grazed me—what Pritkin, my war mage partner, would call a flesh wound. He’d probably slap a Band-Aid on it and tell me to stop whinging—whatever that meant—after he finished shouting at me for getting shot in the first place. But it hurt.
Of course, it would hurt a lot more if she shot me again. I peered over the top of the barrel, hoping to talk some sense into her while she was temporarily unable to kill me. Instead, my attention was caught by movement near the stairs. The dim glow of her flashlight gleamed off the barrel of a semiautomatic that had reached out of the dark. That was a problem since we were currently in 1605 and that type of gun hadn’t been invented yet.
