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She became aware she was panting, and a shudder wracked her. The page swam before her eyes, the words blurring. The term German hadn’t existed in the thirteen hundreds.
How could someone who lived in the fourteenth century have knowledge of something that happened in the twentieth? It was impossible—unless the formula truly worked.
Unless they had known how to travel through time.
Chapter 15
KRIS DIDN’T RECOGNIZE HER. THEY HAD ARRANGED TO MEET outside a supermarket late the next afternoon, and Grace had arrived more than an hour early so she could watch for anything suspicious. She hated not feeling able to trust Kris completely, but there was too much at stake for her to take anything for granted.
She watched Kris arrive in his beloved ’66 Chevelle, the engine rumbling with a muscular cough that had a couple of middle-aged men throwing envious gla
nces his way. Poor Kris. He wanted female attention, but instead his car was attracting the male variety. At least he’d done some additional work on the Chevelle since she had last seen it; it was actually painted now, a bright fire-engine red.
He parked at the end of a lane and waited. There hadn’t been any suspicious, repetitious traffic during the hour Grace had been watching, but still she waited. After fifteen more minutes had passed she slid out of the truck and crunched across the thin layer of snow that had fallen on the parking lot since she arrived. It was still snowing lightly, lacy flakes swirling and dancing in the wind. She went up to the Chevelle and tapped on the window.
Kris rolled the window down a couple of inches. “Yeah, what is it?” he asked, a little impatiently.
“Hi, Kris,” she said, and his eyes widened with shock.
He scrambled out of the car, slipping a little and grabbing the door to right himself. “My God,” he mumbled. “My God.”
“It’s a wig,” she said. She wore a blond one, plus a baseball cap and sunglasses. Add losing more than thirty pounds, and no one who had known her before would have recognized her.
Kris’s stupefied gaze started at her booted feet, went up her tight jeans, took in the denim jacket, and ended once again on her face. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. The tip of his nose turned red. “My God,” he said again. Abruptly he lunged at her and wrapped both arms around her, holding her tight and rocking her back and forth. Grace’s nerves had been on edge for too long; her first instinct, barely restrained, was to kick his feet out from under him. But then he made a strangled sound, his shoulders shook, and she realized he was crying.
“Shh,” she said gently, putting her own arms around him. “It’s all right.” It felt odd to let someone touch her, and to touch someone in return. She had gone so long without physical contact that she felt both awkward and starved.
“I’ve been so scared,” he said into her baseball cap, his voice shaking. “Not knowing if you were okay, if you had a place to stay—”
“Sometimes yes, sometimes no,” she said, patting his back. “The first week was the worst. Do you think we can get in the car? I don’t want to attract attention.”
“What? Oh! Sure.” He trudged around the car to open the passenger door for her, a courtesy that touched her. He was still thin and gangly, his glasses still slid toward the end of his nose, but in several small ways she could see the advance of maturity. His shoulders looked a tad heavier, his voice had lost some of its boyishness, even his stubble was a little thicker. Manhood would suit him a lot better than boyhood; when other men his age were fighting middle-age spread, Kris would still be lean.
He slid under the wheel and slammed the door, then turned to survey her. His eyes were still wet, but now he shook his head in wonderment. “I wouldn’t have known you,” he admitted in awe. “You—you’re tiny.”
“Thin,” she corrected. “I’m as tall as I always was. Taller,” she said, pointing at the inch-and-a-half heels of her boots.
“Cool,” he said, eyeing them and blinking hard. He glanced at his own feet, and she thought he might soon become a boot man. There was nothing like boots to give a man attitude. Or a woman, come to that; she definitely walked with more authority when she wore the boots.
Then he looked back at her face, and she saw his lower lip wobble again. “You look tired,” he blurted.
“I couldn’t sleep last night.” That was the unvarnished truth. She hadn’t been able to close her eyes after reading that little note from Black Niall. Every time she thought of it she felt her spine prickle, and chills would roughen her skin. But after the initial shock, it wasn’t the bit about 1945 that was so eerie, it was the phrase “and so came Grace to Creag Dhu.” Surely he meant a state of grace, but it felt so—personal, somehow, something written specifically to her. She felt as if he were inviting her to use the formula, to step through the layers of time energy. His calculations had been very specific, for exactly six hundred seventy-five years; back to the year 1322, the year the message had been written.
Kris reached out and took her gloved hand, squeezed it. “Where have you been?”
“On the move. I haven’t stayed in one place for long.”
“The police—”
“It isn’t the police I worry about so much as Parrish’s men. At least the police aren’t actively hunting me, not after this length of time. Sure, they’ll follow a lead, but that’s about it. Parrish’s men nearly caught me once.”
“It’s so weird,” he said, shaking his head. “Do you still think it’s because of those papers you had?”
“I know it was.” She stared out the window, which was fogging up from their breathing. “I translated them. I know exactly why he wants them.”
Kris clenched his hands into fists, staring at her delicate profile. He wanted to take her somewhere and feed her, he wanted to tuck a blanket around her, he wanted—he wanted to punch something. She looked so frail. Yeah, that was it. Frail.
Grace had always been a special person to him; he’d known her most of his life, had a crush on her since he was seventeen. She had always been so nice to him, treating him as an equal when most adults didn’t. Grace was a genuinely good person, smart and kind, and her mouth, oh her mouth made him feel all hot and dizzy-headed. He’d dreamed of kissing her but never worked up the nerve. It was lousy of him, but when she had called the day before, he had thought again of kissing her, and even thought that it would be okay now because Ford was dead. But looking at her he knew it wasn’t okay, might never be okay. She was quiet and sad and distant, and that mouth didn’t look as if it ever smiled.
