Michael assumed Mr. Simeon, if he was telling the truth, had seen many breathtaking things in his lifetime. His breathless smile when he spoke of Avalon revealed what he thought of such a place. “How do you know of this realm?”
“I have been there.”
“You can travel through realms as well as time?” Michael asked him.
“I don’t know. I’d never tried before. I didn’t even know there were different realms until I followed Sir Lucan back to Avalon in my quest for the brooch, needed by Miss Lancaster at the time.”
“Did you ever find it?”
“Of course, I did,” the alleged time traveler said indignantly.
“It didn’t work for her?” Michael wanted to smack his own face. He was actually buying all of it!
“Oh, it did,” Simeon answered. “In the end.”
“What end? What happened?” Kestrel Lancaster was his case, after all. He’d chased down empty leads long enough. He’d like to know what happened to her.
“She chose not to go back. Sir Nicholas’ foster mother, of sorts, returned in her place.”
It was a lot to take in. Too much. There was a chance of getting back. Getting back to…
“What I have heard is this,” Simeon continued. “King Arthur recovered from what was thought to have been a mortal wound, and left Avalon. The brooch was made by one or more of the sisters to find him. But the king had his own power and tampered with the spell, causing the brooch to send people to where their greatest love awaited them.”
“Their greatest love?” Michael lifted his shoulder off the wall and stared at Simeon. “How accurate is it?”
“One out of one. Pretty accurate if you ask me.”
“What?”
“No one knows for sure,” Simeon admitted quietly. “It’s all just rumors and guessing.”
Did that mean Charlotte was his greatest love or not? His belly churned. He hoped not. He didn’t want her to be. What if she died? And chances of her dying young in seventeen twenty-four were pretty high. He could stop it. Nothing was written in stone.
“I have to get back to my time,” Michael told him, feeling the new talons of desperation at his throat.
“I don’t see how that’s possible. I don’t have the brooch, nor can I get it.”
“Why did it send me here?” Michael argued. “Just to meet her?”
Simeon’s large, almond-shaped eyes grew even wider. “Who is she? She lives here, I assume?”
“I thought you knew everything,” Michael said skeptically.
“Not everything,” the older man said with an indulgent smile. “I hate to spy. I didn’t want to see you without being seen.”
Michael shook his head and a strange, strangled, little sound escaped him. He had to pull himself together. He could. He had done it every night when he emptied his gun. But this…this was all too crazy and there was so much of it. “Let me get this straight,” he said in an authoritative voice. “I usually do this in my head, but you’ve filled it with all this nutty stuff about traveling through time and—”
“How do you explain what has happened to you?” Simeon put to him soberly.
“I’m dreaming, maybe in a coma. I could wake up at any moment.”
“Or you may not,” the stranger added. “I have recently spent a little time with Kes and Nicholas. They are real. She is expecting his child.”
Michael needed to sit. Why the hell had they come to the stable? He looked around for another stool. He found one and set it in front of Simeon’s.
“Okay,” he said, sitting. “So say this is all really happening, and time travel is real. Does my coming here have anything to do with King Arthur…or just her?”
“I think everyone tied to the king in some way might be going through the same thing.”
