Chapter Seven
The slow descent from the mountain pass gave Kerry a lot of time to think. She found herself wondering if the bodies of the six men were still there in her time. Somehow her mind distanced itself from the awful human tragedy by telling her it had all happened eight hundred years ago.
Would they still be there, buried underneath that enormous boulder?
If she were to travel to that spot and dig down over the intervening centuries worth of rockfalls, would she find their skeletons still gripping rusted swords?
Her mind moved to the fall of the boulder itself. Callum had been one hundred percent certain that the spirits of the mountains had assisted him in his time of need but was it just a coincidence? There was evidence of many rockfalls up there. Perhaps the ambushers had just been unlucky. But then what a coincidence that of all the places that boulder could have landed, of all the times it could have fallen, it just happened to crush the six men trying to kill Callum?
She shook her head. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that this was no fairytale Disney medieval adventure. This was real life and there were six dead bodies back there. That was bad but what was worse was knowing if they had survived, they would have done their best to murder Callum and drag her away with them. The thought of it was enough to make her shudder. Edward would have fitted in perfectly in this era. Who was Edward?
“Are you cold,” Callum asked behind her.
“I’m fine,” she replied. “Are you all right? Did they hurt you?”
“Not a scratch on me.”
The land finally began to level out and as it did so, Callum turned the horse left, following a weak rabbit trail that headed into a wood in the distance.
“Through that and out the other side and we reach The Lantern.”
“What’s the lantern?”
“The inn where we will spend the night.”
“And I thought you’d be a sleeping under the stars kind of guy.”
“I am but you’re not.”
“I could sleep outside just as easily as you.”
“And wake up frozen, stuck to the frost under your body?”
“Maybe an inn’s not such a bad idea after all.”
They rode in silence for a spell, Kerry once again becoming lost in thought. As they entered the wood, she expected to become scared of another ambush but there was no feeling of danger in there. It was strange but without all the modern buildings around she felt almost as if the landscape were talking to her.
She would never have been able to describe it to anyone from her own time but it was as if the world around her responded to things far more strongly. Callum clearly respected the land he moved through and the land respected him in return. She felt that he would never chop one of the trees down in this wood even if he were freezing to death. In return safe passage was being granted to the two of them and a sense of protection encompassed her, making her shoulders relax for the first time that day.
She didn’t want to relax. If she did she might have to handle the thoughts that had whispered to her ever since the attack in the mountain pass.
Her attraction to Callum should not have grown. She had been trying to clamp down on it since they met but it was still there bubbling away and after seeing him fend off the MacDonalds in the ravine, it had wrapped around her like ivy choking a tree trunk, gripping tightly and invading her every thought.
He was a handsome man. There was no doubt about that. The confidence with which he wielded a sword stood in stark contrast to the nervousness of the attackers. The way he had moved, with no fear at all, had scared her beyond measure. She had cried not because she was scared of dying, though that fear was very real during the fight. She had cried because she feared falling into the same trap that had led to her falling for Edward.
The memory had come back all at once. Before she had woken up in the past she had been in a relationship, one that had just ended. In the time it took her to ask herself why it had ended, she knew. He had attacked her. Not just once either. It had been a drip feed of violence that had become as much a part of her life as fetching him toast each morning, making sure it was neither burned nor underdone but just right, not easy with such a temperamental toaster as theirs was.
She felt her ribs. That pain. Was that from the fall or was that from something he had done to her? It was impossible to tell.
The tears came with the memories. She had found Edward attractive. He had been charming, witty, confident to the point of arrogance. That had all been a lie and it was one she must not fall for again.
She found one man attractive and he had become violent. It was entirely possible that she was finding this man attractive because he was violent. She knew she could not trust her own feelings, not after they had so spectacularly let her down.
The best thing she could do was get back to her own time before she fell for Callum any further. She had a proven track record of picking the wrong man and she was determined not to do it again. What she would do was get home and then put all of this behind her.
She would have a unique secret to take with her for the rest of her life. She would have been to the past. No one else had ever done it.
No, wait. Someone else might have done it. She thought of what Callum had said, the rumors of a doorway, of someone coming from the future. What if she were to meet them? That at least would be someone she could talk to about all this.
