I stood outside the castle fortress carved into the mountain and stared at a landscape that had no business existing: megafauna and bog and sheets of ice.
It was like someone had flipped a switch labeled OFF at the back of my skull. My thoughts dimmed. The scene before me blurred, and the volume dropped out of the world.
“Dorcas? Dorcas?” That name I hated again. Aengus… my possible fated mate calling out to me. Technically, he still stood beside me, but his voice sounded as if it was coming from the other end of a wind tunnel. “Are you preparing to scream or shut down?”
SCREAM or SHUT DOWN
The choice flashed, like one of those reincarnation anime where you get to choose your next adventure.
But I would not have chosen this.
Suddenly, the system got tired of waiting and chose shut down by default.
“Dorcasss!”
I think my legs buckled. I was suddenly once again cradled in Aengus’s arms, and the sliding door to the cavern slid open to let us back into the relatively warm room of solid rock.
“Put me down….” a voice demanded.
There was so much static in my head, it took me a moment to realize it belonged to me.
“Put me down!” I shrieked the words this time while twisting in his hold. “Don’t touch me! Put me down!”
Aengus did as I asked, setting me upright on my feet.
“Dorcas. We are sorry to have upset you.”
“Upset me?” I bared my sharp canines at him. “You tried to kill me. And now this?”
“We give you apologies.” As large as he was, Aengus hunched his broad shoulders. Like I was delivering physical blows, and he was attempting to shield himself from my attack. “Many apologies.”
“I don’t want your apology. I want answers!” I shouted back. “Why am I here?! Why did Sadie push me into that lake?”
Aengus just shook his head. “We do not know of whom you speak, or the specific details of how you came to fall from the sky.”
My righteous anger deflated a bit. Of course, he didn’t.
He was the one from an epoch that ended more than eleven thousand years ago. How could he possibly know what had happened in my future?
Technically, he was innocent. It wasn’t his fault Sadie pushed me into the lake. He wasn’t the one who’d given me no other choice but to say what turned out to be a fated mate spell.
Conflicting feelings thrashed in my chest with nowhere to go.
“Dorcas…” Aengus hunched down even farther to address me, like I was a tantruming child beginning to see reason. “May we hug you? Comfort you in your time of distress?”
I could only blink at him. He’d put a knife to my throat last night, and now he was offering me solace in his arms?
“No.” I pointed to the door. “I need you to leave.”
I had to think, come up with a plan to get the devil emoji out of the Pleistocene Age, and I couldn’t do that with him hovering over me.
He straightened to his full height. He wasn’t completely human—his smell told me that. But he wasn’t a robot, either. His expression flickered with something too genuine for machinery, and I knew his feelings were hurt.
“Attempting to process a temporal displacement of this magnitude by yourself is not wise. It might lead to… suboptimal outcomes.”
I gritted my teeth. “You know what’s really a suboptimal outcome?” I asked him. “Getting stuck thousands of years in the past with a knife-wielding…”
I indicated at him helplessly. “Whatever-the-answer-to-my-third-question-is.”
