too.”
I turned and stared out the window as the late afternoon sun faded to a purple twilight. I barely even flinched when the repo truck came for my SUV.
“I have to stop the bargain,” I muttered to Clara. “One last trip and then I’m stuck wherever I go. So this is my last chance to right the big wrong that’s been done.”
The cat’s tail twitched but she said nothing as I reached for the hourglass. Unscrewed the top and plucked out a single grain of sand. I didn’t know what to picture, so I pictured the words even as I spoke aloud.
“Take me back to the day before Clara made her bargain.”
The cat’s eyes rounded and an instant later, Robin appeared, “Joey, you can’t!”
But it was too late. My lids lowered and swirls of sucking color appeared. The grain of sand in my hand disappeared and I was lost to the current of time.
Chapter 18
North Carolina Colony, Winter 1769
Either I was getting used to traveling through time or there was something about journeying outside of my own timeline that helped keep me conscious. One second, I was sitting in my window seat and the next I was bumping along in the back of a horse-drawn cart. The first sense that registered was the smell. It was truly foul, a combination of a port-a-john and fresh manure with a healthy dose of the hay I was lying in. I sat up as the conveyance pulled to a stop in front of a dingy-looking building with even dingier people milling about in front of it.
“What in tarnation you doing back there?”
I turned to see a rumpled old creature all knobby knees and elbows with a long unkempt beard staring at me through squinted eyes. He did a slow up and down perusal of my body, his bushy eyebrows disappeared beneath the brim of his battered hat.
I glanced down and made a face at my wardrobe gaff. I was still wearing the leggings and sweater of my mother’s only now I’d reverted back to my pre-time travel weight. Where before the sweater fit almost like a dress, it hugged my hips and breasts in a way decent for the twenty-first century but decidedly less so for the eighteenth.
Plus, it was cold as hell and I wasn’t wearing a coat.
“I’m looking for Clara,” I said.
“Clara who?”
I made a face. Why hadn’t I bothered to get her last name before I’d embarked on this journey? Or a description of where she’d lived or what she looked like? I knew she was an ancestor, but which side, Grammy’s or Grandpappy’s? Panic filled me as I realized I might have wasted my final trip through time. I hadn’t left myself a ton of excess to accomplish my task and I was totally not prepared.
A hand gripped my shoulder. “I’ve got her, Joseph. Probably just another prostitute from down the mountain looking for work.”
I sputtered and then gawked up into brilliant sapphire eyes. The bastard caught me already. Unlike me, Robin wore period-appropriate clothing of a lace-up shirt tucked into buckskin pants with a heavy woolen coat over the top.
“If you say so, Sherriff.” The man with the cart gave me a quick up and down and a gleam of interest sparked in his eye. “Let me know if she starts working over at the tavern. I’ll throw a few pennies her way.”
“A few pennies?” I spluttered but Robin steered me out of the snow and mud-filled street and toward a sagging wooden building.
“Come with me, you foolish little lamb,” he growls.
“Where are you taking me?” I tried to tug my arm free but his grip was like that of a vice.
“Away from the slaughter.” He pushed through a door then slammed it shut behind him, blocking the chill winter air. Not that the air inside was much warmer. The light was dim and I scanned the dank space. We were inside an actual jailhouse. The two barred cells in the back of the one-room building were a dead giveaway.
“What were you thinking, coming back here?” Robin removed his coat and draped it over the chair next to a battered desk.
I moved to the pot-bellied stove which radiated a decent amount of heat, at least enough to warm my frozen backside. It was a challenge to glare at a man while rubbing feeling into one’s posterior but somehow, I managed. “It’s my trip, I can do what I want with it.”
“So you come back to pre-revolution North Carolina?