Chasing Shadows (2 page)

Sarah did. Sort of. A sudden thought occurred to her. “Karen?” she asked slowly. “Do you think that if you and Seth got married, then they might seem more like an actual family?” Judging by the pained and slightly wistful look that crossed Karen’s features, her query had merit.

“I can’t honestly say that I haven’t thought about it,” she admitted, her green eyes once again focused on the grass under her feet. “Then it wouldn’t just
feel
like we’re a family, but we would actually be one. Legally, I mean.”

“But isn’t that what family’s all about? Heart, not technicalities?”

Karen smile was genuine as she looked into Sarah’s eyes. “You know, you always seem to have the right words to say.”

“Me?” Sarah stroked her chin thoughtfully. “I’ve never really considered myself much of a philosopher, but maybe I should change my major.”

“Well, you sure made me feel better, and you see things differently than most people do.” Karen grinned. “In a good way, of course. ”

“Thanks,” Sarah said quietly. The yard was silent except for the rustling of leaves in the light breeze as the girls set their swings in motion again, and Sarah had to bite her lip to keep from asking the one question that was burning her mind. She didn’t have to wait long before the silence was shattered by the words she’d been hoping for.

“I know you’re dying to ask me, so go ahead,” Karen said without looking up, though there was a grin in her voice.   

Sarah expelled the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, relieved to have an opening. “You know I’m glad to see you, but what exactly are you doing here?”

~Chapter 2~

“I already told you why I’m here.”

Sarah’s shoulders sank. “So the king is really dead?” She felt shocked that the king was actually gone. He was terribly sick when she’d left, but somehow she had expected him to survive the illness. It just seemed so surreal, especially since she hadn’t been there when it happened.

“Three days ago,” Karen answered solemnly. “Queen Meredith and the prince are really grieving over his passing, especially since they weren’t allowed to see him in his last days—you know, because they weren’t sure if it was contagious. I heard the physician declared that it was the illness that took him, but I still think it was foul play.”

Sarah hesitated. “You mean you still believe his brother Cadius poisoned him?”

“I
know
he’s responsible for his death, but I don’t know how to prove it. That’s why I need your help.”

Sarah shook her head at the ridiculous idea. “What on earth can I possibly do to help you from here? I was useless last time, remember?”

Karen remained silent for a long time, her expression pained and regretful. “You know I wouldn’t ask this of you if there were anyone else.”

Sarah stood abruptly, setting the swing in motion. “You’re seriously asking me to come back?” The words were whispered in disbelief. Emotions raged within her; excitement, surprise, fear, guilt. When Karen had appeared on her doorstep and said she needed to come back, Sarah had been too surprised to take her seriously. But now that the request was presented to her again, she knew Karen was dead-set on having her help.

Karen’s eyes pleaded for her to understand. “I told you, if there was anyone else—”

“But what about Seth?” she asked desperately. “He has to be a better choice than me. He can help you.”

Karen shook her head. “I don’t want him to get involved.”

“But you don’t mind me risking my life?”

“No, of course I do.” Karen heaved a gusty sigh of frustration, lifting her bangs off her forehead. “It’s just that you’re already involved in all of this, so I didn’t want to include anyone else. Seth doesn’t know half of what I’ve done. He doesn’t even know my theory about the king being poisoned, and I would like to keep it that way.”

This caused Sarah to pause. Karen’s reasoning made sense, and she also felt a responsibility to her friend to see this through.

Sarah shook her head and mimicked Karen’s heavy sigh. “How did you even get here?” She had thought that the time watch was broken, or faulty at best.

“It gained enough energy to get me back to the lab so I could fix it.”

Sarah stared at her for a long moment and then her gaze drifted to her wrist. The sleek, numberless black face of the watch contrasted against Karen’s fair skin. Sarah wondered how she had missed it before. “So it’s really fixed?”

Karen nodded her head. She stood, reached into the front pocket of her jeans, and held something out to her. Sarah took it in her hand, taken aback, and slid her thumb over the smooth silver band of the watch.

“This one is yours,” Karen said, suddenly sounding unsure of herself. “I made some improvements to the watch that the professor and I had planned on before everything went south. This new model is waterproof, so we won’t be having any accidental trips to the past,” she added with a grin. “It also has a larger storage capacity for GPS memory, too.”

“So that’s how you found out where I live?” There always seemed to be a surprise around each corner. Sarah suddenly felt like she was back at the loft in the Joneses’ barn that first night, remembering Karen’s explanation of the inner workings of the watch and how she had inadvertently pulled them back in time. Sarah recalled that night with perfect clarity, and with that memory came others. She didn’t want to dwell on those thoughts for too long and instead focused her attention back on Karen.

“Do you remember when we sent Lilly back that last time without her wearing a watch?” Sarah nodded slowly, wondering what she was getting at. “Well, I used coordinates to send her back, since we couldn’t give her our only watch to take back with her. It was kind of wishful thinking on my part, since the watch
technically
never worked like that with such minimal power.”

Her eyes brightened like it always did when she spoke of the invention, and she went on. “It uses up a lot of battery power to transfer a person using GPS coordinates, so it can be . . . dangerous if handled improperly.” Sarah’s eyes widened, and Karen hurried to explain. “I was cautious, I promise. She either would have been wholly sent back, or nothing would have happened—no getting stuck in the in-between, I swear.”

Sarah exhaled.  “Okay, go on.”

“Well, it should have occurred to me sooner, but the watch never had the capability to throw coordinates before it took a swim. After you left the same way Lilly did, I realized the implications of what must have occurred in the infrastructure of the watch when water permeated the mechanism that allows us to travel between times.”

Sarah held up her hand, sensing that the other girl was about to go into one of her scientific rants that would undoubtedly lose her completely. She couldn’t help but grin, though, at her friend’s enthusiasm over dropping the watch in a
puddle
. “You’re going to have to slow it down with the wormholes and scientific theories stuff.” She jerked her thumb toward her chest. “Barely made it through high school science.”

Karen actually laughed at this, causing Sarah to smile. It felt good to have a more light-hearted topic.

“Okay,” Karen conceded, a slight grin still on her face. “Basically, I realized that the watch was able to store and focus GPS coordinates—sort of like throwing them across the room at a specific object or person. When the watch got waterlogged last time and brought you and Lilly back, it registered only the last coordinates that it pulled someone from. I just followed the trail back to you, and then it gave me the idea to alter the storing process on the sort of ‘motherboard’ for the watches. Thus, here I am.”

Slowly, her smile faded. “I wouldn’t have come for you unless I truly needed your help, but there’s no one else I can trust to help me stop Cadius from becoming king. And we have to go back before too much time passes there.”

Sarah bit her lip, still having difficulty believing that any of this was happening. A part of her wanted to go with Karen without a backward glance and have another adventure, regardless of the consequences. But the more logical side of her held her back from throwing caution to the wind. She shook her head. “But won’t Prince Adrian become king now? I mean, isn’t that how it works?”

Karen was silent for almost a full minute before she spoke. “That’s part of what I’m afraid of. If Cadius was able to so easily kill his own brother for the throne, I don’t think he will have much of a problem dealing with the next obstacle in his way. It’s becoming harder for me to sneak around unnoticed, since some people believe I’m a witch who escaped a deserved fate.” She cringed. “Not that many people were there when Dunlivey arrested me, but it’s starting to get more risky for me to go into town if someone recognizes me. That’s why I need your help.”

“What about the Shadow?” Sarah asked anxiously, though the words were hard to say. Part of the reason she had such a hard time complying with Karen’s request was because of the way she had left, but more specifically, whom she had left behind. 

Karen shrugged. “He disappeared almost four months ago. No one has been able to find him, and believe me, they’ve tried. Both to kill him
and
to get his help.”

Sarah’s blue eyes jerked up, staring at Karen as though she were crazy. Four months? That wasn’t possible.

“But he saved you from the dungeons a few weeks ago,” she said, finding her voice. “I remember you telling me the story. And I saw him just before I left, so there’s no possible way he’s been missing for that long. I’ve only been back a few weeks!”

Karen appeared surprised and then her eyes softened in sympathy. “Technically, you left Serimone a little over four months ago. I told you a while ago that when you travel back and forth, the continuity between time in the real world and wherever we disappear to isn’t consistent; they aren’t parallel to each other or linear, like time zones, and it’s impossible to say how time passes in one world while we’re in another.”

Sarah remembered a conversation like that, but vaguely. How could it have been such a short time for her and so long for the others? Then she recalled Karen’s words about the Shadow’s lengthy absence and gnawed on her lower lip. Gone for several months? She couldn’t believe that anything would prevent Will from his self-appointed duties as the elusive protector of Serimone.

Her breathing stilled for a fleeting moment of alarm. Had something happened to Will? She almost shook her head at the absurd thought. Though Karen didn’t know Will’s secret, she did know how Sarah felt about him and would have told her if he were in danger. Wouldn’t she?

Karen was motioning with her hand to the watch Sarah clung to absentmindedly. “I still have no idea how exactly the lapse in time between our world adjusts, but when I modified the watch, somehow it seems to have slowed the rate of time in your world.”

Sarah wrinkled her brow, trying to follow as she pulled her thoughts to the present. “So time in the other place has always moved faster?”

Karen lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I don’t know, exactly. I’m not a scientist, but it seems like use of the time watches affects how time flows between worlds.” She began to use her hands animatedly as she tried to convey her ideas to Sarah. “Maybe using them speeds things up when we go to the past, or maybe when we travel back to the present, we get dumped close to the same instant we left. It’s just a theory, though.”

“Or it could be like moving through molasses when we jump a thousand years,” Sarah added absentmindedly. “Like it slows us down when we’re trapped in the in-between world or space-time continuum, or something.”

Karen’s hand stilled mid-motion, and she was grinning. “Who’s the scientist now?”

Rolling her eyes to disguise her own grin, Sarah retorted, “Well, I read a lot of sci-fi, so my ideas are mostly based in fiction.”

“Then come back with me and decide for yourself,” Karen urged, suddenly serious again. “You know I would never ask this of you if there were someone else. Please, Sarah, I really need your help.” Karen’s earnest plea hit its mark, though Sarah was still hesitant to agree.

“But what can two teenage girls do about a medieval tyrant?”

“Two teenage girls that can travel through time,” Karen amended, eyes twinkling as she waved her wrist in the air.

Sarah smiled reluctantly. “Yeah, how could I forget?” She sucked in a deep breath, staring at her legs as she spoke. “Is there a guarantee that I can get back?”

She could hear the surprise and relief in Karen’s voice. “So long as we keep our watches with us.”

“How long would we be gone for?”

When Karen didn’t answer, she glanced over at her. Karen pressed her lips into a thin white line. “Like I said, I can’t say for certain. I know it’s a lot to ask of you. You probably thought that you would never have to come back, and you don’t—the choice is up to you.”

Sarah let her eyes wander the backyard for several long minutes, wondering what she should do. Though she was still intimidated by the prospect of facing whatever, and
whoever,
awaited her, she still felt this crazy, desperate need to flee from the stress of real life for a time. Maybe she was being impulsive, since most normal girls would just go to the mall for an afternoon reprieve, but this seemed like as good an excuse as any to escape. Besides, Sarah had never fallen into the “normal” category.

Karen, seeming to sense that she needed time to process everything, remained silent while Sarah weighed the pros and cons in her head. What better way to forget about real life than to immerse herself in a life of the past?

“Fine,” she said at last.

Karen started. “Fine?”

“Fine, I’ll go back with you.”

Karen visibly brightened. “Really?”

“Yes, but I can’t give you any guarantees. If things are really bad or we get into trouble, I think we should just abandon ship, regardless of whether or not the real killer is put away. That’s my one condition, but it’s a deal breaker.”

Karen hesitated briefly, and then nodded her head in acquiescence. “Okay. I can live with that. Then we will have tried our best.”

Sarah nodded. “I guess we should go, then, huh?”

Karen watched her intently for a moment, looking like she was trying to read the feelings she was hiding. “You don’t have to do this, you know. You have a choice.”

Sarah nodded her head, suddenly reminded of a conversation she’d had with Will about choices. She wasn’t sure if she was making the right one, though she tried not to dwell on that for too long as she fastened the sleek watch around her wrist.

“No, I’ve made my decision. Now let’s go before I change my mind and start to question my sanity.”

Karen actually smiled slightly as they left the swings and stepped onto the patio. “What are you going to tell your mom?” she whispered.