Time's Enemy: A Romantic Time Travel Adventure (Saturn Society Book 1) (4 page)

They were going to behead him.

W
ake up—wake up—wake up!
Tony commanded himself but his body again refused to obey.
You’re dreaming,
he reminded himself, but he was getting harder to convince. He shut his mouth, willing the saliva to flow so he could tell them he wasn’t knocked out.

Trepidation crawled over his skin like a colony of insects as the leader uttered a word, then held something above Tony’s sternum. The flint dagger.

This was no dream. It was the worst fucking nightmare he’d ever had.

Tony squeezed his eyes shut.
Wakeupwakeupwakeup!

He opened his eyes.

The man in the animal skin held the dagger high above Tony, then in a single swift motion, plunged it into his chest.

The crack of bones. Blinding pain. Blood spurting everywhere. Screams. His own. Someone jammed a hand into Tony’s chest, groping around. A high, keening wail. Himself.

Then merciful darkness.

T
ONY VAGUELY REMEMBERED THE NURSE
checking on him, giving him painkillers. An older man in a lab coat asked him questions like what was his name, and please count to ten, and how many fingers was he holding up.

“What is your day of birth?” the doctor asked in accented English.

“May first.” Scratching sounds came from the nurse scribbling on a clipboard. “In Dayton, Ohio,” Tony added. Maybe it would give him some kind of extra credit and make them leave him alone. Damn, he was tired.

Someone shouted from the hallway and they hurried away.

Tony’s neck itched.

He started to lift his arm to scratch, but it was so heavy, he couldn’t. He tried again. Shards of pain burst through his ribcage, like a dagger slicing through skin and muscle. The vise-grip on his brain tightened. He clenched his jaw and forced the leaden arm up farther.

A raised ridge marred the smooth skin of his neck. As he ran his fingertips over it, images burst through his mind
(huge stone axe... Mayan priest... flint knife)
in rapid succession.

His arm fell to the bed. W
hat the hell was that?
Beneath his ribs, pressure warred with the lightness one feels on a roller coaster the second before it plunges over the hill. “Excuse me?” he croaked.

The nurse returned to his bed. “Yes, Señior Solomon?”

“What’s this... my neck?”

Her face twisted in puzzlement. “You don’t know? Look like old injury to me.”

Old injury? What was she talking about? “But I’ve never— what happened to me? What’s wrong—”

She gave him a sympathetic smile. “You had bad fall, bruised ribs. Doctors say you are lucky man.”

No wonder it felt like he’d been stomped on. “But why am I so tired?” And weak? And
(huge stone axe, knife ripping into him)
where had that come from?

“The pain meds. You feel better soon. Relax.”

So the ancient Mayans had to have been a dream. But not all of it. He’d been injured. “But what happened to me?”

“You don’t remember?”

He gripped the cool, cotton sheet, his hands damp. Panic speared his chest and spread until tendrils of ice lanced through his body. He did remember. But which of the images racing through his mind were memories, and which were only dreams?

He came to for brief periods throughout the next several days. Mostly he slept, his body so tired it was a monumental effort to lift his arm and scratch his nose. Keith had brought him his glasses, thank God. Dora visited several times. One time Tony woke and saw her and Charlie sitting in a pair of chairs pushed together, Charlie’s hand resting on her knee.

Violet had come, too, during one of Tony’s more lucid moments. She’d managed to find an English language bookstore, and had brought him a crime novel by one of his favorite authors. And when she’d realized his head still hurt, she’d volunteered to read to him. He’d still been in a mental fog, couldn’t remember much except her low, throaty voice and her red-lipsticked lips forming the words as she read.

The memory took him back further, to Bethany’s funeral, three years ago. He’d slipped out for some air, to find Violet in the parking lot, smoking. Not offering well-intentioned but meaningless platitudes like everyone inside, her lips closed around the cigarette, then released a puff of smoke while she listened to him vent about how everyone wanted him to let them know if they could “do anything” for him and Dora. “Nothing anyone can do,” Violet had said, then she’d let him bum a cigarette off her, even though he hadn’t smoked in years. A small act of kindness, like reading to him.

He squinted at Dora, who sat in the chair beside his bed reading a newspaper on her lap as she twisted her wedding ring around her finger. It never would have occurred to her to read to him.

“Hey.” Tony pushed aside the image of his brother-in-law being a little too friendly with her. Must’ve been conjured up by his painkiller-fogged mind.

Dora looked up with a start. “You’re awake.”

“How long was I out?” Tony clutched the sheet beneath his hand—less tired now, but still weak.

“You’ve been mostly unconscious for nearly a week,” she said. “The doctors are baffled—it’s almost like you’ve been in and out of a coma, but they say the brain waves are more like you were in a really deep sleep. Like an animal in hibernation. Your temperature was low, and your pulse got so slow... nothing they did helped. They were afraid you wouldn’t wake up. But then everything returned to normal this morning.” She turned up her hands.

Tony’s gaze traveled down the bed. What did all the weird stats mean? He definitely wasn’t dead. But almost a week? “Then everyone else—”

“Left two days ago.” Her fingers stilled, then she rose and walked around the other, empty bed. “Next year will be better.”

He heard her unspoken words.
Another vacation ruined.
Last year, he’d had food poisoning. “Sorry,” he grumbled. “It’s not like I planned it.”

Dora stopped her pacing, and drew a perfectly manicured nail around the Gucci watch he’d given her for Christmas a few years before. “I didn’t mean...” Her expression was sympathetic, but he caught the hesitation in her reply.

She walked toward him. He focused on the ceiling. With his glasses on, he could see a chipped spot in the light fixture’s frosted coating.

Dora walked back around the other bed. “They want to keep you another day for observation, then—if there’s no change—they said you might as well go home.”

“You mean transfer to a hospital in Dayton?”

“No.” She stopped at his side. “We might have them re-run the tests, just to make sure. But they won’t check you in when no one can find anything wrong with you, other than how tired you are.”

She kept pacing back and forth along the empty bed. “You look a hundred times better than yesterday.” She finally stopped and took the chair, staring down at her hands. The newspaper on her lap crackled as she twisted her wedding ring. “I don’t know if I could stand it... losing you, after Bethany...”

Tony’s throat swelled. He tipped his chin up. Bethany. Their only daughter. The day after his fall was the first time he’d gone a whole day without thinking of her, since the night nearly three years before, when she’d left a party with a couple of guys no one knew. Ironic—ever since she’d been diagnosed with diabetes at age five, he’d feared that would be what killed her. Not being murdered—

Bethany.
He’d seen her. Heard her calling for him. In his dreams, before he woke up and crawled to the temple. Before the ancient natives killed him.

He remembered it with a clarity unlike anything he’d ever recalled in a dream. The silhouette of a young woman in the middle of that light. He’d barely been able to see her face in the incredible brightness, but it was her. Just as he remembered, forever frozen at age fourteen. Except she was even more beautiful. He’d wanted so badly to go to her...

A shout in the hallway yanked him out of his reverie. A woman yelled something in Spanish from the hallway.

“What the hell?” Tony muttered.

People in the corridor argued. An authoritative voice spoke a few sharp words, then the door opened.

A man wearing a beige, police-style hat marked
Seguiridad
approached Dora. “This person say he is family—”

A Mexican man burst in past the guard, gesturing wildly as he rapidly spoke in Spanish. As his eyes registered Tony’s slack-jawed confusion, he switched to English. “My name is Luis Ramon DeSantiago. I am your brother.” He approached the bed and reached for Tony.

“I don’t have any brothers.” Tony recoiled as Dora yelled for security.

“But you do. In Saturn Society—”

A guard appeared and grabbed him by the elbows. “¡Fuera de aquí!”

“Get him out of here!” Dora rose, clutching her newspaper. The intruder resisted, still facing Tony as a second guard arrived and the two dragged him to the door. “I must tell him what happened... beheaded...” DeSantiago’s words faded as the guards thrust him out the door, slamming it behind them.

Dora huffed as she returned to her chair. “Hopefully that’s the last of them.”

“Last of what?” Tony’s gaze darted to the door. “What’s going on?”

“Reporters. Most of them gave up yesterday or the day before, but there’s still a few persistent ones hanging around.”

“What are you talking about?” Holy shit, what happened?

She regarded Tony with a solemn expression. “Don’t you remember?”

“Remember what?”

“What happened at the ruins.”

“I fell down and busted my head.”

Dora made an exaggerated blink. “That’s more than the doctor thought you’d recall. What else do you remember?”

“I was knocked out for a minute, then... I was burning up.” Like his body had been made of paper, and the sun’s blazing rays were about to set him aflame. “I pulled myself up the side and went into that little building...”

“And then?”

Images of the brightly clad Mayans of his dream burst through his mind. A blood-encrusted, stone battle-axe. The priest and his knife. Tony’s stomach grew queasy. “Nothing,” He turned up his hands.

“Dr. Santos says that’s pretty common with head injury, not to remember what happened immediately before or after.”

Just a dream.
“So why are reporters hounding us?” He swallowed, his throat dry. “What did happen?”

She twisted her ring, then dropped her hands to her lap. “That woman...”

“What woman?”

“The I.T. girl. The heavy one.”

“Violet,” Tony said.

Her nose wrinkled for a fraction of a second. “Yes. She said after you fell and she caught you, you...”

“I what?”

“You... died.”

Tony snorted. “Obviously she was mistaken.”

“She insisted she lost your pulse for a few seconds.”

“Then what?”

“Like you said, you came to, got up, and went inside the little building at the top. Like you were hardly hurt at all.”

“Right.” He remembered hearing Thelma from Finance asking the tour guide about the ancients who’d built the pyramid. “But then...?”

“She said she stepped out for a second, and when she turned around you were...” Dora held up her hands. “Gone.”

“Gone?” A feeling swept over him of standing on a precipice with nowhere to go but over the edge. People did not just disappear. “But that’s—”

“Crazy, I know. But they went over every inch of that pyramid. They even unlocked the gate into the chambers beneath it and searched in there. Then, a half hour later, there you were, inside the building at the top. Covered in blood, and not a stitch of clothing.”

Naked
. Blood.
He squeezed his eyes closed, trying to shut out the sounds of his own screams, the image of blood fountaining from his chest as the priest slammed the knife down, in the second before he’d passed out. “Was it mine?” There had to be a logical explanation.

“Of course it was yours!” She slumped back in her chair and looked down, pressed her fingers to her forehead. “I’m sorry. It’s just that—”

“What about my clothes?” His skin tingled at the memory of the men cutting off his shirt, shorts and underwear.

Dora’s face hardened. “I imagine some little beggar brat picked them up. Made a nice haul on your gym shoes alone, I’m sure. Those things cost over a hundred—” She pressed her hand to her forehead. “I’m sorry, this is really stressful, that’s all.”