Intertwine (2 page)

After days of lovely English sun, the weather had turned, unleashing an impressively ferocious summer storm, which was a pity. She had been looking forward to seeing the Beltane fires and other festivities planned for the evening, hoping to use them as part of her sabbatical research. Jasmine called Beltane one of the most powerful spirit days on the Celtic calendar. Though, trust Jasmine to take something as innocuous as May Day and make it arcane and mystical.

Oh, and to insist on using its Celtic name, Beltane.

But the bonfires had been canceled, rescheduled until the weather improved. Emme snuggled deeper into the plush sofa as a loud boom of thunder emphasized her thoughts.

Things had been going so well. No ash-spewing volcanoes. No random-illness quarantines. Remarkable, really, considering what usually happened when she traveled.

Her travel issues had started as a teenager on the evening ferry from Cozumel to Cancun. She didn’t remember much about that night—just angry shouting, the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic weapons and hiding underneath the bench with Marc. Waiting. Terrified that the gunfire would come closer.

Then, after so much noise, sudden pounding silence. No hum of the motor, no buzz of the overhead lights, just pitch blackness and the sobbing whispers of other frightened passengers. After hours bobbing adrift, they were pulled ashore by a tugboat. Frightened but unharmed.
Piratas.
Pirates
,
the police said. Bandits after the payroll bag the ferry was carrying.

Of course, Marc being Marc had found the whole event wildly exciting. Typical. The lame pirate jokes had gone on for months. (
Emme, you look sad. Is something the matt-arrrrh?
)

So even in this day and age, Emme had to add pirates to her list of “Things to Worry about When Traveling.” Seriously? How does one plan for pirates? Were there brochures on the topic?
Danger on the High Seas: Ten Steps to Avoiding Pirates While in the Caribbean.

After the pirate incident, the travel disasters had come relentlessly. There were the standard hassles: lost luggage and delayed flights, being stranded by a winter storm, that lady in the seat next to her giving birth over Atlanta. Emme rarely batted an eye at such pedestrian events.

It was the true random acts of God—the travel disruptions that were outside anyone’s realm of normal—that got her full attention. Arrested and questioned for two days by the Peruvian TSA about possible nefarious terrorist activity. (Emry Wilde = Terrorist? Really?) Quarantined with the swine flu in Mexico. Trapped on a farm in rural Hungary for two weeks due to a volcanic ash cloud. Escaping a military coup in the Philippines.

Ironically, none of these events had stopped her from traveling. Emme loved to see new places, new people. Raised by a single mother who worked as a flight attendant, Emme was well-versed in travel. Most school vacations had involved flying with Marc to meet their mother somewhere. With a never-ending supply of buddy passes at her disposal, reaching some exotic locale had never been particularly expensive. Just time-consuming. And, at times, life threatening.

After she had been trapped for several weeks in the mountains of Guatemala (worst flooding in a century, they said) without her luggage (of course) or any way to contact family, Marc had stepped in. He had jokingly enrolled Emme in a
month-long survivalist camp run by one of his martial art friends. But Marc hadn’t fully appreciated Emme’s almost obsessive love of planning. Her need to be prepared.

So she had happily made her lists and packed her bags and headed off to
Rod’s Awesome Mind and Body Overhaul
camp. With classes like “Assess! Arrest! Assist!” (a.k.a. first aid) and “Perp Recon and Neutralization” (a.k.a. self-defense). Only after arriving did she realize that the camp acronym was RAMBO.

Marc really had a sick sense of humor sometimes. And, quite frankly, a questionable taste in friends. But she had come home able to light a fire in any condition, as well as flatten someone twice her size.

Of course, disasters never hit at home. Mt. Rainer remained docile; the long overdue Cascadian super earthquake didn’t happen; tsunamis never materialized. Home was always safe and blessedly calamity-free.

Which had made the relative smoothness of this current trip somewhat unsettling, if she didn’t count the rental car fiasco—which she didn’t. The car had been insured, after all. Emme jumped as a particularly violent gust of wind shook the whole house, causing an errant draft to slam one of the bedroom doors upstairs. Loudly. The heavy beams above her creaked in protest.

Emme shook her head, took a sip of tea and tried to think positively. If the whole house came down, at least when rescuers pulled her from the rubble, her feet would look stylish in uber-cute, pink satin slippers.

Of course, Finn had always been a good luck charm. Disasters were never quite as awful when Finn was with her, as this trip had already proved.

Jasmine had analyzed this ad nauseum, ever since Emme had found
him
. Why did disaster avoid Emme when she had Finn along? Jasmine attributed it to ‘the bond’ that tied them. Insisting that Finn—as the destiny of Emme’s soul—was home for her.

Emme wasn’t quite sure she understood. The soul or the home part.

“You’re tied to him,” Jasmine would say. “Life forces intertwined. Your circles definitely overlap.”

This was Jasmine’s favorite theory.

Time is not linear like a river but instead is an enormous sea, with all events occurring at once.

All things are present
, Jasmine would patiently explain.
No past and no future. There is only now. Time is merely a construct of our minds. Any current action impacts not only the present but also the past.

To her, the lives of everyone who had ever lived existed simultaneously as rippling concentric circles on the surface of some vast cosmic ocean. And from time to time, the rings of a person’s expanding circle would intertwine with those of someone else, and they would be linked. Cosmically tied to each other.

For Jasmine, it made no difference that this person might have lived a couple hundred years ago. In a different country. On a different continent.

Emme still didn’t quite accept it all—Jasmine’s sense of reality was loose at the best of times.

This current trip was a last-ditch effort to reclaim Emme’s emotional life. A final expatiation, a way to purge her soul of this impossible sense of connection—no matter what Jasmine might say. Technically on a research sabbatical, Emme had deliberately structured her trip to take Finn’s history as well. A wise faculty mentor had once suggested she choose her research interests based on where she wanted to travel. Good advice indeed.

Emme startled as the rain suddenly shifted, rapping sharply against the window, begging for entrance. A gust of wind whistled down the fireplace, causing the flames to flare erratically. Emme took another sip of tea.

She would conquer this obsession. Once and for all.

Herefordshire

Near the village of Marfield

Beltane

April 30, 1812

James Knight ached for adventure.

He admitted it freely.

He longed to brace his boots against the rolling deck of a ship, sails snapping, wind buffeting his body. He yearned to memorize the smell of an Eastern Orient market. Or the sound of a hot summer breeze rustling through sugar cane in the West Indies.

Poets wrote odes to those born under a wandering star. But James was quite sure he had been born under the most boring, most staid star in the entire heavens. If there were mayhem and adventure to be had, he would find himself a hundred miles away and riding in the wrong direction.

James planned. He plotted. But somehow, life always found a way to tether him to home, to responsibility. Not that he didn’t love his home. Not that he shirked responsibility. But sometimes when he stared at the predictable rolling fields of Haldon Manor, the tired draft horses bringing in yet another harvest, he felt that he had been born for something more.

James had long pondered the problem. Perhaps not all of him wished for change. His head and most of his left hand did seem generally free of wander lust. Perhaps his elbow too. But both his feet and his heart—yes, most definitely his heart—itched for adventure. Ached to stride out the front door of Haldon Manor and keep walking to the ends of the earth.

It wasn’t as if he were adventure-adverse. Just more normal-prone. The unexpected never found him.

All of which made his current situation somewhat ironic.

Wind clawed at the trees and howled around him. Rain lashed against his caped greatcoat, streaming over the brim of his wide hat. James reached up and tucked a sodden lock of blond hair out of his eyes. Lightning regularly flashed through the dark night, brilliantly illuminating the muddy road in front of his horse. Though the lightning itself was actually helpful. At least he could see the road every other minute or so, keeping his horse from wandering into the night.

James generally appreciated any change from his normal routine. But he belatedly realized that this particular night was one adventure he perhaps could have done without.

The sky had been threatening when he left his valet and carriage at the inn. He had just assumed that the storm would quickly pass, leaving him to a pleasant summer evening ride home. So he rode into the storm thinking nothing would happen.

Because nothing ever did.

But tonight, adventure had arrived in the form of a violent Beltane storm. And for once, James wasn’t exactly thrilled about it.

He tried to recall exactly why he had been so determined to reach Haldon Manor this evening. Why had he ridden out into the gathering clouds?

Of course, he worried incessantly over Georgiana’s health when he was away. He could never breathe easily until he saw his sister’s smiling face upon his return.

And Arthur would probably have been affronted by some small village mishap that James would then have to smooth over. Taking offense was a skill Arthur studied quite seriously—his younger brother practiced it regularly and at great length.

And then there was James’ persistent restlessness, that constant twitch of his muscles to be up and doing. Sitting still had never been his forte. James knew resting quietly in the inn while the storm raged outside would have been a particularly keen form of torture.

But still. As of this moment, none of his reasons seemed as compelling as they had three hours ago.

Wind gusted, buffeting his body with rain, causing his great coat to billow around him. Snatching at the sodden fabric, James wrapped it back around his body, trying to force away the persistent chill. Lightning cracked, providing a flickering glimpse of the sodden road. James sighed and thought longingly of a warm bed and dry clothing.

His trip to Liverpool to consult with a renowned expert about Georgiana’s health had been generally pleasant, if uneventful (of course). Dr. Carson had been helpful but had not given James the hope he craved. Though amiable, the good doctor’s recommendations for Georgiana seemed alarmingly drastic. Her condition was not so far gone as to demand the risky experimental surgery he suggested. At least not yet.

A particularly brutal down draft pelted him, sending his horse skittering sideways, but James easily corrected him. Thankfully, Luther was as adventure-adverse as the rest of his life, holding steadily to the water-slopped road no matter how the storm raged.

Georgiana’s ill health prevented him from attending the Season in London. Not that James felt that to be a problem. The Season—that time of year when all of England’s aristocracy gathered—was a hassle he had never particularly enjoyed. Though his easy manner ensured that James was welcome everywhere, comfortable in any situation—a ballroom, a drawing room, a hunting party, the local pub, pitching hay with his tenants and their pigs. It was those latter activities that his mother had deplored. What he saw as an open, accepting nature, she had seen as something common and vulgar to be stamped out.

And she had partially succeeded. James never exceeded his income, never drank too much, never visited houses of ill-repute. His father’s lessons on responsibility and his mother’s militant insistence on propriety had ensured that much.

James sighed. Even his personal behavior was devoid of excitement. How could everything about him be so boring? Fate had given him a longing for adventure but not an ounce of rebellion.