Chapter Five
If you can look into the
seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow
and which will not,
Speak.
—William Shakespeare
OF COURSE, OF course she should have expected this. If he did believe her, it was a natural question. If he didn’t, it was a kind of test. And it was the one question she didn’t dare answer.
Well, you see, Mr. O’Shea, sometime in the next little while you’re going to die and end up a pile of moldering bones in that tunnel over there…
She caught her breath. The image was grotesque. He was here, alive—powerfully alive and compelling as she’d never thought a man could be. The idea that he might, would die, and possibly at the hands of her own ancestor—today, tomorrow, a week from now—was incomprehensible. More incomprehensible than her walk into the past.
Unthinkable, impossible—and undeniable.
With shock she remembered his reaction to the photograph, his demands about Perry and her knowledge of him.
“Our quarrel was a terrible one,” Perry’s letter had said. “I left him in the jungle. …” Left him how? Dead? Yet Perry wasn’t here, and Liam was still alive.
Oh, boy. What have I wandered into?
Not only what, but why. Why she had come back to this time and place. Why she was here with Liam O’Shea hours or days before he was destined to die.
She had no way of knowing the answers. Not yet. And until she did, she had to buy time.
“Well, oh Prophetess?” Liam prodded.
“I can’t tell you your future.”
“Why not?”
“Because… because I can’t risk changing the future.”
Of course. That was the answer. It wasn’t merely an excuse, but the truth. And hard on the heels of that realization came another. She’d been so focused on proving to Liam that she wasn’t crazy that she’d totally overlooked the possible consequences of each word out of her mouth and every modern gadget she’d revealed.
She’d just finished showing Liam things that wouldn’t be invented until well into the next century. She knew very little about him, yet Homer had said he was a self-made man who’d worked his way up from poverty. Just the kind of man who might take an unknown and potentially useful object apart to see if it could be reproduced…
If he survived.
“So you won’t predict my fate,” he said. She looked up to see him on his feet again, arms crossed. “I must be very important in this future of yours if you’re afraid my knowledge of my own destiny will change it.” He leaned over her. “Well, Mac? Am I a great man in your history books?”
She swallowed, hastily gathering up the things she’d laid out on the mosquito netting and shoving them back into her pack.
“I’m not much good at this time-travel business” she said. “I don’t know what would happen if I interfered with the way things were—are supposed to go. I shouldn’t be here.”
Babbling, Mac. But she forgot the clumsiness of her rationalizations when she realized her watch wasn’t where she’d left it. She felt around, scooting in a circle.
“You promised me the flashlight, but I prefer a different souvenir.”
She jumped up. Liam held the watch quite brazenly in one large hand. He was visibly pleased… and triumphant and infuriating.
“Give it back,” she demanded.
“I don’t think so, Mac. This seems more appropriate. I’ll keep it as… proof of your little story.”
“Then you believe me?”
He didn’t answer but pocketed the watch, easily avoiding her swipe at his hand.
“Damn it, you can’t keep that!”
“How do you propose to get it back?”
She eyed his pocket. There was little chance of distracting him, and none of overpowering him. And he knew it.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t change your history. My future is very clear to me.”
Oh, yeah. She’d never been one for crying, but she felt absurdly like bursting into tears. Just great. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she snapped.
All at once he was directly in front of her. “Then we do have something in common.”
Mac contemplated the pulse beating at the base of his throat, noted the way the crisp curling hairs of his chest nestled in the open neck of his sweat-darkened shirt. He didn’t smell the way she’d expect a man in his condition to smell. He smelled… nice. No, that was definitely the wrong word. “Nice” implied something tame. This was not a tame smell, or a tame kind of man. Her own heartbeat picked up speed, and she took a quick step backward.