Chapter 9

Imogen squinted into a castle courtyard that seemed lit with an unusual brightness and experienced a moment of elation that finally someone had turned on the floodlights. Now she was going to have siblings pop out from behind pillars and yell surprise! She would kill them all slowly and then her life would return to normal because no one could possibly hold her accountable for her actions after the night she’d just been through. Horses, hay, and a trip to a bathroom that had been more disgusting than anything she’d ever seen at Girl Scout camp. Those were definitely grounds for some serious retribution.

She sighed. The problem was those weren’t floodlights—that was the sun—and she was still trapped in wherever the hell she was. Hell itself, maybe. Somewhere not boasting running water and a cell signal, definitely.

Something was up. She could sense it in the air, like a thunderstorm before it let loose on the hapless inhabitants underneath it. She steadied, then leaned against a wooden pillar at the entrance to the stables, wishing she had somewhere comfortable to sit down, preferably in a trendy coffee shop with free Wi-Fi.

The scruffy guys—locals, she supposed—were milling around the courtyard with studied aimlessness. For some reason, they made her extremely nervous. She looked around and found herself relieved to see so many of the clean extras doing less milling and more standing around purposefully. If a battle erupted—something she honestly couldn’t imagine even using her formidable powers of the same—she thought she might duck behind the better dressed extras to be on the safe side.

Then again, maybe the best way to avoid any sort of unpleasantness was to be on her way back to Edinburgh. Tilly was probably frantic over her not having checked in the night before, so the sooner she got back, the better. She pulled her phone out of her coat pocket, checked for a signal, then sighed and put it back. She wasn’t sure how she was going to get a cab without a phone, but the last thing she was going to do was go back inside that great hall and hope for a landline that worked.

Obviously the only thing to do was to get away from the castle and out of the clutches of whatever crazy was going on. She would run to the village, seek refuge in the first likely shop she found, then make a call and get herself back to where she belonged.

She eased along the wall toward the front gates. The locals didn’t seem too interested in what she was doing, which she appreciated. She watched a couple of the good guys take notice of her and begin to frown. Skedaddling before they did more than frown seemed like a fabulous idea, so she did.

She made a measured dash for the front gates, grateful that her ankle was limiting itself to twinging and her head had stopped pounding enough for her to see where she was going. She didn’t dare look over her shoulder to see if she was being followed; she simply ran across the drawbridge and was grateful it was back down where it belonged. She hopped off the end of it, looked up, then stumbled to an ungainly halt.

She stood with the castle behind her and gaped at the sight in front of her.

So there hadn’t been all that much civilization before, but there had been a charming little village at least, full of cottages and cute little shops that she had considered wandering through. Now, there was nothing but a rutted road and a few huts.

It occurred to her, as she stood there staring in horror at her surroundings, that she probably wasn’t going to find a phone in the village square.

She would have scratched her head, but just brushing the bump on her forehead made her wince. Obviously physical displays of her distress were out. She would have preferred a pen and paper or even her phone with more battery than she had left, but she would do as others had done in equally primitive circumstances. She would make a mental list.

Her situation was simple: she was in deep crap. She didn’t like to put it so bluntly at the top of her list, but the truth was hard to deny. She was standing heaven only knew where looking at heaven only knew where else, with lots of dedicated extras in the castle behind her who had obviously decided—either singly or collectively—that she must have some sort of pull with a big-time director and their job was to make her medieval experience as authentic as possible. She hadn’t seen a single one of them break character yet.

Someone had also taken away the village in front of her. Either she’d been unconscious far longer than she’d suspected or... well, she frowned as a new thought occurred to her. What if she had passed out in Heather of Haemesburgh’s castle and someone had taken her to some remote location where they intended her to be a participant in some sort of twisted experiment? There was a crazy sort of logic to that because there was just no possible way that anyone could have altered the keep behind her so thoroughly in such a short time, even if she had been unconscious for hours.

But it was possible that someone had spent months reproducing Haemesburgh in a different location. Set designers did it all the time.

The only problem was, she couldn’t come up with a good reason why anyone would have bothered to build a keep that looked so much like Haemesburgh just for her. She was nobody. She was close to broke, she had no connections, and she didn’t even own a couch. As tough as it was to accept, not even her siblings would have made that kind of effort for her.

Where in the hell was she?

She wrapped her arms around herself, looked out over the countryside, and scraped the bottom of the villain barrel in a search for suspects. The only one really with the money and time to do anything as extravagant and over-the-top as what was going on around her was Marcus Davis. She was, as it happened, undating him—or doing her best not to date him. He’d been growing increasingly tired of her pleading the inadvisability of getting involved with a coworker as a means of getting out of everything from coffee to an all-expenses-paid trip to the Bahamas. Maybe Marcus was behind it all. He had the cash and he was just about that crazy. The only problem with that theory was the undeniable fact that he never would have let something of this magnitude go on without somehow hogging center stage. If he’d been behind it, he would have taken the starring role as leader of the good guys for himself. No, there was something else going on.

She considered other items for her mental list. She wasn’t hallucinating, though she supposed maybe that should go a bit lower on her list. She had a raging headache, but that could have been from that sword prop clunking her in the forehead as she stared stupidly up at it on its way down. She was a little light-headed, but that could have come from her lack of coffee that morning and food for the past who knew how long.

She closed her eyes briefly and concentrated on the things that felt familiar. That helped a little. The breeze was brisk, there were a few things chirping, and she could hear noises in the castle behind her that sounded like noises that belonged in that environment. A rooster or two, a horse, a few guys shouting things she couldn’t understand. If she was in a delusion, it was at least a well-rounded one. If someone had orchestrated it, that someone had hired a very imaginative set designer. If her siblings were behind it, they were on their game to a level they’d never been before. It was almost like they’d transported her to another planet.

She froze. Even the pounding in her head paused as if it wanted her to have quiet to better appreciate the moment.

Another planet? She wasn’t going to go there exactly, but she thought she could maybe consider some strange, Dr. Who-ish sort of transportation to another...

Another time?

She laughed lightly, because the thought—now that she’d allowed herself to think it—was so ridiculous. Time travel was the realm of fiction and TV. Besides, there weren’t any of those cute British telephone boxes anywhere she could see and she would certainly know if she’d stepped into one and had it carry her off—

Well, there had been that sword.

She felt her world stop. She had touched a sword, passed out, then woken up in something that looked like it was straight from some a medieval period piece. What if the sword had been some sort of conduit to something straight out of a sci-fi TV show? The cabbie had warned her Haemesburgh was an odd place, hadn’t he? He couldn’t have known just how odd, surely.

But the lady Heather certainly could have.

Damn that woman. She had issued a specific invitation to touch something she’d known was slathered in paranormal, um... slatherings. Imogen hardly knew what to call what had coated that sword, never mind the utter preposterousness of even entertaining the possibility that she might have gotten sucked back in time simply because she’d touched a sword crammed into the cracks of the floor between two medieval stones.

She really needed something strong to toss back with abandon. It was too bad she didn’t drink. She thought she might have ordered a double of anything at the moment.

Well, there was no time like the present to investigate the depth of her straits. If she had somehow traveled through time thanks to a sword in the floor, the best way to get back to where she had come from was to stick another sword in the floor. All she had to do was find a sword she could borrow. Problem solved.

She took a deep breath of surprisingly pleasant air, then turned around and looked at the place that couldn’t possibly be a medieval castle sitting in the middle of a medieval field surrounded by medieval times.

A man was standing by the barbican gate, leaning against it with his arms folded over his chest, watching her. It was him, that good-looking one who was in charge... Phillip, she thought his name was. She had no idea why there was something about him that seemed familiar, but she’d slept through quite a bit of trivia while traveling north on the train with Tilly. Who knew what she’d missed? The one thing she did know was that she had grossly mischaracterized his looks. He wasn’t handsome.

He was breathtaking.

She could bring to mind half a dozen current leading men who would have probably killed for a face like that. That didn’t address the rest of him, but she supposed lusting after a guy she’d just met was a bad idea. She could lust later, when she knew a bit more about him, such as when he’d been born and whether he thought it was more likely that she’d traveled through time or lost her mind. Her dating experience wasn’t all that vast, but she figured those were pretty important things to get out of the way right off.

He had pushed off the wall with an effortless sort of grace that said he’d done that kind of thing before. He walked across the drawbridge toward her as if he didn’t give the slightest thought to the absolutely disgusting water in that moat. Then again, she was too overwhelmed by the sight of him to give it much thought either, so maybe she wasn’t one to criticize.

He stopped directly in front of her and simply looked at her. She wasn’t sure how to begin a conversation with a guy she couldn’t guarantee spoke English, text, or anything approximating her very rusty eighteenth-century French, but she supposed she could try.

“Hi,” she said.

He looked up briefly, looked baffled, then looked back at her. He seemed to be searching for something useful to say, which she appreciated. He finally simply inclined his head in a formal, Mr.-Darcy-ish sort of way and smiled gravely.

“’Tisn’t safe to be outside the gates with the mischief going on inside the walls.”

Or words to that effect. The man had to be an actor. No regular guy could possess such a lovely accent and sound like a prince. Never mind that his English sounded likely something she might or might not have heard during a very long two weeks spent working at a Renaissance Faire thanks to one of her siblings signing her up without asking her first, bodice and uncomfortable shoes included for her convenience.

Really, she was just too nice. One day in the future, she was going to put her foot down and tell her siblings where to go.

“Thank you,” she managed. “I’m Imogen,” she said. “Imogen Maxwell.”

“So you said yestereve,” he said carefully.

She didn’t want to remember yestereve. She wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t barfed on the guy standing in front of her. It was all a bit of an unhappy blur, compounded by a headache, hunger, and an intense desire to find a quiet place to have a nap.

“I am Phillip de Piaget,” he said slowly, “but I believe I mentioned that yestereve as well.”

She nodded absently, not because she wasn’t interested, but because he was just so damned distracting. Medievalish-sounding accent, flawless face, a shoulder that was just the right height to lay her head on and have a wee snuggle. If she’d felt comfortable enough with him for that sort of thing.

Wee.She shook her head. Now she was starting to sound like all the crazies around her. It was obviously past time she got herself back to where she belonged.

“Might I offer you aid?”

Chivalry on display as well. She certainly was running into a lot of those rescuing types of guys in England—

She frowned. It was odd, wasn’t it, how her first encounter with the natives had been with that guy who had hauled her suitcase for her. He’d certainly been into the chivalry thing, and his accent had been... well, now that she thought about it, it had had a little of the same medieval twang to it that her current knight in shining armor possessed. In fact—and it was entirely possible she was imagining it because she wasn’t entirely compos mentis—they even looked a bit alike.

Very strange.

But so was her whole experience and probably the sooner she had it all figured out, the better. She took a deep breath and looked at her potential rescuer. She mustered up her best Renaissance-faire accent and hoped for the best. “I think I’m lost.”

“I wondered if that might be so—”

He looked over her head and swore suddenly.

Imogen looked over her shoulder and saw other guys in the distance, riding on horses. That didn’t seem so unusual, though her new friend didn’t seem to care for it. She understood why when she realized that an arrow had just come so close to her ear that it made a noise. A noise that sounded a bit like you’re dead.

Phillip took her hand—she saved the shiver that went through her at his touch for examination later—and pulled her toward the drawbridge. She went, because it seemed like a damned fine idea to get out of the open. What seemed like a less stellar idea was pulling up the drawbridge. She skidded to a halt in front of it, unsure if she should jump onto the end or not. That decision was made when Phillip lifted her as if she were a feather and set her on the end of it without asking first. She stumbled a bit before she caught her balance, but that was probably thanks to the incline increasing so rapidly.

She turned to try to help Phillip only to land on her knees. Apparently he had some experience with drawbridges going up when they shouldn’t have, because he simply caught the end of it, hooked a leg over it, then pulled himself up. He rolled past her, almost taking her with him in the process. She would have told him to be more careful, but she was too busy suddenly rolling after him down the last few feet of wood.

The portcullis dropped.

The unfortunate thing was, it dropped in front of them, leaving them outside. It was amazing how easily curses translated across time and language barriers. She wouldn’t have messed with Phillip currently, but the guys in charge of the front gate didn’t seem to be intimidated.

A man came shrieking over the walls and fell to the ground next to her, an arrow sticking out of his chest. He lay there, completely still.

“Let us in, you imbeciles!” Phillip bellowed.

Another trio of men fell off the walls. Imogen looked up and realized they weren’t doing so of their own volition. She clapped her hand over her mouth before she started throwing up. It would have been nothing but dry heaves accompanied by tears, she was sure of that. Suddenly things were starting to feel much less like a set and quite a bit more like reality.

Phillip took her by the arm and quickly pulled her toward a very small gap between spikes and ground. “Under,” he said shortly.

“Are you crazy?” she wheezed. “What if they drop it?”

He wasn’t listening to her; he was too busy snarling at the men standing above them on the wall. She decided abruptly that when a person was between the devil and the deep blue sea, maybe inaction was the wrong choice. She dropped and rolled under those spikes, then found herself hauled to her feet by someone holding a bow. She turned around and watched Phillip roll under the spikes a split second before the portcullis dropped completely. He crawled to his feet, swearing and looking as if he would have cheerfully murdered someone. She left him to it, then turned to thank the guy who had helped her. She blinked in surprise.

“You’re a girl.”

“A woman, actually,” the woman said with a faint smile. “Rose Kilchurn.”

Imogen could hardly believe her ears. That was a posh British accent if she’d ever heard one, and that was definitely modern English that gal was using. Before she could ask Rose Kilchurn what the hell was really going on, she found herself in the middle of absolute chaos. She listened to swords clanging against swords, then watched in astonishment and no small bit of horror as those swords began to inflict wounds that just couldn’t possibly be fake.

And Phillip de Piaget was right in the middle of it all.

Her first instinct was to try to at least warn him that he was getting involved in things that she could see were fairly dangerous, but that inclination was swiftly replaced by deciding that while it had been nice to inhabit a delusion or visit another time or be an unwitting part of a reality show, she was done. If she didn’t get herself out of the fray immediately, she wasn’t going to be able to get herself out of the fray.

She suffered a small twinge of regret that she wasn’t going to get to know Phillip a bit better, her dismal dating record aside, but maybe some things just weren’t meant to be. Besides, he looked to be awfully involved in a battle that didn’t look all that choreographed to her. What she knew for certain was that he definitely didn’t need either her opinions or her help. She made sure her daypack was still residing on her back, patted her coat pocket for her phone, then indulged fully in her well-developed sense of self-preservation and looked for a way to make a break for freedom.

It didn’t take long to find an opening in the chaos. She bolted across the courtyard and up the stairs to the great hall without being hit by any stray swords, arrows, or insults. That she was relieved by any of that was almost bizarre enough to have her stopping to make sure she hadn’t lost her mind. She shook her head and continued to run. She would examine her sanity later.

She shoved the doors open and pushed her way past the men standing there. They looked as uneasy as she felt, but she figured they could look however they wanted to as long as they got out of her way and left her free to either find that damned sword or jam another one into its slot.

No one stopped her as she ran for the back of the hall. She realized on her way by that the well-preserved stone floors weren’t quite as uneven as she remembered them being but they still made up for that with their covering of straw and other things she didn’t want to identify. She slipped and slid until she skidded to a halt in front of the lord’s high table. A young woman stood there, guarding the way.

“Move,” Imogen commanded.

“Nay.”

She realized two things immediately. First, with enough practice, she might get that medievalish British accent down. Second, she wasn’t looking at a woman, she was looking at a teenage boy dressed in skirts. She looked at him narrowly.

“Don’t make me hurt you.”

He drew himself up. “I am the lady Heather—” he began in crisp French.

Yes, he was Heather of Haemesburgh, she was the queen of England, and there was no damned sword behind that table. She pushed past him to examine the place where the sword should have been. There was a slit there where something had obviously resided previously. Something would again if she had anything to say about it. She turned abruptly and looked at the teenager standing there in skirts. Funny thing, he had just the thing she needed belted around his waist. She pointed at it and looked at him sternly.

“Give me that.”

He drew back as if he’d been bitten, then his hand went protectively to his sword hilt. “Nay.”

Well, the last thing she was going to do was be bossed around by a skinny sixteen-year-old pretending to be the lady of the house. She needed to get back home and the only way she could see that happening was to use the same method to go home as she’d used to get to her current locale.

She was going to have a sword to stick in that stone if it was the last thing she did.