Chapter 15

Tamsyn was sitting by the fire, trying to discreetly rub her itching nose, when Bowen came back to the table, carefully balancing

three pints in his hands, while a very tiny, very ancient-looking old lady held on to one of his elbows.

“This is Lowri. She knows we’re time travelers.”

Glancing around, Tamsyn hissed, “Wanna say that a little louder? Maybe add a nice burning at the stake to this trip?”

Lowri laughed, a sound not unlike someone stepping on a set of bagpipes, and then sat down, wooden beads around her neck rattling.

“Oh, darlin’, people in Tywyll are used to the strange and unusual. You can’t live here and not be. Whole town built on a

ley line.”

Like Graves Glen, Tamsyn thought, remembering that it was that ley line that powered up the magic in that town, gave the Jones women a lot

of their power. Made sense, then, that Tywyll was so weird.

“How did you know?” Tamsyn asked as Bowen took his own seat, passing their drinks around. He and Lowri had something dark and foamy in their glasses, while Tamsyn’s was a pale gold that smelled just like walking into an apple orchard.

Lowri took a deep sip of her drink before saying, “Oh, it’s all over you. The pair of ya. I felt it as soon as you came in.

You both feel... well, I don’t say this to hurt your feelings, lovies, but you feel as wrong as a snowfall in summer. Or

a drought in winter. Or... you know when you step into a pond, and the earth beneath you is slimy, and you think, ‘That

might be the ground itself, but maybe I’m stepping in a nest of eels, and—’”

“Yeah, okay, I think we get the point!” Tamsyn rushed in before Lowri could think of some new horrifying simile. “We feel

wrong, and specifically we feel like time travelers.”

“Aye,” Lowri said with a nod, one gnarled hand playing with the beads around her neck. “Met one years and years ago. Before

the war. The first one,” she clarified, and Tamsyn tried not to think too hard about how she was sitting across the table

from someone who remembered World War I. “He was an odd duck, no idea what became of him.”

“Did he get home?” Tamsyn asked, and she noticed the way Bowen leaned forward, his arms folded on the table. For the first

time, she noticed his sweater had suede elbow patches, making it a Very Good Sweater Indeed, and great, now she apparently

had a new kink.

But lots more important stuff to focus on right now, namely the way Lowri was shaking her head and sighing into her pint.

“No, poor dove never did find out what it was he’d been sent back to do, so he was stuck here. Not in Tywyll—think he even tually moved to London or summat, maybe Cardiff—but out of his own time.”

The cider and the fire and Bowen’s elbow patches had done a good job of warming Tamsyn up from that freezing ride in the rain,

but now a new kind of chill seeped in, one that twisted her stomach.

“He got... stuck?” she asked, and Lowri nodded, licking the Guinness mustache from her upper lip.

“Aye. That’s the thing with time travel. You only have a certain window to get back.” The old woman leaned in closer, smelling

like an odd mix of woodsmoke, lavender oil, and mothballs. “When did the two of you arrive?”

“Last night,” Bowen answered, his voice rough, and Tamsyn felt that odd, disorienting sensation again, like the ground was

sliding out from underneath her.

Less than a day. And yet somehow, everything was different now.

Bowen’s eyes briefly met hers, and Tamsyn hoped he thought her cheeks were pink from the fire.

Or from trying not to wheeze to death in all this smoke.

Lowri nodded and said, almost to herself, “Yule, I’d bet. Just a few nights away, and magic loves that kind of deadline. A

solstice, a ritual, a moon phase. Yes, if I had to guess, I’d say the two of you need to figure out why you were sent back

here lest you want to stay in 1932 forever.”

Tamsyn sat up in her chair, the cider suddenly sour in her mouth. “Wait, 1932? I thought this was 1957.”

Lowri paused, looking up toward the dim ceiling of the pub before nodding and fiddling with those beads again. “Oh, aye, that’s right. I get my years mixed up all the time.”

She laughed merrily at that while Tamsyn gave her a kind of sickly smile in return and Bowen scowled into his Guinness.

Great, they’d found one person who might be able to help them with this whole time travel problem, and she mixed up her years .

“We were sent back with some kind of spell,” Bowen told her. “Or at least we think that’s what it was. A witch—one of the

Merediths in our time—was wearing a brooch, a piece of jewelry called YSeren. Do you know anything about that?”

Now it was Lowri’s turn to frown. “The Star?” she translated. “No, no, can’t say I’ve ever heard of any jewel like that, but

I’ll look through my books and such back at the cottage. I live just at the end of the high street in the other direction.

Right before you get to the woods. You two come see me in a day or so, I might have something for you then. But for now, Sir

Bedivere and I need to be getting home. Gets dark early this time of year, you know.”

“Sir Bedivere?” Tamsyn echoed as the old woman got up, and Lowri nodded toward the door of the pub.

It was hard to see through all the smoke, but there, just by the row of pegs where patrons could hang up their coats, was

a large basket, and in that basket, a black cat stared back at the three of them with bright yellow-green eyes.

“He’s a right love,” Lowri told them, “but a devil when he wants to be. Fathered half the cats in this village, I think.”

“He doesn’t... talk, does he?” Bowen asked, and Tamsyn stared at him, because even for Bowen, that was a bizarre question.

But Lowri only laughed again. “Cor, that would be something, wouldn’t it? A talking cat! Would love to hear what Sir Bedivere

would have to say.”

“You wouldn’t,” Bowen told her, and once again, Tamsyn stared at him, hoping she was telegraphing with her eyes, Are you having a stroke?

But Lowri didn’t seemed fazed, only shrugged as she set her now empty glass down on the table and made her way to the door.

“I mean it,” she said, pointing one wizened finger at them. “Figure out why it is you’re here, fix it, and do it fast. The

solstice is just a few days away, and I’d bet Sir Bedivere himself that’s your deadline.”

A few days.

A few days to get Harri and Elspeth back together, or she was going to be stuck in the 1950s forever.

With Bowen.

Okay, admittedly, the idea of that wasn’t so terrible, but the rest of it? How was she supposed to live in a time when she

wouldn’t even be able to get a credit card in her own name? Or buy a house? Or be able to watch the next season of Below Deck ?

No, not happening.

Which meant—

She turned back to Bowen as Lowri was leaving, but he held up a hand. “I know,” he said. “ Parent Trap .”

“ Parent Trap, ” she confirmed, and, with that, finished off her cider and headed for the door.

Bowen plucked both their jackets off the pegs by the door, and they stepped out into the cold twilight.

She wasn’t wearing a watch, but Tamsyn would have guessed it was late afternoon, so it was disorienting to see it already

so dark.

“Sun goes down early this time of year in these parts,” Bowen told her, flipping up the collar of his coat. It had stopped

raining, but it was even colder now, the air biting. “Worst part of winter, if you ask me. Looking up before teatime and seeing

the sky already dark.”

“Well, the worst part of this winter is that our bikes are gone,” Tamsyn told him, pointing to the now empty space in front of the hedge.

How were there bike-thieving hooligans in this tiny village in 1957? Wasn’t the whole point of the past supposed to be that

it was safer and people didn’t lock their doors and all that?

Bowen stared at the empty hedge, then heaved a sigh that seemed to come from the bottoms of his feet. “Well, this’ll be a

pleasant walk,” he muttered, and then, hands still shoved in the pockets of his mackintosh, he offered one elbow to Tamsyn.

She took it, giving a sigh of her own, and the two of them headed back up the high street as it turned into the winding road

through the forest back toward Tywyll House.

“At least it isn’t raining now,” she told him, but that was cold comfort—literally—when it was freezing and getting dark, and they were about to walk through an almost certainly Haunted Forest to get back to a house where they had a few days to make two people who were currently fighting like two hissing cats trapped in a burlap sack fall in love.

“Are you all right?” Bowen asked, looking down at her with a concerned frown.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you were making this... whimpering sort of noise?”

Oh.

“Just, you know, not a huge fan of the dark. Or the woods. Or walking through the dark woods.”

Bowen chuckled, tucking his arm closer to his side and pulling her in so that their hips bumped. “Can’t imagine the great

Tamsyn Bligh is afraid of much.”

“I realize I give that impression, but trust me, terrified of lots of things.”

“Such as?”

“Snakes, that’s a big one,” she said, stepping over a thick root in the path. “And ghosts, we’ve established that.”

“And the dark and the woods and the dark woods,” Bowen added, and Tamsyn nodded.

“Those, too. Ooh, and weird dolls. Those scare the shit out of me. What else? Paintings of kids where the eyes are too big.

Opening a can of biscuits.”

You. How I feel about you. How last night might have ruined me for any other man, and you didn’t even touch me.

For once, Tamsyn’s inner monologue stayed where it belonged, and she didn’t say any of that out loud, but she wondered if he could feel the words hanging there between them, because he didn’t say anything for a long time.

Around them, the trees grew thicker, bare branches reaching up into a deepening purple sky that just looked cold.

Shivering, Tamsyn tucked herself deeper into her coat and said, “So you think Lowri is right? We have until Yule to get back

home?”

“I’ve learned that when incredibly old witches approach you in a pub and tell you something, you should probably listen,”

he replied, and she looked up at him even though it was hard to make out his face in the gathering darkness.

“And this happens to you a lot?”

“You’d be surprised.”

That made her laugh at least, which kept her mind off the way the wind eerily whistled through the naked trees and how even

if there had been a moon, the clouds overhead would have blotted it out. They were mostly making their way by feel now, and

once again, she thought of last night, the dark, the bed, Bowen’s groan when he came, how wrecked his voice had sounded, how

she would’ve given anything to look at him in that moment and see if what she had been feeling was there in his eyes.

Dangerous thoughts, even if they did do a good job warming her up, so she decided to put her brain back in much less sexy

territory. “If Lowri has never heard of YSeren, maybe it didn’t have anything to do with what’s happened,” Tamsyn said, and

Bowen grunted.

“Is that an ‘I agree, Tamsyn, you are a genius to point that out’ kinda grunt, or is it ‘You are a stupid human person who doesn’t understand witchy business, of course that ugly piece of jewelry is why we’re here’ noise? I’m usually good at interpreting, but maybe the time travel fucked with my skills.”

Bowen made another sound, this one she had no problem identifying. It was that half laugh thing he did when she’d genuinely

amused him.

She loved that one.

“It’s neither,” he told her now. “It was more ‘Not sure I believe it wasn’t involved, but more open to the possibility at

least, although I still wonder why Carys isn’t here, given that she’s the one who did the damn spell in the first place.’”

“That is a very verbose grunt, Bowen,” she replied, and overhead, an owl hooted.

They walked on in silence for a few more moments, Tamsyn’s hand still comfortably tucked into his elbow, and then she said,

“Speaking of Carys, we’ve got a good twenty minutes or so of walking still ahead of us. Is this a good time to ask you about

her fiancé? The one who died, I mean, not that Ken doll she was marrying.”

Bowen didn’t answer for a long time, long enough that Tamsyn was about to rush in and apologize for even asking, when he said,

“She was engaged to my best mate, Declan. Met him at university, roomed with him for years.”

Again, Tamsyn wished she could see him, but maybe, like last night, the darkness made this easier for him, so she just waited

for him to go on even as her chest tightened at the grief in his voice.

“Declan is—was, fuck, I don’t even know anymore—a good lad. Best lad, really. Takes the piss out of me all the time. You’d like him.”

“I’m sure I would,” she said gently, giving his biceps a small squeeze. “But... he’s... he’s dead, right?”

“Yes and no,” Bowen said with a sigh, and even though he was just a silhouette against the deep purple sky, Tamsyn could see

him lift a hand and rub it over his face briefly.

“Back at college, Declan and me... we were always looking for arcane spells. The really old, ancient shite no one had messed

around with in ages. Mostly we just wanted to study them, see why the witches who invented them came up with them in the first

place, figure out if they’d ever worked, if there was any kind of alteration that might make them work now or make them safer.

It was supposed to be... academic, I guess. Or a way to show off to our teachers at Penhaven.”

Tamsyn still couldn’t see him, but she could hear a smile in Bowen’s voice as he said, “Course, most of our teachers thought

we were mad, and it made more than a few of them pretty hacked off that Declan might actually be a more talented witch than

any of them.”

Tamsyn smiled, too, and rubbed his arm. “Must’ve been nice for you, having someone just as obsessed with weird old magic as

you are.”

“It was,” he said, and there was a heaviness in his voice now that Tamsyn recognized as grief. “Until I found this one spell. Christ, I was so proud of the thing. Hunted it down from five different books because the witch who had made it had hidden it like that. Pieces of the spell spread throughout different grimoires from different centuries, nearly impossible to reassemble.”

“But you did,” Tamsyn said, lulled by his voice and their footsteps. It was full dark now, the clouds parting enough to reveal

a smattering of stars overhead.

“I did,” Bowen said, and those two words were filled with so much pain that Tamsyn couldn’t stop herself from leaning her

head against his shoulder, pressing her cheek to the damp fabric of his coat.

She kept her face against him as he continued: “I never meant for anyone to try it. Certainly not Dec, brilliant as he was.

We weren’t even sure what the damn thing did . Declan thought it was some kind of powering up ritual, increasing your natural magic. He was already plenty strong enough—so

was I—so I didn’t see any reason to attempt it. I just... Ah, fuck it, Tamsyn, if I’m honest, I was just showing off. Sticking

it to my teachers a bit, maybe proving something to my da, I don’t know. I was only twenty-one. Lads are stupid at that age.”

“Girls are, too,” Tamsyn told him, lifting her cheek from his arm. “I dated a DJ at that age. A DJ, Bowen.”

He gave that huffing laugh again, then shook his head. “True, suppose lads don’t have a monopoly on foolishness in their twenties.”

“But my foolishness just resulted in my TV being stolen and a remix of ‘Evil Woman’ with my name randomly spliced into it being played at clubs around my college,” Tamsyn told him. “Seems like yours went worse.”

“Much,” he confirmed with a nod. “Declan got nearly obsessed with that fucking spell. Had to try it. Had me sourcing the ingredients,

things I’d never even seen used before. Flowers I’d never heard of, water from some river in Norway, grass from a high hill

on the Isle of Skye... I should never have tracked it down, any of it, but it was like... dunno, s’ppose it’s like when

people get gold fever or summat. Couldn’t seem to make myself stop, and we were gassing each other up the whole time, the

way lads do, and all the while I was thinking, ‘We won’t really do it, though. We’ll just prove that we could.’ And then Declan

did the fucking thing.”

They turned another bend in the road, and now Tamsyn could see the turrets of Tywyll House against the sky even as the clouds

seemed to be moving back in, getting thicker.

“At first, I thought he’d just disappeared. There was this blinding flash of light, a smell like sulfur, and he was gone.

Not even a mark on the floor where he’d been. I called his name, and I... I think I wanted it all to be some grand joke.

That felt like something Dec would’ve done, you see. Trick me into doing a basic invisibility spell, scare the shit out of

me, then reappear laughing his ginger ass off. But it wasn’t a joke. He was gone.”

“When I asked if he was dead...” Tamsyn said, trailing off, and Bowen tipped his head back to look at the sky.

“I said ‘yes and no.’ And that’s the truth of it. Didn’t see hide nor hair of him for weeks. His parents were ringing, and I kept making excuses. Told teachers he was sick because I didn’t know what else to do. Meanwhile, I was spending every night tearing my bloody hair out trying to learn more about the spell, trying to see if I could bring him back. And then one night, he showed up again, only... only he wasn’t him. He was like a ghost, but not a ghost. Could talk, could hear me, but you could see right through him. He said he had no memory of what had happened, no idea what he even was anymore.”

“Oh, Bowen,” Tamsyn said softly, and Bowen scrubbed at his face again.

“Anyway, that’s when I got my da involved. I don’t know what he told people or who he talked to at Penhaven, but the word

got out that Declan had died in a spell gone wrong. A spell he was attempting alone, of course—couldn’t let the Penhallow

name be attached to a scandal like a boy dying.”

There was something darker alongside the grief in his voice now, something Tamsyn suspected was shame, and she murmured, “You

were young, Bowen. Practically a kid.”

“I know that,” he said. “And Saint Bugi knows Declan’s reminded me that he was the one who decided to do this of his own free

will. But...”

He trailed off, and Tamsyn could only nod.

The house was in sight now, lit up and cozy, and seeing it chased some of the lingering sadness from Bowen’s story away.

They stopped there at the edge of the drive, and Tamsyn turned to him. “Thank you for telling me,” she said, and now there was enough light that she could see his eyes: darker than hers, nearly black, and surrounded by thick lashes, because of course they were. He looked so sad and so handsome, and Tamsyn lifted a hand to his face, his beard damp against her palm.

“Oh, Christ, girl, you can’t look at me like that and touch me,” he said, his voice raw. “It’s fucking hard enough resisting

you as it is.”

Tamsyn felt her stomach swoop, her heart flutter, and she was leaning in before she could even think, his lips so close, his

body radiating heat against the damp chill of the night.

His breath was warm on her face, the soft hair of his beard just brushing her mouth, and in the space of a breath, they’d

be kissing, but it was good, holding out like this, letting the moment stretch and heat up between them, breathing each other

in until she pressed herself up on her tiptoes, her lips finally touching his...

And then, with a crack of thunder that could’ve brought Tywyll House crumbling to the ground, the skies opened up, and freezing

rain poured down, soaking them both.