A Time for Everything Read Online Free

her voice and knew how rattled she was. She kept on talking out loud in an attempt to calm herself. “I need to get out of these wet clothes. There’s only one blanket…” She shook it out and determined it wasn’t wide enough to roll herself up in. “I am not going to lay my naked body on that mattress. God only knows what sort of vermin live in it—”
    A light knock on the door interrupted her monologue. “Siobhan?”
    “The door’s locked,” she snapped, so tightly wound she could barely get the words out.
    “That is as it should be, lass. I wished to ask if ye’d be needin’ aught else afore I went to bed myself.”
    Sam thought fast. “Yes. Can you get me another blanket?”
    “If I canna find one, I shall give you mine own.”
    Before she could protest, his footsteps receded down the hall. In just a few minutes, he knocked again. “You can leave it on the floor,” she said.
    “If I do that, it’ll get dirty. Lass,” there was a weary note in his voice, “ye can trust me. I’ll not see you come to any harm.”
    Sam shivered. The rooms above the inn were far from warm. She really did want that extra blanket. Snaking the key off a wooden table, she twisted it in the lock. The minute the door was open, he handed her a neatly folded blanket, and said, “Now lock up behind me. I’ll collect you come the morn.”
    She didn’t lose any time once the door was secured. She shucked her jacket and then the layers beneath. Once she was done hanging things on hooks and nails, her small room under the rafters looked like an outdoor store. Arranging the two blankets, she slid between them. Then she remembered her phone. Cursing herself for not thinking about it sooner, she padded over to where she’d left her small backpack and dug for the iPhone. When she found it, she groaned. It had escaped from the plastic bag she’d put it in. Water beaded on its screen. Her finger hovered over the On button, and then she drew back. She wasn’t certain, but she thought you weren’t supposed to power on cell phones when they were wet. The driest place in the room was her bed so she slid the phone between the blankets. Upending her pack, she spread its meager contents on the rough, wooden floor and blew out the guttering candle before getting back into bed.
    The analytical part of her mind wanted to make sense of what had happened. If she didn’t know better, it looked as if she’d suddenly emerged into seventeenth or eighteenth century Scotland. “Impossible,” she muttered. “There’s got to be a better explanation.”
    Yes, but what?
    “I have no fucking idea,” she answered herself. “And if I try to figure it out tonight, I may as well kiss sleep good-bye.”
    It took a long time to shut her mind off, though, and to get warm enough to finally fall asleep.
    Her bladder roused her from a deeply disturbing dream. A woman with long red hair had been chasing her. Afraid it was some sort of alter ego who wouldn’t give up no matter what, Sam had finally turned to confront whatever was after her. The unearthly visitor—definitely not her, thank Christ—had held out spectral fingers and spoken in an Irish brogue so thick it had taken Sam a few tries to interpret what she was trying to say.
    “Take care o’ my braw laddie. I canna so ye must. And bairns. Ye must gi’ th’ clan bairns.”
    Remembering a class on dreams she’d taken as an undergraduate, Sam tried to ask the woman who she was, but the creature clutched at herself and wailed in a language Sam couldn’t decipher.
    Heart pounding and fighting a sense of disorientation, Sam felt around for the light switch in her headboard. The crinkle of straw beneath her brought her crashing back into her new reality. “Ah shit,” she muttered. “This is way more than just a bad dream.” Stumbling around in the still-dark room, she managed to find the chamber pot and squatted over it, feeling grateful she didn’t need to take a crap. Insofar as she could