Guardians of Time Read Online Free Page B

praying. Anna was
screaming on the inside, her breath caught so far up in her throat
it was choking her. She glanced down at the speedometer, which was
in kilometers per hour. It told her they were going a hundred.
    And then Mom was behind them, wedging
herself between her children, her arms wrapped around their waists.
“I’m here, you two.” The cliff wall was right in front of them.
    Twenty feet. Ten feet.
    There was no stopping now, even if they
wanted to. They were going to hit the wall. An irresistible force
colliding with an immovable object.
    “Eyes open!” David’s voice cracked.
    Anna screamed as the front of the bus hit
the stones of the cliff with a resounding crash —
     
    But no, like the miracle it had always been
and continued to be, instead of hitting the wall, they went right
through it, as if they were on a ghost bus and had become ghosts
themselves. Anna could only guess what it looked like from the
outside. For the first time, because she was determined to
experience the traveling fully, she kept her eyes open wide
as David had ordered. But the lights at the front of the bus shone
into nothingness.
    She clutched David’s hand, which she was
still holding, felt her mom’s tight grip around her waist, and
counted through the three seconds of blackness that surrounded the
bus.
    Then they were through to the other side—and
the bus was screaming down a highway going the wrong way.
    Horns blared from the two lanes of cars
coming at them.
    “Iesu Mawr!” Jane said, swearing fluently in
Welsh as she swerved the bus to avoid the oncoming cars.
    The bus’s windshield wipers flailed back and
forth at high speed. It was snowing here instead of raining, with
at least three or four inches already on the ground. Since the road
wasn’t a true divided highway, the easiest thing for Jane to do
should have been to veer into the far left lane, where cars were
going in their direction, but a series of giant orange barrels
barred the way. The road was under construction, and it looked to
Anna as if it was being expanded into a four-lane divided highway.
They were driving on the right side of the road, which of course
was the wrong side for Wales.
    Mom staggered away from the dash, bringing
Anna with her. They collapsed into their seats, and Anna felt
Math’s arms come around her waist and pull her close to him. She
put her head into his chest, her whole body vibrating.
    “We’re going to head right back to the
Middle Ages if we don’t get off this road!” Callum had risen to his
feet to stand by David, who was no longer leaning forward on the
dash but had moved both hands to the metal pole behind Jane’s seat,
which Anna had been holding.
    “I’m trying!” An oncoming van forced Jane to
careen the bus to the far right side of the road. Unfortunately, as
was usual in Wales, the shoulder was about three inches wide with a
stone wall buttressing it. On an American highway, they could have
pulled off the road and stopped, even if they were facing the wrong
way. Here, there was nowhere to go.
    “As soon as you can.” David’s voice turned
calm. While Callum stooped to look out the windshield, David
stepped closer to Anna so he could bend forward to look out the
side window of the bus above her head. “Hey, sis. Thanks.” He
smiled at Anna and put out a hand to her. “It worked.”
    She grasped his hand. “It did, you idiot.
One more time.”

Chapter Three
    David
     
    D avid was forced to
admit, in those first moments as they careened the wrong way down
the road, that he’d been criminally arrogant, and he didn’t need
Anna to call him an idiot to realize it. His time traveling had
never hurt anyone before—that he knew of anyway. As he watched a
car, in its attempt to avoid the bus, narrowly miss the series of
orange barrels that ran down the middle of the highway, it
staggered him to realize how much trust the bus passengers had
placed in him, allowing him to risk their lives on the hope that