Page 51 of Promises Made at Midnight
Turning around, uncertain of which way to go, she distantly heard her friend’s voice once more calling out to her. “Hurry, Bridgette, before it’s too late!”
Left! She needed to go left and she took off once more before coming to a sudden halt before a glowing turret. Dristan had warned her about not going near this one, and Bridgette now understood why. This was the place where Katherine de Deveraux and her friends had traveled through Time and Bridgette assumed these were the women she saw in her dream.
Hesitantly, she approached and saw a vague ghostly image of her friend as though she was floating in thin air.
“There you are, Bridgette,” Megan exclaimed with a smile, her hand outstretched for Bridgette to take. “Are you ready to come home? You’ve been missed.”
“I am home, Megan,” Bridgette insisted taking a step forward before she stopped. The urge to enter the stairwell was stronger than she thought it would be.
Megan frowned. “Home is here… with me. Zoe and I need you.”
Bridgette shook her head. “But I’ve found love here, Megan. I’ve married a wonderful man.”
“You don’t belong there, Bridgette, and you are messing with the fabric of Time! Come with me now,” Megan shouted, reaching out her hand once more.
“I cannot leave him,” Bridgette cried out, even as her feet unwillingly took another step closer toward the turret. She watched in fascination as her friend’s hand pushed through the barrier between the past and the present, appearing as real as her very own.
“That’s it, Bridgette. Just one more step,” Meagan urged and Bridgette raised her own arm. Her fingertips were still barely out of reach from her friend’s.
She hesitated once more, tears rushing down her cheeks. “I love him. He’ll never understand why I left him,” she sobbed, as she inched her way forward and watched her friend’s smile of encouragement.
“You will learn to love again,” Megan replied as she took Bridgette’s hand in a firm grip.
“Never…” Bridgette said with a mournful cry. “I will never love another as I have loved Ulrick.”
Hearing his name out loud caused Bridgette to break contact with Megan as she pulled her hand away. My God! What had she almost done? With the spell that had been woven around her broken, Bridgette gazed once more into the turret. It was no longer Megan urging her to go back to her own place in time but some unknown ghostly vision of someone long past dead. The empty space inside the skull where its eyes should have been, began to glow a deep horrifying red.
“’Tis time fer ye tae go home!” The skeletal bones once more reached out to grab Bridgette by the hand and she heard the abominable tone of the repulsive being that had her in its grasp begin to chuckle. As it pulled her closer to the turret and away from Ulrick, Bridgette let out a terrified scream!
* * *
Startled awake, Ulrick reached over for his wife, only to find her place beside him empty. He turned toward the hearth expecting to find her there, only to see the low glowing embers left by the untended fire instead. Bolting upright in their bed, he searched the chamber. She was gone.
He wasted no time getting dressed. As he tightened a belt around his waist, he reached for his sword that was propped up near the head of the bed. Pushing the blade into the scabbard at his side, he rushed toward the door and swung it wide.
Which way? A moment’s hesitation brought him the only conclusion he could rationally think of. Bridgette was leaving him! Running down the corridor, he remembered Riorden de Deveraux once telling him about the tale of his wife, Katherine, and the unbelievable method by which she and her friends had traveled through time. He hurried down a turret, remembering how they reasoned that going down in one particular set of stairs brought the women back into the twelfth century and to go up them surely took them back to the twenty-first. With nothing else to go on, he had the distinct notion he would find Bridgette at the bottom of that particular turret.
He heard her scream just as he rounded a corner. His eyes widened as he watched his wife wrestle within the grip of a skeleton pulling her toward the interior ofTimeitself. With no further hesitation, he ran to his wife, grasped her about the waist, and yanked her into his chest with all his might. They fell backwards onto the floor and the connection to the future was gone. The skeleton threw back its head, giving off a startling scream before it vanished, along with the glowing lights writhing in the turret. Once more, the stairs appeared as any other inside of Bamburgh’s walls.
Bridgette turned into his arms, sobbing and muttering words that were incoherent, as Ulrick continued to grasp the meaning of her being in this predicament in the first place.
“You were leaving me?” His words bitterly escaped from his lips while her betrayal was like a knife wound to his heart.
“No!” she managed to say, pulling back from his arms to stare into his face in the dimly -lit passageway. “I thought I was dreaming and must have been sleepwalking.”
A muffled curse left his mouth and he began to untangle himself from his wife before standing and offering her his hand. Helping her from the floor, he took her elbow to usher her down the corridor.
“Ulrick?”
They passed a guard standing near one of the doorways leading out of the keep.
“Not now,” he fumed, whilst he continued to take her up to the next floor. “I do not wish our private conversation to be overheard by someone who could mayhap use such information against us.”
They reached their chamber and the door slammed against the wall with the force of its opening. He pushed Bridgette inside before bolting the door. His head rested upon the wood, and he took a deep breath. “Explain yourself,” he growled out in frustration before he at last turned to face her. His heart hammered inside his chest, and he knew he was barely holding onto his effort to control his temper.
“I was sleeping and—”
“—and leaving me, Bridgette!” he yelled out and he watched her jerk away from his outburst. “You nigh unto broke my heart to see you—”
