Page 17 of Christmas Past
5
The thirty minutes we’d agreed to wait crawled by with excruciating slowness. I sat on the sofa, trying to gather what remained of my strength while Seth paced the small living room, clearly trying to work off some nervous energy. Every few minutes, he’d pause by the window and peer out at the street, as if he expected to see his parents coming to check on us and drag us off to dinner at Mabel’s house.
“Maybe we should wait until tonight,” he said for the third time. “After the dinner at Mabel’s is over.”
“No.” I forced myself to sit up straighter, even though the simple movement sent a wave of dizziness through me. The exhaustion from the failed jumps earlier had settled into my bones like a fever, making every gesture feel labored and uncertain. “We can’t risk it. If we don’t leave now, we might not get another chance.”
He stopped pacing and turned to face me, his blue eyes dark with worry. “Devynn, look at yourself. You can barely sit up. What if something goes wrong during the jump?”
What if something goes wrong? It was a question I’d been trying hard not to think about for the past half hour. My gift had always been unpredictable, but the failed attempts earlier had shaken me more than I wanted to admit. Each jump had felt different, harder to control, as if the very act of traveling through time was becoming more difficult. During that first attempt, I might as well have been trying to grab smoke with my bare hands. The second had been worse — like being caught in a whirlpool that I couldn’t escape. And the third….
I shuddered, remembering the terrible moment when I’d felt my gift slip and falter mid-jump, leaving us suspended in that gray limbo between one breath and the next. For a terrifying instant, I’d thought we might be lost forever.
“I can do this,” I said, although my voice sounded thin even to my own ears. “I have to.”
Seth sat down beside me and took my hands in his. They were warm and steady, so different from my own trembling fingers. His touch was an anchor, the one constant in a world that seemed determined to slip away from me. “What if we get trapped somewhere else? What if we end up in the wrong time again?”
“Then we’ll figure it out,” I said, trying to inject more confidence into my voice than I felt. “We’ve done it before.”
But even as I uttered those words, I knew this was different. The other times we’d traveled, every jump had been driven by crisis or desperation, had happened almost without me trying. This time, I was attempting something deliberate and controlled…and my gift had never been very good at being controlled.
The silence stretched between us, heavy with all the things we weren’t saying. I could see the struggle in Seth’s face, the way his jaw tightened as he wrestled with the impossible choice between staying in his childhood home and returning to the future we’d built together. Part of me — a selfish, desperate part — wanted to tell him we could stay. That we could make a life here in 1926, pretend to be the people his parents thought we were.
But I knew better. We weren’t meant to be here, and our presence was already changing things in ways we couldn’t predict or control. Every conversation, every shared meal, every moment of joy we brought to Henry and Molly McAllister was altering the timeline in some small but significant way. We were like stones thrown into a still pond, creating ripples that would spread outward through the years, touching lives and changing destinies in ways we might never understand.
“Tell me about the practicing you’ve been doing,” Seth said then. “The time jumps you mentioned before. How far have you been going?”
I looked down at our joined hands, focusing on the way his fingers intertwined with mine. “Not far. An hour or two, one time a whole week, but mostly just a few minutes.” I paused, then forced myself to meet his eyes. “But those were different, Seth. Easier, like my gift was finally starting to listen to me instead of the other way around.”
“And today?”
“Today feels….” I struggled to find the right words and realized it was nearly impossible to describe something I’d never experienced before. “Harder. Like something’s fighting me. Maybe it’s the emotional stress, or maybe I’m just tired, but it doesn’t feel the same.”
Seth was quiet for a moment, his thumb tracing gentle circles on the back of my hand. “What if you’re trying too hard? What if the reason the small jumps worked was because you weren’t putting so much pressure on yourself?”
It was a fair question, and one I’d been pondering myself. The practice jumps had felt almost effortless, like walking from one room into another. But every attempt today had been a battle, my gift fighting me every step of the way.
“Maybe,” I admitted. “Or maybe traveling this far back in time has disrupted something about my abilities. Like being this far out of my natural era is making it harder to find my way home.”
“You traveled to 1884,” Seth pointed out.
True, but….
“I didn’t do so consciously, though,” I replied. “For whatever reason, my talent seemed to think we’d get more help there rather than returning to my own time. Anyway, it wasn’t anything I did on purpose. And think about it — we landed in 1947 rather than going all the way back to the twenty-first century, almost as if my magic couldn’t handle a jump that big.”
The thought was terrifying, but it made a certain kind of sense. My gift had always done what it wanted. What if forcing this journey to 1926 had disrupted it in some way?
What if the farther back I went, the harder it became to return?
“There’s only one way to find out for sure what’s going on,” I said, hoping I sounded a lot braver than I felt.
Seth’s grip on my hands tightened. “Are you sure you’re strong enough?”
No, I was pretty much the opposite of sure. I felt like I was running on empty, my magical reserves depleted by all those earlier failed attempts. But what choice did we have? We couldn’t stay here, living a lie and disrupting the natural flow of time. And every moment we delayed made the situation worse.
“I have to be,” I said simply.
I stood up slowly, testing my balance, and walked to the window. Outside, Jerome looked exactly as it had when Seth and I had first met here — the bustling mining town with its terraced streets and busy sidewalks, although of course there hadn’t been any snow lingering in shadowy spots back in June like there was now. In just a few hours, people would be gathering at Mabel McAllister’s house for Christmas dinner, expecting to see us there.
