“That would be a no,” Michael replied, sobering as they entered the stable.

  The man smiled, looking more like some weird version of Aladdin. And then he disappeared. There was nothing but air where he had just stood.

  Michael blinked and rubbed his eyes. The man was gone. It was just Michael and the half-dozen horses lined up in their stalls. What? No. He was drunker than he thought. He ran his hand through the air and laughed at himself.

  “Detective.”

  Michael spun around, wide-eyed. “What are you doing? How did you do that?”

  “I told you.” Simeon leaned in, wide grin intact. “I can flit through time, landing in this year or that. But I cannot stay in one place too long.”

  Michael gave him an incredulous look. “What are you talking about?”

  “Detective, I’m telling you. I’m a time traveler, cursed by a hag to never settle down, to never have time for love.”

  “This isn’t happening. I’m not standing here with a cursed genie who’s pining for love and who can disappear.”

  The man laughed. “I’m not a genie. Would you like for me to get you something from the past or the present to prove to you the strength of my words?” Simeon asked, confident that he could, in fact, prove his words. “It can be nothing like a phone or something that could alter time.”

  “I’m still wondering if I really traveled back—”

  The man disappeared and returned a few seconds later with a well-worn bicorne hat in his hands. “Napoleon’s,” was all he said.

  Michael’s head was reeling. This guy was actually disappearing and appearing right in front of him. Was he a wizard? He said he was cursed.

  It could have been anyone’s hat. How was Michael to know? But the guy was disappearing! It was difficult not to believe him.

  “Did you just take it from him?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Simeon replied. “I went in, picked it up from where it was resting on a wooden chair, and left. He probably doesn’t even know it’s gone yet.”

  Michael shook his head as if to clear it. He couldn’t be thinking of Napoleon now!

  “Are you here to bring me back?” Michael asked him. Now that it might be a possibility, he wasn’t sure he wanted to go back. Here, he didn’t feel like ending everything. He didn’t feel plagued with thoughts of Clements and his brother and the rest. His thoughts were more filled with Lady Charlotte Whimsey.

  “I cannot bring you back,” Simeon told him. “I had never met any who traveled through time until I met Kestrel. When I—”

  “Kestrel Lancaster?” Michael gave it a shot. He didn’t really think it would be the same person but…

  “Why, yes,” the alleged time traveler said with a smile. “It’s Kestrel de Marre now. Married a knight. They are my friends, but I can only visit for a few hours at a time.”

  “So she was sent back here, too?”

  “To fourteen eighty-five.”

  Michael drew out a long whistle that stirred the horses. Whatever was going on here was some serious stuff. His thoughts trailed off to Charles Lancaster, Kestrel’s father. He was a decent guy, was always very cordial to Michael. He’d looked to be in his late forties, dark hair, silver streaks, expensive reading glasses perched at the end of his straight nose. “Her father was worried sick over her.”

  “Oh?” Simeon appeared curious. “You met him then?”

  “A few times,” Michael told him. “I’m a cop. I was put on the Lancaster case. I wanted to help him. He’s a good guy.”

  Simeon nodded. “Yes, yes, he is. I like him, too. He knows where she is. Fear not.”

  Michael felt better knowing that but how did her father find out? Had she been returned?

  “So,” said the man who could disappear, “you know nothing about the brooch or how you got here?”

  Michael leaned his shoulder against the wooden stable wall and shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “There’s much to be told,” said Simeon pulling up a stool and having a seat.

  “I have much to ask.”

  “You have heard of King Arthur?” Simeon asked, narrowing his coal…or were they dark blue eyes on him.

  “Pendragon. Yes, I know Pendridge is a variant of it. I’m a Pendragon. The duke already figured that out. What about the brooch? Where is it? Why was I sent here? Wait—did you say I met Sir Gawaine?”

  “That is correct. You know him as Mr. Green, I believe.”

  “Yeah,” Michael drawled out, recalling the tall, broad-shouldered man. He was Sir Gawaine of the Round Table? Wait a minute! Why was he acting like this was all real? But it had to be real. There was no other explanation. He thought it wouldn’t hurt to hear this Roldan Simeon—time traveler—out.

  “Okay,” Michael pressed, “King Arthur—you were saying?”

  “Yes, yes. He is real, same as all this, but from another realm.”

  “Another realm.” Michael stared at him. “Yeah, you mentioned that before.” Was he really supposed to believe all this? It was getting crazier by the second.

  “Yes. You come from the future, I come from the past. They are not from here.” He motioned back and forth with his fingers.

  “They?”

  “The king and all his knights, his wife, their wives, his wizard, the sisters. Avalon.”

  Michael assumed Mr. Simeon, if he was telling the truth, had seen many breathtaking things in his lifetime. His breathless smile when he spoke of Avalon revealed what he thought of such a place. “How do you know of this realm?”

  “I have been there.”

  “You can travel through realms as well as time?” Michael asked him.

  “I don’t know. I’d never tried before. I didn’t even know there were different realms until I followed Sir Lucan back to Avalon in my quest for the brooch, needed by Miss Lancaster at the time.”

  “Did you ever find it?”

  “Of course, I did,” the alleged time traveler said indignantly.

  “It didn’t work for her?” Michael wanted to smack his own face. He was actually buying all of it!

  “Oh, it did,” Simeon answered. “In the end.”

  “What end? What happened?” Kestrel Lancaster was his case, after all. He’d chased down empty leads long enough. He’d like to know what happened to her.

  “She chose not to go back. Sir Nicholas’ foster mother, of sorts, returned in her place.”

  It was a lot to take in. Too much. There was a chance of getting back. Getting back to…

  “What I have heard is this,” Simeon continued. “King Arthur recovered from what was thought to have been a mortal wound, and left Avalon. The brooch was made by one or more of the sisters to find him. But the king had his own power and tampered with the spell, causing the brooch to send people to where their greatest love awaited them.”

  “Their greatest love?” Michael lifted his shoulder off the wall and stared at Simeon. “How accurate is it?”

  “One out of one. Pretty accurate if you ask me.”

  “What?”

  “No one knows for sure,” Simeon admitted quietly. “It’s all just rumors and guessing.”

  Did that mean Charlotte was his greatest love or not? His belly churned. He hoped not. He didn’t want her to be. What if she died? And chances of her dying young in seventeen twenty-four were pretty high. He could stop it. Nothing was written in stone.

  “I have to get back to my time,” Michael told him, feeling the new talons of desperation at his throat.

  “I don’t see how that’s possible. I don’t have the brooch, nor can I get it.”

  “Why did it send me here?” Michael argued. “Just to meet her?”

  Simeon’s large, almond-shaped eyes grew even wider. “Who is she? She lives here, I assume?”

  “I thought you knew everything,” Michael said skeptically.

  “Not everything,” the older man said with an indulgent smile. “I hate to spy. I didn’t want to see you without being seen.”

  Michael shook his head and a strange, strangled, little sound escaped him. He had to pull himself together. He could. He had done it every night when he emptied his gun. But this…this was all too crazy and there was so much of it. “Let me get this straight,” he said in an authoritative voice. “I usually do this in my head, but you’ve filled it with all this nutty stuff about traveling through time and—”

  “How do you explain what has happened to you?” Simeon put to him soberly.

  “I’m dreaming, maybe in a coma. I could wake up at any moment.”

  “Or you may not,” the stranger added. “I have recently spent a little time with Kes and Nicholas. They are real. She is expecting his child.”

  Michael needed to sit. Why the hell had they come to the stable? He looked around for another stool. He found one and set it in front of Simeon’s.

  “Okay,” he said, sitting. “So say this is all really happening, and time travel is real. Does my coming here have anything to do with King Arthur…or just her?”

  “I think everyone tied to the king in some way might be going through the same thing.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “I don’t know. I thought there was no Duchess of Glastonbury at first. But the more I find out, the more obscure it all becomes. Sir Gawaine doesn’t even know why the brooch began being sent out, it appears, to the king’s distant relatives. It was made to find him. They have only recently discovered that it was tampered with by Arthur himself. I say, if he wants to be left alone so badly, leave him be.”

  “Where is the brooch now?”

  “The knights likely have it.”

  “The knights. How many are there?

  “Six. Gawaine, Kay, Lucan, Agravaine, Erec, and Sagramore.”

  Michael didn’t care about their names. “How do we get to this realm they’re on? We can take six.”

  Simeon laughed. In fact, he doubled over. “We couldn’t take one of them. Do you hear me, young man? Not one. And besides, I can’t take you anywhere with me. The curse doesn’t work that way. I can do nothing to alter time.”

  “Just my being here is altering it,” Michael pointed out.

  “But I didn’t bring you here. The king’s brooch did.”

  “So how was Miss Lancaster able to return if she wanted to?”

  “Sir Gawaine brought the brooch to her to send her back. She’d been talking about future events and could have been responsible for Henry Tudor not becoming king.”

  “But she didn’t.” Michael knew enough about history and the War of the Roses in fifteenth century England. Henry Tudor won the war.

  “She talked a lot. They were afraid of her altering the slightest thing.”

  “So I have to almost alter something to get Sir Gawaine back here to take me home.”

  “If that is what you truly want. From what I heard, you were at the end of your rope with life, drowning your sorrows in whiskey.”

  Michael couldn’t deny it, but it was love that had led him to that dark place. More accurately, the loss of love. He loved and lost his brother, Clements, Kelly, his hope in mankind. All taken in violence. He lost his love for humanity. He lost his heart, and his soul. He never thought he could get any of it back again. He felt as good as dead. But recently—he looked toward the entrance of the stable—toward the house—for the last day or so, he felt the stirrings of life in him.

  Could he find Michael Pendragon here? He shook his head. He didn’t want to. He was safer this way. Sure, he remembered everything the police therapist had told him. He should step out, trust that he would be okay, blah, blah. He didn’t want to. Weren’t you supposed to want to? He wanted to stay detached. Yeah, the booze helped him forget, most of the time.

  She appeared at the entrance as if his thoughts had summoned her. He smiled almost instinctually. Another thing he hadn’t done in ages.

  “What are you doing in here?” came her dulcet voice, her well-practiced smile illuminated by the lantern she held up to her face.

  “Lady Charlotte, this is Mr. Roldan Simeon. He—”

  “Who? Michael, there is no one there.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  He spun around. No one was there. He was alone, but Charlotte did note the two stools.

  “You know what this is?” Michael raked his fingers through his hair. “He can disappear. He travels—man, I know how this sounds, Charlotte.”

  “He’s like Mr. Clements,” she offered, trying to be helpful.

  “No. This guy is real flesh and blood. He’s hiding. Simeon, show yourself!”

  “Michael, I think you should let me get you back to the house and to your bed.” It would be perfect if he would just follow her, too drunk—as he clearly was—to think straight. If she could get him to bed, he would forget about John deVille and finding him in the dark. He had no idea who he might run into. Perhaps the same men who beat him over the head the first time.

  “I want to prove to you that I’m not nuts. Simeon!”

  She corked her ear with her finger. “Come now, you are frightening the horses.”

  She took his arm with her free arm and led him out, counting her breaths to the front doors. “Tell me about him outside.”

  “No, no,” he chuckled, but it sounded stiff. “Just forget it. I had too much to drink tonight.”

  She suddenly did not believe him. He did not want to speak of Mr. Simeon any longer. That was fine with her. How could her father believe him when he said he came from the future? Michael was sadly not right in the head.

  They walked back to toward house, with Charlotte thanking God that she was getting Michael away from trouble with Preston’s men if they met in the dark. She didn’t want to see Michael get hurt. Although, she thought with a slight smile fixed to her face, it would take many of Preston’s henchmen to beat Michael.

  “How are the boys?” he asked her, his handsome face cast in golden light from the lantern.

  So, he was finished talking about his other friend, Mr. Simeon, then. “You mean Gerald and William? William was hit with the more serious blow. He was likely hit first.”

  She thought she might have underestimated Michael earlier when the young men arrived, and he began asking questions. He was clever, asking things none of them but William were prepared for, as if he had already discovered some truth that would implicate her. What if he caught her one day? What would he do? She could grow closer to him, hopefully making it harder for him to punish her. She would need his mercy because people would always be hungry.

  As for tonight, she hated how their evening had ended but she was glad William had made a full recovery.

  Still, her night with Michael had been…different. Usually, any man who courted her wanted to see her face or “bask in her loveliness”. Ugh, they bored her until she wanted to start ripping strands of her hair out just to feel something. But Michael did not care about looking at her. He had sat on the other side of a wall and opened up to her about himself as she had to him. It had been thrilling. She wanted to spend more time with him, but she knew she shouldn’t.

  “I enjoyed our time together tonight,” she confessed.

  “You did?” he asked, looking surprised.

  “Aye,” she said, just as surprised. “You did not?”

  “Yeah, I did. I’m just surprised you did, too. Usually, a girl likes to be wined and dined, not spoken to from the other side of a wall.”

  “Depends on who is speaking to her,” she told him with the barest of smiles when he cut his glance to hers.

  “Or to him,” he muttered, taking the lantern from her tired arm and looking forward once again.

  “Tell me your story, Detective Pendridge. You do not come from York—or Brittany, do you?”

  “I told you,” he said, eyeing the manor house in the moonlight. “You didn’t believe me. What will change now that I also claim to have met a time traveler?”

  “Did you truly tell my father that you were a time traveler and he believed you? I want to know the truth, Michael.”

  “Why? So you can think less of him for trusting you to me?”

  “That, and I never knew my father was so fanciful.”

  He finally looked at her fully, and when he did, he smiled. It was like the dawn.

  “Are you very sleepy?” she asked, gazing up at him in the lantern light.

  “No. Why?”

  “I know a place. We could go continue our speaking and perhaps watch the sun rise.”

  What was she doing? She had only been so bold with Preston, whom she’d known most of her life. She’d met Michael yesterday! It was too easy to talk to him. She had to be mindful of what she told him. He was not like Preston and her other friends. Besides being a bit mad in the head, he protected the law. There could never be anything between them…well, first of all, because she was going to marry Preston. Someday. If he didn’t marry Amanda. But never mind that. She could not have Michael because he was the enemy. He would put her in a cell if he ever discovered…

  “Michael, perhaps we—”

  “Okay. Let’s go,” he said, only hesitating for a moment. He waited for her to turn in the direction of the place she knew, then he followed her. She was going. She was taking him to Belmair Hill, taking him to the place she used to come to when she was troubled.

  “’Tis not far,” she said, wondering how far gone she was—never mind him!

  “I told your father and John the truth,” he continued on the way. “That I received an antique brooch, bequeathed to me by my distant relative, Eleanor Pendridge. I rubbed it and the name Pendragon became clearer on the brooch. I read the name and said it out loud, Pendragon, and then I was here, in England, in the past.”

  “When do you say you come from?

  “The year twenty nineteen.”

  “You must understand how difficult that is to believe, Michael.”

  He nodded. “I do. There are moments I don’t believe it could be happening either. But it is. You’re real.”

  “Aye, I am.”

  “You said yourself that I sound different than anyone you’ve ever heard. My clothes are different. How do you explain the zipper on my jeans? Have you ever seen one before?”

  “I admit I have never seen jeans before, let alone a zipper. But you could have procured them in some far-off land. Perhaps you come someplace far away from here.”