They’d lost her. “Great.” He’d thought Casey was invincible. Looked like he was wrong.
“What’s even better is that is that I had to spend time cleaning up the trail she did leave.” Casey spit onto the concrete. “The hospital called the police because it looked like the guy was a victim of an attack. They confiscated a nasty-looking sword with blood all over it. She told them he was taking part in some battle reenactment and the blood was fake. Of course an event like that would have to get a permit, so it didn’t take long to find out she was lying on all fronts. That got everybody excited.” Casey shook his head. “I had to call Felton over at the FBI again to get the sword back and take over the case. Don’t want the thin blue line tangling things up.”
“You got a drawing of him circulating? Someone’s got to recognize a half-naked medieval guy.”
Casey glared at Brad’s questioning his competence. “Not sure what he is. We sent the clothes and the sword down to Stanford for analysis.”
The tarp sighed to the concrete floor in big folds. The men gasped at the great golden gears studded with jewels. “I thought you said the clothes were from the Middle Ages.”
“The professor down at Stanford said on first glance he thought they were Dark Age.”
“When was that?”
Casey frowned at him. “Education a little narrow there, Steadman? You should have gone to the Point. Dark Ages were roughly a.d. 500 to 1000. Rough times. Coupled with the Nordic or Germanic language witnesses report he spoke, looks to me like we have a Saxon or a Viking on our hands.” The workers dragged the rollers into place and hooked a cable to the base of the machine.
Brad flushed. Lucy had fallen for a primitive Viking, the kind who pillaged all of Europe? The original terrorists. Saxons weren’t much better. They just got there earlier. Brad lost it. “Great. He’s probably the one who sabotaged the machine just to get the diamond and you can’t find them even though he sticks out like a sore thumb in modern San Francisco.”
“We’ll find them,” Casey said through gritted teeth.
“And you think that, why?”
Without another word the colonel whirled away and strode to the elevator.
Thursday
“Rise and shine,” Lucy said, bringing a bowl of oatmeal into the Viking’s cabin, along with another dose of Vicodin and Keflex. She’d found an alarm and set it to get up and dose him with Vicodin in the middle of the night. The alarm meant he’d been crouched on the bed ready to attack or defend by the time she opened the cabin door. But at least he’d been awake enough to recognize her and relax into a disgusted grunt instead of taking a swing at her.
“Gd mergan,” he muttered now, pushing himself up. She’d heard him giving small, unconscious groans as he tried to get comfortable in the middle of the night. She was afraid the Vicodin wasn’t getting all the pain. But she was already giving him two seven-fifties. She couldn’t give him more. And this bottle was going to have to last. It said no refills and Jake had said no doctor. If Galen had still been in his own time, he’d have had to live in terrible pain for weeks and weeks, or until he died from infection. How did people live with such hardship? She didn’t like seeing him in pain at all.
She set the oatmeal on the nightstand. First things first. “You need to pee? Urinate?” she asked in English because she didn’t know the Latin for it. Not happening. He looked blank. She gestured at the door to the head in the corner of the master cabin. “Privy? Bathroom?”
“Baeth?”
“Not exactly.” But close. Another word that seemed the same in both the English he spoke and her own version. He must have gotten the connection between bath and toilet, though. He got out of bed carefully and made it to the door to the head, giving her an X-rated full frontal view and then a long look at the muscles moving in his back and those round and totally lovely buttocks. He disappeared inside the head. Thank goodness. After a while she heard the toilet flush. He was a quick learner. There was a shower in there, but he probably shouldn’t get his bandages wet. She’d give him soap and a wet cloth and let him wash himself. What to do about his hair? The sink in the galley, maybe.
He came out, X-rated all over again, seeming unconcerned about his nudity. She wished she could be. “You have a fine mirror. It is glass and not polished metal?” He was back to Latin.
“Yes. Glass.”
“Everything here is glass, even the grand halls.” He sat heavily on the bed and maneuvered his way to sit against the pillows as she pulled the covers up to his hips. She was probably fifteen shades of red.
“I must go to buy food and clothes. Stay here.” It made her a little nervous to leave him. A horrible thought occurred. What if he got bored sitting here with nothing to do and went outside? He was weak, but he’d made it outside to pee last night. She looked around. Okay, well, there was the flat-screen television on the wall. What did parents call it? The electronic babysitter.
She found the remote as he wolfed down his oatmeal. This might be a shock. She stopped his spoon in midair and took his bowl. “Wait. Look at this.” She motioned with her head to the screen on the wall and pointed the remote at it. The television flickered to life. He stiffened, his eyes wide as the images settled into a morning newscast. The good-looking guy and the perfectly coiffed girl were talking about the traffic. “It’s okay,” Lucy murmured. He didn’t look soothed.
“What is this magic? Are these the things that are, or that will be?”
“This is like . . . like a mirror. But it shows what . . . happens far away.” Drat her Latin.
He seemed to get it, though. He nodded thoughtfully. “You are wicce.”
Even she knew that Old English word. “I am not a wicce. All people here have these. They are called ‘televisions.’ ”
“I will call it ‘far-seer.’ ”
That kind of said it. And it was poetic, too. Way better than “television.” “This,” she held out the remote, “changes the . . . the painting.” “Painting” was as close as she could get. She showed him volume and the channel control. Fear in his expression was replaced by curiosity. He took the remote and waved it as he pushed one of the buttons. An old western movie appeared. Indians chased a wagon train that had begun to form a defensive circle.
“Hors,” he said approvingly. “Waegen.” He raised his brows at her. He was testing to see whether she understood the words in Old English.
She nodded, smiling. “Horses and wagons, yes.”
“Deathcwealm?”
Whoa. She shook her head. “Sorry.”
He shrugged, looking past her at the television. Well, she didn’t need to be nervous about leaving him. She was definitely of secondary interest. “Keep the door . . . locked.”
He didn’t answer but nodded, never taking his eyes from the screen.
“Don’t bother to see me to the door,” she muttered, and headed for the hatch.
Chapter 8
Lucy drove the Chevy slowly up the dirt road to Highway 37 past the little convenience store Jake had told her about. She’d brought about a thousand dollars of Jake’s cash, but she resolved to spend as little as she could and get back to the boat as fast as she could, before her Viking could get into trouble.