And yet . . . Could it be she loved this Brad? The thought rankled. What if, no matter her transient lust for Galen, it was he who did not measure up? He imagined this Brad a warrior with dark hair and steely eyes. Did she writhe under him as he claimed her, night and morning? Did she moan his name as he suckled at her breast?
Then, too, Brad was very important if he could imprison anyone he wanted. Galen was nothing here. What matter that he was the king’s trusted commander when that king had long since turned to dust? He must push his body back to health. He would have to face this Brad to get back to his own time. And when Lucy saw Galen bring her lover to his knees, when this Brad begged for mercy, then she would be sorry she had not taken Galen to her bed.
She bent over his thigh, not looking at him. She made an apologetic face as she pulled the bandage fastener away from the hair on his thigh, though he did not flinch. Her lips pouted in concentration as she daubed at the wound with her stinging orange-yellow medicine. That wound was already drying and pulling together. The flesh around it was still reddened but not hard and hot with rot. She sat back and cocked her head, studying it.
“No bandage.” She spoke in Latin even though it was hard for her, just so she would not speak words their languages shared. She rejected even that intimacy. “It is better.”
He grunted assent.
She rose. Ahhh. Her blush betrayed her. She lusted for him whether she would or no. She hurried from the room. But soon she returned with her cursed tablets and a glass flagon of water.
“Here.”
He took the tablets. His fingers brushed her hand. He managed to touch her fingers as he took the flagon, too. She practically snatched her hand away. She would not meet his eyes as he swallowed the tablets.
“Good night.” She switched off the light. The little, rocking room went pitch-black.
He sighed. Whatever happened, he could not afford her fear. “Lucy.” He could feel her uncertainty in the darkness. He spoke carefully in Latin to make sure she understood. “I will not try to . . . kiss you again. You need not be afraid of me.”
The silence stretched.
“Thank you,” she said, in English. Then she was gone.
The whole parking structure reverberated with jackhammers and the bone-jarring crash of front-loaders dropping hunks of concrete into waiting dump trucks. This would have to be the last load. It was long after dark. The smell in the air was a curious mixture of diesel fuel and powdered cement. They’d cleared away the little kiosk and the striped gate arms at the entry.
Brad stood still while Casey paced the sidewalk. His head ached with the noise. Or maybe it was the fact that he wasn’t sleeping. He couldn’t stop thinking about what a fool he’d been with Lucy. Why had he been so obsessed with her? A bookseller, for God’s sake, when he deserved someone as brilliant as he was himself. She wouldn’t take up science. She wouldn’t run marathons with him, even though it would have made her leaner. She wasn’t his ideal of a woman at all. Who knows what some hulk from the past saw in her?
He wasn’t the only one upset. The hospital administrator was livid. Especially since no one would tell him exactly why the machine in the parking structure was so important that hospital routine had been shattered, or how it had gotten there if it was too big to fit through the entry. Patients had to park two blocks over in the public lot. Employees were walking five blocks. Only ambulances were allowed to use the driveway and even they had to pull in about fifty feet from the ER doors and run their gurneys up the sidewalk. Cops manned the barriers out at the street where gawkers milled.
And now the engineer said it was going to take three or four days to get the machine out.
Casey stopped in front of Brad, fuming. Casey looked worse than Brad felt. “I need a cup of coffee,” Casey muttered in a normal voice, which meant Brad had to read his lips.
Brad followed, squinting, as though to shut out the noise.
The hospital felt as silent as a tomb after the din of construction, in spite of intercoms and conversations and heels clicking on the linoleum floors. Down in the cafeteria they filled Styrofoam cups with sludgy coffee and paid the cashier before finding a table by the window. An elderly woman was crying in the corner. A father tried to keep a boy of about seven from zooming around the room like an airplane. Casey didn’t even seem to notice. He stared out the window at a little courtyard garden, ignoring his coffee.
“Any news of them?” Brad blew on his coffee. No use burning his lips.
Casey turned cold blue eyes on him. “What do you think?”
Brad just sipped his coffee. It burned in spite of his efforts and he sputtered.
Casey ignored him and turned those eyes out to the garden again. “Won’t get anything useful out of her shop assistant now, because she’ll say whatever we want to hear.”
Brad shuddered. He didn’t want to think about why.
“They didn’t use cabs,” Casey continued. “No hotels. No other hospitals. We’ve checked surgeons and primary-care doctors to see if they had anyone showing up for aftercare for shoulder surgery. Nothing. We’ve got the pictures and the artist’s renderings spread out over airports from San Diego to Seattle, BART and Amtrak stations. We’re blanketing the surrounding counties.”
“That sounds . . . promising,” Brad offered. Casey’s eyes were scary cold.
“No, it doesn’t,” Casey snapped. “It’s as if she and the Viking disappeared into thin air.”
“So . . . uh, the Stanford guy confirmed the guy is Viking?”
Casey seemed to notice his coffee for the first time and took a gulp. It must have been hot enough to scald, but he didn’t register pain. Casey was one big callus. “Hard to tell. Clothes are tenth century. Sword is Saxon workmanship, but the etching on the blade is in Danish runes. Apparently, it says: ‘I was made for the son of Valgar, for whom the world waits.’ ”
“What the hell does that mean?” Anger welled up in Brad’s throat.
“It means the guy has a high opinion of himself.”
Lucy had a high opinion of him, too. Stupid bitch. She falls for someone with empty boasting on his sword. Brad only realized his grip had tightened on his coffee cup when the Styrofoam broke and hot coffee spewed over the table and onto his lap. “Jesus!” He jumped up and grabbed napkins from the dispenser on the table to scrub at his Dockers.
“Maybe the landlord is the key,” Casey muttered. “If you expect to get into your apartment after four months of not paying rent, you’ve got to have an in with the landlord. She was probably boffing him, too.”
Brad swallowed. That couldn’t be. “Maybe the damage made the machine bring her to the wrong time. Maybe she didn’t know she was four months late.”
“Then she’d be surprised she couldn’t get in. And where might she go?” Casey dripped condescension. “Landlord’s lying about not having seen her. We’ll work that angle.” Casey rubbed his jaw. “Then we have the problem of how they got away from the building, landlord or no. They didn’t take a cab. There’s no car missing from the parking lot. We have her car, and they can’t have walked with him in such bad shape.”
“Rental car delivery?”
“Checked that.”
“You need a witness. Maybe there was a homeless person outside her apartment.”
Casey stared back at the garden, jaw working. Okay, he’d checked that. Brad resolved not to offer any more suggestions. But Casey wasn’t giving him a choice. “There’s got to be something about her we’re missing . . . some skill, some . . . something that might tell us where she was.” He looked at Brad.
“I told you everything I know months ago. She hangs out in libraries and bookstores. She walks—a lot. She knows lots of languages.”