West (History Interrupted Book 1) (11 page)

The natives turned away.

“Your father is too kind to those wild men. Josie, you must need rest to have come this far. You are not in the right mind,” Philip scolded me. He waved his hand at the wares of the merchants around us. “This … junk is not worth your time. Nell, I will report to my uncle you let her dirty her hands in such a place.”

“My apologies, Mr. Philip,” Nell said.

“I know what will please your father to see you buy. I have arranged it already. Return home, and I’ll ensure it arrives.”

I almost revolted at the condescending tone. Nell shook her head, and I relented, following my alleged cousin like a good little puppy back towards the carriage. Unhappy, the ride home seemed much longer than it had going to town. My mind never strayed from the native that wanted nothing to do with me and the sheriff who knew I didn’t belong.

Only when I was in my room was I able to text Carter again.

Am I a starman? And does the person I’m looking for glow? And why did the sheriff say there were three other girls who were here before me?

I shoved it away just as Nell walked in. “Miss Josie, we must get you ready for dinner.” She had a different gown draped over her arms.

Not one to complain, I nonetheless groaned internally. I had been sweating and uncomfortable all day.

“Your father is excited,” she added with a smile. “You’ve made him so happy, Miss Josie.”

At the mention of the kindly man, I guiltily dispelled my internal grumbling about the clothing. It wasn’t right to stress the dying man out, not when I was the reason he was happy for the first time in a year. Still somewhat conflicted about whether or not I should tell him the truth, I stood and let Nell strap me back into the corset and a new gown before we headed downstairs to the formal dining room.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

Late that night, I awoke in an outright panic. Sitting up, I stared at the crackling flames of the hearth, unable to register why I was shaking and felt the need to run. Fear flew through me, its source unknown. There had been a dark dream … two voices, a fireplace, blood …

Pain stabbed me through the temple. I gripped my head in my hands and dabbed at the warmth trickling from my nose. The sight of my blood grounded me, and I forced my stiff body to relax. It was around one in the morning, according to the collection of clocks around my room.

What is it with clocks? They’re everywhere.
John had a strange obsession with time.

The curiosity as to why John liked them faded. Climbing out of bed, I crossed to the washbasin and dipped a washcloth, holding it to my nostril.

Wind whistled and howled by my window and slapped the shutters against the siding somewhere in the house. The sky was mostly clear, the moon bright, and the prairie’s grasses nearly flat from the force of the gusts. Assuming the wind woke me, I sat down next to the window, admiring the view, until my nose stopped bleeding. I wasn’t a stranger to sinus infections, and I hoped I wasn’t getting one here. It wasn’t like I could run out to Walgreens for Sudafed if I did.

An image I didn’t recognize was in my head, not mine yet not belonging to anyone else, since I was alone. It was of a cave and …

An aerial view of John’s property with a route highlighted to an unknown destination. Intrigued, I sat up. The map flashed like any other image and then faded. Not wanting to lose it, I sprang to my feet and snatched my phone from under my pillow, writing down what I could recall in a blank text.

The map was meant to be followed. I understood this as well as I knew it was not of my imagining but something placed there by whatever it was Carter did to me. I lit a lantern by following the sequence of steps Nell had gone through and walked into the adjoining dressing room to find something more comfortable than a gown to wear.

Josie had no pants. It took ten minutes of searching to find something I’d consider wearing on an adventure like I planned. There were too many elaborate gowns … and simpler gowns soft enough to tell me they were quite old. I pulled on one of those that fit more of a Regency England time period than the Old West. They had likely belonged to Josie’s grandmother or mother.

Far more comfortable in it than what Nell dressed me in, I pulled on my boots and a long riding habit of wool. Proud I’d been able to figure out how to dress myself with the overbearing clothes, I tucked my phone in a pocket and crossed to the door.

I thought for sure several times that I’d wake the entire house with all the creaking the floors did. No one stirred, though, and I made it down the groaning stairs to the bottom floor and the wide front doors. Fumbling with the locks, I was nearly blown over by the harsh wind outside and barely caught the door before it smacked the wall.

My hair tossed around me. Closing the door, I wrestled my tresses into a sloppy braid that managed to subdue most of it and ran to the barn. The wind was a combination of warm and cool as autumn blew across the plains to replace summer.

Entering the cozy, quiet barn, I sucked in a deep breath of the familiar scent of horses and hay. It took only a moment to realize that John had horses of incredible quality, along with polished, soft saddles and bridles that would cost a lot in my time.

I selected a horse and prepared him for a ride, silently thanking my aunt for pushing me into dressage when I was five.

Moments later, I was outside in the brusque wind, headed at a quick walk on horseback towards the road leading to town. When I was far enough away from the main house not to be overheard, I pushed the horse into a canter.

It was much harder to follow the map when on the road than it seemed in my head. At some point, I was supposed to leave the road and head west, towards the territory of the Native Americans. But that point … well, I failed to recall the terrain features, except that it was somewhere around a huge tree, and there weren’t many of them.

I rode over two hills before spotting the tree – and another flag marking the edge of John’s property. Hesitating only a moment, I switched directions and nudged the horse off the road, trying to follow the map in my head.

The hills continued in this direction, though I began to see shallow box canyons, a river in the distance, and wider valleys. The grasslands bowed to the wind, the rustling sound loud, while the horse snorted every once in a while and picked his way through the grasses.

Pulling out the notes I made, I checked our course to see what else I needed to look for.

“
Canyon with a cave in its wall
.” I read my notes aloud. “Great work, Josie. This is why you never got more than a B in college. You suck at notes.” I allowed the horse to walk in the direction it chose and closed my eyes, trying to recall the map without luck.

Gotta tell Carter the chips need to be more interactive.
When they chose to work, they were fantastic. But I had no control over them, and that was annoying.

From what I remembered, the cave hadn’t been too far. I opened my eyes and stood up in the stirrups to get a better look around. Another canyon was to the east of me. The river disappeared into it, indicating it was larger than I could tell from here.

I guided the horse in that direction. A trail appeared not far from where we were, and I realized the Native Americans had established paths through the grasslands. The horse followed the narrow trail towards the canyon, and we reached the edge before I pulled it to a halt.

The deep canyon seemed to come out of nowhere. Invisible from afar, it resembled something we saw in Northern Arizona in the Grand Canyon National Park, though far more isolated. The river was at the bottom, some two hundred feet below. Between us was a rocky, grassy slope – and a shelf-like trail carved by years of use that ran from the top where I was to the river.

Cave.
Unable to understand its importance, I sensed … darkness from the direction of the cave in the wall below me. It had to be the empathic memory chip; there was a faint whisper, and another instinct of
knowing
that wasn’t inherently mine.

Doubting the path was wide enough for the horse, I left it at the top and went to the narrow path running along the canyon wall. I started down it, startled by the relative stillness and quietness of the air without the heavy wind. With one hand on the wall and another righting my scattered braid, I made my way carefully towards the cave in the side of the canyon wall. If not for the full moon, I wouldn’t be able to see where I went.

The whisper intensified, and half-formed visions bombarded my thoughts. I stopped several steps before the cave.

None of these images were good. Even if I couldn’t quite grasp them and didn’t understand their sources, I could tell something bad happened here. It was like the introduction to a horror movie: slashes of red and black, shadowy movements, the unexplained kaleidoscope of places and inanimate objects, and the general sense of foreboding that made the hair at the back of my neck stand up and my heart race.

A fire flickered to life, casting light and shadows outside the cave, and I sucked in a sharp breath. My intuition was urging me to flee. The map brought me here for a reason, though. I needed to find this cave or maybe, the person inside it.

 
Be like Amy Pond,
I told myself again. She had never backed down from an adventure on Doctor Who. Carter was sort of like the Doctor. At least, I didn’t think he sent me here for me to die before I had a chance to change history the way he wanted. I purposely didn’t think about what I had learned, that there might’ve been other girls sent back before me.

I drew a deep breath and moved towards the cave, pausing in the open entrance.

It was larger than I expected, extending a good thirty feet into the canyon wall, and stocked with barrels and crates along the back wall.

A Native American man sat on a wooden box towards the back, staring at me with a mix of puzzlement and intensity. A glow flared around him briefly, the way it had at the market.

“Running Bear?” I called uncertainly.

He rose, tense, with one hand clenching a bloody knife and another a rabbit he was skinning.

The flickers of memories were faint, jumbled with the insistent whisperings and dream-like images emanating from everywhere in the cave. The chips were confused again, unable to read him clearly but reading the
cave
itself.

Not Running Bear.
The man was an identical twin. The scar running down one side of his face marked the difference between the two men, along with the odd intensity and cold eyes. Running Bear hadn’t been happy to see me at any time our paths crossed, but this man was … hostile.

The historical chip was telling me about the massacre that he would commit, the same tale it told me about Running Bear. I realized with some dread that it wasn’t able to tell the difference between the two men. In fact, there was nothing anywhere in my mind that mentioned there being
twins,
as if the knowledge was either never recorded or lost somewhere in history.

But the visions of blood and shadows, of anger and hatred, belonged to this man.
This
was the man I could see starting a massacre.

There’s something very wrong with him.
My empathic memories were scrambled and overwhelmed by the cave, for there was more than one source to the whispers, and they were spread around the cave, as if …

Dead.
There were people buried in this cave, people whose lives had ended violently, right here, by the man whose mind was too tangled for me to read. Why hadn’t Carter told me I could read objects and places in addition to people?

“Who are you?” I whispered.

“Fighting Badger.” He was studying me. “How did you find me?”

“I, uh …” There was no explaining microchips and a mental map. My eyes went to the floor of the cave, to the places where the dead lay. I had the sense of disconnecting with the world around me, of watching rather than existing.

How was it possible for me to sense something like that? Had Carter put something else in my head that let me read objects and places, or was this empathic memory chip much more powerful than he let on? Was this what he implied about the chip when he said it was experimental?

How was I able to read
dead
people?

“You are a spirit,” Fighting Badger voiced quietly.

I shook my head, struggling to focus with the whispers and images. A small part of me was warning me to run, telling me I should fear this man and place, that they were both evil in a way I didn’t know existed before tonight.

“You must be.” He followed my gaze to a random spot in the cave, where the whispering was loudest at the moment. “Only a spirit can hear others.”

“You can hear them, too?” I asked, surprised.

“They are loud tonight.” Fighting Badger tossed his rabbit and knife down then wiped his hands on his pants. There was an emptiness to his eyes. Though I wasn’t a superstitious or religious person, or someone who really thought twice about souls and the afterlife, I experienced the strange sense that this man had no soul.

“They are.” I swallowed hard and shifted feet. He was built like someone who tracked, hunted and killed his own food, the opposite of the comparatively pampered life I lived, which meant I wasn’t going to get far if I made a run for it. “You are not a ghost and you can hear them.”

“I hear them because they are mine. I did not free their spirits. They stay with me. They are mine.”

He’s a fucking serial killer.
One who collected souls instead of other souvenirs of his victims.

“Come, ghost. You must sit with me.”

“I’m not one of your spirits,” I objected.

“I know.” Fighting Badger sat down near the fire and motioned for me to do the same.

I glanced towards the path that led back to my horse.

“I will hunt you, spirit or woman,” he told me calmly.

“Okay,” I whispered. Not wanting to step on the dead, I made my way through the unmarked graves to the fire and sat across from him.