Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

met, in fact,
he’d longed for this moment. Now that it might finally be here,
however, he was terrified. He pulled Cassie close, wrapped his arms
tightly around her, and managed a few words. “Hang on to me.”
    The three of them huddled together on the
deck. With each wave the ship dove and came up like it was climbing
a mountain. Cassie peered past Callum to shout at David one more
time. “Do you really think that we’ll return—”
    That was all she got out, because David
suddenly stood and faced north, taking the full weight of the storm
in his face. To Callum, he had the look of Odysseus, tied to the
mast lest he follow the siren song to his death.
    “Is this really happening?” Cassie’s voice
caught on the last word.
    “Yes,” David said.
    The ocean seemed to open up in front of
them; they fell into yet another giant trough, and as they came up
the other side, the water rose with them. Callum curled himself
around Cassie’s head and shoulders. But even as he tried to protect
her, he was in the water—and then he was water. He couldn’t
breathe; the world went black all around him for a long count of
three, and then—
    With a thud , he landed flat on his
back on the deck, with Cassie on top of him and all of the air gone
from his lungs. Callum gasped for breath and then ran his hands up
and down Cassie’s back, willing her to be unhurt. He breathed
easier when she opened her eyes. Her wet hair had come loose from
her braid and formed a veil over his face. He swept a length of it
aside. The sun was a bright circle overhead in a nearly cloudless
sky.
    Had they really—?
    Someone sputtered beside him and Callum
turned his head to see David sprawled beneath the mast, shaking
with laughter.

Chapter Four
    September, 2017
     
    David
     
    D avid pushed up
onto his elbows and looked over at Callum and Cassie. They were
both conscious, thank God, though Callum was staring at him as if
by laughing he proved he’d lost his mind. Given that they’d just
time-traveled from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, he
didn’t think anyone should blame him for being a little punchy.
Nonetheless, he quit laughing. His stomach clenched at the
magnitude of the distance that now lay between him and Lili and
Arthur, but as soon as the thought of them came into his head, he
brutally crushed it. The only thing that would return him to them
was to face full on the reality of his present circumstance.
    His immediate concern, beyond the fact of
their location, was the precarious condition of the ship. Looking
down the deck, it appeared that they no longer had a stern
at all, which would explain why none of his men or the ship’s crew
had time-traveled with them. The cog must have split in two on its
way to sinking.
    The loss of half the cog was daunting, and
David hoped they weren’t going to sink to the bottom just yet. The
cog was riding relatively flat, though with a definite (and
disconcerting) tilt downward from where they lay to the water,
which lapped ominously at the ragged boards twenty feet away. He
was pleased to see that the storm had never happened in this
world—or if it had happened in 1289, it didn’t matter in the
slightest to the sunny morning in 2017 they were currently
experiencing.
    “I’d ask what happened, but—” Cassie rolled
off Callum and sat up, allowing him to pop up between her and
David. Neither man said anything, and Cassie finished her thought,
“—I guess at this point it’s pretty clear.” She looked over at
David. “You could have been a little less opaque.”
    “ Time travel is still hard for me to
say out loud, even after all the times it’s happened,” David said.
“And I could have been wrong. We could have just drowned.”
    Even as he spoke, the cog tipped a bit more
towards the stern. Instinctively, the three of them scurried
backwards like crabs, trying to bring the damaged ship back into
balance.
    “I can’t believe you brought us back,”
Cassie said.
    “Not