Linda Evans - Far Edge of Darkness

"Lucy, hon, I'm so sorry..."

"Shh... Dan, don't—"

"This is my fault, it's all my fault, you're hurt and I've smashed up all these innocent people's lives..."

Sibyl swallowed hard. As bad as her own situation was, Dan Collins was living in hell.

"No, Dan." Lucille Collins' voice was breathless from pain, but there was no compromise in her tone. "It is not your fault. You didn't put me here. They did. You didn't hold a gun to our heads. They did. You didn't pull the trigger... or order us marooned someplace horrible to die... they did."

"Lucy—"

"Dan, sometimes we have to... have to stand up to evil men, no matter what the cost. I love you even more because you did. Because you cared enough about... about what's right to risk us, to risk everything..."

The sound of a grown man crying like a child was too harsh, too intimate a sound to be borne. Sibyl wanted to stop her ears, but couldn't move without waking up Charlie. And if he woke up, he'd start hurting again... .

Sibyl must have moved, because Charlie stirred sleepily. His arm tightened around her.

"You okay?" he murmured.

She nodded, then turned over and looked up into his eyes. "And you?"

"Tired," he admitted.

The voices coming from the other room stopped, then resumed more quietly.

Charlie's eyes had gone dark, very nearly unreadable. "Sibyl, I—you're a wonderful girl, smart and sweet and... and dammit , you're a wonderful friend in a tight spot. But... there's... there's a lot you don't know yet about me. I'm not a very nice person, Sibyl."

She remembered waking up with ropes on her wrists and ankles, and no memory of herself. Remembered a battered man's whispered gentleness to a complete stranger.

"You don't know yourself very well, then, Charlie."

His glance was startled. She thought about marshaling all sorts of sentimental arguments. Settled for something he might be able to accept. "You could have chosen to work for Carreras, instead of hunting him."

His whole face closed, like a mimosa leaf that's been pinched too hard. "Yeah. Well. I could see where that got the rest of my good old buddies in the Thirty-Seventh Street Tarantulas. I didn't figure a coffin and a jail cell were all that much different."

Something in the way he wouldn't meet her eyes told her there was a great deal left unsaid. She wondered what had prompted him to become a police officer. She decided if he didn't want to share it, she didn't want to prod. Some things were too hurtful to share.

"Well," Sibyl muttered, having determined this was confession time, round one, "I'm not exactly the innocent you seem to think I am."

His glance was clearly skeptical.

"Charlie, I stabbed Tony and lied to him, then left him to die."

"Yeah, I know."

"And I was glad I—" A gasp of shock broke loose. "You know ?"

"I found him. While I was looking for you."

"And you don't mind?"

"Mind—?"

"Jeezus H. Christ," Logan McKee muttered from across the room, "keep it down, will you? Let a bum sleep!"

Sibyl gulped. These men had gone through hell to rescue her and the others, and they were being rude when Mr. McKee clearly needed sleep.

Meanwhile, Charlie's eyes reminded her of a little boy confronted by an abusive father after a Saturday night binge. How many times has life slapped you to the ground, Charlie Flynn?

She tried to explain how she felt in a way that wouldn't cause him further pain. "I don't rush into things. Generally, that is," she added ruefully. "Seems like lately, rush is all I've done."

"Does that mean you, uh, maybe want to get to know me better?"

She wouldn't meet his eyes for a moment, then, so softly he strained to hear it, whispered. "Yeah. Think I do."

His touch was so light she could barely feel his fingertips. He traced dark circles under her eyes. "You haven't slept at all, have you?"

She shook her head.

Across the room, Logan McKee grumbled into his blankets. Sibyl repressed the urge to laugh aloud at the black look Charlie gave McKee's back. She settled for a contented sigh as Charlie gathered her close. He tucked his arms securely around her again. For a long time, Sibyl lay with her eyes closed, more content than she'd believed possible, then drifted into sleep with Charlie still draped warmly against her.

"So," Dan Collins broached the subject that had been on Sibyl's mind since waking, "here we all are. Battered, bruised, but not quite beaten, in the year 28,000 b.c."

Seven of them sat around the makeshift table the guards had set up in the kitchen. Lucille still slept, drugged into painlessness, and Zac Hughes was still too ill to get out of bed. Lucania was asleep, too, having finished her breakfast then curled up like a puppy on her father's lap.

Logan McKee scratched his beard and merely looked thoughtful. Danny, looking more white-faced than any fifteen-year-old ought to, glanced toward his father for reassurance. Charlie said nothing, but gripped Sibyl's hand under the table. Dan Collins clearly had suffered a sleepless night. Purple hollows under his eyes met deep gouges that plowed down his cheeks from the edge of his nose. Francisco Valdez tried valiantly to look comfortable in the hard, straight-backed chair and failed utterly. Of them all, Janet Firelli was possibly in the best shape, and she'd been shot .

The condition they were in frightened Sibyl. I've seen healthier people walk away from plane crashes. How can we possibly go after Carreras like this? He'd laugh himself to death. She suppressed the urge to close her arms around herself. Carreras could send his people through at any time and catch them flat-footed. And just how did the recall devices work? Would they be reappear in the middle of Mafia Crime Central?

Sibyl decided someone had to start voicing doubts and questions and no one else seemed eager for the job.

"Colonel Collins—"

"Dan. Please." His eyes urged her to agree.

Sibyl shrugged. Why not? "All right. Dan, I don't really have any idea how this time-travel thing of yours works, except Tony told me you press a recall button on that little gadget he had with him and you get back home again." She frowned. "Where is it, anyway? I had it in a pouch..."

Francisco said, "All your stuff's in the sickroom. I didn't take the time to look at it. Your jewelry's in there, too."

For a moment she was nonplussed. "Jewelry?" Then she recalled the heavy gold ornaments Bericus had ordered her dressed in. She almost laughed aloud. She had a source of income, after all. "You know, I'd forgotten I came through dressed like the Queen of Sheba."

Charlie glanced up. "You sure were."

She cleared her throat delicately, aware of the heat in her face. "Anyway, Colonel—Dan—I don't know how this time-travel stuff is supposed to work, but a couple of worrisome thoughts have occurred to me."

Dan Collins nodded tiredly. "I expected them." He leaned forward and steepled his fingers. "Go on, please."

"I don't think Tony planned to end up here, in this time and place. What would be the point? And I can't imagine how you and Mr. McKee ended up in a position to rescue Charlie, although I'm eternally grateful you did."

"Hear, hear," Charlie muttered. He gave her hand another squeeze under the table.

She squeezed back. "It doesn't make sense you'd have known he was there at all, never mind knowing exactly where to look, when he was a couple of hundred miles from the place Carreras dumped him to die. Besides, you don't seem to have anything with you that would be appropriate to early Imperial Rome. So it couldn't have been a planned mission. The only explanation which makes sense is that you were up to something else altogether and something went seriously wrong. All of which tells me these jumps, or whatever you want to call them, aren't reliable."