Read Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) for Free Online Page B

down on her knees between the seats.
At least she was safe.
    David followed, losing his footing as she
had, and swallowed down a curse. He felt awkward, completely out of
his element, and helpless. The last time he’d come to the modern
world, he’d done it accidently-on-purpose to save Ieuan, who at the
time had been his man-at-arms and had been wounded by an English
arrow. The wound would have been mortal if David hadn’t jumped off
a cliff with him on the wild theory that putting his own life in
danger would transport them both back to the twenty-first century.
It had done exactly that. They’d returned to the Middle Ages with
Bronwen in the same way he and Anna had come the first time: by
almost causing a car accident.
    More recently, his mother had jumped with
his father and Goronwy off the balcony at Chepstow Castle, also on
purpose, to save his father’s life. Llywelyn had been suffering
from an infection around his heart, which was killing him. They’d
returned to the Middle Ages the same way, though with Callum as a
stowaway. Today, with the storm raging around them, David had
calculated that the odds of ending up in the twenty-first century,
rather than ending up dead, were relatively high. In a strange way,
it was almost as if he were immortal, except that he was pretty
sure that one swing of a sword to his neck would put an end to him
in short order.
    Still, the risky part was that time travel
didn’t always happen. Before he was born, his mother had fallen out
of the window at Brecon Castle with his father to escape an
assassin, and a few years ago she’d been caught up in a storm in
the Irish Sea and almost drowned. Anna had seemed to waver in time
at the birth of her first son, Cadell. None of those events had
resulted in time travel. The unpredictability of the whole process
made him more than nervous about getting back. It made him want to
puke.
    “What’s wrong?” Cassie’s voice was a low
whisper in David’s ear as he struggled to right himself and find a
seat in the boat beside her.
    “I’m royally ticked off to be here,” David
said.
    Cassie snorted a laugh, a hand to her
mouth.
    “How about you?” David said.
    “Ask me in a few hours,” she said. “I think
I’m still too stunned to think straight.”
    “You need to know that I’m serious about the
timeline,” David said. “To me, this is a raid: we get in, we gather
whatever information we can or need, and we get out. Or at least I
do,” he amended.
    “Callum and I are with you,” Cassie said,
“whatever happens.”
    David nodded, accepting that she meant it in
this moment, though they really would have to see how both she and
Callum felt in a day or two, after a shower and the chance to truly
consider what they would leave behind to return home with him.
Callum, at least, was none too certain that a return to the Middle
Ages was what he wanted to do, even if Cassie didn’t want to admit
it.
    Callum and the coastguard officer got into
the life raft last, and the coastguard officer waved at the
helicopter, which began to circle around them but at a higher
altitude. David touched the artificial fabric of his life vest. He
wanted to take everything here home with him, but he would have to
make do with filling his brain instead.
    “Why not the Bahamas?” Again Cassie leaned
in close to whisper to David, though between the noise of the
helicopter and the lifeboat engine, she could have shouted in his
ear and nobody else in the raft could have heard her.
    “Excuse me?” David said.
    “Why don’t you ever end up some place warm?
We could have a hut by the beach, a hammock, and a fruity drink by
now.”
    “Because that’s not where I’m needed,” David
said, taking her question as a serious one instead of a joke.
    Cassie made a rueful face. “Leave it to you
to be so practical, even when doing something that ought to be
impossible.”
    The lifeboat sped back to the cutter, and
David allowed himself to be lifted onto the