Read The Family Trade for Free Online Page A

Twilight Zone, Time Squad, programs like that. “Item: I don’t know where or when I am, but this ain’t home. Do I stay put and hope I automagically snap back into my own kitchen or… what? It was the locket, no two ways about it. Do I look at it again to go back?”
    She fumbled into her pocket nervously. Her fingers wrapped around warm metal. She breathed more easily. “Right. Right.”
    Just nerves, she thought. Alone in a forest at night—what lived here? Bears? Cougars? There could be anything here, anything at all. Be a fine joke if she went exploring and stepped on a rattler, wouldn’t it? Although in this weather… “I’d better go home,” she murmured to herself and was about to pull the locket out when she saw a flicker of light in the distance.
    She was disoriented, tired, had just had a really bad day, and some cosmic trickster-god had dumped a magic amulet on her to see what she’d do with it. That was the only explanation, she reasoned afterward. A sane Miriam would have sat down and analysed her options, then assembled a plan of action. But it wasn’t a sane Miriam who saw those flickers of orange light and went crashing through the trees downhill toward them.
    Lights. A jingle, as of chains. Thudding and hollow clonking noises—and low voices. She stumbled out into the sudden expanse of a trail—not a wide one, more of a hiking trail, the surface torn up and muddy. Lights! She stared at them, at the men on horseback coming down the trail toward her, the lantern held on a pole by the one in the lead. Dim light glinted off reflecting metal, helmet, and breastplate like something out of a museum. Someone called out something that sounded like: “Curl!” Look. He’s riding toward me, she thought dazedly. What’s that he’s—
    Her guts liquid with absolute fright, she turned and ran. The flat crack of rifle fire sounded behind her, repeated short bursts firing into the night. Invisible fingers ripped at the branches overhead as Miriam heard voices raised in hue and cry behind her. Low branches scratched at her face as she ran, gasping and crying, uphill away from the path. More bangs, more gunshots—astonishingly few of them, but any at all was too many. She ran straight into a tree, fell back winded, brains rattling around inside her head like dried peas in a pod, then she pushed herself to her feet again faster than she’d have believed possible and stumbled on into the night, gasping for breath, praying for rescue.
    Eventually she stopped. Somewhere along the way she’d lost her slippers. Her face and ribs felt bruised, her head was pounding, and she could barely breathe. But she couldn’t hear any sounds of pursuit. Her skin felt oddly tight, and everything was far too cold. As soon as she was no longer running, she doubled over and succumbed to a fit of racking coughs, prolonged by her desperate attempts to muffle them.
    Her chest was on fire. Oh god, any god. Whoever put me here. I just want you to know that I hate you!
    She stood up. Somewhere high overhead the wind sighed. Her skin itched with the fear of pursuit. I’ve got to get home, she realized. Now her skin crawled with another fear—fear that she might be wrong, that it wasn’t the locket at all, that it was something else she didn’t understand that had brought her here, that there was no way back and she’d be stranded—
    When she flicked it open, the right-hand half of the locket crawled with light. Tiny specks of brilliance, not the phosphorescence of a watch dial or the bioluminescence of those plastic disposable flashlights that had become popular for a year or two, but an intense, bleached blue-white glare like a miniature star. Miriam panted, trying to let her mind drift into it, but after a minute she realized all she was achieving was giving herself a headache. “What did I do to make it work?” she mumbled, puzzled and frustrated and increasingly afraid. “If she could make it—”
    Ah. That was what