“You have to stop!” the woman said. It was the first time she’d spoken, and Elliot found he liked her voice, if not its tone. It was deep and rich, and laced with a thick accent that fit her looks. Dark, exotic and intense. It was exactly how he’d expected her to sound. While he was cocking his head, looking down at her and wondering about her, she spoke again, louder this time. “This animal cannot take much more! You have to stop.”
“Yeah. You’re right about that.” The horse was damp with sweat, hotter than hell and blowing hard. He looked around, spotted a stream nearby, and guided the tired animal into the water. The mare tugged at the reins, trying to lower her head for a drink, but Elliot held her firm, made her go a few more yards, until they were behind a stand of trees, before he eased up and let her drink.
He drew a breath, watching while the mare drank, making sure she didn’t overdo it. He used the time to untie the woman’s hands. “So…Esmeralda, is it? You want to tell me just what the hell I walked into back there?”
She turned halfway around to glare up at him. “You can fool your own brothers, Eldon Brand, but not me. Never me. You think just by taking a well-needed bath and scraping the whiskers from your face you can convince me you are someone else? Eh?”
Elliot licked his lips. “My name is Elliot. Not Eldon.”
She studied him for a long moment, tilted her head to one side. “You are a Brand, that is plain enough.”
“Yeah, I’m a Brand. Elliot Brand, but I don’t know you, and I never met those guys in town before in my life.”
“You look like Eldon,” she said. “Only…cleaner.”
“Well, I’m not Eldon.”
He tugged the reins when he judged the mare had drunk enough, and she lifted her head. Elliot hated to, but he nudged her into a brisk walk, following the stream for a ways, and finally emerging into a copse of trees. There he dismounted. Then he turned to grip the woman around the waist and help her down. She stiffened at his touch, but she let him help her. She was so wary, though—her eyes on his hands, and her body poised as if ready to react to the slightest move on his part. She pulled away from him the minute her feet touched the ground.
“Look, it’s pretty clear you don’t believe me. But I’m telling you, lady, I don’t have a clue what’s going on here. I don’t know where the hell I am, or how I got here, or—”
“You are in Quinn, Texas, Señor Brand. And what is going on is an execution. I murdered you—or your twin—and I was about to hang for it.”
Elliot nodded slowly. Quinn, Texas. Hell, he’d had a knot in his gut, fearing she would tell him just that. “They…um…don’t hang people where I come from.”
“No?”
“What…uh…what’s the date, Esmeralda?” He didn’t look her in the eye when he asked the question.
Her voice was softer. “Eleven October, eighteen hundred eighty-one. What difference can that possibly make?”
He blew a sigh. “A lot. Oh, hell.” This was all some delusion. He was probably lying hunched over his pickup’s steering wheel right now, with a massive concussion or worse, and all of this was a coma-induced dream. Shoot, he hoped he would come out of it okay. Hoped he didn’t die. Wished to hell his brothers would show up and get him out of this mess, the way they always did. Come on, Garrett. Shake me or slap me until I wake up, he thought.
Someone shook him. Not Garrett. The lady. “Hey? What is the matter with you?”
He looked at her. “Damned if I know. So why don’t you tell me about this Eldon? Why’d you kill him?”
Again that narrow-eyed look. “Are you pretending…or are you really a different man?”
Elliot shrugged. “Okay, let’s try this, then. How did you kill him?”
She lowered her eyes. “He tried to rape me. I drove my knife into his heart, all the way to the hilt.”
Bloodthirsty little thing, wasn’t she? He fought off a full-body shudder. “And you know for a fact you stabbed him, right? I mean, that’s his blood on your blouse there?” He nodded at the all-but-shredded little half jacket and the bloodstained white cloth underneath.
“Si. He bled like a pig.”
Only, when she said it, it sounded like “peeg.” Damn near made Elliot grin. He liked the way she talked. Blood lust aside, of course. “Well, then, we can get this out of the way pretty easily.” Elliot reached up to his own shirt, untucked it. The woman took a step away from him as he began undoing the buttons, and he realized what she thought. So he gave up the unbuttoning and ripped it open instead. Better to get to the point as soon as possible. Hell, she might just knife him again, otherwise. “There,” he said. “Look at my chest. You see any stab wounds? Any blood?”
She stood stock still, staring at his bare skin, blinking in shock. Slowly, she stepped closer and, lifting her hand, pressed her palm to his chest. Elliot felt a ripple run through him—a delicious little shiver instigated by that touch, and he thought maybe it wasn’t a real good idea to have her hands on his bare chest. Not a good idea at all. She was the kind of trouble he didn’t need. Even if she was just part of some delusion.
Finally she lifted her head, met his eyes. Hers were wide and dark and frightened. “You are not Eldon Brand,” she said slowly. Her hand was still resting right over his heart, warm and soft and small.
“No. I’m not. I’m Elliot. You can trust me, okay?”
Her brows slammed down into a frown, and her hand fell to her side. “Trust you? You are still a Brand, señor.’“
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
She glared at him and, reaching to her throat, fingered the chain she wore. As she did, the pendant at its end came out from beneath her blouse, and Elliot saw it, caught his breath and blinked in shock. It was the crystal skull! “Where…where did you get that?”
She lifted her brows, then looked down. “This? It has been handed down through my family for generations. My father gave it to me just before he died. Murdered by more of your stinking family,” she added with a scowl.
Hoofbeats sounded in the distance. Their pursuers were coming. Hell. “What is that thing, Esmeralda? What does it…what does it mean, what does it do?”
“Do?” She lowered her eyes, averting her gaze. “What makes you think it can do anything? I do not know what you mean.”
“You’re a lousy liar.” He heard a shout, then splashing. He gripped Esmeralda’s shoulders. “Listen, I was perfectly okay an hour ago. I was running an errand, and the date was October eleventh, nineteen-ninety-nine.’’
She sucked in a breath, looking up at him fast. “You are loco!” she whispered, taking a step away from him.
“I’m not loco, dammit, I’m here, and I got here when I held that very stone you’re wearing in my hands and read what was written on the back!”
Shaking her head, she took another step backwards.
“Look, dammit!” Elliot held up his palm.
She looked, then came closer and looked again.
“Dios,” she whispered, seeing the burned shape of the skull in his palm. “What can this mean?”
“I don’t know. Let’s get out of here, find a better place to hole up, and try to figure it out.” He reached for her hand. She looked at it, shaking her head slowly.
“I cannot go with you. You are a Brand. Your family stole my father’s land and his cattle, and then his life. I would sooner take my chances on my own than to trust a Brand. Any Brand.”
Elliot opened his mouth to argue, just before he saw the riders crashing through the trees, guns raised. He grabbed Esmeralda, flinging her to the ground and landing on top of her, just as the first shots were fired. Then he swore as he realized he was trapped. Stuck right here. There were men on all sides, all of them getting off their horses now. They formed a wide circle around them, and began closing in.
“Toss your gun out, fellow. You don’t wanna die for trash like her!” someone yelled. Sounded like Adam, but he would never call any woman trash. The Brand boys hadn’t been raised that way.
“You want her, you’re gonna have to go through me,” he shouted back.
She turned her head, staring up at him as if shocked. Then she looked out at the others, moving ever closer around them. “That is Allen Brand, the banker,” she whispered, pointing. “And his brothers, Waylon and Blake, the outlaws. Garrison, the sheriff. They will kill you. They will kill us both.”
Elliot was good and riled, a state he didn’t remember ever being in before, as he looked down at her terror-stricken eyes. “They’ll try,” he told her.
“We have no chance!” she pleaded.
“We have one.” He nodded down at her. “The pendant.”
She shook her head slowly, her hand closing around the skull and lifting it. “It is only carved stone.”
“It got me here,” Elliot told her. “I’m sure of it. Maybe it can get us out.” He looked up, saw the men coming closer. Men who looked startlingly like Garrett, and Adam, Wes and Ben. Only mean, cruel and murderous.
Esmeralda grabbed his hand, pressed it over hers, where she gripped the skull, and said a prayer in Spanish. Then she began reading the words on the back of the skull. But even as she did, the men came closer.
“Toss the gun down, pard, and hand over the lady.”
“Get the hell away from us or I’ll shoot!” Elliot said, aiming his stolen six-gun.
There was a blinding flash of light in his eyes, a huge pain shooting through his head, dizziness…
…and then clarity again. He lay on top of Esmeralda, who was cringing beneath him, hands to her eyes, shaking all over. He lifted his head and saw the circle of men still closer, all peering at him. Lifting the gun, he said, “I mean it! Back off or I’ll blow you to kingdom come!”
They stopped. They looked at each other, then at him, their faces utterly puzzled. “Uh, Elliot? Hey? You okay? It’s us, all right? Take it easy,” Garrison, the evil sheriff, said, his star winking in the sunlight.
Elliot frowned, looking down quickly to make sure the hammer of his gun was pulled back. But there was no gun in his hand. He was pointing a finger at the men around him. And…and his pickup was right behind him, its nose crumpled against that big old oak tree. And the men surrounding him were…his brothers.
Oh God, thank God, it was all just a dream, and he was…he was…he was….
Lying on top of a trembling, frightened woman…a woman from another time. And she, in turn, was staring at his brothers, hatred and terror in her eyes as they all surged forward at once.
Esmeralda blinked the dizziness from her eyes and scrambled out from beneath the stranger’s protective body. Facing the others, she backed up slowly. “Stay away!” she shrieked. “Stay away from me!” She backed up until her back pressed against something cool and hard. Jumping, she looked behind her. The thing was so foreign, so strange to her, that she only frowned, staring at it. And then another such beast roared past, made a squealing sound, and slid to a stop. Esmeralda screamed at the top of her lungs and dove facedown onto the ground, covering her head with her arms.
“What the hell?” someone said.
“Damn, he must have run her over or something!” another shouted.
“Wait…wait, guys.” That voice was the one she knew. Elliot, the stranger who’d saved her from the gallows. The man who looked like the most evil of men but wasn’t him. Couldn’t be him, for he had saved her life, risking his own to do it.
Yet, did that matter? He was a Brand. Bad blood. Bad family, her father would say.
“Just stay where you are, okay?” Elliot said.
Then he came to her, knelt beside her, and his hands closed on her shoulders. “Esmeralda, it’s all right.” He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a whisper. “It was the crystal. It worked. We…we’re in my time now. We’re safe.”
Blinking in shock, she dared to lift her head and look around. Those evil men were all standing there staring at her in confusion, and a woman had jumped from the noisy iron beast and joined them now. Jenny Brand, the saloon matron and whore. Only…younger.
“Esmeralda, do you understand me?” Elliot asked.
She shook her head. “How can you say we are safe,” she whispered harshly, “when they still surround us?”
“That isn’t them. These are my brothers. My real brothers. Look closer. No guns. And…they’re all clean. No whiskers. Look at Garrett, he has all his teeth and everything….”
Blinking slowly, she took a second look, just as the big one, the sheriff who had only an hour ago tried to hang her, tipped his head to one side and said, “Elliot? Did I just hear you tell that girl that I have all my teeth?”
“Oh, hell, what’s going on here, anyway?” the female cried. She came forward, prying Elliot away, and staring down at Esmeralda with concern in her brown eyes. How strange she was, with her red hair cropped so short. “Are you hurt, hon?” she asked. “Come on, let me take a look at you.”
With her hands—gentle hands, Esmeralda noted—she helped her get to her feet. Then her eyes widened as they raked over Esmeralda’s bloodstained blouse. “Landsakes, she’s bleeding! Garrett, you’d best get an ambulance!”
“No,” Esmeralda said. “I am fine. It is not my blood.”
Elliot came back to her then. “She’s right, it’s not.”
The girl frowned. “Not her blood? Well, then, whose blood is it?”
“No one’s…probably the deer that caused all this,” Elliot said. “I must have hit it.”
“I don’t see any deer, Elliot,” the sheriff said, looking around.
“Doesn’t matter. Probably ran off. The point is, she’s okay. We both are.”
The woman put her hands on her hips. “Oh, sure you’re okay, Elliot! Except for that bump on your head, and the bruise on the lady’s face, anyway.” She shook her head. “What happened out here? Elliot, you were gone for hours. When you didn’t come back, we got worried and headed out to look for you.”
Esmeralda watched him, wondering what he would say. He only shook his head. “A deer ran out in front of me, I jerked the wheel to avoid it, and um… Esmeralda was…just there.”
“But you’re both okay?”
Elliot nodded. Esmeralda, hesitantly, nodded as well.
“Well, I still think you’re both shaken up. Poor thing, nearly getting run down by my lunatic brother.” Jessi stroked Esmeralda’s hair and shook her head. “Let’s get you back to the house, clean you up and…and…” She was eyeing Esmeralda’s dress again now. “My goodness, that’s quite an…unusual outfit.”
“Is it?” Esmeralda didn’t think so. The woman was dressed much like the men…who had to be her brothers. The resemblance was too strong to be missed. But she didn’t look like the same Jenny Brand Esmeralda had known. She had kind eyes, a soft, smooth-skinned face.
“She was on her way to a…a costume party,” Elliot said quickly. “Right, Esmeralda?”
Esmeralda looked at him, saying nothing.
“Listen,” Elliot went on. “She’s pretty shaken up. Jessi, let me take your pickup and drive her back to the ranch, okay? You can pile in with the boys.”
Jessi eyed her brother, then slanted a perceptive gaze at Esmeralda. “Well, shoot, I guess. Just don’t wreck it like you did yours, Elliot, or I’ll kick your tail all the way to the Texas Brand. And then I’ll make you buy me a new one.” She put her hands on her hips, grinning at her brother expectantly. When he said nothing, her smile died, and she frowned. “What, no comeback? Nothing about how it would take ten clunkers like mine to live up to a new one?”
Elliot tugged his gaze from Esmeralda’s to glance at his sister. “What?”
“Nothing,” she said, looking from one of them to the other again and again, a frown knitting her brow. “Never mind. I’ll see you at the ranch.”
Elliot nodded, taking Esmeralda’s hand and guiding her toward the odd metal carriage that waited at the roadside, while his family looked on curiously. When they were out of earshot, he leaned close. “We can’t tell them what really happened. Where you…really come from.”
“Why not?” she asked, staring up at him. He had the bluest eyes…kind eyes. And his face lacked the harshness of Eldon’s, she saw that now.
“Well, because they’d never believe it, for one thing. Look, all we have to do is act normal until we have a chance to…to figure out what we’re going to do next. Okay?”
Looking around her, she glimpsed the town in the distance. It was different. The road was hard…and black. Like stone. And there were rope-like things strung from towering poles, stretching endlessly in either direction. Carriages without horses moved this way and that. “I am not so certain I know what normal is, Elliot Brand. This…this is not my world.”
“I know just how you feel.”
She met his eyes and knew he did. He’d been in her very position only a short while ago. How it could be true, she could not imagine. But there was no doubt it was. “I am afraid,” she said.
“I know. Tell you the truth, so’m I.” He reached up to open a door. “Come on, get in. We’ll figure it out as we go, all right?”
She eyed the machine. Its seats looked soft, but it was foreign to her. “Is it safe?” As she asked the question, she eyed the other one, its front crushed against the large tree.
“I promise, you’ll be safe,” Elliot said. “We’ll go very slowly. It’ll be just fine.”
She looked at him, doubting his words, but not his intent. “All right.” She climbed in. But as soon as Elliot made the machine begin to move, she thought she was going to be sick.
“Are you sure Elliot was okay?” Garrett asked. He was driving his pickup, which, thankfully, had a back seat, because Wes, Adam, Ben and Jessi were all crammed in with him.
“Sure,” Jessi said. “Just a little bump on his head was all.” She frowned through the windshield at her old clunker of a pickup, just ahead. “Gotta wonder, though.”
“Yeah. Gotta wonder.” Garrett looked down at his speedometer. The needle hovered between twenty and twenty-five miles per hour. Sighing, he settled back in his seat and resolved to endure the slow, slow trip back to the Texas Brand.
Elliot watched her. She clutched her stomach for most of the trip, staring out the window with wide, frightened eyes. Gasping and pointing every now and then at such mundane things as the neon Budweiser sign in the window of La Cucaracha and a tractor putting along slightly slower than they were.
As Elliot looked on, she spotted a couple of teenagers with gelled hair and short skirts and too much makeup, and she muttered in Spanish, crossing herself as she did.
Scared. Poor thing was scared witless.
“Look, it has to be that pendant of yours,” he told her. “And if it is, it can get you back where you came from just as easily as it got you here.”
She turned to stare at him. “And if it does, what will I return to, Elliot Brand? Your murdering brothers and their gallows?”
“Those were not my brothers.” His lips thinned as he thought it over. “Must have been…my ancestors.”
She sniffed indignantly, but she wasn’t fooling him a bit. She was more scared than she was mad. No matter how she might try to hide it.
“I cannot stay here, and I cannot go back. The legends told in my family about the pendant were lies!”
“Legends?” Elliot eyed her, but kept track of his speed, too. He was determined to go slow. Not upset her. “What legends?”
She waved a hand with an expressive snap of her wrist. “Foolish tales. They don’t matter.”
“They might. Tell me.” They were leaving the town behind them now and heading away from it, toward the ranch. A five-minute trip that was going to take them at least twenty minutes.
She sighed, looking away from him to the rolling fields beyond the roadside. “It was said the skull had powers. That much must have been true, I suppose. But my family believed it was created by some ancient mystical race, and that its task was to set our world right when things went wrong. To restore human beings to their proper place and time.” She shook her head. “All it has done for me is take me away from all I know and love.”
“Didn’t seem to me like there was much to love about it.”
Her head swung around, eyes and nostrils flaring at once. “There was my land. My father’s land. My home. I went there to take it back from those who stole it away. And now thanks to this stupid…” She reached to her throat, but stopped speaking when her palm flattened to her chest. Looking down fast, she sucked in a breath. “Dios! It is gone! The pendant is gone!”
Elliot swore, barely resisting the urge to slam his foot on the brake pedal. Then he calmed himself, gave his head a shake and wondered why it was suddenly such an effort to keep his legendary cool. “All right, it’s all right. It probably fell off back there in all the excitement.” And his brother was going to skin him alive if he didn’t find it, he added silently. Shoot. “We’ll go back and look for it. But later, okay?”
“Why later? We should go now, before someone else finds it and takes it for their own, no?”
“No one’s gonna find it. Look, it’s gonna look mighty odd to the family if we go rushing back there now. And I still think it’s best we don’t tell them any of this.” She eyed him, doubt about his wisdom blatantly plain in her face. “They’d think we were both insane,” he told her. “They’d probably drag us off to some headshrinker somewhere for treatment.”
“Headshrinker?” For just a second she looked terrified.
“That’s just an expression. I meant a doctor for crazy people. A psychiatrist. You understand?”
“No. I understand none of this.”
“Look, just follow my lead. Play along with me on this. Here, we’re almost home.” He nodded ahead at the sprawling ranch that was just coming into view.
Esmeralda looked, and then she went very still. “This…is your home?”
He allowed a small smile. “Yep. Finest ranch in the great state of Texas. We call it the Texas Brand.”
He waited for her reply. Waited, fully expecting her to make some comment about the beauty of his home, the way most people did the first time they set eyes on it. Instead, he only heard a low hissing sound, like a snake about to strike, and when he looked at her, he saw utter fury in her eyes.
“You are right, Señor Brand. It is the finest ranch in all of Texas. But it is not yours.”
“Huh?”
“This is my land! Your thieving family stole it from my father. I came to this town to take it back, only to face your murdering brothers and their tricks. I nearly died to get this land back from you, and I tell you now, Elliot Brand, I do not care what time this is. It is still my land. And I will have it back. On my father’s memory, I vow it!”
As she spoke, the pickup rolled underneath the arches of the Texas Brand, and Elliot stopped it in the driveway, right in front of the house. He just sat there, staring at her.
She was breathing hard, her face flushed from her recent rush of emotions. They seemed to surge and wane in her like waves on the ocean. She sure wasn’t level, or steady as a rock, the way he was.
“I don’t know what to say to you,” he said at last, speaking slowly, softly. “Esmeralda, this ranch has been in my family for over a hundred years.”
The anger left her face, and her lips parted. “A…a hundred years? Is that how far I have come?”
He nodded. “Almost a hundred and fifty.”
Her eyes closed, but he’d seen the moisture gathering in them before, and he saw it again now, squeezing through to glisten on her dark lashes. “My aunt Maria…my little cousins…. Oh. Oh, all gone. All of them gone….” Her voice was a tortured whisper now. With trembling hands she fumbled with the door, got it opened and half climbed, half fell out of the truck. Then she stood on the ground, looking around at the house, the stable, the barn. The horses in one pasture and cattle in another, more distant one. Elliot got out and walked around the pickup to stand beside her.
“I know it’s a lot to deal with, all at once. Just take it easy. Take your time. Try not to…Esmeralda?” She didn’t seem to be hearing him at all, and then he heard the sound that was so familiar he hadn’t even noticed it at first. It was the mosquito-like hum of a very small airplane. And as the craft passed overhead, he saw it, saw Esmeralda’s neck arch as she tipped her head back. Only…she kept right on going.
He caught her before she hit the ground. Passed out cold, she was limp as he gathered her up into his arms and carried her toward the house.