Gift of Gold

she whirled to find an opening. All she needed was an opportunity to plunge the rapier into Kincaid while he concentrated on his intended victim.
    She never got the chance to land her blow. Jonas had seen the blade in her hand. He spun aside from Kincaid’s second lunge and the movement took him past Verity.
    Jonas snatched the rapier from her hand as he moved by her.
    “Jonas, no, don’t touch it, it’s the dangerous one!”
    But the warning came too late. The moment his fingers closed around the hilt, the walls of the room began to curve around her and the psychic corridor opened in Verity’s mind. She tried to shout a warning but the sound died on her lips.
    She stood frozen in the doorway, her hands clenched at her sides as Jonas slipped into a fencer’s crouch. She struggled to hold on to both realities simultaneously. It was the first time she had ever attempted it and she was startled to find it was even possible. But it wasn’t easy. The two sometimes threatened to blend together, she discovered.
    The present reality was suddenly overlaid with the sensation of a man’s unrelenting fury. The fury was old and potent and timeless. It was also new and raw and reverberating through the bedroom.
    Some things never change. A man
’
s rage would always be a terrify
i
ng thing, whether it was very new or four hundred years old.
    Verity couldn’t tell if the rage was emanating from Jonas or from the terrible, writhing ribbons seeping down the corridor toward her. The coiling tendrils were the colors of midnight and blood and steel. The last time she had witnessed anything like them in the corridor was the night Jonas had come to this room with this rapier in his hand.
    In the bedroom she watched the two men moving around each other in a deadly pas de deux. But in her mind she stood in the time corridor and watched another scene in which a man dressed very much as Jonas was dressed did battle with an enemy. The scene flickered and died and reappeared again in quick staccato bursts.
    She closed her eyes in present time for a moment while she assessed what was happening in the corridor. She sensed the danger there and knew that someone had to deal with it. Jonas had his hands full. He must be waging a major battle just to keep his attention on the present. The past would be reaching for him through that rapier.
    The only reason why the past wasn’t swamping him was due to her.
    She was acting as a magnet for the seething ribbons of emotion that flowed from the faltering image in the corridor. The tendrils of violence and emotion wanted Jonas but they were forced to hover impotently around her.
    Instinctively she turned to search for Jonas but she couldn’t find him in the corridor. She sensed his presence but he was not in sight. She stood alone watching the short, flickering battle scene.
    The two men in the corridor circled each other with the same movements as the two in the bedroom. As the nearest one revolved slowly, rapier ready, Verity saw his face. It was the face of a man about Jonas’s age and it was locked in the same taut fighting mask. It was the face of a man who meant to kill his opponent. For some reason the other man’s face was more indistinct. The image winked in and out of sight, never progressing beyond the point where the man who was Jonas’s age drove his rapier into the chest of the other man.
    Over and over that one scene flickered in her mind. Over and over she was forced to watch the ghosts go through the motions of fighting and killing. It always ended the same way: blood welled and the image recycled.
    And all the while the tendrils of emotions flowed from the image like blood from a wound. They sought Jonas, the one who had called them forth by touching the rapier, but they were forced to tangle around Verity’s feet.
    Verity was shaken as she had never been before. She was there alone with the image and the swirl of night and blood that was flooding the corridor. She sensed the dangerous, silent hunger in the ribbons of emotion that slithered around her.
    “Verity!”
    “Jonas? Where are you?” She whirled around in the corridor, searching for him.
    “Stay where you are.” Jonas’s command came from a disembodied voice that seemed to fill the tunnel.
    “Where are you?” she screamed in her mind.
    “Trying to balance between the corridor and real time.” And then came a disgusted oath.
    “
Shit.
”
    There was an impression of momentary distraction and pain, then a