Out of Time 01 - Out of Time

been with her father. Being with Simon was an entirely different story.
    A splash of red caught her eye. The only decoration in the room was a god-awful painting of a barn over the bed. The bed. She’d managed to ignore it for all of two minutes. Time for a little more ignoring.
    “So,” she said too brightly. “You got it figured out yet?” She thought she saw Simon smirk. She walked over to the table and looked over his shoulder.
    “Incredible workmanship,” Simon said. “These dials control the time—century, decade, year, month, day. Down to the very minute. Fascinating.”
    Elizabeth pointed to the thin bands that ringed the face. She leaned in closer and rested her hand on his shoulder to steady herself, and willfully ignored the feeling of his muscles beneath her fingers. “And those must be directional coordinates. Longitude and latitude.”
    He cleared his throat. “Exactly.”
    “Then shouldn’t you be able to set it for the time and place we left? And voilà. Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.”
    “Or it could have a built-in homing device. Automatically returning the person to the point at which they left.”
    “What makes you think that?” she said and took a chair.
    “I can’t seem to change the dials anymore. They appear to be locked in place.”
    “Well, then let’s hope it’s got an auto-return feature.”
    Time travel was fun and all, but deep down she’d always believed Simon could control the watch without any trouble. The small room got a little bit smaller.
    He tried varying the extension of the stem, but the dials remained fixed. “I wish I knew how it was activated in the first place.”
    “We could just recreate exactly what we did before.”
    Simon looked up from the watch and gazed at her intently. She needed to understand the seriousness of the situation. “It could be dangerous.”
    “Nothing ventured...” she said.
    A smile tugged at his lips. Her confidence and bravery shouldn’t have been surprising. She’d met each obstacle they’d encountered so far with enthusiasm and a very appealing sense of adventure. She really was quite bewitching. Abruptly, his smile faded. He had to stop doing that. Every time he looked at her his thoughts drifted to foolish schoolboy notions. Now was not the time. “Right, exactly as we were then.”
    Elizabeth stood and moved next to his chair, putting her hand back on his shoulder. “You were sitting, and I was looking over your shoulder. What did you do next?”
    Simon pretended not to notice she was touching him, that the simple gesture made his heart beat a little faster. “That’s the problem. I didn’t do anything. The watch simply...started.”
    “You must have done something. Did you close the case?”
    “No, I remember watching the moon phases as it—”
    “The eclipse!” Elizabeth said excitedly. “Remember, we had a lunar eclipse and that little black disc slid over the full moon.” The excitement ebbed from her voice. “You don’t think we need an eclipse to make this thing work, do you?”
    The moon displayed now was barely half full, and there was no sign of the small disc. He wasn’t surprised she’d come to the same conclusions he had. It was one of the things that had drawn him to her when she first started working for him.
    “It’s not uncommon for astrological phenomena to play a critical role in the supernatural.” The words were spoken by rote. He’d probably said the same thing in his class dozens of times, but he’d never considered what that really meant.
    “So we have to wait for an eclipse?”
    “Possibly.”
    His mind was racing now. Memories of conversations with his grandfather sped across his thoughts. Grandfather had always been obsessed with the phases of the moon. Simon had never paid it much heed. Sebastian Cross had been obsessed with many things.
    Elizabeth started to pace. “I wonder how long we have to wait.”
    “A few days. A few months. A year.”
    “A year?”
    “We’ll have to research that tomorrow. There is another possibility. The watch could have broken when we landed, and we will never be able to return.”
    “You must be fun at parties,” Elizabeth mumbled. She shook her head and pushed out a deep breath. “For now, I’m going to believe it’s set on auto-return.”
    “Believing it doesn’t make it so,” he said matter-of-factly and went back to studying the watch.
    “Sometimes believing something is all you have,” Elizabeth snapped.