What an idiot she’d been! Hiding away from the government agents, allowing them to ransack her house. Maybe they had a good reason to be after the egg. Maybe it was a matter of national security. Or that the thing was contaminated—or carried some nasty disease. Maybe she should have turned it over from the start, instead of aiding and abetting a crazy person to steal it away.
Connor stepped forward, his expression anguished, beseeching. “Please, Trin,” he begged. “I know it sounds crazy. But I can explain.”
“Explain?” she sputtered. “Explain what? That you’ve come back from the future to steal a freaking dragon egg?”
“That’s oversimplifying things a bit. But yes, that’s the idea.”
“And you’d do that, why?”
He gave her a sheepish look. “To stop the dragon apocalypse?”
She narrowed her eyes, fury winding up inside her. She was right to have punched him—she only wished now that she’d hit him harder. Instead, she’d somehow gone and convinced herself that he was some kind of self-sacrificing hero with her best interests at heart. When all along, he’d been playing her like a fool.
At the end of the day, she was as a gullible as Grandpa.
What could she do? She could try to scream, to alert the last guard in the house to her presence. But Connor had a gun. He could shoot her before help could arrive and he’d still have the egg. She bit her lower lip, mind racing. There was no way she could overpower him on her own. And the barn wasn’t exactly a stocked arsenal.
Then she remembered her cell phone, stuffed in her pocket. Could she reach in and dial 911 without him seeing her? Maybe if she kept him talking…
“Prove it to me,” she blurted, forcing her voice to stay strong as she slowly inched her hand down to her side.
Connor nodded tersely, though he looked slightly relieved. He dropped to his knees, ripping open his black bag and rummaging through. She took her opportunity, slipping her hand into her pocket and gripping her phone, seeking the three buttons she needed for help to arrive. Once she’d pressed them, she let out a small sigh of relief. Now she just had to keep him occupied until the cavalry came.
“You already saw my laser pistol,” he reminded her, looking up from his bag. “Not exactly your everyday handgun.”
She frowned, thinking back to her captor’s head, exploding in a mass of green goo. Growing up in Texas, she’d seen a lot of guns—but never anything like that. Still, she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of admitting it.
“Sorry. I let my
“What about the Bouncer, then?” Connor asked, pulling out the strange disc they’d used earlier to escape over the fence. As he held it in his hand, the sphere twisted and turned, hovering an inch above his palm. She turned away, ignoring the niggling at the back of her brain. He really did have a lot of strange stuff. But still!
“I’m sure they sell those by the dozen at sci-fi cons across the country,” she managed to say, though her voice had definitely lost some of its confidence.
“Right.” Connor pressed his lips together, then went back into his bag of tricks, this time pulling out a shiny, egg-shaped object, encased in silver. He set the bag aside and rose to his feet, pushing it into her hands. “What about my transcriber then?” he asked, his voice starting to take on a desperate tone. “Tell me this technology exists here.”
Against her better judgment, she closed her hands around the object, studying it with careful eyes. Her fingers brushed against a small button on one side and, to her surprise, a three-dimensional hologram popped up in her palm. A woman, who looked to be in her late forties, seemed to stare up at her.
“Connor, on your way home could you pick up—”
She shrieked, the device tumbling from her hand. Connor caught it midair, running his thumb across the smooth side. The image vanished.
“My mom’s holomail,” he explained, looking a little wistful. “It’s all I have left of her now.”
Trinity knew she was gawking, but found she couldn’t help it. As much as she didn’t want to admit it, Connor was right; that thing definitely didn’t belong in her world. In fact, none of it did. Nor did Connor himself, with his strange accent and strange timing, appearing at the exact moment she needed him to help save the egg. She let out a frustrated breath. Why was the most impossible explanation suddenly the one making the most sense?
“There’s one more thing,” Connor said. “This one I think you’ll recognize.”
He reached into his bag and, to Trinity’s surprise, pulled out a small, red velvet box. A ring box, she realized.
“Um, don’t you think you should at least buy me dinner first?”
Connor sighed, then pulled open the lid. Trinity gasped, her eyes bulging from their sockets as she realized what was nestled inside.
Her mom’s ring. The one she’d pawned to pay the taxes. The one that inadvertently brought the egg into her life to begin with. She looked at Connor in amazement. He pushed the box in her direction. With trembling fingers, she somehow managed to pull it out and hold it in unsteady hands.
“How did you get this?” she stammered as she examined the all-too-familiar piece of jewelry, cataloging its beloved imperfections: the scratch on the left side, the missing pave diamond on the top right. It was exactly the same—and yet somehow different too. Older looking, more worn. As if it had been antiqued.
Like two hundred years antiqued.
With shaky breath, she turned it over, her eyes searching for the inscription she knew she’d find inside.
“Your father gave this ring to your mother,” Connor stated quietly. “He told her to never take it off her finger. After she died, you vowed to do the same. At night, you would twist it around your finger exactly five times while staring up at the ceiling, praying for courage to face the next day.”
She looked up from the ring, feeling the color drain from her face. “I never told anyone that,” she whispered.
“Not yet,” he replied smoothly, his blue eyes piercing her own. “But you will.”
She didn’t know what to say.
“According to our histories, you wore this ring until the day you died,” Connor continued. “It became a symbol to many people. After your death, the Dracken took it and claimed it as their own. It took a lot of work for us to get it back. Many men died in the effort. But the Council knew they could never convince you to help us unless I could prove I was telling the truth.”
Trin stared down at the ring. Then she slowly slid it onto her finger. It fit perfectly, of course, and for the first time all week, her hand felt whole again.
But before she could speak, car headlights flashed through the window, freezing the words in her throat. She cringed. The cavalry had finally arrived—just in time for her to realize they may not be the men in white hats she’d assumed they’d be.
Connor caught her guilty face, then glanced out the window. The car had pulled up just outside the barn’s front door and the driver’s side door popped open.
“Oh, fleck,” he whispered. “Trinity, what have you done?”
Chapter Nine
What
