I pressed away from him as he scrunched across the dried twigs and leaves to get closer.
“Mae,” he said, a warm smile spreading across his face. “You’re back far quicker than I thought. Did you manage it? Did you learn your magic?” Dropping to his knees, he lifted my hand, squeezing my fingers tight as he skimmed his lips across my knuckles. The purple gem at my throat heated and vibrated with his touch and my heart raced. “The Mage and your father escaped, along with most of the staff of Fire Stone. This whole nightmare has all been for you. The school—everything. Lots of the kids have gone home.” He stopped talking as my silence spread around us. “Mae?”
Lowering slowly, he bent to look me in the eye. “Mae?”
I blinked my eyelids shut. The smell of him. It burrowed into my senses, earth and forest, soap and warm skin. It tangled somewhere deep in the recess of my brain. Reaching a hand, I felt around his face as a blind woman would feel the shape of a love one.
“Tristan, it’s you?”
My eyes flew open as he moved, his actions abrupt, almost knocking me off balance as he put space between us. “Mae, do you not know who I am?”
A wild sob built in my throat as I stared at him, at the trees, at the death and desolation surrounding us. I knew where I was—back where I should be: Scotland 2019. “I’m home. I’ve come back through the stones?”
Everything came hurtling to a single pinpoint of clarity. I was Mae Adams. I’d lived in Queens, New York all my life until I came to the Scottish Highlands. Here I met Tristan and we wanted to kill one another, until I found the necklace and found the skeletons on the stones…. My heart stuttered, my stomach squeezing so tight. Until I’d found us.
Oh God.
“Tristan.” I stared at him wildly, my hands slipping around his neck, my body rising until I was on my knees and able to press myself into the firm surface of his chest. “Oh God, Tristan. I don’t remember who I am when I step through. I’ve done nothing, achieved nothing.”
“You’ve been gone for days, Mae. I’ve been sat here waiting for you to come back, though worried out of my mind.” He scrubbed a hand through his golden hair. “I didn’t want anyone to harm you. The guardian’s family and I have been taking it in turns to guard the stones while Mrs Cox,” he hesitated, “does whatever she does.”
Tears prickled my eyes. The thought of this beautiful boy waiting for me to step through, knowing I was somewhere lost in time, pulled a deep and strong wave of emotion from me.
Lost in time. That’s what I was. The girl lost in time.
“Tristan.” My lips skimmed his cheek, the warmth of his flesh against my mouth warmed me from the inside out. “I don’t know who I am when I go through. I don’t remember that I’m Mae Adams.” A searing tight grasp of panic worked its way around my chest. “I think I’ve only been there one day. But I honestly can’t remember.”
“One day! You can’t have been.”
My body fell limp and he caught me in his arms, grasping me tight and pinning me into an embrace. “I don’t know how I can do this. How can I learn anything and bring it back with me when my idea of who I am extinguishes with every step through the stones?”
Tristan shook his head, his lips turned down in disapproval. “You can’t go back there, Mae. It’s too dangerous. I won’t allow it. We will find another way.”
My heart beat heavy. “How can I not go back? I still know nothing. I haven’t managed to change a damn thing and I still don’t know who I am.”
“I won’t let you go.” His fingers tangled with mine like he was going to tether me to him. In many ways I wished he would.
“We are still going to die on those stones.” A horrific vision of my final moments in the twenty first century painted themselves in vibrant and appalling detail in my mind. “Phil will still die.” A sob built in my throat and I tried to swallow around it. I’d stepped through the stones and forgotten my friend had died, and that it was all my fault. Everything was my fault. Everything.
“I’ve got to go back. I just don’t know what to do. It’s impossible to achieve anything if I forget who I am.”
“Have you healed Mary yet and set in motion the chain of guardians?” Tristan cocked his head, his dark onyx eyes thoughtful.
“I don’t think so,” I replied. I shook my head trying to make sense of what limited memory I had of the day before, the day that had actually happened two thousand years before. God, I couldn’t afford to think about it too much or I would be sick in front of Tristan. “Mae’s father is keeping her close. She’s not allowed to talk to Tristram.”
I raised my eyes at the faint hiss that escaped from his lips.
“To you.” I smiled and lifted up, brushing my lips against his. His arms snatched around me, pulling me tighter, his mouth hard on mine, his tongue probing between my teeth. A kiss that was everything; it stole every worry I had. I submitted freely, allowing my body to cave against his, for our chests to push together with our breath. The more I seeped into him, the more of myself I remembered. The flight from the States, the days in the Fire Stone, the miserable dank castle that seemed to be settled where Mae and her people used to live. I gasped into his mouth as I recalled the initial fiery hatred we’d maintained for one another. My fingers tangled in his hair and ran through the silky strands.
Eventually, I pulled away. With every memory I reawakened, my reasoning for stepping through
