The Angel Wore Fangs(30)

“Are they gone?” she asked.

He turned. “You’re awake,” he stated the obvious. “Yes, they’re gone.”

Even though his fangs were mostly gone and his eyes were back to being blue, Andrea couldn’t forget what she’d seen. She felt like Alice in Wonderland having fallen down into some weird garden hole, except that the Mad Hatter’s world here was a ranch with terrorist owners and inhabited by strange beasts. And Cnut was the strangest of them all.

“I think I’d like to go home,” she said, sitting up on the side of the bed. And suddenly the prospect of being back in her cozy apartment and restaurant job, safe from any danger except a burnt soufflé, held much appeal.

“You can’t go home. At least not right now.”

“Why? Because of Celie?”

He shook his head. “I made a little mistake when I teletransported us.” His face was flushed, as if he was embarrassed.

She rolled her eyes. “You’re some teletransporter, Cnut. I’ve got news for you. We’re in the same place. Is that the ‘little mistake’ you mean?”

“No. We’re in the same place, but not the same time.”

“Huh?”

“We’re in the Old West now. The real Old West.”

She was beginning to think Cnut was a little bit crazy, and he was rubbing off on her.

“C’mere. Look,” he said.

She walked over to the window where he still stood. Looking out, she saw several horses tied to a hitching rail.

“That’s where the parking lot used to be . . . I mean, will be.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“We traveled back in time. I’m guessing about a hundred and fifty years.”

“And this lodge?” She waved a hand at their surroundings.

“Is someone’s home.”

She started to laugh and couldn’t stop. It was probably hysteria. “That’s some mistake. Undo it.”

“I’m not sure I can.”

“Are you saying we are trespassing in someone’s house, and it’s the Old West, and the owner will probably come at us with pistols blazing?”

“Something like that.”

In fact, she heard some voices outside, a man and a woman. She and Cnut both went to the other window. The man and woman were coming from the barn and headed toward the house, chatting amiably. The woman had gray hair swept off her face in a bun or something. She wore a long-sleeved blouse tucked into an ankle-length, buckskin skirt and low-heeled boots. The man was much taller and younger, wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots. Andrea blinked several times. It was either Barbara Stanwyck and a young Michael Landon, or else they had doppelgängers.

She turned and smacked Cnut on the arm. “You idiot. What did you do?”

“I told you, it was a mistake. We vangels used to time-travel all the time on our missions. Back and forth through the centuries until a few years ago when we got stationed permanently in the twenty-first century.”

She hadn’t a clue what he just said. It didn’t matter. He was the one responsible for this mess, that much was clear. She smacked him again, then latched her arms around Cnut’s neck and hitched her legs up so that she straddled his hips. Surprised, he just held on to her.

“Get us out of here. Right now,” she demanded.

“What?”

“You heard me, you freakin’ moron,” she practically shrieked. “Do that damn transport thing. Again. Take me home.”

“I’m not sure if—”

Suddenly they were covered with the mist once again, and this time they were falling, falling, falling, as if off a cliff. She might have screamed. Cnut was definitely swearing.

And then she lost consciousness again.

Or maybe she was really dead this time.

She pinched herself. Nope. Alive.

But she was freezing cold.

Rising from the snowy ground where she must have fallen, she stood and saw a massive fort-like wood structure on a flat-topped hill in front of her. Sort of like the Montana buttes, but different. Possibly man-made.

Cnut was standing beside her, equally stunned. “I do not believe this. I do not believe this,” he kept repeating.

“Another little mistake?” she asked.

“A big one,” he replied, without looking at her.

She smacked him again on the arm.

He just ignored her.

“Where . . . are . . . we?” she gasped out, shivering. This wasn’t just cold. It was Alaska cold. It was North Pole cold. It was restaurant walk-in freezer cold.

“Home.” He was staring forward, still not looking at her, but she could see his breath frost in the air before him.

“Home . . . where?”

He turned toward her and said, not at all happy, “The Norselands. And it’s 850 A.D.”