And then Tamsyn had done that adorable thing with her nose again and said, “Beddoe. That was the name of the pub in the village here. I passed it on my way to Tywyll House. Well, you know, Tywyll House in the future. Or the present as it was at the time.” She’d frowned. “God, that makes me sound like you. Anyway, there was a sign over the door that said beddoe’s tavern, and I remembered it because that’s a great last name and one I might use for . . . absolutely legal and non-nefarious purposes.”
Bowen had grunted at that, but he’d agreed that this was something, and they could at least go to the village, see if Beddoe’s Tavern was still there, and maybe make some discreet inquiries.
Hence the bloody bicycle.
“You’re both mad,” Emerald had told them as she’d watched them put on coats and wellies at the front door while one of the lads who worked in the gardens brought around the two rickety bicycles. “Going out in this. My gran would say you’d die of the ague, but then my gran died because she accidentally drank poison she’d been meaning to give my papa, so what did she know?”
It might have been the first time in a year that Bowen had ever seen Tamsyn speechless.
But now here they were, mad indeed, pedaling through weather that Bowen was sadly all too familiar with—not hard enough to be rain, too wet to be mist, a miserable kind of thing Declan called “mizzle”—and Bowen squinted against it as he navigated the bike over ruts and puddles on the dirt road that wound through the forest from Tywyll House to the village of Tywyll itself.
He was just thinking he’d never be warm again when he heard a cheerful brrrng! and looked over to see Tamsyn ringing the bell on her own bicycle. Her dark hair sparkled with raindrops, and her wellies were splattered with mud, but she was smiling as though this were all just a grand adventure they were having, soaking themselves to the skin in bloody December in 1957.
Goddess, but how he loved her.
Still an awkward thing, that love—still a thing he wasn’t sure he was meant to feel, much less talk about it—but there it was, and there was no getting rid of it.
And when she turned and smiled at him, he couldn’t feel the cold of the rain at all.
All right, that wasn’t entirely true—he was shivering, his beard was dripping, and his cock had retreated so thoroughly that even if Tamsyn had stripped naked right here in the forest, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to actually do anything about that—but it was the sentiment of the thing, wasn’t it? That when he looked at her, life felt . . . easier. Better.
Happier.
Bowen had known people could feel this kind of thing. He hadn’t seen it between his parents because he’d been so young when his mam had passed, but he saw it with Rhys and Vivienne. There were times those two were just sitting on the sofa together, Rhys looking at his phone while idly stroking Vivienne’s hair with his free hand while she read a book, her own hand resting on Rhys’s thigh, and it always looked so . . . nice.
Wells and Gwyn weren’t quite so cozy, but they had their moments, too. Like the time Bowen accidentally caught them on the stairs, Gwyn pressed back against the wall, Wells looming over her, not touching her, not kissing her, and yet whatever it was in the air around them had been so electric that Bowen had scurried away, his cheeks hot, like he’d caught them shagging or summat.
Was that what people saw when he and Tamsyn were together? Just last night, Elspeth had told Harri that Bowen and Tamsyn were what two people in love looked like, and the memory warmed him even now.
Or maybe it was just that they were finally rounding the corner onto the village high street, and he could see the pub rising up out of the misty rain like an oasis, the windows glowing, the sign over the door gently swaying.
No tavern on the sign in 1957. This just read beddoe’s, and Bowen had never been so happy to see a pub in his entire life.
He and Tamsyn wheeled their bicycles to a tall hedge just beside the door, resting them there before hurrying into the pub.
Inside, it was warm, which was a fucking blessing, and a fire crackled merrily in the hearth while the few locals at the bar turned to see the newcomers, judged them not particularly interesting, and then returned to their pints and whatever it was men like these gossiped about seventy years ago. Price of sheep, probably. Weather, always, what with this being Britain.
Next to him, Tamsyn wrinkled her nose. “God, I forgot everybody smoked inside back then. Back . . . now? Anyway.”
She rubbed at her reddening eyes, and Bowen glanced around, realizing that there was indeed a sort of cloud hanging about the place, the tips of lit cigarettes glowing in the murkiness, the smell of pipes thick in the air, and Bowen nodded toward the bar. “I’ll grab us a couple of pints while you look around, see if there’s anyone worth talking to.”
“Like a video game,” Tamsyn murmured, but when Bowen gave her a questioning look, she just shook him off. “Get me a cider, please,” she told him, then, even though her eyes were teary from the smoke, she threw him a quick wink. “Or Rudolph’s Rosé, if they have it.”
Bowen snorted. “Sip of that would probably kill these people,” he said. “They’re not ready for what we do to alcohol in the future.”
“Fair point,” Tamsyn acknowledged, before pointing toward an empty table near the fire. “I’ll be over there.”
Bowen nodded and moved toward the bar, determined to redeem himself for their first meeting and that first drink, and equally determined to find some casual way of asking if any of the Beddoes were still around.
The bar itself was an ancient piece of oak, scarred up and discolored, and he knew the sight of it would send his brother Wells, who’d once been a publican himself and took great pride in the shininess of his bar—to the point that Rhys had openly wondered if he was overcompensating for something—into conniptions.
The fellow behind the bar was barrel-chested with a steel-gray beard, and he had just turned around when Bowen suddenly felt a tug at his sleeve.
He looked over, then looked down, because the woman at his elbow was tiny. Her face was creased with wrinkles, but her blue eyes were bright and sharp, and Bowen could feel magic rolling off her. No doubt about it, this woman was a witch, and a powerful one at that.
Which was why he wasn’t all that surprised when she looked up at him with something near wonder and said, “Oh, achan, you are a long way from home.”
Chapter 15
Tamsyn was sitting by the fire, trying to discreetly rub her itching nose, when Bowen came back to the table, carefully balancing three pints in his hands, while a very tiny, very ancient-looking old lady held on to one of his elbows.
“This is Lowri. She knows we’re time travelers.”
Glancing around, Tamsyn hissed, “Wanna say that a little louder? Maybe add a nice burning at the stake to this trip?”
Lowri laughed, a sound not unlike someone stepping on a set of bagpipes, and then sat down, wooden beads around her neck rattling. “Oh, darlin’, people in Tywyll are used to the strange and unusual. You can’t live here and not be. Whole town built on a ley line.”
Like Graves Glen, Tamsyn thought, remembering that it was that ley line that powered up the magic in that town, gave the Jones women a lot of their power. Made sense, then, that Tywyll was so weird.
“How did you know?” Tamsyn asked as Bowen took his own seat, passing their drinks around. He and Lowri had something dark and foamy in their glasses, while Tamsyn’s was a pale gold that smelled just like walking into an apple orchard.
Lowri took a deep sip of her drink before saying, “Oh, it’s all over you. The pair of ya. I felt it as soon as you came in. You both feel . . . well, I don’t say this to hurt your feelings, lovies, but you feel as wrong as a snowfall in summer. Or a drought in winter. Or . . . you know when you step into a pond, and the earth beneath you is slimy, and you think, ‘That might be the ground itself, but maybe I’m stepping in a nest of eels, and—’”
“Yeah, okay, I think we get the point!” Tamsyn rushed in before Lowri could think of some new horrifying simile. “We feel wrong, and specifically we feel like time travelers.”
“Aye,” Lowri said with a nod, one gnarled hand playing with the beads around her neck. “Met one years and years ago. Before the war. The first one,” she clarified, and Tamsyn tried not to think too hard about how she was sitting across the table from someone who remembered World War I. “He was an odd duck, no idea what became of him.”
“Did he get home?” Tamsyn asked, and she noticed the way Bowen leaned forward, his arms folded on the table. For the first time, she noticed his sweater had suede elbow patches, making it a Very Good Sweater Indeed, and great, now she apparently had a new kink.
