Free TIME QUAKE by Linda Buckley-Archer Page B

beseechingly. He ignored her silent pleas. The Tar Man, too, fixed the big man with a stare and, with a jerk of his head, indicated that the fellow should remove himself from his sight.
    ‘I believe you have urgent business elsewhere, Mr O’ Donnell.’
    ‘Yes, Master Blueskin, indeed I do.’ The tall, turbaned figure sidled off as quickly as he could without breaking into a run.
    The Tar Man dragged Kate backwards into the fortune-teller’s tent. The woman, still shaken from her sighting of Kate, was sitting at a small table and drinking gin from a pewter mug. She looked up expectantly, composing her face into a pleasant smile for her latest customer. The smile withered on her face.
    ‘I’ll thank you to hold your tongue, madam,’ said the Tar Man, holding the struggling Kate in one hand and the point of his knife to the woman’s throat with the other. The woman looked from Kate to her attacker and back again and an expression of such abject terror came to her face that even the Tar Man was taken aback. She pointed a trembling finger towards them and then made a curious sign in the air that Kate could not decipher.
    ‘The Oracle!’ she breathed.
    The woman’s face had turned ash-grey and an instant later she fainted clean away, her head landing with a thump on the table. The Tar Man, who was accustomed to his victims using all manner of ruses to escape his clutches, instinctively questioned the authenticity of the woman’s fainting fit. He therefore pushed at the woman’s chair with the sole of one foot and continued to lever it over until the laws of gravity caused the woman to collapse out ofit like a sack of potatoes onto the hard ground. Kate winced as she heard the woman’s head knock against a table leg.
    ‘Oracle?’ the Tar Man repeated. ‘What did the wench mean?’ It was a rhetorical question given that his hand was still clamped over Kate’s mouth. He kicked out at the woman’s back, without any particular relish, to confirm her unconscious state before diverting his attention back to the matter at hand.
    He leaned over, picked up the fortune-teller’s chair and pushed Kate into it. He stood looming over her. Kate managed to return the searchlight of his gaze for only a few seconds. She looked away but could still feel his eyes burning into her. The Tar Man’s presence was powerful, knowing, unpredictable . . . Joe Carrick, the vicious leader of the gang of footpads, had terrified her, too, in the same way that a mad dog would, but at least she had the measure of him. With the Tar Man she felt that she was floundering out of her depth. Gideon’s words came back to her.
I suppose he is fearless because he has faced the worst a man can face and still survived. Most rogues’ hearts are not completely black but his heart is buried so deep I doubt it will ever see the light of day
. . .
Beware of him, children, he is always two steps ahead of you while appearing to be two steps behind
. Surely he and Gideon couldn’t be brothers,
could
they?
    Why was the Tar Man just standing there, looking at her without saying anything? Kate stared fixedly at her lap, steeling herself for whatever was about to happen. She would be brave. Or at least she would try. A dog barked outside the tent and, for one blissful second, she convinced herself that it was Molly, and that her dad had travelled across time to rescue her. But it was not to be. She was alone, where none of her friends would think to look for her, with Lord Luxon’s wicked henchman, who did not care if she lived or died. Who could help her now?
    Finally the Tar Man broke his silence. ‘I have grown fond ofyour century, Mistress Dyer,’ he said in a half-whisper, too close to Kate’s face. ‘I had a secret that was the envy of every villain in London. A secret that you and I share, do we not? Each morning I arose to look out over a world where
anything
was possible. I am not a man inclined to fancy, but in truth, I often travel back, in my