Free Wakening the Past: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series Book 2) by Barbara Bartholomew

passenger in the car. And now she was sandwiched in between two huge, fast-moving trucks and in the corner of her eye she was seeing a tiny fleck of light that shouldn’t be there.
    She was being looped back in, caught in the past and if she slipped from her body in these circumstances, leaving it to unconsciousness, she and Bobbi and maybe others on the roadway might die.
    “No! No!” she shouted and, for perhaps the first time, fought the transfer that would send her back into the past. “Hang on, hang on,” she told herself and trying to ignore the tiny light that grew larger in her peripheral vision, she clicked the indicator that would tell others she was trying to pull over to the right. Instead she hit the emergency flashers.
    That was good. This was an emergency. She had to get off the highway and bring the Nissan to a stop.
    As though from a distance she heard Bobbi’s frantic voice. “Hart, you’re driving crazy! What’s going on? Hart, is she taking over? Are you going back?”
    Then, as she sensed herself slipping into that tunnel that led to the past, she felt Bobbi take hold of the wheel and knew that she was surrendering control to a fourteen-year-old who most likely had never driven a car before. She held on as long as she could, pressing her foot to the brake and trying to get the car slowed and off the road.
    She heard Bobbi scream.
     
    The strain of trying to slow the switch to the past left Stacia shaking and sick. She dropped the platter of fried chicken she was carrying and it fell into bits on the floor, the pieces of Mom’s perfectly browned chicken flying all over.
    Stacia heard two voices screaming at once: Bobbi’s back on the highway and Helen’s here in the kitchen of the little house in Medicine Stick. “Mom, Stacia dropped the chicken,” Helen yelled, even as Bobbi’s shrieks faded into the background and then were gone.
    Her mother came in scolding over her carelessness, but Stacia had a hard time considering the loss of the main dish for the family’s dinner seriously. Not when she couldn’t know what had happened to that car she’d been driving down the highway.
    It was one thing to endanger herself, but she’d put Helen’s granddaughter and innocent travelers at risk by her carelessness in getting behind the wheel after her recent experience.
    “I didn’t think,” she said out loud. “I forgot.”
    S he rushed outside to vomit into the red dirt in the front yard. Then she looked up to find that both Mom and Helen had followed her from the house.
    “You’re sick, baby,” Mom said, taking her arm to lead her back into the house where she was sent to brush her teeth and wash her face. The smell of chicken in the air made her feel even more sick, but she managed to avoid disgracing herself by heading back to the bedroom she shared with Helen.
    She closed her eyes and tried to push herself forward, back to Hart’s body, but though for the first time she’d managed to delay the switch for a few seconds, hopefully enough to prevent an accident, she seemed unable to exert any control now.
    She saw herself in the vanity mirror, a red-haired young woman, not a child at least. Once more she was reliving the past, though she could see no purpose for doing so.
    “Feeling better, Stacia?” Helen peered in, her eyes showing her concern.
    She nodded.
    “Mom said not to worry. She’d just washed the kitchen floor and she’ll pour water over the chicken and put it back in the skillet to heat up.”
    Still halfway back in Hart’s time when the loss of a meal wouldn’t have meant much, she remembered that here a dinner of fried chicken was a big deal. Most days they had meatless meals, mostly beans and fried potatoes, and the whole family would be looking forward to Mom’s fried chicken.
    She’d just bet Bobbi would be disgusted at the idea of picking the chicken up off the floor and washing it. She’d probably think it should be fed to the neighbor’s dog as being