Free All The Time You Need by Melissa Mayhue Page A

more than historical artifacts. Interesting and cool, and maybe even worth cash to a museum, but that was about it.
    Or maybe they didn’t know that at all. In which case, she’d need to tread even more lightly until she could get out of here and get the authorities to sort through all of this.
    Although… Lissa had specifically said the land had been granted to her grandfather. Perhaps it was only a twist of the language difference. Maybe she used the term grandfather to mean all her male ancestors. Though in the context she’d used it, it didn’t seem as though that was what she meant.
    “I think I’m misunderstanding what you meant,” Annie said at last. “Because what I thought you said isn’t making any sense to me. I may be just another American tourist who doesn’t know a lot about your history, but I do remember reading about King Alexander, and I do remember that he ruled in something like twelve hundred. So obviously there’s no way your grandfather could have dealt with him.”
    “Aye, but he did.” Lissa tilted her head to the side, a confused smile lifting the corners of her mouth, as if her confusion was as great as Annie’s. She also seemed equally determined in the accuracy of her claim. “As a young man, Grandda served the good king as one of his private guardsmen. In the year of our Lord twelve twenty, this land and the castle standing upon it was granted to my grandfather to be home to Clan MacKillican, to remain so for as long as any MacKillican descendant survived. As such, three generations of our people have occupied these lands for more than seventy-five years. Yer forty years are hardly a match to that, aye? Up with you now, Annie, and off the bed. Let’s get you out of these strange things yer wearing and into something more presentable.”
    Seventy-Five years? How could that be? Well, simply, it couldn’t be. Not unless…
    “What year is this?” Annie asked, her voice little more than a strangled whisper as she pushed Lissa’s helping hand away. “Answer my question first.”
    “Twelve ninety-five, of course,” Lissa answered, one eyebrow raising as she turned to share a look with the old healer.
    Agneys shook her head, once again making the clucking sound with her tongue. “Don’t be looking to me in surprise, Alissaund r e, daughter of the MacKillican. What did you expect from a woman you pulled out of yer grandfather’s Faerie haunt?”
    Twelve ninety-five.
    The date played over and over again in Annie’s head, rattling around like a loose marble, as she allowed Lissa to pull her from the bed and help her lift her sweater up over her head.
    “Where’d you get this?” Lissa lifted the pendant hanging around Annie’s neck.
    “It was my grandmother’s,” Annie answered without thought, feeling as if she’d just climbed off a roller coaster after hanging upside down for an hour.
    Twelve ninety-five?
    If she were the type of female who slumped into a faint at every little shock, she’d be a puddle on the floor at this very minute. She almost wished she were that type. Anything to escape the insanity of the world she found herself in right now.
    Twelve-freakin’-ninety-five!
    Her mind reeled at the idea as she struggled to put everything that had happened into some sort of reasonable pattern. No matter how she considered the facts, she could find no reason, no pattern. Only the stark possibility of something that couldn’t possibly happen loomed larger than life.
    “She’ll need slippers for her feet,” Agneys said, staring down at the floor. “I don’t suppose you’ve any of yer mother’s old ones, have you? Yers are no' likely to fit her.”
    “I always kenned the truth of it,” Lissa murmured, her features wrinkled in a thoughtful frown as her finger traced the outline of Annie’s pendant. Then she shook her head as if to clear her thoughts, and a semblance of her smile returned. “Slippers. Aye, you have the right of it, Aggie. She’ll be needing