Abandoning Anarchy (The Lost in Time Duet #2) Read online

  The Lost in Time Duet #2

  By Kamery Solomon

  Table of Contents

  Other books by Kamery Solomon

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Join the Mailing List

  Other Books by Kamery Solomon

  Forever

  Hell Hall (A Halloween Novella)

  The God Chronicles

  Zeus

  Poseidon

  Hades

  Adrastia

  Exoria

  Dreams Novels

  Taking Chances

  Watching Over Me

  The Swept Away Saga (A Time Travel Romance)

  Swept Away

  Carried Away

  Hidden Away

  Stolen Away

  Buried Away

  Taken Away (A Swept Away Saga Origins Story)

  The Lost In Time Duet

  Finding Freedom

  Abandoning Anarchy

  The Lost in Time Duet #2

  By Kamery Solomon

  Happily Ever After Publishing - Arizona

  Copyright © 2018 Kamery Solomon

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Published by

  Happily Ever After Publishing

  Arizona

  Smashwords Ebook Edition

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  This book is available in print and ebook format.

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  For Tyanne

  I gave you the first one and you get this one too, because I couldn’t have done it without you ♥

  I was quite possibly dead. It had always been pressed upon me that Hell was rather hot, but it seemed odd to assume heaven would be cold by comparison. If the ice digging into my skin was any indication, I was therefore not in either place, but somewhere else entirely. For a moment, I believed myself in a strange kind of limbo, caught in a world that was all darkness and frost.

  A tingling sensation was present in every one of my limbs, weightlessness permeating into my core. It was as if I floated through nothing, repeatedly stabbed by a million needles, my consciousness refusing to scratch more than the surface.

  Strange wailing filled the air, soft at first, as if trying to push through cotton shoved in my ears. It grew louder with each passing second, until the sound rang in my mind, creating a dull throb.

  Groaning, I haltingly lifted my head, feeling my muscles cry out in protest as I blinked through the frozen water crusted on my eyelashes. A swirl of snow fell peacefully on the trees I lay among, following the slope of the ground upward. There, at the top of the small hill, a scene I couldn’t fully comprehend was unfolding, the source of the piercing noise found at last. Colorful lights flashed across the earth from atop a strange box looking thing, the red and blue orbs unlike anything I had ever seen before. Beneath them, a stationary white light shone in my eyes, forcing me to squint.

  Shadowy forms emerged from the surrounding night, running toward me, carrying bags and shouting. The words they said were foreign, my ears ringing as I peered up at them. Hands wrapped around my arms, dragging me up the bank of the river, the lower half of my body leaving the water I hadn’t even realized I was partially submerged in, my brain struggling to remember how I had ended up there in the first place.

  Fingers pressed into my skin, more lights shining in my eyes as the forms bent over, examining me. They continued to speak, the words not meaning anything to me, though they were in English. It was if they were talking through a muffled haze, the beating of my heart drowning out everything else. My mouth wouldn't work through the fog, and so I remained silent watching whatever it was the people were doing to me.

  Suddenly, I was unclothed. My coat and boots were pulled off me, scissors sliding through my waistcoat and shirt, ripping through my pants, leaving me bare to the elements. A cot with wheels appeared, and I was assisted onto it, a thin blanket wrapped around me as we rolled further from the bank of the river, towards the flashing lights.

  Everything about this situation felt off, as if I'd somehow fallen into a different world, one I had no chance of understanding. The longer I was awake, the more I began to collect my thoughts, my mind struggling through the icy haze that had held it captive at last.

  "Where is Olivia?” I slurred out.

  "She’s in the other ambulance, honey.” The face of one of my rescuers materialized, and I was able to see who she was. She wore a heavy coat with a symbol I'd never seen before on the breast. It was an odd-looking star, the image of a snake entwined around a staff in the center of it. Her dark skin almost melted into the night sky, the snow sticking into her twisted locks and eventually seeping into the braids. Her eyes were kind and sympathetic, her hand grasping mine as she helped to lift me inside the strange, box-like contraption at the top of the hill.

  "What's an ambulance?” I was still struggling to put the pieces together, my brain moving slowly as it dethawed. Then, it all came back in a painful flash, like I’d placed my hand in a fire and couldn't pull it out.

  Olivia, a time traveler and my fiancée, had been injured. She was stabbed by Gabriel Scott, her fellow traveler and a man bent on changing history. I had brought her to the banks of the Delaware, to the river that had transported her through the ages in the first place, hoping I would be able to send her home so she could live. In my haste, I had accidentally caused our horse to rear, throwing us both into the water. When the tunnel to the future opened, I must have gone through with her.

  The revelation filled me with panic, and I shot up, trying to slide from the cot. Searching the night outside with fear and terror, I looked for Olivia, finding no sign of her.


  In response, the woman I'd spoken to and the man with her both grabbed me, sitting me down in the reclined cot and offering words of comfort.

  “You need to rest,” the man said, shaking his head. "It doesn't look like anything is broken, but we're going to take you to the hospital to get checked out just in case, okay?”

  The woman smiled at me again, her eyes moving toward her companion’s face. “Get the heat packs,” she ordered. “And turn the heater on high. He will be lucky if he doesn't have hypothermia.”

  The man nodded, reaching into one of the drawers at his side. Overhead, bright lights continue to shine in my face, an array of items I've never seen before positioned around the small rectangle. Tubes smaller than any I’d seen up to this point, bandages, and row upon row of cabinets surrounded me. The closest thing I could think of to equate the scene to was the surgeon’s tent on a battlefield. Clearly, I was in the care of people with medicinal training, but their instruments were far more advanced than anything in my own era.

  “What's your name?”

  The question dragged me from my surprised inspections and I glanced at the woman, clearing my throat. “August Bancroft.” It wasn’t more than a whisper, the strength of the words vanishing as I sunk further into the revelation of what had happened to me.

  I was in another time. No one here would know me, nor I them. Olivia had at least had her knowledge of the past to help her along when she traveled. I had absolutely nothing. Other than the few things she’d told me about her century, I knew not one ounce of the history or procedures of this place. By consequence, I suddenly felt much smaller and ill-equipped to handle a situation than I ever had in my life.

  “August, I’m going to uncover you,” the woman beside me stated, drawing my attention to her as she moved to pull away the only thing keeping my nakedness from being on display.

  “Whatever for?” I asked, clutching the fabric to me, my nervousness causing all other thoughts to flee and making it impossible for me to focus on anything other than what was happening right at that moment.

  “We’re making sure you don't get too cold,” she said, understanding in her tone. “My name is Melissa, and Jeff and I are going to make sure that everything is okay.”

  By my own self-assessment, everything appeared to be fine. However, my mind raced like a galloping horse, all my thoughts returning to Olivia and the strange millennium we had been thrown into together.

  “Is Olivia okay?” I peered outside once more.

  The doors near my feet slammed shut, and we were suddenly moving, rocking back and forth as the box we were in hurtled from its place, the piercing wail continuing. The motion made me feel sick to my stomach, my body not used to moving so quickly and without any warning.

  “Were you in the car with her?” the woman—Melissa—asked.

  Confused, I shook my head. “Car?”

  She paused, frowning as she shined a light in my eyes again. “Your friend—you said her name was Olivia?—drove her car off the bridge. Were you in it with her?”

  Panic flooded my system. Car? Bridge? She was talking nonsense. The horse had thrown us into the river, and I must have lost hold of Olivia when I hit a rock along the shallows. That was the last thing I remembered before waking in this time, without my love and half frozen to death.

  “We fell in the water,” I started lamely. “There was no car.”

  “The driver of the truck told us someone had jumped in the river beforehand,” Jeff stated. “Was that you?”

  Floundering, I gaped at them. If what they were saying was correct, Olivia and I had somehow returned to the exact moment she first traveled from. In this epoch, her accident on the bridge was only moments ago, not an entire year.

  Unfortunately for me, I was not the man who had jumped in the water before her. Gabriel Scott had been that person, and he was nowhere to be seen, possibly still in the past.

  “I . . .” Pausing, I couldn’t think of what to say. The truth would sound ludicrous, at best. As much as it pained me to do so, the only option I had was to speak dishonestly, to protect us both until we could be reunited. “I do not remember,” I finished lamely. “Only that I saw Olivia. Nothing else.”

  Melissa’s frown deepened, but she accepted the lie. “Let's focus on getting you the help you need, and when we get to the hospital, we can check on Olivia.” She took a small pouch from the man, twisting it some and then pulled the blanket back, exposing me.

  Unbothered by the state I was in, she put the warm pouch against my groin. At the same time her partner, Jeff, placed another bag on my stomach, the warmth stinging painfully.

  “She is well, though?” I pressed, fidgeting some as the heat seeped into my skin. “Someone is assisting her as you are me?”

  “They pulled her out of the water a little down river from you,” he said, passing a few more of the packs to Melissa, who put them in my armpits and instructed me to hold them there.

  Once the pair was satisfied I had enough of the odd little bags spread across my body, they covered me up and began talking with each other, going through the drawers and calling to someone else I couldn’t see.

  Sitting down, Melissa held a strange object up to her mouth and began speaking into it, detailing my condition. We continued to move at an alarming speed, my stomach twisting uncomfortably as my head pounded, my fingers fighting off numbness. She used phrases I didn't understand, an unseen person replying on the other end of the device. It was a stark sign I was no longer in the place I'd known my whole life. Rather than allow myself to take a moment and wonder at the things around me though, I found I couldn't make myself concentrate on anything other than the woman I loved.

  She was in the other ambulance—a contraption like the one I was in now, I assumed. Hopefully, that meant she was receiving aid as well. Whatever happened to me would be worth it, so long as she lived.

  All at once, we slammed to a halt, and the doors near my feet flew open. Melissa and Jeff raised railings on either side of me, and my forced bed began to roll. As we left the car—that was what Olivia had called these things, wasn’t it?—we were greeted by new people. Their hands pressed on me, voices speaking with each other as if I weren't even there. More light shone in my eyes, and they wheeled me into a building with doors that opened magically on their own.

  “What's your name?” one of the new people asked. I could just see his dark hair and concerned eyes as he glanced over me, the strange box of light in his hand flashing an image as he walked beside us.

  “August Bancroft,” I replied.

  “We found him on the bank a couple hundred feet away from the woman,” Jeff added.

  “What happened, August?” the first man asked, nodding to someone in front of us as they moved out of our path.

  “I—I don’t know,” I replied hesitantly.

  “Do you know what day it is?”

  “December twenty-sixth,” I answered confidently.

  “And the year?”

  I opened my mouth, a year from the eighteenth century on the tip of my tongue, only to swallow the words with a painful gulp. “I believe . . .” I started, hesitating some as I desperately tried to remember the year Olivia had said she traveled from. “Two thousand . . . six, I mean, seventeen?”

  The answer seemed to concern all of them, the group trading looks as they continued to wheel me along. Thankfully, their inquisition of me stopped for a moment as the man held his flashing box up to his ear and began speaking to it.

  Seizing the opportunity, I glanced around, searching for Olivia. Unfortunately, I saw no sign of her. Slates with writing on them adorned the walls, a glow I didn’t comprehend making it easy to see what they all displayed. Lights blinked, poles beeped at people, and the counters were covered in little rectangles that everyone seemed to stop and stare at. This place was noisy as well, people talking to each other and moving quickly through the hallway. A loud ringing sounded off every few seconds, prompting someone behind a desk to pic
k up another object and hold it to their ear. Before I really knew what was happening, I was pushed through another doorway and into a small room, my bed halting and the wheels locking into place as one of my helpers pressed a button.

  “Okay, August,” Melissa announced, smiling down at me. “Jeff and I are going to leave you with the nurses and doctors here at the hospital now. They will take good care of you.”

  “What about Olivia?” I asked, desperate.

  “She is on her way in,” Jeff reassured me. “They’ll give her all the help they can.”

  “They’ll save her you mean,” I corrected him, frustrated that no one was answering my questions. “She’ll live?”

  "It’s an exciting Christmas night here at Pennsylvania Hospital, isn’t it?”

  Focusing on the latest addition to the room, I watched as a man in a blue uniform walked in, a cord hanging around his neck with a small plaque that bore his likeness and name.

  “I'm Robert,” he said, stopping beside another strange object I didn't recognize on the wall and holding his hand beneath it. A white foam poured onto his palm unbidden, and he rubbed his hands together, massaging whatever the substance was into his skin. “I'll be your nurse while you're here.”

  “Nurse?”

  He smiled, nodding as he emitted a small laugh. “That's right. What's going on? You were in a car accident?”

  “N-no,” I stammered, confused again as to what was going on. “Olivia was in a car accident. I was . . . I don’t remember.”

  “You were standing on the bridge?” Robert The Nurse continued to stare at me as if he didn't believe me, but no accusations passed his lips.

  Blinking, I sucked in a sharp breath, trying to come up with some sort of explanation for what I knew would sound impossible.