Hell Transporter (Between) (2 page)

“Well, I’d best be shoving off,” Jim said finally, standing up. “I’ve got to get back to my rounds, but thank you both for your hospitality, and congratulations again.” He gave Aiden a firm handshake and patted me on the shoulder as he left.

Aiden’s face glowed with excitement. I raised one eyebrow at him while I gathered up the breakfast dishes, not sure what was so thrilling about Ranger Jim.

“That’s the first living, breathing man I’ve spoken to since my death. It’s just… incredible to be alive again. I cannot explain it.”

“You don’t have to.” The look of awe and sheer joy on his face softened me. For the first time since Ranger Jim had appeared, my shoulders relaxed. I reached up and kissed him. “But you do need to be careful about telling people we’re married.” An awful thought occurred to me. “What if he were to call my parents? They don’t know anything about my getting married in December, do they?”

His face creased in a frown and he held my hand in his own, twisting my wedding ring between his fingers. “But you’re my wife, Lindsey MacRae, whether they know it or not. What would it look like if I were staying here with you all alone, and we weren’t married? What of your reputation then? I would not dishonor you that way.”

I struggled to find words to make him understand. “I know, but in this world, right now, you’ve simply materialized out of thin air. I’ve been at school since December. Hardly anyone even knows I died in that car accident. I was revived at the scene of the crash, so even though I spent all that time with you in between—and yes, married you—“ I put up a hand to cut off his protest, “to everyone else, I never left. So there’s no way they could understand I’m your wife, not without us getting married here.”

He grunted and fell silent. Nervous energy bubbled inside me, making the hash browns I’d eaten congeal into a hard, solid lump in my gut. The myriad of complications ahead of us suddenly smacked me in the face.

“I mean, just look at you! I love your kilt and all, but that is definitely not going to fly in the real world. We’ve got to go shopping and get you some new clothes ASAP.” He gave me a questioning look at the unfamiliar term, but I ignored him. “We’ll have to come up with some explanation about where you came from and how you got to be here in the first place. Like, if you’re from Scotland, what are you doing in Priest Lake, Idaho, halfway across the world?” A note of panic crept into my tone.

“You don’t have any ID, no driver’s license or passport. You have no money and no way to get a job. What are you going to do? You just learned how to use a toilet two days ago, for crying out loud! How long will it take before someone notices that you don’t know anything about things from this century? Things even a child would know!” My eyes flickered around the room, my freak out switch completely flipped at this point.

“What’s a computer? And the Internet? What about a cell phone? Somebody’s going to ask you the most mundane question—like, what’s your favorite video game?—and you’re going to give them a blank stare just like you’re doing to me right now and they’re going to know.
They’re going to know, Aiden!
” My voice reached the upper limit of hysterics.

“They’re going to know you’re not from this place, from this time and they’re gonna call the police and they’re gonna take you away and hook you up with electrodes in some lab…”

The breakfast plate I’d been holding slipped out of my fingers and fell to the floor, smashing into pieces. I covered my face with my hands and started to hyperventilate, envisioning guys in white jackets hauling him off. The hundreds of ways that things could go terribly wrong pummeled me from all sides.

Aiden grabbed my shoulders and shook me hard.

“Lindsey. Lindsey! Stop it. Listen to me.”

I blinked up at him, tears threatening to spill down my cheeks. The look of steely determination on his face was like a port in a storm. Trembling, I locked onto his eyes in order to keep from being pulled under.

“You will teach me everything I need to know in order to blend in. When I was a teenager, my Uncle Alex taught me to live in high society in France on top of a completely new language. I can learn how to live in this place, in this time, too.” His words were strong, tempered and methodical. I drank them in like a woman dying of thirst.

“Don’t be afraid,
mo chridhe
. We will manage. Trust me.” Fear choked out my reply and I nodded at him, overcome with dread. He sighed heavily, drawing me into his arms.

“God did not give me new life to be a burden to you. Believe me, I will work day and night to learn it all. And I will make you my wife, here for all the world to see, and I’ll do it the right way this time.” My eyes misted with tears but when he kissed me, the iron grip of fear loosened so I could breathe again. Enveloped in his strong embrace, I couldn’t help but trust that everything would work out.

It had to. There was no alternative.

Aiden straightened up and painted on a bright smile. “Come, lass. Let’s start right now, this minute. I’ll walk around the cabin and call out anything that looks foreign and you can teach me about it.”

So we did just that. I followed him around and did my best to explain electricity, microwaves, digital music, refrigeration, plumbing, plastics and every other concept I could think of. Every time I’d start to get overwhelmed and feel like the situation was hopeless, he’d squeeze my hand and that tiny seed of hope would grow again.

I pulled out my laptop, got him acquainted with the mouse, and showed him how to surf the web. He commented how remarkable it was that I could type words on the screen without even looking at my fingers.

“Kids these days learn to use a computer before they can read and write. Some people spend their entire day working on a computer and then spend the evening playing games on it or chatting with their friends.”

“How can… ye mean to tell me… people live inside there?” He looked at the slim laptop screen, apparently so far beyond his comfort zone that he was willing to believe anything was possible.

I started to laugh uncontrollably and he scowled at me.

“Sorry, I…uh, no. People don’t live
in
the computer.” I explained the concept of social networking to him and his shoulders relaxed. “Maybe it would help if you took notes.” I grabbed my pink paisley journal and a pen out of the living room and handed them to him, explaining as I did about ballpoint pens and that no one uses quills anymore. He opened the journal to the first page, which was the poem I’d written about him while we were separated. He stopped, reading it silently to himself. I’d forgotten it was in there. Snippets of the poem came back to me as I watched him read.

My God, my God

My heart is pierced, my foundation shaken

I’m pressing hard against the dam but it’s not enough

I can’t keep the pain at bay

The leaks are killing me, memories of joy stripped . . . away

I am not God, I am barely even me

Make me whole again, Lord

And hold me through the flood

My heart had bled onto the page as I’d written those words, agonizing over being brought back to life while he was still in between. He looked up from the journal and stared at me several heartbeats, his eyes resting on mine. The memory of our shared pain wound around us like a steel cord.

Finally he said, simply, “I love you.”

I love you, too.
I echoed him in my mind and he smiled at me. Then we returned to our task, more focused and determined than ever to make this work.

Chapter 2

In the afternoon, I taught Aiden how to drive and let him practice on the back roads. The car had a manual transmission and Aiden was so not getting the hang of the whole stick shift thing. After about the fifth time he bunny hopped the car, I had to talk him down, telling him that I’d done the same thing when I first learned to drive. Of course, I didn’t have to learn terms like steering wheel, brake pedal and rear view mirror my first time out, so he was doing just fine.

The downside of the whole experience was that my transmission was getting thrashed. On the upside, I was learning some great new swear words in Gaelic. He kept at it and eventually learned to start and stop without killing the engine. I was ridiculously proud of him and had a fleeting thought that my dad must have felt the same way when he’d taught me.

We needed some supplies, so I asked if he felt up to driving to the store, about ten miles away. He looked like he was going to say no, but then mustered his courage and nodded. It threw me off a bit to see him so unsure of himself, since he seemed to have this supernatural confidence about him all the time. I didn’t know whether to egg him on or to treat him with kid gloves. So I did neither and just kept quiet.

The first few miles went smoothly, but when a semi passed us going the opposite direction, the muscles in his forearms tensed and his knuckles went white. I was afraid he was going to jerk the steering wheel and dump us in the ditch, but he kept it together, his eyes locked on the road like laser beams. Stress radiated off him in waves and I dared not say anything to break his concentration. The last few miles felt like an eternity.

Finally, he pulled into the gravel parking lot of the little grocery store and turned off the car. With a huge sigh of relief, he closed his eyes and murmured a prayer.

“I’m sorry to put you through that,” I said, feeling guilty.

He shook his head and smiled, though I could tell the onslaught of new information was starting to weigh him down.

“It’s not easy, but I have to learn it. All of it. And I will,” he said. A glimmer of his former confidence shone in his eyes and my heart clenched.

“You’re doing great,” I said, as much for my own benefit as for his.

Once inside, I filled my cart slowly, allowing Aiden time to absorb the unfamiliar surroundings. I tried to remind myself that nearly everything in the store—from the Hamburger Helper to the toilet paper—was new to him. Trying to see through his eyes, I scanned the narrow rows, my brows knit together in concentration. Lines of boxed goods and canned vegetables stared back at me, standing stiff like soldiers ready for battle. And a battle it was, with the deck stacked against us.

As I let the situation really sink in, the walls of the little store seemed to contract, inch by inch, little by little, suffocating me. Hopelessness pressed me into the floor, the playlist of worry and fear stuck on eternal repeat in my brain.

It’s too much to learn in too little time. We only have until the end of the summer. We’ll never make it. Someone’s going to figure it out. Something’s going to slip.

Anxiety churned in my gut. I wanted to scream, to cry, to punch someone in the face over how freaking unfair this was. After all that we’d been through, why would God bring us back together again and yet make it so damn hard? He had the power to bring Aiden back to life, so it’s not like he couldn’t have filled Aiden’s mind with things of this time. It’s not like he couldn’t have made this easier.

Anger started to boil within me. I didn’t want to be pissed at God. He did, after all, give me Aiden, but there was no one else I could yell at, no other way to vent the panic that was twisting me into knots.

“Lindsey?”

I snapped my head around to see Aiden, holding a peach and frowning at me.

“You look ready to kill someone.”

I looked down at the box of instant rice in my hands, now mangled and leaking tiny white tears out the bottom. I threw it in the cart, ignoring the trail of rice on the floor.

“It’s nothing. I just... I need to get out of here.”

Speeding through the store, I tossed groceries into the cart, refusing to acknowledge Aiden’s concerned gaze, then emptied the contents onto the counter to be rung up.

Horror flitted across Aiden’s face when he saw the cashier. I heard him bite back something that sounded like “Holy God.”

Her short, purple hair had black spikes sticking up in the back, and she had both a nose ring and a pierced bottom lip. A tight orange tank top emphasized her large breasts, and tattoos covered both of her arms from shoulder to wrist. I caught him staring and coughed a little, hoping to distract him. He blinked a couple of times and his gaze dropped to my hand as I pulled a small box out of the bottom of the cart.

“Trojan.” Aiden read the label out loud. “What kind of food is in that wee box? Candy?”

So much for burying it under the other groceries,
I thought. I dropped the condoms on the counter and studied the floor, my cheeks burning hot. The cashier’s boisterous laugh made me snap my head up and she gave me a knowing grin, wiggling her eyebrows.

“Yeah, candy’s just about right. But if you were planning on eating them, you should have gotten the fruit flavored ones. They’re my favorite.”

Too stunned to remember I could talk to him with my mind, I shot daggers at Aiden with my eyes.

Miss Purple Hair swept her gaze over his body and flicked her tongue over the silver stud in her lip. “Mmmm… I wouldn’t mind a taste of that candy myself, come to think of it.”

That was it. After all I’d been through—and had yet to go through—this chick leering at Aiden was more than I could take. Something inside me snapped and I just about leapt over the counter to claw that smile off her face. Aiden’s touch on the small of my back guided me back through the angry red haze.