“Yeah. Um. This way.” Shaking her head to dispel her foggy wonderment, she stepped off the porch. She was aware of the two men following her, Merlin trodding almost on her heels, and Arthur still playing with Mab, who bounded alongside like she’d found her soul mate.
Arthur. If she’d seen him hanging around a construction site or a biker bar, she wouldn’t have given him a second glance. Until he smiled and looked at her with those eyes.
They rounded the far corner of the house, and she stepped aside. “Here it is.”
Merlin had seen it before, but still he stopped to gape.
Arthur stepped past him, his face drawn with a sad, heartbroken look, like he was approaching the dead body of a long-lost friend. History shone through his eyes, memories, intense and desolate. He looked to be in his thirties, but he was older, much older, as if he had been reborn a hundred times and retained the memories of each of those lives.
Evie wished her father were here to see this.
He reached the stone and took hold of the sword’s grip. Squeezing, he took a deep breath and pulled. The sword came out as smoothly as if from a scabbard, with the barest slipping noise.
The blade gleamed when he held it aloft; he turned it, studying it with a haunted gaze. Evie resisted an impulse to drop to her knees—Arthur, the true king, the rightful bearer of Excalibur stood before her.
Arthur turned the sword so it pointed to the ground. He knelt with the point resting on earth, his hands laced together over the grip and cross guard. He
bowed his head low and his lips moved, undoubtedly in prayer.
Evie’s heartbeat rattled, anxious that she was watching something private, that she had no business intruding. She and Merlin stood side by side.
“How did you know to come here?” she said, her voice hoarse. “How did you find us?” Hopes Fort was halfway around the world from Britain.
He nodded at the praying Arthur and said, “Faith.”
“And why—why now?”
“Because there is need.”
“What need?”
“At the end of one age, the shattering of the old era, someone has to stand by to pick up the pieces and build the new one.” He said this with the same straightforward tone, no matter how Evie gaped at him.
The ground began to tremble. Mab whined and turned circles, then stopped to look across the prairie at nothing. The trembling increased in violence, shaking Evie to her bones. She swore she could hear the house’s foundations rattling.
After living in Southern California, she knew what an earthquake felt like. She sat down before she fell, grabbed Mab, and hugged her. Already off balance, the dog toppled into her lap. Merlin stuck out his arms for balance. Arthur, still kneeling, held his sword ready and looked for an enemy.
Then it ended.
A temblor like this wasn’t particularly frightening—it might even have been as high as a 6 on the Richter scale. Except this was Colorado. Colorado had baby earthquakes, imperceptible, every decade or so. What was a magnitude-6 earthquake doing in Hopes Fort?
She ran to the house, Mab loping alongside her. Merlin and Arthur followed. She dashed into the kitchen, vaguely aware that there could be aftershocks and she should stay outside. But she had to find out if her father was okay.
The house phone was dead. The lines must have been down. She tried the light switch, and the electricity was gone as well. Hopes Fort was probably going to be a disaster area. No one around here knew what to do with a quake like that.
In a moment of irrational panic, she remembered her laptop and the thousand words or so she’d produced that morning. Her heart sinking, she checked the living room next, dreading what she’d find on the screen.
The battery had saved her. Her work was intact, and knowing full well she was luckier than she had any right to be, she saved the file and shut down the machine. Now to check on her father.
Merlin and Arthur stood in the kitchen. The sword seemed to fill the room.
She retrieved her mobile phone and dialed Johnny Brewster’s number.
“We’re sorry, your call cannot be completed—”
She clicked off the phone with a huff and started pacing.
“What’s happening?” Arthur said.