Dark Stars by Danielle Rollins (best affordable ebook reader txt) 📕

her fingers into the ground and the dirt crumbled between them, which was good. That was exactly how dirt was supposed to behave. It was a strange thing to think, but her head felt swimmy, her chest full and hot, and she wasn’t entirely sure that matter would act the way it was supposed to.

She opened her eyes, but the air was thick with a gray haze that might’ve been smoke or might’ve been clouds dropped down from the sky.

Where am I? she wondered.

And when?

She began to choke, deep, hacking coughs that felt like they were pulling up bits of her lungs. Thoughts began to form in the haziness of her mind:

Ash. The dagger. The Professor’s theory.

“Ash,” Dorothy choked out, when she could breathe again. In her hand there was something warm and wet and firm. Roman’s dagger. She couldn’t see through the smoke but, if that’s what she was holding, it was almost certainly covered in blood. Ash’s blood.

Her stomach turned over.

Oh God . . . What had she done?

She began to panic, trying to wave away the thick gray smoke, trying to see anything. “Ash? Are you alive?”

She thought she heard a groan, but she could hardly make it out through the roaring sound that filled her ears. God, what was that sound? She’d thought it was her own heartbeat, adrenaline causing her blood to pump hard and fast, blocking out all other noise but, now, she could tell that the sound wasn’t coming from inside her at all. It was something else, something close and loud.

There was movement in the smoke. Blinking, Dorothy thought that she saw something, some animal flying through the sky. She squinted . . .

No, what she saw was moving too smoothly to be an animal. It was a machine of some sort. The smoke billowed and cleared around it. Light flared behind distant clouds, illuminating an object, sleek and metallic against the black.

An airplane, Dorothy thought, with a twist of déjà vu. And now she looked around her, taking in her surroundings. Gnarled branches and flattened grass and the heavy smell of campfire smoke. She was in the wooded area just behind the church where she was to marry Dr. Charles Avery back in 1913.

A small smile curled her lip. She had no way of knowing the exact day or the time, but she could guess that it was the morning of her wedding, and that the machine she’d just seen take to the sky wasn’t an airplane at all but a time machine, and, in fact, it was the Second Star, disappearing into the future with her and Ash on board.

The last thing she remembered with any clarity was standing in her rickety boat outside the anil in New Seattle, 2077, staring into Ash’s golden eyes as she slid a dagger into his body and praying to whoever would listen that her foolish idea might actually work.

She released a small, sharp laugh. Remarkable. It had happened just as the Professor wrote that it would. Of course, neither the Professor nor she had known that the anil would spit them out here and now, of all the times and places throughout history she could’ve gone, but she couldn’t think about that. Time, as always, was slipping away.

“Ash?” She turned her full attention to the body splayed across the earth in front of her. Now that the time machine had gone and the smoke had begun to fade, she could see him more clearly.

Oh, he looked like death. He was lying on his back, his eyes closed, his arms splayed to either side of his frightfully still body. His skin was gray and sallow, and blood clung thickly to his shirt, the color much too red and garish in the early morning light. Staring down at him, Dorothy felt fear roar up inside of her.

No, she thought, gritting her teeth. He couldn’t be dead. That wasn’t the plan.

It wasn’t going to end like this.

With a grunt, she pulled Ash’s head and shoulders off the ground and maneuvered them onto her lap. She lightly slapped his cheek. “Ash? Jonathan Asher, can you hear me? Wake up. Please.”

He didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. His eyelashes didn’t even flutter. Dorothy felt her fear turn cold.

Oh God, what have I done?

She groped along his neck, desperately searching for a pulse. Nothing and more nothing and more nothing after that . . .

And then . . . there. Just below Ash’s skin she’d felt something, a slight bomp bomp bomp, so faint that she could barely make out the vibration against her finger. It wasn’t strong, but it was still a heartbeat, which meant there was hope, if only she could figure out what to do now.

Think, damn you, she thought, looking up. Oh, this was bad. They were in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trees and woods, a few yards from the old church and a mile or so from the train station. The nearest hospital was in Seattle proper, and it would take them ages to get there.

“Blast,” Dorothy muttered, beneath her breath. “All of history at our fingertips and we couldn’t have landed somewhere with a bleeding doctor—”

She stopped talking at once. They had landed somewhere with a doctor. Her fiancé, Dr. Charles Avery, was a surgeon. And not just any surgeon, but a good one. He was the surgeon-in-chief at Seattle’s Providence Medical Center.

And he was just inside.

Dorothy’s heart leaped inside of her. There was a chance. If she hurried, there was still a chance.

She leaned close to Ash, bringing a hand to his face. His skin was cold to the touch, shockingly so. It caused an uncomfortable shiver to move down her spine, making her shoulders clench. There was still time; there had to be time. . . .

“Hold on,” she told Ash, her voice a whisper. “I’ll be right back. Just . . . please, please stay alive until then.”

The church was smaller than Dorothy remembered, a squat, two-story building made of crumbling bricks, with tall, arched doorways and intricately stained-glass windows.

She was breathless when she reached the