Chapter 5: The Wrong Branch
The Dusty Rose Saloon wasn’t much to look at, but after the nauseating vertigo of the time jump, its warped wooden walls felt solid. Jan pushed through the batwing doors, Stacy a shadow at her elbow, Johnny a placid presence behind them. The air inside was a solid thing: smoke, sweat, stale beer, and the ghost of a recent, violent smell—cordite and something coppery.
Godfrey padded in, sniffed at a spittoon, and immediately sneezed.
A tinny piano clattered through a raucous tune in the corner, competing with the rough laughter of men clustered around a faro table. Jan’s eyes, sharp and assessing, scanned the room. They skipped over the card sharks and the drunks, settling on a lone figure at a corner table. A young man, maybe twenty, with a shock of sandy hair and nervous hands rolling a coin across his knuckles.He wasn’t drinking. He was staring, with a kind of aching hopelessness, at a barmaid collecting empty glasses.
The barmaid had auburn curls escaping her kerchief and a tired but kind smile. She moved with a weary grace, avoiding the grasping hands of the patrons with practiced ease. The young man watched her like she was the only lit candle in a vast, dark room.
Jan felt it—a familial tug, faint but unmistakable, a thread in the chaotic tapestry of time. She didn’t need her compact to know.This was blood.
“Watch the door, Coach,” Jan murmured to Stacy, who gave a tight nod, her hand resting casually on the worn grip of the Colt at her hip.Her posture was different here, looser, more naturally commanding. The Old West suited her in a way feudal Japan had not.
Jan sauntered over, the dust of the street still on her calico skirts. She pulled out the rough-hewn chair opposite the young man and sat without invitation.He startled, the coin falling to the table with a clatter. “Ma’am, I… this seat is—”
“Taken. By me.” Jan smiled, not her full, blazing grin, but something softer, conspiratorial. “You look like a man who could use a little courage, friend.”
He blinked, confused. His eyes were a pale, watery blue, but there was a sweetness in them.“I’m alright.”
“Sure you are. And that lovely girl over there is just a picture on the wall.” Jan nodded toward the barmaid. “You’ve been staring at that picture for an hour, I’d wager, without making a move.”
The young man’s shoulders slumped. “Alice… she’s… she’s beyond me. Looks at me like I’m part of the furniture.”
“Maybe she needs new eyes.” Jan reached across the sticky table and laid her hand over his. His skin was cool and damp.She didn’t push her magic hard, not like with the daimyo. This was a gentle thing, a subtle unfurling. The Power of Exposure wasn’t about awe here; it was about permission, a slow-burning fuse of confidence lit deep in the belly. She let the Green Moon energy flow, a warm, golden ripple that bypassed fear and tapped directly into want.He inhaled sharply, a shudder running through him. The nervous flutter in his hands stilled.The color rose in his cheeks. He looked from Jan’s knowing eyes to Alice, and his gaze changed.The hopeless longing sharpened into focused desire. “I… I should speak to her.”
“You really should,” Jan said, releasing his hand.He stood, his movements sure now. He squared his shoulders, ran a hand through his hair, and walked directly toward Alice as she deposited a tray of dirty glasses on the bar.Jan watched, a faint smile on her lips. He spoke; she couldn’t hear the words over the piano. Alice listened, then shook her head with a sympathetic smile, gesturing to her tray. The young man—Thomas, Jan suddenly knew his name—persisted.He took her hand.Alice tried to pull away, but then stopped. She looked into his face, and Jan saw the exact moment her magic bridged the gap. Alice’s tired expression softened, then warmed.A genuine blush crept up her neck. She glanced toward the curtained archway at the back of the saloon, then back to Thomas. She bit her lip, nodded once, and let him lead her, their fingers laced together, through the archway into the shadowy hall beyond.Jan let out a satisfied breath. A small, good deed in a chaotic stream.
A glass of murky sarsaparilla appeared on the table next to her elbow.Johnny slid into the vacated chair, his duster brushing the floor. He took a slow sip.“Well done,” he said, his tone flat as river stone.
“Thanks. He seemed like a decent kid.She did, too. A little happiness never hurt anyone.” Jan picked up the sarsaparilla and took a drink.It was overly sweet and rooty.
“It rarely does.” Johnny set his glass down with precise care.“His name is Thomas O’Connor. Hers is Alice Finnegan. In approximately nine months, she will give birth to a son, Patrick. Patrick will father Liam, Liam will father Sean, Sean will father Michael, Michael will father Martin, and Martin will father Marty O’Connor. Our father.”
Jan’s smile froze, then cracked.The sweet drink turned to ash in her mouth.“Wait. So we’re not… we’re not on the right track to find Brigid? We’re on the wrong fucking branch of the family tree?”
Johnny nodded, a single dip of his chin. “The temporal turbulence caused by the journal is creating… eddies.Side streams.We were pulled into one. This is a localized stability.A side effect.”
Jan slumped back in her chair, a groan escaping her. “Fantastic. So we’re lost in time, and I just personally jump-started the conception of my own great-great-great-grandfather. Jesus Christ.”
Stacy sidled up from her post by the door, having caught the tail end.She leaned against the table, her smirk evident. “Could be worse. You could’ve been the barmaid.”
Jan shot her a look of pure horror.“Don’t even joke. That is a mental image I do not need.” She rubbed her temples.“Okay.So we’re in a timeline cul-de-sac. How do we get back to the main road? Back to Brigid?”
Johnny’s eyes were distant, focused on the curtained archway. “The act we just facilitated is anchoring this moment.The energy is… concentrated there. We can use it as a focus to pierce back into the main flow. But we must wait for the event to reach its peak.”
Stacy’s eyebrow quirked. “Its peak.”
“Yes.”
“You mean we have to wait for them to finish.”
“Correct.”
Jan dropped her head to the table with a soft thud. “Of course we do.”
The room at the end of the hall was little more than a closet, storing the sour smell of old beer barrels and dust. A narrow cot with a thin, straw-ticked mattress was pushed against the wall. Thomas closed the rickety door, the sounds of the saloon dulling to a muffled roar.
Alice stood in the weak light from a single high window, her arms wrapped around herself. “Thomas, I shouldn’t…”
He was on her before she could finish, his new-born confidence a heady, reckless thing. He kissed her, not with boyish hesitation, but with a hungry, open-mouthed urgency. Jan’s magic was a spark in dry tinder; it didn’t create desire, it obliterated the walls around it.Alice gasped into his mouth, her protest dying. Her hands, which had risen to push him away, instead clutched at his shoulders, pulling him closer.
He fumbled with the buttons of her blouse, his fingers clumsy but determined.She helped him, urgency matching his. The faded calico parted, revealing a simple chemise. He pushed it down, her small breasts falling free, nipples pebbled tight in the cool, dusty air. He groaned, ducking his head to take one into his mouth, sucking hard.
“Oh God,” Alice breathed, her head falling back.Her fingers tangled in his sandy hair, holding him to her.He wasn’t gentle. The magic stripped away courtship, leaving raw need. He backed her toward the cot, her knees hitting the edge.She fell onto the thin mattress, and he followed, his body covering hers. He yanked at her skirts, bunching the rough fabric up around her waist. Her drawers were a simple, worn cotton; he ripped them at the seam without a second thought.
“Thomas, please,” she whimpered, but it was a plea for more, not less. She was wet, her cunt aching and slick, her thighs falling open in silent, desperate invitation.
He freed his cock from his trousers.It was thick, erect, the head flushed and leaking. He positioned himself at her entrance, and with one solid, unceremonious thrust, he buried himself inside her to the hilt.Alice cried out, a sharp sound swallowed by the noisy saloon beyond the wall. It was a cry of shock, of sudden, overwhelming fullness. There was no finesse, no rhythm beyond the primal drive to fuck. Thomas pulled back and slammed into her again, the cot legs scraping against the floorboards. Each thrust was a rough, claiming punch, jolting her body up the mattress.
He fucked her like he was trying to escape something, or anchor himself to her. His hands gripped her hips, his fingers digging in, his breath hot and ragged against her neck. The wet, slapping sounds of their coupling filled the little room, a obscene counterpoint to the tinny piano tune. Alice moaned, her own hips rising to meet his drives, her inner muscles clenching around his invading length. She scratched at his back through his shirt, her legs locking around his waist, pulling him deeper, taking all of him.
“Yes… yes, right there, don’t stop,” she chanted, her voice ragged, all pretense gone. This wasn’t love.It was combustion.His pace grew frantic, brutal. The cot hammered against the wall in a steady, creaking beat. He was grunting now, animal sounds, each one punctuated by a deeper thrust. Alice felt the coil inside her tighten, a fierce, urgent pressure building with every jarring impact. She came suddenly, violently, her cunt convulsing around his pounding cock, her scream muffled against his shoulder.It triggered his own release. With a final, shuddering roar, he emptied himself into her, pumping his seed deep, his body collapsing onto hers as the last pulses left him. They lay there, a tangled, sweaty mess on the squeaking cot, breathing in the smell of sex and dust.
Back in the saloon, Johnny’s eyes snapped open, fixed on the archway. “Now.”
He stood, drawing a small, brass sextant from inside his duster. Jan and Stacy were already moving. They followed him not toward the front doors, but to a shadowy alcove near the whiskey barrels, away from prying eyes.
Johnny held the sextant up, not to the ceiling, but to the space where the hallway began.He adjusted a dial. The air where Thomas and Alice lay spent and joined began to shimmer, not with light, but with a palpable thickening of reality, a resonant energy born of creation.
Johnny muttered words that hurt the ears to hear, sounds that slipped between the ticks of a clock. He traced a sigil in the air with his free hand.It hung there, glowing with faint, dawn-colored light.
The saloon around them didn’t fade.It peeled back, like layers of painted scenery being dragged away. The piano warped, its notes stretching into long, distorted echoes. The faces of the men at the bar smeared into streaks of color. The smell of whiskey turned metallic, then into the damp, peat-and-herb scent of an Irish garden.
The floorboards under their feet became flagstones, then hard-packed earth.They stumbled, the transition less violent but no less disorienting. The rude noise of the Dusty Rose was gone, replaced by a deep, country quiet and the distant lowing of a cow.They were in a stone-flagged kitchen. A fire crackled in a wide hearth.Dried herbs hung from the beams. And sitting at a heavy wooden table, her hands wrapped around a chipped mug, was Brigid. Her long red braid was messy, her eyes red-rimmed from crying, but they widened in shock at the sudden appearance of her brother and sister in the middle of the floor.
Godfrey let out a happy bark and trotted over to lick her hand.Jan stared, then let out a shaky laugh.“Hey, Brigid-Bear. Fancy meeting you here.”
Brigid’s lip trembled.“Jan?Johnny? How…”
Johnny put the sextant away.“We followed the pulses. Your attempts to control the journal are causing temporal shear. You’re pulling pieces of the past into your present.”
Brigid looked down at the journal on the table, its pages faintly glowing with intricate, shifting equations. “I saw Da,” she whispered.“In our old street. It felt so real.”
“It was a memory with weight,” Johnny said, not unkindly.“A gravity well. You have to stop casting.Now. Before you pull something into this time that can’t be put back.”
Before Brigid could answer, the door to the kitchen opened. A young woman with vibrant red hair and sparkling green eyes bustled in, an apron over her simple dress.Annie Monaghan. She stopped short, seeing the newcomers.
Her gaze swept over them—the oddly-dressed women, the man in the long coat, the golden dog—and settled on Brigid’s face. A slow, knowing smile spread across her features. It was a smile Jan knew intimately, a mirror of her own mischievous grin.“Well now,” Annie said, her voice rich with amusement. “And who might this be, dropping in for tea without so much as a knock?”
Brigid looked from her many-times-great-grandmother to her older sister, a desperate apology in her eyes. The journal on the table gave a sudden, vicious pulse of cold green light. The cups on the dresser rattled.Annie’s smile vanished, replaced by sharp focus.“Right. That’s the feeling that’s been hanging about the place. That’s yours, is it?” She pointed at the journal, then looked at Johnny. “And you’re here to fix it?”
“We’re here to contain it,” Johnny corrected softly, his blue eyes already scanning the room for the epicenter of the next distortion. “Before it fixes something—or someone—permanently out of time.”
The air in the kitchen grew heavy, pressing down on them all. Godfrey whined softly and nudged Brigid’s knee.
Godfrey’s cold nose against her skin broke the dreadful silence. Jan and Stacy moved as one, crossing the stone floor to kneel beside Brigid’s chair. Jan wrapped an arm around her sister’s shoulders while Stacy took her hand, her grip firm and grounding.
“He said he was proud of me,” Brigid mumbled into Jan’s shoulder, her voice thick. “Of the woman I became. It was only a few minutes, but… I needed that. I wanted to hear more.”
“Of course you did, Bear,” Jan whispered, stroking her hair. She pulled back, her brow furrowed. “Wait. How would Da know what kind of woman you became? You were only with him for a minute.”
Brigid sat up straight, the confusion cutting through her grief. She stared at her own hands. “He couldn’t. Not unless…” Her green eyes, sharpening with a sudden, terrifying clarity, locked onto Johnny. “You said I was casting. That I was pulling things. But I wasn’t doing anything. The journal… it just sends me. I don’t control it.”
Johnny’s placid facade finally showed a crack—a slight narrowing of his blue eyes, a minute tilt of his head. “That contradicts established temporal theory. An artifact requires a—”
“It’s fused to my fucking hand, Johnny!” Brigid shouted, lifting her right hand where the leather seemed to melt into her skin. “It has a mind of its own! I’m not driving, I’m just along for the—” Her sentence clipped off. Not like she stopped speaking. Like the sound itself was severed.
One moment she was there, vivid and angry. The next, the space she occupied was empty air. Jan’s arm fell through where her sister’s shoulders had been. Godfrey let out a confused ‘whuff.’
Johnny stared at the vacant chair, his analytical certainty visibly crumbling. “That’s… not a standard displacement pattern. There was no energy surge.”
Annie Monaghan let out a soft snort from the doorway. She walked to the hearth and picked up the iron kettle. “She’ll be back in a few minutes. Does it all the time. Makes a dreadful draft.” She began to pour hot water into a teapot as if spontaneous temporal evaporation were a simple nuisance, like a fly at the window. “Now. Who in the name of the good folk are you lot?”
Johnny mechanically turned toward her, his mind clearly elsewhere. “Johnny O’Connor. This is my sister, Jan. Our friend, Stacy Steinberg.”
“O’Connor,” Annie said, her twinkling eyes appraising Jan’s fiery hair. “That tracks. And what do you do, Jan O’Connor? Besides fetching lost puppies from other centuries.”
Jan, still shaken, shrugged. “I’m a member of the Order of the Green Moon.”
Annie’s response was a rich, rollicking laugh that filled the kitchen. She set the pot down, wiping a tear from her eye. “The Green Moon! Oh, saints preserve us. The wee lads in the velvet trousers?”
“Velvet is optional,” Jan said dryly, some of her spirit returning.
“They tried to recruit me, you know,” Annie chortled, fetching cups. “Came all the way to Ballymore with their talk of sacred pleasure and cosmic harmony. I told them they were especially silly and to take their orgasms and their pamphlets elsewhere. I have enough chaos in my blood without ritualizing it.”
Stacy smirked, leaning against the table. “I like her.”
“And you?” Annie asked, pointing the teaspoon at Stacy. “Another moon-worshipper?”
“Just Jan’s friend. I’m a fitness instructor.”
Annie’s head cocked like a curious bird. “A what-instructor?”
“I teach people exercises. How to move their bodies to become stronger, healthier.” Stacy demonstrated a slight, smooth squat.
Annie’s intrigue was immediate and palpable. “You mean like a drill sergeant for well-being? Can you teach me something? I’m stuck in this cottage with my mother and her endless prayers. My legs feel like pudding.”
Stacy shrugged, a real smile breaking through. “Sure. I can show you some basic aerobics moves. It’ll pass the time.”
The world reassembled with a silent snap. Brigid stumbled, her boots scuffing not on stone flags, but on a wide-planked wooden floor polished to a soft sheen. The smell was different—lemon cleaning solution, the faint ozone of electricity, and the same underlying peat smoke.
She was still in the Ballymore cottage, but not. The hearth was now a sleek, closed stove. A single, miraculous bulb glowed in a porcelain fixture overhead. A small, matte-black device with a constellation of tiny blue LEDs hummed on a shelf—an internet router with a design decades beyond her time.
“What are you doing here, Brigid? And how’d you get in?”
Brigid whirled. The voice was familiar, but worn softer, layered with years. Aisling stood in the doorway to the parlor. Her hair was a elegant sweep of grey, her face lined with laughter and wisdom. Beside her stood a young woman with defiant eyes and coal-black hair streaked with violent, bottled red.
Panic, cold and immediate, seized Brigid’s throat. “Aisling! I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to miss it, the journal just keeps pulling me and I can’t—”
Elderly Aisling’s stern expression shattered into a radiant, mischievous grin. “Got ya!” she laughed, the girl beside her giggling. She closed the distance and pulled Brigid into a fierce, warm hug. “You didn’t miss a thing, you great eejit. You were there.”
Brigid went limp in the hug. “I was?”
“Of course you were. You stood right there in a blue dress that made you look like some poised, powerful queen. Your speech…” Aisling pulled back, her hands on Brigid’s shoulders, her eyes misty. “You said family isn’t just blood, it’s the people who see the mess you are and still choose to stand in your corner. Half the church was weeping.”
The relief was so potent it felt like pain. Brigid’s own eyes filled. “So I get there.”
“You do. Because you’re you.” Aisling’s expression turned earnest. “I believe you’re the best of the O’Connors, Brigid-Bear. Johnny’s too distracted by the logic of things, feels nothing in the moment. Jan’s all passion and mischief, never thinks and then needs you to help clean up the chaos.” She smiled, squeezing Brigid’s shoulders. “But you? You feel everything without letting it drown you. You use that brilliant brain without forgetting your heart. You’re just… a good person. I know that, no matter what timeline we’re in, you’re doing your absolute best by me.”
She gently pulled the young woman forward. “This is my granddaughter. I ensured her mother named her Brigid. For my favorite cousin.”
The young Brigid Monaghan-Byrne offered a shy, proud smile.
Brigid O’Connor, 19 years old and lost in time, fought back a sob. “I’ll do everything I can to get to the wedding. I swear.”
Aisling felt the girl beginning to fade, her form growing insubstantial. “I know you will,” she whispered, holding on until her hands passed through empty air.
Silence reclaimed the modernized cottage. The young granddaughter turned to her grandmother. “She’s very young.”
“She is. And she’s carrying the weight of every when on her shoulders.” Aisling sighed, then called out toward the shadows of the hall. “You can come out now. She’s gone back.”
From the darkened hallway, another woman stepped into the lemon-scented light. Her long braid, streaked with elegant white, rested over her shoulder. Her green eyes, decades wiser, held a profound fatigue. Elderly Dr. Brigid O’Connor nodded slowly, watching the space where her younger self had vanished.
“I remember this moment,” the older Brigid said, her voice a soft rasp. “The disorientation. The fear. The hope.” She looked toward the ceiling, as if she could see through the thatch and plaster to the 1899 kitchen above. “Jan and Johnny are with her now. For all their good intentions, they’re about to make everything worse.”
Aisling folded her arms. “What are you going to do?”
Elderly Brigid’s jaw tightened. She looked at her hand, to the spot where the journal used to be. “What I did the first time. I’m going to cut the knot.”