She stopped Singing in time to hear a baby cry. A moment later, his brother joined in, raising their voices in the indignant protest of newborns suddenly shoved from protected warmth and exposed to the great, wide world.

“Okay, then.” It seemed safe to start breathing again.

The weather was no longer definitive October. The trees around her were in full leaf and the air warm enough she started to sweat under her jacket. Allie had been a day or two over eight weeks along when Charlie’d stepped into the Wood. Thirty-two weeks remaining. Eight months give or take. That meant this was June and it was still a little over a year to the impact.

She knew that if she listened, really listened, she’d be able to hear what the aunties were saying. Hear Allie and Graham rejoicing in their sons. Divide the murmur of family into individual voices and learn what was . . .

Hoofbeats.

David.

Charging.

In this place, at this time, he had to know it was her. But this wasn’t her time and he knew that, too.

Charlie stepped back and froze as a familiar current lifted the hair off the back of her neck. The vantage point she’d chosen eight months ago stood immediately inside the fourth circle, the protective barrier the family raised around the park to separate their workings from the city. No one wanted a stranger to stumble into ritual, least of all the stranger—although, that said, it was the aunties who wouldn’t shut up about how much harder it had become to hide a body.

Harder, not impossible. And if David felt he had to protect the circle from her, he wouldn’t leave much of a body to hide.

Backing through the barrier, a barrier that she’d helped build, would announce her presence with authority. Given that she was already on the hill, it would lead to questions she—the she of this time, the her of later—shouldn’t answer. The aunties heard I can’t tell you as I haven’t told you yet. Feel free to nag incessantly.

Of course, there was always the chance that this whole thing had gone tits up in a major way and she wasn’t already on the hill because she was singing with the choir eternal, in which case hitting the barrier would evoke a completely different line of questioning and . . .

Time travel gave her a migraine.

She had a chance of succeeding only as long as she didn’t know she’d already failed and while she couldn’t stop David from sensing. . . .

Shit! David!

Her heart pounded in time with his approach; his hooves pounded into the sod, her heart against her ribs. Underbrush crushed or flung aside, mangled foliage marked his path.