My Pirate Lover by Lexie Stewart

now?” asked Josephine.
    “No party could compare to laying here with you, lass,” said Lance. “Nay, I’ll keep you in my arms for just as long as I can.”
    With those words he squeezed her tight as if he’d never let her go.
    #
    Up on Ripple Thief’s deck, a small crowd braved the storm. They were there to help set up the Lightning Circle and to say goodbye to Josephine.
    Josephine was dressed in her jeans and t-shirt, which Lance referred to as her other-world clothes.
    Lance finally had the two Lightning Circles. He handled them as if they were explosive.
    “Be careful not to touch the glass,” he warned.
    “Why not?” asked Josephine.
    “There’s lightning about, lass. It activates the glass, see?”
    Josephine looked and gasped with surprise. The pearly surface of the glass was moving like ripples across water.
    “If you touch it,” Lance went on, “you might slip through into another time.”
    “How do you make them work?” asked Josephine.
    “You move the shadow on the sundial to set the time of day you want to open a portal to. And then to set the date, you twist the monster’s tongues and the little numbers on the dial move, see?”
    Lance was shocked to hear the year she came from.
    “Two thousand and eleven?”
    “Don’t look at me like that,” said Josephine. “I’m not a cyborg or anything.”
    Lance positioned one of the Lightning Circles on Ripple Thief’s deck and sent the other one out with some of his men in a longboat about fifty meters away.
    “What now?” asked Josephine.
    “Now we wait, lass.”
    They waited. Above them the storm wind whistled through the rigging and made the sails billow and snap.
    The air fizzed with electricity and lightning-- which they’d been waiting for-- flashed all around them. Josephine felt as though she was at a disco with strobe lighting.
    “What happens now?” she asked.
    “You’ll see, lass!” said Lance.
    She didn’t have to wait long.
    A bolt of lightning suddenly veered off its downward path and hit the Lightning Circle.
    It should have smashed to pieces but instead it bounced off. Because the glass was tilted, the lightning shot off it at an angle back up into the clouds it came from.
    The rebounds from both Lightning Circles criss-crossed through the sky, flying past each other but never connecting.
    “What we want,” Lance explained, “is for two bolts to hit each other!”
    Not long after, two bolts collided. Sparks exploded and a big, fat lightning bolt plummeted straight down towards the water. It stopped and hung in the air as if snap-frozen.
    The bolt was in the centre of a beam of sparkling, white light, some seven meters across.
    Josephine’s eyes grew wider and wider as she watched a shape appear in the beam, just below the point of the lightning bolt.
    Josephine drew a sharp breath. It was Little Bounty.
    #
    Lance and Josephine boarded the waiting longboat and Lance took the oars. They made the trip in silence.
    When they reached Little Bounty, Lance tossed up a grappling hook. The rope stretched all the way back to Ripple Thief where his men were waiting for his signal. When he did, they pulled the rope, moving Little Bounty inch by inch until the bolt of lightning that was frozen above her was no longer going to hit her when it unfroze.
    “I dare not move her anymore,” said Lance, signalling his men to stop. “Or else they’ll pull her right out of the beam and she’ll fall into this time.
    That done, Lance pulled up the oars. He and Josephine just sat there, unable to look at each other.
    Until then, they’d had the technicalities of setting everything up to keep them distracted. Now the moment to say goodbye was upon them.
    “Don’t go, Josie,” said Lance suddenly.
    Josephine felt overcome by emotion. She shook all over, her heart pounded and her vision blurred.
    “I have to,” she said. “For Katie.”
    Lance nodded. “I knew you’d say that, lass, but I had to try.”
    “Come with me?”