Fortify

Prologue

I used to view my abilities as a curse.

By abilities, I mean time travel. I could travel back in time.

When my mother first told me about the possibility of being able to time travel...well, frankly, I thought she had lost her mind. I had been just shy of turning eighteen, which was when, if I carried the gene to let me time travel, I was supposed to receive this gift.

However, the first time I had successfully time traveled, I was much older and it had been a complete accident. I had sent me and my sister, Josephine, back into 1882—smackdab in the middle of the infamous Hatfield and McCoy feud.

While I had been picked up by the McCoys, Josie had been found by the Hatfields. Cap Hatfield, to be exact. I took us nearly a week to find eachother, and when we did it was at Election Day, where Devil Anse Hatfield's brother Ellison was stabbed and shot mercilessly by three of Rand'l McCoy's sons. Josie and her bleeding heart made us stay. It didn't take me long to figure out she had a crush on Cap Hatfield.

It took some convincing and some major messing up of history, but I finally got Josie to travel back with me...only to immediately return to the past when we realized our muddle with history had gotten Cap prematurely killed when he was supposed to long outlive the feud.

Turns out, that was a terrible idea and only succeeded in getting us into more trouble and Josie falling more infatuated with Devil Anse's son. We nearly got ourselves killed at every corner we turned, starting with the Hatfields believing we were spies for the McCoys. Cap eventually turned against his father just enough to help us flee to safety.

And then my freaking sister went and confessed to Cap we were time travelers. That went about as well as you'd think.

I kind of thought, and hoped, that Cap's complete dismissal of her would thwart Josie's affections for him and that everything would go back to normal when we returned to our time. But that wasn't the case. She was a basket case for months; a shell of the spunky sister I'd grown up with.

But on her eighteenth birthday, my aunt, who also had the gene and who had also fallen in love with a guy from the past, taught her how to travel back. Before any of us had a chance to really digest it, Josie returned with the proclamation that she was returning to 1882 to live her life with Cap and that they were getting married.

Aunt Amelia had brought her love to live in the future with her, so we were all a bit thrown that Josie had decided to live in the past.

It wasn't until she had made this decision that I realized this gene wasn't a curse after all. Josie truly inspired me to think of it like the gift it really was and to take advantage of it. But I respectfully refused to be like my aunt and sister and fall for someone from the past. While I was happy for them, it still struck me as selfish in a way. I wanted no part in that. I didn't want to change history; I just wanted to explore it.

So that was what I had been doing the past few months. I knew it was a lot on my parents to seemingly lose two of their kids at relatively the same time, but we owed it to ourselves to live our own lives and explore time travel. Well...I was, anyway. Josie seemed pretty content just remaining where she was; I visited her from time to time.

But now I feared her little save haven because...time travelers were under attack. And I needed all I could get on my team to defeat the organization that was hell-bent on making sure our lineage died.