The Art of Stealing Time: A Time Thief Novel

by Katie MacAlister

  “Alice, dear, not so fast around corners,” my mother said in a near shriek. “Poor Mrs. Vanilla is on the floor.”

  “MOTHER!”

  “Oh, hello, Gwenny. How was your flight home?”

  I took a deep breath, but it didn’t go any way toward calming what were quickly becoming frazzled nerves, so I took five or six additional breaths.

  “Are you hyperventilating?” the man nearest me asked, lowering his newspaper to look at me in obvious concern. “Do you want a paper bag?”

  “No, thank you, it’s just my mother driving me crazy as usual,” I said through gritted teeth, and swiveled around even farther in my chair until I was almost off it entirely.

  “Mother,” I said in a low, mean tone of voice that under normal circumstances I would never think of using to her. “What. Is. Happening?”

  “Lost ’em!” a triumphant Mom Two said in the background. I slumped sideways in despair, and promptly fell off the chair. By the time I reassured the newspaper man that I was fine, and not in danger of passing out, my mother had hung up her phone.

  I moved over to the corner of the waiting area, found a relatively empty spot, and facing away from the room, called her back. “Tell me you didn’t kidnap some old woman and are not at this very moment running from the mortal police.”

  “We did not kidnap some old woman and are not at this very moment running from the mortal police,” she said promptly.

  I waited for the count of three. “Is that true?”

  “No, of course it isn’t. But you asked me to say it, so I did.”

  Gently, so as not to brain myself, I thumped my forehead against the wall. “Mom, you do remember that it was only six months ago that I was arrested by the Watch because they thought I was you, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but they let you out because you aren’t me.”

  “They let me out because I had an alibi. They still think I’m you, or at least that blond Watch guy does.” The memory of him had haunted me at odd moments during the last two days.

  “What blond Watch man?”

  “The one who stopped the lawyer from killing me.” Anticipating her next question, I added, “The one you agreed to sell magic to, remember?”

  “Of course I remember the lawyer,” she said in a scolding voice. Faintly, oh so faintly, I heard the sound of a police siren coming from my phone. I slumped against the cool wall, closing my eyes for a moment. “He wasn’t a very nice man, but we needed the money, and it’s been decades since anyone from the Watch was interested in us.”

  “Centuries,” Mom Two said loudly. “Eighteen-something. Seventies, was it, Mags?”

  I was so close to going home. Even now, I could see the plane being serviced by various technical people. In just an hour or two, it would be in the sky, heading toward the States. I could be on that plane.

  “No, it had to be longer than that,” Mom argued. “Because they tried to make me sit for one of those sepia-toned photographs, but I kept moving just enough that it turned out blurry. It had to be the 1820s.”

  I had the ticket right there. I could be on that plane, leaving my troubles behind me.

  “They didn’t have cameras in the 1820s,” Mom Two told her, and behind their voices, the sirens grew louder.

  Life would be sane again. No more would I find myself being killed, in the afterlife, or suddenly (and inexplicably) resurrected.

  “Daguerreotype! I think that’s the name for it. Gwen, do you remember if that’s what they did?”

  I eyed my phone. Just the touch of one finger on its screen, and I could hang up. My mother probably wouldn’t even notice I’d done so for at least several minutes. Then, carefree, I could blithely go on with my life, leaving my mothers to cope with whatever they’d done with theirs.

  I turned around so the wall was to my back and slid down it until I was sitting on the floor, my forehead resting on my knees. I couldn’t leave them. Not if they had gotten into yet another tight place. There wasn’t even any pretense I could make about having a choice. They were my mothers, and I loved them. They had a knack for getting into trouble and a disregard for pretty much all forms of common sense, but I loved them, and I couldn’t leave them. Not this way. Not when the Watch so clearly had us in their sights.

  “Sooner or later they’re going to follow me to you, and put two and two together,” I told my mother.

  “I don’t think daguerreotypes came out around until the 1840s— What was that, Gwenny?”

  “The Watch. They may be confused about our identities now, but they’re not stupid. At least the blond guy isn’t. I told him I wasn’t you, and he believed me. They’re going to find you, and then they’ll put you in jail.”

  “But, dear, we haven’t done anything wrong!”

  “You were selling magic to a mortal! That’s so incredibly illegal!”

  “But we didn’t actually sell anything to that man. Or to the lawyer. We just said we would.”

  “And took the money to do so.” I made sure to mention that. It was one of the points that rankled so greatly with me.

  “Well, of course we took the money. We needed it.”

  “The fact remains that you were poised to engage in illegal activities, but I stopped you from actually doing so. And got killed in the process.”

  “She’s going on again about being killed. I do wish she could have had more time with the counselor,” she said to Mom Two before addressing me again. “Gwen, dearest, I am your mother. I think I’d know if my only child was killed.”

  I thought seriously about rolling my eyes at both the statement and the chiding note in her voice. “The point is that you were about to do something very illegal, and the Watch knew that. They sent someone to catch you in the act. The only reason they didn’t is because I went down to tell the lawyer who arranged for the sale to stop threatening you with all sorts of horrible things if you didn’t honor your contract with him. A wholly illegal contract, I’d like to point out.”

  “He’s a lawyer, Gwen. I’m sure it was illegal.”

  “Where are you?” I changed the subject, knowing the argument was going to go nowhere. We’d had it several times during the last few days, and it always ended up the same way: my mothers refused to admit that they’d done anything wrong. “The siren sounds louder. Can you pull over and cast a spell to escape the mortal police?”

  “Of course we can cast an escape spell. Any third-year pupil of Lambfreckle can cast a basic escape spell, and your other mother and I are more than two hundred years old, so we certainly know—”

  “Mom,” I interrupted. “You know what I mean.”

  “I do, and much as I love you, Gwenny, I’m insulted that you think we can’t take care of ourselves and get away from mortals. Oh, dear, Alice, Mrs. Vanilla is on the floor again. Perhaps if you pulled over I could right her—”

  I stood up, and without even one poignant glance at the plane that was being fueled so that it could fly me back home, collected my luggage and started the long journey back to the train station that connected to the airport. “Where are you?” I asked as I wove my way through the people who milled around the shops and the airline kiosks.

  “Outside of Emylwn,” she answered, naming the small coastal town where they had lived since before I was born.

  I thought for a few minutes while I continued to forge my way against the stream of people arriving for evening flights to the Continent, then said, “They are going to know you’re in that area.”

  “Pah. I told you that we can escape the police.”

  “No, not them. I’m not worried about the mortals. The Watch found me in Malwod-Upon-Ooze, and that’s only, what, ten miles away from Emylwn?” I shook my head. “That’s too close for comfort.”

  I glanced up at the sign at the entrance to the airport, and made a swift decision while my mother was protesting that the Watch didn’t even have an inkling of what was going on.

  “The mortal police don’t know that the Otherworl
d Watch even exists, Gwenny. There’s no reason to worry that they’ll call them. Besides, they—the mortal police, that is—have no idea who we are. Or rather, what we are.”

  Evidently, Mom had put me on speakerphone, because I could hear Mom Two say, “That’s right. Mrs. Vanilla was in a mortal retirement home when we snatched her.”

  “Snatched?” I said, freezing in the act of going through a door to the escalator that led down to the trains.

  “Rescued,” my mother amended. “We rescued her. We didn’t kidnap her at all.”

  “Then why are the police chasing you?” I hefted my massive bag and bumped my way down the escalator, apologizing to the people it smacked. One or two people looked askance at me as I descended, but I sent up a silent blessing for stoic Brits who wouldn’t be caught dead blatantly listening to someone’s phone conversation.

  “There was a little issue with the rescue,” Mom Two admitted in her usual brusque voice. “We had to change one or two attendants into frogs.”

  “MOMS!”

  “Just temporarily,” my mother hurriedly added. “Just for the time it took to rescue Mrs. Vanilla from her captors.”

  I shoved some coins into a machine and accepted the ticket it spat out at me, hauling my luggage down another level to the train I wanted. “Do you have any idea of how bad this is? Not only have you kidnapped a mortal woman—yes, I said ‘kidnapped’!” I ignored the sputtered protests from both mothers. “Not only did you do something as completely heinous as to take an old lady from her caregivers, but you also magicked up mortals. You know how dangerous that is! What were you thinking? That no one would notice that people had suddenly been turned into frogs?”

  “No one did notice that,” Mom Two said in a disapproving tone. “Your mother told you it was a temporary spell. Only lasted two or three minutes.”

  “Then why”—I parked my luggage at a grimy bench and took a deep, acidic-scented breath—“why are the police chasing you? Why didn’t you just go home?”

  “We might have forgotten that mortals have those spy cameras everywhere,” my mother admitted.

  “Big Brother!” Mom Two added righteously. “He’s everywhere, watching us all!”

  I rubbed my hand over my face, wondering how on earth I was going to pull my mothers out of the hole into which they’d managed to dig themselves. It was possible, just barely possible, that they could magic their way out of trouble with the mortal police, if the thing was planned properly. But once the Watch got wind of it . . . I groaned aloud. “We are so doomed. They’re already in the area. The blond guy is looking for you. They’ll hear that you stole a mortal and used magic in front of other mortals, and that’ll be all she wrote.”

  “Who wrote what?” Mom asked with benign interest.

  “We have to meet up,” I said quickly, glancing down the platform and noting at least three security cameras. Even now I was being filmed. I had to get somewhere out of sight of those cameras, had to get my mothers tucked away someplace where we could talk. I needed all the details of their latest shenanigans before I could put things right. But where could we meet? Where could we find the anonymity we needed?

  A dirt-encrusted woman shuffled past me to the nearest trash can, digging through it and muttering to herself under her breath. Her coat was matted and filthy, having long ago given up any pretense at color. She extracted several pieces of trash and shoved them deep into a plastic carrier bag clutched in one of her grubby hands. A piece of paper fluttered out of her bag as she moved off.

  I stared at the leaflet advertising a tourist event, then sat up straighter. “Mom, go to Bute.”

  “Go where, dear?”

  “Bute Park.”

  “But it’s nighttime. One should never go to the park at night. I’ve warned you about the bad people who can be found there after dark.”

  “They’re doing illuminations of the castle this week. All week, while they celebrate the history of Cardiff. There will be fireworks, and music, and hordes of people. It’s the perfect place to hide in plain sight. I’ll meet you at the Animal Wall in”—I glanced at my watch and did some quick mental calculations—“forty minutes. OK?”

  “I don’t think we—”

  “Meet me there,” I said in a growl that should have scared the pants off her. A whoosh of air from the arched tunnel at the end of the platform warned of the near arrival of a train. “Or else.”

  “Or else what?” she asked, clearly curious.

  “Or else I’ll invoke some very bad magic!”

  “Oh, Gwenny,” she said with a dismissive laugh, “you couldn’t do bad magic if you had a spell book in front of you.”

  “Try me,” I snarled, and hung up my phone.

  I had a lot of things to do, and little time to do them.

  TWO

  “Hello, my old friend.”

  The stone Animal Wall is one of my favorite places in Cardiff city proper. I was just a child when it was first carved, and I have vague memories of being taken to see the original painted animals. Sometime in the early 1920s, about thirty years after it was placed outside of Cardiff Castle, it was moved to the edge of Bute Park, where it still resides.

  “You’re looking as placid as usual,” I told my favorite animal where he sat atop the wall, the stone images illuminated by the floodlights planted along the base of the wall. Directly in front of me, a stone seal gazed serenely into the distance, his flippers poised as if he were about to leap off the wall. “You know, Mr. Seal, I used to think that a spell would turn you to flesh and blood, and I’d beg my moms to give it to me so that you could slip out into the bay and swim away. They never did.”

  The statue said nothing, for which I was extremely thankful—the last thing I needed was an animated statue, or a nervous breakdown. Although at times, I was ready to swear that the latter had some good points to it . . .

  Around me, music sounded from a stage across the park, where a local Welsh band was entertaining folks who were out enjoying the history festival.

  The air was filled with scents as well as sounds: the cooling of the sun-warmed lawn had a pleasant earthy note that mingled nicely with the salty tang wafting in from the bay. A more artificial, but no less pleasing, aroma came from the food stalls that had been set up for the festival, selling everything from Indian food to fish cakes to Welsh beef burgers. I salivated, my stomach rumbling uncomfortably while I contemplated enduring the crowds to feed my soon-to-be-uncontrollable hunger.

  Common sense prevailed. I would never find my mothers in the throngs of people who queued up in front of the food area. Blue and red and gold lights lit Cardiff Castle beyond the Animal Wall, but I turned my gaze from its familiar ramparts to the crowd that moved like so many fireflies in a random pattern around the park. Fake torches lined pathways, while vendors in small pushcarts sold the inevitable glow sticks, bracelets, and necklaces. Soft neon glows of green, blue, and orange lit up faces old and young, but I ignored them to try to pick out the familiar shapes of my mothers: Mom, short and somewhat round (unfortunately, I inherited her propensity to abundance, although not her lack of height), and Mom Two, as tall and angular as Mom was the opposite.

  I glanced at my watch, tilting it to catch illumination from a nearby faux torch. The fireworks would start in about fifteen minutes. “I swear, if I have to come and find you—” I started to grumble under my breath, pulling out my phone to call one of my mothers, but at that moment my peripheral vision caught the flicker of a familiar form.

  “Mom!” I raised my hand and moved toward the three shapes. “It’s about time. I’ve been waiting for almost fifteen minutes. Hello.”

  The last was spoken to the tiny old lady that both moms held in a firm grip.

  “Gwenny, dear, we’re late, aren’t we? We had to stop for a wee. You know how your mother is.”

  Mom Two made a grimace. “Pessary, you know. Makes me have to go sometimes. Must have shifted. Will have to have it checked out again.”

  I wr
inkled my nose. “Yeah, we don’t really need to talk about your bladder-holder-upper device right out here in the park. Is this Mrs. Vanilla?”

  “Yes, it is. Oooh, is that Chicken Korma I smell?”

  I grabbed my mother’s nearest arm and held on, as she was about to head straight for the food booths. “Yes, it is, and if I have to starve myself, so do you. It’s not on our diets.”

  She sighed, and her shoulders slumped. “I know. But it smells so very delicious, and we’ve had a very stressful day, what with you returning to the States, and then the rescue of Mrs. Vanilla. Oh, I haven’t introduced you. Dear, this is my daughter, Gwenhwyfar. Mrs. Vanilla is our student, as I think I told you.”

  I eyed the old lady between my mothers, trying to assess how likely she was to lodge a charge against them. If she was as confused as my mother made her sound, perhaps she wouldn’t remember anything that happened once she was returned to her nursing home. She was a tiny little thing, smaller even than my five-foot-three mother, but as delicate as a bird. She had narrow little hands that flitted about with graceful darting gestures that reminded me for some reason of shorebirds as they ran up and down the beach looking for food. Her hair was mostly white, cropped short, but there was an unusual black stripe right down the middle. A cowlick in the back made the tip of the stripe stand up on end, giving her a somewhat comical appearance. Her eyes were dark, but clouded with cataracts, and her hands had the faintest tremor to them. A thick greenish-black dressing gown covered her from neck to ankles, embroidered with what looked to be fanciful creatures from mythology. All in all, she looked like a perfectly nice little old lady.

  I sighed, shaking my head at my moms, noting that a short distance away a family that was in possession of a bench had gathered up the remains of their dinner and moved off to a trash can. I steered my mothers’ captive over to the bench and turned to give both mothers the eye. “You two know you’ve gone way over the line this time, yes?”

  Mom startled to bristle, while Mom Two looked haughtily down her long nose at me. “We have a duty to our students, Gwen,” the latter told me. “Not to mention a duty to save those who are under the protection of the god and goddess. We couldn’t hold up our heads if we were to let Mrs. Vanilla languish away in the mortal old-person prison.”