The Art of Stealing Time: A Time Thief Novel

by Katie MacAlister

  “I might,” Peter said, thinking about it. “If I didn’t have a weapon, and needed to use the victim as a hostage to secure my own safety. As for the other two women—they’re clearly her accomplices. The nursing home said that there were two of them who abducted the old lady.”

  It didn’t make sense to Gregory. Despite what Peter claimed, he didn’t think Gwen was a cold, callous woman who cared nothing about the people around her. Yes, the facts were irrefutable in that she had kidnapped an elderly woman, but according to the security man, she’d been very careful to make sure the victim wasn’t harmed in the act of escape.

  “I’m going to talk to the police again,” he said, coming to a decision. “I want a look at that storeroom they went into.”

  “The police scoured it already. It’s empty,” Peter said without looking up from his notebook. “The only way she could have gotten out is by using an escape spell of some sort.”

  “If that was so, then why didn’t she use one earlier, when the police were chasing her? Or even earlier still, when she abducted the victim?”

  Peter looked up at that, but clearly didn’t have an answer. Gregory, his false identification badge pinned to the outside of his jacket, went into the shop to have another look around.

  “They didn’t look like criminals,” one of the customers was saying to a policewoman who was interviewing her. “They just looked like a bunch of old ladies and one young one. They ran around the counter and into the back, and then a bloke dashed in shouting at them to stop, and went in after them. That’s all we saw.”

  Gregory passed the investigation team, moving around the counter to the doorway of the supply room. The room was filled with metal shelving units on either side, with the usual accoutrements scattered about—wheeled bucket and mop, cans of industrial cleaner, boxes of napkins, straws, and cup lids, which he assumed had been stacked tidily but were now splayed out in disarray. The back wall held a sink with a notice about washing hands, a small desk stacked high with take-out boxes waiting to be assembled, and huge drums of cooking oil. There was no exit door, no window, no possible way out of the room except by means of magic.

  Gregory stepped into the room, intending to test whether he could sense any sort of residual magic, and came face-to-face with an anomaly: smack-dab in the center of the room was a portal. He glanced at the policeman who was at the rear of the room, tapping the walls in order to find who knew what, then back at the portal. He approached it. He’d never seen a portal in person, Travellers not having much of a need to visit places like Abaddon or the Court of Divine Blood (what most mortal people thought of as hell and heaven, but which were in reality quite a bit different), but he knew that what he was looking at had to be a portal. He circled it, examining it from the back. It appeared the same as the front.

  He glanced again at the mortal, who didn’t seem to notice the oddity at all, and then returned to Peter’s side.

  “I figured out how they got out of the shop,” he said in a conversational tone.

  “Magic,” Peter said, in the middle of sending a text message, no doubt to his wife.

  “Not really. There’s a portal in the room.”

  “A what?” Peter stopped texting to look askance. “I looked in the room. There was nothing there but what you’d expect to see in a storage room.”

  “Smack-dab in the center of the room is a long oval that runs from ceiling to floor. The air in it is thicker, and twisted in long ropes that seem to spiral down in a never-ending pattern. If that’s not a portal, I don’t know what is.”

  Peter looked thoughtful. “It does sound like one. But I swear to you that it wasn’t there when I looked in the room earlier.”

  “I didn’t see anything, either, until I got within a yard of it. How far into the room did you go?”

  “Not very far—just enough to see there was no exit and no place to hide. Damn. We’re going to have to find out where the portal leads to.”

  “The cop in there didn’t seem to see it.”

  “He wouldn’t.” Peter finished up his text message and punched in a phone number. “Portals are generally warded and protected so mortals can’t see or access them. If this one didn’t appear to you until you were right on top of it, it’s probably heavily protected. Dalton? It’s me. Gregory and I have found a portal in Cardiff. In a doughnut shop. Can you find out where it leads to?”

  A small car pulled up. Gregory watched a familiar woman get out of the car and march over to the nearest police officer. She flashed some sort of a badge.

  “Probably has identification set up through her boss like we do,” he said softly, his eyes narrowing as she entered the shop.

  “Uh-huh. Got it. You’re sure? Damn. Thanks. Yes, we’ll wait until you get permission. So long as there’s no other exit for her to leave there, we should be OK until we are allowed in.” Peter stopped Gregory as he was about to follow the red-suited minion of Death into the shop. He didn’t like the woman at all, and worried that she might see the portal if she went far enough into the room. “Dalton says the records say the portal is to Anwyn.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Some sort of Welsh afterlife.”

  “Great. So we’ll have to fight our way through dead people to get Gwen.” He started forward again, only to be stopped once more.

  “It’s not that easy. We can’t go in.”

  “We can’t? Do you have to be dead? Gwen wasn’t dead, nor was her victim and the other women.”

  “No, you don’t need to be dead to go to the afterlife, but some agreement with the Akashic League and the L’au-dela prohibits the Watch from marching in there and arresting people.”

  “What’s the Akashic League got to do with it? I thought they headed up ghosts and ghouls and the like . . . oh. Afterlife. Dead people.”

  Peter nodded. “We can’t legally enter Anwyn without permission of the person who runs it.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “According to Dalton, there are legends about Anwyn. Ah, here’s the file Dalton said he was sending.” Peter looked at his phone, reading aloud. “Arawn is the king of Anwyn, the Welsh underworld where tradition says he has ruled in peace for several centuries. Let’s see . . . there’s a bit about him switching places with a mortal for a while. . . . Ah, here’s something interesting. It’s written that a powerful lord named Amaethon ab Don and his brother, Gwydion, started a war with Arawn when Amaethon stole a dog, a lapwing, and a roebuck from Arawn. There’s something about trees, and the length of the battle, and a guessing game held to find the name of a warrior—your usual folklore stuff.”

  “How long is it going to take us to get permission to go after Gwen?” Gregory asked, feeling antsy. He didn’t like the fact that the red-suited reclaimer had been in the shop so long. Had she seen the portal? Had she entered it? Did she have permission to do so?

  “Don’t know.” Peter gave him a grim smile. “But it looks like we’ll be on stakeout here for a bit to make sure that Owens doesn’t pop back through the portal and make a run for it. I’ll give Kiya a call and let her know we won’t be back tonight.”

  He moved off to do so. Gregory frowned at the entrance of the doughnut shop, every muscle in his body urging him to follow Gwen. But he was already on shaky ground with Peter over the time theft episode, and to blatantly disregard the laws of the Watch would finish his budding career for good.

  Hours passed. Each one seemed like an entire week to Gregory, and each subsequent hour seemed to bring more and more anguish. Death’s servant hadn’t reappeared, which meant she’d gone through the portal after Gwen. And there he was, stuck playing a waiting game, unable to do his job. It was pure torment, a veritable storm cloud of frustration.

  “Stop it,” Peter said at one point as the sun was about to rise. The two of them were in their car, waiting for the official permission and to make sure that Gwen didn’t try to escape from Anwyn.

  “Stop what?”

  Peter nodded toward the
front of the car. Gregory glanced out, pursing his lips a little at the flash of lightning across the pale bluey-pink sky.

  “Sorry. I’m just frustrated.”

  “We both are, but making freak lightning storms isn’t going to help.”

  “I didn’t mean to. It just happens sometimes when I’m distraught. You keep a good control over your emotions. I’ve never seen you make it storm.”

  “I can’t.” Peter gave a little shrug and a half smile. “I think it’s because I’m mahrime.”

  Gregory was silent for a moment. Until he’d met his cousin, he’d never had trouble with the Traveller belief that those of impure blood—those with only one Traveller parent—were unclean, but now he felt the full injustice of the attitude. It reflected just one of the ways he felt the Traveller society as a whole needed enlightenment. “You can’t control lightning at all? But you have the mark.”

  Peter touched his chest where the long, feathery pattern had been branded into his skin by a lightning strike. Kiya had a name for it—“lightning flower.” Gregory himself had a similar mark spreading across his back at the shoulders, but he never bothered much about how or why he had it. “Not in the way you can. I can’t manifest lightning except when Kiya and I . . .” He gave an embarrassed cough and stopped.

  Gregory decided that was a subject he had no business pursuing, and so he merely returned to his sense of frustration and irritation over the delay. An hour later, a car pulled up at the front of the shop, this one carrying two men. Both were built like bulls, with thick, almost nonexistent necks that rolled down to shoulders rounded with muscle. Their jackets hid most of the outlines on their upper halves, but the way the fabric stretched across their wide backs signified that they were men who had a serious interest in a steroids company. The men didn’t look to the right or left; they simply entered the shop, not pausing when one of the remaining policeman called out for them to stop.

  Gregory had a very bad feeling about those two men. He hadn’t forgotten what the reclamation agent had said about two thugs being on Gwen’s heels.

  “I’m just going to check inside again,” he said, getting out of the car. “I need to be doing something.”

  He didn’t wait for Peter’s response. There was no way in hell—the Welsh version of it or any other—that he was going to allow thugs or Death’s agent to claim Gwen. She was his.

  In a professional sense, of course. Nothing more, despite the fact that he wouldn’t at all mind getting to know her better. Much, much better.

  He shoved the erotic pictures that immediately popped into his mind out of it, and reminded himself that he had a job to do and that he’d be damned if he let someone else put that job in jeopardy.

  The outer shop was empty of either a woman in a red suit or two thuglike bulls in human form. He smiled at the policewoman who was staring with a worried look at the supply room, and then he entered it.

  It was empty.

  He stepped farther into the room. The portal shimmered away in an annoying business-as-usual manner. He ground his teeth. He couldn’t go in. Not without permission. Peter had made that absolutely clear.

  But those two men and Death’s agent had gone through it. They would get to Gwen first. And they might hurt her.

  He couldn’t go. He couldn’t break the rules. Not again, not when he was so close to achieving what he most wanted out of life. Not when it would mean destroying not only his own professional future but his blossoming relationship with Peter, and more importantly, their plans for dragging fellow Travellers into society, where they could use their abilities for good.

  He couldn’t throw away all of that just to capture one woman.

  One delectably enticing woman.

  “Damn everything to perdition and back,” he snarled, and pushed his way through the portal.

  It was the noise that he noticed first. Or rather, the lack of it. It was quiet in Anwyn, the sort of rural, pastoral quiet that comes with birds going cheerfully about their business, sheep and cattle lazily grazing away with nary a tail swipe at irritating flies, and the soft wafting of gentle breezes about one’s temples. It was, in short, as idyllic a spot as any place he had ever seen. More so, given the lack of the irritations that had plagued his life ever since he had joined the Watch.

  He stood next to a low stone wall, the kind made by farmers for hundreds of years out of rocks turned over from plowing. On the far side of the wall lay a faint dirt track. Behind him rose a large rock, about twelve feet high. He took that to be the portal out to the mortal world, since the way out was frequently separate from the way in.

  “Hello, cow,” he greeted a brown and white cow that was grazing near him. She was a clean cow, her whites very white, her browns a rich milk chocolate, her hooves shiny. He wasn’t overly familiar with the world of cows as a whole, but brief glances he’d had out of car windows when passing through farmland had led him to believe that cows were frequently splattered with mud and feces. Particularly their hindquarters. And yet here was this cow, all shiny and clean and looking as if she would give already pasteurized milk. “I had no idea they had cows in the afterlife, but I guess you too need somewhere to go when you die. You look plump and clean and happy, so this is good. Have you seen a woman named Gwen?”

  The cow stretched out her neck and snuffled his front.

  “A smallish woman in a red suit?”

  A large pink tongue emerged from the cow’s mouth. With a delicacy that surprised him, she tasted the buttons on his jacket.

  “How about two large men with no necks? You couldn’t miss them; they’re roughly the same size as you.”

  She returned to snuffling his chest. Her ears wiggled happily.

  “I’ll take that as a no. Or as a statement that I smell good to cows. Good day, madam.” He patted the cow on the head, stepped over the low wall, and strode off down the dirt track, wondering just how he would find Gwen. And whether or not the others had already found her.

  “I’m not going to worry about what I’ve done,” he said aloud to a large green, white, and black bird as it flew in front of him across the track, a few twigs in its beak. The bird fluttered in a circle around him, then alighted on the stone wall, spitting out the twigs.

  For one startled moment, he expected it to speak. It didn’t. It just cocked its head as it looked at him, picked up a twig, and flew over to drop it at his feet. It then flew a few feet at right angles to the path.

  He looked at the twig. “A present? How thoughtful of you.” He retrieved the stick and examined it. It did not, alas, have Gwen’s current whereabouts engraved on it. “I would reciprocate, but I have no idea what to get a bird.”

  The bird fluttered a few feet, then landed on the grass, clearly watching him.

  “I’m not the smartest man in the world, you know,” he told the bird, “but I’m also not the most obtuse. Do you want me to follow you?”

  The bird just sat there, waiting for him.

  He pointed down the track. “There’s no cow or sheep shit if I go that way. There’s bound to be some if I cross the fields.”

  The bird spat up a beetle, twisted its head around to look at the carcass, then consumed it again.

  Gregory grimaced. “What the hell. It’s not like I’m not up to my elbows in it already.”

  He left the path and headed toward the bird, which immediately took wing and flew about a hundred feet ahead, then paused and waited for him. “Your name wouldn’t be Lassie, would it?”

  Gregory followed the bird for some time, the bemused feeling of being led by an animal eventually fading, allowing regret to darken his mood. “I’ll get fired for sure. Peter will be angry as hell, but with time he might forgive me. My grandmother will be sure to hold my failure over my head for the rest of my life. But nothing I can do now will change any of that, will it?”

  The bird said nothing, but continued to lead him through trees, and up and down the rolling hills. Despite his brave words, he did, in fact, fret over t
he situation that his impatience had cast upon him, but all the chiding words he hurled at himself faded away when he passed through a small copse of trees and crested a slight hill. Before him lay a panorama of . . . well, he was hard put to name exactly what it was. More gently rolling green hills. Periodic clumps of trees. A stream, silvery bright, cut a serpentine path through the hills and wound its way past him on the right. Fluffy white blobs that were no doubt spotlessly clean sheep dotted the grassy undulations, the latter of which were sprinkled with the yellow, red, and blue of wildflowers. Large blobs indicated more cows. But it was the man-made structures that held his attention.

  “I take it this is what you wanted me to see?” he asked the bird, who was now perching on a tree branch and consuming yet another insect. The bird looked at him with its bright, intelligent eyes, two sets of beetle legs kicking and thrashing out the side of its beak. “I thank you for your assistance. Assuming, that is, you’re not leading me to something heinous.”

  He looked closer at the scene before him. To the left of a stream, a large camp of tents was splayed along the slight rise of one of the hillocks, like a large bull’s-eye made from tents of every hue. To the right of the stream sat another tented encampment, this one made up wholly of black tents that glittered with touches of gold in the morning sun. Those tents weren’t laid out in any order, and if he squinted, he could make out tiny figures moving to and fro.

  “That’s interesting.” He started walking toward the camps. “And not at all in keeping with the pastoral setting. It almost looks like two camps about ready to battle.”

  The bird flew in front of him, then disappeared into the distance, obviously finished with him. He wondered idly if all the animals in the afterlife had agendas.