A Thief in Time (Thief in Time Series Book 1)

by Cidney Swanson

  But when the sorcerer grasped Halley by the hand, Edmund reached for his sword. Halley resisted the grappling, swiftly pulling her hand free, unharmed and seemingly unafraid. Had it been no more than a taking of hands? But for what purpose? Those who greeted one another as friends ought to bow and kiss, as was customary. Edmund hesitated, his right hand on his sword, his left resting on the odd door handle he’d seen Halley use.

  Halley seemed safe for the moment. And yet, she was but a girl in physical strength. Had she perhaps her own magic? It was clear she had been a visitor to the realm of Faerie often enough to know its rules and dangers. She had not been at all surprised to find herself in this place of hunched oaks, pole-trees, daub and brick, and window-glass so clear as to appear invisible.

  And as for the wagon in which he was seated? She had called it her own. It was a thing of great mystery wherein he saw nothing familiar but his own discarded garments. He frowned at the odd breeches the girl had asked him to wear, which he had not yet put on. If he were to need suddenly to leave the wagon, he ought, perhaps to don the breeches. The strange tunic, he had already put on. Well, if the girl believed it would be dangerous for him to be seen in his own apparel . . .

  His mind decided, he unlaced his upper stocks, sliding off his hose and boots as well. It was infernally hot in this realm. Grasping the strange breeches, he pulled them on over his braies, preferring that his own undergarment alone should touch his skin, the channel by which miasmas and all manner of illness entered the body.

  Once the change of weeds was effected, Edmund focused again upon the girl and the magician.

  The language of the older man’s body whispered much to Edmund’s experienced eye. The man feared the girl, or feared some power she might have over him. Edmund watched the magician’s hand, clenching and unclenching behind his back, and felt suddenly sure the magician meant some harm to the girl. He felt equally sure this was the sort of man to be frighted into a peace if outnumbered or outweaponed, and by the rood, he should like to prove it.

  The magician grasped the girl’s hand again and then placed a restraining hand on her shoulder. It was too much. Edmund reached for his sword, then recalled Halley had forbidden him the use of the weapon. Could the magician perhaps charm Edmund’s sword against him? Cursing, he cast about his discarded garments seeking his small folded blood-letting knife. She had not forbad that. Finding it, he unclasped the blade, and holding it at the ready, he stepped from the wagon.

  10

  • HALLEY •

  Halley stared in horror as Edmund, now barefoot and dressed in her pajamas, moved purposefully toward her. As he walked, he tossed a knife, tip over handle. Toss. Catch. Toss. Catch. He never glanced at the knife, but he caught it by the handle every time. He looked threatening as all hell. She had to defuse the situation, and fast.

  “Min Kæreste,” she called to Edmund, “my sweetheart.” She ran to stop him from getting any closer. “He’s Danish,” she called over her shoulder to the professor. “Speaks no English.”

  She stood on tiptoe to plant a kiss on Edmund’s cheek, murmuring, “Don’t even think about using that knife. And whatever you do, don’t speak.”

  The professor, meanwhile, had bent over and picked up the river rock at his feet. It was a casual motion. It might have meant nothing.

  “He did grapple with thee,” Edmund murmured softly. His breath ruffled the hair beside her ear.

  “He what?”

  Halley steered him back toward her truck. To her great relief, he didn’t fight her.

  “He restrained thee,” replied Edmund. “Twice by the hand and then by the shoulder.”

  Halley was bewildered for a moment but then rolled her eyes.

  “Those were handshakes. Handshakes, you know—” She broke off. Maybe he didn’t know. “I’ll explain later. Things are fine. Everything’s fine. Trust me. And get back in the truck. We’re leaving in a minute.”

  She swung the passenger door open.

  Edmund glowered.

  The professor was now shifting his rock from one hand to the other, face unperturbed.

  Edmund, eyes on the professor, leaned against the passenger seat, occupying himself with clasping and unclasping a hinge so that the knife folded in half and then snapped back open. The professor’s mouth produced a rather artificial smile.

  “Just wait here,” Halley ordered Edmund. Turning, she strode back toward Khan.

  “So, um, my boyfriend got a text and we have to run. If you could maybe mail Mom’s check?”

  The professor ceased passing the rock from hand to hand, but he held it tight in his grasp as he stared at Edmund. Faint hostility rippled in the heavy air. Was the professor suspicious of Edmund?

  “Yes, of course,” said the professor at last. “I’ll mail it.”

  Halley took the notebook back and scribbled her address down. “Okay. That’s where we live. Send the check there.”

  Examining the address, he murmured, “I’ll have it out right away.”

  “Thanks.”

  Halley dashed back to her truck, entering on the driver’s side. She didn’t care how odd it looked that she was driving her “boyfriend’s” truck. She just wanted to get out of there. Now. Before Edmund gave the professor any reason to suspect he didn’t belong in this century.

  Sticking the keys in the ignition, she murmured, “Try not to react. This is going to be a little noisy.”

  11

  • KHAN •

  Back in his basement, the professor stared at the navigation panel of his temporal singularity device, struck by the uneasy feeling that something was not right. His gaze rested upon a picture in his retrievals catalog. It was, in fact, a picture of his first retrieval—his Gutenberg Bible. Head tipped to the side, he tugged at his goatee. Had he left his retrievals catalog open to this page? He couldn’t recall with certainty. The last time he could remember doing anything with the catalog was more than a week ago, when he had been meaning to insert another ten or twelve pictures. They lay nearby, scattered across his desk. He was woefully behind in cataloging his retrievals.

  “A day late and a dollar short,” he muttered. It was spoken ironically. If anyone had less reason to run short of time or money, he would like to meet them.

  He flipped the catalog to the empty pages at the back. It was perhaps foolish to produce so tangible a record of his handiwork, but it helped him to keep track of what he had already sold and to whom. It was a thoroughness demanded by his scientific mind, this tracking of interactions with those who alchemized his treasures into dollars and yen, pounds and dirhams.

  He frowned. Had he really left the catalog like that?

  Again, suspicion stirred within him. Was it possible someone had been down here? The girl? Or the girl’s mother? His heart suddenly hammering, he strode to his desk and opened a program on his computer designed to record the activity of the temporal device.

  The tracking program showed that a complete system reboot had occurred forty-six minutes earlier, following a brief power outage. A reboot? That was interesting. And fortunate. Without the singularity device, his return journey would have been potentially disastrous.

  An unpleasant thrill trailed along the professor’s spine.

  The machine’s original inventor, Dr. Littlewood, had likely made copious notes pertaining to emergency protocols, but Khan had not been able to recover these notes. He’d barely been able to steal the designs for Littlewood’s failsafe program. For obvious reasons, Khan had never tested the failsafe. Well, until today. Unintentionally. He hadn’t even been clear what the failsafe would do in an actual emergency. Would it forcibly reinstate travel in progress or reinitiate travel from the last setting?

  He had his answer here in today’s records: the failsafe had done both, covering all contingencies. How very like Dr. Littlewood to cover all contingencies. Khan smiled, recalling Littlewood’s hypercaution. It was a miracle the man had ever tested his own invention.

  Khan sigh
ed. Sometimes he wished he had Littlewood as a partner. But a partner introduced all sorts of messy complications, and the professor hated messy complications.

  He patted the podium affectionately. Computers might be complicated, but they were never messy. In any case, the fact that the program had successfully rebooted indicated that either (a) the failsafe had worked or (b) the failsafe had been unnecessary to begin with. And regardless of which was true, there was still no evidence that anyone had tampered with his equipment.

  Other than the retrievals catalog being opened to the wrong page.

  The professor drummed his long fingers on his desk.

  He was being paranoid. He must have shifted the pages himself. He knew he could be absentminded at times, although he preferred to label it “distractible.” “Absentminded professor” gave the wrong impression.

  Not that labels should bother someone like him. He was the greatest explorer since Magellan. More intrepid than Scott. More important than Neil Armstrong. And someday, naturally after he shuffled off this mortal coil, the world would know he had blazed the trail of temporal exploration.

  “Après moi, le deluge,” the professor murmured, quoting a king whose miniature portrait had been his first sale. After the professor was dead and gone and mankind had harnessed the temporal singularity, all hell could break loose, for all he cared. And it probably would.

  Meanwhile, however, he must guard his work from outside attention. Just to be safe, he searched the past six days’ security records, looking for evidence of a physical break-in to his sacred basement. He saw nothing unexpected until he reached the current day’s records. Forty-nine minutes ago, the basement door seal had been breached. He checked the US Geological Survey records, discovering the Santa Ynez–based quake had, in fact, occurred forty-nine minutes and twenty-one seconds earlier. This meant that the breach, and presumably the brief power outage, had happened three minutes prior to the computer program’s reboot. Three minutes wasn’t an unreasonable amount of time for such a complex system to come back to full functionality.

  But the door . . . The door.

  He cursed himself for not fixing the door a month ago, when he’d noticed the latch mechanism was faulty. His neglect might prove to be costly. And messy.

  The professor stared into space, thinking the situation through logically. The door seal had been breached in concert with the earthquake. It seemed highly unlikely the girl had decided to snoop and had succeeded in unlocking the door at the precise moment an earthquake had struck. The odds against such would be astronomical. So the earthquake, and not the girl, must have been responsible for the door seal’s breach.

  But had she, upon noticing the door was already open, snuck inside and examined his retrievals catalog? The door was sealed when he returned to the room, which meant that someone must have closed it. It was suspicious the girl hadn’t mentioned closing the basement door. He flipped through her notes on the property. Ah—no, he was mistaken. There it was, her confession: “17) Basement door lock apparently disabled due to earthquake or brief power loss? I closed it again, which locked it.”

  So she had been down the stairs. That much looked certain.

  The only question that remained, then, was this: had she entered the basement?

  12

  • HALLEY •

  Back when Halley turned ten, her mother had taken a month-long job at an estate with a pair of six-month-old greyhounds. The pups had been intelligent, affectionate, and . . . reserved. At least in Halley’s opinion. Alert and curious about everything, they’d also been quiet, observing strange sights, sounds, and smells rather than barking at them.

  Having Edmund in her truck right now was like having one of those greyhounds along for the ride. From the initial roar of the truck engine to the opening of the automatic gate, everything plainly startled Edmund, but he made no sounds to indicate shock. He just held himself in ready alertness, exactly like those pups.

  Was it only this morning that making a favorable impression on Ethyl Meier had been the gravest of Halley’s concerns? Now she had to figure out how to entertain—or maybe just contain—a sword- and knife-wielding member of a different era for the next ten days. At which point she would have to figure out how to break into a Cold War–era bomb shelter and return him to where he belonged.

  What was she going to do with Edmund for ten days? Ten days.

  Halley took a curve too fast. She wasn’t paying attention. She wasn’t even sure where she was heading, let alone what to do with Edmund. With regard to her heading, however, her hand was shortly forced. Around the next curve, a palm was draped inelegantly across the road, presumably a victim of the quake.

  “Fantastic,” she muttered.

  Halley could think of three or four alternate routes to circumvent the palm tree blockage, but really what she needed was to stop and think. So instead of turning around, Halley pulled the truck to the side of the road and killed the engine. Edmund startled, but again he made no sound.

  “So here’s the thing,” Halley said, facing her inadvertent tagalong. “I need to coach you a little on life here, because it’s going to take a while to get you back where you belong.”

  “This, then, is the road to London?” asked Edmund. He leaned forward as if to size up the tree blocking the road. “Had I the use of an axe . . .”

  “The tree in the road is not the problem.”

  “If this be the road to London—”

  “It’s not. This road does not go to London.”

  Edmund frowned. “Mistress—er, Halley, I must return forthwith. Wherefore travel we this road if it be not the road to London?”

  Groaning, Halley collapsed her head onto the steering wheel. She tried to calm her rising sense of panic. What was she doing? What was she supposed to do? She had a man from the sixteenth century in her truck!

  “I needed to get you away from there,” Halley said, head still collapsed forward.

  “Halley, what place is this?”

  Halley ground her forehead into the steering wheel and muttered, “Give me a minute.”

  She had to make a choice. She could tell Edmund the truth. Or she could continue the ruse of “Faerie Land” which Edmund seemed ready to accept. Apparently her Shakespearean literature teacher had been right about educated Elizabethans accepting the existence of fairies as readily as they accepted the existence of cats and dogs. But Edmund was going to be with her for ten days. Ten days. Really, there was no choice. He was going to need to know the truth.

  As she raised her head, her phone buzzed in her pocket. Edmund looked at her pocket with curiosity.

  “Text message,” she said. “It’s, um, a way to dispatch messages. Minus the horse and rider. Like, a messenger that travels through the air. Invisibly.”

  Edmund looked puzzled by her explanation, but at least he wasn’t holding up a silver cross to ward off her witchy ways. He was just taking it all in, like those greyhounds.

  Her phone buzzed again.

  “Your . . . messenger persists,” said Edmund.

  Cursing softly, Halley withdrew her phone from her pocket. It was DaVinci.

  U ok from the earthquake? U totally called it! Freaky! So, the show monitors are letting vendors leave. Branson can’t get us bc the driveway is blocked with a tree. Come get us? I can’t reach my family and we have all this crap to haul. Pleeeeeeease?

  Halley’s jaw clenched. She had to help. Of course she had to help. She took a deep breath and turned to Edmund.

  “My best friends need my help. But before you meet them, there are a few things you should know.”

  13

  • EDMUND •

  During the past half hour, Edmund had concluded that his fair companion was most probably an enchantress. Fearless she was; her beauty, otherworldly. And careless of displaying her limbs as well: he’d caught tantalizing glimpses of her calves and thighs. Her skin was everywhere the same warm fawn color of his best gloves. Beside her, he felt daub colored, wi
nter pale though it was high summer.

  She was surely fey. She commanded a beast hidden within the cavern of her wagon—her truck—compelling it to go and to halt, he knew not how. And if he understood her aright, she received messages through the air, though he heard no speech—only a buzzing sound, as of bees. Surely she was an enchantress of this, the land of Faerie.

  No sooner had he reached this conclusion than the words of the wise woman bent over his cradle came back to him.

  One day shalt thou travel far, thy family’s fortunes to restore.

  His eyes grew wide. This must be the traveling far spoken of by the wise woman. His heart began to race. He was so accustomed to the prophetic words that they had lost their impact, like a word spoke over and over till it seemed void of meaning. But to live to see the words come true? He felt laughter welling inside. But just as quickly as glee possessed him, he felt his bones chilling. If he was truly a captive in the land of Faerie, how was he to return to his own land? His chest tightening, he fixed his eyes on his captor.

  He must resist her enchantments. He must keep his head clear so as to return safely home. The fate of his family—nay, that of the estate and all its dependents—lay in the balance. The sword at his side comforted him, but if he was in the power of an enchantress, would it protect him? He uttered a silent prayer for aid.

  Mistress Halley, meanwhile, was gazing at the source of the buzzing noise—a flat, narrow device the size of a playing card. Repeatedly, she stroked the magical, glowing item. This seemed to calm her. Then, clearing her throat, she placed the device into a concealed pocket and raised her enchanting eyes to meet his.

  “There are a few things you should know.” She dropped her gaze once more. Her eyes were shaded by thick lashes, her brows finely arched and black as deep water. Had he the use of pen and ink . . .