The Art of Stealing Time: A Time Thief Novel (9 page)

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 the 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.

The sense of martial strife, which grew stronger as he approached the center area, was aided not a little by the fact that the sky darkened from its clear topaz blue first to a dusky purple and then to reddish gray. Little snakes of lightning streaked across the red and gray sky, causing reciprocal tingles along his skin. He paused, waiting, and as one of the flashes spread out above him, he raised his hand and called it down. The lightning obeyed, encasing him in long, delicate tendrils of static that jumped and snapped with a familiar tingle. He embraced it for a moment, then released it into the earth.

What was this place? He narrowed his eyes on a mound just this side of the stream that had been blackened and scorched until it was nothing more than bare earth. Two figures stood there, one of whom was clearly a man in armor. The other was almost as tall, but held himself with less grace. It wasn’t until he caught sight of the hand moving as the latter talked that he realized the figure was a woman.

As he moved closer, he recognized the black hair of the woman as it fluttered behind her, lifted by a breeze. She, too, was in armor, but seemed much less comfortable with it, holding herself very still.

Relief swamped him that the thugs and Death hadn’t found her before he did, and he sent a mental thank-you to the bird for pulling him off the path and setting his feet in this direction. That emotion was quickly replaced by anger, determination, and no little amount of admiration for how gracefully Gwen gestured while being encased in armor.

As he strode up behind her, he overheard her say to the man she was facing, “How about I go get us a little light refreshment?”

“You’re not going anywhere,” he said with grim finality, stopping immediately behind her. “Not again. Not on my watch. And yes, I mean that literally, although this little stunt of yours is likely to cost me my job.”

Gwen whirled around and stared at him with wide, startled eyes. He could have sworn that they were as innocent as a newborn babe’s, but he wasn’t going to allow himself to be fooled again. He placed a proprietary (and prohibitive) hand on her arm.

“Gregory? Goddess above, what are you doing here? And what do you mean, I’m going to cost you your job?”

“I’m here to arrest you, Magdalena Owens,” he said firmly, fighting back the need to take her in his arms and kiss the startled look right off her face.

“You can’t arrest me!” she protested.

“On the contrary, I can. I may be a probationary member, but I am fully able to arrest denizens of the Otherworld.”

“I’m not Magdalena Owens!”

He turned a deaf ear to her claim. He wouldn’t be fooled again. “I arrest you in the name of the Watch for the abduction of a human woman, and for the sale of magic to non-immortal individuals.”

“Look, you annoying man, I just told you: I’m not Magdalena Owens!”

“Pardon me,” said the man in knight’s armor. He had a slight Welsh accent and raised the visor of his helmet as he spoke. “You are interfering with our battle. This warrior and I are engaged for the next . . .” He consulted his wrist, swore, then cast a look at the red and gray sky. “Another hour. Kindly step off the battlefield so that we might commence our battle.”

“And I just told
you
that I’m not a warrior,” Gwen told the man.

“Who is this?” Gregory asked Gwen, nodding at the knight.

“His name is Douglas.”

“It is not!” the man declared.

“Well, that’s what I call him,” she amended, giving Gregory a conspiratorial smile that he felt down to his toes.

“She named me after a rabbit. A toy rabbit!” Douglas said, clearly outraged by this fact.

“It was one of my favorite toys. My mother says I used to suck on his soft, velvety ears while I was teething.”

The man made a disgusted noise of protest.

“If you don’t like the name, surely you don’t have to use it.” Gregory couldn’t help but be distracted by the odd situation. “I wouldn’t care to be named after a rabbit, either, although I wouldn’t mind if you sucked on my ears.”

Silence fell following that statement. Gregory felt all shades of awkward, an emotion he hadn’t experienced in a very long time. If ever.

Both Gwen and Douglas were looking at him with doubt.

“Dammit,” he told Gwen, “I am a very erudite man! I am known for my smooth personality, my very polite manners, and my blond good looks. My cousin’s wife insists that I’m really a cover model! Erudite and smooth potential cover models do not say things that make people look at them the way you two are looking at me.”

“Sir Cover Model,” the knight said, gesturing with his sword. “You just told the warrior that you’d like her to suck on your ears. I take it you two are a couple?”

“No,” Gwen said quickly. Too quickly for his taste.

“We have a complicated relationship,” Gregory told Douglas.

“No, we don’t. We don’t have any relationship short of a casual acquaintance. We just met a few days ago.” She gave him a look that spoke in no uncertain terms. “And I have no intention of sucking on his ears.”

The knight pursed his lips. Gregory looked over her shoulder into the distance and fought to keep from smiling.

“Shall I say it?” Douglas asked. “I will. Ahem.” He looked at Gwen and said in a tone that implied he was finishing her sentence, “Or anything else?”

Gwen’s expression darkened. She walloped Gregory on the arm. “Stupid men and their penises!”

“I said nothing,” Gregory pointed out, rubbing his arm. “I mentioned no penis. He did!”

“No, but you were thinking about it. And probably snickering to yourself. It’s just a very telling point when you can’t even mention sucking someone’s ears without grown men turning into ten-year-old boys giggling about their penises.”

“My apologies, Gwen,” he said, his abused hand on his chest as he made her a bow.

“Stop being erudite and smooth at me,” she snapped. “I don’t like it at all. Why did you say I was ruining your job?”

“Alas, the discussion the two of you are having—fascinating as it is—will have to wait for another time. We must battle now, or you will forfeit the fight.”

“What fight?” Gregory asked at the same time that Gwen said, “What happens if I do that?”

“Forfeiting a fight means that you have failed to do your lord’s duty and are released from his service.”

“Well, hell, I’m totally on board with that,” Gwen said, handing Gregory her sword to hold while she pulled off the metal gauntlets. “I only did this to keep from being put back in prison.”

The word “prison” brought Gregory’s mind back to his reason for being there. “Magdalena Owens—”

“Will you stop calling me that? I’m not my mother!” Gwen shouted, smacking him in the chest with one of the gauntlets.

He stared at her. Could it be true? Or was she lying to him again? “Your mother?”

Her gaze skittered to the side. “Yes. That’s my mom. I’m Gwen Owens.”

“You said that your name was Gwenhwyfar Byron.” She sounded like she was telling the truth. Did he dare believe her?

“It is. It’s Gwen Byron Owens.”

“You lied to me.” He gave her his sternest look. It was necessary in order to keep from grabbing her and kissing her as she deserved. The very fact that she was ashamed of herself lent truth to her statement. She wasn’t the Owens they were looking for! She wasn’t a criminal!