Time Thief: A Time Thief Novel (10 page)

“How very kind of you,” I said in a frosty tone upon viewing the arrangements. I clutched the toilet seat (still in plastic wrap) to my chest, and fought hard to keep from screaming.

“You will not visit our women’s latrines,” Andrew said sternly. “You are—”

“Mahrime, I know, thanks so very much for mentioning it.
Again
.”

He grunted, ignored my withering sarcasm, and stomped off to go lounge around in expensive RV luxury. I muttered several rude things under my breath as I set up my facilities, and returned to my tent, where I pulled my chair out to the side so I could look pathetically hungry in hopes that someone would offer me a bite of food that was being grilled by two of the women.

They didn’t even glance my way. And since Mrs. Faa wasn’t around to make people be nice to me, I settled down to develop my campfire cooking skills. Mrs. Faa and her dogs emerged for their dinner, after which I hooked up the little beasties and took them for their prebed constitutional, opting to go down the drive toward the main road rather than get tangled up in the undergrowth. By the time they’d had their walk and been returned to their owner, I was too beat to even make a pretense of conversation with her, and, with a weary smile at Gregory, who was deep in conversation with his cousin Andrew, headed into my tent and spent the next forty minutes pumping up my air mattress. Despite the odiferous surroundings, sleep claimed me the second my head hit my rolled-up sweater that served as a pillow.

Until, that is, my entire tent was shaken by an earthquake, one that had me groggily grunting, “Huh?” before the earthquake manifested itself into a human form. “What on earth?”

The moon was just past full, and although the tent canvas was too thick to let a lot of light in, it gave me enough to make out the fact that a man had entered the tent.

“What— Who the hell are you? And what are you doing here? This is my personal tent, sir, and I—”

“Help me,” the man croaked, dropping to his knees. “They want…kill…”

Startled, I rolled off my sleeping bag, but before I could even process his dramatic statement, male voices called urgently to one another behind me, out by where the RVs were located.

“Help…” The man’s voice wavered as he swayed.

I don’t know what possessed me at that moment. It makes no sense to me now, and it didn’t then, but despite that, despite the fact that I had no idea what was going on, or who this mysterious man was, or why he was in my tent, despite all forms of common sense, I flung my sleeping bag to the side, grabbed the stranger by his arms, and more or less dragged him over to the air mattress. He collapsed on it facedown without a sound. I hurriedly arranged his legs so they lay on the mattress, as well, pulled his arms down to his side, then spread my sleeping bag on top of him.

It looked like a sleeping bag oozed over a man-shaped mattress. “Damn,” I whispered to myself, then apologized softly. “Sorry, mister, but I hear people, and that means—”

Hurriedly I lay down on top of the sleeping bag/man arrangement, and pretended to snore.

Nearby, a man shouted something in a language I didn’t understand. I screwed up my eyes tight, sprawled as best I could to cover as much of the sleeping bag (and man) as possible, and snored even louder.

“Kiya? Kiya, are you all right?”

“Hruh?” I tried to sound groggy and surprised when Gregory stuck his head into my tent. “Whosat?”

“It’s me. Gregory Faa. You didn’t happen to see a man skulking around here, did you?”

“A man?” I didn’t have to work to make my voice sound high and sketchy with shock. “What man?”

“A prowler. We caught him trying to break into my grandmother’s RV.” Gregory pulled his head back and spoke quietly with one of his cousins who was obviously just outside. He leaned in again and I saw the brief gleam of his teeth in the moonlight. “Sorry to disturb you. Go back to sleep.”

“Are you kidding? You think I’m going to be able to sleep knowing there’s some strange man running around?” Again, I didn’t have to work to sound like I was on the verge of freaking out. I was, and one part of my brain—what Carla calls my superego—told me I was an idiot, and yelled like crazy to tell the very nice, very normal Gregory that there was a strange man lying underneath me who had delusions of paranoia. My id, however, told me that something about the man’s claim sounded entirely realistic, and to go with my gut instinct. My ego—the part of the psyche that Carla says is all about realism—simply pointed out that I was probably smothering the man, and needed to get off him pronto before he asphyxiated.

“I will zip up the door to your tent,” Gregory said all the while my brain was bickering with my psyche. “If you see anyone, yell and we will be right here.”

I said nothing as he zippered up the tent flap—which I had left loose to encourage air to flow—but the second his shadow moved away, I rolled off the man and yanked the sleeping bag off him.

“Mister?” I said softly, poking him in the arm. “Sorry I had to lay on you, but it was the only thing I could think of. You OK? I didn’t smother you, did I?”

The man didn’t reply. I wanted badly to turn on my camp light to see his face, but knew that would alert Gregory and the others to something being awry. “Hey, you OK?” I asked, and with a stifled grunt, grasped his arm with both hands and heaved, rolling him over onto his back.

He didn’t make a sound. In the dim light, I could only see the outline of his face, no details. “Holy carp on rye, I squashed you to death!” I whispered, and put my hand on his chest to feel if he was breathing.

Something warm and wet and sticky smooshed beneath my fingers. I pulled them back and squinted at them. “This had better not be blood, because if it is, and you’re dead, that means I laid on top of a dead guy, and that’s grounds for a full-fledged freak-out. Hey, you. Wake up. Please wake up.”

Wiping my hand on the sleeve of his shirt, I felt along his chest again, almost sobbing with relief when I felt him breathe. “Thank the gods and goddesses and all their little minions,” I said in a whisper as I patted the man’s face. “Hey. You’re not dead. That’s good news. But you’ve been hurt. Was it one of Mrs. Faa’s family? Hello?”

I spoke the last word in the man’s ear as I continued to pat his face, having a vague memory of black-and-white movies wherein people chafed wrists and patted the faces of women who had fainted. It seemed to work, too, because after a couple of stressful moments during which I envisioned him dying right there before me, he made a moaning noise deep in his chest.

“Shhh,” I said softly, gently clasping a hand over his mouth. “Mrs. Faa’s family is searching for you, and by the sounds of it, they’re not very far away.”

What felt like a steel vise clamped on to my wrist, causing me to bite back an exclamation of pain. “Ow! You’re hurting me!”

The vise loosened its grip enough for me to reclaim my hand. “Who the hell are you?” he asked in a rough whisper. “And for that matter, where am I?”

“Kiya Mortenson. This is my tent. You staggered into it claiming Mrs. Faa’s family was trying to kill you. At least I assume it was them you were referring to. Are you bleeding?”

“Yes. I was stabbed. Twice. The first time was when I entered my motel room. The second when I ran into an ambush outside of Lenore Faa’s caravan.”

I jerked my hand back from where it was gently feeling his upper torso. “Holy jebus!”

“Did you just say—” Suddenly, the man pushed me back and sat up, his quick intake of breath indicating the truth behind his claim of having been stabbed. “You’re the woman who thinks she’s Elizabeth Taylor. The one with the bag of dog shit.”

“The popsy?”

“Hush!”

I goggled at his silhouette (really all that I could see of him). “What…who…was that someone else speaking? Or are you like a ventriloquist or something?”

“No.”

“But your voice just sounded different than when you said popsy. And did you just tell yourself to hush? Wait—you’re the man who jumped out at me in the woods, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am. What are you doing in a tent? Why aren’t you with your husband?”

“What husband?”

“The one you married, obviously. Stop touching my chest. You keep poking the stabbed area.”

I jerked my hands back from where I had been trying to gently feel how badly he had been injured. “Sorry. I’m not married, hence no husband.”

“What are you doing here, then?”

“I told you—I’m working for Mrs. Faa.”

“I know you told me, but I didn’t believe you.”

How annoying he was. And also, how warm, and how nice smelling he was, too. “Well, thank you very much,” I said softly. “I do not lie!”

“Pfft. All people lie.”

“I don’t. My foster mom taught me that people who lie pay the price in the end. Karma, you know.”

“I’m very familiar with karma, thank you. You needn’t lecture me on the history of our people.”

What the hell? The poor man must be delusional with pain or fever or whatever it is that stab victims get. Blood loss, maybe.

“If you are working for Lenore Faa, what are you doing out in the middle of the woods?”

“I’m not in the middle of the woods.”

“You’re not?”

“No. OK, William set up my tent as far away from the RVs as he could, but still, I’m technically on the mill grounds. Just on the fringes. And I’m here because the family has some weird cleanliness fetish, and evidently I don’t meet their standards. What are you doing running around getting stabbed? And what is your name, anyway? I can’t go around thinking of you as ‘the guy with violet eyes who jumped out at me in the woods,’ and while we’re on that subject, I never said I thought that I looked like Elizabeth Taylor.”

“My name is Peter. You are not a Traveller?”

“Well, not really, no. I was on my way home when my car broke down and Gregory—that’s Mrs. Faa’s grandson—rescued me. One thing followed another, and I’m taking care of the dogs until I can get my car fixed.”

“Gregory,” the man named Peter muttered under his breath.

“Yes. He’s very nice.”

“That’s what you think.”

“Yes, it is what I think. That’s why I said it. I do things like that. It’s called polite conversation. You might want to give it a try when you’re not busy being stabbed or leaping out at unsuspecting women. Wait a sec.” I blinked at him, all shades of surprised. “You know him?”

“I do.” The man grunted with pain as he tried to get to his feet, but the tent wasn’t big enough to allow him to stand at full height, which I figured must be a couple of inches over six feet. “I must leave.”

“Where do you intend on going?”

“There’s a spot in the woods where I was to meet—no, that isn’t safe. They almost caught me there. It will have to be the motel in Rose Hill.”

“What’s at the motel? Other than people who stab you. Just why were you stabbed? Was it a burglary? Or something else?”

Peter made a face. “Do you do anything but ask questions?”

“No. Why do you want to go back to the motel so badly if that’s where you were stabbed?”

He sighed a long, put-upon sigh. “I wish to return because it’s entirely possible that the friend I arranged to meet here, but who may well have been attacked by the
same people who stabbed me a second time, might have gone there to find me.”

“Dude, you got stabbed there. You can’t go back!”

He waved that away just like it didn’t matter. “The person or persons who stabbed me were gone when I recovered consciousness. They have no reason to return, especially if they are the same person or persons who attacked me here. Stop holding my arm, and kindly allow me to get up.”

I let go of him, not sure what to say. I was appalled that someone had attacked him—twice. And yet he was so calm and cool about the whole thing. If I’d been stabbed, I sure as hell would be making a huge fuss about it!

“Whoa!” Peter weaved violently to one side. Luckily, I caught him before he fell. “You are in no shape to be marching off anywhere, not if you’ve been stabbed all over the place. Which reminds me, you didn’t say who attacked you.”

“No, I didn’t. It’s called not having a conversation. I prefer to do that when I’m busy being stabbed and stumbling around in the dark attempting to escape with my life.”

I might have taken offense at his smart-ass answer, but for one, the memory of those violet eyes haunted me, and for another, his words were very breathy and labored. I figured he had about thirty seconds before he passed out again.

“Well, got that one wrong,” I murmured as Peter, with an odd little choking noise, keeled over onto his face. I bit my lip as I considered rolling him onto his side to make him more comfortable, but since I didn’t know exactly where he had been stabbed, I hesitated to do much
that might aggravate the wounds. “And now what am I going to do with you?”

What I wanted very badly to do was to help the man. I shook my head at that notion—I knew nothing about him other than his first name, and that he was most likely a policeman. But if so, where was his backup? His partner? His whatever it was that police had these days?

Maybe he was an undercover cop. It wasn’t out of the question that he was nosing around Mrs. Faa’s family given that folks in town felt they were a bad sort. Was that why one of her family had attacked him? Or had that happened somewhere else? He said something about a spot in the woods where he had been attacked. “Dammit, you didn’t tell me who hurt you. Now I don’t know who I can trust to get to help with you. Annoying man.”

I spent a good ten minutes trying to figure out what to do. I had just decided to search his pockets for ID, but when I eased my hand into his front pocket, my fingers encountered some sort of object like a joy buzzer. It zapped my fingers, causing me to jerk my hand back.

“Well, that’s odd.” I squinted at the pocket in question. A faint glow seemed to flicker for a few seconds before fading away. “Must be some sort of anti-pickpocket thingie. OK, think, Kiya. What are you going to do with him?”

After a few minutes of concerted thought, I emerged cautiously from my tent, glancing around the camp in case murderous Faas were standing around with sharp daggers at the ready.