The Art of Stealing Time

FIVE

The gentle glow of the Krispy Kreme sign lit Gregory Faa’s face. He was not happy, and he didn’t have one iota of trouble letting the man who stood with him know that fact. “I am not happy.”

“It’s hard luck that your girlfriend duped you again, but we need to focus on what’s important,” Peter said, without the slightest shred of sympathy.

“That just makes me want to punch you, you know,” Gregory answered, tired and cranky and utterly unable to keep from telling his cousin what was on his mind. Another day he might have been more circumspect, but tonight, as the two of them stood outside the Krispy Kreme shop in the Cardiff Shopping Centre, he lacked the verbal check needed to keep his emotions to himself.

Peter looked up from his notebook, wherein he was recording information on the chase that they had just undertaken across Cardiff to the shopping center. The fruitless chase. Gregory ground his teeth again at the thought of how Gwen had fooled him. Wantonly and brazenly.

“Why, because you don’t like me pointing out that she misled you?”

“Because you aren’t the least bit sympathetic with my plight. And she’s not my girlfriend.”

“You’re interested in her,” Peter insisted.

“I’ve never once said that,” he protested, wondering how Peter could tell that he was, in fact, quite interested in the delicious—if wicked—Gwen.

“You don’t have to. You saved her life. Twice, according to the account you gave of what happened after you stole time.”

Gregory looked into the distance, ignoring the flashing lights of the police cars as the officers continued to mill in and around the shop, interviewing workers and customers alike about the events of twenty minutes before. “I thought we weren’t going to speak of that again.”

Peter laughed. “We aren’t. Why do you need sympathy if she’s not someone you’d like to have a personal relationship with?”

He found it difficult to answer that question, and decided instead to answer another one, despite the fact that it hadn’t actually been asked. “I don’t think she escaped by means of a spell.”

Peter returned to making notes. “You interviewed the security guard. Didn’t he say that Gwen and her abductees ran into the doughnut place?”

“Yes. And I’m not so sure they were abductees.”

“Look, I know your pride is still stinging over this betrayal,” Peter said, giving him a sympathetic look that he found he didn’t like or want after all. “But you’ve got to face the facts that this woman is not someone you should be lusting after.”

“I never said—”

“You didn’t have to. Anyone who uses the terms ‘lush’ and ‘delicious’ when describing a woman lusts after her. She’s a bad egg, Gregory. She’s rotten to the core, and she’s not above using you to get what she wants.”

Gregory fought back the urge to argue with his cousin about Gwen’s character. He didn’t, but not because he realized that arguing at that moment would be futile—surrounded as they were with the mortal police, who, by means of some false identification cards, they believed were members of Scotland Yard—but because he had better things to do with his time and energy. “The guard said that Gwen helped the women out of the car. He said that the women, in turn, helped the kidnap victim very carefully and that Gwen and one of the others more or less carried the woman into the shop. Would you do that if you had the cops right on your heels?”

“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 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!

“Kind of. Not really.” At last her gaze met his. “All right, I did, but it was more a lie of omission than anything else.”

“Again, I must point out that this conversation is not appropriate at this time,” Douglas said, gesturing toward the tents behind them. “The battle must commence now, or you will forfeit the fight.”

“I forfeit,” Gwen said, spreading her hands in a gesture of apology. “Sorry about gabbing away at you for so long, but I really am not trained for this sort of thing.”

“A pity,” Douglas said, then turned and put his fingers to his mouth, blowing a loud, piercing whistle. “But perhaps we can change that. You are under arrest. Both of you. Please come with me of your respective free wills, because otherwise I will have to bind your arms and legs, and I understand that being trussed up in that fashion is not at all comfortable.”

“Arrest?” Gregory said, moving to stand protectively in front of Gwen. He held the sword that she had handed to him, and although he was unused to wielding such a weapon, he felt that given the need, he could find it in him to do so. “I am a member of the Watch—”

“Which has no authority here,” Douglas interrupted. “You are clearly in cahoots with this lady, and since she has forfeited the fight and shamed herself before her lord—”

“Hey!” Gwen protested.

“—thereby making her my prisoner, you also are in my charge.”

A thin man in a long black and gold tunic and black leggings arrived in response to Douglas’s whistle. “Ah, Tallyrand. I believe the king would like to meet these two. Can you arrange transport for Lady Gwen and Sir Cover Model?”

“My name is Gregory Faa, not Cover Model,” Gregory snapped. “And if you think I’m going to let you take me prisoner, let alone Gwen-who-isn’t-her-mother, then you’re madder than Gwen’s mother.”

“Oh, you did not just say that,” Gwen said, jerking him around so he faced her. That she was furious was clearly evident in both the dangerous glint in her eyes and the stubborn set to her jaw.

“You have a very nice nose,” he told her. “I even like it when you’re incensed and your nostrils flare, as they are doing now.”

“My mothers are not mad! You take that back.”

“Mothers?”

“Yes. I have two. My mom and her partner, who is my second mom. And I don’t tolerate anyone saying anything bad about either of them.”

“Your mother, or mothers, have kidnapped a mortal woman.”

“Yes, well—”

“They have also attempted to sell magic to another mortal via the lawyer who we met on the cliff outside of Snails-on-the-Half-Shell.”

Her nostrils flared again. It was utterly adorable. “The name of that town was Malwod-Upon-Ooze. I don’t know why you have such a hard time remembering it!”

“You cannot deny that to do such acts, especially given the history of Magdalena Owens, indicates a lack of mental stability.”

She hit him. Right on the chest, the same place she’d smacked him with the gauntlet. “Look, I never said what they’ve done is right. Lord knows I’ve had to spend much of my adult life cleaning up after them and keeping them on the straight and narrow—but they are not insane! They’re simply . . . forgetful.”

He looked at her.

She looked away, a flush darkening her cheeks.

“Even you don’t believe that,” he pointed out.

“I know.” She sighed and met his gaze again. He was pleased to see that her expression had lost its hard, angry edge. “One of the problems with being raised Wiccan is that it’s very hard to lie to anyone, but especially to yourself.”

“You had no problem lying to me.”

“Oh, I had a problem with it. I just figured it was more important to protect my mothers than to shield myself from karmic repercussions. If you had arrested me, I wouldn’t have been able to extricate them from the situation. Which, I’ll have you know, I was doing just fine.”

“My definition of doing fine doesn’t include dying in the act.”

She stared at him with stark amazement. “How do you know I died?”

He hesitated, glancing to the side, a bit startled to find that except for the thin young man in the tunic, they were now alone. Evidently Douglas had gone off to his camp, leaving a guard set to watch them. He smiled to himself. He would have no trouble taking care of the young man when it came time for Gwen and him to leave. But first he had to dance around the delicate subject of the events on the cliff a few days past. “I was there.”

“I know you were there. I saw you. You stopped that lawyer from throwing me over the edge. But how did you know he’d done it before?”

“I was there when you were killed the first time.”

“You were?” She clutched his wrist, her eyes searching his. “So it was the lawyer who did it? Did you see who resurrected me? How come you weren’t there when I came back to life?”

“Yes, in a way, and I was. Just not where you expected me.”

She stared at him in incomprehension.

“I’m a Traveller, Gwen. Do you know what that is?”

“No. At least . . . no. The word seems like it is familiar, but I guess not. Wait . . . yes, I know it. There’s a family who visits the town my moms live in. They’re Travellers. Mom says they used to have a horse and one of those wooden trailers all painted up, but now they just bring camping equipment and hang out on the edges of the town.”

“I suspect they are Romany, not actual Travellers. The Rom frequently use the same word to describe themselves, but I assure you that despite superficial appearances, we are very different from them.”

She eyed his hair. “I suppose you don’t see many blond-haired, blue-eyed Gypsies. So what is the Otherworld version of Travellers?”

“Most of the people in the Otherworld think of us as time thieves.”

Her lips pursed for a moment before relaxing. He had the worst urge to taste those lips. “How do you steal time?”

“Travellers see time as a physical possession. You have so much time. I can take it if I so desire. But we always pay for it.”

“That’s not really stealing, then, if you pay for it.”

He shrugged. “It’s a matter of perception.”

“What does this have to do with me dying? If you stole my time, then I’d have less of it, not more in terms of being reborn.”

He glanced again at the young man next to them, but he appeared occupied with drawing something in the dirt at their feet. “I didn’t take your time. I took someone else’s, and . . .”

“And?”

He didn’t want to tell her, but he’d turned over a new leaf when he joined the Watch, and that meant taking responsibility for his actions. It would be so much easier to lie to Gwen, or rather, to hide the truth from her, but he knew instinctively that she would much prefer the harsh truth than comfortable lies.

And suddenly, her wants had become quite important to him.

“When a Traveller takes time, the people in the immediate vicinity are affected by the loss just as if their time was taken as well. You have to be very close for that to happen. The woman whose time I took was standing right next to you. So when I took her time, it set her back about half an hour . . . and you, as well.”

“You resurrected me by resetting time?” Gwen asked, incredulity in her voice.

“I did.”

“I don’t know whether to kiss you or smite you on the head with that sword,” she said, her face a delightful mixture of emotions.

“I would suggest the kiss. Smiting is never as satisfactory as you imagine it will be.”

“I don’t know,” she said with a dangerous edge to her voice. “I think there might be times when—”

Her words fell to the earth at the same moment that a yawning abyss opened at their feet and they plummeted into it.