The Art of Stealing Time: A Time Thief Novel Read Free

are. Turn right, dear. No, the other right!”
    I looked wildly to my right (and left, because long acquaintance with my mother had taught me that she had difficulty telling directions). “What? Why should I turn right?”
    “Not you, dear. That was for Alice. Oh, my. No, no, dear, don’t get onto the main roads. Don’t you remember that show on the telly we saw last month?” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “They have those spiked things they lay in the road.”
    Spiked things? What spiked things? What was she—? With a horrible presentiment, I suddenly knew. They were on the run from the police.
    “What the hell is going on?” I asked, my voice rising loudly at the end of the sentence, enough that everyone around me stared. I turned in my plastic seat so that I half faced the wall behind me, dipping my head down so I could speak sternly, but more quietly, into my phone. “Mother, are you, at this moment, running from the police?”
    “Alice, dear, not so fast around corners,” my mother said in a near shriek. “Poor Mrs. Vanilla is on the floor.”
    “MOTHER!”
    “Oh, hello, Gwenny. How was your flight home?”
    I took a deep breath, but it didn’t go any way toward calming what were quickly becoming frazzled nerves, so I took five or six additional breaths.
    “Are you hyperventilating?” the man nearest me asked, lowering his newspaper to look at me in obvious concern. “Do you want a paper bag?”
    “No, thank you, it’s just my mother driving me crazy as usual,” I said through gritted teeth, and swiveled around even farther in my chair until I was almost off it entirely.
    “Mother,” I said in a low, mean tone of voice that under normal circumstances I would never think of using to her. “What. Is. Happening?”
    “Lost ’em!” a triumphant Mom Two said in the background. I slumped sideways in despair, and promptly fell off the chair. By the time I reassured the newspaper man that I was fine, and not in danger of passing out, my mother had hung up her phone.
    I moved over to the corner of the waiting area, found a relatively empty spot, and facing away from the room, called her back. “Tell me you didn’t kidnap some old woman and are not at this very moment running from the mortal police.”
    “We did not kidnap some old woman and are not at this very moment running from the mortal police,” she said promptly.
    I waited for the count of three. “Is that true?”
    “No, of course it isn’t. But you asked me to say it, so I did.”
    Gently, so as not to brain myself, I thumped my forehead against the wall. “Mom, you do remember that it was only six months ago that I was arrested by the Watch because they thought I was you, don’t you?”
    “Yes, but they let you out because you aren’t me.”
    “They let me out because I had an alibi. They still think I’m you, or at least that blond Watch guy does.” The memory of him had haunted me at odd moments during the last two days.
    “What blond Watch man?”
    “The one who stopped the lawyer from killing me.” Anticipating her next question, I added, “The one you agreed to sell magic to, remember?”
    “Of course I remember the lawyer,” she said in a scolding voice. Faintly, oh so faintly, I heard the sound of a police siren coming from my phone. I slumped against the cool wall, closing my eyes for a moment. “He wasn’t a very nice man, but we needed the money, and it’s been decades since anyone from the Watch was interested in us.”
    “Centuries,” Mom Two said loudly. “Eighteen-something. Seventies, was it, Mags?”
    I was so close to going home. Even now, I could see the plane being serviced by various technical people. In just an hour or two, it would be in the sky, heading toward the States. I could be on that plane.
    “No, it had to be longer than that,” Mom argued. “Because they tried to make me sit for one of those sepia-toned photographs, but I kept moving just enough that it turned out blurry. It had to