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

fly me back home, collected my luggage and started the long journey back to the train station that connected to the airport. “Where are you?” I asked as I wove my way through the people who milled around the shops and the airline kiosks.
    “Outside of Emylwn,” she answered, naming the small coastal town where they had lived since before I was born.
    I thought for a few minutes while I continued to forge my way against the stream of people arriving for evening flights to the Continent, then said, “They are going to know you’re in that area.”
    “Pah. I told you that we can escape the police.”
    “No, not them. I’m not worried about the mortals. The Watch found me in Malwod-Upon-Ooze, and that’s only, what, ten miles away from Emylwn?” I shook my head. “That’s too close for comfort.”
    I glanced up at the sign at the entrance to the airport, and made a swift decision while my mother was protesting that the Watch didn’t even have an inkling of what was going on.
    “The mortal police don’t know that the Otherworld Watch even exists, Gwenny. There’s no reason to worry that they’ll call them. Besides, they—the mortal police, that is—have no idea who we are. Or rather, what we are.”
    Evidently, Mom had put me on speakerphone, because I could hear Mom Two say, “That’s right. Mrs. Vanilla was in a mortal retirement home when we snatched her.”
    “Snatched?” I said, freezing in the act of going through a door to the escalator that led down to the trains.
    “Rescued,” my mother amended. “We rescued her. We didn’t kidnap her at all.”
    “Then why are the police chasing you?” I hefted my massive bag and bumped my way down the escalator, apologizing to the people it smacked. One or two people looked askance at me as I descended, but I sent up a silent blessing for stoic Brits who wouldn’t be caught dead blatantly listening to someone’s phone conversation.
    “There was a little issue with the rescue,” Mom Two admitted in her usual brusque voice. “We had to change one or two attendants into frogs.”
    “MOMS!”
    “Just temporarily,” my mother hurriedly added. “Just for the time it took to rescue Mrs. Vanilla from her captors.”
    I shoved some coins into a machine and accepted the ticket it spat out at me, hauling my luggage down another level to the train I wanted. “Do you have any idea of how bad this is? Not only have you kidnapped a mortal woman—yes, I said ‘kidnapped’!” I ignored the sputtered protests from both mothers. “Not only did you do something as completely heinous as to take an old lady from her caregivers, but you also magicked up mortals. You know how dangerous that is! What were you thinking? That no one would notice that people had suddenly been turned into frogs?”
    “No one did notice that,” Mom Two said in a disapproving tone. “Your mother told you it was a temporary spell. Only lasted two or three minutes.”
    “Then why”—I parked my luggage at a grimy bench and took a deep, acidic-scented breath—“why are the police chasing you? Why didn’t you just go home?”
    “We might have forgotten that mortals have those spy cameras everywhere,” my mother admitted.
    “Big Brother!” Mom Two added righteously. “He’s everywhere, watching us all!”
    I rubbed my hand over my face, wondering how on earth I was going to pull my mothers out of the hole into which they’d managed to dig themselves. It was possible, just barely possible, that they could magic their way out of trouble with the mortal police, if the thing was planned properly. But once the Watch got wind of it . . . I groaned aloud. “We are so doomed. They’re already in the area. The blond guy is looking for you. They’ll hear that you stole a mortal and used magic in front of other mortals, and that’ll be all she wrote.”
    “Who wrote what?” Mom asked with benign interest.
    “We have to meet up,” I said quickly, glancing down the platform and