Time Crossed: A Time Thief Novella (A Penguin Special from Signet) Read Online Free Page A

the phone from some guy named Tesserman. Or Bandersnatch. Something odd like that. And he says that he’s got a mortal client for ‘the stuff’ and that I need to get ‘the stuff” down to Malwod-Upon-Ooze pronto. Obviously, I had no idea what he was talking about, but just as obviously, my moms were doing something they shouldn’t be doing—and no, I don’t want to go into that, because it has nothing to do with me dying and going to hell. Well, okay, it does, but I’m still not going to talk about it. Suffice it to say that I knew that my moms would be in seriously hot water if they did what the guy wanted them to do, so I told the guy that there was no way in hell I was going to let my moms break the law by selling magic to mortals. And he went all ballistic on me, and threatened them with all sorts of crazy stuff. You can imagine how that made me feel, so I told him no again, and he said that if someone wasn’t in Malwod to hand over the goods he’d already paid for, then he would take his payment out on my moms. There was no way I was going to let him threaten them, so I went down to Malwod to have it out with him.”
    “You are a very caring daughter, but do you not feel that you were stepping into a dangerous situation? Would it not have been wiser to call in the Watch?”
    She shook her head. “My moms and I are already persona non grata with them. They wouldn’t lift a finger to help us. Besides, it appeared that my mothers had already taken this asshat’s money for the spells.” She took a deep breath, and picked off another flake of dried mud from her jeans. “I managed to ditch Seawright at a shop just outside of the train station and went to Malwod. But Seawright is getting better at finding me, and caught up with me while I was waiting for the buyer in a pub. As soon as he showed up, I managed to get out of the pub without her seeing me, and headed to the rendezvous point, which was halfway up an impossibly hard-to-climb cliff. I ended up going to the wrong place, and had to climb down the scariest drop I’d ever seen just to get to this little area at the top of another cliff. Anyway, I was hiding behind a clump of trees when some guy dashed into the bushes in front of me and crouched down like he’s hiding from someone. I thought he must be the guy who set up my moms to meet with a mortal, and was about to crawl over to him and give him a really solid piece of my mind, when whammo! Someone grabbed me from behind and jerked me off balance. Next thing I knew, I was plummeting over the side of the second cliff to the rocks below.”
    “That must have been horribly frightening,” I murmured.
    Gwen visibly shuddered. “You have no idea. I mean, it was a long drop, but not long enough that I could speak a protection spell.” She paused and rubbed her arms, her expression pensive. “I wish I’d seen who threw me over the edge.”
    “And you found yourself in Anwyn?”
    “Yes. Woke up to find myself lying on a green, grassy hill. The sun beamed down in the bluest sky I’ve ever seen. Birds sang. Trees, arranged in grace clumps, swayed gently in the breeze. Daisies that dotted the hill bowed their pale heads and seemed to dance to some distance music that only they could hear. Butterflies landed on me and fanned me with their sparkly wings. Bunnies pattered to and fro on lupine business. A family of deer strolled past. It was the most idyllic thing in the world, and I was just thinking about taking a nice little nap with the butterflies and the bunnies, when suddenly I was yanked out of Anwyn and back onto the road that led to the cliff where I got tossed over the edge.”
    I made a few notes. “That seems like a very curious thing to have happened. How did it make you feel?”
    She gave me what could only be termed a scathing look. “How do you think you’d feel if you were yanked from an idyllic, Disney-esque paradise and were set down in a wind-battered cliff several thousand feet above