Katie MacAlister: The Art of Stealing Time

“Pah,” Mom Two said, while my mother added, “ We don’t want money to take care of her. We will do it because she is our student, and is in need of help, and the god and goddess have charged us to take care of others whenever possible.”

I took a deep breath. “I know full well what the Wiccan creed is, so don’t try to blow smoke up my ass.”

“Gwen!” my mother said, waving a hand at the old woman. “Not in front of Mrs. Vanilla!”

I glanced at her. She had stopped squeaking, but her hands were still flittering a few inches off her lap, almost as if she was trying to use sign language. “Sorry, ma’am. Mother, might I have a word with you?”

“What do you need?” Mom Two asked the old lady, bending over her to bellow. “Do you need to use the toilet again? No? Paper? You want paper?”

“Gwenny, I think you’re being very close-minded about this whole thing—” my mother started to say when I pulled her a few yards away.

Mom Two was digging through the messenger bag she always had strapped across her torso, pulling out a tattered notebook with pen attached by means of a grubby bit of string. She gave that to Mrs. Vanilla.

“I am through explaining why you can’t kidnap a mortal and keep her. What I need from you and Mom Two is your plan on how to return her. She doesn’t look like the sort of woman who remembers much, so we’ll have to trust that once you get her back to where she belongs, she won’t file a charge with the police. But the fact remains that she has to go back.”

“We can’t take her back,” Mom Two said, moving over to stand with us. The old lady was busily drawing on the notebook, which I gathered was her thing to do in spare moments.

“If you’re worried about that video of you and Mom taking Mrs. Vanilla, then you could throw a glamour or something on yourselves so the mortals wouldn’t recognize it was you bringing her back.”

She raised one eyebrow. “I’m surprised to hear you suggest that we should do something so illegal as to use magic to fool a mortal being, Gwen.”

“Balanced against abduction? Yeah, not such a big worry, especially when it’s done in order to return the old biddy.”

My mother whapped me on the arm. “It’s not nice to refer to the elderly by that term.”

“Kidnapping isn’t nice, either.” I took a deep breath, wondering if I’d be able to change my ticket for one the following day, and said, “OK, here’s the deal: you guys clearly don’t want to take her back. Yes, I know, you rescued her. That’s not the point. She has to go back to her home, and since you won’t take her, I will. Keys.” I held out my hand.

Mom Two looked mulish for a moment, but dug into her pocket and pulled out a set of car keys. “I do this under protest, Gwen.”

“Duly recorded. Where’d you leave the car?”

She described the parking lot where she had taken the car after dropping off Mom and Mrs. Vanilla at the entrance to the park.

“All righty. I’ll bring the car around to the disabled people’s entrance and will meet you there to pick her up. Once I have her back at her place, I’ll come back here for you two. We’ll have to stop by the train station for the luggage I left there, but that shouldn’t take long.”

“And then?” Mom asked, sniffing like I’d said something mean to her.

“And then we’ll find somewhere safe to park both of you while the dust settles.”

“Where, exactly, would that be? We can’t go home, not with the mortal police seeing us. And don’t say that we should wear a glamour for however many months or years it will take the police to forget about us.” Mom Two gestured toward my mother. “Mags dislikes glamours. She couldn’t tolerate one for longer than a few hours.”

I slapped my hands on my legs, frustrated but aware that I owed them some sort of an answer. “Well . . . maybe you could go away. Go to the U.S. with me?”

“We don’t have passports. The authorities want passports nowadays. You remember the trouble we had getting you one?”

“Yes, well, the people at the passport office just don’t expect to see people born in 1888 needing a passport. Besides, we ended up getting me a fake one. We could just do the same for you two.”

“And where are we to stay until that is ready? It took you four months to get one made that would pass scrutiny by mortal security personages,” Mom Two said.

She had me there. I racked my brain for somewhere that they could lie low, somewhere they would be safe from all contact with the mortal world. “Well . . . I don’t know exactly.” I bit my lip and tried to think of all the places I’d ever been. I said, with an ironic little laugh that was to come back and haunt me later, “What we need is a place like Anwyn. You could stay there and the mortals couldn’t touch you. I don’t think that even the Watch has jurisdiction there. It would be ideal, except, of course, that you’d have to be dead to go there.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mom snorted, giving Mrs. Vanilla’s arm a reassuring pat when the old lady started squeaking and drawing sharp little lines on her tablet of paper. “We wouldn’t go to Anwyn. It’s a Welsh afterlife.”

“Mom, you are Welsh, just like me.”

“I’m also a Wiccan, and since your other mother wouldn’t be eligible to rest in Anwyn, not being Welsh by birth, I certainly wouldn’t go there without her. When our time comes to depart for the next stage of our lives, we shall go to Summerland.”

I eyed her, thinking hard. “Can you . . . this is crazy, I know, but needs must and all that . . . can you get into Summerland without being dead?”

“Of course,” she said, murmuring softly to Mrs. Vanilla. “So long as you know where the entrance is, you can enter its domain. Mind, you can’t stay without permission of the lord and lady, but assuming you have that, it’s an easy thing to do.”

“Then that’s our answer!” I said, feeling as if a great weight had been torn from my shoulders. “You and Mom Two can go to Summerland. You’ll like it there, I’m sure, and I can’t imagine why the lord and lady wouldn’t let you stay there. You’re both super Wiccans.”

“They might grant us permission, but we could never do that,” Mom Two said, and my mother nodded her agreement.

“Why not?”

“Have you not listened to any of our teachings? Summerland is a place of great importance, Gwen. It is a holy place, if you will, one sacred to us. We do not tread on its green fields and fertile pastures unless we have been sent there.”

“But—”

“No,” Mom Two said firmly, giving me a sharp nod that let me know she was done discussing the subject. “We will not go.”

“Well, hell!” I said, doing some more of that hand-thigh-slapping thing that no doubt looked juvenile but did so much to release unpleasant emotions. “You can’t go to Anwyn, you won’t go to Summerland. . . . Where else can you go that would put you out of reach of both the mortal and immortal worlds?”

“We could go to Anwyn if we wanted,” Mom said complacently, glancing in surprise at Mrs. Vanilla when she began to squeak again, shoving the notebook toward me. “What is it you want Gwenny to see, dear? Your lovely drawing?”

“Mom, you just got done saying you couldn’t go to Anwyn because Mom Two isn’t Welsh—”

“That has nothing to do with it,” Mom Two interrupted, leaning forward to see the paper. “We could get in if we wanted.”

“But you were born in Scotland.”

“Location of birth has nothing to do with whether or not Arwyn will allow you to stay in Anwyn.”

“Who’s Arwyn?”

“The king of Anwyn, of course. That’s very interesting, Mrs. Vanilla.”