The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway (mobi ebook reader .txt) 📗

“Ah, yes. Spain. Thirteen years. Surely the small matter of the time of day won’t hold you back.”

Nick couldn’t help but smile at her absurd manipulations, all to get him to drink a beer. “A half then, please.”

Badr nodded and disappeared. Alice led Nick down a long hallway and into a vast boardroom. A long table set about with chairs filled the room. In the center of the table, a crystal vase holding at least fifty white tulips was clearly intended to relieve the corporate severity of the space but served only to heighten it. One entire wall of the room was glass. Nick went to look out at the city.

Badr reappeared with a glass of water for the Alderwoman and what was, truly, a beautiful beer for Nick. Nick took a sip. It tasted marvelous. In fact, nothing had tasted so good in his entire life. “Has ale improved across the last two centuries?”

“Many things have improved. Please. Take a seat, Nick. And thank you, Badr, that will be all.” The young man left them alone.

Nick sat, and the Alderwoman took the first chair along the table’s long side. “There is more to the Guild than you know.”

“Ah.” Nick allowed some sarcasm into his voice. “You mean that it’s more than what we tell the kids? More than a swanky social club?”

The corners of Alice’s mouth twitched. “Much more.”

Nick sipped his beer and regarded the Alderwoman. She seemed to be waiting for him to speak. He decided to try to take control of this extremely strange situation. “Why am I here? In London, where I’m not allowed to be?”

“Give me your hand,” Alice said, reaching for it. She wore that same ring he remembered from Chile, the one set with a large yellow jewel. She turned his hand over and contemplated his palm.

“Are you going to read my fortune?”

Alice smiled and traced his lifeline with a short, perfectly manicured fingernail. A tremor extended up his arm to the base of his skull. “Time,” she said. “It is like a river. It always flows in one direction.” She placed her finger at the intersection of Nick’s heart line and his fate line. “Or does it?”

“I’m losing respect for you, Alice. Next you’ll be pulling out a crystal ball.” It felt like her finger was resting at the crossroads of him.

“This hand has done many things.”

“Do you see my past deeds written in the creases?”

“No.” She tapped her finger twice at the center of his palm. “I know very little about palmistry. But I do know about you.” She leaned back, releasing his hand. “I know because as the Alderwoman of the Guild I have more information at my fingertips than you can possibly imagine. I also know because I am a good reader of men and women. You wear your past in your body and your face. We all do.”

“When you say I’ve done many things with my hands, do you mean killing?”

“You have killed, haven’t you? In Spain.”

“Yes.”

“But you’ve done many other things as well.”

Nick lifted his glass. “Drinking,” he said.

Alice nodded. “And loving women.”

Nick took a sip. He wasn’t going to respond to that one.

“Writing letters and sealing them with that ring.”

Nick glanced at his ring. Its crest gleamed in the morning sun. “What are we talking about, Alice? Why am I here? Am I to become one of your hit men?”

“You think the Guild has hit men?”

“Of course it does.” He thought of Meg and Leo. “Don’t treat me like a child.”

Alice let her breath out slowly, looking over Nick’s shoulder at something. Her dark eyes seemed curiously blank for a moment. Then they snapped back to his. “Look outside, Nick,” she said.

He raised his eyes and gasped. The sky had changed. The sun was well risen now, and there were a few clouds where before there had been none. As much as an hour might have passed. He scanned the room. On the table under the tulips there was a fallen petal that had not been there before. He leapt to his feet. “What did you do to me?” He looked down at his beer, picked it up, sniffed it. It had the flat, unappetizing smell of a drink left sitting too long. “Damn it! I was enjoying that.”

Alice leaned back in her chair and favored Nick with a smile. “I stop time and you worry about your beer.”

“You stopped time? What do you mean? What the bloody hell do you mean by that?”

“Sit down, Nick.”

He sank back down into his chair. He felt like throwing up. But he clenched his jaw and stared at the Alderwoman, waiting for an explanation.

She reached over and pushed his flat beer away, down the table. “I stopped time,” she said, and her voice was crisp and businesslike. “Though only in this room, and only for you. For almost an hour. I did various things during that time. Wrote a few e-mails. Made a phone call. Then I started time up again and you started up, too. It is much like pressing pause and then play on an iPod.”

“But . . . I thought—” Nick stopped. He could tell before he even finished his sentence that much of what he had believed a few moments ago—an hour ago, apparently—was about to be revealed as infantile nonsense.

“You thought what the Guild wanted you to think,” Alice said. “You thought that you’d jumped in time ten years ago and that was the end of that. But now, Nick, the Guild has cleared you for Level One security. We need you, and we need you to know a little more.”

He swallowed. “Why me?”

Alice waved her hand as if shooing away a mosquito. “Don’t worry about that. We need you for reasons that have to do with your past. But to be of use, you will have to learn more about the Guild, about yourself and of what you are capable. Some of what you learn might disturb you, or make you angry.”

“I can handle