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

above the pit, as easily as he might hold a spider over a flame, and his eyes burned toward Nick. In a moment the fire would singe the thread, burn it asunder. . . .

And then Nick was gasping and cursing before he even registered that someone had tossed cold water in his face. He twisted, breaking Mibbs’s hold: “Shit!” He blinked water away from his eyes. “What was that?” He meant the crushing grief. He meant Mibbs’s touch.

But by the time he could really focus, Mibbs had melted away across the street, and a young Japanese woman was trying to wipe at Nick’s face, prettily accented apologies spilling from her lips. She had dropped her purse and tossed the contents of her water bottle up and over Nick, and now she was torn between drying him off and collecting her scattered belongings from the sidewalk. Her asshole boyfriend laughed and took her picture.

Nick dropped down and started retrieving her things.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, and crouched down too.

“It’s okay.” Nick handed over her pocket-sized A–Z street guide. “I needed the shock. I wasn’t feeling well.”

She took the book and smiled at him. She was lovely, but more than that she wore sparkly eye shadow, and the things they were gathering up were contemporary. A phone. Some ballpoint pens. As she tucked them into her purse, he felt as if he were being tucked back with them into the twenty-first century. His heartbeat slowed.

Ah. A cellophane pack of tissues. “May I?” Nick extracted one and wiped the remaining water from his face, looking up in disbelief at the boyfriend, who was still going at it with the digital camera. “Your boyfriend is a jerk,” Nick said as the woman leaned toward him for a pound coin that had rolled between his feet.

She laughed, glancing up, and was even lovelier than before. “He is my brother,” she said.

“Oh, really?”

“Yes.”

Nick handed her the purse, now fully reassembled. He stood and put out a hand to pull her up. “You must find a better traveling companion next time you come to London.”

She held his hand for a moment after she rose; she had that look in her eyes. Nick smiled down at her, well-being seeping back into his soul. She had given him all he could ask for with that warm glance, so unlike Mibbs’s terrible blue stare. “Thank you,” he said, and bowed, like a marquess.

He straightened and watched as she walked away, expostulating with her brother in Japanese.

Then he turned and looked for Mr. Mibbs.

He was gone.

CHAPTER NINE

Julia woke the next morning fired with purpose. She was the Talisman, but what did that mean? A human talisman . . . it made no sense.

After breakfast, she knocked resolutely on the study door. When Eamon called for her to enter, she threw the door open with a flourish and closed it briskly behind her. Then she turned and froze Eamon where he sat in his chair, his mouth open to demand an explanation. He looked like a trout.

“Hold fast to that thought, Cousin,” she said, and strode past him to the bookshelf. There was Grandfather’s copy of Johnson’s Dictionary, pristine in spite of being over fifty years old: Grandfather had considered himself omniscient.

Julia hooked her finger over the binding of the first heavy volume and then the second, dragging them forth from among their friends. She carried them over to the desk, relieved to see that at least the pages were cut. “Excuse me,” she said, moving Eamon’s arm slightly to give herself room. “I need to look up the word talisman,” she explained as she flipped open volume two. “Because we need to know what we’re talking about, don’t you think? Now that the stakes are a little higher?”

She paged through the dictionary, and after five full pages given over to a definition of the word take, she found it. Talisman. Blast. The definition was three useless words long. “A magical character.” She closed the book. What did that mean? A magical character, like in a play?

She cracked volume one open, chasing after a new word and smiling when she saw it: character. But her smile faded as she drew her finger down the many definitions. “A mark, a stamp, a representation; a letter used in writing or printing; the hand or manner of writing; the person with his assemblage of qualities; particular constitution of mind.” And then a quote from Pope, to illustrate Johnson’s last definition: “Most women have no characters at all.”

“Marvelous,” she said aloud. “Grand. Look here, Eamon, I believe you will appreciate this tidbit of wisdom. What’s that you say? Cat got your tongue? How sad.” She slammed the book shut.

Julia hauled the dictionary back to the shelf and pushed the two volumes into place. Then she positioned herself in front of the closed door. “‘Hark, hark, the watch-dogs bark,’ Eamon!” He gaped blindly at her, and she laughed. Then she started time up again.

Words spilled from his lips: “Get out of here!”

Julia curtseyed low. “I am sorry to intrude upon you, Cousin. I wondered only if I might search for a word in the dictionary.”

“Get out!”

* * *

The problem, she decided five minutes later, as she stared out the window of the yellow saloon, lay in the definition of the word character. If she was a magical character in her own right—“the person with his assemblage of qualities”—then she was in control of her talent. It was hers to use and no one else’s. And indeed, she was clearly able to use her power herself. But if she was a magical character in the sense of “a representation, or a letter used in printing,” then her talent could be used by someone else. Writing was a method for channeling meaning from one mind to another, and she suspected that a talisman worked like writing—to channel magic, not to make it.

She was like Ariel, in other words. A magical character in and of herself, but also bound to do the will of another,