Flirting With Forever by Gwyn Cready (new books to read TXT) 📕

And while Peter desperately wanted a new life as an artist—he couldn’t imagine himself, or at least his soul, spending the next sixty years as a barber or dairyman—

what he real y wanted was a chance to redeem himself, which he knew he would never find. He had final y agreed to slip back into the pinched, desiccated skin he had sloughed off at his death two years earlier for one reason only—to try to return Ursula’s good name to her, an intention he had purposeful y not shared with Mertons, who had been assigned by the Guild to accompany him and who monitored the attacks on his precious time-travel constraints with the ferocity of a mother lion.

“Tel me again what we know.” Peter had heard the story several times since their arrival a week ago. Nonetheless, Mertons liked to tel it, and it would give Peter time to prepare for acting out his plan. He glanced at the clock and then at the smal storage room off the office. Just before five. Good.

Mertons sighed and looked down at his clipboard. “To be honest, we know very little. The writer’s name is Campbel Stratford—a Scot,” he added as if that provided a significant detail to the understanding of the event. “The book wil be an embarrassment to the Guild—”

“An embarrassment to Van Dyck, you mean.” Peter had immense respect for the work of the man he had succeeded as royal portraitist, Van Dyck to the court of Charles I and he to that of Charles I , but it irked him that the Guild would jump through hoops to help certain of its dead members but not others.

“An embarrassment to one of our members is an embarrassment to the Guild, Peter. We do not want Van Dyck’s il -considered contretemps with a few women outside his marriage to overshadow a career that should be judged strictly on its professional merits—merits, I might add, that are both numerous and laudatory.”

A few women? Peter, who had known Van Dyck wel , rol ed his eyes. “I expect the Guild doesn’t particularly like the idea of someone on Earth running around with access to a time tube, either.”

The muscles in Mertons’s jaw contracted. The Guild, like every organization that managed souls in the Afterlife, had a stake in ensuring the tubes were tightly control ed.

Representatives of the Guild, or, like Peter, those chosen to serve their needs, were the only people al owed to travel the tubes as conscious adults, and then only under very special circumstances. That this Stratford fel ow would find a way to breach the tube terrified the Guild, who claimed that alteration of the fabric of time could be as dangerous as an asteroid hit. No one on Earth had done it in decades.

Peter didn’t doubt there was some level of danger, though he suspected the Guild’s concern was just as much about retaining power as averting chaos.

“No, Peter, the Guild does not care for it, and neither should you. The results would be unimaginable.”

Peter made an ambiguous noise. A few more minutes, and then al he’d need was a brief distraction. “Tel me, how did you come to know the writer would be traveling here?”

This was the one part of the story Mertons had not shared with him, and the calculations showed in the man’s eyes.

Fortunately, Peter thought, there’s nothing like a time-jump accountant for long-winded self-aggrandizement, especial y when it comes to the intricacies of time travel.

“I probably shouldn’t be tel ing you this—”

Peter gave him a conspiratorial nod.

“—but it was me. Dawson, the associate in External Affairs, was reviewing the daily log and saw Stratford’s book had spiked a seven-point-three on incongruity.

Normal y you’d ignore something like that unless it happened again, but when Dawson brought it to me, there was just something odd about it. Over a seven on an art biography? An art biography by an unknown author? I got permission to check it against the Alexandrian tables, the safest way for someone in the present to examine future occurrences, and the