The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway (best novels of all time txt) 📕

check whether the man leaning drunkenly against a fence was all right. Nick shuddered, remembering the terrible feelings that had flooded him at Mibbs’s touch. “Yes, that’s him. That man followed me all day long and toward the end of it he started controlling my mind. Which you didn’t tell me you people could do yesterday when you were inducting me into the rites and privileges of Level One security clearance. Nor did you tell me that it is possible to force a man into a sinkhole of despair just by touching him.”

Alice was silent, lost in thought, and Nick noticed that Arkady was watching her with a sort of professional detachment, more like an aide than a husband; Alice was fully the Alderwoman now. She reached wordlessly for the phone. Nick held it out, and Alice made another call. “Venkatesan, this is the Alderwoman. I’m sending you Kumiko and Shuchiro’s photos and notes about our guest’s journey this morning. He started out from here at around four thirty A.M. and got back half an hour ago. I want all the CCTV footage of him from the minute he left the house until he returned, and I want you to watch for a big, white man who was following him wearing . . .” She looked up at Nick, her eyebrows aloft.

“A pale green three-piece suit, tweed. Plus fours. Yellow socks.”

“Green suit. Probably always a block or so behind. You’ll see Kumiko and Shuchiro throughout, but apparently they didn’t notice this man, so he was crafty. Yes. Yes. His name is Mr. Mibbs. No. Today. Now. Wait, I’ll ask.” She looked up at Nick. “What kind of hair?”

“Dark. Thick. American politician hair. But his name isn’t—”

She held up a hand to shush him. “Dark, thick. Yes. American politician hair. I want you to put everyone on this. Get me a good image of Mibbs’s face in half an hour, and all the footage before the end of the day. Yes. Yes. Good. Good-bye.”

“If the Guild has CCTV cameras all over London, why have me followed?” Nick asked as she hung up.

“So we could save your ungrateful butt,” she said shortly. “A camera can’t throw water in your face.” She tapped at her phone, sending Shuchiro’s texts and images on to Venkatesan, whoever that might be. “And they are not our CCTV cameras. We use the government’s.”

“They let you do that?”

Arkady snorted and drained his teacup. “Little priest. They do not even know we exist.”

* * *

Nick paced back and forth in the parlor, telling them everything about Mr. Mibbs. Except he kept Leo out of the story. He’d betrayed Leo once already. He wasn’t going to do it again.

So he told Alice and Arkady he’d seen Mibbs once in Chile, and had experienced the aura of despair that surrounded him. When he realized that Mibbs was following him in London, he’d just assumed that he was Guild police. Then Mibbs started controlling his mind, and finally pressed Nick into that terrible misery. Nick had assumed that this was how the Guild dealt with malefactors.

Alice shook her head. “We don’t do that. We can’t. He read your mind?”

“He put feelings into my head. Like my head was a bowl and he was just ladling them in.”

“Those things you describe, they are impossible,” Arkady said.

“They happened.”

“I do not say you lie. I only say they should not be possible with what we know of our talents.”

Just then Alice got an image through from Venkatesan, and they all three clustered around the little screen to see what he had found. It was a short clip of Mibbs walking across the Millennium Footbridge behind Nick. His mirrored shades were on.

“That man is not in the Guild,” Alice said. “And he certainly hasn’t ever been in the compound in Chile. I would know.”

“He was there,” Nick said. “Clear as day. I saw him. Dressed in a wide-lapel baby-blue suit.”

She frowned, then called Venkatesan again. “Send all your images to Chile. Find out if anyone has ever seen him there, in the compound. Maybe dressed in blue.” She turned back to Nick.

“He controlled your mind,” Alice said as she and Arkady sat back down. “When his glasses were off? So with his eyes?”

“Yes.”

“We can’t do that.”

“So you keep saying.” Nick shrugged.

“But honestly, we can’t.”

“All right. But you say he isn’t in the Guild. That just means he’s some other kind of supernatural freak. He has other weirdo talents. What’s so strange about that?”

Alice tossed him an impatient glance. “We aren’t superheroes, Nick, everyone with a different power. Time has rules. We don’t understand them all, but this seems far out of the ordinary. I’ve never known anyone to do what you describe Mibbs doing.”

“Group control of time,” Arkady said to Alice. “We can do much more in groups. Maybe he was working with some other people. And Nick, he didn’t notice.”

Alice frowned. “That’s a possibility.” She turned to Nick. “If we work together in a group, we can influence someone for a short period of time. But in a carefully managed environment. Not walking down a street in the middle of the city, surrounded by Naturals. Even when we work together, we aren’t controlling anyone’s mind. We are controlling time, in an interlocking series of microenvironments. It is very complex and requires a team of highly trained people. We aren’t invading anyone’s actual thoughts.”

“Well, he did.” Nick closed his eyes, trying to remember. “It wasn’t exactly my thoughts he was controlling. It was my feelings. I could think whatever I liked, but I felt what he wanted me to feel. Feelings that weren’t really my own. Fear the first time, when I tried to cross Euston Road, and a profound despair the second, when he put his hand on me in Guilford Street.”

“Feelings, not thoughts,” she said.

“Right. And I really don’t think there was anyone working with him. I kept a relatively close eye on him all morning.”

“Let me try something on you.” Alice stared at him intently, her