Book One Time for Alexander
Ashley is a one of the elite, a time-travel journalist who has fought to prove herself in a world that that believes her road in life was paved by her parents' money and her title.
After winning a prestigious award she is chosen to travel through time and interview a historical figure. Choosing her childhood hero Alexander the Great, she is sent back in time for less than a day to find and interview a man whose legend has survived to the present day. He mistakes her for Persephone, goddess of the dead, and kidnaps her, stranding her in his own time.
What follows, after she awakes under a pomegranate tree, is a hilarious, mind-bending tale of a modern woman immersed in the ancient throes of sex, love, quite a bit of vino, war, death, and ever so much more.
Chapter One
I could not, would not, go back in time with my head shaved. But the fashion consultant ignored my protests, put the razor to my head, and swept off my hair.
That should have been a warning, but all day long I'd ignored the signs. To begin with, I couldn't get any of my so-called friends from Tempus University to come pick me up. They'd stopped speaking to me when I'd been chosen for the prize. It shouldn't have bothered me. I'd never had friends before, why did I need them now? Well, they would have come in handy for a ride. The only flat I could afford after giving my money to a charity foundation was in a crappy section just outside town and there was no zip-tram nearby. When I called a taxi, he'd refused to drive up to my door and I had to walk through the garbage strewn streets to the main station.
When I finally got to the University, the fashion consultant gave me a dress to wear that felt like it had been woven from nettles and the most uncomfortable sandals in the world. The sandals, the fashion consultant informed me, were made by a shoemaker-slash-historian from plaited grass imported directly from the Euphrates riverbanks.
Just after I finished dressing, the smug fashion consultant shaved me bald and gave me a most unflattering wig. Then, in another room, a surgeon gave me a shot that would temporarily protect me from all the known illnesses of the time, including pregnancy and rabies. Then he implanted my tradi-scope right above my left ear, missing the first time, and giving me a fearsome headache. I didn't complain. Besides, I needed the tradi-scope to understand all the languages I would meet.
Finally, when I was deemed dressed and coifed appropriately for 333 BC, the fashion consultant escorted me to the very center of the Institute of Time Travel, where I climbed onto the massive seat carved from a block of pure quartz crystal that would send my atoms spinning through time.
A nurse paused next to me and looked at the glowing screen by the cylinder of frozen nitrogen. "Only a few more minutes before you get vaporized," she said, and smiled.
Everyone in the room was waiting for me to fail at my undertaking or to show some sort of weakness. I leaned back in the freezing chair and pretended to yawn.
Above all, a time-traveling journalist must be in control of his or her emotions. Emotions clouded judgment. Emotions were marks against you at Tempus University. Sentiments were stomped out and clinical thinking was put in their place. I was trained to observe and to ask pertinent questions, all the while remaining detached. The Time-Travel Institute was not about to spend millions of dollars to send people back in time to have them fall apart and blither.
Lightning crashed and thunder shook the building. On the glass dome above my head, rain poured like a waterfall, the sound deafening. More lighting jagged across the sky, and the white-coated scientist standing next to me glanced upwards. "Right on time." He checked his watch and then motioned curtly to a nurse standing nearby. "Four minutes."
"Ashely Riverain, you've been chosen to travel back in time to interview Alexander the Great..."
What I didn't know, was that I was about to be kidnapped and stranded in 330 BC!
