Stolen Compass (The Painter Mage Book 4) (11 page)

Nik fell silent. I hoped that appealing to our history might make him share more than he would otherwise. He could be stubborn—I didn’t think that had changed, or that
could
change—but he also was insightful. And he
had
been my friend. When I thought him gone, I had known real sadness. I didn’t have all that many friends. Growing up like I did, knowing that my father was a skilled painter, that I could use magic like that, but not knowing anything about Arcanus until after my mother was gone kept me from having too many friends. Even in Arcanus, I hadn’t had friends. There, I had been the tagger son of the Elder, someone to compete with, not someone to get to know. So when I met Nik and learned that he was a tagger, an outcast much like myself, we had managed to bond.

“Oliver, you are alive because of our friendship, but you can’t understand what I went through, what I will still go through. Not because I have to, but because I
want
to. The things I’ve learned from the Druist are things that I could not have learned anywhere else. He’s helped give me real power for the first time.” He raised his hands to keep me from interrupting him. “You always thought us equals. That was part of your charm. But it was never true. Even when you first crossed, you were more skilled with the arcane patterns than I was. I knew then that I would become expendable. There wasn’t anything I could do to avoid it.”

I stared at Nik, knowing sadness again at the loss of my friend. Whatever Nik might be now, he was no longer the person I had known. “I’ve told you what the Trelking foresaw. You know what I must do.”

“You may try, Oliver, but trust me when I tell you that you will never have the power needed to confront the Druist Mage. Now that the Druist knows you’re here, and that you have me, you won’t live long enough to understand how little you know.”

I glanced at Devan. The temptation was there to close the box and keep Nik confined within. Hell, the temptation was there to use the cylinder and turn him back to stone. But I needed to learn from him. He might not
want
to teach me, but I would find some way to convince him to.

Devan twisted suddenly and looked over her shoulder.

“What is it?”

She shook her head and nodded toward the box holding Nik.

He looked up at her and smiled. “She doesn’t want to tell me that she’s detected another surge of power.” He fixed Devan with a hard stare. “I’ve learned many of your tricks, De’avan. I’m no longer the painter I once was.”

“No,” Devan said. “Now you’re worse.”

She flipped the lid of the box closed and again ran her finger around the rim, sealing it closed. She crouched next to Kacey and ran her hand along the shifter’s fur. Kacey’s breathing quickened and then she howled softly. At least I knew she’d be all right. Whatever Nik had done wasn’t permanent.

Devan turned to me. “Come on, Ollie. We need to go see what that was.”

“
W
here did you sense it
?” I asked as we rumbled down Jakes’s street in Big Red. My hands gripped the wheel more tightly than necessary, the pattern placed onto the hard plastic pinching into my hands.

“I don’t know, somewhere to the south,” Devan said. The octagonal box holding Nik rested on her lap and she glared at it, almost as if she could pierce it with her eyes. I felt the tension from her. She didn’t like that we had to have Nik with us.

“We’ll have to figure out something more permanent for him when this is over,” I said.

“You still intend to use him?”

I reached across the truck and took Devan’s hand. “I think we have no choice but to use him. Think of what we need to learn to stay alive. The other option is doing what he said and going to the Druist Mage myself.” She arched her brow at me. “Hey, I didn’t say that I wanted to do that, only that it was my other option.”

“That’s not any kind of option,” she said.

“No, it’s not. Which is why I need to use the resources available to me.” Probably more of them than would make Devan comfortable. I’d already decided that if I could get Nik to help me learn, then I might be able to do something similar with the other little prisoners my father had in the cabinet. With what was to come, we needed any edge we could get.

I turned onto Weeds Street when Devan thumbed to the right, telling me which way to go. It was one of the narrow side streets that ran north to south through Conlin, the blacktop seemingly hastily repaired, leaving cracks along the pavement that sent the truck thumping as we drove along it.

“Along here?” I asked as we went.

“Seems like it.”

I tried thinking of what she could have picked up on down this street, but couldn’t think of anything. There wasn’t much down this way. We could reach one of the grocery stores in town, but it would be pretty roundabout, nothing as easy as shooting down one of the main streets running through Conlin. But whatever she’d sensed had been magical enough to catch her senses, magical enough to pull her attention away from Nik. That meant the kind of power that her father had sent across the Threshold.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

Devan looked over, eyes flashing with amusement. “Ollie, it’s not me that has to be ready.”

I reflexively reached for the satchels of ink hanging from my belt. Devan wasn’t going to be doing any attacking if it came to it. That wasn’t the way the Te’alan used their magic.

She pointed toward another road, and we turned again, this time onto an unmarked side street. Tall elms and oaks grew on either side, branches stretching across the street as if trying to hold hands with the other side. Looking ahead, the street appeared to be a dead end.

I glanced over at Devan. “You sure about this?”

She nodded. “This is where I sensed it.”

“Still sensing it?” I asked.

“Not now. Whatever caused it is gone.”

When we reached the end of the street, I saw that it wasn’t a true dead end as I’d thought. The street ended, but it ended in a row of faded orange metal storage sheds. The roofs were unfinished steel. A simple chain link fence blocked access to the sheds.

“Looks like you could use a little directional help,” I said. “We could’ve gotten to the U-Stor sheds from the other direction.”

When we stopped, Devan left Nik resting on the floor and jumped out of the truck and ran her hand along the fence. Her eyes went distant. A soft breeze whistled through the sheds and rattled the fence. The air held the hint of rot, like some animal had gotten caught in there and now rotted.

“They were here,” she said.

“Who?”

“I… don’t know. Something with power. It feels like my father, but he wouldn’t come across.”

“Well, he came across, but he wouldn’t risk
remaining
across. That’s why he stood with the doorway open.”

Devan turned to the fence and gripped it in her hands, pressing her face as if to push through it, and inhaled deeply. “There’s something over there.”

I reached for one of the charms I had in my pocket. I didn’t need to know anything more than that. If there was something on the other side of the fence, we needed to get there and see what they were after.

With my free hand, I dipped into the red ink and made a swirling mark across the lower portion of the fence. I hated that I had to damage it like this, but the barbs on the top might pinch, and well, I’d rather not have
me
damaged trying to get to the other side.

Devan took a step back as I infused the pattern with power. It surged with a flare of yellowish light before fading to nothing. I tapped on the fence, and part of it fell through to the other side.

“Who needs tools?” I said, crawling through the hole in the fence.

“Really, Ollie? Sometimes I think you’re the tool.”

“Are you just going to leave him back there by himself?”

“Where can he go? Anything he attempts inside that box is only going to ricochet and hit him. The more he tries—the more he attacks the walls of the box—the more he basically is harming himself.” She stepped through the fence and smiled up at me. “Pretty ingenious, if you ask me. And since you weren’t smart enough to figure it out before freeing him, then I guess you don’t get to criticize me.”

She smacked me on the ass as she walked past and hurried down the path leading toward the sheds. I chuckled to myself and ran after her. Devan had stopped in front of one of the storage units. It was pretty easy to tell which one we needed to look at since the door to the unit had been torn off, crumpled, and folded, and then actually stuffed back inside the shed, as if to hide the fact that it wasn’t there any longer.

“That’s a new one,” I said, tracing a repeating crescent pattern at the base of the storage unit. I pressed my power through it and felt the pattern burst into place. Nothing moved inside and, as far as I could tell, there wasn’t anything magical still there.

“What?” Devan had waited for me to finish my pattern. This wasn’t the first time we’d worked together like this, though in the past, we’d been on the other side of the Threshold, and anything that we might have found there was more likely to kill us than it was here. Here, we had the advantage that there weren’t as many magical beings, but what we had encountered outmuscled most of the things we ever came across on the other side.

I waved my hand toward what had been the door. You could still sort of make out the “U” in the U-Stor logo, but the rest of it was too far gone to read. “We’ve at least got courteous thieves.”

“Not any old thief here, Ollie. Look at the ground.”

I’d already seen what Devan pointed to. Where the door met the cement pad, the lock that connected it had been sheered free. We’d seen similar magic up at the monument where the compass had been stolen. “At least we know it’s the same thing,” I said.

“Yeah, but
what
is it?”

I broke the protection that I’d placed around the storage unit and ran my finger across the cement, letting the maroon ink on my finger smear across it. As I worked, I pressed slightly out with my will, using that to detect anything that might be there, that might give me the answer as to what had been here. It was a simple pattern, but for things like this, simple patterns were often the best, mostly because they didn’t take much power. With what we might face over the next twenty-four hours, I might need to preserve my strength.

The pattern should let me know if any painter magic was used. I didn’t really expect it, not considering what we’d seen. The ink surged softly under my finger and then rebounded against it.

I jerked my hand back. “Damn!”

Devan crouched down next to me. “You find something?”

“Only that I should know better than to go mucking about until I understand what we’re dealing with,” I said. I wiped my hands on my pants and searched for anything that might help me understand what I’d just sensed. That
had
been painter magic, but nothing like I was used. I shouldn’t be surprised, not after having seen a shifter using painter magic to the point where he couldn’t even shift like he once had. But this had been made to look like a painter had done it. Not any particular painter—mimicking another was possible, but it was nearly as difficult as the artistry Taylor managed—but the fact that someone had gone through the effort of trying to disguise their magic concerned me.

“I don’t like that look on your face,” Devan said.

“Yeah, I don’t like having to make it.” I stepped into the shed. There wasn’t any light, and the overcast day didn’t offer much help. I turned to Devan. “Anything you can do about this?”

“I’m not your lamp, Ollie.”

“Nope, but I still think it’s pretty sexy when you do it.”

She smirked and punched me, but obliged by working enough magic that her skin began to glow. With Devan, it didn’t take much magic to get the effect, a trickle really, but when she did it, her skin glowed with a soft yellow light. At least on this side of the Threshold. On the other side, she’d never glowed like she did now except when throwing around serious power. The Threshold changes magic in very particular ways. With Devan, it made her a lamp, but we still didn’t know the full impact of the crossing for her.

The light gave me enough to see into the shed. Other than the folded remains of the door, it was pretty much empty. A damp spot on the concrete told me that something had been here before, but not what had been here. I made a circle around it. From the size—probably six feet by six feet—it was something large.

“What do you think it was?” I asked.

“Looks like a box.”

“Now who’s being the idiot?”

“You’re the one who asked the dumb question. I’m just working with what I’m given.”

I shook my head and knelt on the ground. Working with a careful tracing, I made a trail of ink around where the box had been, tracing the outline. When this was done, I added a series of what could really only be called squiggles. They were a particularly distinct arcane mark, one that I’d learned from Devan’s father.

With a soft press of power through the patterns, I felt the thrumming sense of the magic I drew pressing against what had been here. This was a detection pattern, but not any old detection pattern. It let me determine if there were magical qualities to what had been taken. Since the garage seemed to have been opened in the same way that the compass had been removed, I suspected that there were, but this would let me know for sure. Had I known how to determine the outline of the compass, I could have used this pattern there, but the missing item had to have been in contact with what I placed the pattern around, making it less useful for things like the compass, which had been elevated off the ground on a metal pedestal.

When the power surged through it, it practically hummed.

“Shit,” I breathed.

“That bad?”

I stood and looked around the shed. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“What doesn’t?”

I studied the walls of the shed. They were simple metal, but I had to be missing something. “Why would a box of such power be housed in a place like this where anyone could find it?”

Devan glanced at the ground where the box had been. She could detect magic being used, but she would have to work a bit harder to sense what I could learn from patterns like the one I used to detect the box. Then she stepped across the square I’d traced and reached toward the metal wall of the shed. Her fingers glowed as she trailed them along the steel. She made a complete circuit around the shed before stopping in front of me.

“There are dozens of patterns in this. And there’s something else in the air,” she said, her nose crinkling as she did, almost as if picking up a foul smell. “It’s familiar, but I don’t know why.”

“Figures,” I said. Leaving a magical box unprotected would have been foolish. Even with protections placed around the shed, someone had managed to break in, though it had taken more power than a simple painter would have been able to manage.

I made one last pattern, this near the folded and bent door from the storage unit. With a series of patterns and a triangle for anchoring, I focused the power on the deepest dent that I could. Whoever had been here had focused on the door with enough energy to fold it in. I might be able to use that to determine if not who, at least
what
had come through.

As I infused the pattern, I sucked in a surprised breath. “Oh.”

Devan stopped next to me. “What is it? I can see you don’t want to tell me.”

I released the power I’d been holding and turned to her. “There’s power here, but it’s not what I was expecting.” Devan arched a brow at me as she waited. “It’s Te’alan power, but funneled through a painting, made with marks here,” I said, pointing to an indentation along the folded door, “and here,” I finished, pointing to another series of indentations. They were patterns, as surely as anything I ever made was a pattern, but different from anything I’d ever made, more like what Devan did when she made my charms or when she’d made that box that now contained tiny Nik. Unlike what Devan did, power could be infused into these patterns.

Devan leaned over them and ran her finger along the metal, letting it glow softly as she did. She stopped as she neared the deepest indentation. “Well, fuck.”

Devan slammed her fist against the metal door, leaving it even more dented than it had been before. She stalked along the side of the door, her magic flaring as she went. When she finally stopped, she looked back at me.

“What is it?”

“Nothing much,” she said. “Only my brother.”