Stolen Compass (The Painter Mage Book 4) (12 page)

I
jumped
as Devan slammed her fist against the metal door again and left the storage unit. I glanced at the ground again, wondering what could have been here and who might have placed it there. The only person with painter power strong enough to hide something in Conlin had been my father, but why would he have used a shed like this when he had his house and the shed at Jakes’s place?

I ran after Devan. “I thought your brother was gone.”

“So did I. Father made it sound like he was lost.”

Lost meant many things to the Te’alan, but in this case, we had thought that Devan’s younger brother, Brand, had been lost while fighting along the front lines. Many Te’alan were lost there, and he’d been serving as the Trelking demanded, determined to learn enough to come back and serve at his father’s side. Once, Devan would have been expected to serve a similar fate, but she’d been essentially reassigned when I showed up, and then again after she was betrothed to the Druist Mage.

Brand had always been a little off, but I was never able to quite explain why I felt that way. I didn’t know him all that well—he’d been lost too soon for that—but he’d pestered me about painting, and tried to understand what I did, and how it was different from what the Te’alan could do.

“This your father’s idea to hide him from us?”

“Probably,” she said, shaking her head in a way I knew meant she was angry.

“Why hide him from you?”

“Why does he do anything, Ollie?” she asked. She almost reached the fence but stopped, turning and sniffing at the air.

“You think he sent him through while he distracted the shifters?” I asked.

“Hell if I know,” Devan said. She started away from the hole in the fence, and I followed her, frowning. “Why him? And why would my father send him if he was only going to demand you find this box?”

The Trelking would have multiple layers of reasoning. It could simply be that he wanted something else in addition to the box, or that he wanted to make certain that we didn’t fail finding the box, or maybe it wasn’t about the box at all. Maybe he wanted to delay us, send us scrambling around Conlin while Brand searched and dug up other items that the Trelking wanted.

But why?

“Uh, Ollie?”

“Have you figured out why your father might have sent Brand over? And why we sensed painter power?” I asked, focused on the truck.

“No. But you need to see this.”

I hadn’t realized that she’d disappeared around the side of the shed. I followed the direction she went and nearly tripped over a body. Black hair spilled around, leaving only a glimpse of olive skin visible.

“What the hell?” I said.

“I’m only guessing,” Devan started, “that she sensed the magic used here and came. Think it was her painter magic you picked up?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“She’s out. Shouldn’t last too long.”

At least there was that. I scooped her up and carried her to the truck. Carrying Taylor through the hole in the fence was difficult, but Devan helped, propping up her legs. “Always going barreling in,” I muttered as I did. “Gonna get herself killed one of these times.”

“Like you should talk,” Devan said, sliding onto the middle of the seat.

I set Taylor next to her. She breathed slowly, and I saw no evidence of real injury, though the magical kind could be plenty bad. She’d recover, but hopefully not before we got this sorted out. I didn’t need her interfering. Devan held her so I could close the door, then she leaned Taylor against the window.

As I climbed into the truck, Devan grabbed the box containing little Nik and put it on her lap. There was a part of me that was tempted to open the box and see what Nik might know, but another part warned me against sharing too much with him. It would probably be best if I just placed him back into his stasis. Then at least I wouldn’t have to worry about him learning something he might be able to use against us in the future.

“We have to come up with a better containment,” I said, throwing the truck into gear and starting back down the road. The thick trees hanging overhead felt like the branches would brush the top of the truck, almost as if they were trying to seal me into Conlin.

“The box will hold. He’s not going anywhere.”

“I don’t want him to have the chance to hear anything we might be doing. Or learn about… you know.” I motioned toward our sleeping passenger. Nik cared about Taylor, and I knew he’d be pissed to learn she was hurt.

She turned toward me with a smirk. “What do you think he might hear?”

I flushed as I tried to push those images out of my mind. “We can’t have him learning anything he might take back to the Druist Mage.”

“Like you haven’t told him enough already? Besides, he’s not going to get back to the Druist,” Devan said.

She had a good point. Nik had heard about the shardstone box, but hadn’t known anything more that would help. I hadn’t completely expected him to, though it would have been nice.

I drove us toward my house. I didn’t know where else to go. We needed to understand what was going on, but as usual, I felt overmatched and underprepared. I was getting tired of feeling so out of my league.

“No, but what if he can send messages across the Threshold?”

Devan frowned and then nodded. “I don’t know how, but I don’t know how he managed some of the other shit he did, either, so it’s possible. After we get this taken care of, I’ll see what else I can come up with. You need to be able to work with him somehow if he’s going to teach you, some way that he won’t harm you.”

We pulled into the long drive leading down to my house and found Jakes waiting there for us. He stood outside his cruiser, leaning against the car, almost as if expecting us. Maybe he was.

I nodded to him as I got out. “Is Kacey all right?” I asked.

His eyes twitched slightly, and the muscles pulling at his brown sheriff shirt flexed. He glanced into the truck and arched a brow at me. “She’s fine. I didn’t expect you to pull her into your plans.”

“I didn’t pull Kacey into anything,” I said. “She saw me show up and decided she wanted to watch. She’s still pretty angry about what happened in the park.”

“We all are,” Jakes said. He eyed the box Devan carried, studying it for a moment. “You dragging her here to help?” he said, nodding toward the truck.

I shook my head. “Not Taylor. She wouldn’t help me make another orb, but I did manage to get my father’s orb to work for me, so there’s that.”

Jakes pulled his attention away from the box and met my eyes. “You used the Elder’s?”

“Once I figured out what I needed to do, I was able to control my power going through it.” It had actually been easy enough once I knew what I was doing. Nothing like when I’d completely wasted my power when I’d first struggled to figure out what the hell I could do with the orb. So far, I had managed to use quite a few things of my father’s. What else might he have lying around that I could learn about, especially if he was one of the magi? Would there be something here that might help us figure out a way to stop the Druist Mage and finally be free of Devan’s father?

“And the mage?”

Devan tapped the box. “He’s here.”

“Why are you here, Jakes?” I asked. “I thought you weren’t going to get involved with the Trelking.”

He hesitated. Jakes
never
hesitated.

“You know something, don’t you?” I said. “Is it the box that just went missing?” I still didn’t think it was the shardstone box that the Trelking sought. He made it sound like that was small enough to hold in his hands. But there had to be some reason that Brand went after the box in the shed, tearing through the protections placed around it. The poor storage unit would never be the same.

“What box?”

“Storage unit down on the south end of town. You might need to file a report,” I suggested. “There’s a unit that had its door torn off, just plain ripped free. Oh, and there were painter patterns set into the shed that should have made that difficult.”

Jakes turned toward the south and his nose wrinkled slightly as he sniffed at the air. “That was not of the Elder,” he said.

At least he answered that question for me. “No? Then it was something else. You think Tom learned enough to make items of any power?”

Jakes glanced over at me. “Tom Brindle has never been a powerful painter. His skills are different.”

“Yeah? How different?”

“Different,” Jakes said.

“Listen. How common are attacks like this?” I asked Jakes. “Before we showed up, how common was it that things would happen like this, because it seems to me that there have been pretty regular magic attacks here. That doesn’t seem quite right to me, but maybe it’s normal.”

“There is nothing normal about the frequency of these attacks,” Jakes said. “When we had the protection of the Elder, the city was left alone.”

Which was why Jakes wanted me to serve in some protector-of-the city role. Only, considering the fact that I wasn’t anything like my father—and the more that I learned, the more certain of that I became—there wasn’t much that I would be able to do to prevent these attacks from occurring.

“Anyway,” I said, “there was something in the shed. A big box.” I stretched my arms apart to show him how large the box in the shed had been. “There was something magical about it. And Devan thinks it was her brother who took it.”

We hadn’t talked much about how, if it
had
been her brother, he was now using some element of painter power. That wasn’t typical for one of the Te’alan, but then again, there was so much about what we’d seen that wasn’t typical.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that things were happening that we didn’t fully understand, but that I would need to understand in order to keep Devan and me safe. Between the Trelking trying to pull me back into his schemes and the Druist Mage on the other side, it felt like we would be pinched any way we went.

Then there was Taylor. She had her own motivations. She’d come from Arcanus, searching for signs of the Elder. And in Conlin, there were plenty of items for her to study.

Jakes turned to Devan. “You have a brother?”

“Sort of,” she said. “He’s kind of adopted. My father treated him as a son for most of his life. Then he sent him to serve along the front. I haven’t seen him since.”

“I am sorry.”

Devan snorted. “We weren’t what you’d call close.”

“Do you have any idea what might have been stored in that storage unit?” I asked Jakes.

“No. If it wasn’t the Elder’s, we might not have known about it. I’ve already told you that Conlin sits at a certain crossroads. That’s the reason he created a place like the Rooster and entrusted his closest friend to watch over it. Many people of power come through here,” Jakes said.

We had to figure out what was missing. It was tied to the shardstone box the Trelking wanted, I was sure of it. But how? And what if Jakes was wrong? What if the box taken at the U- Stor
had
been my father’s?

Only one answer came to mind: I needed to speak to someone familiar with the people of power who came through Conlin.

“I think it’s time for me to have a talk with my father’s buddy,” I told them.

T
he afternoon had stretched
into evening by the time we got everything together and made our way back over to the Rooster. Devan had taken the most time, making certain to collect a dozen or so of her figurines, the tiny army that she could bring to life, and placing them carefully into a pouch she slung over her shoulder. After setting Taylor down on the sofa in the house, I packed ink into my satchels and made a point of grabbing six or so different charms and stuffing them into my pocket.

When we reached the Rooster, Jakes pulled his car around to the back and I followed. I’d never been to this side of the Rooster, having always stuck to the front of the diner. There wasn’t much on this side. A massive air conditioner unit, the fan spitting hot air up out of the top. A long dumpster, though I knew there was also one on the other side of the building, because it was where we’d discovered one of the Nizashi. There was a bucket full of thick grease. And, I suppose least surprising, patterns were marked along the side of the building, making it clear that a painter was here.

The patterns were made with a little less skill than those I could make. Done by a tagger, and one who clearly struggled finding the right proportion, they arched over the top of a door set along the wall of the diner.

Devan glanced at them before looking over at me. “He studied with the Elder?”

I smiled, but paused. Something about the patterns caught my eye. I studied the nearest, a series of stars linked together to make a circle. It was brushed on with brown ink, painted into the doorway. At first glance, there seemed to be no skill to it, almost as if a child had drawn it. The more I studied it, the clearer it became that the irregularities I saw in the arms of the stars were intentional. And repeated with each one. The pattern was
made
to look crude.

“Maybe not such a tagger, after all,” I said with a laugh.

Devan frowned as Jakes shuffled us into the door. It opened to a large room decorated with a comfortable old sofa with two wooden chairs set across from it. A wide table sat between them. There was a door off this room that led either to the rest of the living space, or possibly the back area of the diner.

“Guess we know why Tom always seems to be here,” I said.

Jakes nodded. “The Elder helped with the creation of this building. It provides as much protection as the house he chose for himself.”

I thought of the house and how the Nizashi nearly twisted it off the foundation. I doubted they would have been able to do that to the diner. “Maybe,” I said. The diner was well protected—I could sense that easily now—but Tom’s private area felt different. “Where is he?”

“He will be here soon. He will know that we’ve come.”

I glanced back toward the door where the patterns had been. Had they not been meant to keep us back, but to provide warning?

I made my way around the room, looking first at the walls. Like the outside of the Rooster, they were painted with a rich brown, though of a lighter color, more like the color used to make the patterns around the door itself. I studied the walls, looking for signs of similar patterns, but didn’t see anything. That didn’t mean they weren’t there. Skilled painters often hid their patterns behind layers of other paint, using the outer coating to cover the protections they used. That Tom hadn’t bothered on the outside of the building told me that he
wanted
others to know about the patterns, almost as if advertising that he was a tagger.

“Do you sense anything?” I asked Devan as we trailed around the room.

“There’s power here,” she whispered.

I glanced over to her. “You’ve been in his diner more than I have. How is it you haven’t sensed it before?”

She punched me lightly on the shoulder. “I’m not the painter, Ollie. I could say the same about you.”

“Well, he made it seem like he was a tagger. Nothing powerful.”

“Sort of like you?” she said.

“I’ve had extra training,” I started, but then, so had Tom. And Tom’s had come from my father, not some Te’alan who didn’t really know the
intent
of the patterns they taught, only possessing the ability to make the more difficult arcane patterns. That’s where I’d learned most of my tricks, but I’d had to spend countless hours learning what each pattern could do. Some I still didn’t know. With patterns, especially with arcane patterns, the shape implied the intent, but even subtle changes made it so that the pattern could react differently.

It was why Tom’s linked star pattern outside his door would put someone with any knowledge at ease, making them think him incompetent. What they wouldn’t have realized was the skill that he’d used to make it appear that way. What Tom had displayed took amazing talent. He might be a tagger, but he was clearly talented.

“Oliver.”

I turned to see Tom standing in the interior doorway. He closed the door slowly behind him. Faint light suffusing out from it looked to come from a computer screen. I wondered what else he had in the back of the Rooster. And here I thought this was only a diner.

“Hey, Tom.”

“I figured you would come for me eventually. I never expected Sam to bring you.”

Jakes stood with his arms crossed like he so often did, basically blocking the back door. Was that to keep me from leaving or to keep Tom inside?

“Jakes knew that I had some questions,” I said.

Tom shot Jakes a questioning look before turning back to me. He tipped his head to Devan. “De’avan.”

I don’t know that I’d ever heard Tom speak her name with the correct inflection. I made certain never to do it. Mostly because it was sort of our thing. She called me Ollie—or idiot—and I called her Devan. But partly, it was because names carried a certain weight, especially to the Te’alan, and even more so to one with as much power as Devan. Speaking her name could draw her attention, but it was more than that. It was a form of greeting, of submission, but also of power. With Devan, I never really wanted to hold that kind of power over her. What we had was different from any sort of power relationship.

Where had Tom learned to speak it so fluently?

“It seems you knew my father pretty well,” I said.

Tom motioned to the sofa and went to sit.

I glanced at Devan before following. “You coming?” I asked Jakes.

“I will be here if needed.”

“Your guardian role?”

He gave me a half smile. “There are no gateways here, Morris.”

“Ah. So your sheriff role. I don’t think you have too much to worry about.”

Jakes simply crossed his arms over his chest.

I took a seat on one of the faded wooden chairs opposite the sofa. Devan took the other, but pulled it over close to me. As she did, I made a point of grabbing one of my charms and palming it. I couldn’t explain why I did, and I didn’t really expect anything from Tom, only that with everything that had gone on around us lately, I was trying to be better prepared for the unknown.

When we were settled, Tom leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, looking from Devan to me. “I knew the Elder about as well as anyone could know him. He was a mentor, but more than that, he was my friend.”

I noted that Tom said “was.” Why was it that everyone was suddenly convinced that my father was gone? They hadn’t been nearly as convinced before now, or at least, they hadn’t seemed to be. “Yeah, I wouldn’t know about that.”

“Wouldn’t you, Oliver?” Tom asked. He peered at me through his half-frame glasses. A flop of his gray hair fell down into his eyes, but he didn’t bother to push it back. “I recall your father working with you quite a bit when you still lived here.”

I didn’t remember Tom from that time, but then again, there were quite a few things from my childhood that I’d forgotten. Mostly because I didn’t want to remember them, even though they weren’t necessarily
bad
memories. Those didn’t start until I got to Arcanus. After Arcanus, I should have had even worse memories, especially given some of the things I was asked to do, but there I had Devan—and, I had to admit, Nik had been a good friend for the first part of my service to the Trelking—who had kept me company.

“What’s your role in all of this?” I asked.

Tom took a deep breath and leaned back, setting his hands on his legs. “My role is to offer a place of safety. That has always been the role of the Waykeeper.”

He said it like a title, only one I had never heard before. “I assume you’re the Waykeeper?”

Tom pushed his hair back then and studied me. “I am.”

“I thought you were the warden.”

His eyes narrowed, and he glanced to Jakes. “They are much the same.”

That wasn’t quite an answer, but I didn’t push. “My father chose you for this role?”

Tom smiled slightly. “Not at first. As you can imagine, it is not without its dangers, but he saw the value in having someone he trusted.”

I glanced at Devan. She wore a troubled look that clouded her face. “I’ve got a pretty good imagination, but I don’t know anything about the Waykeeper. Did you?” I asked Devan.

Devan shook her head.

I turned back to Tom. “What does it mean? What do you do?”

He looked past me to catch Jakes’s eyes. “You haven’t told him?”

“That’s not my place.”

“It is now that your father is gone.” Tom’s voice was normally warm and fatherly. When he spoke to Jakes, it became hard.

“He will not serve. What does it matter?” Jakes said.

Tom shifted in his seat. His eyes darted from Jakes to me. “You have asked him?”

“I have asked.”

“All right,” I said, interrupting them. “You’re going to have to fill me in a little. I might have spent a decade learning from the Trelking, but there seems to be quite a bit that I knew nothing about.”

“Because you were shielded from it,” Tom said. “The Trelking foresaw your role in all of this. Why do you think he summoned you? Why do you think he kept you away for so long?”

“What do you mean? He didn’t summon me, I triggered the crossing myself.”

Tom nodded. “You were to trigger the crossing, but it did not go as planned. Your father needed you on the other side of the Threshold, but he didn’t think you’d be claimed by the Trelking.”

“No?” I couldn’t believe that my father would have any plans for me dealing with the Threshold. It seemed to me that everything he had planned turned out exactly the way he expected, except for maybe his death. Even that I wasn’t certain had really happened the way I was told. For all I knew, my father was still alive somewhere, waiting…for what? For me? To avoid the Trelking? To attack the Druist Mage?

“Do you think the Elder wanted his son committed to serve the Trelking?” Tom asked. “He wanted you to learn, but to do so on your own.” He glanced at Devan. “That you survived at all is a testament to your strength and the friendships you forged.”

I resisted the urge to turn and stare at Jakes. How much of what Tom was telling me did he know? How much of it was even true?

Then again, how much of it really mattered? At this point, nothing really mattered. Had I not crossed the Threshold, had I not been claimed by the Trelking, I would never have met Devan. As much as our friendship and ultimate relationship meant to me, there was another reason that was important. I might not know as much as Tom or Jakes about what had happened on this side of the Threshold, or what happened with my father, but I knew what had been happening on the other side. I knew how the Trelking and the Druist Mage battled. And I knew that Devan could never go to the Druist Mage.

“Tell me how any of this is going to help me stop the Druist Mage when he decides it’s time to claim Devan,” I said. “Tell me how any of this is going to help me keep the Trelking from dragging his daughter back across the Threshold. Can you do that?” I looked from Tom to Jakes. Neither spoke. “No? Then tell me what the Trelking is after on this side of the Threshold. Because you seemed pretty petrified that he was here,” I said to Tom, “and since he held the doorway open, we’ve seen that the compass up on Settler Hill has gone missing and now some storage unit has been broken into. Know anything about that, Tom? Because that’s the kind of information I need to understand
now
.”

“What do you mean the compass is missing?” Tom asked.

I frowned.
That
was what he chose to latch onto?

“The compass was taken. Maybe last night, maybe longer ago than that.” We still didn’t know when, or why, and Taylor hadn’t been able to help. “Something with serious power, enough to separate the base from the ground.”

Tom looked over to Jakes. “You knew about this?”

“Morris told me.”

“And you didn’t know what it meant?”

Jakes took a step toward us before settling back on his heels and taking a breath. “There are many things in the city that I don’t fully understand. Without my father’s guidance, I might never fully understand.”

With that statement, I suddenly realized that Jakes was struggling with nearly as much as I was. He missed his father, but it was more than that. With his father’s disappearance, he was asked to provide more protection than he might have been ready to offer. Jakes was a powerful shifter, but it was just as likely that he was a
young
shifter, still learning what he needed to know to fulfill his role. And here I had been treating him like he had all the answers, when he probably had nearly as many questions as I did.

“Why don’t you tell us, Waykeeper? What does it mean?” I asked Tom.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “The compass is more than a simple monument.”

“Yeah, I sort of figured that. There was too much power used to make it anything less than something with a bit of magical draw, but it didn’t seem like anything of my father’s.”

“That’s because it is not. It predates your father providing protection to the city. The compass is a magical creation, made by ancient painters, back when there were true masters, before the hunters nearly destroyed them all. It provides a sort of diffusion over the city, a way to mask what passes through here. I never would have thought it able to be taken. The city itself provides the protection to the compass.”