Veiled Magic (4 page)

The Kobold peered critically around the room and through the door into the living room.

“Missus,” he stated flatly, “this place was already a disaster area. I just made it a little messier, that's all.” He shook his head in disgust. “Besides, you did plenty to me. You ignored my friend—sent him away when he wanted to talk to you. And I'm not leaving until you give him a good listen, and that's that.” He sat down solidly on the floor to make his point.

“Friend? What friend?” Donata had no idea what the little man could be talking about. She didn't know anyone with a Kobold.

The Kobold snorted. “How many people did you ignore today, you can't even figure out which one I mean? You must be one rude lady.”

Donata fought the urge to pick him up and toss him out a window—he'd be right back anyway. “I'm no lady—I'm a cop. And I haven't ignored anyone . . .” Her voice trailed off as she thought of one person she'd given the brush-off to.

Slowly, she lowered herself to the ground and sat down opposite her uninvited guest.

“Your friend—he wouldn't be named Clive Farmingham, would he? The restorer at the museum?”
Oh, please, goddess, let me be wrong.

The Kobold glared at her. “That's right, missus. Clive was my friend, and he needs to talk to you real bad.” He folded his arms. “And I'm not going nowhere until you call him back and listen to what he has to say.”

For the second time that day, Donata watched the smoke from her incense coil around itself until it assumed a Human form. Within minutes of completing her summoning ritual, Clive Farmingham was standing in her living room. He looked a little hazier than he had earlier at the museum, but still much more solid than your usual ghost. Clearly, there was something important keeping him from moving on. Donata kicked herself mentally for not paying enough attention when he'd tried to speak to her before—if she wasn't careful, they were going to revoke her Witch license.

The Kobold leaned against the wall, out of the way but still very much present. Donata had promised him a chance to say good-bye to his long-time companion on the condition that he stopped messing around with her stuff.

Farmingham had been agitated when he first manifested, but as soon as he realized she was prepared to listen, he calmed down somewhat. At the moment, he hovered an inch or two above the couch, as though he were trying to sit but not quite managing to align himself with the real world.

Donata thought she'd better start off with an apology and some introductions. She gave a polite bow in the direction of the restorer and nodded her head at the Kobold, just for safety's sake.

“Mr. Farmingham, sir,” she said. “I am deeply sorry that I did not give you my full attention earlier. Some unusual pressures distracted me from my job, but that is no excuse. I hope that you will accept my apology. My name is Donata Santori, and I promise, I am ready to listen to whatever it is you need to say now.” She snuck a look at the Kobold and was relieved to see a smile crease his already craggy face.

The restorer gave her a wavering smile too. “I completely understand, Officer Santori. I confess, I was somewhat thrown by the . . . er . . . bodies . . . and was perhaps not as coherent as I might have been.”

The Kobold rolled his eyes and pushed himself off the wall, strolling over to stand right outside the ritual circle.

“Dyin' will do that to a person,” he said dryly. “She still shoulda paid more attention.”

Farmingham made shushing motions with one noncorporeal hand. “Now, now, Ricky, the young lady has had a rough day too. Let's not be rude.”

“She's no lady, she's a cop,” the Kobold corrected. “And I'm never rude. Just direct.” He and the restorer grinned at each other as if that was an old joke between them.

“
You're
Ricky?” Donata exclaimed. “Mr. Farmingham kept mentioning a Ricky, but when I asked his boss, Mr. Turnbull, he didn't know anyone by that name.”

The Kobold executed a surprisingly elegant and old-fashioned bow. “Adalrik, actually. It means ‘noble friend,'” he said proudly. “But my pal Clive here kept mispronouncing it, so I told him to just call me Ricky.”

Donata turned to the older man in surprise. “You knew about him? I mean, you'd actually talked to him?” She'd figured the “friendship” had only gone one way.

“Oh, my, yes,” Farmingham said, light warming his dead eyes. “I discovered Ricky's existence many years ago, soon after taking the job at the museum. He's been a great help to me.”

The Kobold blushed, much to Donata's amusement. She hadn't even known Kobolds
could
blush. Live and learn.

“Of course,” the restorer added, “his biggest gift to me has been in getting you to listen to me. Otherwise, I would have had to resort to haunting you, and I'm not sure I would have been very good at it.” He looked at the ground. “I'm a bit shy, you know.”

Donata felt guilty from her hair down to her toes. “I am sorry, Mr. Farmingham. I couldn't understand you, but I should have realized you had something important to say to me. I should have been more patient.” Privately, she still suspected it was likely to be one of those things that seemed overwhelmingly crucial to the dead person, but in reality was only a trivial bit of unfinished business to the living. “Why don't you just tell me now, and then you'll be able to move on the way you're supposed to.”

“It's about the painting,” Farmingham started to say.

Donata gritted her teeth. Not that damned painting again.

“Sir, I tried to tell you before. The painting is perfectly safe. It's in a police evidence locker, all wrapped up and tucked away until the case comes up to trial.”

The restorer shook his head to and fro. “No, you don't understand. It won't be safe there. If they found out it was at the museum, they can find out it's at the police station. And it can't be allowed to fall into the wrong hands—that painting is like a ticking time bomb, just waiting to go off!” He wrung his hands and the Kobold took a step closer, as near as he could get without disrupting the circle, and glared at Donata.

Donata gestured at the ghost to calm down. “I'm sorry, Mr. Farmingham, but I don't understand what's so special about this painting. I researched the painter, and he wasn't terribly famous. The painting itself is valuable, but not unusually so. Why would anyone want it?” She didn't add that the thing was ugly as sin. She figured he'd seen the damn painting, so he knew that. Of course, there had been that weird vision she'd seen when she touched it . . .

“The painting is not what it seems.” Farmingham made a visible effort to compose himself. “It is one of the lost Pentacle Pentimentos. And either the Council or the Cabal would kill to get their hands on it.”

Donata could feel herself turn pale.
Dear goddess.
Nobody wanted to get mixed up in Council business, not if they could help it. The Council was the ruling body for the Paranormal Alliance—each major race had one representative on the Council, and the minor races were all represented by a Protector, who was designated by the Council itself. And then there were other lesser members who acted as administrative or policing personnel. Either a Dragon or a Witch always led the Council, since none of the other races wanted the position of Adjudicator Supreme. As purebred Witches, Donata's own family had often held high positions in the past, although in this generation they'd stayed mostly on the periphery.

The Council was a powerful and often arbitrary organization, and Donata wanted nothing to do with them, or anything they were interested in. And as for the Cabal—

“Isn't the Cabal just a scary story to tell Paranormal children?” she asked dubiously. “I thought they didn't really exist.”

Farmingham looked grim. “Oh, they exist, all right. They've kept to the shadows for many years, but I assure you, they are as real as you or I.” He looked down at his translucent body and gave a self-deprecating smile. “Well, you know what I mean.”

He gazed thoughtfully at Donata. “How well versed are you in your Paranormal history?” The look on his face reminded her of one of her favorite college professors, right before he gave a pop quiz.
Great. A test.
She was never going to get to eat her dinner.

“I know pretty much what everyone else knows, I guess,” she answered. “What does Paranormal history have to do with the painting?”

“The Pentacle Pentimentos date back to the Inquisition,” Farmington said. “They were all thought to have been destroyed, but apparently, this one survived.”

“They?” Donata questioned. “There was more than one of these things?” It was hard to imagine a bunch of these ugly things.

“Many, actually,” the restorer said. “Now mind you, they all looked different, and they were painted by different artists, but their purpose was the same: to help the Inquisitors hunt down members of the major Paranormal races and exterminate them.”

Donata suppressed a shudder. The Inquisition had been the most terrible period in Paranormal history. As far as the Human population was concerned, the Inquisition had been a long-lasting religious witch hunt. The reality had been even grimmer: an all-out holy war between the Catholic Church and the Paranormal races, one that lasted for hundreds of years with terrible losses to each of the opposing forces.

But in the final days, there was no question who was winning. The Church was well organized and united in their purpose, whereas the Paranormals—for all their special abilities—were scattered, mostly living underground and often at odds with each other. In the end, the Paranormals had to concede victory to the Catholic Church, and both sides signed the Compact, an agreement that spelled out parameters for each race that limited their powers and guaranteed their safe coexistence with the Church.

“What does the painting have to do with the Inquisition?” Donata asked. Like all Paranormals, she'd been raised with a combination of fear and resentment toward the Compact and the restrictions it had placed on the major races. When Witches had finally come out into the open, that act had marked the first time any of the races had openly defied the Compact's rules—and even then they'd skirted the edges of the agreement by downplaying the scope of their powers to the general public.

Farmingham shook his head ruefully. “Did you never wonder how the Inquisitors tracked down the Paranormals they tortured and killed? After all, most of us appear just like the rest of the population, unless you know the signs to look for.” He pointed at himself. “I'm a Witch myself, on my mother's side, although my only talent seems to be in telling true art from
counterfeits. A form of dousing, I suppose, although not a very practical one, for the most part.”

Donata wasn't terribly surprised by this revelation; she doubted the Kobold would have been so open with a regular Human. She thought about the question for a minute.

“I suppose I always figured the Church mostly relied on informers—after all, we know that a lot of the people who died during the Inquisition were innocents, folks who just got caught up in the fever of the times.” She shrugged. “And, of course, there were all those lovely tests once they'd brought someone in for questioning. It's hard to protest that you're not a Dragon when your skin won't burn, no matter how hot the fire.”

The Kobold jiggled nervously in his spot outside the circle. No Paranormal, major or minor, liked to talk about those years. Just about everyone had lost family and friends. Sometimes entire clans had been wiped out. It had been a hellish time.

Farmingham looked gloomy. “Well, those were certainly a part of the equation. But a few of the most powerful Inquisitors also had another tool they used to discover hidden Paranormals: they called them the Pentacle Pentimentos.”

“Hey,” Donata said, “you mentioned that name before. What the heck is a Pentacle Pentimento?”

She pulled out the silver pentacle necklace she wore underneath her shirt and showed it to him. “I know what a pentacle is, of course—the Witch's symbol: a five-pointed star within a circle, with each point representing one of the five elements—Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit—and the circle representing unity. But what is a pentimento?”

The restorer put his teacher's face on again. Donata made a silent bet with herself that if she checked his records, she'd find he'd spent some time as a lecturer at the local arts college.

“
Pentimento
, the usual kind, anyway, is an art term. It can mean either a technique for restoring paintings by removing a top layer of paint to reveal a second painting underneath, or it can be the name for the revealed painting itself.” He paused for breath, even though he didn't actually need to do so anymore.

“The Pentacle Pentimentos were special paintings commissioned by the Church to aid in detecting and defeating the major Paranormal races. In recent years, many experts have come to believe that such things never actually existed—but the one you saw today clearly proves that they weren't just a myth.”

Donata thought back to the painting she had dropped off at the precinct. “So, that corner where you had been working . . . that wasn't just a cleaned-up bit of the paint? It was actually a piece of a second painting underneath?” She shook her head. “I only caught a glimpse of it, but it didn't look important.”

Farmingham gnawed on his lower lip, causing tiny bits of incense to swirl in and out around his mouth. “The edges wouldn't have shown anything. It was the figures that were significant. According to the old records I dug up—with great difficulty, I might add—each of the six figures in the painting represented one of the major races. They were delineated in a way that showed their more ‘public' faces, like the way the Fae tend to be enchantingly beautiful, and Ghouls are grayish and shabby looking. They provided clues for how to distinguish the Paranormal races from regular Humans, if you knew what you were looking for.”

“How does that work?” Donata asked. “Like you said, most of us don't look that different. I don't see how it would help.”

The restorer shook his head. “It wasn't the top layer that was crucial, Officer Santori. It was the pentimento underneath that caused so much destruction and misery.” His misty eyes filled with phantom tears in memory of those who had been lost.

“Since it was a deep Church secret, the bottom painting could be accessed only by those who were told the secret of its use: a very few specially trained Inquisitors. But once revealed, that layer showed not only the Paranormal traits and abilities of each race, but also symbols that represented what each race needed to survive, and how to destroy them. Think of it as a Paranormal Most Wanted poster, but one which could only be used by people who knew the right way to read it. In the wrong hands, it was a powerful weapon whose magic could be used against the Paranormal races.” He paused for emphasis. “And if you don't find a way to keep that painting safe, you and all the rest of the Paranormals could be in danger. Could be wiped out.”