Stolen Compass (The Painter Mage Book 4) (6 page)

“That seems to be the trend we’ve seen here, isn’t it?”

“Pretty much.”

We got back into Big Red and reached the Rooster without saying much more. I suspected Devan sat thinking over what her father had said to us while I was mostly focused on trying to decide how badly I wanted to know what had happened to my father. If I found this box for the Trelking, he claimed he’d tell me how to find my father. I didn’t have any reason to doubt him. The Trelking was powerful enough that he knew things no one else did. For him to come to me with this task meant that either my father was really and truly gone and the Trelking saw me as his last hope to get the box back, or he figured I might have already found it. Either way, he’d made an offer mixed with a threat.

As we pulled into the parking lot, there was a soft surge from the protections built into it that let me know we were back on safe ground. The Rooster was a sort of safe magical meeting place, made that way by my father. Only Nik had managed to violate that safety, the magic he’d learned from the Druist Mage giving him enough power to overcome most of the protections built into the land around the Rooster.

There was another car in the lot—a newer blue Chevy van—but I didn’t see any sign of Tom’s car. That didn’t mean he wasn’t here. He often walked or even rode his bike over to the diner. I hadn’t been back in Conlin long enough to know what he’d do when the weather changed. Probably keep walking, knowing what I did of Tom. Lights shone from the windows. The large Rooster sign over the diner wasn’t lit, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t open. I don’t think Tom had ever invested in lighting for it.

We pulled open the door, and the scent of burgers and grease and the hint of Tom’s famous meatloaf wafted toward us. A soft bell jingled overhead as we did. The jukebox thumped with some new dance song. It hadn’t worked at all until Devan had spent time fine-tuning it. I think she was also responsible for the song selection. I didn’t know many of the songs on it. Spending the last ten years on the other side of the Threshold sort of keeps you out of the current music scene, but Devan blasted the radio constantly working in the shop, so she’d developed a very distinct taste that was different from mine.

A middle-aged woman sat at one of the booths by herself. She glanced over as we entered and then quickly looked down at the table. A partially eaten burger and fries sat on the plate in front of her. She picked at it, but didn’t make much of an attempt at eating it. I hadn’t seen her before, but then again, I hadn’t been back in Conlin long enough to recognize many people.

Devan and I took seats at the counter, sliding onto stools that had probably been there since the diner first opened. Usually, there was someone working the counter, but we didn’t see anyone tonight.

“You’re going to do it, aren’t you?” Devan asked, pitching her words low enough that they didn’t carry over the sound coming from the jukebox. She twisted on the stool so that she could look at me.

She hadn’t questioned me about the Trelking’s demand during the entire ride to the diner. Not that she didn’t want to know, but I think she wanted to give me time to figure out what I wanted to do. The Trelking had asked me to find the box. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more that I had missed.

“He knows where my father is,” I said.

“And if he’s dead, will it help you to know?”

There was the million-dollar question. Would it change anything if I knew he was dead? Probably not. It might give me a sense of closure. After everything that I’d been through, a large part of me wanted that closure. But if he still lived, why wouldn’t I want to know that? What if he were stuck somewhere, in need of help? There might not be much that I could do, but wouldn’t I try?

“And if he’s dead, he’s left you with enough around here,” she swept her arm around her, motioning to the town around us, “to remember him. To learn from him. Wasn’t that what you really wanted?”

“Yeah, that’s what I wanted. Once. Now what I want is different.”

Devan touched my hand. She felt warm and my skin tingled where she touched. “You don’t have to keep worrying about me. It’s not like so much has changed.”

I met her eyes. “Everything has changed, Devan. I never wanted anything to hurt you before, but now? It would destroy me if anything happened to you.”

“You’re an idiot sometimes, you know that, Ollie?”

“Why? Because I care about you?”

“Because you think that you have to protect me. That you think I’m some sort of helpless little girl.”

“I’ve never said—”

“No. You haven’t said it. Since you’ve realized you were being an idiot,” she smiled and squeezed my hand, “You always think
I’m
the one who needs protecting. How many times have I saved your ass?”

I smiled and gave her a wink. “Are we keeping track?”

She shrugged. “If we have to. I can tell that you’re afraid. It’s in your hesitation when trying to use the orb. That’s not like you. That’s not the Ollie I know and love.”

I smiled. “Love? So we’re there already?”

She punched me on the shoulder. “Ten years and you’re still as dumb as when I first met you.”

A small, cute brunette came from the kitchen and smiled widely when she saw us. “You’ve returned. Tom wasn’t sure what to expect,” Kacey said. She approached where we sat at the counter and leaned over, lowering her voice. “Sam was pretty upset that he showed up like that, just so you know.”

I hadn’t seen Kacey since the night Nik had attacked. There was a part of me that knew she could have been one of the shifters that nearly died, but I didn’t know which one she was. Jakes was easy when he shifted. He was enormous in either form. Kacey was petite enough in human form that it made me wonder if she might not be just as petite in her wolf shape. She didn’t seem to show any sign of injury, and for that I was thankful. I’d begun to get the sense that there was something between her and Jakes, and I didn’t want to be the reason she ended up dead. There was enough of that on my plate the way it was.

“Dad never really adhered much to custom,” Devan said.

A smile stretched across Kacey’s face. “I didn’t know he was so powerful. There aren’t many who can keep the doorway open for that long. Supposedly, the Elder has some trick to hold it open, but then again, he’s the Elder.”

I didn’t know about his trick. And it was another part of my father that I wouldn’t get the chance to understand, especially if he was already gone.

“Well, he’s gone now,” I said, referring to the Trelking, mostly for Devan’s benefit.

“What did he want?” Kacey asked. Her breath was hot as she spoke and smelled a little like stale meat.

I had a sudden image of her in wolf form, standing over some dead creature, ripping at raw flesh, and tried to shake it off. “The usual. He wanted Devan to return and had an assignment for me.”

She tipped her head. “Why would the Trelking have an assignment for you?”

I twisted so that I could carefully look over my shoulder at the woman sitting alone in the booth. She didn’t look up as Kacey spoke, so hopefully she hadn’t heard. In most places, there wouldn’t be too many who would know anything about the Trelking, but the Rooster wasn’t like most places. I couldn’t know for certain whether the woman was some local simply here for dinner, or if she was one of the magical variety here for the protection of the Rooster.

“I was sort of his muscle,” I said carefully. I figured Jakes would have shared that with her. I wasn’t really certain why he hadn’t.

Kacey frowned. “But you’re a painter.”

“He’s the son of the Elder,” Devan said softly. “He’s more than simply a painter. My father has a habit of collecting people with certain abilities that serve his needs. I think he recognized Ollie’s gifts when he first crossed the Threshold. And with his other Painter not really panning out as he’d hoped, I think he was quick to latch onto our Ollie.”

Kacey nodded slowly as if that explained everything just fine. “What does he want you to do?”

“Only return something of his that I have no idea how to find. Supposedly my father was storing it here.”

Kacey glanced around the diner. “Here?”

It was a reasonable consideration and one I hadn’t really considered before. My father
could
have left the shardstone box in the Rooster. The diner was as much a place of his as the house or the shed, but somehow, I didn’t think it was likely that he would have left it here. There were too many people coming through for the Elder to have stored something of such importance to the Trelking here.

“Probably not here,” I said. “And I’m not really sure where. I don’t think Jakes knows, either.”

“Why does he want you to find it?”

I shook my head. “Who knows with him? But if I find it, he’ll tell me what he knows of my father.” It had been over ten years since I’d had any sort of useful information. The Trelking had never been willing to share his prescience, especially not when it came to my father. I wondered if it was a way of controlling me, or it could have been that he feared me knowing would distract me from whatever he wanted from me.

Kacey let out a slow breath. “Shit. Sort of makes it so you have to help him, doesn’t it?”

“Pretty much.”

She pushed back from the counter and slapped it with her open palms. “Well, let’s get you something to eat. What do you feel like? Burger? Fish? Steak?”

I snorted. “Come on, Kacey, do I really have to beg for the meatloaf?”

“Hey, it’s not on the menu every night.”

“Right. And Tom can’t whip it up for me.”

“He’s not back yet. He stopped by after dropping you off, but then he took off again and didn’t say where he was going. That’s not all that uncommon with Tom,” she went on, as if anticipating the question, “so you’re stuck with whatever I can make.”

I’d had Kacey’s cooking before. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the same. “Burger for me, then.”

Devan nodded.

“Two burgers.”

She disappeared behind the door to the kitchen. The bell over the front door tinkled, and I turned, somewhat surprised to see Taylor standing in the doorway. The fluorescent lighting made her hair look even bluer tinted than usual. Her normally olive complexion looked pale and a slight sheen of sweat covered her face.

When she saw me, she sighed and hurried over. “Oliver. I’m glad to finally find you. I’ve been looking for you for the last hour.”

I glanced at Devan before turning back to Taylor. “We’ve had a bit of a busy night, Taylor.”

“There’s something you need to see. I think it has to do with—”

“Can’t it wait?” I asked.

She shook her head. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. When I left you, I spent some time wandering around Conlin. There’s something you need to see.”

“It will still be there in the morning.”

“That’s just it.
That’s
what I want to show you.”

“You’re not making any sense,” I said.

“What you need to see is missing.”

I twisted in my chair to face her, not certain whether this was something I should even care about. Knowing what I did of Taylor, what she found could be any number of different things, but I had a nagging suspicion that whatever she’d found hadn’t been just any old thing. If she’d gone out wandering in Conlin and found something, that made it likely to be something of my father’s.

Devan must have come to the same conclusion. “Ah damn,” she groaned.

“Yeah. Guess I’m not even getting that burger.”

A
fter apologizing to Kacey
—she offered to wrap the burgers so we wouldn’t go hungry—we made our way out of the Rooster and back into the truck. The woman sitting alone in the booth cast a quick glance our way before looking back down to the table. It was strange, but no stranger than any of the other people we’d come across at the Rooster. Catching my reflection off the glass door, I realized that I looked pretty rough. I didn’t blame her for giving me a second look. She was probably glad we were leaving.

I looked around the parking lot of the Rooster, suddenly wondering how Taylor had gotten there. We only had the one truck and there weren’t any bikes. I didn’t see any other cars in the lot. “Did you walk here?” I asked her.

“I needed to find you,” she said.

I glanced over at Devan. “It’s like five miles from the house.”

Taylor shrugged.

“You and your damn mods,” I grumbled.

She’d probably managed to get from my house to the diner in under twenty minutes. The mods she’d done—the tinting of her hair and whatever else she’d done that I still didn’t quite know—gave her additional abilities, things that were almost like what Devan possessed. Nik had helped Taylor do the mods, but there had to be a cost. With magic, there was always some sort of cost, but I didn’t quite know what the mods had cost her. Normal painting required energy that took time to restore. Pretty simple: you work too many patterns and with too much magic, you’re going to have to rest and get some sleep. But her mods didn’t seem to work the same way.

“Get in,” I said, waving toward the truck.

She pulled open the passenger-side door—it wasn’t locked, this was Conlin after all and no one was going to steal Big Red—and climbed in. I pulled Devan with me around to the driver’s side.

“Don’t you find it a little strange that something went missing about the same time as your father crossed over?” I asked her under my breath.

“Jakes said nothing came through.”

I thought of the delay the Trelking had made in putting up his barrier to keep out the shifters. In the time that he’d simply stood there with the doorway open, what else could have come through but somehow managed to avoid detection from the shifters? That would take some sort of serious magic to hide from the shifters, but there was magic like that on the other side of the Threshold. Devan knew that as well as I did. The only problem was that we had no idea
why
the Trelking would have gone to such trouble.

At least we’d found another possible reason for him to have made the crossing himself. The fact that he had risked it had troubled me the most. Had he only wanted the box, he could have sent any of his little minions on his behalf. Hell, he could have simply sent a message. That would have been as effective as anything else. But he’d come himself, holding the doorway open the entire time.

“Something else came through,” I said. “That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Devan looked up at me, her mouth opening and then closing again. Finally, she said, “I’m sorry about him.”

I leaned toward her and gave her a lingering kiss. “Don’t be sorry. Without him, I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of spending the last ten years needing you to help me stay alive.”

“There is that.”

When we got into the truck, Taylor studied us. “Something happened tonight, didn’t it?”

I wondered how much she’d heard. Had her mods helped with her hearing? I suspected they augmented her eyesight and her strength, probably even helped her overall stamina somehow, but had the modding enhanced all of her senses?

“Yeah, you said something of my father’s disappeared.”

“I never said it was the Elder’s,” Taylor said.

“If it was interesting enough for you to go after it, then it was probably his. So tell me, where are we going?”

Taylor looked out the window toward the west. “The hill near the center of town.”

“That’s the old—”

She didn’t let me finish. “That’s where we’re going.”

I frowned at Devan, but she didn’t have anything to say, so I backed out of the Rooster’s lot and headed west.

C
onlin at night
was probably like every other small town. There were the usual streetlights giving a warm yellow glow, but they were staggered, the planners not bothering to design them too close together. In Conlin, it was mostly a comfort thing to have the streetlights. The city itself was pretty safe, and we didn’t really need one for every house. By this time of night—I figured it had to be heading on ten o’clock—most of the houses were dark. A few had lights on in the front window or the porch, and fewer still blazed brightly. We passed a couple of kids walking in the street and then near Thistle, passed an older guy on his bike. I made sure it wasn’t Tom as we veered around him.

The hill at the center of town had some significance to the city. Way back when Conlin was first founded, the earliest settlers had placed their homes atop the hill, giving them the wide view of the once-forested valley below. The river ran in the distance, though it had never been wide or swift enough for anything larger than a kayak or raft to travel on it. They had left a monument atop the hill, now called Settler Hill—yeah, real creative folk in Conlin—that memorialized that time. The monument was nothing more than a pedestal with a round metal compass pointing toward the north and a plaque laid into the ground beneath it. The compass had been there so long that I had never thought to look into it.

We started up Washington, a slowly winding road that led up the south side of Settler Hill. The truck rumbled, the lights swinging out and over the roofs of the town before pointing back at the hill. I hadn’t been to the top of Settler Hill since I was a kid. Since returning, there hadn’t been any reason to come up here.

I looked over at Taylor. “You climbed this?”

When she nodded, I could only shake my head. Climbing the hill, and then she still had energy to make it all the way to the Rooster. Mods like that couldn’t be all bad.

Devan nudged me, as if knowing what I was thinking.

As we reached the top, I pulled the truck to a stop in the small lot marking the overlook. A few houses still perched atop the hill, but mostly it was cleared, left as a scenic viewpoint with the marker for the city. I climbed out of the truck and stopped, peering out across the rooftops. The lights in the scattered windows took on something like a pattern, though nothing with enough regularity that it would create any sort of power. From here, I suspected you could see most of the city and knew why Taylor had come up here.

“You wanted to see if there was a larger pattern, didn’t you?” I said.

“I did. I thought I could figure out the rest of the pattern from here, but there’s nothing that I can see,” she said.

That didn’t necessarily mean that there wasn’t a greater pattern laid over the city by my father, but it sure made it much less likely. If Taylor couldn’t see it, then it wasn’t like I would suddenly manage to find a pattern that an artist—and not simply and artist, but someone practically an Arcanus Master—had not seen.

Taylor pointed toward a small slab of concrete near the ridge overlooking the city. A wooden fence kept people from attempting to climb down the other side, though plenty had been known to try. It wasn’t that Settler Hill was all that technical of a climb, but the north face was plenty sheer. A few had tumbled down it and broken bones over the years. I don’t know if anyone has ever died as a result, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

The slab was empty. It should not be.

“Ollie?” Devan asked.

I looked over and nodded. “Sorry. Just having childhood flashbacks. I haven’t been here since I was a kid. We’d come up here, sometimes riding bikes, sometimes with my parents back when my mother was alive, and sit next to the compass and look out over the city.” I made my way toward the fence and pushed on it. It wobbled slightly. Had it done that when I was a kid? It seemed larger then, too, but so much seemed bigger when you were younger. The house we lived in had always seemed plenty big when I was a kid. Now that I saw some of the manses people put up, it was barely more than a trailer home. “Sometimes I’d even come sit by the fence, my legs tucked beneath the lower slats and my arms curled over it, and stare out at the city. My mother always loved the view from here.”

Taylor stood near where the compass should have been. “It was here the first time I came up here when exploring the town,” she said. “After I heard you leave the house, I decided to see what else I could find in the pattern. This was the only location I could think of to get the view I needed.”

“Can’t fly yet?” I asked.

Devan gave me a sharp look and shook her head.

I studied the empty slab. The bolts that had once secured the pedestal to the concrete looked to have been sheered off, cut down at the base. There shouldn’t have been any way for the bolts to be accessed with the compass in place. Whatever had gotten through there had either been something like a laser or, more likely—and much worse—some sort of powerful magical creature had managed to remove them.

I dropped to my knees and ran a finger over the severed bolts. Six of them, placed in a circle, had been cut straight across. These weren’t just any bolts; they were each nearly an inch across. “What did this?” I asked Devan without looking up. “And can you tell why he’d want it?” The Trelking had to have been after the compass—I suspected that was his
real
reason for coming to Conlin tonight—but why? Why bother asking me to find some shardstone box, if what he was really after was the compass?

She knelt next to me. Without touching anything, I felt her magic begin to build as a freezing chill that washed over the medallion I wore. Whatever she did drew plenty of power. “I don’t know,” she said. “There was something here, but I can’t tell you what it was. It’s like it’s masking from me.”

“Other than shifters, do you know anything that can do that?”

Devan looked at me, her face close enough that I could smell the slight mint on her breath. Any other time and I’d find it kind of fun to be up here with her, nothing but the stars overhead and the lights of the city below. Tonight—and with whatever her father had planned—I wanted nothing more than to get my ass someplace safe. Out here, unprotected, wasn’t it.

“Ollie, there are plenty of things that can hide their power after it’s been used. I’ve seen you do it, so don’t make it sound like it can’t be done.”

“If I did it, there would be some sort of residue from the pattern.”

“You’ve hidden that before, too. Remember what you did when you were still working with Nik?”

I smiled as I thought about it, remembering a time when Nik and I had still been friends. That had been a pretty little piece of painting. My kind of painting wasn’t like what you’d see hanging in galleries or on the walls of museums. When I managed an effective painting, the only thing I really wanted to achieve was for the power I pulled through the patterns to do exactly what I wanted. Most of the time these days, it did. When I first started learning how to paint, that wasn’t the case. Paintings went sideways sometimes. It was easy for the pattern to fail, or worse, for the painter to get hurt. It was why new painters only worked in pencil. It wasn’t until after I left Arcanus that I’d taken to using inks. When working for the Trelking, I wasn’t given a choice. It was ink or nothing. If a painting went sideways, there were much more serious consequences, so you learned to be very careful.

“I remember. I wanted to make it so your father wouldn’t know it was me. We’d layered so many patterns around the palace that any one of them could have been the reason Nik got free. It was easier to claim ignorance.”

“He still knew,” Devan said.

With the Trelking, I suspected he would always know. “He still knew.”

I ran my fingers around the cut off ends of the bolts again. They were smooth, and cut flat with the cement. I grabbed a pinch of powdered ink—this time brown, making the choice to stay away from red and black—and made a single circle around where the compass had rested. With another pinch of ink, I drew a perfect triangle, anchoring around the circle. With an infusion of my power into the circle, I split my focus and sent the rest into the triangle. The combination created something akin to a summoning, a way for me to detect if there was anything else magical that we might have missed. It wouldn’t be nearly as powerful as what Devan did, but it could pick up on a different signature than she could manage.

The power pressed out through the painting and then disappeared. I’d picked up on nothing. That didn’t mean there wasn’t anything here, only that I couldn’t detect it.

“I tried something similar,” Taylor said.

I cocked my head and turned toward her. “What did you find?”

“Nothing. It’s like something tore it from the base,” she said.

I stood. A cool breeze came across the top of Settler Hill, blowing across me. I wasn’t wearing anything warmer than I’d worn all day. Basically jeans and a T-shirt. I missed my jacket, the one with all the pockets for storing ink and charms. Tonight, it would have been nice just to keep me warm.

“Did the compass look like something of the Elder’s?” I asked Taylor. It had been too long since I’d come up here. I didn’t think that it was his, but I hadn’t known my father had such a hand in so many things throughout Conlin. I wouldn’t be surprised if the compass was his, too, in which case, I could understand why the Trelking would want it.

“Not the Elder. There was a certain…artistry,” she said, almost puzzling over the word, “to the compass, but nothing about it screamed to me that the Elder had placed it here.”

“Then why did he want it?” I asked Devan.

“Who?” Taylor asked, placing herself between Devan and me.

I figured Devan would give her about the count of five before she pushed her away. She surprised me and turned away from her and went to the fence to look over the city.

“What did I say?” Taylor asked.

“Her father came for a visit tonight,” I said.

Taylor hadn’t heard of the Trelking before coming to Conlin. She might have worked with Nik, but I don’t think he’d let on about the Trelking or about what he ran from. Hell, he’d hidden everything about what he’d learned from the Druist Mage close to the vest, making it seem like the only thing he knew anything about was modding, giving Taylor a reason to work with him before he’d sent her out searching for my father.