A Catastrophic Theft

by P. D. Workman

  “Okay. If I’m blocking myself, then I can unblock myself.”

  Reg breathed long and slow. She focused her thoughts. She settled Starlight in her lap, intending to use his psychic powers to amplify her own. She put away her phone and looked into the crystal ball, where she had before seen Calliopia running away from home and joining up with Ruan. Reg was calm. She was focused. She was in that meditative, alpha-wave trance that would allow her to access her psychic gifts most easily.

  “Karol Blackmoor. I will find Karol Blackmoor.”

  Her mind didn’t stay in a calm, meditative trance. As soon as she voiced the desire, her brain exploded with data. Words and images and sound burst into her mind, not in sequence, but all at once, like a computer error log. Too much data to process. Reg pulled back, trying to harness it all, and then it was gone. Just like that, everything disappeared, and she was left looking at an empty room.

  “What the heck was that?” Reg demanded, furious with her brain for the change of tactics. Had her foray into the shadow realm or her rescue from it left her with permanent brain damage? Had Calliopia healed her or had she caused further harm in that flash of brilliant white light when Reg was restored?

  A fairy who had just come into her own was dangerous. Powerful, without full understanding or control of the powers that she held. It could take a few decades for her to settle down. And Calliopia was different. Reg didn’t have a lot of experience with fairies, but Calliopia struck her as having retained some of her former pixie nature. She was sly and secretive. She didn’t have the regal, stately bearing that her parents and Lord Bernier had achieved. She had run away from her family. Maybe the first time she had been kidnapped, but her desire to return home turned out to be little more than wanting to escape from the dungeon she had been held in. As soon as she had been free, she had run away.

  Maybe she had damaged Reg’s abilities because she didn’t want Reg to be able to track her down once she escaped again. So she shackled Reg’s abilities, leaving her too disabled to find Calliopia again.

  The ironic thing was, Reg hadn’t even tried. She had seen Calliopia’s escape in her crystal ball merely by chance, never intending to, and she had not attempted to follow or find her again. Her parents didn’t ask for help. As far as Reg knew, aside from the Papillon household, she was the only one who was even aware that Calliopia had left again.

  Too frustrated to continue with the fruitless attempt to find Karol using her psychic abilities, Reg got up and marched to her office to see what she could find on the internet.

  As she walked through the kitchen, a glass burst in the sink. Reg winced and went on without stopping to clean it up.

  Searching for Karol’s name had not turned anything up, but then, Reg hadn’t really expected it to. A pixie, even one who had left the realm, was not likely to have left much of an electronic trail. But the interview footage had provided plenty of clues when Reg examined it more closely. Organizations that Karol was working with were mentioned. The video footage of the streets where she searched for her sister revealed the names of other businesses and made it easy to track down the area it had been filmed in, whether that was where Karol was living or not. Once she got there and started asking questions, she was bound to pick up Karol’s trail.

  Reg painstakingly copied and pasted the various organizations and addresses into her phone and headed out. She needed to get moving if she were going to track Karol Blackmoor down and try to recover Sarah’s emerald. Time was running short.

  When she got to the dusty street Karol had been filmed on, it was even more dismal-looking in the sunlight than it had been in the night-time footage. She got out of her car and, taking a deep breath, tried to reach out to Karol Blackmoor. Not to find her, but to touch her mind, to try to communicate with her. If she were nearby, it would be easier. The farther away she was, the harder it would be.

  There was an immediate connection. Reg smiled in satisfaction. Karol Blackmoor was very close. She looked around, fully expecting to find her on the street, looking back at Reg. Reg couldn’t see her immediately, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t there. Reg could feel her. She walked slowly down the street, watching in doorway and alley entrances. She’d lived on the street. Not much; no more than she could help, but she had experience in staying out of sight of searchers. She didn’t try to communicate anything to Karol and didn’t try to enter her mind. She just kept in touch with it, like a game of warmer/colder. If she started to get farther away from Karol, she’d be able to tell.

  She was strongly tempted to speak aloud to Karol, to call softly to her that she was coming. She had to bite her tongue and keep from saying anything. She didn’t know how the girl was going to react when Reg confronted her. Reg wanted to keep the upper hand.

  Her eyes swept the gutter and the alleyways, places that a pixie, used to living in damp underground tunnels, would be comfortable. Their children and sentries played in the streets above the underground city. Karol would be quick to observe any behavior that was out of the ordinary or of concern.

  And then they were staring into each other’s eyes. Karol flinched and jerked back, ready to run. But then her muscles relaxed.

  “I know you,” she said softly.

  “You came to me. Asking for help to find your sister.”

  Karol looked around, as if waiting for someone else to appear. “Is she here? Did you bring her?”

  Reg blinked at her. “No. I don’t know for sure where she is. But I saw you on TV. I wanted to make sure that everything was okay.”

  Reg shifted, making sure she was close enough to grab the pixie in a flash. At some point in their conversation, Karol was going to realize that she was in trouble, and she was going to try to run. Reg had seen pixies disappear, but they seemed to need a running start, and Reg knew if she held on to Karol, she could not become invisible. Reg needed to succeed. For Sarah.

  “Oh.” Karol’s tentative smile dimmed. “I thought you had called her.”

  Called her. Reg knew by the way that Karol emphasized the word that, like find or seek, call was a psychic or magical action. Not call out or call on the phone, but call her. Reg shook her head slightly.

  “I’m sorry… things have happened. I haven’t had much of a chance to think of your sister. I’ve been worried about my friend.” She met Karol’s eyes. “You remember the woman who showed you to my house. Sarah.”

  Karol tried to move, but she wasn’t fast enough. Reg had been ready. She held Karol tightly by the wrist, ignoring the girl’s writhing and wailing. She held on for all she was worth. It wasn’t nearly as bad as when she had been brought back from the shadow world, at least not for her—Karol’s cries certainly sounded agonized.

  “No!” Karol protested. “No, you can’t. I need it. Don’t. Let me go!”

  “Don’t let you go? Don’t worry, I won’t.” Reg gave a grim laugh. “You have some explaining to do. I need that emerald. I need it right now, before my friend dies.”

  “She’s lived a long life,” Karol objected. “Much longer than humankind are meant to live. Her time was up many years ago.”

  “That’s not up to you to decide. You can’t just arbitrarily decide that someone is too old to live. And you can’t walk into someone’s house and steal their possessions. That’s what you did.”

  “No.” Karol again tried to pull away from Reg. “I was invited. I did not breach the woman’s home.”

  “You were allowed to walk through her house to get to mine. That’s not the same as being invited. Even if it was, that doesn’t give you the right to steal.”

  “Stealing is what humans do when they take stones out of the ground,” Karol countered. “They do not belong to humans. They belong to the piskies.”

  “Just because you live underground, that doesn’t give you the right to everything in the earth.”

  Karol looked at her with a stubborn expression. That was exactly what she did believe.

  “The emerald was Sarah’s and sh
e is dying without it. I want it back now.”

  “It is not here,” Karol said quickly. Far too quickly. Reg immediately knew she was lying. She pulled back the pixie’s shirt to see if she were wearing the necklace, but her dirt-smudged neck was bare. Keeping a tight hold on Karol’s arm, Reg patted her pockets, feeling for the stone. Karol kept twisting her body away, keeping her left side away from Reg, telling Reg as obviously as if she’d held up a neon sign where she was hiding it.

  Reg jerked Karol closer to her, their faces and bodies right against each other, then grabbed Karol’s left coat pocket. She didn’t care if she tore the jacket, she needed the emerald far more than Karol needed a coat in the Florida heat.

  “Give it to me.”

  “You are the thief! You! It is not yours!”

  “It’s Sarah’s. But she’s not getting out of bed again without it. I’m going to take it back to her.”

  Karol flailed wildly as Reg clawed at her pockets. Then Reg’s hand finally closed around something that was hard and heavy and clinked when she moved it.

  ⋆ Chapter Twenty-Two ⋆

  K

  arol shrieked as Reg pulled the emerald necklace out.

  Reg gritted her teeth, maintaining a tight grip on the pixie. Detective Jessup had told her that pixies had superhuman strength, and Reg believed it. It was like trying to hold on to a gorilla. But she was determined and focused every ounce of her physical and psychic strength on holding on to the pixie.

  “What’s going on? Let go of her!” Crowds were starting to gather around the two women. People seemed to think that Reg was beating up on Karol because of the way the pixie was wailing and writhing to escape.

  “Call the police!” Reg growled at a man who tried to step in and separate the two of them. “She’s a thief!” Reg brandished the necklace. “I’m not letting her go until I’m sure she’s not going to get away!”

  “It’s mine!” Karol screamed. “I didn’t steal it, it’s mine! It doesn’t belong to your kind!”

  “My kind?” the tall black man repeated. “What are you talking about?”

  “She’s crazy,” Reg said. “She doesn’t even mean you. Just get the police. Tell them to call Detective Jessup. This is her case.”

  “You should let go of her. She’s not going anywhere with all of these people around. They’ll make sure she can’t run.”

  “No way,” Reg said, teeth gritted. “She is not disappearing on me.”

  The black man’s look clearly communicated that he thought she was the crazy one, but he pulled out his phone and went about trying to get the police there and to get them to call Jessup in.

  Reg felt like she was going to have to hold on to the flopping fish forever, but eventually, Karol stopped trying to escape her, crying and whining and trying to cajole Reg into letting her go with promises that she wouldn’t run away or disappear. She just wanted to move her arm. Reg’s grip was hurting her.

  Reg just glared at her, keeping her eyes on Karol and her grip tight. She wasn’t about to lose the necklace or the culprit.

  A police car finally pulled up, siren blaring, and a couple of uniformed officers stepped out, growling instructions and trying to get things under control. They pushed back the crowd and shouted at Reg and Karol.

  “Step away from each other. Break it up. I want both of you to put your hands over your head. Come on, get them up.”

  Reg wasn’t moving. She wasn’t going to let go of Karol and she wasn’t going to put her hands up.

  “She’s a thief,” she told the male officer, the one closest to her. “If I let her go, she’s going to disappear. You secure her first and make sure she’s not going to get away, and then we can talk.”

  “You don’t want me to have to get rough, now, do you? Just let her go. Trust me, we can take care of this.”

  “You have no idea. I’m not letting go until you’ve got her in handcuffs.” Reg wasn’t sure that handcuffs would be enough to hold a pixie. What if she just disappeared in a poof of dust? But it was the only thing she could think of. Hopefully, Jessup would be there soon and would be able to tell them how to properly secure the pixie so that she wouldn’t be able to get away. Karol needed to be sent to jail and forced to live behind bars for a long time. Whatever magical power was required to hold her there.

  “She’s hurting me,” Karol whined. “I’ll stay here if you can just make her let me go. This is all just a misunderstanding. She just attacked me out of the blue. I have no idea what her problem is.”

  “She stole my friend’s emerald,” Reg said, holding up the necklace. “This is what she’s trying to get away with.”

  The woman cop gave a low whistle. “Isn’t that pretty,” she admired. “Where did you get it? I’d really love to put on some bling like that.”

  “It’s a family heirloom. It’s not just sparkly, it’s a real gemstone and real gold. Check your briefings, it was reported stolen. You must have some kind of record or information sheet you can access.”

  “That’s not real,” the woman said, laughing.

  “It is!” Reg insisted. “And we need to get it back to its owner right away. She’s dying, and it’s… it would really comfort her to know that we found it and could return it to her family. Please, you need to get Detective Jessup here. She knows all about it. She’ll confirm everything and she’ll know what to do to make sure that this… woman doesn’t escape. She’s really good at escaping custody. You don’t want to be the one to blame when she disappears into thin air.”

  “Let’s put them both in cuffs,” the male officer suggested. “That way we don’t have to know which one actually owns the emerald, if either one of them. We’ll prevent them both from taking off and Detective Jessup can fill us in on the situation when she can get here.”

  “It needs to get back to the owner right away,” Reg insisted. “She’s dying. She needs to know that it’s safe.”

  “That will wait until the scene is secured and everybody has been called.” The big, burly cop grabbed Karol’s free hand and twisted it behind her back in one swift movement. He patted her down one-handedly, focused mainly on her pockets and legs. Then he put his hand on her other arm, which Reg was still holding on to stubbornly. “I need you to let go now, ma’am.”

  “You have to hold on to her tight. She’s super strong and she’s tricky. If you don’t hold on to her, she’s going to get away…”

  He slapped the first bracelet over the arm Reg was holding, and then brought her other hand closer.

  “She’s not going to get away.”

  He was just about to slap the second cuff into place when Karol gave a sudden twist and a ferocious growl, ripping her arm away from him.

  Reg had maintained a tight grip on the other arm, knowing that Karol was going to do whatever she could to get away. The cop felt his quarry slip away, but Reg jerked Karol back, pulling her to the pavement in a heap. The cop looked at Reg in surprise, his mouth open in an ‘O’.

  “She’s—I just—”

  “I told you.”

  He was more careful the second time, bringing her hands together into a prayer position behind her back before trying to chain them both together again.

  “Okay, she’s secured. Now let her go,” he told Reg.

  Reg took a deep breath. “If she disappears the moment I release her…”

  “She’s not going to disappear into thin air. I have the cuffs on her.”

  Reg hoped she was right. She needed someone to say some kind of prayer or incantation to keep Karol there. Something more than Reg’s wishful thinking.

  She let go. Karol remained where she was, slumped on the concrete, crying softly.

  “Now it’s your turn,” the woman cop said briskly. “Hands up. Lace them behind your head.”

  Reg obeyed. The officer took the necklace away from her. “The police will hold this for now. It will be returned to the rightful owner in due course.”

  “Due course better be today, because she’s
—”

  “She’s dying. We heard that part.”

  Reg was tired and sore. Her whole body ached from trying to deal with Karol. Even holding them up to the back of her head made her arms shake with fatigue.

  “Why did you do this?” Karol cried as the two of them were marched over to the police car to sit on the curb while the cops took their statements and called their dispatcher for the various pieces of information they needed.

  “You stole it,” Reg growled. “Sarah is dying because you stole it from her. You had no right to go into her house and take one of her possessions.”

  “I needed it,” Karol insisted. “You led me to it. I knew when I walked into that house and felt it that that was why I had gone to you. Not so that you could look into your crystal ball. I needed the stone.”

  “Needed it for what? You already have a long life, right? You’re barely started in life.”

  “No, I needed for Alicorn. You would find her, because you are connected. The emerald would return her to the pixies. It would turn back her time so that she could be one of us, not one of them.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Reg Rawlins.” Reg heard Jessup’s voice, heavy with frustration and fatigue. “What have you done now?”

  “I found it,” Reg said with relief. “Get it from your cop friends. The woman. She has the necklace.”

  Jessup had been studying Karol with narrow, suspicious eyes, and the mention of the necklace made her snap her attention back to Reg.

  “What?”

  “This is the pixie who had it. The one that Sarah invited into her house. She left the ribbon and took the emerald. I don’t understand why she took it, but she thinks since it came from under the ground, that it belongs to the—to her people, you know?” Reg eyed the other cops, making sure they were out of hearing range.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This afternoon, when I went over to Sarah’s house, then Marian and I—” Reg realized that she was going too fast and Jessup wasn’t understanding because she hadn’t been filled in on all of the details in the proper order. Of course she was confused. She hadn’t been a part of any of those conversations. “We looked at the display case again, where the necklace had been displayed, and I saw a ribbon that had been missed by the investigators. Marian explained to me how the pixies swap when they see something they want. And we figured that it must have been a pixie and that she had gotten into the house because Sarah had walked her through the day that she came to see me to find her sister.”