"Painting room?" Holly whispered as they walked through the back room, divided between Angela's gardening supplies and new items for the shop that had to be unpacked and assessed, and either priced or refurbished before going on the shelves.
"Painting room." He kept a grip on her hand as they headed through the shop and up the stairs, but walked before her. Just in case.
Maurice imagined he felt and maybe even heard the big old house breathing, relaxing a little as the two of them climbed higher. On the third floor landing, he considered calling out to Angela, but common sense said that if she was in trouble to the point that the defensive net of the house shut people out, then she probably wasn't in any condition to talk, or maybe even hear him.
Holly pointed to the right when they reached the landing with the door to the first library on the right and the door of the painting storage room on the left. Both doors were open, and that wasn't a good sign. Maurice nodded that he understood. The winkies had lit up the painting room, though, so he decided to go in there, first. Granted, there were some books in the inner, magically sealed room of the library that could cause problems if they were handled the wrong way. But Angela was up to taming any book, no matter how much inimical magic or how many inimical magical people might be stored in it.
Unless she had been hurt so badly by something in the painting room... No, he wouldn't think of that. He would concentrate on a positive image. Angela safe and laughing and a little embarrassed over whatever had happened.
The winkies circled a painting that sat on a crate near the doorway. They kept trying to light on the frame and then flittering off again almost immediately. No wonder, Maurice decided a moment later, when he narrowed his eyes and separated the agitated red light of the winkies from the agitated red haze of magic coating the frame.
Then he saw the two hands gripping the bottom of the frame, the knuckles white and the tips of the fingers turning purple from trapped blood. He lunged forward, going to his knees on the crates, and grabbed hold of Angela's wrists. A hot sheet of irritated, strained magic wrapped around him, yanking the breath out of his lungs for a moment.
Angela looked up at him, pale and sweating, her lips bitten through and bloody, her eyes wide. Maurice nearly roared from the sudden stab of fear that cut through him. Angela's customary serenity was entirely missing--she was afraid and in pain.
"Hold on, Angie-baby," he growled, and threw himself backwards, using all his weight to yank her up and out of the painting.
Holly shouted. Behind him, he was vaguely aware of running feet, thudding on the landing and then down the stairs.
Maurice gritted his teeth and leaned backwards when the painting's magic got stubborn and resisted him. For a precious couple of heartbeats, Angela hung in mid-air, stretched between Maurice's grip and the painting's, still caught in it from the knees down.
At last something snapped, and there was a smell like ozone and hairs caught in a blow dryer. The two of them went tumbling toward the door of the painting room. Angela landed on him, her elbow in his gut, and Maurice saw stars when the back of his head hit the edge of a crate.
"You...okay?" he gasped, trying to convince his diaphragm to resume working and let him breathe.
"Maurice." Angela nodded. Sweat coated her face and darkened her hair. She closed her eyes and took a couple deep breaths. "Thank you."
"Hey, what are pals for?" Then he realized something was wrong. Missing. "Holly?"
"They took her." She staggered to her feet and past him.
Maurice turned over and got up, and saw the doorway and landing were empty of Holly.
"Who?" He held out his arm and swallowed against a howl of anguish that wanted to come up his throat when she actually took his help to steady herself.
When did Angela need help from anyone?
"Whoever broke in. I've been thinking the whole time I was hanging there," she said as they hurried down the stairs as fast as her shaking legs would allow. "They came into the shop while I was still open for business and hid. Then something distracted me, someone who understands magic got me to lose touch with the shop."
She let out a little snort when Maurice stared at her and actually came to a stop halfway down the flight of stairs between third and second floor.
"Exactly." They resumed their flight down the stairs. "I was unbalanced enough by that, I didn't notice their presence until I did a full, conscious scan of the shop." Her legs were steady and she had regained her normal color by the time they reached the ground floor.
The front door of the shop hung open. Holly stumbled back inside at that moment. She looked furious and unharmed. That was all that mattered to Maurice for a few heartbeats.
"They made me open the door for them!" Her shriek ended on a growl that made him think of the first time he saw her when he visited her dreams, dressed to play a Hollywood-style Robin Hood game. "Angela, are you all right?"
"They knew you had a passkey." Angela frowned and led the way to the main room, where the dimensional slits came open and released hot cappuccinos for them. "I was wrong again. They were prepared. Or else they knew enough to guess that was how you got in when they couldn't get out."
"Speaking of getting in." Maurice quickly explained how they had gotten back to the shop so quickly. In moments, Angela had released the protective net to let the other Fae and Lanie and her friends into the shop.
Lanie saw the first book, lying in the shadows at the bottom of the stairs, open and face-down, with its pages bent. Felicity hurried up the stairs and found another one that looked like it had been dropped during a hurried exit, and Lori looked outside and found two more.
"So they were here for books," Angela mused, when everyone had settled down in the expanded coffee shop portion of the front room. She looked around the room and offered a crooked smile, blushing a little. "Thank you. All of you. It's been...quite a long time since I was the damsel in distress and needed some rescuing. Not a pleasant experience at all."
"The question is whether they got away with any books, or they were in such a hurry to escape they dropped everything," Bethany said. "Do you need help cataloging, checking what's there?"
"I won't know until I actually get up to the library and see how far they penetrated. But thank you."
Harry and Guber, who were talking about starting a Fae security and investigation business together, insisted on treating that night's incident in an "official" manner: going over the chronological sequence of events and taking test samples of the magical atmosphere; recording the magical resonance; and exploring the memory built into the protective net surrounding the shop, to see if they could get any clues.
Maurice realized how much the last hour had shaken him, when it struck him that ordinarily he would have made a few teasing remarks about how they conducted the whole investigation.
In the middle of it all, midnight came, and he was yanked away from the discussion to be shrunk and squeezed back down to the six inches and wings of his exile. After spending the day as an ordinary mortal, the return of his magic, even though greatly reduced from his normal levels, was a relief that nearly brought tears to his eyes.
He flew around the shop, sinking halfway into the walls to get a taste of the magical resonance of the building, taking his own tests, gathering his own impressions. When he had done all he could think of, he settled down on Holly's shoulder to report to the others. He wasn't above admitting that there was some comfort in the sweet strawberry scent of her hair, and the feeling of her pulse in her neck. Now that everyone was safe, he had time to feel terror on Angela's behalf, frustration at not having his magic available to help her, and fear that someday danger would wrap around Holly and he wouldn't be able to defend her.
* * * *
Angela worked through the night, until past dawn, checking the library for any damage both physical and magical, and then checking the inventory. She worked her way in, from the least magical and alert books to the ones that had taken on a life of th
eir own. Lori and Epsi insisted on helping her, along with Bethany and Holly. Angela wondered if they suspected she took on the task to avoid going to sleep and possibly dreaming.
She suspected now that last night's dream had been part of tonight's events. Either the dream had been triggered by someone testing her magical defenses, or the dream had weakened and distracted her. The enemy, who had been watching all this time for such an opportunity, took advantage of it.
Ironically, though they had the least amount of magic, Bethany and Holly were the most help. Holly knew books, and Bethany had grown up in the shop, since Angela was her godmother. They were able to wade through the piles of books that had been toppled from their shelves during the thieves' search, pick up a book, and know its specific place on the shelves. That kinetic sense or memory helped shorten the time it took to identify which books were missing. Lori and Epsi concentrated on the protective spells enfolding the library. When they found a damaged thread in the protective net, they rewove it and strengthened it. A side effect of that repair work was to let the books "go back to sleep," as Holly put it. They had been disturbed by the poking and prodding and picking of the intruders, and faint shimmers of magical dissonance sometimes rippled out of them during the cleanup.
By the time they finished with the outer library, Guber and Harry and Brick returned from Guber's workshop, with the components of an invention he had been tinkering with in response to a crisis in the Fae realms. As always happened when he worked on one problem, he came up with spin-off designs and applications. With the help of the recording and filtering devices Guber had been refining, the plan was for Angela to look backwards time-wise, to identify and see the books that had been stolen. By figuring out how the thieves had chosen the books they took, maybe she would be able to decipher what they had been looking for and what they wanted to do with the books.
They finished doing the scan of the outer library just after sunrise. Lanie and Felicity showed up with breakfast, and Kurt arrived not long after with a burglar alarm he had designed for Divine's Emporium. Angela was just tired enough to feel a rebuke forming on her lips. If magic couldn't protect her shop from intruders, what did Kurt, with all his mechanical abilities, think he could do?
Angela knew the answer to that question almost at the same time her tired mind and frayed nerves asked it. Kurt had a gift for making machines work when they had no right or reason to work. He had rebuilt a junker car during his junior year of high school, using all materials he had scavenged for free from junkyards. That car purred for him, and wouldn't even turn over for friends who borrowed it.
Lanie had told Angela about a time she, Kurt, and Felicity had gone on a picnic in the quarries north of the Metroparks. They were all in high school and middle school at the time, and her two friends were still living at the Neighborlee Children's Home. Whenever they thought they had developed a new angle to their unusual talents, they went to the quarries for privacy to experiment and practice. This time, some college-age bullies had encountered the three teens, and one of them stole the carburetor from Kurt's car, in an attempt to trap them. With Kurt driving, that car started up and sped out of there without any trouble.
"What are you going to do to your alarm to make it impervious to their magic, if they come back?" Angela asked Kurt, as he spread out the pieces of his newly built gizmo on the long table that had been set up in the main room of the shop for their breakfast. It occurred to her then--again late--that she should feel flattered and touched that he had gone home and stayed up all night to build this for her.
"Well..." He shrugged, and colored a little, and glanced at his girlfriend, Jane, who had just come through the door. "It's a passive system. With luck, it'll have so little reaction that these slimedogs won't know they've been spotted. We figured if they're using magic to blind you to their presence, they might not be looking for an old-fashioned burglar alarm. If you're warned, they can't zap you again."
Angela laughed, partly from weariness, and partly in amusement at herself for not having thought of that before. That was what friends were for, she decided, and delighted in kissing Kurt on the cheek and making him blush even darker. She was even more touched, to the point of tears--that could be blamed on exhaustion, though--when she learned that Kurt and Jane had receivers set up in their homes, so they would know Divine's Emporium was under attack again, and they could come to help.
Lanie and Felicity finished setting up breakfast during Kurt's explanation of how the alarm system worked--heavy on hot chocolate and chocolate mega-muffins, in recognition of Fae dietary needs--and everyone gathered around in time to hear most of it. They immediately demanded their own receivers, so they could take turns being on the alert for Angela and Divine's Emporium.
John Stanzer, the town's sole, resident private investigator, came in during the last part of this, with Dawn Dover, his assistant and fiancé. Their joining the group this late in the process required backing up and explaining what had happened and what had been found. Angela let Maurice and Guber do the explaining, while she watched Stanzer and Dawn.
She blamed the long night and the strain of everything that had happened, but only partly, for the feelings surging through her when she looked at Dawn and Stanzer. They had been betrothed as children, in another world, another dimension, before they were sent to Earth for safekeeping. Their dimensional guardians, the Hounds, had separated all the children sent through. Dawn and Stanzer had been separated by time as well as distance. At home, he was only a few years older than her, but here on Earth he had just turned thirty and she was seventeen, a high school senior. The age and time difference constantly threw up barriers between them, and Angela sometimes wished she could knock some heads together--she wasn't quite sure whose--and order someone to have some pity or mercy or common sense.
Maybe her exhaustion made her imaginative, or maybe it tore down some barriers in her heart and mind and memory, but Angela felt an especially strong sympathy for them. As if, somewhere in her misty past, she had suffered the same kind of loss and separation and deprivation. Someone was out there for her, too, and she couldn't be with him. She knew she had a true love, her eternal destiny and soul mate, but was unsure if they had met and been separated, or he still had to arrive in her life.
If I dare go to sleep, will I dream of you? she mused, while listening as Stanzer and Dawn volunteered their skills in the search for the missing books and the thieves. The thought of perhaps seeing her true love, hearing his voice--determining once and for all if he was real or just a wish-dream--was almost enough to drive away the uncharacteristic fear of dreaming that had gripped her more than a day ago.
Chapter Three
By mid-afternoon, the middle and inner libraries had been searched and time-recorded. Both doors were locked, magically as well as physically, when Angela's team got to them, but they showed signs of having been attacked on both levels. It disturbed her more than she liked to admit, to discover the thieves had locked up after themselves. Did they have that much confidence in hiding their tracks? Or had it been the plan all along to toss her through that painting into a world that would eat her alive?
The middle library had less mess to clean up. Whereas the outer library was missing four books, and all the books that had been found in the wake of the departing thieves had belonged on those shelves, the middle library was missing eight books. Maurice opened the door of the inner library, and the magic released its usual shower of sparks as the seals were broken.
"As far as I can tell," he reported, after backwinging to land on the top edge of the laptop that controlled Guber's security and tracking gizmos, "nobody got this door open. They tried, but maybe they were still working on it when we showed up, and they ran."
"That's what I think," Angela said. "But better safe than sorry."
Only after they searched the room, which seemed to be exactly the way she had left it, did she admit she feared she had been wrong in her assessment. And only to Maurice.
; Guber's gizmos were able to go backwards in time almost an entire day, getting images of the intruders and then backtracking them to show how they had come into the shop. The entire time, they had worn their black clothes and masks.
Angela found it odd that the thieves bothered to wear masks at all, when all the other customers in the shop who encountered them didn't seem to see them, or at least didn't react to them wearing masks and looking like refugees from a bad Ninja movie.
"My guess is that they had talismans from someone with some magic, to make them invisible. But either the people providing the talismans weren't sure they would work," Lori said, when she came to look at what Guber had found, "or the thieves themselves didn't trust them to work. Maybe they didn't quite believe in magic to begin with."
"Just add it to the things we have to ask them when we find them," Harry said with a sigh. He groaned, but cracked a grin, when an enormous list appeared in green and blue sparkles in the air above the computers he and Guber had labored over. A notation to "interrogate the creeps" appeared in Guber's very distinctive scrawl before the list winked out.
Dawn took over then, printing out and making electronic copies of pictures of the stolen books, taken from the images Guber had harvested magically and stored in his computer. She double-checked the inventory, ridding from her list the books that were still on the shelves, leaving only the titles and images of the missing books. She called in Athena Longfellow, the local computer guru and Internet wizard, to begin a search for all the places where the thieves might go with their stolen books.
They could have been hired by someone to steal the books from Divine's, in which case there might be Internet records of conversations in chat rooms or messages left on Internet message boards. Or they might have stolen the books to sell them, not knowing how valuable they were and how much real magic they actually contained. In that case, they could be on a multitude of bulletin boards for magic-users or even rare book dealers.
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