Trickster's Girl (The Raven Duet)

by Hilari Bell

  "Of course. My father worked there."

  Kelsa took off down the quiet street, her heart hammering as if she was already committing a crime. But even if one of the street cams happened to be on—or more likely, someone who knew her mother was looking out the window—all she'd done so far was set off on a bike ride. With a strange boy. A really strange boy! That would get her grounded for only a year or two.

  And at least her mother would never call her "perfectly reliable" again.

  Kelsa ran the bike's speed up a bit in celebration, though not enough to trip a traffic sensor into report mode.

  ***

  They reached the campus in about twenty minutes; traffic was light this late on a Sunday.

  Kelsa even remembered where the museum was, though having little interest in the history of the Southwest, she'd never gone there. It was in the oldest part of the campus, housed in several well-remodeled buildings that had been built as private homes a few centuries ago.

  "Take your bike into the alley between those houses."

  She was driving so slowly that Raven hardly had to raise his voice to be heard through the helmets. "There are no cameras back there."

  The alley was only four feet wide, and very dark. When Kelsa turned into it, the bike's headlight illuminated several trash cans, and trash cans usually meant...

  The door was just in front of the cans. Kelsa pulled the bike past them and made sure it couldn't be seen from the street before shutting it off.

  In the absence of the headlight the alley became very dark. She removed her helmet, then took a few seconds to bring up her night vision, running her fingers through her flattened hair.

  "I'll let you in." Raven dismounted and handed her his helmet. "It will only take a few minutes."

  "What about the alarm?" Kelsa murmured. "And the security cameras?"

  "It won't be a problem."

  Even with her night vision engaged, she couldn't make out the details of the transformation. Perhaps it was too horrifying for her to want to watch closely. But only moments later a huge black bird struggled out of a pile of cloth and flapped upward.

  Kelsa shook her head. Either she was completely deranged, or the world was even more full of wonder than her father had taught her. And if she wasn't crazy...

  If the Native American spirits were real, what about other mythical creatures? Was she about to encounter dragons and vampires? And werewolves, oh my?

  She reached down and picked up the discarded clothing. The fabric felt real, with the rough softness of cotton and denim, the heat of his body still lingering in the folds.

  If she wasn't crazy, did the power to stop the tree plague really rest in her hands?

  Kelsa's heart was pounding. When the door opened, she jumped and barely suppressed a yelp.

  "That was fast!" She handed Raven his clothes and stepped inside, averting her gaze from his nakedness. "How did you get in so quickly? In fact, how did you get in without tripping the alarm?"

  "The same way I did the other night, when I first located the medicine bag." His voice held none of the fear that tightened her throat. "Someone who works in one of the upstairs offices likes fresh air. They leave the window open about three inches."

  "Even at night?" It was embarrassing listening to him dress. They were standing in a narrow hall, which led to what had once been a kitchen and now looked like some sort of workroom. A security camera hung from one corner of the ceiling, but its power light was dark. He must have handled it, just like he'd promised.

  "The window's fastened so it can't rise any higher," he told her. "And it's not in a place a human could reach without a ladder. But I had to tear the screen again, and that may raise questions, so I'd like to finish here tonight. This way."

  Alarms on the screen were unlikely. Kelsa followed him down the hall, through the workroom, and into a room filled with cabinets of pottery and informative signs. It should have felt reassuringly mundane, but...

  "This is creepy," Kelsa whispered. "Everything's so old."

  "Not all of it." Raven drifted over to a display of shiny black pottery. Kelsa had once been told the name, but she'd forgotten it. "Much of this is modern. Beautiful, though."

  Maybe he had reason to be a history geek, but still...

  "Shouldn't we get this over with?"

  "You're right, of course." He turned away from the pottery and led her through another room, where the walls were covered with maps and flat panels that contained clothing, jewelry, and small artifacts. Nothing looked like you could black-market it for millions, so maybe this museum didn't have high-tech security. Kelsa relaxed a trifle.

  In the next room a case of kachinas caught her eye—one in particular.

  "Was that you?" She gestured to a small statue of a dancer, masked in black, with black feathers dripping from his arms.

  Raven barely spared it a glance. "That's Crow Mother. She's not a bad woman, but she hasn't yet made up her mind."

  Hasn't yet? Kelsa's sense of reality fractured once more. "Hasn't made up her mind about—"

  Every com board in the building chirped at the same moment. Kelsa almost jumped out of her skin. "What the—"

  An eerie glow shone through the doorway to another room as a com board on the desk activated.

  "Museum of the Southwest." The woman's voice was crisply professional. "This is Tri-metro Securicorp, and we have an alarm activated in your building. Please give us your security code and password."

  "I thought you took care of the alarm!" Kelsa whispered furiously.

  "I did." Raven sounded concerned, but not nearly as panicked as he should have. "The big red bell by the front door hasn't—"

  "The silent alarm, you—"

  "Please, get on a board and give me your security code and password." Professionalism was giving way to impatience. "If you'd repaired your security cams, as we requested two days ago, I wouldn't need confirmation. But this is the third time in four months you've forgotten to notify us when someone was working late, and I must remind you that according to your contract one more false alarm will result in a raise in your rates. So if you're still there, you'd better get on and verify immediately, or I'll be forced to call campus security. Which, as you know, means an automatic fine."

  It had happened three times in four months? Kelsa took a deep breath to steady her nerves.

  "Don't do that!" she called. "I have Professor Hammond's permission to be here, and everything."

  "Who is this, please? I don't have a Professor Hammond on my staff list."

  "Well, he let me in," Kelsa said. "He said it would be OK. He had a key card."

  "It must have malfunctioned," the woman said. "But I still have to verify that he has access. Tell him to get to a com board, please, and give me his security code and password."

  "He's gone now." Kelsa took Raven's arm, pulling him back toward the door, but he didn't budge. "The professor just let me in to work on the signs. Extra credit."

  She pulled harder, scowling. Raven shook off her grip.

  "It's this way." He strode quietly through the doorway at the far end of the room. Kelsa glared after him.

  "Well, someone has to give me a security code in the next two minutes, or I'll have to call campus security," the woman said. "It's procedure. Would you come to the com, please? If you have a student ID, at least I could identify you."

  "I can't," said Kelsa desperately. "I'm, uh, I'm holding some glued stuff. If you'd just call Professor Hammond..."

  "I'm calling campus security. Now."

  The light from the com board winked out.

  Kelsa raced through the doorway where Raven had gone. "She's calling security! Where are you?"

  "Down here."

  She followed his voice into another narrow hall, and down a set of steep, winding stairs. The basement was clearly used for storage, and Raven was standing beside a pile of boxes.

  "It's in this one." He pointed to the second-lowest box in the stack.

  "I
don't care about your stupid medicine bag," Kelsa snarled. "She's calling campus security! They'll be here in minutes!"

  "Then we have only minutes," said Raven. "So you'd better get started."

  "I'm leaving," said Kelsa.

  "I'm not." There was no yielding in his face or voice. "Not until we've got what we came for. And if I get caught, I'll name you as my accomplice."

  "You wouldn't. I can't turn into a crow and fly out the prison window, like you can."

  "Then you'd better..." He sighed, his shoulders suddenly slumping. "No, I wouldn't. But we can get it now if you'd just get a move on. I won't let you get arrested. I promise. Please!"

  Kelsa took one step toward him, then rushed across the basement and dragged the first box off the stack.

  "You said you'd taken care of the alarm too," she grumbled.

  "And the alarm didn't ring," Raven said. "I still don't know how that woman knew we were here."

  He took the second box off the pile and put it on the floor. "It's in this one. In a tin box, in the front right corner near the bottom."

  When Kelsa raised the lid, the box was filled with other boxes and objects, probably priceless irreplaceable artifacts, swathed in ordinary bubble wrap. She plunged her hands through them with ruthless haste.

  "Why couldn't you do this? You could have had it out by the time I got down the stairs!"

  "I told you, humans caused the problem, humans have to fix it."

  "But this isn't magic! It's just moving a couple of—"

  Her groping fingers touched a metal corner.

  She had to lift out half a dozen anonymous bundles to extract it, and when she did the tin box rattled. It held several bits of worked flint, an old pipe, a sheaf of faded photos of people wearing the long hair and loose jeans of the mid-1900s, and a soft leather pouch about the size of a flattened golf ball. It was tied shut, the rest of the cord forming a loop designed to be worn around the neck. The few beads still stitched to its surface were about to fall off. This was clearly far older than the photos. Kelsa was afraid to touch it.

  "Come on!" Raven was looking at the ceiling, as if he could see what was happening above them. "I did some work on the leather when I was here before. It won't fall apart on you."

  Kelsa picked up the bag and squeezed it gently. It squished under her fingers, but the leather felt fairly sturdy. Still...

  "It's too old. It's probably valuable. We shouldn't handle—"

  The sound of a door opening in the building above wasn't loud, but it froze her in her tracks.

  "Tarnation," Raven muttered. "Nothing else for it."

  "What are we going to do?" Kelsa whispered. Visions of handcuffs and barred windows flashed through her head, even though in modern prisons the windows were covered with steel-threaded tempra glass.

  "Don't look so panicked." Raven was repacking the box. "We'll have some time before they get down here."

  Footsteps crossed the floor above them. The old boards creaked.

  "Can you shapeshift me into a raven too?" Kelsa asked, though remembering how horrible that had looked, she'd almost rather go to jail. "Can you—"

  "No," said Raven. "And a huge bird flapping around in here would make them a lot more suspicious than a false alarm with nothing out of place. Help me get these boxes back together."

  Kelsa flung the cord over her head and helped him replace the artifacts. Then they restacked the crates.

  "Now what?" she demanded.

  "Now we hide."

  Raven went over to an old closet and opened the door. Despite the long rolls of plasti-board, and more stacked boxes and bins, there was room for a couple of people inside. He bowed and gestured for her to enter.

  "They'll look there," Kelsa said.

  "Not if it's locked and they don't have the key."

  There was an old-fashioned keyhole under the doorknob.

  "You don't have the key either! Even if you did, you couldn't lock it from inside."

  Raven scowled. "Do you always argue like—"

  He stopped, listening. Footsteps started down the stairs.

  Kelsa shot across the room and into the closet, even though it was stupid, even though it would delay their discovery by only a few more minutes.

  Raven stepped in after her and closed the door. Even enhanced night vision needed a bit of light to work with. She couldn't see what he was doing, but he bumped into Kelsa several times as he knelt in front of the door.

  She didn't dare speak, even in a whisper, so Kelsa laid a hand on his shoulder. The muscles under the cloth of his shirt were tense, which meant he wasn't as unconcerned as he pretended. Which didn't exactly reassure—

  A soft click came from the lock, and the tension in his shoulders eased.

  How did he do that? Even if he'd had the key, closets weren't designed to be locked from the inside. Was she going to have to cope with even more magic than shapeshifting? The sound of voices came through the door, and Kelsa stopped caring about magic.

  "Nothing down here either." The woman sounded irritated. "I told you. Just some grad student coming in without the code. I bet she freaked when the desk paged in."

  "Then how did she get out?" a man's voice demanded.

  "Out the back door," the woman said. "She probably left it wide open. These kids don't give a carp about the trouble they cause for other people. All they care about is picking up their study notes, or their com pod, or whatever they left behind."

  "But Nadine's board shows the door closing after the alarm went off," the man protested. "It's logged as closed when she talked to the intruder at—"

  The door rattled as someone tried the handle. Kelsa's heart tried to batter its way out of her rib cage.

  "Eleven fifty-two. It hasn't opened again."

  "So maybe the sensor on the door is glitched," the woman said. "It wouldn't be the first time. I don't care what Nadine's board says. We've been through the whole place. There's no one here."

  "I suppose." The man's voice was growing fainter. "But it's weird."

  The voices receded into silence.

  "You might as well sit down," Raven said softly. "We should give them time to get away from the building before we leave."

  Kelsa was glad to sit down. Her knees were shaking. "Suppose they find my bike in the alley?"

  Raven shrugged. "Then someone must have left a bike there. There's nothing to say it's yours."

  There would be if they peeled the tape off her license plate. But someone who didn't know about silent alarms probably wouldn't know about license plates either, and Kelsa had tucked it out of sight behind the cans. They might well miss it.

  "How did you lock that door?" she asked.

  His laugh was warm and deep in the darkness.

  "You'd call it magic. But it didn't take much. The lock is designed to open, so it wants to."

  "But if you can do that, why didn't you get the pouch out yourself, the first time you broke in here? And don't give me that carp about magical rules, and a human having to do it. What's the real reason?"

  "The rules are the real reason." There wasn't enough light coming under the door for her to see his face, but he sounded serious. "I'm bound to them, or it all fails. Why do people these days swear by a fish?"

  "By a fish? Oh, carp."

  "A carp is a fish."

  "Not really. It's a euphemism. About sixty years ago, the people who didn't want anyone swearing on vid, or anywhere, really, got a law passed that you couldn't use bad language on the net either." Kelsa squirmed away from a box corner that was poking into one shoulder blade. "They got the software companies to put in a program that whenever someone typed in profanity, it changed a few letters. Which was stupid, because it still means the same thing."

  "It is stupid," said Raven. "But it's not new. They used to say 'tarnation,' but 'damnation' was what they meant."

  He'd said "tarnation," she remembered. And Jehoshaphat. Was he really that old?

  "It didn't work either," Kelsa
told him. "Because people started using carp or carpo, and frack to swear. So then the people who believe in dirty words decided those were dirty words too and tried to ban them. But by that time there was a new government in office, and they haven't been able to get the software companies to change their program again. They're still trying."

  "You're a stubborn folk." Raven's voice was full of amusement. "That will be to your advantage, on the way to Alaska."

  "I'm not going to Alaska," Kelsa said. "I told you I'd help you rob the museum, but that's it."

  "But you owe me. Because I kept you from getting arrested, just as I promised. The least you can do now is finish the job."

  "I owe ... You're the one who got me into this!"

  "Deeper than you know." Raven reached out and lifted the pouch, then let it thump down on her chest. "You're bound into the healing magic now. I mixed some of your father's ashes into the dust."

  "You what?"

  "I'm sorry if you're upset." He didn't sound sorry. "Atahalne would be appalled. The Dineh won't have anything to do with dead bodies. They—"

  Kelsa didn't care about the Dineh, whoever they were. "You mean my father ... his ashes are here?"

  "And that matters to you," Raven said calmly.

  "You bet it does!"

  "Which is why those ashes bind you into Atahalne's magic. Which will make it possible for you to use it."

  "You're crazy."

  But if he wasn't...

  She'd seen him lock a door without a key. She'd seen him shapeshift too, but somehow the small click of that lock had convinced her of his reality, of his magic, in a way that seeing him change hadn't. Perhaps because the lock was something real, something from her world. She didn't owe him anything. That was outrageous. But he had kept them from getting arrested. Maybe...

  "Where is the first nexus?" Kelsa asked cautiously.

  "It's in TuTimbaba," he said. "The lava fields north of here. Craters of the Moon, they're called now. There are lava tunnels there, perfect for an earth nexus."

  Craters of the Moon was in Idaho. "If all you need is a cave, how about Timpanogos. It's only about an hour's ride. We could do it tonight if you could find some way to get us in."

  Raven shook his head. "It has to be in the lava tunnels at TuTimbaba. It's not that far. Little more than a day on that bike of yours."