The Canvas Thief

by P. Kirby

  She studied his face, looking for some suggestion of guilt and finding none. “It doesn’t bother you? Stealing?”

  “If it bothered me, I wouldn’t do it.”

  Maya swallowed. “So what bothers you?”

  “Probably the same stuff that bothers you.” He took a small bite of pizza and chewed. “I don’t like to hurt people. I try not to lie.”

  “Try?”

  “Everybody lies. Sometimes lies are necessary. But I don’t like to lie.”

  “Me neither.” At that they both got down to eating, settling into the same comfortable silence that they had shared a day before. He leaned back into the couch, beer in one hand, pizza in the other. Maya did the same. Though she kept her face pointed across the room, she sneaked little glances at the cat burglar who sat on the couch with her.

  “So, what do you do?” she said after finishing off a second slice of pizza. He turned, eyebrows lifted. “When you’re not breaking the law?” she clarified, earning a slight smile.

  “I read. A lot. Crime doesn’t take that much time.”

  She smiled back. “What do you read? Mysteries? True crime?”

  He laughed. “I like Lawrence Block’s cat burglar series. But I read anything. Science fiction, Westerns, romance, literary stuff.”

  “Romance?” His handsome face picked up a definite reddish hue, and it was Maya’s turn to laugh. “You read bodice rippers?”

  He rubbed a hand over his face, pushing the hair off his forehead. “I like romantic suspense.” He shrugged, embarrassed. “I have a lot of time on my hands.”

  Maya brought her napkin to her lips, the touch reminding her of the kiss. “What about Adam?”

  At the mention of the man’s name, Benjamin’s smile faded and she saw a muscle tighten in his jaw. “You know what he does. He’s an ATF agent.”

  Taken aback by his change in demeanor, she took a breath before continuing. “Has he tried to stop you from doing what you do?”

  “I’m no more than an annoying blip on his radar. He’s got bigger fish to fry.” He spoke before she could ask him anything else. “So what do you do?” Gesturing around the room with the pizza slice, he said, “This is nice place. Your day job must pay pretty well.”

  “I’m a commercial artist. I work for—” She stopped. “Why do you ask? You don’t know?” she asked, thinking again of Adam.

  “I know you work for a local consulting firm called Famtek. I made the mistake of thinking the only thing I needed to know was your hours.” He winced. “If I hadn’t been sloppy, I would’ve found out you had a well-armed vigilante neighbor.”

  Maya grinned. “How’s your shoulder?”

  “Much better. I think the muscle damage has healed.” He rolled the shoulder gingerly. “All that’s left to heal is the superficial stuff.”

  Battling a strange impulse to touch his shoulder, Maya asked, “You heal faster than, er, ordinary people. I take it that’s because you’re…” She couldn’t bring herself to say, “A comic character brought to life.”

  His face clouded and he picked up the little plastic separator that kept the top of the box from touching the pizza. Maya watched, fascinated, as it danced between his nimble fingers. With an audible sigh, he said, “I’m immortal, Maya. All the Formed are immortal.”

  “No way. You think you can’t die.”

  “I know I can’t die.” The plastic separator stopped spinning. “Barring something extreme, like decapitation or being blown to pieces, I can’t be killed. And I haven’t aged.”

  “You know how crazy you sound?” Maya asked with a wry smile.

  “Is it any crazier than anything else I’ve claimed?” He took a long drink of beer.

  Maya thought about what he had said. “It sounds like a great deal. Never get old, never die.”

  “It’s not,” he said sharply.

  “Oh, come on,” she said with an incredulous snort.

  “Do you really want to outlive all your friends and family? Everyone you love? Do you want to spend an eternity making friends and losing them to old age and disease?”

  “Well, when you put it that way, it sounds—”

  “Miserable.”

  “Funny, I never thought of dying as a good thing.” She stared at the bottle in her hand, not really seeing it. “This is why you want to go to…EverVerse?”

  He turned, dark eyes filled with hope. “Everyone is immortal there.”

  Caught up in his intense gaze, she swallowed and said, “How do you know all this? About EverVerse and everything else?”

  “Adam. He found a book.” As he spoke Adam’s name, the light faded from his eyes. “An old book, written by a human, a Holder.”

  “Did you say ‘holder’? I don’t understand.”

  “Holders of the True Light of the Sun. They’re humans, dedicated to keeping magical creatures in line. I don’t know how Adam got the book. It should be locked up in the Holders’ library.”

  Maya pulled a face. “Magical creatures.”

  “Yeah, you know, demons, vampires?”

  Maya’s reaction was automatic. “There’s no such thing as demons or vampires.”

  He laughed. “Then who painted the Sh’ree demon’s portrait? The painting that hangs in your studio, by the door? It looks like your work.”

  Maya gulped. “I—” The denial died in her throat. The guy sitting across the table was a comic book character come to life. Or he thought he was. Arguing with him about the existence of demons was foolish.

  “I saw him in the Santa Fe Plaza, across from the Palace of the Governors. Since then, I’ve seen him around at least a dozen more times.” She took a deep breath and asked, “What did you call him? A She?”

  “Sh’ree. One of the oldest demons races and the most powerful.” Benjamin said this as though he were discussing something as mundane as American history.

  “So he is a demon?”

  Benjamin smiled and Maya felt her stomach flutter. “Yeah. At least that’s what most humans call anything they don’t understand. But the Sh’ree aren’t evil. At least, not any more than the average human.” He took another bite of pizza and Maya watched his jaw move.

  “His name’s Terrence.”

  Maya blinked. “Huh?”

  “The Sh’ree. His name is Terrence.”

  Maya laughed. “Terrence the demon. You’re kidding me.”

  Though his smile had faded, his gray-black eyes still emanated warmth. “His Sh’ree name is A’Tahransh Devar.”

  “Oh, Terrence. Got it.” She finished off the pizza slice before speaking again. “So if you can see them, you must have power.”

  “Less than you,” he said with a pointed look at Maya, “and more than Adam. I’ve never had any training, so I can’t do anything useful.”

  “Like transform lead to gold?”

  He let out a quiet laugh. “I don’t think that’s possible. But some sorcerers can do some amazing stuff.” His expression thoughtful, he looked at her. “Like imbue a drawing with life.”

  Maya’s jaw dropped. “Sorcerer, me? Even if that’s who you truly are, Benjamin Black in the flesh—” she winced “—I had nothing to do with it. Not intentionally, anyway.”

  He nodded and looked away. Maya got another slice and leaned back into the couch. She considered the numerous demons and other beings she had seen in her lifetime. If they existed, then there really was magic in the world. And if what the thief said was true, if he was truly Benjamin Black, then she was connected to this other side of life more than she’d ever imagined. Then she thought of her Uncle Andrew, and shivered. Is this, this hidden side of life, what had taken him from the family so many years ago?

  Finishing off this final slice, she resisted the habit of reaching for another. While her third sliced tasted good, it lacked the first-slice-melt-in-your-mouth goodness, a clear sign it was time to stop eating.

  Anyway, at the rate Benjamin was devouring the pizza, there wouldn’t be leftovers. Maya looked aroun
d the room. Delilah was making a slow circuit of her aquarium, pausing every so often to peer myopically into the room.

  “When…” Maya paused, wondering if she should broach the subject at all. “When did you first become Formed? How did it happen?”

  A ballpoint pen sat a few inches from the pizza box. Benjamin scooped it up. Seemingly unaware of what his hands were doing, he stared across the room, the pen whirling between his fingers. Maya watched it become a bluish blur and then disappear up his sleeve. Another minute passed, and she thought he wouldn’t answer the question. His hand twitched and the pen reappeared.

  “All of a sudden, I was in a diner.” He worked the pen’s mechanism with his thumb, clicking it in and out. “Poof, and I was in the Real.” He turned his head slightly and looked at Maya out of the corner of his eye. “The crazy thing is that nobody noticed. The waitress walked over, refilled my coffee and started flirting with me.” He shrugged.

  Maya blinked, surprised by the tiny spike of jealously she felt toward the waitress. “But how did you know it was the Real?”

  “The air-conditioning. I could feel it against my skin, cool, too cool, cold. I had never felt cold or hot before.”

  “Really,” Maya said, “you’d never—”

  “No. But the real kick in the pants was sex.”

  “Uh, sex?”

  “I went home with the waitress.”

  “Oh.” Maya looked away, assimilating what he said and her reaction. Funny, she didn’t feel this way about Adam. She knew Adam must have been with plenty of women, but it didn’t bother her. Trying to keep her tone cool and detached, she said, “You mean you had never…”

  “Had sex,” he said for her, bluntly. “No. Honestly, I never wanted it. Maybe it was a function of NeoVerse. Or maybe because I was the product of a kid’s unsexy imagination.”

  Maya squirmed. Her imagination hadn’t remained entirely innocent, especially in her teens, but the object of her X-rated fantasies was Adam, not Benjamin. That, she reasoned, explains my reaction. I just don’t see Benjamin that way.

  “I think I’d been Real a few months longer than Adam,” Benjamin said.

  “Yeah, I was so impressed with that drawing, I did a whole series of Benjamin art,” she said absently, her mind unable to shake an image of Benjamin and the waitress.

  “That drawing?”

  His tone shook her from her reverie. She turned and her eyes met his. Trapped in his dark eyes, she stammered, “Yuh-yeah. Now that you mention it, I remember that drawing, of you in the diner.” She snapped her mouth shut, suddenly unwilling to say more.

  “Can I see it?”

  She didn’t answer. How would he react to it? What if—

  “Your two weeks isn’t up, Maya. I don’t break deals.”

  “Okay.” She got up and headed for her studio. To her relief, he stayed in the living room while she retrieved the drawing. She pulled the sketch from the bottom of the drawer, and wondered if she should hide it somewhere he’d never find it. Of course, he’d know she’d broken the deal, when, after everything else was destroyed, he didn’t Fade to EverVerse.

  She sat next to him and held out the drawing.

  He shook his head. “I can’t touch it. Touching my drawing is like sticking my hand in fire.”

  That was why he didn’t steal any artwork that night. And why, later, he wanted her to gather up all the drawings. Rather than ask why—she’d asked so many questions this evening, her head was spinning—she set the drawing on the coffee table and they both leaned over it.

  The drawing depicted him from the chest up. He sat at a counter, facing the viewer. For Benjamin, the pose was positively gleeful. He leaned over, both elbows on the counter, his face propped up by his left hand, the right side of his face quirked up in a befuddled smile. The smile, Maya noted, made him look several years younger.

  “You know, I think that’s the only drawing where I drew Benjamin smiling.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t smile much.”

  “You should…smile more.” She offered her own smile as demonstration. “That smile is probably why the waitress took you home.”

  Benjamin turned his head, and because they were both leaning close over the drawing, his face was inches from hers. The expression in his eyes was unreadable, but not unfriendly.

  Maya met his eyes, suddenly aware of his proximity, the light scent of soap and laundry detergent. His gaze traveled down her face and back to her eyes and she wondered if he wanted to kiss her.

  I wouldn’t stop him, she realized. The sudden silence focused her senses on the man next to her. All blood and reason must have left her head, because she forgot this was the man who’d broken into her house. The leather couch pressed against her thighs, close to the fierce heat that started to burn between her legs.

  He turned abruptly away and then stood. “I’ll remember that. Smiling. When I’m in EverVerse.”

  “EverVerse,” Maya said, not quite sure why she sounded dismayed.

  Benjamin headed for the door, but she didn’t follow.

  “Ten more days, Maya.”

  “I’ll figure something out, Benjamin, you’ll see.”

  “Bye, Maya.” The door opened and there was a pause, but Maya said nothing, her mind still too addled by the lust surging through her body. The door shut and a minute later Benjamin’s noisy car roared to life.

  Chapter Twelve

  Internet search engines, when given the keywords “made flesh” came up with an assortment of useless results, the majority referencing the Bible. “The Formed” picked a host of information on pottery and mold making. Maya spent a good part of the morning trying every possible combination of the words and phrases that Benjamin had mentioned. The only thing that seemed even remotely promising was a vague mention on a conspiracy site, where Holders of the Light were described as a branch of the Illuminati. She peeled a pink sticky note off its pad and crumpled it slowly, each little crunch sending a satisfying little frisson through her skin and up her arm. Uncurling her fingers, she studied the crushed note. Did everyone feel little vibrations in their blood, tiny earthquakes set off by the crunch of paper fiber under their fingers? Or was this a function of the magic that supposedly ran through her blood?

  I’m a freak. Chucking the destroyed sticky note in the waste bin, she searched again, this time for the name Adam Richards. Not an unusual name, Adam Richards gave her pages of results. On the eleventh page, she spotted a reference to a newspaper article. The link opened to an archived article in the San Diego Tribune.

  “Veteran policeman George Jimenez was shot and killed following a chase down Market Street.”

  Maya read, seeing nothing of interest until midway through the article. “His partner, Adam Richards, received minor wounds and was treated on scene.” Adam and his partner, George, hadn’t been involved in the car chase. Instead they’d been returning to their squad car after picking up dinner at a fast-food restaurant. The killer, a man named Tom Jackson, had plowed his stolen car into their squad car. George Jimenez was fatally wounded in the shootout that followed. The article noted that Adam Richards was a rookie cop, wearing the blue for only five months.

  The only Benjamin Black she found lived in Des Moines and was a World War II veteran. Then Maya remembered Adam’s comment about twenty dollars and the internet. An ad for something called “ID 4 Sure” had popped up when she’d searched for either Adam or Benjamin.

  Adam was wrong. It cost her a cool fifty dollars to get the complete background, including credit references and all last known addresses for the past ten years. She confined her search to men in the twenty to thirty age group. Even then, there were too many Adam Richardses to choose from, so she narrowed the location to San Diego. That worked; she found an Adam Richards who’d been employed by the San Diego P.D.

  If his credit was any indication, Adam was a good catch. His credit cards carried no or low balances and he never missed a payment. He had lived in San Diego for six yea
rs before moving to his current address in Phoenix.

  Benjamin, in contrast, was a waste of fifty dollars. All her money bought were a couple of addresses in San Diego. The first was an apartment, the second probably a house, judging by the addresses. He’d moved into the apartment five years ago and before then there was no known address. He had a California driver’s license and his birth date was listed as April 23.

  The cursor skated over the screen as Maya arranged the two men’s profiles so that they were side by side. Maya picked up the phone and dialed Roland’s extension. “You busy?”

  “Swamped.”

  Five seconds later, Roland appeared in Maya’s cubicle, his body language happy as a dog about to receive a juicy steak. “You know,” Maya said, “if you were busy, it could wait.”

  “Is this about your two men of mystery?” When Maya nodded, Roland said, “Then it can’t wait.” His teeth flashed in the glare of Maya’s computer. “I’m an old married man. This is the most excitement I’ve had in years.”

  “Eric will love to hear that,” Maya said dryly. She scooted back from her computer and pointed at the screen. “Look at their addresses.”

  Roland leaned toward the screen, palms on the desk. “Yeah, so…?” His head shook in slow confusion and then realization spread amazement over his face. “San Diego.”

  “San Diego.”

  “You set your comic in San Diego.” Roland slipped his hand over the mouse and scrolled down Adam’s information. “A cop.” His black eyebrows rose to a peak above his nose. “That’s one freaky coincidence.”

  A deep shudder ran through Maya, as if the stew of emotions—denial, acceptance, shock—was trying to break through her temporary shock.

  Her father, a doctor at a small, low-cost clinic, had been a workaholic and family vacations were rare. When Maya was growing up, the only vacation the Stephensons took was an occasional visit to San Diego to visit her mother’s sister. Maya had used her memories of San Diego, taking liberties with the details, but still keeping the essence of what she thought was San Diego, and based Adam and Benjamin’s adventures in the city.