Stolen Compass (The Painter Mage Book 4)

by Holmberg, D. K.

  “Then there’s the bit about him taking the compass,” I said.

  “He was with us, Ollie, so we know he wasn’t the one to take it.”

  “No, but I’d bet he knew it was happening. That’s why he left the doorway open as long as he did, but why? What’s the compass to him?”

  “That’s what bothers me. Jakes said nothing came across. Wouldn’t he know?”

  I didn’t know how the shifter power worked. Jakes had certainly seemed attuned to the doorway opening when we’d run into him in his yard. That had been the reason he’d shifted and bolted off, streaking away to see what had triggered the doorway to open. For him to not recognize something else crossing over seemed unlikely.

  “Well, shit,” I muttered.

  “What is it?”

  “The doorway. What if your father held it open for a different reason? We were thinking it was because he let something make the crossing, but that would mean that whoever or whatever crossed would have needed to sneak past three shifters. I’m not sure even your father could manage that. Doesn’t mean your father couldn’t use it for a different reason.”

  “You think it might have been a diversion?”

  It seemed as likely an explanation as any that we had. The shifters would have been focused on the doorway the Trelking held open, but what if another doorway had been opened, if only briefly enough for something to pass through? With the shifters attention so focused on keeping the doorway with the Trelking under control, would they even have known that another had opened?

  “I think we need to check the other doorways that we know of.”

  Now that we’d seen the one last night, I knew of three others, but only two that might be accessible. The third was still buried in the park.

  “Do we get our friend up?” Devan asked.

  I leaned around the doorway leading toward the living room. Taylor lay on the sofa, sleeping quietly. A pile of my father’s old books, mostly the ones written in some sort of code, lay all around her. They were about the only thing I felt comfortable letting Taylor access. If anyone could decode them, she’d be the one. “Nah, let her sleep. I’d like her help when we go back to the hill, though. We need to see it in the daylight.”

  We snuck out of the house, Devan moving more quietly, and stopped in the garage long enough for me to load up on charms and ink. The truck rumbled to life, probably loud enough to wake Taylor, and we backed out of the garage and started out of town.

  The last time I’d gone this way had been when Adazi attacked. The barn—or what had once been the barn—had been one of the doorways I knew about. Now that the barn itself it had fallen, I didn’t know if the doorway could still be opened, but it didn’t hurt to check.

  We cautiously approached the area where the remains of the barn were scattered. No one had been out to clear the debris yet. I didn’t know whose land the barn was on, but Jakes hadn’t seemed terribly concerned that someone would be sad about the fact that it had fallen. It had been in pretty rough shape already.

  The east wall still sort of stood. A pile of broken wood propped it up, angled so that it wouldn’t fall in like the rest of the barn. You could almost make out the angle of the roof as it sloped toward the ground. Shingles spilled around it, black mixing with the faded red from the barn sides. Some were burned, leaving an acrid scent from the magic used.

  I patted the steering wheel as we stopped. “Big Red barely survived the last time she was out here.”

  Devan popped her door open. “She’s not the only one, Ollie.”

  I climbed out of the truck and started making a circle around the outside of the barn. As I went, I trailed a thin band of green ink with me. Devan went the other way. From the cold medallion, I knew that she was doing something with her magic. It was comforting to me just knowing that she was there.

  I didn’t see anything during my search around the barn that would make me think something else had been through here recently. The fallen remnants of the barn were strewn all over, but no differently than they had been when Adazi had fallen. I sealed my circle and infused it, not really expecting anything.

  As the power flowed through the circle, I listened to the way it reverberated against my pattern. There was the sense of distant and residual power, and I could tell the way that Adazi had used his mark, the way that he’d pulled power through here. That was a distinct sense.

  There was another sense, and more recent. It was difficult to detect, but clear enough to know that the doorway had opened a few days ago.

  I trampled through some of the debris and made a looping arcane pattern around where the doorway would be. With a surge of power, I listened. The doorway bowed, starting to open, then exploded with a burst of light and energy that knocked me on my ass.

  “Shit,” I whispered, dusting myself off and standing.

  Devan had climbed up the remaining wall and sat nearly at the top, balancing easily there. She didn’t seem bothered by the fact that I’d nearly killed myself. Again. “What is it?”

  “Something came through,” I said, “but it wasn’t when your father was here.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. Whatever it was came days ago.” Long enough to make me wonder if her father had hidden something else that crossed over. Maybe I’d been wrong about the reason he held the doorway open.

  “Like when the compass could have gone missing?”

  I hadn’t thought of that, but now that she said it, it made sense. Just because we discovered it missing the night he’d crossed over didn’t mean it hadn’t been taken before that. “Why would your father care about the compass?” I asked. Even if he really wanted the shardstone box he sought, the fact that he’d crossed after the compass would have gone missing was too much of a coincidence. That meant the Trelking noticed—and cared about—its absence, but why?

  “There’s another question we don’t have an answer to,” Devan said. “How could it have been stolen before my father crossed and I didn’t sense it?”

  I didn’t have an answer to that. Or to why Jakes wouldn’t have been alerted to the doorway opening and something else coming across. Unless he had, and didn’t say anything, but that didn’t make any sense.

  We stared at the barn for a moment and then got back into the truck. On the way back into town, I stopped at the welcome sign on Highway 16. Like the other one, there was evidence that my father had helped place the sign, though this sign didn’t have the same brickwork that the other one did. There was a series of patterns behind the letters that you would only see if you got out and looked for them. As I studied them again, I realized that the patterns I’d detected before made up another pattern, this one larger and like the sign on the other end of town, anchored to the ground.

  “How many welcome signs are there leading into Conlin?” Devan asked.

  “I don’t know. Probably one on each of the major roads leading into town. But I can’t really figure out what he’s trying to do here.”

  “What does this one do?” Devan asked.

  She had powerful magic, but the patterns and painter magic weren’t things she knew about in the same way that I did. She could learn them, though. In the time I’d known Devan, she’d shown me that she could master patterns more quickly than I could, but there wasn’t any power bonus in it for her the way there was for me. With my patterns, they augmented what I could draw, the way I could focus. Without the patterns, there wasn’t much I could pull on my own. With Devan, she didn’t need patterns to focus. Her magic came as naturally as breathing. The Te’alan, like so many other creatures on the other side of the Threshold, basically were magic.

  “Protection,” I started, and Devan gave me a sour look, telling me I was being an idiot. “And this one,” I said, motioning to the pattern I’d missed before, “anchors this to the city. I don’t really know why he bothered.”

  “You don’t think they’re active?”

  There are ways to power a pattern and leave it powered, bu
t these didn’t seem to be that way. I couldn’t tell what he had done here, and I didn’t want to attempt to use them without knowing their intent. It could do something as simple as light the sign, or it could lead to something bad happening around Conlin. With my father, nothing would really surprise me.

  “Not active,” I said.

  We circled the sign, studying it for evidence of another pattern, but I saw nothing else.

  Devan and I got back into the truck and started back toward town. “The other crossing would be harder to use,” she said.

  I looked over at her. “Why?”

  “It has to be triggered from this side. That’s how you got over the first time.”

  We’d returned using the barn crossing, which was why we’d gone out there first. I hadn’t known that the other crossing had to be triggered from this side. “You think your father has someone on this side who would help?”

  “It’s possible,” Devan said. “But this side of the Threshold doesn’t really appeal to him. There’s no power here.” I gave her a sharp look and she shrugged. “Sorry, but it’s true. The painters here don’t even care what they can do. They don’t bother to learn the more powerful patterns. I think the only painter my father ever really respected was the Elder. Well, and then you, but he felt he had a hand in shaping you.”

  There wasn’t any denying the role her father had in my training. “I need to know how well your father and mine knew each other,” I said. “If we’re going to find this box, then we’ll need to know that. And we need to know if the other crossing was used, but we don’t have time to keep driving around like this.” I slapped the wheel of the truck, frustrated. The Trelking hadn’t given us a firm deadline, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one. He wasn’t the sort of person to wait. If we failed to find the shardstone box, would he send someone else? More of the Nizashi?

  “Let me go check out the crossing,” Devan said. “You need to go and talk to Tom.”

  I didn’t like the idea of separating, not with the likelihood that someone or something working for her father was out there in the city, but I had to trust that she could detect them if they got too close. Besides, we had only the next two days before the Trelking planned to return. We needed to get our asses moving if we were going to figure out what was going on before he got back.

  “Fine. But promise me you’ll be careful,” I said to her as I pulled to the curb.

  “Ollie… How many times have I saved you?”

  “On the other side. On this side, you’re more at risk.” I still didn’t know why that should be, but there was no question that it was true. Oh, Devan had saved me when I tried using the Death Pattern on myself, but other than that, she’d needed far more help than was usual for her. Maybe that was the biggest reason I was so uncomfortable with her on her own.

  She punched me hard enough for me to wince. “You’re an idiot.”

  She jumped out of the truck and took off running, racing off with something like sprinter’s speed. Devan wouldn’t get tired moving at that pace, and I’d seen her go even faster when she needed to. She disappeared around the corner, looking like someone out for a quick jog, except for the fact that she ran in faded jeans and thick-soled boots.

  I veered toward the Rooster. Tom hadn’t been there last night, but hopefully he’d returned by now. I had questions that needed answering, and it was time for him to help.

  8

  The parking lot of the Rooster looked more crowded than I’d ever seen it before. By that, I meant that there were at least five cars parked in the lot. I rolled in and parked next to an older white Chevy—the one car that I recognized—and hurried inside. After my time in Conlin and the frequency with which I visited the Rooster, I expected to recognize a few more cars, but none looked familiar.

  As I suspected after seeing the Chevy, Jakes sat at the counter working over a heaping plate of eggs and toast. I glanced at the others in the diner and saw a booth with two older kids sitting next to each other playing on their phones, an elderly couple eating breakfast silently, a man by himself in the back corner booth, and the same woman from the night before. She made a point of looking down at the table as I came in.

  Jakes twisted and nodded to me as I approached. “Morris,” he said between bites. “Figured you’d be out searching for the item.”

  It was a measure of how frustrated I was feeling that I didn’t manage some smart-ass response. “I’m trying. Did you know that the compass atop Settler Hill was stolen?”

  Jakes set his fork down and turned around to me slowly. “Say that again?”

  “Yeah. The monument atop the hill, that big old compass, was stolen. All the way down to the bolts. Nothing but the slab of concrete sitting in the ground now. Don’t know when.” I watched Jakes as I spoke. He kept his face composed, but the muscles along his jaw tensed slightly. “You didn’t know, did you?”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Taylor discovered it missing when she went to the top of Settler Hill last night. I thought at first it might have happened while the doorway was open. Devan and I thought something else got through, but you said it wasn’t possible.”

  “We would have known,” Jakes said. “Even shielded as he was, we still would have known if something crossed.” He turned forward in his chair and stared at his hands. His brow knitted slightly, and he let out a few soft panting breaths.

  “Yeah, that’s what Devan and I kinda figured. We thought maybe something came through another doorway while we were focused on the”—I glanced around the diner and lowered my voice, not really certain who might be listening in here—“on the Trelking, so we went out to the barn. Something came through, but not when the Trelking crossed. This was before.”

  Jakes glanced over at me. “That gateway was destroyed with Adazi, Morris.”

  “Apparently, not completely.” Jakes still didn’t react. Here I thought the shifters knew everything around Conlin, but maybe Jakes didn’t. “Whatever came through destroyed it, though. Won’t work to cross back over. Devan is looking into the other doorway we know about since it can’t be opened from the other side.”

  His eyes twitched, and I swear he started to shift before catching himself and taking a deep breath. “That is the one you went through?”

  “You knew that?”

  “We know when the doorways we guard are used. We’re… tied to them in a way.”

  That answered a little of the question that I had, though I suspected there was much more to it than what Jakes let on. “And you didn’t detect any of the other doorways around town being opened?”

  Jakes shook his head. “We can’t oversee all the doorways, Morris. There are more of them than there are of us. Even around Conlin, there might be crossings we don’t know about, that have been lost to us. It’s why some cross in spite of us watching.”

  Like me. And like the Nizashi. They would have had to sneak past whatever protections the shifters placed on the gates, as well. “So you knew when I returned.”

  “The moment the doorway opened.”

  “And you knew that I’d crossed over the first time?”

  “The Elder warned it might happen.”

  I froze. “Wait. You’re saying my father suspected that I would cross the Threshold, and that he told you—or more likely, your father—before he disappeared?”

  Jakes tapped the counter and then pointed toward the door. “Not here.”

  “I’m trying to find Tom to ask him a few questions.”

  “You won’t find him here. He’s resting.”

  I leaned over as if to peer into the back of the kitchen, but I couldn’t see anything. If Tom wasn’t here, then the reason I had come to the Rooster was basically shot, and I was only wasting time. I turned and headed back out of the diner, passing the kids sitting at the table tapping away on their phones. They didn’t look up at me. The woman from the other night made a point of not looking, almost as if trying to hide the fact that she was watching me.
I paused to look at her out of the corner of my eye before reaching the door and pushing it open.

  The gray sky left the day cool, and a northerly breeze gusted across the parking lot, slapping against my bare skin. Like last night, I should have grabbed a coat. My coat had other benefits, as well. I’d taken the time to sew a few patterns into it. Mostly protective works that would keep me out of most shit storms, but there were a few charms that I’d let Devan weave into it, too. I’d gotten away from wearing it while in Conlin. On the other side of the Threshold, I wore the coat most of the time. Over here, I hadn’t found the same sense of urgency, but after everything we’d been through, maybe that was a mistake.

  Jakes followed me out of the diner, and I turned to him when I reached my truck. “So what is it that you didn’t want anyone inside to hear?”

  Better to get right to the point given the timeline we were working with.

  I could detect Jakes working his magic with as a distinct change to the air. The breeze suddenly stopped, falling still and leaving me with a muted sense. Had he walled us in?

  Jakes’s muscular arms crossed over his chest, straining at his uniform. Aviator sunglasses hung from the left chest pocket. He wore a holstered gun and a flashlight, looking like any other cop I’d ever seen. I wondered how much of his uniform was real and how much he’d simply shifted into place.

  “You keep talking about the Elder as if he is like any other painter from that school of yours,” Jakes said.

  “Not my school,” I said. “They tossed me out.”

  “Yes, and you are better for it. With everything that you know of the Elder, don’t you think that he planned much of this? Do you not think it’s possible that he intended for you to make the crossing?”

  I considered Jakes for a long moment before answering. “You cared about your father?” It was a dangerous question, considering how his father died, but I needed to make a point.