Stolen Compass (The Painter Mage Book 4)

by Holmberg, D. K.

  I released the power I’d been holding and turned to her. “There’s power here, but it’s not what I was expecting.” Devan arched a brow at me as she waited. “It’s Te’alan power, but funneled through a painting, made with marks here,” I said, pointing to an indentation along the folded door, “and here,” I finished, pointing to another series of indentations. They were patterns, as surely as anything I ever made was a pattern, but different from anything I’d ever made, more like what Devan did when she made my charms or when she’d made that box that now contained tiny Nik. Unlike what Devan did, power could be infused into these patterns.

  Devan leaned over them and ran her finger along the metal, letting it glow softly as she did. She stopped as she neared the deepest indentation. “Well, fuck.”

  Devan slammed her fist against the metal door, leaving it even more dented than it had been before. She stalked along the side of the door, her magic flaring as she went. When she finally stopped, she looked back at me.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing much,” she said. “Only my brother.”

  12

  I jumped as Devan slammed her fist against the metal door again and left the storage unit. I glanced at the ground again, wondering what could have been here and who might have placed it there. The only person with painter power strong enough to hide something in Conlin had been my father, but why would he have used a shed like this when he had his house and the shed at Jakes’s place?

  I ran after Devan. “I thought your brother was gone.”

  “So did I. Father made it sound like he was lost.”

  Lost meant many things to the Te’alan, but in this case, we had thought that Devan’s younger brother, Brand, had been lost while fighting along the front lines. Many Te’alan were lost there, and he’d been serving as the Trelking demanded, determined to learn enough to come back and serve at his father’s side. Once, Devan would have been expected to serve a similar fate, but she’d been essentially reassigned when I showed up, and then again after she was betrothed to the Druist Mage.

  Brand had always been a little off, but I was never able to quite explain why I felt that way. I didn’t know him all that well—he’d been lost too soon for that—but he’d pestered me about painting, and tried to understand what I did, and how it was different from what the Te’alan could do.

  “This your father’s idea to hide him from us?”

  “Probably,” she said, shaking her head in a way I knew meant she was angry.

  “Why hide him from you?”

  “Why does he do anything, Ollie?” she asked. She almost reached the fence but stopped, turning and sniffing at the air.

  “You think he sent him through while he distracted the shifters?” I asked.

  “Hell if I know,” Devan said. She started away from the hole in the fence, and I followed her, frowning. “Why him? And why would my father send him if he was only going to demand you find this box?”

  The Trelking would have multiple layers of reasoning. It could simply be that he wanted something else in addition to the box, or that he wanted to make certain that we didn’t fail finding the box, or maybe it wasn’t about the box at all. Maybe he wanted to delay us, send us scrambling around Conlin while Brand searched and dug up other items that the Trelking wanted.

  But why?

  “Uh, Ollie?”

  “Have you figured out why your father might have sent Brand over? And why we sensed painter power?” I asked, focused on the truck.

  “No. But you need to see this.”

  I hadn’t realized that she’d disappeared around the side of the shed. I followed the direction she went and nearly tripped over a body. Black hair spilled around, leaving only a glimpse of olive skin visible.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  “I’m only guessing,” Devan started, “that she sensed the magic used here and came. Think it was her painter magic you picked up?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “She’s out. Shouldn’t last too long.”

  At least there was that. I scooped her up and carried her to the truck. Carrying Taylor through the hole in the fence was difficult, but Devan helped, propping up her legs. “Always going barreling in,” I muttered as I did. “Gonna get herself killed one of these times.”

  “Like you should talk,” Devan said, sliding onto the middle of the seat.

  I set Taylor next to her. She breathed slowly, and I saw no evidence of real injury, though the magical kind could be plenty bad. She’d recover, but hopefully not before we got this sorted out. I didn’t need her interfering. Devan held her so I could close the door, then she leaned Taylor against the window.

  As I climbed into the truck, Devan grabbed the box containing little Nik and put it on her lap. There was a part of me that was tempted to open the box and see what Nik might know, but another part warned me against sharing too much with him. It would probably be best if I just placed him back into his stasis. Then at least I wouldn’t have to worry about him learning something he might be able to use against us in the future.

  “We have to come up with a better containment,” I said, throwing the truck into gear and starting back down the road. The thick trees hanging overhead felt like the branches would brush the top of the truck, almost as if they were trying to seal me into Conlin.

  “The box will hold. He’s not going anywhere.”

  “I don’t want him to have the chance to hear anything we might be doing. Or learn about… you know.” I motioned toward our sleeping passenger. Nik cared about Taylor, and I knew he’d be pissed to learn she was hurt.

  She turned toward me with a smirk. “What do you think he might hear?”

  I flushed as I tried to push those images out of my mind. “We can’t have him learning anything he might take back to the Druist Mage.”

  “Like you haven’t told him enough already? Besides, he’s not going to get back to the Druist,” Devan said.

  She had a good point. Nik had heard about the shardstone box, but hadn’t known anything more that would help. I hadn’t completely expected him to, though it would have been nice.

  I drove us toward my house. I didn’t know where else to go. We needed to understand what was going on, but as usual, I felt overmatched and underprepared. I was getting tired of feeling so out of my league.

  “No, but what if he can send messages across the Threshold?”

  Devan frowned and then nodded. “I don’t know how, but I don’t know how he managed some of the other shit he did, either, so it’s possible. After we get this taken care of, I’ll see what else I can come up with. You need to be able to work with him somehow if he’s going to teach you, some way that he won’t harm you.”

  We pulled into the long drive leading down to my house and found Jakes waiting there for us. He stood outside his cruiser, leaning against the car, almost as if expecting us. Maybe he was.

  I nodded to him as I got out. “Is Kacey all right?” I asked.

  His eyes twitched slightly, and the muscles pulling at his brown sheriff shirt flexed. He glanced into the truck and arched a brow at me. “She’s fine. I didn’t expect you to pull her into your plans.”

  “I didn’t pull Kacey into anything,” I said. “She saw me show up and decided she wanted to watch. She’s still pretty angry about what happened in the park.”

  “We all are,” Jakes said. He eyed the box Devan carried, studying it for a moment. “You dragging her here to help?” he said, nodding toward the truck.

  I shook my head. “Not Taylor. She wouldn’t help me make another orb, but I did manage to get my father’s orb to work for me, so there’s that.”

  Jakes pulled his attention away from the box and met my eyes. “You used the Elder’s?”

  “Once I figured out what I needed to do, I was able to control my power going through it.” It had actually been easy enough once I knew what I was doing. Nothing like when I’d completely wasted my power when I’d first strugg
led to figure out what the hell I could do with the orb. So far, I had managed to use quite a few things of my father’s. What else might he have lying around that I could learn about, especially if he was one of the magi? Would there be something here that might help us figure out a way to stop the Druist Mage and finally be free of Devan’s father?

  “And the mage?”

  Devan tapped the box. “He’s here.”

  “Why are you here, Jakes?” I asked. “I thought you weren’t going to get involved with the Trelking.”

  He hesitated. Jakes never hesitated.

  “You know something, don’t you?” I said. “Is it the box that just went missing?” I still didn’t think it was the shardstone box that the Trelking sought. He made it sound like that was small enough to hold in his hands. But there had to be some reason that Brand went after the box in the shed, tearing through the protections placed around it. The poor storage unit would never be the same.

  “What box?”

  “Storage unit down on the south end of town. You might need to file a report,” I suggested. “There’s a unit that had its door torn off, just plain ripped free. Oh, and there were painter patterns set into the shed that should have made that difficult.”

  Jakes turned toward the south and his nose wrinkled slightly as he sniffed at the air. “That was not of the Elder,” he said.

  At least he answered that question for me. “No? Then it was something else. You think Tom learned enough to make items of any power?”

  Jakes glanced over at me. “Tom Brindle has never been a powerful painter. His skills are different.”

  “Yeah? How different?”

  “Different,” Jakes said.

  “Listen. How common are attacks like this?” I asked Jakes. “Before we showed up, how common was it that things would happen like this, because it seems to me that there have been pretty regular magic attacks here. That doesn’t seem quite right to me, but maybe it’s normal.”

  “There is nothing normal about the frequency of these attacks,” Jakes said. “When we had the protection of the Elder, the city was left alone.”

  Which was why Jakes wanted me to serve in some protector-of-the city role. Only, considering the fact that I wasn’t anything like my father—and the more that I learned, the more certain of that I became—there wasn’t much that I would be able to do to prevent these attacks from occurring.

  “Anyway,” I said, “there was something in the shed. A big box.” I stretched my arms apart to show him how large the box in the shed had been. “There was something magical about it. And Devan thinks it was her brother who took it.”

  We hadn’t talked much about how, if it had been her brother, he was now using some element of painter power. That wasn’t typical for one of the Te’alan, but then again, there was so much about what we’d seen that wasn’t typical.

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that things were happening that we didn’t fully understand, but that I would need to understand in order to keep Devan and me safe. Between the Trelking trying to pull me back into his schemes and the Druist Mage on the other side, it felt like we would be pinched any way we went.

  Then there was Taylor. She had her own motivations. She’d come from Arcanus, searching for signs of the Elder. And in Conlin, there were plenty of items for her to study.

  Jakes turned to Devan. “You have a brother?”

  “Sort of,” she said. “He’s kind of adopted. My father treated him as a son for most of his life. Then he sent him to serve along the front. I haven’t seen him since.”

  “I am sorry.”

  Devan snorted. “We weren’t what you’d call close.”

  “Do you have any idea what might have been stored in that storage unit?” I asked Jakes.

  “No. If it wasn’t the Elder’s, we might not have known about it. I’ve already told you that Conlin sits at a certain crossroads. That’s the reason he created a place like the Rooster and entrusted his closest friend to watch over it. Many people of power come through here,” Jakes said.

  We had to figure out what was missing. It was tied to the shardstone box the Trelking wanted, I was sure of it. But how? And what if Jakes was wrong? What if the box taken at the U- Stor had been my father’s?

  Only one answer came to mind: I needed to speak to someone familiar with the people of power who came through Conlin.

  “I think it’s time for me to have a talk with my father’s buddy,” I told them.

  13

  The afternoon had stretched into evening by the time we got everything together and made our way back over to the Rooster. Devan had taken the most time, making certain to collect a dozen or so of her figurines, the tiny army that she could bring to life, and placing them carefully into a pouch she slung over her shoulder. After setting Taylor down on the sofa in the house, I packed ink into my satchels and made a point of grabbing six or so different charms and stuffing them into my pocket.

  When we reached the Rooster, Jakes pulled his car around to the back and I followed. I’d never been to this side of the Rooster, having always stuck to the front of the diner. There wasn’t much on this side. A massive air conditioner unit, the fan spitting hot air up out of the top. A long dumpster, though I knew there was also one on the other side of the building, because it was where we’d discovered one of the Nizashi. There was a bucket full of thick grease. And, I suppose least surprising, patterns were marked along the side of the building, making it clear that a painter was here.

  The patterns were made with a little less skill than those I could make. Done by a tagger, and one who clearly struggled finding the right proportion, they arched over the top of a door set along the wall of the diner.

  Devan glanced at them before looking over at me. “He studied with the Elder?”

  I smiled, but paused. Something about the patterns caught my eye. I studied the nearest, a series of stars linked together to make a circle. It was brushed on with brown ink, painted into the doorway. At first glance, there seemed to be no skill to it, almost as if a child had drawn it. The more I studied it, the clearer it became that the irregularities I saw in the arms of the stars were intentional. And repeated with each one. The pattern was made to look crude.

  “Maybe not such a tagger, after all,” I said with a laugh.

  Devan frowned as Jakes shuffled us into the door. It opened to a large room decorated with a comfortable old sofa with two wooden chairs set across from it. A wide table sat between them. There was a door off this room that led either to the rest of the living space, or possibly the back area of the diner.

  “Guess we know why Tom always seems to be here,” I said.

  Jakes nodded. “The Elder helped with the creation of this building. It provides as much protection as the house he chose for himself.”

  I thought of the house and how the Nizashi nearly twisted it off the foundation. I doubted they would have been able to do that to the diner. “Maybe,” I said. The diner was well protected—I could sense that easily now—but Tom’s private area felt different. “Where is he?”

  “He will be here soon. He will know that we’ve come.”

  I glanced back toward the door where the patterns had been. Had they not been meant to keep us back, but to provide warning?

  I made my way around the room, looking first at the walls. Like the outside of the Rooster, they were painted with a rich brown, though of a lighter color, more like the color used to make the patterns around the door itself. I studied the walls, looking for signs of similar patterns, but didn’t see anything. That didn’t mean they weren’t there. Skilled painters often hid their patterns behind layers of other paint, using the outer coating to cover the protections they used. That Tom hadn’t bothered on the outside of the building told me that he wanted others to know about the patterns, almost as if advertising that he was a tagger.

  “Do you sense anything?” I asked Devan as we trailed around the room.

  “There’s power here,” she whi
spered.

  I glanced over to her. “You’ve been in his diner more than I have. How is it you haven’t sensed it before?”

  She punched me lightly on the shoulder. “I’m not the painter, Ollie. I could say the same about you.”

  “Well, he made it seem like he was a tagger. Nothing powerful.”

  “Sort of like you?” she said.

  “I’ve had extra training,” I started, but then, so had Tom. And Tom’s had come from my father, not some Te’alan who didn’t really know the intent of the patterns they taught, only possessing the ability to make the more difficult arcane patterns. That’s where I’d learned most of my tricks, but I’d had to spend countless hours learning what each pattern could do. Some I still didn’t know. With patterns, especially with arcane patterns, the shape implied the intent, but even subtle changes made it so that the pattern could react differently.

  It was why Tom’s linked star pattern outside his door would put someone with any knowledge at ease, making them think him incompetent. What they wouldn’t have realized was the skill that he’d used to make it appear that way. What Tom had displayed took amazing talent. He might be a tagger, but he was clearly talented.

  “Oliver.”

  I turned to see Tom standing in the interior doorway. He closed the door slowly behind him. Faint light suffusing out from it looked to come from a computer screen. I wondered what else he had in the back of the Rooster. And here I thought this was only a diner.

  “Hey, Tom.”

  “I figured you would come for me eventually. I never expected Sam to bring you.”

  Jakes stood with his arms crossed like he so often did, basically blocking the back door. Was that to keep me from leaving or to keep Tom inside?

  “Jakes knew that I had some questions,” I said.

  Tom shot Jakes a questioning look before turning back to me. He tipped his head to Devan. “De’avan.”

  I don’t know that I’d ever heard Tom speak her name with the correct inflection. I made certain never to do it. Mostly because it was sort of our thing. She called me Ollie—or idiot—and I called her Devan. But partly, it was because names carried a certain weight, especially to the Te’alan, and even more so to one with as much power as Devan. Speaking her name could draw her attention, but it was more than that. It was a form of greeting, of submission, but also of power. With Devan, I never really wanted to hold that kind of power over her. What we had was different from any sort of power relationship.