The only one I could think of who would want to remove the masking of the compass would be the Druist Mage. Could he also want the log that Tom had kept? Possibly, if he thought it would lead him somewhere, especially if he thought it would lead to the shardstone box.
“Can we use something like Taylor suggests? Something non-traditional?” I asked Devan, still troubled.
“Depends on what you mean by non-traditional,” she said.
“I mean, can any of your little friends help? We could use Nik…”
Devan’s eyes narrowed. “There’s something that might work,” Devan said, “but we’d have to know what it was we were looking for. It would have to be attuned to it.”
I glanced at the picture. “Something like that?”
“Might work. I don’t know.”
At some point, we were going to have to talk about what her figurines could do. There might come a time when we needed them for more than straight bashing, and it seemed like that time was now. I know that Devan didn’t like the idea of using her magic for anything violent—part of the reason I suspected she used the figurines to do the dirty work for her—but with what we were inevitably going to face, we wouldn’t be given the chance to handle things calmly and with nicer magic all the time.
Taylor stopped and looked at the pictures lying on the desk. “These are done by the Elder!”
“Yeah, good old dad did these. We took them from Tom when we went out a hole in his wall. It seemed like the safest play.”
She studied the pictures more quickly than I had managed, moving from the compass and Settler Hill, to the picture of Agony, before pausing and staring at the one of the forested scenery. “This one is different from the others,” she said. “But they all have the same angle to the light.”
“Huh?” I focused on the light first. “I’ll be damned.” As Taylor said, the lighting in all three of the paintings appeared to come from the same angle. It slanted down from the left, giving odd shadows to the compass and to the trees through the last picture, but it was Agony that caught my attention the most. The light didn’t come from the direction indicated on the picture. A small detail, but that was my father. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details.
“Where is this one?” Taylor asked. “It looks like the park, but the pattern isn’t there and the water in the top corner doesn’t fit with the geography. I’d say it’s on the north side of town, but there aren’t the same number of trees there and they grow in a different configuration from what he’s drawn here. More like this.”
She set the painting down and pulled her pad closer and sketched out a quick drawing that included trees and the stream. It looked much like where the Trelking had come through the doorway, only it was at a different point in the river.
She caught me looking at her. “What?”
“You were able to draw that from memory?” I asked.
Devan covered her mouth and laughed. I turned and shot her a look. “Hey, you’re the one who’s been saying she’s the artist. I don’t know that I’ve ever been around an artist before. I thought you were talented, Ollie, but it seems like Taylor is way more skilled than I realized.”
“What is it?” Taylor asked.
I tapped the painting of what the forested area had looked like. Now it was grown, matured, and changed, both by nature and possibly by intent. Either way, what existed in the park north of town was different from what we saw in my father’s painting.
“You thinking what I am?” I asked Devan.
“Doubtful.”
“What is it?” Taylor asked.
I tapped the canvas again. “This is pretty much the location the Trelking used to cross. We know they can’t go back through the doorway we destroyed near the barn, so what if this is how they intend to get back?”
“We still don’t have the shardstone box,” Devan said.
“About that,” Taylor began. Devan and I both looked at her, and she pulled one of my father’s coded journals out from behind her back. “When you mentioned shardstone, I thought I’d seen something like that before. It didn’t make sense when I’d tried translating it before, so I thought I’d been wrong. Then when I detected the attack on the storage shed…”
I didn’t need her to finish. She thought she could stop whoever came, and maybe find the shardstone first.
“Wait,” I began. “You found something about shardstone?”
“I think so. There’s this passage,” she started, setting the book on the table in front of us, “it mentions something called soulstones.” Taylor glanced up and shrugged. “I thought that might be wrong, too.”
Soulstones. That had been what Devan had described. They were supposed to be the heart of fallen gods. “You said your father has them,” I said to Devan.
She nodded. “He does. They’re supposed to be powerful, but he’s never done anything with them.”
Taylor tapped the book. “That’s because he can’t, not without the shardstone. It controls the soulstones. It’s complicated.”
That was the focus Nik mentioned. And here Taylor had found out about it.
“I don’t think this is the Elder’s,” she went on. “The writing is different, like most of the others. He might have collected the journals, but I doubt they were his.”
I sighed. “At least we now know why he wants the shardstone. If it controls the soulstones…”
“He’ll be even more powerful,” Devan said.
“Must be why my father kept it here,” I realized. “The compass shielded it—”
“And when it was gone, my father came for it.”
“Pretty much,” I said. “So far, whoever else is after it hasn’t been able to find it. And we haven’t had any idea of where to look.”
“But you do now?” Taylor asked.
I stared at the picture of Agony, wondering why my father had painted everything with such precision, except for the base of the sculpture.
I glanced over to Devan. We had to go by my hunch. “Think you can track them before they reach it?”
“We’d better try. I’m getting tired of nearly dying in that park.”
16
We stood outside the house near the garage. The door to the garage was open, letting light spill out from inside. Devan crouched on the ground in front of her figurine, this one looking something like a slender fox, but more snakelike. With a whispered word, she released it and stood, backing away quickly.
“We can’t get too close to this one,” she cautioned, putting her arm out to keep us back.
As I watched, the fox stretched like the other figurines had done and quickly pulled into a larger size, but still not that large. Then it slithered away, disappearing into the growing darkness. It rustled through the grass, sounding something like the wind blowing through the trees. A faint shimmer followed it.
“How will we know where it’s going?” Taylor asked.
I had to admit I was impressed with how quickly she was accepting the strangeness of Devan’s magic and the fact that the figurine had come to life. She hadn’t even questioned our need to keep the Trelking and the Druist from keeping the compass. Or the concern about the shardstone and what releasing it might mean. I still didn’t know whether to trust Taylor, and maybe we never would, but I wouldn’t deny ourselves her expertise. I was a big enough man to know when I didn’t know something, and to be able to admit when I needed help.
“I’ll know,” Devan said. “You ready with Nik?”
Devan pointed a thumb toward Big Red and we all hopped in. Devan squeezed into the middle, and I offered her a smile and a wink, but she only shook her head at me. The truck turned over slowly—more slowly than before—and hiccupped as I backed it out of the garage before stalling.
“Uh, Devan?”
“I’m on it,” she grumbled, throwing an elbow into my stomach as she crawled over me. She popped open the hood of the truck and there came the sound of metal bending. Devan didn’t have any tools on her, s
o I suspected she did it by hand. “Damn it!” she shouted.
I got out of the truck and made my way around to where she stood on her toes peering into the engine. I wasn’t much of a mechanic, so I didn’t really know what I was looking at, but Devan made an attempt at bending two twisted metal arms together. “What happened?”
She turned to catch me with one eye. “Something that shouldn’t have happened. I placed enchantments on this thing to keep it running smoothly. There shouldn’t be anything that could have happened.”
“Unless it’s magical,” I said.
“Yeah, but I would have sensed anything strong enough to do it. And the truck was fine when we left the Rooster. What’s different?”
We hadn’t checked on little Nik since returning from the Rooster, and here I’d planned on using him to help us find the Druist’s friend that had been sent. “There wouldn’t be anything he could have done…”
With the way Devan had sealed the box, there shouldn’t have been anything that Nik could have done to get free, but he was the Druist Mage’s apprentice, so maybe we continued to underestimate him. I picked up the box and shook it slightly. It sounded empty.
With a quick swirl of ink, I made a circle on the floor of the garage and set the box inside it. “Devan, can you open this for me?”
She arched a brow at me. “Are you sure you want to do that?”
Taylor watched me, her lips pursed and making a sour expression on her face.
“Don’t know that we have a choice,” I said.
Devan touched the rim of the box, running her finger around the top. As she did, it unsealed.
“Same time?” I asked.
She flipped the lid of the box, and I infused my circle with power, sending enough through it to hold Nik in place if he were to come jumping out of the box. It wasn’t necessary. The box was indeed empty.
I sank to the floor and stared out into the night. “Well, looks like things just got a little more interesting,” I said.
“What was in that?” Taylor asked, her gaze moving from Devan to me before dropping down and studying the box. “Wait, you didn’t… oh. You must have. Oliver, you know how dangerous he was the last time.”
I looked up at her. “Yeah, I know. Now we’ve got a miniature mage running around Conlin to go along with whatever the Trelking intends.”
At least I still had my father’s cylinder.
I tapped my pocket to make sure it was still where I’d stuck it. Thankfully, it was. I stood from the cold cement ground and went to the edge of the garage and stared into the night. Would a summoning pattern work? Would anything work on something as small as Nik?
Devan stood next to me and grabbed onto my arm. “Ollie?”
I shook my head. “I should have put Nik back into stasis. It was stupid not to. I saw how powerful he was, even in his miniature size.” Strong enough to knock out a shifter. Probably strong enough to take me out.
“He’s still small?” Taylor asked.
“Yeah. But he took down Kacey even when small. Had Devan not made this little box for him, he might have been able to get away from me, too.”
“But his power is reduced?” Taylor pressed.
I turned to her. “Reduced, but he’s still plenty powerful. Nik knows about the shardstone now, and if he finds it first—or the person who’s after it—I wouldn’t put it past him to manage to get unshrunk. Then we’re really fucked.” And then we’d have two for the Druist, and one for the Trelking, and little old us in the middle.
“He’s small. He won’t move too fast,” Devan said. “There might be something that we can do—”
“He’s modded,” Taylor interrupted. “So he’ll move faster than you think.”
I hadn’t really kept that in mind when I was working with him. It explained why he’d managed to trudge through the grasses so quickly. Hell, he’d probably been moving faster than I realized all the time. Speed might actually have helped free him.
“How did he get out?” I asked.
Devan went and grabbed the box, turning it over as she studied it. “He shouldn’t have managed to get free. The top was sealed.”
“Unless he kept you from sealing it from the inside,” Taylor suggested. She ran her finger around the edge of the box and nodded.
Devan tossed the box back down to the ground. “That little shit. When I get ahold of him again, I’m going to make sure that he can’t escape.”
“Your fox thingy still out there hunting?” I asked.
“You know it is,” Devan said.
Actually, I didn’t. When she used whatever magic she did to animate the figurines, I couldn’t tell. Her magic didn’t trip the medallion like it normally did when she used it. Maybe it really didn’t take that much power for her to use them, or maybe it was a different kind of power.
“Make him follow Nik.” Beyond that, I was only beginning to suspect what we’d find. I didn’t like what I was coming up with. How much damage could a mage apprentice, a rogue painter, and the Trelking’s son do?
17
We called the police. Well, the sheriff, really. When Jakes pulled into my driveway, the blue bubble of the cruiser lights catching the light from the front of my house, I didn’t know whether to be relieved or annoyed that we needed his help. With this, I suspected he actually would help, not like some of the other times I’d asked.
“What is it, Morris?” Jakes asked, stepping out of the cruiser.
“Well, Jakes, we missed you. Thought we should apologize for what happened back there with Tom, and you know, tell you that a miniature mage is running through town and planning to join whatever battle is intended for Conlin.”
“You released him?” Jakes asked. His eyes darted to Devan and then to Taylor.
“Not us,” Devan said, raising her hands out in front of her. “When Ollie gets a bug up his ass, you know how he is.”
Jakes looked like he wanted to smile but then shook his head. “Why call me?”
I motioned to the truck. I had complete faith that Devan would get it running again, but for now, we couldn’t go anywhere in it. We could try going by foot, and with Devan and Taylor—especially modded as she was—they might even reach where we needed to go before we could riding with Jakes.
“Little Nik. He decided to give the truck a makeover.”
“You know where he’s going?” Jakes asked.
“Not really, but Devan has her scout out there, so we should be able to follow that. I suspect they’re going to end up in the same place.”
Jakes studied me, his face as hard as usual. “They cannot cross. The ways around here are guarded.”
“I’m not so sure of that, big guy,” I said, going to the passenger door of his cruiser. “They got over here, didn’t they? And besides, I think we know of a crossing they might use that you don’t know about.”
Jakes waited for Devan and Taylor to get into the car before he followed.
The car was as I imagined every police cruiser. There were plush cloth seats, and the inside smelled of a floral air freshener. I would have figured Jakes for something manlier, something like pine or sawdust, or maybe just let the car get all funky. The radio crackled softly, but didn’t seem to be tuned to any particular channel. A computer was mounted on the dash, with the cover closed. I turned so I could see behind me. Devan and Taylor sat in the back seat, behind a wire mesh screen. I smiled at them and waved.
“Suits you pretty well, Devan,” I said.
“Careful, Ollie, or I’ll pull this off and wrap it around your head.”
I suppressed my grin and turned back to Jakes as he climbed in and settled behind the wheel. “She probably could, too.”
“She could,” Jakes agreed.
We pulled out of my driveway and sped down the street. Jakes didn’t flip any sirens on, which disappointed me a little. There weren’t many other cars out at this time of night.
“Where are we going?” Jakes asked.
Devan closed her e
yes for a moment. The medallion went cold, so I knew she used her magic. “North. Outside of town,” she said.
“Not the park?” Devan shook her head. “Are they already making a play for the crossing?”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Devan said. “Why would they go that way when there’s the risk that my… Oh shit, Ollie.”
I glanced over at her. “What is it?”
“Why else would they want to come out this way at this time? What if they knew my father was going to return?”
“They wouldn’t attack him, would they?”
“Why not? We know his magic is probably changed on this side of the Threshold. What better way to get to him.”
“Ah, damn. Now I’m going to have to help your father.”
Jakes looked over at me, somehow not having any trouble steering the car as he did. We pulled around a curve in the road, the car accelerating as we made our way out of the city. We passed the sign welcoming people to Conlin, the sign my father had some hand in creating, though I still didn’t quite know what it did. Protection of some kind, most likely, but with my father, that could mean anything.
Scenery turned from the scattered houses and farms along the edge of town to the trees that would eventually come together and form the park along the Cotton River. I didn’t exactly know where we were going and trusted Devan to guide us. The car raced up a hill, and suddenly, I no longer needed Devan’s help knowing where we were headed.
“Guess we’re nearly there,” I said.
Power thundered from the park, the kind only found with a doorway opening.
Jakes floored the accelerator, and we went flying down the road.
“We’re going to just blast in there without knowing what we’re facing?” Taylor asked.
“We know what we’re going to face. And it’s not good,” I said. I turned toward Taylor so I could see her reaction. There was a part of me curious about what she’d do when faced with what was coming. I’d seen her when attacks came before. It wasn’t like Taylor was afraid to mix it up when things started getting dangerous, but sometimes she could be almost too eager. “This will be dangerous, Taylor.”
Stolen Compass (The Painter Mage Book 4) Page 16
