The Painter Mage: Books 1-3

by D. K. Holmberg

  “It’s been a few months,” she admitted. “He was one of the group that taught me about modding.”

  I looked again at her hair. I’d heard of other painters doing more exotic and dangerous mods. When I’d known Nik, I never would have pinned him as a modder, but then he had survived the Trelking for the gods only know how many years and had somehow managed to cross over the Threshold when he shouldn’t have been able to do so. As far as I had known, Nik hadn’t survived in the first place.

  “Modders place patterns on their skin, inside mouths and on tongues,” I explained to Jakes.

  Devan shivered. I suspected she was recalling what Adazi had done, some of which had required modding. Thankfully, the barn had fallen on him and he was no longer a concern. We hadn’t found his remains, but then again, most of the barn had burned. Neither Chase nor Adazi had made it out.

  “It’s not only that,” I went on. “I’ve seen modders use piercings and other body modifications to change themselves.”

  “It’s more than that, but yeah. Some of the more extreme modders will do pretty crazy things,” Taylor said.

  “Why would they do it?” Jakes asked.

  I shook my head. “You saw Adazi, what it let him become, but most modders are taggers who’ll never achieve much power. When they start changing themselves, they tap into something more.”

  “It’s a dark power,” Devan said.

  “Pretty dark stuff,” I agreed, “but you’re talking about people who will never have much power otherwise. Most think they have to mod, especially when they discover the limits to their power.”

  Jakes looked from me to Taylor. From the widening of his eyes, he finally understood the tinting of her hair. It was a subtle mod, not like some that I’d seen. Maybe that was why it hadn’t changed her too much. Or maybe it had. Hell, what did I really know about her? Only that she’d risk anything to open a dangerous gateway. And that she helped me close it once she understood what it was. She helped me save Devan when Adazi abducted her.

  “You’ve not done this to yourself? Modded?” he said to me.

  “I don’t really need to. I’m just a tagger, too,” I said, “but I’ve learned to use arcane patterns. Most modders can’t even get traditional patterns to work for them consistently, but that’s why they’re a little more dangerous. They know there’s power out there in the world, but they can’t reach it. So they mod.”

  Taylor sat silently for a moment. She rubbed her hands together. “Not all of the modders I met were without talent,” she said. “Some were pretty skilled painters, though their skills weren’t what Arcanus would have considered typical.”

  She glanced at me. I knew she meant my talent with arcane patterns. I had shown aptitude when learning from the Trelking and his people. Had I not, he might not have considered me useful enough to keep around. That arcane patterns were useful to me as well had been a boon. Using them had given me insight into how the traditional geometric patterns worked and how I might supplement them with arcane patterns.

  “Like Nik,” I said.

  “Like Nik,” she agreed.

  “Nik is a painter like you?” Jakes asked Taylor.

  She shrugged. I expected her to explain more, but she didn’t.

  “Nik served the Trelking in a capacity similar to what I did. When I appeared and showed some talent with particular patterns, Nik became expendable. He was imprisoned and nearly died.”

  “You helped him,” Jakes said.

  “How could I not? Nik was my friend. I didn’t have many friends. Not in Arcanus and not on the other side of the Threshold.”

  “Hey,” Devan said.

  “Except Devan,” I corrected.

  She gave me a satisfied nod.

  “So this pattern you detected, it was one of his?” Jakes asked Taylor, shifting his attention back to the murder.

  “Not Nik’s, but there were those with him—”

  “Other modders?” Jakes asked.

  “Modders, and others. Nik is sort of the guy when it comes to modding. Others would learn it was possible and then learn of Nik. They’d go to him looking for help. But he had other friends, powerful painters…”

  “And enemies?” Jakes asked.

  “What are you getting at, Jakes?” I asked.

  He turned to me. “She’s here, Morris. If she’s friends with him, there might be a reason others would follow.”

  Taylor’s face flushed slightly. “I don’t know if he had any enemies. Not that I saw, but he could be harsh at times. Mostly, it was to keep others from hurting themselves.”

  I could see where Jakes’s line of questioning was leading. “If the dead guy is a modder, there’d be some sign. It’d be a tattoo or a scar or a piercing.”

  “Would we know with the body in that state?” Jakes asked. “Is there anything you can do to tell?”

  I laughed. “Isn’t there anything you can do? You’re the shifter. You can draw a hell of a lot more power than I can.”

  “That is outside my capabilities,” Jakes said.

  We sat in silence for a moment. I picked my fork back up and began working at the meatloaf. The longer we sat in the Rooster, the more my appetite returned. I tried to ignore how the meatloaf sort of looked like one of the burns on the dead guy’s chest.

  “I can try,” Devan said.

  I turned to her. She was powerful in an entirely different way from Jakes. Hers was a pure power, drawn from something deep inside her. The Te’alan could detect magical power. Well, except for shifters. Apparently, she couldn’t see much there.

  “I’m not saying I can do it,” Devan said. “Only that I’ll try. That kind of painting would leave a stain. I should be able to detect it, but if it’s been gone too long, even I won’t pick it up. Not there, though,” she said, pointing toward the back of the diner. “It’s got to be somewhere that doesn’t suppress me.” She pulled my plate in front of her and turned to the meatloaf. “And first, I need to eat.”

  * * *

  We stood in a narrow room in front of a silver table, the charred body resting atop it. Harsh, white light hummed overhead. The coroner worked quietly in the corner at a sink running a steady stream of water, readying a tray of tools. Every so often, he glanced over, almost as if he wanted to ask us something, but he never did.

  Jakes knew him and asked him to give us a few minutes. It made me wonder if the coroner was a shifter, too.

  Getting the body away from the Rooster, away from the circle of power that my father had placed there, had been the purpose. I wondered if I, too, might be able to reach enough power here to determine if this guy was a modder. I didn’t try. Doing so would involve patterns and ink and more than I wanted to try without knowing a little more about the coroner. At least with Devan’s magic, there were no marks left behind.

  The air smelled of the burned body mixed with the antiseptic used by the coroner. He mixed a bucket of bluish liquid that smelled vaguely of bleach. I was thankful that it smelled mostly clean. I wasn’t sure I could handle it if the place stunk of organs or decay. I’d smelled that often enough working with the Trelking.

  Devan set her hands on either side of the table, her jaw clenched in concentration. My eyes dipped to the dead guy’s hands, and I noted that he wore a plain silver band around his thumb. I stood back and away from the table, waiting for Devan to begin. If this guy had done some modding, I wanted to know. If Nik was somehow involved, we needed to know. Taylor might know more about modding than I did, but I suspected I knew Nik better than she did. A guy can change—I’d seen that happen often enough that I knew it was possible—but not so much that he changed who he was completely.

  When she focused her power, the medallion hanging beneath my shirt went cold and her skin started to take on a soft glow. Taylor sucked in a soft breath. She’d likely never really seen Devan working with her powers, at least not with enough time to actually study them. Chasing after Devan through the park while trying not to die wasn’t exactly t
he same thing.

  Devan shifted her hands up and gripped the painter’s shoulders. As she did, she pushed power out through him.

  Nothing about the painter changed. Even so, Devan jerked her hands back and away from the body. She took a step back, staring at the charred remains with new suspicion.

  Instinctively, I went for one of my charms and pulled it out, holding it in front of me. “What is it?”

  She shook her head, still staring at the body. “That’s not a painter.”

  “Are you sure? No mods or anything?” I asked.

  She finally tore her eyes away from the body. When she looked at me, I saw fear in her eyes even deeper than what she’d shown what Adazi had attacked. “Not a painter,” she repeated. “It’s one of the Te’alan.”

  She started to shake, and I hurried to her, slipping my arm around her waist to keep her from falling. “There shouldn’t be anyone else here,” she said as I steadied her. “None of my kind crosses the Threshold. That’s why I’m safe here.”

  “Maybe you’re wrong,” I suggested, though I didn’t think she was. Knowing Devan as I did, she likely had double- or triple-checked before even saying anything, which was probably why it had taken her so long when she used her magic.

  Taylor came around the edge of the body. “Are you certain it’s not a painter?” Devan shot her a hard look. Taylor quickly looked away and turned to me. “Then maybe one of Nik’s friends didn’t do this. You weren’t sure. With as difficult as it is to sustain a pattern around the diner, there’s no way to really know, is there?”

  I peered over at her and shook my head once. “Yeah, it doesn’t make sense. Nik wasn’t ever all that powerful. And for him or his crew to go after one of the Te’alan?”

  “You’ve already given him a reason, haven’t you, Morris?” Jakes said. “He resented the Trelking. That would be reason enough.”

  “But there’s no reason for one of the Te’alan to cross the Threshold,” I told him.

  “Are you certain your friend Nik wasn’t the one to cross first? Perhaps they chased him,” Jakes said.

  I thought about it, but it still didn’t make sense to me. Not knowing what Nik had been through.

  I studied the body. We still didn’t know why someone had attacked one of the Te’alan. Or even how the Te’alan could have reached Conlin. Then there was the issue of why he ended up at the Rooster, a place that was supposed to be safe.

  “Can you tell who it is?” I asked Devan. If we could figure that out, maybe we’d understand more about what had happened.

  She shook her head. “Not like this.”

  She held something back. I didn’t know what, but knowing Devan for as long as I had, there was something more to this.

  Jakes watched us with that blank expression he had. It was creepy in a way. There was something about Taylor’s face that made me wonder what more she might know. She had been around Nik more recently than I had, and given the fact that she had modded herself, I wouldn’t entirely put it past her to have some reason to protect him.

  As I took Devan’s hand to pull her out of the coroner’s exam room, Jakes grabbed my arm.

  “If the Te’alan are involved…” he started.

  “Yeah,” I said. That meant the Trelking might know where Devan and I had gone. It meant that she wasn’t safe here, and others weren’t safe with us being here. With a magical murder in Conlin, it felt too much like when I’d been on the other side of the Threshold.

  Devan and I went down a narrow hall lined with faded, old oak doors until we reached the lobby at the front of the building. There was a desk behind an empty counter. An old tube TV sat with a flickering picture, the sound nearly muted. A computer whirring loudly was the only other sound.

  “What else did you sense?” I asked as we reached the lobby.

  Devan nodded toward the glass doors we’d just exited. The coroner’s office was located in what had once been the town’s hospital, before it had moved to its new campus. By new, I’m talking thirty years ago. This old hospital building was all-brick and only one level, reminding me of an old-fashioned schoolhouse. The back half had been converted into office space.

  We stepped out onto Washington Street, feeling the chill in the air as dusk turned to night. There wasn’t much else in this part of town. A few closed businesses, signs long-since faded. A white fence blocked someone’s lot from the street.

  “Well?” I said when we were on the street. Yellow streetlights kicked on as we headed toward Big Red.

  “I didn’t want to say too much in there.”

  “I noticed that.”

  We made our way along the cracked sidewalk. Devan stared down, as if studying the grass and weeds growing through the cracks. “I could tell a little more than what I let on.”

  “Yeah. I know you well enough that I could see that.”

  “I didn’t recognize who that was, but I did recognize what it was.”

  “One of the Te’alan,” I said.

  Devan stopped and turned to me. “Not only that. He had power. Enough power that he wouldn’t have died easily.” An uneasy sensation began building in my stomach. “He worked for my father. And did you see the ring?”

  I had, so I nodded. “What does it mean?”

  “You didn’t recognize it?”

  “No. Should I have?”

  She looked back toward the building. “You were on the other side long enough that I thought you might know about them, but my father keeps them pretty tightly controlled, so maybe you never really had the opportunity.”

  “Who?”

  “The Nizashi.”

  I started shaking my head before I knew what I was doing. “That can’t have been one of the Nizashi,” I said. They were assassins, among the most feared of the Trelking’s soldiers. They subverted the magic used by the Te’alan in order to serve the Trelking, giving up a part of themselves and turning what should only be used for protective magic into something darker. Few were willing to make the sacrifice. “There’s no way a painter would have managed to kill one of them, even an artist.”

  Devan’s eyes were distant. “So you have heard of them.”

  “I’ve been around you long enough to have heard of them.”

  “Then you understand my concern. It’s not about who killed the Nizashi lying on that table.”

  “Oh, shit,” I breathed.

  “Yeah. Where are the other two?”

  4

  Devan leaned back on her wooden chair in the garage, slowly twirling a pair of figurines between her fingers. From what I could tell, one looked like a gargoyle, but the other was cupped in her hand so that I couldn’t see. She stared toward the bench where she did most of her work, the shelf lined with shaped metal in various stages. Some would eventually be charms she made for me, while others were the figurines she preferred to make for herself.

  Big Red was parked off to the side, a steady clicking coming from its engine as it cooled. It gave off the smell of burned oil, mingling with the scent of the sawdust and the sharp tang of cut metal. We’d left the garage door open, letting in the cool night air, which helped dissipate some of the odors. Devan never moved, even when the occasional gust came into the room. Taylor stood near the door, probably hoping for fresher air.

  Devan hadn’t spoken much since we left the coroner’s. Jakes had stayed behind to speak to the coroner, likely finding out something more about the body, but we already knew all that we needed. If the Nizashi had come, it would only be a matter of time before they came for Devan. She was too valuable to the Trelking for there to be another reason. We hadn’t told Jakes, but then the shifter didn’t need to hear about the Nizashi to know that Devan was being hunted.

  I had shared what I thought I had to with Taylor in the car, but I’d waited until we were back in the garage to try to sort out what we knew of the Nizashi.

  “So there are three?” Taylor asked.

  Devan didn’t blink as she nodded. She placed one of her figuri
nes on the bench and pushed it toward the back. This one looked something like what I imagined a troll would look like, with thick, rounded arms and a lumpy club hanging from one hand. The detail work to her figurines always impressed me.

  “Why three?”

  “In case one of them fails,” I said.

  In the time since Devan revealed that it was one of the Nizashi, I’d racked my brain trying to remember what I could about them. It wasn’t much. Even on the other side of the Threshold, there wasn’t much known about them. Not even how many served the Trelking. They were a secretive group, and for good reason. What they had done with their magic was much like what the modders did, but the power the Nizashi were able to access was much greater than anything a modder would be able to do.

  “And the fact that we’ve only seen the one…”

  “Means that either the other two are still here and trying to complete the mission or the assignment is complete and they’ve crossed back over.”

  “But Devan doesn’t think they’ve gone back,” Taylor said. She shook her head in answer. “Why not?”

  “Because Devan is still here,” I said.

  Devan set her hands on her bench and looked over at me. “We don’t know that they’re here for me,” she said.

  “You’re right, we don’t. And we don’t know why the one we found would have been killed. And whoever killed the Nizashi knew Nik at one time,” I said.

  “We need to find them before they find us,” Devan said.

  “The Nizashi?” I asked.

  “No, Ollie. Whoever took out the Nizashi.”

  I wasn’t sure which was worse: searching for the Trelking’s assassins or someone able to kill one of them. Either one put us in danger. After what Devan had just gone through, I wasn’t willing to risk that kind of danger again.

  “Do you know any reason they’d be here?” I asked Taylor.

  Taylor met my eyes. “I don’t even know who they are.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” I said. “There’s something you’re not telling us. When we were at the coroner’s, I could tell that you knew more than you were letting on.”