The Painter Mage: Books 1-3 Read online

  “You don’t watch any movies.”

  Devan shrugged and started back toward the kitchen. “Don’t need to watch many to know what happens. Most of them are the same.”

  I laughed. “They’re not the same. Besides, the movies you’ve seen were some late night show while you worked in your shop. You probably had no idea what you were watching.”

  I stopped inside the kitchen. It looked like someone had been murdered. Powdered red ink was spilled all over the counters and floor, heaped in places. What would Jakes have thought had I let him in? “Umm, Devan? What were you doing in here?”

  She glanced at the ink on the floor and shrugged. “Figured after last night, you might need to be ready. I was trying to refill some of your charms.”

  “By spilling ink all over them?”

  I glanced at the tall oak cupboard. It didn’t look like much. Stain had long ago worn away and there were gouges in the wood, but I’d worked the surface in a series of interlocking patterns that kept almost anyone out unless I released the energy infusing it. Devan pretty much ignored every protection I placed on it. Another of her gifts.

  “Listen. What happened last night—”

  “Yeah,” I started. “About that. Do you know what was out there?” I suspected she did, but wanted to make certain we were on the same page.

  Devan pushed her hair out of her eyes and looked up at me. “Something stronger than me.”

  “Seeing how I found you on the ground, I gathered that.”

  She shook her head and fixed me with a hard gaze. “That’s not what I mean. What was out there got past me. I thought it was some kind of wolfhound. For me not to even know what it was…”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” I told her.

  She frowned at me, pausing near the sink. “You knew what it was?”

  “Not at first. And maybe I’m wrong, but I should’ve made the connection when you mentioned seeing the wolf prowling outside. Not too many things with that sort of power, certainly not around here. And the way it looked at me told me that it knew what we were doing.”

  Devan’s eyes widened as understanding came to her. “No, Ollie, they don’t exist here.”

  I smiled. “Like your people don’t? And painters and hunters and magi and—”

  She didn’t have a good answer as she cut me off, gripping the counter. “But why would it have come here?”

  I didn’t have the answer yet. Maybe once I had a chance to see what Taylor had been up to near the park, I might get a better idea. “Taylor, I suspect. I just don’t know why they’d be working with her.”

  “Are you sure they were?”

  Now that she asked, I wasn’t. It was possible that the shifter came for Taylor rather than with her, but for her to risk going out into the night while it was here meant she was a different kind of crazy than I first thought.

  “Why couldn’t it have tracked her here? You saw the look on her face when I mentioned it.”

  I hadn’t paid attention to Taylor then. I’d been so fixated on the charms Devan had made. “We need to know if it did.”

  “You really want to get mixed up with whatever it is she brought here?”

  I slipped across the kitchen, moving carefully so I didn’t coat my shoes in ink. “It attacked my house, Devan. If it’s what I think, then it knows about us.”

  “A shifter?” Devan asked. “Let’s just get that out there. Even if we understand why they’d be on this side of the Threshold, we still don’t know why it would come here? How would it have come here?”

  They were good questions. Shifters were nearly mythical in the magical world. Most had heard of them, but none had ever seen them. Partly that had to do with an inherent protection they had that kept them from being detected, but partly it was the sheer power they could draw. It was different than anything I could manage. My power came from within, augmented by the colors and patterns I used in my paintings. Even Devan’s magic was tied to her, though I suspected she could draw from sources of power around her. But shifters? From the stories that were out there, they were altogether different. I’d come across them only one time before, and then only by way of rumor.

  But the creature last night wanted us to know it was there. And it hadn’t attacked directly.

  “It’s the only explanation I can come up with. They’re supposed to be powerful. What hit us last night has more power than any painter I ever met—”

  “Even your father?”

  From the way the house had nearly been burned to ash, it was easy to believe it was stronger than my father. He might have been an artist—a painter of exquisite skill—but even his magic had limits. “Probably even him.”

  Devan turned to the kitchen and made her way to the sink. Her feet made tiny prints in the maroon ink as she walked, creating a trail. I wondered if she recognized that pattern in her steps, or if that was something I had simply borrowed from her. She seemed to shrink in upon herself as she walked.

  She was scared.

  Devan grabbed a glass and filled it with tap water. She leaned over the counter, staring at the window—or, more likely, beyond it. I’d never bothered hanging any window coverings here. Thick paint swirled onto the window made it difficult for much light to sneak through. Only a few spots were open enough to look out.

  “Why didn’t it attack?”

  I’d been thinking about that. The longer I was awake, the more my mind got back into gear. When Devan had gone outside to try and learn what was out there, the shifter had left her alone. Oh, she’d been knocked down. Doing that to one of her kind took a certain type of power—and, let’s face it, considering the repercussions, balls—but it had left her. And me.

  Until we got into the house.

  The way I figured, there were two possibilities. Either the shifter worked with Taylor, or the shifter came after Taylor. And now she was gone.

  “If they were working together,” I said, “it means she’s working outside of Arcanus.”

  Devan paused while setting the glass onto the counter, smearing across the ink. Water dripped down the side of the glass and into the ink, turning it a brighter red, the powder slowly congealing. “You’re sure she said she came from Arcanus?”

  Hadn’t she? Or had I simply assumed it?

  But why make up something about Hard? The Masters, at least, knew how I felt about him, which made me wonder if maybe part of it weren’t true.

  “Damn it,” I muttered. I hated getting pulled into this, especially not knowing what I was getting into. After the last few years, all I wanted was some time to recuperate and prepare. That was the reason I had returned to Conlin. Considering what we ultimately faced, the promise Devan’s father had made to me, this wasn’t the sort of distraction either of us needed.

  Devan stared at me while I considered my options, dragging her finger through the ink, letting it swirl into a quick pattern. A shape that resembled a massive wolf took shape before slowly spinning into something that resembled a man. With a flick of her wrist, the ink smoothed back out, as if she’d never drawn anything.

  Devan rarely dabbled in inks. When I’d seen her work with it before, I could always tell she would have had skills somewhere above your average tagger. She had to in order to create the charms she made. What I’d just seen her create in the ink rivaled anything an artist could make. If she could press her will into the ink as I did, she could be a powerful painter, except her magic didn’t work like that.

  She peered down at the counter and whispered something I couldn’t hear. A soft, rolling energy spread through the kitchen like a breath of air, sweeping up the ink until it formed a neat pile.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked, kneeling in front of the pile of maroon ink and scooping it into a large jar. An amused smile twisted her lips.

  Devan already knew what I needed to do. She was smart, but more than that, she was clever. The combination made her dangerous. And the perfect friend.

  “Do you think she
lied about the other doors?” I asked.

  “Who knows? Doorways across the Threshold aren’t necessarily uncommon, only difficult to detect, especially from this side.”

  “And if someone had crossed, we would have heard.”

  Devan shrugged. “Not necessarily. There are crossings all the time that we don’t hear about.”

  “You think a painter could cross the Threshold and your father wouldn’t hear of it?”

  “I don’t know what my father might know,” she said bitterly.

  “Yeah. Considering what he intends, we’re better off here. Nothing good comes from the other side.”

  She glared at me. “Nothing?”

  “You don’t count,” I said.

  “You’re an idiot. I’m the only one who counts.”

  I laughed. She was right.

  I stepped over to the window and peered through the glass. Officer Jakes’s car was gone. “Want to go figure out what she did?”

  “You don’t think you need to figure out what she wanted first?”

  “From what I can tell, that book was enough reason to come. And if she opened one of the other doors…”

  If she opened one of the other doors, why wouldn’t we have known? We’d only been here two months. There would have been some warning had a painter crossed the Threshold a year ago, enough that Devan’s father would have sent me to investigate. For me not to have heard anything made me wonder if the doors in Arcanus opened somewhere else entirely.

  “Too bad your pretty little girl didn’t tell you everything.”

  I laughed. “You almost sound jealous.”

  Devan pushed me with enough strength to turn me away from the window. “Not jealous. I just don’t want to see you get yourself killed for that place. It almost happened once.”

  “What happened when I left wasn’t their fault.”

  “No? And they made certain you were so well-trained that you could protect yourself against the other things out in the world? Before you rush to return, don’t you think you should figure out why she came here, of all places?”

  I thought she’d come for my help, but what I’d seen of Taylor told me she didn’t really need it. And if the first thing she did when realizing this was the Elder’s house was to sneak down and steal the book, it meant the real reason she’d come hadn’t been me. It had been my father.

  “Come on. I’ll need your help.”

  5

  We stood at the back of my yard, where the park edged up against it. I stared at the wide pine tree with blue ink staining the bark. A rim of faint yellow ink in the shape of a narrow pentagram worked around its base. With what strength I could muster, I infused my will into the yellow ink, straining through it as I struggled to understand the purpose of her marking.

  It didn’t work. I was too weakened from last night.

  Part of me hadn’t really expected it to work. For me, painting took real physical strength, and I felt sapped. It might be days before I was back operating a full speed. In that time, Taylor would be long gone, and with her, any chance I had that I might recover the book.

  I cared about the book. It was about the only thing I had that could tell me what my father had studied before he disappeared. Notes he’d made. Patterns he discovered. Even more than most of the Masters, the Elder was an artist. I might never be able to manage his skill, but I could understand what had happened to him. And why he’d left it to me in the first place.

  But it was more than that. In the time I’d left Arcanus, I’d developed my own set of skills. I wasn’t an artist, but I was more than a simple tagger now, too. Time living with people like Devan, serving her father, had taught me that there was much more than painters knew. Working with Devan, I’d come to understand how small painters were in the grand scope of the world.

  I’d crossed over the Threshold twice before. The first brought me to Devan, the way probably opened by her people and I had basically stumbled through it. Devan sat watching, as if she knew I was about to arrive. I never learned if she had or not. Given what I knew of her father, I wouldn’t put premonition like that past her people. My second crossing had returned us to Conlin.

  “Can you sense anything?” I asked her.

  She made her way around the tree. Beneath the shadows, light shimmered off her skin, making it glow. Her chin thrust forward as she sniffed, taking long, slow breaths as if to inhale the magic Taylor had worked.

  “There should be others,” she said, studying the nearby trees.

  I motioned to the pine a few trees over. A matching blue stripe worked up its surface. Beyond it was another. They formed the outline of a pattern I hadn’t yet worked out.

  Devan slipped between the trees. She moved silently in the woods, her steps barely disturbing the needles and leaving no prints. With the rain the night before, the ground was soft and soggy. Each step I took sunk deeply into the ground.

  I paused and looked around the tree for other prints. Mine were clear, mucking through the needles and making deep depressions as I worked the yellow ink around the tree, but there weren’t any others.

  How would Taylor have marked the tree?

  The rain should have washed the marking away. It would have washed away any of the powdered inks I used, but then, Taylor had shown she was an artist. Maybe she knew of different inks or maybe she’d worked with paint. It wasn’t as neat or as easy to mix, but there were uses for paints.

  I slogged back over to the tree and stepped carefully over the pentagram, bending between boughs laden with dry needles as I edged up to the trunk. Leaning toward the tree, I sniffed the bark. Nothing but pine assaulted my nostrils.

  I touched the blue mark, careful not to disrupt the pattern. If I was going to understand what intent Taylor had with it, I couldn’t upset it too much. Powdered inks would smear, but this wasn’t any powdered ink. The marking on the tree felt thick and sticky. A shiny coat of something like varnish protected it. I twisted my head before I realized what she had done, laughing softly to myself as I did.

  Tree sap. Clever for a painter.

  Taylor had worked with the powdered ink I saw her use, but she’d smeared sap over it, protecting it. It left the ink glistening and solidly in place, protected from the rain. I didn’t know if the sap would have any other effect, but from what we’d seen of her last night, I doubted it diminished her intent too much.

  Devan stopped at the next tree and studied its higher branches. I made my way over to her, impressed as always that she hadn’t left any prints in the soil, and followed her gaze. The wide pine tree pointed toward the sky. Pinecones hung on branches. With a little snow in a few months, it would look practically decorative.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  She took a deep breath, but her eyes remained drawn upward. “There is something here. I just can’t tell what it is.”

  “She sealed the marks in sap.” The mark on this tree was the same as the other, worked into the trunk and then sealed over with thick sap.

  “Bet you wish you would’ve thought of that.”

  I shrugged. I had actually. “What’s the pattern?”

  I asked the question mostly to myself as I circled around the tree. The lower branches held nothing but dried needles, just like with the other tree. Higher up, long, green needles remained.

  I glanced at nearby trees, but none of them were dried like this one.

  I did a mental recount and compared to what I’d noticed earlier. There had been one more tree. Hurrying back into the yard, I found it quickly. Like the others, the blue ink faced my yard. And like the others, the lower branches were dried out and dead, as if some pestilence had worked through them. Trees all around were otherwise healthy. I couldn’t remember if they had been damaged before last night.

  Moving to the center of my yard, I stopped and spun slowly in place, looking for any signs of similar trees. As I worked my way around, I noted at least five additional trees marked like the other. I expected to find them in a pat
tern around my house, but that didn’t seem to be the case.

  “Ollie?”

  I looked over to see Devan watching me from the within the shadows.

  “I found something.”

  I pointed to the other trees. “Me too.”

  She waved me over. I stopped long enough to remember which trees were affected by the strange blight before hurrying over to her. She stood turned away from the marked tree, staring into the deeper woods of the park. Streamers of sunlight pierced through the trees and reached the forest floor. The pines and oaks mingled together, leaving a mixture of needles and fallen leaves. The rain had left a heavy, earthy scent on the air. Mixed with it was another scent I recognized, a hot, bitter odor of power.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. I thought the marks were odd. They seemed to draw power up the tree, but that didn’t really make much sense, you know? And why only these few trees? If she’d marked them as some way to weaken the defenses your father had placed, you’d think she would need to have focused the energy toward the house.”

  I spun back toward the house, trying to get an image of the marked trees in my mind. What pattern was there? As I thought about it, I realized that Devan was right. The focus of the painting wasn’t toward the house, but away.

  What had Taylor been doing?

  Shifters didn’t use paint. Their power came from within, like mine, but they didn’t need a focus. Their body was the focus, especially when they were in their true form. And I’d seen the effect of the power they’d used last night.

  Or had I?

  I started through the woods, hurrying to the next tree marked with Taylor’s ink. Like the others, blue streaked across the bark, covered with a shiny layer of dried sap. Unlike the others, the marking worked across the bark rather than up. The next tree was similar.

  The pattern started to form in my mind and I shook my head in disbelief. “Damn,” I muttered.

  Devan stopped next to me and studied the marking. “What is it?”

  “The pattern,” I said, pointing to the ink. I ran my finger through the sticky sap, reaching the blue ink. Now that I knew what it did, I didn’t really worry about disrupting it. The painting was spent, the power gone and dissipated, not to return in this form. I didn’t doubt Taylor could make another one like it, but she would have to use another series of trees. She’d drawn all she could out of these.