Chapter 38 - Quite a Performance

When we were further away from the coffee shop, I explained to Olivia, in much clearer terms, that I had faked the phone call. I knew the moment she understood me; her eyes narrowed into slits.

“Why did you want to get out of there so fast?” she demanded.

I squirmed as I walked. It isn't always easy to pull off a good ambulatory squirm—but other times it comes as natural as breathing. “It’s hard to explain.”

“You didn’t see anything?”

“No.”

“Then—”

I interrupted her: “So, Ashworth…” My voice trailed off. I’d been so eager going into the sentence, but for some reason, my cheeks went red and all the words dried up.

“What about him?” Olivia asked.

There was a faint smile hiding at the edge of her lips. It took me a second to process what it could possibly mean. Then it hit me.

Oh, geez.

“Olivia,” I said in the most serious voice I could muster, “I do not have a crush on Owen Ashworth.”

The smile knew it’d been caught, so it stopped trying to hide. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Then what is it?”

“I’m trying to keep my eyes a secret. He knows I have a secret, and he’s dedicated an uncomfortable amount of his charm into worming the information out of me.”

“How?”

“By being all nice at me.” I shivered from head to toe.

“Having handsome men be nice to you makes you uncomfortable?”

“Yes!…Wait. No. That’s not—it’s not about that. Mostly.”

“Then what is it about?”

“Look, can we both agree that, even at the best of times, I’m an idiot when it comes to speaking?”

Olivia, the ever supportive, said, “No argument here.”

“Ashworth makes me feel all blathery and muddle-headed, which makes me even dumber than normal when it comes to speaking, which is not the best state to be in when attempting to keep a secret.”

“I see.”

We walked on in silence. The booths at the edge of the street fair came into view, and the noise of the crowd grew as we approached.

Out of the blue, Olivia said, “You did fine.”

I blinked. Her tone had been clipped and casual—the one she uses whenever her mood is neutral—but my brain had to sort through the words an extra time to make sure it had understood them correctly. Findings were inconclusive.

“Huh?” I said.

“With that challenge and everything,” she said. “You sounded natural, and it got the job done.” She shrugged. “I wouldn’t have thought of something like that.”

I stopped. Two steps later, Olivia turned to look back at me.

“Olivia Oliversen,” I said, “are you complimenting me?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m telling you that you weren’t any more idiotic than normal, and you’re a high-functioning idiot.”

I grinned and ran the two steps to catch up with her. “Well, that was almost nice of you to say so.”

We continued on.

“Olivia,” I said, “why didn’t you want me to mention ARC Hall?”

This time her shrug lifted only one shoulder at a time. There was a slight frown on her face. “It would’ve been just another unknown object.”

The squirmy nature of the shrug clued me in. Having so recently enjoyed a squirm myself, I knew it meant she was uncomfortable. By that time, I thought I had a pretty good idea about the kind of things that made Olivia uncomfortable.

“It’s your mom, isn’t it?” I asked.

She glared at me, then faced forward again. “I may not like my mother, but I’m not the kind of person to spread rumors when someone’s trying to keep things quiet.”

I hummed thoughtfully.

“What?” Olivia demanded.

“How many almost nice things do you think someone has to do before they can be accused of actual niceness?”

“I don’t like you either, Emerra Cole.”

My heart withered, and an emotion-based frost crept up my stomach.

“Yeah,” I said softly, “I know.” I scraped up some enthusiasm to add to my voice. It wasn’t enough to make me sound cheerful, but at least I wouldn’t sound sad. “But I’m glad we can work together, even if we don’t like each other.” I let my eyes wander over the crowd and the booths. “Maybe that’s enough.”

It had to be enough. It was all we had.

I knew from dealing with my father that there were times you’d be desperate for someone to care about you, and they never would. Sometimes you didn’t even have the comfort of understanding why. That desperation was nothing but pain on top of disappointment. Several talented therapists had carefully walked me through the facts of the matter while gently pointing out the need for acceptance. They seemed to think it was important for me to understand.

What I never had the words to explain was that they were only addressing half of the ghost-coin. Two sides. Same coin. They rested one side on their thumb and flicked it hard into the air. I could hear it ring. It was solid. But they never seemed to notice the side that haunted me, so it remained, in some ways, unreal.

It was hard wanting to be liked and not being liked. But there was just as much desperation and sadness when you wanted to like someone, and couldn’t. There were just as many unfulfilled wishes. If only my father had been there for me, if only he’d said anything kind or encouraging, if only he hadn’t been so distant and selfish—I would’ve loved him. But he hadn’t, he didn’t, and he wasn’t. I had to accept that too.

I could’ve liked Olivia—if she was nicer, if she was less caustic, if she was less sarcastic. But I had no right to ask her to change and no reason to expect that she would. She didn’t care about my good opinion of her. She didn’t care about most people’s good opinions. After what little I’d learned about her life, I could understand why she had taken that stance.

I let out a loud sigh—one that contained at least a smidge of a groan. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Olivia look at me, so I looked back at her.

“Shall we continue working together?” I asked.

She hesitated, then said, “At least until Kirby is home.”

I nodded and put my hands in my pockets. “Back in the coffee shop, there was one point where you got really thoughtful. What were you thinking about?”

By then we were in the thick of it all. There were booths on either side of us and people milling around. I had to resist the urge to dart off and look at all the arts and crafts on display. Olivia and I walked down the wide aisle that led toward the small stage at the center of the park.

“I was thinking about what Misserly said about magical signatures,” Olivia said at last.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that if this damn case wasn’t so full of holes, maybe we could figure something out! If only we knew what they took!” She kicked at the ground as she walked. “Five thefts, and we don’t know what they took from three of them. Kirby’s. ARC Hall. The hardware store.”

“Do you think Ashworth might be right about the two projects?” I asked.

“How would I know?” she snapped.

I massaged my temples for a second, then let my hand drop back to my side. “We could talk it over. Bounce a few ideas off each other.”

“Why?”

“Remember that whole ‘working together’ thing? This is part of it.” I reached up and flicked the brim of her hat. “Come on. Two projects. What do you think?”

To her credit, Olivia did think about it.

Then she raised her head and said, “That might explain the gap.”

“What gap?” I asked.

“Kirby went missing, and nothing happens for a whole week. Then the hall gets broken into, there are three burglaries in one night, and they break into our house the next night. It feels like the last few days are all tied together, but them breaking into Kirby’s feels like something else.”

“But what about the blood?”

“What blood?”

“The needle. We talked about the idea that one of the reasons they might have stolen the needle was to get some blood.”

Olivia made a face and shook her head.

We arrived at the edge of a crowd. The stage they were surrounding was nothing more than a platform that stood a whopping one-and-a-half feet off the ground, but it gave the crowd a slightly better view of the performer.

The performer was a lovely female magician in a red spangled outfit so revealing, I shivered with empathy when an icy breeze blew past. The breeze didn't seem to bother her. She had dedicated her life to the art of showmanship; she could ignore such minor things as a forty-degree temperature, not including wind chill.

Her show was meant to mimic the kind of amateur magician's show that you might see in Las Vegas, but she was using real magic to create some of the effects. I could see the blue and purple lights.

That spoiled it for me slightly, and I smiled when I realized how silly that was. You know things are screwy when fake magic looks more impressive to you than real magic.

Olivia and I stopped a few feet back from the rest of the crowd.

“I don’t think the needle has anything to do with drawing blood,” Olivia said.

I pulled my eyes away from the show. “You mentioned back at the coffee shop that witches try to avoid magic that calls for blood. Is there a reason?”

“Because the vast majority of it is black magic. It’s not just a tool for us—it’s malice. Using it has consequences.”

“There really is black magic?”

She nodded.

“Does it work the same way for sorcerers and alchemists?” I asked.

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Olivia crossed her arms. She was watching the performer, but she said to me, “We don’t know. Witches are the only ones that talk about how intention influences magic. The others ignore it. Dorsey’s the only sorcerer I’ve read that even gives credit to the idea that we know what we’re talking about, and he claims that it only matters for witches because the magic we’re using comes directly from us. We’re the vessel—”

“Like the jug,” I said.

Olivia gave me a scathing glance. “What?”

“It’s like what Misserly said. The shape of the thing matters. If you’re the jug the magic comes in, then maybe your mood is like your shape.”

“Do I look like a jug to you?”

I nodded solemnly. “A very feisty one.”

She rolled her eyes and returned her attention to the stage. I did the same—minus the eye-roll.

“But if the needle doesn’t have to do with blood,” I said, “does that mean it’s another tool? Like the jug?”

It took Olivia a moment to answer. “Probably. But we’re also dealing with someone who was able to make a person invisible. For all we know, he stole the needle to inject a potion into someone. That makes more sense that it being used in a device.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s all wrong! It’s the wrong shape. It’s the wrong material—”

“How’s it the wrong material?”

“Hypodermic needles are stainless steel. That’s a dead-weight metal when it comes to magic. It might be a part of a device, but it wouldn’t be the active part. It’d be more like a spring or a cog—but what the hell kind of a machine would need a needle as one of its working components? It’s too fine. It’d break the moment it was used.”

“But…then…”

“We don’t know! Okay?” Olivia wasn’t shouting, but her voice was strained. “Why don’t you try coming up with some answers, instead of pestering me with a thousand questions that I can’t do anything with!”

When she finished her tirade, she pressed her lips together.

I couldn’t be offended. One glance at her expression was all it took. Her frustration and grief were almost palpable.

Maybe I was projecting, but when you don’t get the love you need from your family, you have to find your value somewhere else. I was pretty sure that Olivia had found hers in excelling—in being the best witch possible, defying everyone who thought she couldn’t do it, in knowing everything. But now, when it really mattered to her, she didn’t have the answers. And she couldn’t look them up in a book.

I gazed up at the performer. She was wowing the crowd with some contact juggling. The clear balls rolled over her arms as smooth as liquid, without any help from her magic. Then she caught one of the balls in her palm, and the two others rolled down to meet it, disappearing in a flash of blue light, one after the other.

The satisfied sigh of the audience was followed by applause.

That must have been cool to see. Shame the blue light had hidden it from me.

“Olivia, why did you ask Big Jacky to be your master?” I asked.

“More questions?” she grumbled.

I leaned toward her. “At least you know the answer to this one.”

“Does it matter?”

“No. That’s why I’m asking it. Brains work better when they’re distracted.”

“Is that what you tell yourself?”

My mouth opened, then closed again.

As a matter of fact, that was what I told myself. I’d heard the line once—out of context and without understanding what it meant—and I’d liked it so much I immediately embraced it and refused to do any further research.

I had assumed it meant that you had to distract your conscious mind so that your unconscious could get to work on the real problems. Unfortunately, there was a chance that my unconscious was as easily distracted as my conscious mind, and they ran around together like two dopes at a carnival.

“We’ve tried it your way,” I said. “Why don’t we try it my way for a bit?”

Another chill breeze blew the smell of snow and street food over us. Olivia’s chest rose and fell in a sigh.

“I didn’t care if my master was a witch,” she said. “Because of how I use my magic, an alchemist or a sorcerer would’ve worked just as well for me. The only thing I wanted was for them to be important. I wanted them—” She stopped and her cheeks turned pink. With a courage I could admire, she went on, “I wanted them to be more important than my mother. I researched the five closest Torrs, and I kept seeing the same name—Jack Noctis. I thought he had to be someone special if he was a torrman with more than one Torr.”

I bit down on both my lips to keep from laughing, but my chest jerked with suppressed giggles. Olivia, of course, saw it and glared at me.

“Well,” I said, when I could control my giggling, “you were right about him being special.”

Was it my imagination, or did the far edge of Olivia’s mouth tick up for a second?

I said, “When you found out he wasn’t a magician, why didn’t you go find a new master?”

“My mother and I had had a fight about it. She said that I was making a mistake and wasting my apprenticeship…” Olivia’s voice trailed off.

“And there was no way you were going to admit she was right?”

The pink in her cheeks had been fading, but now it bloomed again, even brighter. “It wasn’t a mistake! It’s not what I expected, but it wasn’t a mistake. Iset’s the perfect tutor. She’s studied every type of magic there is, and when she wants solutions, she doesn’t care where they come from. That was exactly what I needed.”

I thought about the two long scrolls and smiled. “Olivia Oliversen, I think you’re a very lucky girl.”

When she turned her eyes to me, they were narrow with anger and suspicion. She must have thought I was teasing her.

I elaborated: “Who else can pull a goof like that, and plop themselves—smack!—into the best place possible?”

She relaxed and looked back up at the stage. “Yeah. Maybe you’re right.”

Our Madam of Prestidigitation had put away the clear balls. Part of her act was that she never made a sound, so now she silently, and with exaggerated hand motions, drew attention to her wide-open mouth, proving to the audience (or those close enough to vouch for her) that it was empty.

To further prove it, she squirted some water in her mouth, swallowed, then squirted some more. She pretended to gag on the volume of water and spat it back out in an arc. I watched the blue sparks dance along the water as it turned to ice. When she stepped away, it hung in the air, suspended without support. She wandered around, seemingly dumbfounded by her own magic. The children in the audience tittered when they saw her expression.

She touched the ice and it shattered into a million pieces. I saw the flash of magic that accomplished the job.

Next she pulled a balloon out of her costume—a deflated balloon. Considering how skimpy her costume was, if she’d managed to pull out an inflated balloon, that would’ve required real magic.

She blew it up, then drew out one of her long metal hair pins, causing her hair to roll down her back. She pressed the point into the side of the balloon. When the balloon popped, the fire that erupted from it made several children scream with surprise and delight.

I smiled when I heard their laughter and turned to Olivia, to ask her how impressive it had looked if you couldn’t see the magic, but the expression on her face froze the question to my lips.

“We need Jacky,” Olivia whispered. “I need—”

She stopped suddenly and fumbled around her cape, trying to reach the pockets of her dress. I pulled out my phone, dialed Jacky, and handed it to her.

She glanced at the screen and put it to her ear. A second later, she groaned. “Do you think he remembered to take it off silent?”

I frowned.

Big Jacky was famous for not answering his phone. But the way he’d talked before he left us made it sound as if, in this case, he was going to make a special effort.

Olivia suddenly raised her head. “Mr. Noctis? Are you nearby?”

Big Jacky appeared beside us. There was no noise or movement to mark his arrival. One second there was air, the next it was occupied by a skeleton in a suit.

He pulled the phone away from his skull and hung up. “Yes.”

Olivia passed me my phone. As I returned it to my pocket, I noticed that Jacky clicked off his ringer before putting his phone away. I shook my head. Some people are born hopeless.

Not…not that I had any idea if Big Jacky had ever been born.

“Has something happened?” Jacky asked.

“I may have an idea,” Olivia said, “but I need you to check it. Tell me what’s wrong with it.”

Jacky nodded. That was something he could do. He was oddly good with seeing around ideas and logic. Of course, without anything resembling common sense or a concept of proportion, it was an easy romp from there to the realms of the ridiculous—but, by gum, it was going to be a logical romp.

Olivia led us away from the crowd and over to the edge of the street fair to escape some of the noise.

When we stopped, Jacky said, “Did you talk to your mother?”

“She said nothing was taken,” Olivia said.

Jacky raised his skull to rest his eye sockets on the line of booths. The face he didn’t have managed to look frustrated. Then, without warning, he turned to me.

“Was she telling the truth?”

Jacky has this strange quality to his voice sometimes. It’s a sense of eternity and fathomless space, and it makes his moderately low voice feel like it’s coming from the world’s deepest bass. I'm around him enough, sometimes I take him for granted. Whenever that happens, he'll say something in that voice, and it reminds me that I'm listening to death.

I hadn’t been expecting to hear it, and I certainly hadn’t been expecting to hear it directed at me, so my answer came out as a stammer. “Y-yes. I mean, I think so.”

“Witches will lie about things like that. They don’t like to be perceived as weak. Were you watching her face?”

Olivia broke in, “She was telling the truth, Mr. Noctis. Listen to me for a second.”

Jacky turned and waited.

“I think I know what the thieves are after,” Olivia said. “No—not really. But I think I know where they’re after. Like, their final goal.”

“Olivia, I’m afraid you’re not making any sense,” Jacky said.

She held her hands up by her head, then jerked them down. All her movements were tight with suppressed excitement. “All right, look! When the thieves broke into ARC Hall, we assumed that they were after something in there.”

Jacky said slowly, as if looking for a trap, “That’s correct.”

“Then, when they broke into those other three places and my house, it looked like they were trying to build something or collect tools, and we assumed that whatever they’d been after in ARC Hall was a part of that. But what if we were right the first time?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if they’re after something in ARC Hall? What if that’s their final goal?”

The poor girl had finally snapped. She’d been wound so tight for so long, and now the spring had cracked. It was a shame. I blamed the witches’ culture.

“Olivia,” I said with a heart full of sympathy, “we know it wasn’t their final goal. They broke into four other places afterward.”

“No! You don’t—ugh. Just try to follow along, Emerra.”

I was already trying for all my worth, but I wasn’t going to correct someone in the middle of a mental breakdown.

“Why was nothing gone from ARC Hall?” she demanded. “Because they’d failed! When you accept that, it all makes sense! Jacky said that they were careful people. They probably checked out Kirby’s place before breaking into it. They waited days before their next heist. They took the time to test the wards around ARC Hall even though they could walk right through the front door. That is careful. So, then, after that, why did they suddenly go into panic mode and break into three places on the same night?”

“Maybe because the festival was coming to a close, and they felt like they were running out of time,” I reminded her.

“Right! But we know that they were here at least a week ago! If they knew they were going to be breaking into those other four places, don’t you think they would have spread it out a little more? Played it a little more safely. Then they wouldn’t have had to break those two windows!”

Jacky’s spine straightened. “You think they broke into those places because of what happened in ARC Hall?”

“Yes!” Olivia grinned. It was a fierce little smile with triumph and teeth bared.

“But,” I said, “you can’t know that. Not really.”

“Not know it, no. But it makes sense.” She put her thumbnail between her teeth for a second, then pulled it out. “Time to play pretend, Emerra. You can do that, right?”

I nodded.

“They came to Craftborough a week ago. They’re careful and thoughtful. They break into Kirby’s place, but as cautious as they are, he catches them because a blind guy isn’t going to care if you’re invisible. They mucked that up badly, but they don’t want to give up on their final goal. It’s too important to them. So they kidnap Kirby to keep him quiet until they can get what they’re really after. That’s a big risk for some cautious people—so whatever they’re after must be worth a lot—”

Jacky mumbled, “And the most precious things in this town are all in ARC Hall.”

Olivia pointed to him, then returned her attention to me. “They finish their preparations for breaking into the hall. They’re not worried. They have plenty of time. They sneak the invisible guy into the hall during the day so they don’t have to worry about the wards. Except that they didn’t know about the inner wards because those wards are kept secret from everyone who isn’t directly involved in maintaining them. They fumble around, set off the ward, alerting the wardsman, who calls up my mother. When everyone shows up there, they look around, but they can’t see anyone. Captain Transparent could have stayed there until the coast was clear, or he could’ve left in all the chaos.”

“How could he leave if the ward was up?” I asked.

“Wards only keep you from coming in. They never stop you from going out.”

“Go on,” Jacky said.

Olivia obliged: “Their first attempt failed. Now they have to make a choice. Do they give up and go home, or do they stay and try again?”

Jacky said, “Whatever their original motivation had been, they’d taken on the risk of holding Kirby against his will. To abandon their project without any prize, after all that work and risk, would be repugnant to them.”

“That’s why all the other burglaries were so rushed,” Olivia added. “Now they’re in a hurry, because the festival’s going to be over, and they’ll lose the cover of the crowd. That’s why they stole all those cheap things that weren’t worth stealing. They’d be hard to get a hold of, and they didn’t have any time to wait.”

I remembered what Misserly had said. “Olivia, blessed silver isn’t cheap.”

“Yes, but it is hard to get a hold of, and they needed it to get through the ward.”

Jacky said, “You mean the inner ward? You think they’ll try again?”

“Yes!”

“But how can you break a ward?” I asked. “I thought that it would take an impossible amount of power.”

Olivia grinned again and her eyes lit up. “That’s only if you’re trying to crush it from the outside.”

“Huh?”

“Do you know why a bigger ward is always weaker than a small ward, Emerra?”

Ah. She’d found a chance to show off. No wonder her eyes were so bright.

“No,” I admitted.

“It’s because it’s too big. If you’re trying to protect several buildings at once, you better hope whatever you’re protecting it from isn’t a magician because all it would take is one good punch with a directed blast—you wouldn’t even have to form it!—and it would shatter. It’s the power of the strike concentrated at the point of impact versus the power spread over the total surface area. That’s why, if you directed that same blast at a ward that was only protecting a room, it wouldn’t do jack squat.”

Big Jacky raised a finger to get our attention. “Who is Jack Squat?”

We ignored him.

“But Nylah made it sound like they had multiple wards,” I pointed out, “so they’re probably only protecting a room. Or maybe even something smaller than that. Like a shelf. A blast wouldn’t do it.”

“No, but something tiny, something that could bring the magic to the absolute smallest point, something coated in blessed silver that could shed most of the magic as it pierced through—”

“The needle!” I couldn’t have been more excited if I’d been the one to come up with it myself. “They’re going to pop the ward like a balloon!” I turned to Jacky. “Is that possible?”

“If you’re asking about the magic,” he said, “Olivia is our expert, but her scenario is plausible, and there’s no fault in her reasoning.” He held perfectly still for a quarter of a second, then turned and started walking. “Come.”

Olivia and I ran to catch up.

“Where are we going?” Olivia asked.

“The festival ends tomorrow. We need to find your mother.”

“My mother!”

“What does she know about the situation?”

Olivia cast a dark look my way. “I told her everything.”

“Good,” Jacky said without slowing down. “That will simplify things.”

“Jacky,” I said, “Olivia’s already talked to her—”

“Olivia isn’t going to be talking to her. I am. Olivia, if it’s too uncomfortable for you, you’re welcome to leave.”

I glanced at Olivia’s face. Yeah. That wasn’t going to happen.

Jacky added, “Emerra, you keep an eye on Mrs. Oliversen.”

“Always happy to lend an eyeball, but can you tell us what’s going on?”

“If the thieves are in a hurry, then so are we.”