Chapter 44 - Home Again

“I talked to Tracy before I came over,” Autumn said. “It was Cameron Misserly that was asking about you. I described him to her.”

Olivia nodded as if the information was nothing new or surprising.

The only thing I was surprised by was the fact that Tracy thought Misserly qualified as handsome. I mean, he wasn’t bad, but…handsome?

Then again, I’d only ever seen him standing next to Ashworth. And I was probably prejudiced against him since he’d betrayed our slovenly camaraderie by turning out to be the kidnapper.

It was around nine o’ clock the next day. Autumn, Olivia, Jacky and I were all waiting in the alley behind Kirby’s store. Darius had called Olivia at eight to let her know that Ansel was bringing Kirby home that morning, and she’d wasted no time calling Autumn.

We’d arrived in the alley no later than eight-twenty, and had been burning the anxious minutes away by talking about the case.

Autumn said, “Was he going to keep what he stole for himself?”

When Darius had found out that Autumn had been with us since the beginning, he accepted the idea that she had the right to a few answers, but he’d asked us to impress upon her the value of “being reserved with information”—meaning, he didn’t want it to get out that an alchemist had transformed someone by turning them invisible. If the other alchemists found out it was possible, half of them would rush out to try to figure out how it was done.

I told him that Autumn was a witch, and that witches knew all about the value of being reserved. It was practically an obsession with them.

The only thing we weren’t allowed to tell Autumn was exactly what Misserly and Sammy had been trying to steal. That was still considered a coven secret. When we explained the situation, Autumn had accepted the restriction without comment.

She’d been around witches enough, she knew not to question the obsession.

“No,” Jacky said. “When Misserly was given the chance to attend the Besom Days Festival in Reynell’s place, he started fishing for anyone who might pay him to steal something. A witch from another coven replied to his post.”

That was why Cosmo had shown up at the cocktail party. Part of Torr security keeps an eye on the areas of the dark web that are involved with magic. They caught wind of the arrangement and brought it to Cosmo’s attention. He didn’t know who the thief was or how they thought they could get past the security, but he knew their target.

Autumn shook her head. “Damn witches.”

Olivia grunted her heartfelt agreement. I grinned.

Jacky went on, “Misserly needed the money badly. The lineage of instruction for experimental investigators was broken long ago. He didn’t have the support of a mentor, and he couldn’t get a standard loan to fund his work. He had to borrow money from other people.”

“The kind of people that shoot your leg if you don’t pay on time,” I said.

I didn’t know if that was strictly accurate, but I did know that loan sharks were involved, and I wasn’t about to ruin a good story with research.

“So he was using Leslie Sams?” Autumn asked.

My stomach twisted.

“Almost certainly,” Jacky said.

I had been there when they took Sammy in. I’d told Ansel I’d sit in the cell with him, but she and Darius had both raised their voices to explain to me, in blunt terms, why that was a stupid idea. I didn’t argue. They couldn’t see him, so they wouldn’t understand. Instead I waited on a chair outside his cell.

Misserly was in the cell next to him. I caught him glancing at me occasionally. When I raised my eyes, his lips would thin as he pressed them together.

When Ansel came to get him, Misserly jumped to his feet.

“Where’s Sammy’s lawyer?” he demanded.

Ansel used her magic and her key to unlock his cell. “Mr. Sams hasn’t asked for a lawyer.”

“Sammy!”

Sammy looked up from the floor, his face slack with sorrow. “I want a lawyer,” he mumbled.

“There.” Misserly glared at Ansel.

She exchanged glances with me, then sighed. “The Torr will appoint him a lawyer, but it may take a while for them to arrive.”

“Then he won’t say anything until they get here. Will you, Sammy?”

Sammy mumbled, even quieter, “I won’t say anything until they’re here.” He went back to staring at the floor, his fingers interlaced, his head bowed.

Ansel nearly growled, “Come on, Dr. Misserly.” She pulled him from his cell and escorted him out of the room.

When the door closed behind them, I whispered, “He cares about you, you know. That’s why he wants you to have a lawyer. He’s going to try to save you, Sammy.”

And Sammy had licked his lips and said, so softly I had to strain to hear him, even in the silence of the room, “But he said he was using me.”

Would anyone be able to see his tears, or only me?

Rall was right: power was part of what defined a relationship. But it wasn’t everything.

Autumn put her hand on my arm, drawing me away from my memories. “Are you all right, honey?”

I took a deep breath. “Yeah. Sorry. I had a late night last night.”

Autumn put her arm around me and squeezed my shoulders.

Olivia said to Jacky, “What will happen to Sams?”

“In the long term, that’s something the courts will have to decide. For now the Torr is making arrangements to have him kept secure and comfortable while they try to find a way to undo the transformation process.”

“Do you think they’ll be able to?”

“Misserly has agreed to help them. With the doctor’s assistance, it should be possible.”

“And Misserly?” I asked.

Jacky said, “I suspect he’ll be going to prison for a very long time.”

“I thought he was cooperating,” Autumn said.

“He is, but he and Sams have been working together for a while and their crimes are numerous.”

The phone call Big Jacky had made, back in Mrs. Irvine’s office, had been to Agent Darius Vasil. He explained the situation and asked for advice. Darius skipped the advice and told Jacky that he’d be down there in three hours with his own Torr enforcement unit. The moment Darius heard about the possibility of an invisible man, he had a suspicion, bordering on certainty, that we were after the same thief he was.

They’d picked up a partial fingerprint from an earlier heist and had tentatively matched it to Leslie Sams, but no one had seen him for months.

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Imagine that.

“Did you ever suspect Misserly?” Autumn asked.

“It was kind of hard not to,” I said. “The second you think that someone out there is building a magical tool to help them with a robbery, you kind of start looking around for an alchemist.”

“But we didn’t really know it was him,” Olivia explained. “Witches and sorcerers also build tools. They’re just not famous for them.”

“That’s why we set up the trap,” Jacky added.

“A trap?” Autumn said.

Jacky explained our original plan—how we’d hoped to get a witness who could testify about who’d brought in the tool, and a witness who saw Sams use it.

“We wanted to get as much evidence against them as possible,” Jacky said, “and for Kirby’s safety, we wanted to pick them up together. Unfortunately, they acted much sooner than we thought they would, and the tool was smaller than we’d anticipated.”

It was Barnaby’s jug that fooled us. During the briefing with the security team, Darius had explained that the jug probably wasn’t going to be used in the tool itself, but I think it subconsciously set the expectation for how big it might be. I know that I had pictured something about half that size.

But Misserly had only needed the jug to store the magic before he fed it into the iron he used like a battery. The stupid thing, minus the needle and switch, was no larger than a cell phone. He waltzed into ARC Hall with it sitting in his pocket and dropped it off before we even realized he was there.

It was a clever little device, and there wasn’t a witch that had seen it who wasn’t furious that it existed. Olivia had gone home and filled up four pages in her notebook, brainstorming ways to keep it from working on her wards.

Jacky said, “Fortunately we had a back-up plan. We blocked off all the exits but one and left our Torr enforcement team and Officer Ansel waiting behind it with a capture ward in place.”

“Why would you make them wait outside?” Autumn asked.

“We were trying to minimize the risk of Sams escaping. Some of our Torr enforcement personnel had special talents that would’ve been useful for catching Sams—”

I tried to look as un-special as possible in case Autumn glanced my way.

“—but that wasn’t true for all of them. If we’d put the team inside the building, Sams would've seen them long before the majority of the team would have been able to figure out where he was, and he had a distinct advantage if there was a chase.”

Autumn Langley let out a loud sigh. “Well, it worked.”

“We got lucky,” Olivia grumbled.

Autumn’s smile lit up her face. “We did.”

Olivia saw her friend’s expression, and her scowl relaxed into a faint smile. The redhead probably hated to rely on luck, but in this case, she could appreciate that it was the outcome that was important.

Thinking of Kirby must have jogged something in Autumn’s memory. She asked, “Did you ever learn why they’d broken into Kirby’s store?”

Olivia and Jacky glanced at each other to see if the other one knew the answer.

I said, “I did.”

Everyone looked at me.

I scuffed at the water left in the bottom of our mushy blob of melted footprints. “There’s a rare plant that Misserly needs to create the formula he used to transform Sammy. When they heard there was an apothecary who specialized in magical plants, they thought it’d be worth looking around.”

“Was he going to try to turn himself invisible next?” Autumn asked.

“He said he needed it to help him create the formula that would turn Sammy back to normal.”

They reacted about the way I had—with a whole lot of thoughtful silence.

It explained why the break-in at Kirby’s had happened so much earlier than anything else; it wasn't a part of their theft at ARC Hall. But it also meant that Misserly had already been looking for ways to help Sammy.

I wondered how he'd spin that into the narrative he'd been feeding Darius and Ansel.

We all looked over when the police car turned into the alley.

Olivia and Autumn stepped forward while Jacky and I hung back.

Ansel stopped the car a few feet away from where we were waiting, and Kirby, who was riding beside her in the front, opened his door and emerged with his red-tipped long white cane in hand. He seemed shaky, and his shoulders drooped a bit, but otherwise he looked exactly as he had in my vision.

“Nolan!” Autumn cried and ran toward him.

He turned at the sound of her voice. “Autumn!”

She took his arm to let him know she was there. When he felt it, he grabbed her forearm and pulled her into a fierce hug. They held each other, laughing and trying to speak, but their words came out garbled because both of them were crying too hard. Autumn pulled back to wipe Kirby’s tears away. He laughed at the useless gesture. It was like trying to wipe away a line of water from a running faucet.

Olivia walked up to them at a more sedate pace, and stopped a few feet away to allow them their time together.

By then they’d gotten enough control of themselves that I could make out what they were saying.

“I heard you were looking for me,” Kirby teased.

“Every stupid day you were gone,” Autumn said with a sob.

“Worrywart.”

“I had to call in Olivia! That means you scared her too, you thoughtless brute.”

“Olivia?”

Olivia said quietly, “Hello, Kirby.”

Kirby turned his head. “Olivia! You’re here!” He held out his arm toward her.

She didn’t need any more invitation than that. She walked over and was scooped up in an embrace big enough to capture both her and her former mentor. Kirby’s tears were flowing even faster. He held Olivia and Autumn like he was never going to let them go.

The sight of it blurred when my own eyes teared up. I put a hand over my heart. Excessive happiness had filled it up so far that the darn thing was in danger of exploding.

Kirby kissed Olivia’s hair and Autumn’s cheek. He groaned when they asked how he was doing. They laughed some more and cried some more, then Ansel had to break up the party by telling Kirby that she had to go, but she’d be in touch. She handed him a copy of his key.

Kirby thanked her too, but she refused his generous offer to join in the hug.

Autumn proposed that they go inside. When Kirby came toward me and Jacky, Olivia introduced us and explained that we’d come along to help find him.

Kirby’s smile was a thing to treasure.

As he shook our hands, he told us how much it meant to him that we were friends with Olivia.

Neither Olivia nor I bothered to correct him. We could be friends for a few minutes. That was Kirby’s superpower.

He opened the shop and told us all to come in. When Autumn, sounding exactly like the worrywart that Kirby accused her of being, asked if he wanted to go upstairs and lie down, he told her he’d had enough rest at the hospital, and that he’d been idle to the point of madness for twelve days. All he wanted to do was sit on his stool, in his shop, and be home.

“The stool’s right where you left it,” Autumn said. “I’ll grab the watering can, and you better tell me and Olivia what to do because some of your plants need attention.”

“The plants!” Kirby cried.

I stayed off to the side, happy to do nothing but watch. This was my reward.

I looked away when I felt Big Jacky tap me on the shoulder. He motioned for me to follow him. We returned to the alley.

“What is it?” I asked.

He said, “I’ve seen that Nolan Kirby made it safely home. Now I’m afraid I must go.”

My heart sank. “Already? But we just got here!”

“I know, but I have urgent work that I’ve been putting off.”

“Please, Jacky! A few more minutes! How often have you seen Olivia smile like that? I need to get a picture so I can use it for blackmail.”

Jacky reached into his pocket. “I have no intention of taking Olivia away so soon. I think this time is important to her.” He pulled out his car key and fob and held it up. “You have your driver’s license, don’t you?”

Comprehension dawned. “You want me to drive home?”

When I held out my hand, Jacky put the key in it. “Stay as long as you like. Come home when you’re ready.”

A five-hour drive across several states. That would be the longest drive I’d ever done. I felt a flutter of nerves, but Jacky was right about that time being important to Olivia.

“What happens if I wreck the car?” I asked.

“Try to avoid doing that, but all I ask is that you get yourself and my apprentice home safely.” Jacky took out his wallet and pulled out a hundred-dollar bill and a fifty-dollar bill. “This should be more than enough for gas and food for you both.”

“Yeah, I’d say so,” I mumbled as he put the bills in my hand. That kind of money could buy an awful lot of gas station snacks.

Jacky put his hand on my shoulder. “Please give my regards to the Oliversens and apologize for the fact I couldn’t say goodbye to them.”

“I will.” I grabbed onto his jacket before he could disappear. “Big Jacky…”

My mind went blank. There was some kind of tender emotion clogging up my chest—“tender,” like, something sensitive and delicate, as well as “tender,” something gentle. I wanted to say something to him, but I didn’t know the right words. My hand tightened around the fabric of his suit coat.

“Thank you,” I said.

He paused, then turned back to me. I could sense the difference; one moment he’d been about to fly away, his mind already distracted by thoughts of urgent work—then he was there with me, focusing on me.

“You’re thanking me?” he said.

“You helped.”

“I helped Olivia. I don’t understand why you’d be thanking me.”

No, he wouldn’t understand something like that.

“Thank you for being the kind of person who’d put off urgent work to help Olivia.”

“I still don’t see why that would matter to you.”

I grinned at him. “I know you don’t. But it does.” I let go of his jacket. “Go on now. And don’t forget to turn on your ringer! Darius might need to talk to you, and if I get in a wreck, expect a call.”

After one last wary glance, he disappeared.

I tucked the money in my pocket and went back into the store.

It was happy chaos. Kirby had moved his stool out to the center counter. Autumn and Olivia were bringing him potted plants for inspection and instructions on what to do. It was something he could’ve done by himself, but he must have known that Olivia and Autumn wanted to be involved, and I think he wanted to have them around.

My offer to go grab coffee from the local shop was universally approved. I took down everyone’s orders and headed to the front of the store.

“Could you raise the blinds as you leave?” Kirby asked.

I raised the two blinds on the windows, as well as the blinds on the door, to allow the meager February sunlight to come streaming in. The on-vacation sign was still taped to the door, and I felt a healthy surge of pleasure when I ripped it off. As I wadded it up into a ball, I happened to glance out the window.

Nylah was across the street, watching the shop. Her posture was stiff and perfect, like normal, but the expression on her face was relaxed. I wondered if that’s what she looked like when she thought no one was watching.

She noticed me. When our eyes met, I nodded to her. She nodded back, then turned and went on her way.