Story Thieves Page 6

  Wait. What?

  CHAPTER 11

  What had the fog just made him say? Owen tried desperately to lie, to take back everything he’d just spouted out, but the fog filled all of his thoughts, arranging them like soldiers in a line, ready to march out the door of his mouth and into battle. And no matter how much he ordered them to stop, they just kept marching.

  Or something like that. It was honestly a little hard to think of analogies with his brain so magicked.

  The Magister’s eyes bore in on Owen. “I’m sorry, my boy. You didn’t just suggest that we don’t actually exist, did you?”

  Kiel tapped his own arm. “I feel fairly solid to me. Could we get back to more important things now?”

  The Magister closed his eyes for a moment, then reopened them. “The spell is working. Somehow he actually believes that we aren’t real.”

  “You’re not real,” Owen’s mouth said. “You’re just characters in a book.” He frantically tried to bite his lips closed to keep from saying anything else, but his lips just pushed out into a fish-face expression to escape his teeth. Ugh, those clever lips of his!

  “He’s probably been science brain-cleaned, washed, whatever they do,” Kiel said. “Charm told me about it. They use their electric lights to flash your eyes until you believe whatever they say.” He shrugged. “Science people do weird things for fun. Magi, I need to find the Seventh Key—”

  “Why would you think us not real?” the Magister asked Owen, giving him a quizzical look. “You can see us standing in front of you, and you are responding to my magic. Could an unreal person have cast such a spell?”

  “Apparently!” Owen said. “I know you’re not real because I’ve read about you in books, especially Kiel. I’m a huge fan. Everyone is! We know all about your quest to find the Seven Keys to the Vault of Containment, then use the Source of Magic’s power to defeat Dr. Verity once and for all. But there are things you don’t know yet. Like the Magister was actually born on Quanterium, and Dr. Verity was born on Magisteria, and they were switched as some kind of peace offering, to let each side experience the other’s culture. See? I couldn’t have known that except that it’s in the books.”

  The Magister took a step back, his eyes wide. Kiel turned to him, one eyebrow raised. “That isn’t true, is it, Magi?” he asked quietly.

  “No one knows that,” the Magister said quietly. “It happened thousands of years ago! No one alive still knows apart from Dr. Verity. How could you—”

  “It’s all in the books,” Owen’s mouth continued. “Just like how Kiel found out he’s a clone of Dr. Verity in the fourth book, and that the parents he’d always been searching for never actually existed. Which made him wonder that if he was actually from Quanterium, like Dr. Verity, how could he do magic, since no one from Quanterium’s ever been able to do it.” Owen paused for a breath, while inwardly he screamed at himself to just shut up already. “Obviously, you’re from Quanterium, Mr. Magister, and you can do magic, but he didn’t know that part yet. Not that it matters, since Dr. Verity was from Magisteria to begin with anyway. And remember how you originally told Kiel that his parents were killed by a time bomb that Dr. Verity sent, since you didn’t think he was ready to know that he’s a clone of Dr. Verity? You thought that’d turn his life upside down—”

  “And it did, at the time,” Kiel said quietly.

  “Enough!” the Magister shouted, and Owen’s mouth clamped shut. “There is no way you could know these things!”

  “None of this changes anything, as . . . surprising as it might be,” Kiel said. “If you really know what is happening here, why not tell us what Dr. Verity has planned?”

  “Oh, he’s going to blow up Magisteria using a huge science bomb,” Owen’s mouth said. “That’s what I read on fan sites, at least. Someone went through and pieced it all together from various threats. And somehow, it’s going to be your fault, Kiel. That’s what I read, anyway.”

  “My fault?”

  The Magister gave Kiel a quick glance, then turned back to Owen. “Tell me how you know these secrets. I must know!” He gestured, and the fog became even thicker in Owen’s head.

  “I read them!” Owen said. “I told you! There’s a guy who writes all of your books, Jonathan Porterhouse. He made you up. I don’t know how you’re here now, trust me. That’s all Bethany’s thing. Somehow she has the power to jump into books like they’re windows or something. Not that you’d jump into windows usually, but you know what I mean—”

  Kiel tapped the Magister on the shoulder. “Did you hear what he said? The part about Dr. Verity blowing up the planet—”

  “This Bethany girl,” the Magister interrupted. “She travels between your world and this one? My world? The one you claim doesn’t exist?”

  “Yeah, because she’s half-fictional,” Owen said. “I don’t honestly get it at all, but she said that her father was fictional, so, you know, imaginary, and somehow he came out to the real world and married her mom or something, but then he disappeared, so she wants to find him. But she can travel between here and there, yeah. Between fiction and the real world. Nonfiction? Would that be it?”

  “She brought you here the first time,” the Magister said, turning away and rubbing his temples. “She could take me to your world myself, and I could see if these wild statements have any truth to them.”

  “Didn’t you bring me here?” Owen asked. “Why don’t you just go back the same way?”

  “I borrowed a bit of her power,” the Magister said absently. “When I first met the two of you. I meant no harm by it, and solely wished to learn about her abilities. However, I used up what little I could take, bringing you back. To do more, I would need her at hand, if not taking me herself.”

  “I don’t know why you’d ever want to leave here,” Owen said. “You’ve got magic and time machines and dragons and—”

  “I would wish to meet this . . . writer,” the Magister told him. “The man you mentioned, Jonathan Porterhouse. The one who knows my deepest secrets, who has recorded my entire life.”

  “He’s not really recording,” Owen said. “He’s making it up in his head. There’s kind of a difference.” Okay, really? That was the point he had to keep driving home here?

  “Magister, we’re all in danger!” Kiel said, but the Magister just waved him off.

  “That shall wait, Kiel!” he shouted. “I must learn the truth of this! If what this child says is true, none of this might be real! We would have been fighting a war that never should have happened.” He sighed, leaning against his spell book. “All my thousands of years of life, learning everything I could, seeing the impossibilities of magic . . . all those years, dreamt up in someone’s head?”

  “It can’t be true,” Kiel said, shaking his head. “That’s all there is to it.”

  “I put this boy under the Fog of Truth spell,” the Magister said. “Everything he has said is objectively the truth as he knows it, or his brain would collapse like a dying star.”

  “Really?” Owen said. “Cool!” Stupid truth spell! Okay, it was cool, but it was also scary! Apparently, scary wasn’t objectively true enough to be said by a truth spell, though.

  “We need this Bethany girl, then,” the Magister said, turning back to Owen. “When will she be returning here?”

  “Oh, she won’t be,” Owen said, finally happy to be saying good news. “She hates me now, and wants nothing to do with me. You’ll never see her again. She’d never—”

  Bethany’s face popped out of nowhere right in the middle of the air.

  Kiel shouted in surprise, grabbed the Magister’s spell book, and banged Bethany over the head with it. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she tipped forward, but Kiel grabbed her head before it could fall, then helped her the rest of the way into the room.

  He laid her gently on the floor, only to back out of the way as the Magister gestured. Bethany’s body glowed with magic, then stood up on its own like a puppet, her eyes still closed.
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  “Perfect,” the Magister said. “And you,” he said, pointing at Owen, “shall wait with Dr. Verity beyond time and space until I return. You won’t need to eat or drink, as your body won’t actually exist as anything beyond a possibility until you come back out.”

  “That’s all well and good, but what about bathroom breaks?!” Owen shouted as the Magister mumbled a spell. “Seriously, that’s an important question!”

  But neither Kiel nor the Magister answered, and Owen began to disappear. The last thing Owen saw was the Magister reach out and take Bethany’s hand as Kiel took the other.

  “Take me to your world,” the magician said to his puppet. “And then I shall take us to this Jonathan Porterhouse writer.”

  The unconscious Bethany body nodded, then jumped the three of them right out of the book, just as the entire room disappeared into nothingness.

  Owen sighed. Bethany was totally going to blame him for this.

  CHAPTER 12

  The first thing Bethany noticed when she woke up was that she wasn’t in Owen’s bedroom. Instead of a bed, a desk, and a few bookshelves of dead books, there were . . . well, hundreds of bookshelves, maybe thousands. And all the books had their covers, too.

  It looked like she was in some kind of massive library, with the shelves rising at least two, maybe three floors, with those rolling ladders you only see in movies with rich people’s houses. That, combined with the marble floor and enormous oak desk, meant that whoever owned this house probably had a very large bank account.

  That was the first thing she noticed. The second was that she was alone.

  Where exactly was she, and how had she gotten here? She must have jumped out of a book, but since when did she not come out of the same book she went into? And if she had jumped out of a book, which one was it? There weren’t any books on the floor around where she’d woken up, and the last thing she wanted to do was have to figure out which book to jump back into out of the hundreds of thousands on the shelves.

  That, and even worse, she had no idea what time it was, or how far from home she might be.

  Could she use the location spell to find out where she was? But then she’d have wasted it, and how would she find her father then?

  “Owen!” she yelled, not even caring. “If you can hear me, I will make you pay for all of this!”

  Two double doors swung open at one end of the room, and a man in robes with a long beard and a twitching hat strode in. The Magister.

  Well, that explained things. She hadn’t jumped out of a book because she was still in a book. That made a little sense, at least. She had stuck her head into that Kiel Gnomenfoot book.

  “I’m glad to see you’re awake,” the Magister said. “We have quite a lot to talk about.”

  “No, actually, we don’t,” she said, and immediately jumped out of the book.

  Except . . . she didn’t. Instead, she just hopped a foot in the air, and landed right back where she’d started.

  A little more panicked, she tried jumping out of the book a second time, then a third, her heart starting to race as nothing happened. “What did you do?” she shouted at the Magister. “Why can’t I leave?”

  The Magister gestured to a huge comfy leather chair nearby, and it waddled toward her on its little feet. “Please. Sit.”

  Bethany began to hyperventilate. She’d had panic attacks before, usually when her mother had almost found all her hidden books beneath her bed, but this was something else altogether. Where was she? How could she not jump out of the book? And if she wasn’t in a book, how was a fictional character here too?!

  Why had she ever, EVER trusted Owen?

  “Sit,” the Magister repeated, and this time, her legs sat her down without her doing anything.

  “I don’t know what you want,” she said, words just tumbling out of her mouth. “Please just let me out. Let me go, please ! I don’t want this. I need to fix it, before it gets worse, whatever’s happening. Please!”

  The Magister just tented his fingers in front of his chest and waited for her to finish. She realized he wasn’t going to answer her, so she took a deep breath, then another, and waited.

  “You are no longer in my world,” the Magister said finally. “I apologize, but I used your power to transport myself and my apprentice here. Your magic is . . . strange to me. And my spells weren’t able to replicate it. In fact, if I hadn’t siphoned a bit of your power from you when we first met, I wouldn’t have been able to find your world at all.”

  Okay. Okay. This was about as bad as it could possibly be.

  “You . . . you took some of my power. But how?” She paused, remembering the chill she felt when the Magister had first noticed her. “You mean, back in your tower?”

  The Magister nodded. “More to learn about it than anything, at the time. I wasn’t sure what you were capable of. As I said, the power seemed strange, foreign. Unreal, in a way.”

  She swallowed hard. “You’ve got no idea.”

  The Magister raised an eyebrow. “Actually, I do.”

  The implications of that statement made Bethany’s heart skip. “You . . . do?”

  “I do. But perhaps we should discuss where we are.” He gestured around the library. “What you see before you is the home of a man named Jonathan Porterhouse.” He stopped, apparently thinking Bethany should recognize that name. It did seem familiar, actually. Where had she heard it before?

  And then it hit her. Not heard, but seen. An image of a book cover came to her, and her heart just completely gave up for a moment.

  “Oh,” she said, sinking back into the chair. “Oh, oh, no.”

  The Magister nodded silently.

  “NO, NO, NO!” Bethany shouted, jumping to her feet. “You need to get back now! Please! Where’s the book? I’ll take you back myself. Give me your hand! You can’t be here, this is so, so bad!”

  “Sit down, if you would,” the Magister told her, gesturing back to her chair.

  “No, I can’t!” she yelled. “You have no idea how awful this is! It’s impossible, it is! NO. You’re going back, right—” And then she stopped, something horrible occurring to her. “Where is he? Where’s Jonathan Porterhouse?”

  The Magister just stared at her until she sat back down. Finally, he spoke. “Owen told me that your father comes from my world. Is that true?”

  Did Owen just give away everything? And speaking of, where was he? “What did you do with Owen?” Bethany asked, feeling sick to her stomach.

  “He waits outside of time for my return just as Dr. Verity does,” the Magister said. “He will be completely comfortable until I free him, and no harm shall befall him.”

  “I’d be more worried about the harm he’d cause, actually,” Bethany said, but at least Owen was safe. Safe, in a nowhere prison beyond time and space, only able to be freed by a fictional character. So maybe “safe” wasn’t the best word so much as “trapped.”

  “Be that as it may. Answer my question, please.”

  “We’re not doing this,” Bethany said, shaking her head. “Whatever you know, it’s way too much. Just let me bring you back. You’ll be so much better off. I found a forget spell in your spell book. I can use that on you, and none of this will ever matter again. You can free Owen, and we’ll all go back to our lives!”

  “Is that true? About your father?” the Magister repeated.

  “It is and it isn’t, okay? He’s . . . he’s from a world like yours, but not yours. And beyond that, I don’t know much more than you.”

  The Magister nodded. “How is it done? How do these writers, in this world, chronicle the stories of worlds like mine?”

  “They use these things called computers,” Bethany said, just trying to hold herself together. “I know you don’t know science, but—”

  “THAT IS NOT WHAT I WANT TO KNOW !” the Magister roared, and the lights in the room dimmed as his entire presence grew. He seemed to gather ahold of himself, though, and everything lit back up to normal a mome
nt later. His voice was once again measured as he continued. “I want to know how they know what they write. Can this man see into my world?”

  Bethany stared at him. “I don’t honestly know,” she said in a quiet voice.

  The Magister’s eyes grew hard. “Because if he cannot see into my world, but instead my world sprang from his head in some way, that would mean my entire life, as well as the lives of everyone and everything I hold dear, have all been a lie. Made up. A fiction.”

  Bethany swallowed hard again, but didn’t say anything.

  “I can remember back thousands of years, Bethany,” the Magister said. “I remember my childhood, when the original magic-users first built the great cities of Magisteria. I remember the first time I met Sylvia, the love of my life. I remember centuries upon centuries of magical study. And my children. I watched them grow and age and have children of their own. I remember the school I once taught in, before the Quanterians destroyed it and put my planet under martial law, outlawing all magic. I remember those whom a mad doctor has imprisoned just for living their lives the way they wished, with magic.” He leaned forward. “My power kept me alive for all this time while others, dear friends and loved ones, passed away. It did so because I knew I had purpose, a reason to keep living in spite of time. So you might imagine how it would feel if, in reality, my entire existence amounts to nothing more than six adventure books for children.”

  “Seven, in a week or so,” Bethany said, her voice barely above a croak.