Story Thieves Read online

  “If you won’t answer my question, you give me little choice but to find out the truth another way,” the Magister said, his voice dangerously low. “I used my Fog of Truth spell on your friend and did not yet have a chance to relearn it, but there are other methods.”

  “I . . . I really don’t know!” Bethany said. “I swear, I don’t! I know some authors say they hear their characters’ voices in their heads, like they’re talking to them—”

  “Their characters?” the Magister said softly.

  “The people they’re writing about, that’s all I meant! And if that’s true, then they couldn’t just make them up, you don’t just hear voices. I mean, some people do, but they’ve got mental diseases, and authors probably don’t have that kind of mental disease. I mean, they could, but—”

  “I see that we’ll have to do this another way,” the Magister said. “Come.”

  He stood up and gestured. Invisible hands yanked Bethany out of her seat and carried her along behind the Magister as he strode back to the double doors.

  Outside the library was some sort of large entryway, with marble floors and stark-white columns. Two people stood in the middle of the entryway, right in front of a large staircase: one younger, wearing some kind of black cloak, with twin wands in what looked like holsters at his waist, and the other middle-aged in jeans and a sweater, his eyes filled with terror as ropelike snakes wrapped and unwrapped themselves around his arms and legs, holding him in place.

  “The girl has not been as much of a help as I’d hoped,” the Magister said. “So we’ll have to try a different way to find out the truth.”

  “Please, no,” the middle-aged man said. “I told you, I don’t—”

  The Magister gave him a look, and the man’s mouth disappeared right off his face.

  “Magi, we don’t need to do this,” the boy in the black cloak said, not seeming too happy himself. “Honestly, I get it. I nearly gave up entirely when I found out I was a clone. I thought my whole life had been a lie. But I learned that it didn’t matter, because who you are isn’t about where you come from, but about what you make of yourself. You taught me that! What does it change if—”

  “Everything,” the Magister said. He gestured, and the middle-aged man rose into the air, a paper and a pen appearing in the author’s hands. The Magister stepped to the man’s side and nodded at the items. “Now, Jonathan Porterhouse, we shall perform a small experiment, just like the Quanterians. You are going to describe me, the me you see before you, on paper. However, change one aspect of my clothing. A simple shift in color, perhaps.”

  Jonathan Porterhouse’s nostrils flared as he frantically struggled for breath without his mouth, his eyes wide.

  “What is this going to prove?” Bethany asked, her voice barely louder than a whisper.

  “If nothing happens, then we’ll know that these so-called writers have no control over us, or our world,” the Magister said, turning to Bethany. “However, if my clothing does change based on the description that he writes . . .”

  His eyes darkened, as did the room again. Somewhere lightning crashed, and Bethany didn’t think it was from a storm. “Then we will have a problem.”

  CHAPTER 13

  BORING!” Owen shouted into the white blankness all around him. “This is so boring! Why can’t something just happen already!”

  He sighed and tried to bang his head against the nonexistent wall behind him. Nothing existed in this place, apparently. Not walls, not hunger, not time, and definitely not entertainment.

  Or Dr. Verity for that matter. Which was weird. Shouldn’t he have been here too? Had he broken out? And if so, why hadn’t he left some sort of instructions so Owen could do the same thing? Being evil was one thing, but that was just inconsiderate.

  “Still boring!” he shouted to no one. “Bethany, where are you? If you’re off having fun with Kiel and the Magister without me, I’m never going to forgive you!”

  Bethany, having fun? Okay, that wasn’t likely, but given that she hadn’t come back yet, she had to be doing something exciting with them. Assuming she was okay. Since they’d basically kidnapped her, the Magister and Kiel. After she’d been knocked out.

  Owen frowned, suddenly worried. What if they stole her power, or banished her to a horrible dimension of just audiobooks or something? Or worse, what if they forced her to jump into stories to talk to all the cool characters? That’d make her crazy!

  Nah, she had to be okay. The girl could grab aliens from Mars out of books if she had to. What was going to stop her? An old man and his awesome, incredibly cool teenage apprentice? No way. She was fine. She had to be.

  When Bethany rudely didn’t respond or come get him out of this nowhere nonprison he’d been trapped in, Owen banged his head a few more times, then tried walking around again.

  The problem with walking into nothingness is that you honestly had no idea if you were getting anywhere. For all he knew, he’d walked ten miles and found just as much boring as the spot he’d left. He collapsed from boredom against the ground, and conveniently found another wall to bang his head against. Or the same one. Maybe the ground had just moved underneath his feet like a treadmill.

  Would he grow old in here, until he looked like the Magister with a huge beard? Would his fingernails grow out like that guy in Guinness World Records? Could Bethany jump into that book and hang out with Fingernail Guy? . . . That’d be weird.

  Was he missing his birthday? Had he already missed it? For all Owen knew, he’d been sitting here for years! Think of the presents he’d missed. Birthdays and Christmas!

  “Let me out of here!” he shouted.

  Nobody answered.

  It was time to give up. There was nothing else to do, literally. Here he was, trapped in a book, but outside the book, and—wait a second.

  If he was really still in the book somehow, maybe he could jump forward in the story, like books did when a chapter ended. It’d be like fast-forwarding time, chapter after chapter, until Bethany came back to find him. That was brilliant!

  Except, how did you end a chapter?

  Owen thought back to all the books he knew, and what he could remember about the ends of chapters. Most seemed to stop on some kind of ironic one-liner, or a cliffhanger. Cliffhangers would be a bit tough in here, with no cliffs to hang off of, but maybe he could trick the book into chaptering by saying something horribly ironic, and then waiting for it to (surprise! ) happen.

  “Now would be a horrible time for someone to show up out of nowhere to come rescue me!” he said, then paused to see if it worked.

  Time didn’t jump forward, and no one showed up out of nowhere to rescue him.

  This may not have been as good an idea as he’d hoped.

  “You know what’d be funny? If Dr. Verity came back and kidnapped me! Who’d expect that !”

  Nothing.

  “I’d really hate if I fell asleep and it turned out this was all just a dream. . . .”

  Nope.

  “This seems like the most secure prison ever! NO ONE could break in here!”

  Was that a sound? . . . Nope. Nope it wasn’t.

  Owen growled in frustration, then just started screaming various things. “Chapter Twelve! Chapter Thirty-Two! Chapter Seventy-Five, The Boy Who Was Rescued from the Boring Prison!”

  Nothing happened.

  “If anyone ever reads this,” he said to no one, “I hope they find out just how dumb it was to jump into a book. Apparently, you just get thrown into jail and left to rot. Don’t do it. Let me be a lesson. At least my life will have meant something!”

  He paused to see if that had done anything, but no.

  “Seriously, can NOBODY hear me?” he shouted.

  “I can hear you,” said someone. Out of nowhere stepped a person with no features, just a blank face and body, like an undressed mannequin. “And you can call me Nobody,” the creepy no-faced person said.

  Owen blinked. Now that would be the perfect place for a
new chap—

  CHAPTER 14

  —ter. Except of course, there wasn’t one.

  “Who are you?” Owen asked Nobody. “And why would I call you Nobody, when clearly you’re somebody ? Not that you look like somebody, actually. You mostly look like an unpainted action figure.”

  “You talk quite a bit when you’re nervous, don’t you,” Nobody said.

  “My mom tells me that it’s charming,” Owen said, trying to sound indignant. “But you didn’t answer my question.”

  “That’s right, I didn’t. You don’t belong here, so I’m here to take you home.”

  “Why do you not have a face? Or anything else?” Owen backed away slowly. “Traditionally, when someone looks either evil or faceless, it means they are evil, and faceless, or they’re a misunderstood good guy. How misunderstood would you say you are?”

  “If you’d be more comfortable,” Nobody said, “I can look a bit more . . . normal.” With that, his body began to sprout clothing, hair, fingernails, and everything else one naturally took for granted when looking at a regular person. Two green eyes popped out right around where they should be, and the face split to grow lips and teeth and such. Not a moment later, a handsome, middle-aged man with bronze-colored hair stood in front of him, raising a now-existing eyebrow. “Better?”

  “It would have been if I hadn’t just seen it sprout out of your body,” Owen said. “But that’s fine. You can still rescue me.”

  The man’s mouth curled up in a half smile. “I usually go formless when traveling between stories. It’s easier that way. You wouldn’t want to show up on an alien lizard planet looking human, after all.” He gestured for Owen to follow him, then began to walk off.

  “Wait, you travel between stories?” Owen shouted after him. “So you’re half-fictional too?”

  The man stopped abruptly and turned around, giving Owen a knowing look. “No, I’m not. I didn’t realize she’d shared so much with you.”

  “She? Bethany? You know her?” Wait a second. Was this man actually her father? Had he really just found Bethany’s father for her? What were the odds? Unless this was some kind of twist, and he actually wasn’t her father, and everything he said was just to throw Owen off?

  Or maybe he was way overthinking all of this.

  The man smiled again, just slightly. “Let’s be off. It’s not safe out here, between stories. You can get pretty lost, and many never find their way back to the story they’re from. You’re lucky to have survived so long. Though I suppose that’s because you aren’t, strictly speaking, from a story. As far as you know, at least.”

  Huh. Cryptic. Classic trickster character. Those were always Owen’s favorites, and that meant something interesting was happening. And right now, interesting was infinitely better than the boringness of the white, blank nothing. Plus, if this really could be Bethany’s dad, Owen had to find out for sure. “So how’d you find me? You’re not from the Kiel Gnomenfoot books, or I’d remember you.”

  “That’s right,” Nobody said. “But I’ll have to take you back there first, to get you home.”

  “How? How can you get me home if you’re not like Bethany?” Bam. Subtle.

  Nobody just gave him the same half smile. “There are other ways to travel between the worlds. Now come on.”

  What did that mean? And why wouldn’t he just say who he was?

  “From what I could tell, two main characters just disappeared out of the book,” Nobody continued, not looking back at Owen anymore as he quickened his pace, so Owen hurried to catch up. “If the last Kiel Gnomenfoot book were to come out right now, missing Kiel Gnomenfoot, questions would be raised. Questions no one should be asking just yet. That means someone needs to bring those two back.”

  “So?” Owen said. “Shouldn’t you be talking to Bethany, then? Good luck finding her. She never came back for me. Like she should have, by the way. She left me here in prison!”

  “Ah, here we go,” Nobody told him, stopping in the middle of nothing. He reached out a hand and gently pushed.

  The entire nothingness around Owen crumbled like he was on the inside of a sand castle as someone kicked it down, to be replaced by the Magister’s study.

  “Okay, that was kinda cool,” Owen said. Nobody glanced around a bit, then walked over to the Magister’s spell book. He stopped over the book, then pulled something out of the coat he had grown out of nothing, something that looked a lot like a hand mirror.

  “Now,” Nobody said, holding a hand over the spell book. “What I’m about to do isn’t exactly magic. It is, but not in the way you’d think. But this spell book is a good way of accessing the power I need. It unleashes magic in this story, and I can use that energy to open a doorway. Not like Bethany does, but it’ll get you home.”

  Home? A few minutes ago that’s all Owen had wanted, but a few minutes ago he wasn’t standing unchained in the Magister’s study again. There was so much coolness everywhere, and he had to immediately say good-bye to it all? How unfair was that?

  “There’s not really a hurry, is there?” Owen asked, his eyes passing over Kiel’s winged cat, Alphonse, who was currently curled up by the spell book. He hadn’t even petted the cat’s wings, which was supposed to be lucky. And what about all the weird magical experiments still bubbling merrily along, completely unwatched by anyone, which was probably a fire hazard, but still?

  And then there was the spell book itself. Every spell that Kiel or the Magister had ever used, plus a bajillion that would never even get mentioned, all contained in that one book. And because of the whole tricking Bethany into using it, Owen hadn’t even gotten to touch it, let alone learn any magic!

  The hand mirror began to glow as Nobody recited words over it. Was this really it? Owen had saved the Magister, and now he’d just have to go back home? Bethany would bring Kiel and the Magister back, the story would go back to the way it was meant to, and so would Owen’s life? What about meeting Kiel’s half-robot friend, Charm, or time traveling or something?

  The glow intensified, and Nobody held the mirror up toward Owen. On the other side, Owen saw his bathroom, and a kind of embarrassing dirty towel on the floor. Whoops.

  “This was as close as I could get it, as you don’t have a mirror in your bedroom,” Nobody said. “Now, when you return to the real world, you can’t speak about anything you’ve seen here. If you do, I’ll come find you. Trust me, you don’t want to see my formless face in a mirror sometime.” He grinned humorlessly.

  “You are just like Bethany,” Owen said. “Neither of you likes anything fun.”

  Nobody ignored that. “It’s time, Owen. I have to get you out of here now, then go locate those two missing characters before they cause any trouble in your world.”

  “No, please, not yet,” Owen shouted. “Have you seen everything here? I only got to see a little of it, not all the best parts! Can’t you just let me stay and hang around?”

  “Charm is on her way, and the final book is about to begin,” Nobody told him. “You must leave now.”

  “Charm’s coming here? Now I can’t go yet. I have to meet her!”

  “You’d show up in the book, and I can’t have that.” Nobody held out a hand.

  Owen’s mind raced as he took a step backward. “But . . . but Kiel’s not back! If he’s not here when she shows up, the book will start out wrong. Someone has to be waiting for her, right? That’s the whole point, that readers don’t notice anything’s different?”

  Nobody gave him a questioning look. “What exactly are you suggesting?”

  Owen didn’t really know—he was making this all up as he went, but his eyes fell on the spell book, and suddenly an idea exploded like a lightbulb over his head. “There’s a disguise spell in there!” he practically shouted. “Kiel’s used it before! Use that on me, make me look like Kiel. I can do all the things Kiel would have until you bring him and the Magister back here. Then no one has to know!”

  Nobody just stared at him for a moment. “T
here are so many things wrong with that idea that I don’t even know where to begin. Still, you’re not wrong. She is about to arrive, and I’m not entirely sure how long it’ll take me to return with Kiel.” He sighed. “Perhaps this might give me some insurance. If I do this—”

  “DO IT!”

  “If I do this, you’ll be completely on your own from now until I can find a safe spot to switch you out for the real Kiel. That might not be until the very end of the story, Owen. Do you fully understand what that means? Whatever would have happened to him will now happen to you, good or bad. And you’d have to act exactly like him, or the story could progress in a very different fashion. How well do you know these books?”

  “SO well!” Owen shouted, realizing that wasn’t exactly an amount. “Tons! I know them by heart. I’ve read them all a thousand times!”

  Nobody sighed. “This is a huge risk, and I doubt it makes sense—”

  “Sometimes the impossible is the only thing that DOES make sense!”

  “. . . . Though it makes more sense than what you just said.” Nobody rubbed his eyes. “I would caution you—”

  “I’m cautioned!”

  Nobody gave him a tired look, then began to flip through the spell book pages until he found what he wanted. “So be it. Stand still, please.”

  “We’re doing it?” Owen said as Nobody began to mumble something. “Are you casting—”

  “Cast, past tense,” Nobody corrected as Owen felt warm all over. “Look at yourself.”

  Owen glanced down in midsentence and trailed off. Instead of his normal clothing, he now had on a black cloak, a black shirt, black pants, and two magic knife-wands in two sheaths at his waist.

  “What?” he said, barely able to contain his joy. “Are you kidding me?”

  Nobody handed him the hand mirror. Now, instead of Owen’s dirty towel and bathroom, it showed KIEL GNOMENFOOT standing in the middle of the Magister’s study! “I’ve never been this happy in my entire life,” Owen said, touching his face—Kiel’s face—then pulling out his twin knife-wands. “This is the greatest thing anyone’s ever done for me, or anyone, ever.”