Free Story Thieves by James Riley Page A

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?”
    â€œIt can’t be true,” Kiel said, shaking his head. “That’s all there is to it.”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œReally?” 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.
    â€œWe need this Bethany girl, then,” the Magister said, turning back to Owen. “When will she be returning here?”
    â€œOh, 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.
    â€œPerfect,” 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.”
    â€œThat’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.
    â€œTake 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
    T he 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 notcome 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,