Free Stolen Compass (The Painter Mage Book 4) by D.K. Holmberg Page A

cooking before. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the same. “Burger for me, then.”
    Devan nodded.
    “Two burgers.”
    She disappeared behind the door to the kitchen. The bell over the front door tinkled, and I turned, somewhat surprised to see Taylor standing in the doorway. The fluorescent lighting made her hair look even bluer tinted than usual. Her normally olive complexion looked pale and a slight sheen of sweat covered her face.
    When she saw me, she sighed and hurried over. “Oliver. I’m glad to finally find you. I’ve been looking for you for the last hour.”
    I glanced at Devan before turning back to Taylor. “We’ve had a bit of a busy night, Taylor.”
    “There’s something you need to see. I think it has to do with—”
    “Can’t it wait?” I asked.
    She shook her head. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. When I left you, I spent some time wandering around Conlin. There’s something you need to see.”
    “It will still be there in the morning.”
    “That’s just it. That’s what I want to show you.”
    “You’re not making any sense,” I said.
    “What you need to see is missing.”
    I twisted in my chair to face her, not certain whether this was something I should even care about. Knowing what I did of Taylor, what she found could be any number of different things, but I had a nagging suspicion that whatever she’d found hadn’t been just any old thing. If she’d gone out wandering in Conlin and found something, that made it likely to be something of my father’s.
    Devan must have come to the same conclusion. “Ah damn,” she groaned.
    “Yeah. Guess I’m not even getting that burger.”

6
    A fter apologizing to Kacey —she offered to wrap the burgers so we wouldn’t go hungry—we made our way out of the Rooster and back into the truck. The woman sitting alone in the booth cast a quick glance our way before looking back down to the table. It was strange, but no stranger than any of the other people we’d come across at the Rooster. Catching my reflection off the glass door, I realized that I looked pretty rough. I didn’t blame her for giving me a second look. She was probably glad we were leaving.
    I looked around the parking lot of the Rooster, suddenly wondering how Taylor had gotten there. We only had the one truck and there weren’t any bikes. I didn’t see any other cars in the lot. “Did you walk here?” I asked her.
    “I needed to find you,” she said.
    I glanced over at Devan. “It’s like five miles from the house.”
    Taylor shrugged.
    “You and your damn mods,” I grumbled.
    She’d probably managed to get from my house to the diner in under twenty minutes. The mods she’d done—the tinting of her hair and whatever else she’d done that I still didn’t quite know—gave her additional abilities, things that were almost like what Devan possessed. Nik had helped Taylor do the mods, but there had to be a cost. With magic, there was always some sort of cost, but I didn’t quite know what the mods had cost her. Normal painting required energy that took time to restore. Pretty simple: you work too many patterns and with too much magic, you’re going to have to rest and get some sleep. But her mods didn’t seem to work the same way.
    “Get in,” I said, waving toward the truck.
    She pulled open the passenger-side door—it wasn’t locked, this was Conlin after all and no one was going to steal Big Red—and climbed in. I pulled Devan with me around to the driver’s side.
    “Don’t you find it a little strange that something went missing about the same time as your father crossed over?” I asked her under my breath.
    “Jakes said nothing came through.”
    I thought of the delay the Trelking had made in putting up his barrier to keep out the shifters. In the time that he’d simply stood there with the doorway open, what else could have come through but somehow managed to avoid detection from the shifters? That would take some sort of serious