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

magic to hide from the shifters, but there was magic like that on the other side of the Threshold. Devan knew that as well as I did. The only problem was that we had no idea why the Trelking would have gone to such trouble.
    At least we’d found another possible reason for him to have made the crossing himself. The fact that he had risked it had troubled me the most. Had he only wanted the box, he could have sent any of his little minions on his behalf. Hell, he could have simply sent a message. That would have been as effective as anything else. But he’d come himself, holding the doorway open the entire time.
    “Something else came through,” I said. “That’s the only thing that makes sense.”
    Devan looked up at me, her mouth opening and then closing again. Finally, she said, “I’m sorry about him.”
    I leaned toward her and gave her a lingering kiss. “Don’t be sorry. Without him, I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of spending the last ten years needing you to help me stay alive.”
    “There is that.”
    When we got into the truck, Taylor studied us. “Something happened tonight, didn’t it?”
    I wondered how much she’d heard. Had her mods helped with her hearing? I suspected they augmented her eyesight and her strength, probably even helped her overall stamina somehow, but had the modding enhanced all of her senses?
    “Yeah, you said something of my father’s disappeared.”
    “I never said it was the Elder’s,” Taylor said.
    “If it was interesting enough for you to go after it, then it was probably his. So tell me, where are we going?”
    Taylor looked out the window toward the west. “The hill near the center of town.”
    “That’s the old—”
    She didn’t let me finish. “That’s where we’re going.”
    I frowned at Devan, but she didn’t have anything to say, so I backed out of the Rooster’s lot and headed west.
----
    C onlin at night was probably like every other small town. There were the usual streetlights giving a warm yellow glow, but they were staggered, the planners not bothering to design them too close together. In Conlin, it was mostly a comfort thing to have the streetlights. The city itself was pretty safe, and we didn’t really need one for every house. By this time of night—I figured it had to be heading on ten o’clock—most of the houses were dark. A few had lights on in the front window or the porch, and fewer still blazed brightly. We passed a couple of kids walking in the street and then near Thistle, passed an older guy on his bike. I made sure it wasn’t Tom as we veered around him.
    The hill at the center of town had some significance to the city. Way back when Conlin was first founded, the earliest settlers had placed their homes atop the hill, giving them the wide view of the once-forested valley below. The river ran in the distance, though it had never been wide or swift enough for anything larger than a kayak or raft to travel on it. They had left a monument atop the hill, now called Settler Hill—yeah, real creative folk in Conlin—that memorialized that time. The monument was nothing more than a pedestal with a round metal compass pointing toward the north and a plaque laid into the ground beneath it. The compass had been there so long that I had never thought to look into it.
    We started up Washington, a slowly winding road that led up the south side of Settler Hill. The truck rumbled, the lights swinging out and over the roofs of the town before pointing back at the hill. I hadn’t been to the top of Settler Hill since I was a kid. Since returning, there hadn’t been any reason to come up here.
    I looked over at Taylor. “You climbed this?”
    When she nodded, I could only shake my head. Climbing the hill, and then she still had energy to make it all the way to the Rooster. Mods like that couldn’t be all bad.
    Devan nudged me, as if knowing what I was thinking.
    As we reached the top, I pulled the truck to a stop in the small lot