The Magician's Dream (Oona Crate Mystery: book 3) Read online

  “Shush.”

  Like a pouncing cat she leapt the open distance to the next stone. She paused a moment with her back against the stone, waiting for someone to come looking. No one came.

  The conversation between the night watchman and the inspector was louder now, but she needed to get closer still if she wanted to hear everything that was being said.

  “I need to get closer.”

  “Have you completely lost your mind?”

  “Just one more stone,” she said, and poked her head around the corner. There was a problem. If she crossed now, she would be in clear view of the daytime guard. She pulled back behind the stone and bit her lip, thinking. “I need a distraction, Deacon.”

  “Don’t look at me,” he said. “I’m supposed to be gone, along with you.”

  “That’s true,” Oona said, and then, realizing she had no alternative, she pulled her magnifying glass from her dress pocket and gripped it tightly at her side. Peering around the corner of the stone, her gaze fell upon a portrait on the other side of the room: a rather hairy-looking goblin wearing a wooden crown. With his saggy green skin and large fanged teeth, the goblin king looked old and feeble, not to mention quite angry that he had been forced to sit so long for the portrait.

  Oona raised her magnifying glass and took aim at the portrait. “Aldis-tractio.”

  A wisp of misty light shot from the end of the magnifying glass and struck the portrait between the eyes. The goblin began to blink his eyes rapidly before letting out a horrific sneeze.

  The museum guard turned and began to walk in the direction of the sound as Oona bolted across the open space between the stones and came to a sliding stop. Deacon joined her as she peered around the corner to discover the day guard standing in front of the goblin portrait, his brow furrowed in confusion.

  “Let’s go over it one more time,” Inspector White said.

  “I’ve already told you twice,” came a voice that Oona assumed to be the night watchman’s.

  “Perhaps you are forgetting something,” Mr. Glump said.

  “I’m not forgetting anything!” the inspector snapped.

  “No, Inspector, I was speaking to Mr. Hackelsmith.”

  “Of course,” the inspector said. “I knew that. I was just testing you.”

  Oona placed a hand over her eyes and shook her head. She still could not believe that this buffoon was the head of the Dark Street Police Department.

  “So, it was nine o’clock last night when I stepped out the front door for some fresh air and to eat my apple, see?” Night Watchman Hackelsmith began. “Nothing out of the ordinary. I always have an apple around nine o’clock out on the steps, but last night was different. See, last night, I’d just taken a bite when a woman comes running up the steps waving her arms and all out of breath like, right? I can hear her saying something about needing help, but it’s all under her breath.”

  “Did you get a look at her face?” the inspector asked.

  “No,” Hackelsmith said. “Her face was all in shadow on account of the great big hat she was wearing, and all the streetlights were behind her, so she was . . . what’s that called, when the light is behind and their front is too dark to see?”

  “Silhouetted,” Deacon whispered in Oona’s ear, and Oona grinned. One of the many books stored in Deacon’s brain was the Oxford English Dictionary, which, along with the Dark Street Who’s Who—a book that briefly described the lives of nearly every inhabitant on the street—came in quite handy. Thinking of the Who’s Who, Oona made a mental note to ask Deacon about Mr. Hackelsmith.

  “You mean the woman was silhouetted?” asked Mr. Glump.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” the night watchman continued. “I couldn’t see her face. But when I moved forward to see what was the matter, something hit me on the back of my head and I just sort of . . . well, it all went black.”

  “And how long were you out?” the inspector asked.

  “Not sure. Next thing I know, I’m all tied up, and my head is fit to burst. Takes me a minute to realize that I’m lying right here, in the middle of the entryway, and I hear voices.”

  “What did the voices say?”

  “Well, it was hard to understand them, ’cause there’s a terrible ringing in my ears, see? Everything had a strange echo, but the first voice was definitely a woman’s. That I’m sure of.”

  “The same woman you heard on the steps?” The inspector asked.

  “Possibly,” Hackelsmith said. “Like I said, my ears were ringing. Anyway, she says: ‘We’ve got it. Let’s get out of here.’ And then comes a man’s voice. He was harder to understand, ’cause of my pulsing head, but I’m pretty sure he says: ‘Shush, he’ll hear you.’ Then the front door slams, and I’m forced to lie there all night until Victor finds me and cuts me free in the morning.”

  “Victor is the daytime guard?” Inspector White asked.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” came the deep voice of the day guard. But to Oona’s surprise, she realized the voice was not coming from the other side of the room, but from right behind her.

  She jumped as she spun around to find the thickset guard staring down at her, arms crossed, fingers drumming his forearms. She winced, rebuking herself inwardly for getting so lost in the conversation that she had failed to notice the guard sneak up on her.

  “Look at what I found here,” the guard said, and grabbed her by the arm. Deacon cawed threateningly at the big man, and the guard jerked back from the bird’s fluttering wings, but he did not let go.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Inspector White demanded as Oona was forcefully pulled from her hiding place and shoved into the circle of stones.

  She stumbled into the center, where her foot seemed to get tangled in something and she fell to the floor. She was not hurt, though the shock of the fall startled her. She looked quickly at her feet to find what had caused her fall. It was the rope that had been used to tie up the night watchman.

  “I . . . I can explain,” she stammered, and reached for the rope to untangle her feet.

  The inspector’s nostrils flared. “You can explain yourself right into a police dungeon, Miss Crate!”

  “Inspector, I was only trying to—” But her words stopped abruptly as her eyes came to rest on the knot that had been used on the rope. Her eyes went wide with astonishment, and her mouth went dry.

  “No more excuses, Miss Crate!” the inspector shouted at her. “I have told you for the last time . . .”

  But Oona was hardly listening. Every bit of her consciousness was focused on the peculiar knot that had been used to tie up the night watchman. It was an extraordinary knot. Beautiful, in fact. It looked like a rose.

  She pulled it closer, running her thumb over its petal-like complexity, marveling at its perfection. Indeed, she might have said that she had never seen anything like it . . . and yet she had seen it before, not in real life, but as a sketch in an old police report—a report that Oona had read countless times over the past three years. It was a famous knot in the world of criminals, and there were only two people whom Oona knew for sure were capable of tying it.

  She pushed herself to her feet and held the knotted rope in front of her, surprised that Inspector White had not recognized it straightaway—but then again, Inspector White probably did not study old case files. Currently, the inspector was rambling on about putting her in a jail cell for her own good.

  “Hey, look at what she’s got there,” said one of the police constables.

  The inspector gave the man a nasty look for interrupting him, but then another of the constables put in: “Oh. How could we have missed that?”

  “Missed what?” the inspector said incredulously.

  “The Rose Knot,” said the first constable.

  The inspector cast several confused looks at his constables before stating: “Ah . . . of course. The Rose Knot.”

  It was clear to Oona that the inspector did not understand the significance.

  “The only two pe
ople known to tie a knot like this,” Oona said, “are the infamous Rose Thieves. This is their signature.”

  The second constable scratched thoughtfully at his balding head. “But the Rose Thieves have not struck for years.”

  Oona’s heart felt as if it were making its way up into her throat. “Not for over three years. They disappeared from the criminal world the very day that they . . . killed my father.” Her voice shook slightly, and her fingers gripped the rope in a pale fist. The sudden burst of emotion threatened to explode.

  Deacon shivered on her shoulder. “It would seem they have returned.”

  Chapter Three

  The Critic

  Oona quickly ascended the stairs that rose along the side wall of the museum entryway to the library. Deacon clung precariously to her shoulder as she bound up the steps, her mind racing. And yet it was difficult for her to follow any one thought before a sting of anger would obliterate it completely.

  The knowledge that her father’s killers had never been brought to justice had angered her for years.

  “You know, you are lucky that the inspector let you go,” Deacon said. “I thought for sure he was going to arrest you this time.”

  “Is that all you have to say?” Oona snapped at him, and then immediately felt guilty for it. “What more can you tell me of the Faerie Carbuncle, Deacon; this magical gemstone that was stolen?”

  “There is not much to tell,” Deacon said. “It is more of a legend than anything else. The magical powers it is purported to have given to its wearers are only accessed by a spell that has been long forgotten. Perhaps there is a mention of it in more obscure magical texts, but as you know, the Encyclopedia Arcanna is mostly an historical reference and has no mention of actual spell work. I can tell you, however, that as far as anyone actually receiving faerielike powers from the stone, it has not happened in over six hundred years. That’s over a hundred years before Oswald the Great closed the Glass Gates. Some historians believe that the written spell was lost in Faerie, and has since been forgotten.”

  “Should we then assume that the thieves stole it simply for its value as a gemstone?” Oona asked.

  “Unless the thieves know something that historians don’t,” Deacon said, “it is probably safe to assume.”

  Oona let out a heavy breath as they reached the top landing. She did not like the fact that the thieves had stolen such a potentially powerful object, despite the lost spell.

  “But for the moment,” Deacon added, “there is nothing we can do about it, and I really think you should return to the Pendulum House library and learn all you can about this battle test.”

  Oona experienced a twisting sensation in the pit of her stomach. She knew Deacon was right, and yet still she felt compelled to pursue the investigation first and foremost.

  She pushed through the library door. “There will be time to research the battle test later. But first we need to do a little research here, in the public library.”

  “But I’ve told you, the best books on magic reside at Pendulum House.”

  Oona shook her head. “It’s not books on magic I’m looking for.”

  “Then what?”

  Oona sighed, as if the answer should be self-evident. “We need to find books on knots. Now, where to begin?”

  She peered around the enormous room, unsure of where to start. As the outside of the building suggested, the new library was cone shaped on the inside, with level upon level of rising balconies that supported countless shelves of books. Unlike the Pendulum House library, the books here appeared to be shelved in an expertly ordered fashion. The bottom floor consisted of various chairs and tables topped with dim reading lights.

  Oona approached the reference desk. Her face grew warm as the boy behind the counter looked up from his book cart and grinned. The odd assortment of symbols tattooed on his cheeks and around his eyes pulled tight.

  “Ah, hello, Miss Crate,” said Adler Iree in his lilting Irish brogue. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  Oona smiled back. Despite having told him many times to call her Oona—not to mention the fact that he had kissed her at Oswald Park . . . on the lips—he still insisted upon calling her Miss Crate. She wondered if it was his way of telling her that the kiss had not meant all that much. After all, it had been four whole months since that first kiss, and she had not received a second.

  Of course, Adler had been extremely busy with his studies at the Magicians Legal Alliance—the guild and school for the practitioners of magical law. He was taking a full course load, and on top of that—as part of the alliance’s community outreach program—he was now volunteering at the library as a part-time “book-shelving expert.” With Oona’s own apprentice duties, the two of them had had little time to see each other over the past months, and when they did, they were never alone.

  But still, she had hoped that he would ask her to be his girlfriend. Many girls Oona’s age had steady boyfriends—such as Adler’s own sister Isadora Iree, who took every opportunity to remind people who her handsome boyfriend was—and Oona was beginning to wonder if Adler was simply against the idea.

  “Hello, Adler,” she said, hoping he would pick up on her use of his first name.

  He moved closer to the desk and squinted at her. “Everything all right?”

  She tucked her hair behind her ear. “Yes . . . I mean, no. I mean . . .” And she told him all about the crime scene downstairs and the connection with her father.

  He tilted his top hat back and leaned on the desk. “And no one knows who the Rose Thieves are?”

  “Not a clue,” Oona said. “I’ve looked through my father’s personal file on them countless times, and there are no names. Just that they were known associates of Red Martin. But of course, I’ve known they were working for him ever since Red Martin admitted to me that he was the one who paid to have my father murdered. The Rose Thieves staged a robbery, and when my father showed up to apprehend them, they shot him dead and then tied a ribbon in the shape of a rose around the gun and left it at the scene of the crime. That was their signature. They would break into a rich household, steal a prized possession like a painting or jewelry, and leave behind a bit of ribbon tied like a rose.”

  Adler frowned. “How do you know the robbery that your father was investigating was staged?”

  “Two reasons. The thieves were perfectionists, brilliant and arrogant, leaving behind their signature knot wherever they struck. It was one of the reasons my father wanted to catch them so badly. They were never seen coming or going from the crime scene. But the police received a tip that someone saw two masked figures crawling in through a second-story window in broad daylight. The supposed thieves made sure they were seen. My father must have thought it was just an ordinary burglary. And the second reason I know the robbery was a setup is because the apartment was vacant. There was no one living there and nothing to steal. The thieves made sure they were seen breaking in, and then waited there. They shot both my father and the constable he had with him the instant they came through the door, and then left the gun with the ribbon tied to it in the center of the empty room. Many people heard the shots, but no one saw the murderers flee.”

  Deacon put in: “And there have been no Rose Knots left on the street since.”

  “Not until today,” Oona said.

  Adler walked around the desk, scratching absently at his cheek, where Oona just now realized he had a fresh symbol tattooed. This one looked a bit like a squiggle set inside of a triangle, and she realized that he must have completed a new course of study at the alliance. Many of the alliance’s older members had completed so many courses that their faces were completely covered in multicolored tattoos. She hoped Adler did not become so ambitious.

  “So I need to find books about knot tying,” she said.

  Adler nodded understandingly. “To see if you can’t find some clue about that Rose Knot that leads you to the thieves?”

  Oona nodded, excited that they were following the same trai
n of thought. “I had never seen the actual knot until today, except as an illustration, but I’ll bet we can find something about it in a book that—”

  Deacon cleared his throat.

  Oona sighed. “Ah, but as Deacon keeps reminding me, I do have other obligations today.”

  “And don’t you have obligations as well, Mr. Iree?” a new voice interrupted. “Such as putting away books?”

  The voice was bright, and girlish, and sweet. They turned to find a young woman of about eighteen years old watching them from behind the reference desk. Her pretty, slender face was framed by straight red hair that parted down the middle and fell freely down her shoulders.

  Adler cleared his throat and turned to Oona. “Ah, Miss Crate, may I introduce you to Miss Mary Shusher, the assistant librarian.”

  Oona smiled graciously. “How do you do?”

  Mary Shusher raised both eyebrows in surprise. “You didn’t tell me you knew the Wizard’s apprentice, Adler.” She extended her hand to Oona, and they shook. “I’ve read all about you. In the paper. About your exploits. You’re the one who finally completed the Magician’s Tower.”

  Oona’s face flushed. The fact that she was a celebrity on the street was something she had never gotten used to.

  “So, is it true?” Mary asked before Oona could respond. “Are you a genuine Natural Magician?” Oona opened her mouth to reply, but Mary did not wait for an answer. “That’s incredibly rare. Only one born in every hundred years, or something like that. It is said that you have the same natural abilities as a faerie, and that you can do all sorts of magic without having to study.”

  Deacon responded before Oona could open her mouth. “While Learned Magicians, such as the Wizard, must study for decades to learn their craft, a Natural Magician, such as Miss Crate, has active faerie blood in her veins. Like a faerie, Natural Magicians are born with incredible magical abilities. But unlike a faerie, they are not born with the instincts to control the magic they possess. They must be trained.”

  Mary Shusher leaned eagerly over the counter and asked: “Can we see some magic.”