Story Thieves (7 page)

She tried the door, and it was still unlocked, so she pushed it open and walked in. It wasn't breaking and entering if you'd just been in a place and had stomped off, she was pretty sure.

The lights hadn't been turned on since she left, so it looked like Owen hadn't even come out of his room. That made Bethany feel even more sure about letting him apologize again. Obviously, he was upset. So upset he couldn't even bear to go downstairs.

Unless he was playing video games in his room or something.

No, he had to be upset. You couldn't just do something like he'd done and not feel horrible. No one was that heartless.

She took a deep breath, practiced a stern but forgiving face, then knocked on his door at the top of the stairs. “Owen? It's Bethany. I, um, forgot my book.” Yeah, that sounded like a good reason to come back. “I'm still mad, obviously. Because you were a huge jerk, and you never should have done what you did. It was like you betrayed me, Owen, you know? You promised one thing and lied. You know how messed up that is?”

She paused, waiting for a response, but didn't hear one. He probably felt too guilty.

“It's very,
very
messed up,” she said, answering her own question. “So let me have my book, and we can go back to never speaking to each other again.” There. Now that she'd made her point, she could take the high road and let him apologize his way back into being friends with her. After a while, at least.

Feeling good about things, she opened the door to an empty room.

Empty except for the Kiel Gnomenfoot book, which was still lying open right in the middle of the floor.

He couldn't have.
No way.
He
couldn't
have gone back. It wasn't possible. Only she could jump into books, right?

Right?

She slowly picked up the Kiel Gnomenfoot book and opened it to the last page.

“Good-bye, Sebastian,” Dr. Verity said, and his gun began powering up to fire.

So it still read the same as before. But maybe it wouldn't hurt to check?

She pushed her head in, just to make sure, since it was impossible, but—

Something slammed into her head, and the last thing she could see before everything went black was Owen's surprised face as someone yanked her all the way into the book.

A
s Bethany slammed his bedroom door, Owen sighed, then started to go after her. This wasn't how things were supposed to go. How was he going to be best friends with Kiel Gnomenfoot now? Would anyone even know that he was the one who'd saved the Magister if his whole saving scene hadn't made it into the book?

Plus, what about Narnia?

And there was that other small issue of, well, Bethany being hurt. Not just annoyed or irritated, but actually hurt by what he'd done. And that gave Owen a heavy feeling in the back of his shoulders, like when his mother wasn't mad, just “disappointed.”

Stupid guilt.

“Bethany,” he tried to shout after her, but for some odd reason his lips didn't move, and all that came out was a weird
sort of “hunnnnnh.” Why couldn't he move his lips? He tried to bring his hands up to touch his mouth, but now his hands decided to play the same lip game and not move either.

Arms, legs, toes . . . nothing worked.

And that's when Owen noticed that his bedroom seemed quite a bit brighter than it had a minute ago.

“I'd just like a minute of your time, if it's all the same to you,” said a voice from behind him. Owen's body froze from disbelief, along with whatever it was that had already frozen him a few seconds ago.

That was the
Magister's
voice.

The Magister shouldn't even have a voice, because books don't have voices, unless they're audiobooks, and really, that wasn't the character's voice so much as the person who read the audiobook. And yet, there it was in Owen's house, all polite and magical and Magistery!

“I apologize for such treatment,” said the Magister, and Owen's legs turned the rest of him around like some kind of puppet. There, behind him, was a doorway made from brightness, lighting his entire room.

And inside the doorway stood a fictional character.

Um. This had to be a mistake, right? Sure, the Magister
existed in the book, but this was the real, actual,
nonfictional
world. Wasn't it?

The magician raised a hand, and Owen's body jerked forward, walking like some kind of zombie toward the doorway.

“It's just that you disappeared in such a hurry,” the Magister said, beckoning Owen forward with one finger. “And after riling up my curiosity in such a way! We can't have that, now, can we? I promise this won't hurt a bit.” He frowned. “Well, I shouldn't think, at least.”

Well,
that
didn't bode well. Owen tried to shout again for Bethany, hoping she'd hear and rush back upstairs to shut down this doorway made of light and save him, but his lips still wouldn't move. His legs kept jerking him forward, though, and soon he was just inches from the doorway.

And that's when he saw the one thing in the world that would cheer him up.

“Are you taking on a new apprentice without asking me?” said a younger voice, and Kiel Gnomenfoot—KIEL GNOMENFOOT—stepped into view behind the Magister.

Just like in the books, Kiel was dressed in black pants, shirt, and cloak, the better for sneaking in and sabotaging Quanterium labs. A rope belt weighed down by pouches
hung around his waist, and two different knife-wands were holstered at his side like pistols.

All in all, he looked like the coolest thing Owen had ever seen in his entire life.

“Ah, Kiel,” the Magister said. He gestured toward Owen. “This is the boy who saved me from Dr. Verity. And somehow knew that I would
need
saving.”

“You fought Dr. Verity?” Kiel Gnomenfoot, the actual
real, live
(sort of) Kiel Gnomenfoot, said to Owen. “With
what 
?” He grinned. “I'm just kidding. Nice job, buddy! I owe you one. Doesn't matter when or where. You just tell me what you want done. The more dangerous, the better. In fact, if it's world-being-destroyed dangerous, that's the most fun, so really, you'd be doing
me
a favor.” His grin widened, and he winked.

Owen fanboy-giggled in response, only since he couldn't move, it came out like a weird moaning ghost. Kiel
winked 
! That was just so Kiel!

Kiel's grin faded and he gave Owen an odd look, then turned to the Magister. “So the Seventh Key's location is in the Original Computer? You
know
how much I hate going to Quanterium.”

“That will have to wait for just a moment, apprentice. This might be of greater importance.”

“But even if you captured Dr. Verity, there's an infinite army of Science Soldiers waiting in orbit around Magisteria, ready to attack! We still have to shut them down. And all the magic-users that were arrested, I need to free them—”

“If this child knows of Dr. Verity's plans, we might do well to find out how that is possible, before you run off again,” the old man said, flashing a patient smile at Kiel. “Something already worries me. Do you see what I see, through the portal?”

Kiel squinted past Owen. “Someone doesn't know how to hang up his clothes?”

The Magister shook his head. “The world this boy comes from has no magic. None at all. We could be looking at another alternate reality, where magic was truly destroyed. It's even possible that this boy knows of Dr. Verity's plan because, in some manner, Dr. Verity exists there, as well.”

Uh-oh.
That
didn't bode well
either
. “No Dr. Verity!” Owen tried to shout. “No Dr. Verity! And magic wasn't destroyed! It just never existed here!”

None of that got said, of course. Just a lot more moaning.

“He says that magic never existed there,” Kiel translated, then paused. “You know, I've seen alternate worlds, desolate futures, and the nothingness beyond the end of the universe.
But I've never seen anything like that room.” He shook his head. “It just screams boring. You have to feel bad for whoever grew up there.”

“Ah, appearances might deceive,” the Magister said. “Look closer. This boy and another, a girl, mentioned a book while they were here. Take a look at those books on his shelves.” The Magister gestured, and several books popped off Owen's shelf and began flipping their pages. “There's magic in their histories, Kiel. Magic everywhere. Schools for magic. Wardrobes leading to magic lands. Gods and monsters, impossible things. And yet, that magic no longer exists in their world. How would that have happened?”

Kiel frowned. “Let him talk. Maybe he knows why. Maybe he even wants to help?” He turned to Owen. “You
do
want to help, don't you? You saved my master here. I bet you want to learn magic and become amazing and do impossible things, yeah? Of course you do. Everyone does. That's all science people are, just jealous of magic. Want me to teach you some right now?”

Owen's eyes widened, and he tried to nod vigorously. Tried and failed.

“Answers it shall be,” the Magister said. “If you wouldn't mind, my boy, just a short trip back to my study?”

“Let's keep it as short as we can,” Kiel said. “I still have to find the Seventh Key.”

Owen's feet picked up off the floor and walked him into the shining doorway, then over to the wall in the now-familiar Magister's tower. There, his uncontrollable hands reached down and fastened chains to his ankles, then to each wrist. The chains magically tightened, making sure he wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.

“Just for your own safety,” the Magister said, giving a friendly wink.

This
really, really
wasn't boding well.

The Magister murmured something, and suddenly Owen was free to speak, to move, and to escape.

Unfortunately, the chains kept him from doing two of those things, so he went with the third.

“You're making a big mistake!” he shouted. “There's no magic in my world. Those books are just made-up stories! You know, for entertainment! We love magic so much that we tell each other stories about it, like we wish we could do it! That's it! Trust me, if any of us could, we'd be magicians in a minute!”

The Magister watched Owen for a moment as Kiel made “see?” gestures with his hand, fidgeting from foot to foot, clearly
anxious to get on with his quest/book series. But the Magister ignored his apprentice. Instead, he whispered something else, and a weird sort of fog slid into Owen's brain.

“Now,” the magician said, his voice low and commanding, “tell me again how there is no magic in your world.”

“There isn't,” Owen said, meaning to repeat exactly what he'd just said. Only the strange fog didn't want him to. And for some reason, the fog seemed to be in control of his mouth now. “Just in fictional stories. Like you. You're made up. You don't really exist. None of this is real. It's all just the product of someone's imagination, a writer, an author, his name is Jonathan Porterhouse. He made you all up. You don't really exist. All this? Your whole war with Dr. Verity? Made-up. It's not real. There's no such thing as magic, never was. You are just a bunch of words on a page, and the only reason I'm here is because my friend Bethany—well, not really my friend, because I annoyed her—she brought me here, because she does that kind of thing.”

Wait.
What?

W
hat had the fog just made him say? Owen tried desperately to lie, to take back everything he'd just spouted out, but the fog filled all of his thoughts, arranging them like soldiers in a line, ready to march out the door of his mouth and into battle. And no matter how much he ordered them to stop, they just kept marching.

Or something like that. It was honestly a little hard to think of analogies with his brain so magicked.

The Magister's eyes bore in on Owen. “I'm sorry, my boy. You didn't just suggest that we don't actually
exist
, did you?”

Kiel tapped his own arm. “I feel fairly solid to me. Could we get back to more important things now?”

The Magister closed his eyes for a moment, then reopened them. “The spell is working. Somehow he actually believes that we aren't real.”

“You're
not
real,” Owen's mouth said. “You're just characters in a book.” He frantically tried to bite his lips closed to keep from saying anything else, but his lips just pushed out into a fish-face expression to escape his teeth. Ugh, those clever lips of his!

“He's probably been science brain-cleaned, washed, whatever they do,” Kiel said. “Charm told me about it. They use their electric lights to flash your eyes until you believe whatever they say.” He shrugged. “Science people do weird things for fun. Magi, I
need
to find the Seventh Key—”

“Why would you think us not real?” the Magister asked Owen, giving him a quizzical look. “You can see us standing in front of you, and you are responding to my magic. Could an unreal person have cast such a spell?”

“Apparently!” Owen said. “I know you're not real because I've read about you in books, especially Kiel. I'm a huge fan. Everyone is! We know all about your quest to find the Seven Keys to the Vault of Containment, then use the Source of Magic's power to defeat Dr. Verity once and for all. But there are things you don't know yet. Like the Magister was actually born on Quanterium, and Dr. Verity was born on Magisteria, and they were switched as some kind of peace offering, to let
each side experience the other's culture. See? I couldn't have known that except that it's in the books.”

The Magister took a step back, his eyes wide. Kiel turned to him, one eyebrow raised. “That isn't true, is it, Magi?” he asked quietly.