He’d done it!

He reached in to his pants and pulled his prize from its hiding place. Whether from exhaustion or the greasy sweat slicking his palm, the journal tumbled from his grasp to land at his feet.

When he bent to pick it up, a sharp jolt moved through his fingers, flaring at his wrist and burning up his arm, as if he’d touched an electric fence.

What the—?

He stopped dead, staring at the object in his hand, thinking it seemed peculiar but he would almost say there was a green glow to it. Or was that just him and his delirium from fear and the physical exertion?

Just as quickly, the tingling disappeared, and all he held was a simple book. No spark or strange vibrations. A volume made from ordinary paper with what seemed to be only handwriting of a few names. No special spells or potion recipes for weaving magic on the populace.

“Don’t want… to give up your… secrets?” he gasped, still trying to catch his breath. “Too late. I’ve got… you.”

William opened the car door, threw the book on the passenger seat and climbed in behind the wheel. He’d done it. Her book was now his. Now he only needed to figure out where to go next.

65

Somebody had played Nem. Her bag wasn’t found by a waiter at the café and nobody there had called her. The staff took a good ten minutes checking with each other to come back to her and swear none of them had seen her bag or anything it might have contained, like her wallet.

Her initial annoyance had been because the unknown caller had awoken her, while she wanted to sleep; needed to rest her mind and recover from everything seeming to go so awry in the past few weeks.

The bag and her wallet meant nothing to her. She had plenty more of those, and the cash was inconsequential. She had only roused herself and rushed back there because she figured by reuniting with her bag she might gain a connection to the thief. That in turn might affect the diary; start it up possibly by reminding it someone deserved to be punished.

As she drove home empty-handed, she wondered at the timing of the bag theft. The caller’s voice sounded familiar. She’d told herself being tired and annoyed made her brain jump from one foolish notion to another and she was imagining things. Even the dream she’d been having just before the call had been odd.

Three miles from home was when the rush of emotion slammed into her as if someone had not just walked over her grave but stomped there with big, angry boots. Her hand waved around her face in an instinctive response to her first thought, which was that a bug or spider or creepy-crawly had clambered over her skin.

Nothing was there, and she relaxed. Then in that quiet moment, a flash of recognition told her that what she’d felt was not a creature but an unbalance; a disruption in the air, particles of something powerful filling the car’s cabin; the feeling of fate, which until now she had controlled so well, suddenly shoved off course.