Reserved for the Cat

“I’m afraid not,” Alan replied, crestfallen. “Whoever this is, he’s infernally clever, and I mean that almost literally. He set traps for us, and they weren’t the things intended to catch and perhaps harm us either. If we had been gulled by his deceptions, what we did would have hurt perfectly innocent people—well, not perfectly innocent, they were actually rather vile.” He flushed a deeper crimson. “But they were innocent of any wrongdoing towards us.”

“A good job you were being cautious, then,” Arthur said in an attempt to console him. “At least we won’t have that on our consciences.”

“Yes, but I didn’t find him, and Mademoiselle is still in danger.” He rubbed one temple. “I’m not used to failing.”

Jonathon snorted. “Then you aren’t trying things that are challenging enough.”

To his surprise and Alan’s obvious chagrin, Ninette nodded. “The more and harder things you attempt, the more you will fail. You are only guaranteed not to fail if you do not try. C’est las vie.”

“We have all failed at this one, Alan,” Nigel pointed out. “Whoever this is, he’s a step ahead of us.”

“He certainly was this time,” the young man said glumly, and began to outline just what it was he had discovered.

That was when Jonathon’s head literally came up like a dog catching a scent. “Damnation!” he swore. “This is not just a trap. He’s misdirecting us!”

“Like in one of your illusions?” Ninette asked, brows creased in a thoughtful frown.

“Exactly. He wants us to look for him using magic. He wants us to waste our time doing so. And meanwhile, he is doing something else! But what?” Jonathon grimaced. “What is it that he doesn’t want us to see?”

“Whatever it is,” Wolf observed, “it can’t be good.”

“He doesn’t want us to see him, or rather, to find him.” Nigel rose from his chair and began to pace. “The question is—”

And then he stopped, and a look of surprise mixed with annoyance spread over his face. “Good gad. We’ve been making a fundamental error here. All along we’ve been operating on the assumption that whoever this is first attacked Mademoiselle with a storm and sank her yacht.”

“Nom du nom!” Ninette exclaimed. “That was all a fabrication! It is the red fish!”

“Red herring,” Arthur corrected absently. “Exactly. So when we remove that from our puzzle, we need to know when the real attacks date from. And are they centered on Mademoiselle after all? It could just be coincidence, or it could be she was attacked just because she was vulnerable. We might not be looking for an enemy of Nina’s; we might just be looking for an enemy of Nigel’s.”

“I haven’t stirred up any trouble that I know of,” Nigel said slowly. “But then again, neither has Ninette any magically gifted enemies. But at least we know where to start looking for mine.”

“And what to look for.” Jonathon pursed his lips. “For that matter, the first attack that we definitely know of came after I had arrived. I might be the one that this magician seeks to ruin. And I must say I have made a considerable number of enemies over the years. I am not an easy man to get along with, and I do not suffer fools.”

“Surely not—” Nigel interjected, and then stopped. “No, you are correct, old friend.”

He began paging through a little book he kept, separate from the larger daybook in which he scheduled acts and noted things down about the day’s events in the theater. He had the daybook open too. He looked up.

“Do you suppose—when Harrigan broke his leg, do you think that could have been the first attack?”

All of them stared at him. It was Jonathon that spoke first. “Didn’t Mrs. Harrigan say that the street just opened up in front of him?”

Nigel nodded, his lips pressed into a thin line. “Well then, that was the first attack, and it not only came after you joined us, it came after I began letting information on our planned productions get out.”

“It does seem to point to the notion that this is an enemy of yours, Nigel,” Wolf put in thoughtfully. But then Jonathon saw Alan brighten.

“There is no reason to think that this enemy might have been covering his tracks quite so effectively that far back is there?” he asked eagerly.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.” Nigel regarded the young man shrewdly. “I take it you have a notion?”

“If you know where that hole was, I can probably read what happened in the past,” Alan said with a look of determination. Jonathon whistled.

“I don’t know of more than one or two Masters that can do that.” He was impressed in spite of himself. But Alan only shrugged.

“It’s usually more in the line of a clairvoyant rather than a magician, but Water is uniquely suited to scrying,” he replied diffidently. “It’s more the aptness of the element rather than any virtue on my part.”

“Well I think you are very clever to have thought of it!” Ninette said, looking at the young man with admiration. Jonathon scowled a little.

“Will we have to go there?” the Fire Master demanded. “Because that could be deuced awkward even at night. When you start performing magic in the middle of a public thoroughfare, people tend to look at you askance.”

“It’s not that obvious,” Alan replied, “But I do need the exact spot—”

Jonathon rolled his eyes and growled a little, but agreed to take him to the spot. “I will come too!” Ninette insisted. “If need be I can make the distraction.”

“You are already a distraction,” Jonathon grumbled, but he knew better than to order her to stay behind. She wouldn’t obey him and it wasn’t as if he had the right to issue commands to her anyway. So the three of them went out into the afternoon—which threatened rain again—as Jonathon led them to the place where the so-called “sinkhole” had been a wonder and a nuisance.

It was filled in now, but that didn’t seem to matter to Alan, who looked around to make sure no one was near enough to notice what he was about to do, then pulled a watch out of his pocket along with a small flask, opened the watch so that the cover-plate was resting on his palm, then poured a tiny bit of water into the little dish that the cover made.

Ninette stationed herself in front of him. Looking up at him as if they were having a conversation. Seeing what she was doing, as Alan began to mutter to his little pool of water, Jonathon interposed himself between Alan and the street, his tall form making an effective screen. Anyone who saw them now would only think it was three friends having a peculiarly intense conversation.

Jonathon, of course, could not see what it was that Alan was doing, but he caught some words in a variant of Gaelic that sounded very old indeed.

Alan made a small sound of triumph and spilled the water out of his watch onto the ground. He watched it intensely for a moment, then nodded. “Feel up to a trek?” he asked the two of them, raising his eyes. “I can follow the disturbance in the Water-magic back to the source, I think.”

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” Jonathon observed. “But we should send Mademoiselle back to the theater.”

She opened her mouth to protest. He gave her one of those looks that she had learned meant she was going to get nowhere in arguing with him. Then, as he had learned to do around her, he told her why.

“Mademoiselle,” he said, in a quiet, firm voice, “we do not know what sorts of neighborhoods we may be going through. I am sure you can defend yourself against a single man, or even two, but we might be set upon by a gang. And someone has to tell Nigel that Alan has succeeded in wringing something from the stones, and is off on the hunt.”

Alan was casting entreating looks at her , but she did not look away from Jonathon’s eyes. “All right,” she replied. “Those are good reasons.”

She nodded agreement, but before she could turn to go, Thomas had his own say.

I will be staying with you, the cat put in. You might need another messenger. You might need for someone to get in at a second-story window.

“So that you can tear a room apart?” Jonathon snorted. “I think you were an anarchist in a previous life.”

Not likely. And I wouldn’t have done that if we hadn’t needed to cover what we’d