Trickster s Girl - By Hilari Bell Page 0,19

with ruthless haste.

"Why couldn't you do this? You could have had it out by the time I got down the stairs!"

"I told you, humans caused the problem, humans have to fix it."

"But this isn't magic! It's just moving a couple of - "

Her groping fingers touched a metal corner.

She had to lift out half a dozen anonymous bundles to extract it, and when she did the tin box rattled. It held several bits of worked flint, an old pipe, a sheaf of faded photos of people wearing the long hair and loose jeans of the mid-1900s, and a soft leather pouch about the size of a flattened golf ball. It was tied shut, the rest of the cord forming a loop designed to be worn around the neck. The few beads still stitched to its surface were about to fall off. This was clearly far older than the photos. Kelsa was afraid to touch it.

"Come on!" Raven was looking at the ceiling, as if he could see what was happening above them. "I did some work on the leather when I was here before. It won't fall apart on you."

Kelsa picked up the bag and squeezed it gently. It squished under her fingers, but the leather felt fairly sturdy. Still...

"It's too old. It's probably valuable. We shouldn't handle - "

The sound of a door opening in the building above wasn't loud, but it froze her in her tracks.

"Tarnation," Raven muttered. "Nothing else for it."

"What are we going to do?" Kelsa whispered. Visions of handcuffs and barred windows flashed through her head, even though in modern prisons the windows were covered with steel-threaded tempra glass.

"Don't look so panicked." Raven was repacking the box. "We'll have some time before they get down here."

Footsteps crossed the floor above them. The old boards creaked.

"Can you shapeshift me into a raven too?" Kelsa asked, though remembering how horrible that had looked, she'd almost rather go to jail. "Can you - "

"No," said Raven. "And a huge bird flapping around in here would make them a lot more suspicious than a false alarm with nothing out of place. Help me get these boxes back together."

Kelsa flung the cord over her head and helped him replace the artifacts. Then they restacked the crates.

"Now what?" she demanded.

"Now we hide."

Raven went over to an old closet and opened the door. Despite the long rolls of plasti-board, and more stacked boxes and bins, there was room for a couple of people inside. He bowed and gestured for her to enter.

"They'll look there," Kelsa said.

"Not if it's locked and they don't have the key."

There was an old-fashioned keyhole under the doorknob.

"You don't have the key either! Even if you did, you couldn't lock it from inside."

Raven scowled. "Do you always argue like - "

He stopped, listening. Footsteps started down the stairs.

Kelsa shot across the room and into the closet, even though it was stupid, even though it would delay their discovery by only a few more minutes.

Raven stepped in after her and closed the door. Even enhanced night vision needed a bit of light to work with. She couldn't see what he was doing, but he bumped into Kelsa several times as he knelt in front of the door.

She didn't dare speak, even in a whisper, so Kelsa laid a hand on his shoulder. The muscles under the cloth of his shirt were tense, which meant he wasn't as unconcerned as he pretended. Which didn't exactly reassure -

A soft click came from the lock, and the tension in his shoulders eased.

How did he do that? Even if he'd had the key, closets weren't designed to be locked from the inside. Was she going to have to cope with even more magic than shapeshifting? The sound of voices came through the door, and Kelsa stopped caring about magic.

"Nothing down here either." The woman sounded irritated. "I told you. Just some grad student coming in without the code. I bet she freaked when the desk paged in."

"Then how did she get out?" a man's voice demanded.

"Out the back door," the woman said. "She probably left it wide open. These kids don't give a carp about the trouble they cause for other people. All they care about is picking up their study notes, or their com pod, or whatever they left behind."

"But Nadine's board shows the door closing after the alarm went off," the man protested. "It's logged as closed when she talked to the intruder at - "

The door rattled as someone tried