Two weeks later Lord Morren returned. It was mid-afternoon when he came up the stairs and opened the door to his workroom. The thief had shut it, but she’d had no way of restoring the spells she’d disarmed. He must have immediately noticed that something was wrong. He surveyed the room from the doorway. His eyes narrowed and he stepped into the room. A minute or so later there was a tremendous crash and a stream of swearing. The door flew open and Lord Morren stormed out. His face was twisted into a mask of fury, sharply emphasized by his recently acquired fangs. He fixed his raging stare on me. “Who was it? Someone has stolen three of my most valuable books. You must have seen him, who was it?”

I was frozen in his gaze. I could actually feel the force of his anger, his magic leaking through as an almost physical pressure. I managed to answer, “I don’t know!”

The feeling of pressure intensified, then suddenly I was hit with a blow of raw power that flung me against the wall. I slid down to lie in a heap on the floor, stunned. “You must know! Your door was open, you must have seen something! Tell me!”

I shook my head dazedly. “I didn’t see anything, I was asleep. How could I have seen anything?”

Lord Morren turned his attention to Amelia. “What about you? You must have seen something!” Her eyes were wide and her voice was small and terrified.

“No, Master Morren. As Ashen said, we were asleep.”

He glared at her for a long moment, then swung around and stalked back into his workroom. Anger was evident in every line of his body, and I heard him mutter, “I’ll find him. No one steals from me and gets away with it!”

I shivered. If Lord Morren tracked down the lady thief, she wouldn’t be able to tell my father about me, and there would be no rescue. I was left with that uncomfortable thought for the next few hours as Lord Morren did whatever he was doing in there. He couldn’t be doing very much, as I knew his personal reserves of power had to be low. He’d been away for a long time and he hadn’t had a chance to restock his power from Amelia or myself.

So I wasn’t surprised when Lord Morren opened the door to his workroom and summoned me inside. I went to my usual place in the circle on the floor. As I knelt in place, my mind was whirling. If this spell was going to do something to that thief, I had to stop it, but I didn’t know how. Sure, I was familiar with the theory behind most any spell, and I knew of a dozen ways I could disrupt things if only I had some magical power of my own, but I had none whatsoever. For the thousandth time I cursed my latency. Then I saw something that distracted me quite thoroughly. A sparkling lattice of power hung over a second circle drawn in the center of the room. It was the barest thread of power, a kind of framework, or skeleton. I’d never seen anything like it. There were certainly spells that created such patterns, but they were all immensely powerful. This was the barest wisp of power in comparison.

Lord Morren went through the familiar ritual of the power transfer spell. I braced myself for the pain as he knelt behind me and his head bent down, his lips finding my neck. I was engulfed again in that blaze of agony. No matter how may times I experienced it I was always startled by the intensity of it. Human beings don’t remember pain very well. We don’t need to recall the exact degree of agony caused by putting a hand on a hot coal to know not to do it again. The amazing thing was that after a moment I could actually put it at a small distance from myself and think. I couldn’t ignore it, or put it out of my mind entirely, but I had become accustomed to pain to the point of being capable of thought while experiencing that white-hot agony.

What I was thinking right then was that this seemed to be going on a lot longer than usual. Ordinarily Lord Morren would only take a small amount of blood, and the transfer lasted less than a minute, though the pain made it seem longer. But surely the first minute was long past? I had a bizarre wish to see a clock, so I could know exactly how long this was lasting. Five minutes? Ten? It felt like an hour to my abused nerves, but I knew it couldn’t be nearly that long. I tried to move, to struggle, to break the mage’s hold on me, but it was no use. As always, I was caught in a complete paralysis and couldn’t so much as twitch. When at last Lord Morren released me, I collapsed completely. I thought I’d felt drained after all those other times, but now I was empty to the bottom. I wanted to just lie there, and indeed, I lacked the energy to crawl even an inch, but I did manage to open my eyes.

Lord Morren was standing above me, his back turned to me, his face to the glittering spell construction. To my eyes he glowed with power so brilliantly I was surprised it wasn’t actually illuminating the room, though I knew to normal sight nothing would have been visible. A thread of power spun itself out from Lord Morren to the spell construct, and it began to flesh itself out. Soon the thread had broadened into a rushing cable of energy. It poured into the spell until it was a massive, pulsing scintillation of light to my eyes. And I recognized it now. It was a very high-level, complex spell. I hadn’t known it was possible to build the framework first and then empower it, but for a mage like Lord Morren, with almost no personal energy, there wasn’t any other way to do it.

It was a very sophisticated “hunter” spell, one meant to find a person that met certain criteria that were woven into the spell itself. Simpler hunter spells existed, but they were fallible. This one would leave no stone unturned. It would find the one it sought if they were on the other side of the world, or dead, or even on another plane. Lord Morren laughed darkly as the last of the power he’d taken from me drained out into the spell, completing it. “No thief has even lived to enjoy the rewards of stealing from me,” he said, and I shivered at the vindictiveness in his voice.

The spell had already begun to work. It might take minutes, it might take days, but eventually it would find the lady thief. And what would happen next I didn’t want to think about. I still could see no way of halting what was to come. My hopes all seemed to be swirling down the drain, but what could I do? To physically attack Lord Morren would accomplish nothing. He was larger than I, and stronger, and with a wave of his hand he could immobilize me. I lacked the ability for a magical attack, and the thought of trying to talk him out of this was ludicrous. What other options remained?