“I have a confession to make,” I said a few days later. Maguire looked up from the book he was reading, waiting for me to continue. “I know more about what happened in the pole than I told the Clauses.”

  “Does it have to do with the trickster spirit you took out of the vault?”

  “Yes. It's a friend of mine. Kind of. It's more like a cat you pet on the street that starts following you around, so you may as well feed it but it’s never really something that can be considered a pet because it still very much does its own thing. Sometimes it's helpful. Other times, it causes chaos.”

  “Like stealing the basket to distract the fairies as opposed to stealing things up in the pole.”

  “Exactly. I don’t think it was the instigator in either instance so much as it got caught up in the possibility for mischief. Something else was in the works and behind the bigger bits of chaos, including the move on the vault. Entities of the kind that I faced in the vault can be easily shaped by the things around it, though thankfully the influence doesn’t last all that long. It's like putting a glass marble in a glass of water, then adding color. It will change the appearance of the marble without actually changing the marble itself.”

  “I spent some time reading about them when I arrived, to satisfy my own curiosity. Any idea what was really behind it?”

  “I never got a good read on it, but hopefully my little trickster did. I just have to win it back over, which brings me to why I am bringing this up now.”

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  “It’s here, isn’t it?”

  “Yep. I’m pretty sure it hid in the trunk on the way back from the park, and it’s starting to move out of its dark basement corner. There will be chaos over the next few days as I try and win it back over after scruffing it, and I don’t want you to get too freaked out.”

  “Noted. I will follow your lead on that.”

  “That is appreciated. It shouldn’t take too long.”

  It ended up taking longer than I anticipated to get the trickster to speak to me again, though it warmed up to Maguire very quickly. I played up my sense of betrayal as my form of revenge, only to have it wake me in the middle of the night with a box of matches in its mouth.

  “Why can’t you just let me sleep?” I grumbled. It nudged me again. “Fine, fine. I’ll open the door for you.”

  The trickster padded along beside me as I shuffled to the secret room containing the mural to Clever Jack. It rubbed up against my leg affectionately, and I gave it ear scritches before pushing it into the room. It sat patiently in front of the mural as I reached forward and lit the candle.

  I told you they would come back.

  “That you did,” I acknowledged, “still wish you’d asked first.”

  So you have said, and so I will do in the future.

  “That is appreciated. Do you want me here for this or can I go back to bed?”

  You may want to stay for this. Our friend has some information they want to share about what happened at the Pole and what happened in the woods.

  “Alright. Give me a second to grab a notebook, then let's get into this.”