A/N – Another mahoosive thank you to all the reviews, follows and favourites! The reviews really make my day, I love hearing your thoughts, and they help me work out how to progress with this fic. Once again I always feel like I'm making the chapters a bit long (thanks Chocoegg333 for assuring me otherwise!), but you'll get some explanations in this one. Please let me know what you think!

Edit: in answer to the question I just received, this fic takes place just after the movie.

Chapter Three

Eden jolted awake like someone had shocked her. She pressed herself deeper into the seat, sinking into the sagging, lumpy sofa, her eyes adjusting to the unusually dim light.

A sofa, not a seat; a single bare light bulb, not stage lights. It took her brain less than a second to process that she was no longer in the Albert Hall.

And as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, it took her brain even less time to work out that the four faces looking down at her definitely didn't belong to her friends.

She didn't know where she was, but she certainly recognised the Four Horsemen.

"Easy, easy," Merritt soothed as Eden scrabbled to the other end of the sofa, her heels clacking on the uneven wooden floor.

She looked at the four faces in turn, her pulse throbbing in her ears. Merritt was sat on the sofa beside her, a hand held out as if to calm her. Henley was perched on a rickety seat, brow furrowed in concern. Daniel was stood by the window, backlit by the murky street lamps outside, his face in shadow. And Jack, he hovered nearby, his tongue nervously tracing his bottom lip.

Eden tried to speak, but her mouth just worked like that of a fish, no words coming out. She was in a small, sparse room, ground floor. She could just make out houses across the street. Yet other than that, she still had no idea where she was.

Merritt took the lead. "Now, I know this must seem strange-"

"Strange?!" Eden exclaimed, suddenly finding her voice. Her skin felt hot and clammy, her mouth dry.

"Eden," Henley said, leaning closer, "we're not trying to frighten you and we're not going to hurt you, I promise."

"Oh, okay, you promise, right then." Eden's defence mechanism had always been sarcasm, but today it did nothing to still her nerves. She was out of her depth, she knew; she'd never found herself in a situation like this before.

She shouldn't have let Jack Wilder stay in her cab. She shouldn't even have gone to that stupid magic show in the first place.

"We just want to talk," Daniel said from where he stood in the shadows. Maybe she'd believe him if he actually stepped into the weak light the bare bulb emitted.

"About what?" Eden snapped. It felt like her stomach had dropped through the floor and was being repeatedly run over by trains in the London Underground. She opened her mouth to give another sarcastic retort, but she stopped herself when her eyes met Jack's. He looked anxious. His eyes were a little too wide. Would someone who meant her harm look anxious? She didn't know; she wasn't exactly acquainted with criminals.

"It's about your father," Henley said. At the mention of that one word, she had Eden's attention.

"What?" She recalled saying her dad's name during the show. She'd meant to spell out Maisie's name, but instead had said 'Martin'. She hadn't known why. Could this be about that?

"Your father left you when you were seven," Daniel said matter-of-factly, finally stepping away from the window. He too looked a little skittish. In fact, they all did.

What on Earth is going on?

"Do you know what your father did?" Daniel continued.

Eden stared at him, bewildered. Her fear was slowly giving way to blind confusion. "He worked in a bank. Why are you asking me this? Seriously, what the hell is going on?"

"Your father worked in a bank, yes, but what about his other job?" Daniel asked.

"What other job? I don't even know what you're on about!" Eden answered. In that moment she had an overwhelming surge of homesickness. She didn't want to be here, wherever here was. She didn't want to be talking about the father she'd tried to forget.

All Four Horsemen exchanged glances. Eden snuck a glance of her own at Jack. Out of all of them, she felt like he'd betrayed her trust the most. She was never letting a stranger into her cab again.

"She doesn't know," Henley said quietly.

"I told you she didn't." It was the first time Jack had spoken since she'd been here. Was he defending her or himself? Eden met his gaze, but quickly looked away.

Merritt sighed and turned to her. "Your father was a magician."

A pause, and then the bark of shocked laughter escaped Eden before she had time to control it. She looked at them all in disbelief. "I don't think you've kidnapped the right person. My father was a boring old banker with a sense of humour crisis. He would have thought 'magic' was a load of crap, believe me."

"Show her the file," Daniel said.

Jack did as he asked, retrieving something from a cluttered desk. He held out a folder for Eden. She looked from the folder to Jack, resolved not to take it. She wasn't going to have any part of this. She was going to go home.

"Just look at it, please," Henley spoke up.

Eden didn't know if it was Henley's gentle tone or her own curiosity that won out, but Eden found herself warily taking the folder from Jack's outstretched hand.

She flipped open the cover and was immediately granted a look at the face she had struggled to erase from her childhood memories. She had managed to make his features blurry over time, anonymous, but the photo brought everything back to her.

He looked older than she remembered, but there was that same strong nose, same strong jaw, same calculating eyes. Eden remembered him as being always clean-shaven, but in this photo he had a smattering of stubble. She didn't like how he was looking directly into the camera, directly at her, so Eden scanned further down the page. It listed general details of her father, birth date and such.

Eden could feel irritation rising. She quickly turned the page over and found a plastic wallet. Inside was a single, colourful card. It looked to be a tarot card. Eden didn't need to read the writing to know which one it was. The Devil.

She moved onto more plastic wallets. Inside each were newspaper clippings, posters, leaflets, photos and all of them made her breath hitch. They were all about a magician called Damien Hale. Damien had been her father's middle name. And in all the photos was her father, stubble growing on his face, illusions and tricks going on around him.

She frantically scanned the clippings and posters. All the newspapers were foreign, some in different languages; nothing from England.

"I don't understand," Eden stuttered. She would have liked to have said none of it made sense, but little things were piecing together in her head. All those times her father had been away on 'business', he hadn't meant with the bank.

She found herself laughing again. This was absurd. "My father," she said, trying to curb her laughter, "was a magician."

Daniel nodded. "Yes. But not just any magician, actually-"

"Oh, let me guess," Eden interrupted, "he was the greatest magician who ever lived? And now you've come to recruit me as one of your own? Honestly, I don't understand how any of this matters. My father was a magician and he didn't tell me or Mum, big deal. Everyone has hobbies."

"Well then," Merritt drawled, "I guess you can count theft as being another one of your daddy's hobbies."

Eden's smile faded as she looked to Merritt. He only raised an eyebrow at her.

"Actually," Daniel went on, "your mother knew that your dad was a magician. It was only you who didn't."

Eden couldn't deny that hurt a little bit, but she swallowed it down and shrugged. "I was only seven, wasn't like my dad told me a lot of things. And what's this about theft, anyway?"

"I don't suppose you've heard of the Eye?" Merritt said. Eden stifled a smart arse response, and instead waited for him to continue. "The Eye is an organisation of sorts, to do with magic and illusion. We don't really have time to explain all the details right now, but I can tell you that we are a part of it, and so was your father."

Eden shifted uncomfortably. She didn't know what to make of any of it. "And?"

Daniel picked up the explanation. "Your father stole something from the Eye, something important, and disappeared with it. He's been missing for thirteen years."

Thirteen years. Eden could have told them that herself. "What did he steal?"

They all exchanged glances again. Eden wished they would stop doing that.

Merritt smiled at her. "Classified information."

"However," Daniel went on, "we think there was a sighting of your father in New York a few weeks ago. We've been assigned to find your father and retrieve what he stole."

"And where, exactly, do I come in?" Eden asked, exasperated now. This was all sounding crazier by the minute.

"Your father was a talented hypnotist," Merritt said. "Now, every magician needs a backup plan in case a trick goes wrong, a kind of fail safe. For your father's little disappearing trick, we think you're the fail safe."

Eden could only stare. It sounded ridiculous, but through it all she found herself wanting to know more. "What?"

"We think your father left clues to either his whereabouts or that of the artefact in your mind, via hypnosis, so if something went wrong everything he - or someone of his choosing - needed would be locked away in your memories. We just need you to help us work it out," Henley explained.

"You think my dad hypnotised me?" Eden asked, astounded.

Henley nodded. "We think so."

Eden's head was reeling. She stood up. "I'm going home."

She moved for the door, a little unsteady in her heels on the lopsided old floor, but Jack stepped in front of her, holding his hands out to stop her. "Wait, wait, wait," he protested, "we're not gonna keep you here against your will. If you don't like what we've proposed then you can go your own way. But don't you wanna find out? Don't you wanna know what happened to your dad?"

"No, I don't," Eden snapped, "now would you please get out-"

A sweeping beam of light illuminated the room, as though a lighthouse had just been dumped right outside. For a fleeting moment, Eden panicked that they had driven her out to the coast and she was no longer in London, but then the light was killed along with the sound of an engine.

Daniel backed closer to the window and peered outside. "Shit," he said, "we're out of time. They're here."

"Who are here?" Eden asked, but her words fell on deaf ears. Fear was seeping back into her.

"Look, Eden," Jack said, his hands on her shoulders, shaking her lightly. He looked desperate. "You're either in or you're out, but if you don't come with us right now you'll spend the rest of the night getting interrogated by the feds and you'll be no closer to having answers about what happened to your dad."

"But what, if I come with you I can just postpone the now inevitable police interrogation?"

Jack smiled, only one corner of his mouth rising up. "Pretty much, but at least you'll have answers."

Did she want to know about her dad? Yes, she realised. She wanted to know why he'd walked out on her and Mum for some silly 'artefact', why he'd left Eden to grow up always scraping around for money. She wanted to know how he could put something so trivial above his own family.

Her head was a muddle. A part of her was trying to reason that this was actually stupid, full on stupid. Yet curiosity was winning, and Jack had made it pretty clear; she could talk to the police but be left without answers, or she could talk to the police in the future, knowing exactly why she was there.

"Are you coming or not?" Daniel asked. Henley and Merritt were rushing about the room, packing bags.

Eden hesitated. There was a rhythmic banging coming from down the hallway. Someone was trying to break the front door down.

"I'm coming."