“A shuttlecraft with a nice pair of laser guns strapped to the sides,” the voice said. “Now answer my question, and do it quick. Name yourself.”
“It wasn’t really a question, was it?”
Emmanuel’s smile spread across his face. What could possibly be so funny?
The turrets swiveled to aim at the windshield.
“I won’t ask again,” the voice said.
“Oh, gods,” Emma said, covering her mouth.
Emmanuel tapped the console’s display a few times. The shuttle descended and landed with a few skips on the ocean’s surface. When they were cruising along at the speed of a sailboat, Emmanuel tapped the console again.
A cold mist entered the chamber as a side door slid open. The jets lowered themselves so there was one on either side of the shuttle. One of the pilots, wearing a helmet that covered his face, peered at them.
Emmanuel walked to the opening and grabbed an overhanging strap as a salty breeze ruffled his hair. He leaned out over the water and gave the salute Milo had come to know well, making a steeple out of the fingers of his right hand and touching his forehead.
Light guide your step, is what the gesture meant. Milo’s mother and father had invented it.
The pilot’s voice rose from the console, sounding boyishly ecstatic. “Well, send me to the underworld. It’s really him.”
SUBMERGED IN HIS OWN THOUGHTS, Oscar ignored what was going on with the jets, instead savoring the cold touch of mist against his face.
They sailed smoothly the rest of the way, both side doors open to invite the smell of salt water and cawing of seagulls into the shuttle. The jets, flying overhead now, escorted them at a leisurely pace.
“They’re wardens,” Emmanuel said when everyone had calmed down and he’d shut off communication with the pilots. “They protect the citizens of Theus, but they answer to only one man.”
“The Archon,” Barrel said.
Emmanuel nodded. “Things have changed since I was last here. I’m no longer sure how far the Archon’s power extends over the people of this country. He’s served two ten-year terms already. There’s an election coming up, and I have a feeling he’s going to try for a third.”
“That’s illegal, isn’t it?” Gunner asked.
“We’ll see about that.”
Oscar went back to admiring the ocean water undulating outside the shuttle, its salty smell so thick in his nose that he could taste it in his throat. Emmanuel’s advice ran through his mind, as refreshing as the sea mist. There are no limits to what you can accomplish here, except for the ones you set for yourselves…
He was yanked out of his reverie by a hand suddenly clamping down on his shoulder.
“Careful,” his father said, pulling him back. “You could fall in.”
Oscar gritted his teeth. He hated to admit it, but sometimes he envied how free and independent his friends all seemed with no fathers to hold them back.
CHAPTER 4
T he baker had come to Peleros when Calista was ten years old.
By then, her father had already disappeared, leaving her to live with her mother and older brother and sister. Her mother, left to raise three children by herself, pulled Calista out of school to steal food for the family. Being the most agile of her siblings, Calista took naturally to the life of a thief. Due to her small size, she found it easy to sneak around the market and pocket the fruit, loaves of bread, and strips of dried and salted fish that her family came to depend on.
At the age of twelve, two years after she began her life of petty crime, Calista received orders from her mother to infiltrate Artemis Sol’s bakery, which by then had become the most popular food store in Peleros. The man baked fresh bread and pastries every day that could make your mouth water from all the way across town.
But Artemis Sol ran a tight outfit. He employed men to guard his store against thieves like Calista as well as other businessmen—competitors mostly, looking to gain an edge by learning his secrets. In those days, a man named Kristian Keldran owned a string of restaurants, bakeries, and brothels in the west end, and when his customers began to drift to the center of town to buy from Artemis, Keldran became vengeful and started sending over thugs to extort money. Artemis was urged to pay them a monthly tax “for protection,” they assured him. After he refused, Calista saw newly broken windows, fresh scorch marks, or other signs of attack on the bakery every time she walked by on her way to the central market.
It was wrong to target this particular baker. Calista knew he was a decent sort, a tough man who wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody, whom everyone loved for his sense of humor and friendly nature. But her mother cared not a whit.
“You listen to me, you little scamp,” she told Calista one day, grabbing her hair and yanking her into the kitchen, where a rickety metal stove and a crude icebox were the only signs of habitation. “Take one good look at how we live. Your father left us with nothing, you hear me? All you do is think about yourself. What about me? What about your brother and sister? How do you expect me to feed all of you, run the sewing shop at the same time, and put up with your attitude?”
Her mother was a tall, angular woman with a face that had once been beautiful, but was now tired and lined. She had burning orange eyes that resembled flames, especially when she was angry. Her tail, long and silvery, had a habit of lashing from side to side like a whip.
“I don’t care,” Calista shrieked. “I don’t want to steal anymore. I want to go to school with my friends.”
Her mother yanked her toward the stove, opened the compartment where the coals were stored—they were still hot from breakfast—and shoved Calista down to her knees in front of it. Still clutching a handful of Calista’s hair, she shoved her face toward the hot blackness inside. Calista screamed.
“Mama, stop.”
“You take a good look,” her mother said. “Either you go out there and steal, or so help me Valcyona, I will tie a leash around your neck so you never leave this room. You’ll cook and wash all day long, and then you’ll see what I have to put up with.”
Calista gave in and promised her mother to steal once a week from Artemis’s bakery.
Someday I’ll leave this place forever, she promised herself.
A week later, during a calm and peaceful night, Calista was about to leap from her window to begin her mission when her older sister, Marcely, woke up in the next bed and hissed at her.
“Hey scamp,” she said, lying on her side in bed. Calista could sense her greedy smile. “You bring back some of those chocolate swirly things I like, or I’ll tell Mom you been smooching with Delan out in the fields.”
Delan was a local boy, the son of a fisherman, who had buckteeth and always smelled like the fish he carried into the market each morning. At twelve years old, Delan was well-known to mothers around town as a good-for-nothing little rat. One year, he ran up to one of the town’s beauty queens during the annual Carnival of the Vale celebration and ducked his head under her gown during the parade. She had been in the middle of waving to the crowds from atop a platform made to resemble one of the famed whales the goddess Valcyona had loved. Such a shriek of terror had never been heard in Peleros before or since. The beauty queen, a young woman named Lizel who had since been married off to an alpha’s son in a distant city, had edged back her dress to find the boy peering up at her, a wide grin on his idiot face.
“Gross,” Calista whispered fiercely. “I would never.”
“Mama doesn’t know that,” Marcely said, lying on her elbow with one hand propping up her head and her blonde hair spilling all around her.
At only sixteen years old, Marcely was in the running to become one of the local beauty queens. Even in the dark, her beauty could not be obscured. Her voice was light and musical—whiny and annoying, Calista often thought—and her skin and hair gave off a healthy luster that turned heads whenever she walked down the street. Her beauty was only skin-deep, though. Beneath that layer of rosy skin dwelled a soul th
at cared only for itself and resorted to lies and trickery to get what it loved most: attention.
“If you tell her that,” Calista said, “I swear…”
“What? What could someone like you possibly do to someone like me? In a few years, I’ll be married to the eldest son of an alpha family. Then I’ll leave this rat-infested town forever. Until then, Mom would never take your word over mine.”
“Fine,” Calista said. “You like those tasty treats, you’ll get them. More than you could ever eat in one lifetime.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” Marcely said, rolling away from Calista and making herself comfortable on the dozen or so pillows she liked to sleep on. “And be quick about it. I want one for breakfast.”
Calista imagined her sister’s body growing soft and fat after years of covertly snacking on pastries and candies. See what alpha prince would marry her then.
She slipped through the window and made her way quietly across the roof. Scouting was her favorite part of the burgling process.
Tonight would be an intelligence-gathering mission. Artemis baked his wares first thing each morning. It would be stupid for Calista to assume he had anything left over each night that wasn’t stale. Even if he did, it probably didn’t amount to much, and her mother had told her to come back with a week’s supply of delicacies or not come back at all. Calista would scout the bakery, determine the best way to get in and out undetected, and discover where he kept surplus baked goods that she could swipe during busy hours.
She already knew from hanging around the bakery (without going inside, since showing her face would be risky) that Artemis baked his supply at four thirty, then smoked a pipe outside when he was finished. It was always fifteen minutes before the place opened for business, which was at six This gave her a window of time during which the food was unattended.
The night was pleasantly cold, quiet except for the occasional flyovers of birds and the grumbling drunks outside the corner tavern. Calista, dressed in dark hues with her hair gathered in a tight bun, made her way across the rooftop of her mother’s house, then leaped over the alley to the neighboring rooftop. She did this several times, avoiding the streets, trying to be as nimble and quiet as possible. She wasn’t capable of phasing into an animal shell—her eyes hadn’t even turned orange yet—but even in human form she could compete with the quickest and sharpest of nature’s beasts… or so was her childish assumption.
When Artemis’s bakery came into view, she hunched down on a rooftop across the street and searched for any signs of movement. Nothing. Empty. She jumped down to the packed dirt, darted across to the alley, and flattened herself against the bakery’s outer wall. It took only a moment for her to discover the bells attached to the windows of the bakery—inside, obviously, where no one could disarm them without setting them off. Artemis was a clever man, but even at that age, Calista understood one important thing about clever men: they were also arrogant.
A quick search of the grounds brought her to a padlocked door leading into the basement. She smiled down at it. Out from her pocket came a set of lock-picking tools wrapped in a dirty cloth. Her fingers felt for the right ones and pulled them out. All she had for light was the glow of twinkling stars and a half-crescent moon.
Calista loved the night. Before getting to the lock, she took a moment to breathe in its crisp coolness. She listened to the drowsy music of snickrits humming from the branches of the great old tree in the backyard, the soft burping of firebelly frogs, whose undersides flashed as they stood up in the grass and waited for their next meal to fly overhead. Then she crouched over the padlock and got to work.
Something looked off about the heavy device. It was attached to only one end of the chain, the other end having been tossed aside, leaving the left door unlocked. She set the open padlock aside on the grass and did the same with the chain, careful not to make any noise. Someone had either picked this lock already, or they had left it that way overnight. She would go with the first option; this wasn’t the sort of mistake a man like Artemis would make, not in a million flights.
She stood still and listened. A quiet thump came from the basement, followed by a man’s grunt. It could be anything. Maybe Artemis had unlocked the door and was down there now, doing prep work for tomorrow.
No, that didn’t seem right. Surely he could access the basement from inside the house. That would be easier than unlocking this padlock and smarter than leaving it unlocked in the meantime. She tested the door to see if maybe it was locked from within.
As her fingers lifted the door half an inch, the sound of another thump came through, amplified by the closed space within.
“You’re makin’ a mistake,” came a man’s gruff voice.
There was another thump. Clearly, someone had been punched.
Calista almost let the door fall back into place but caught herself in time. She had a choice now; either slip inside and help—obviously, Artemis was in trouble—or slip away, back into her warm cot in the corner of her bedroom, where she could sleep away this night and come back tomorrow morning to see if the baker was still alive.
Her mind ran though options. She pictured Artemis sitting in a dank, barely lit basement, tied to a chair, being slapped around by the men who had picked this lock to get inside. “The baker-man,” as her mother called him, didn’t deserve to be treated that way. He was an honest businessman, a good fellow. Everyone said so.
“Valcyona’s ragged tail,” another man cursed in a well-mannered but impatient voice, drawing a sharp gasp from Calista.
It was blasphemous to suggest that Valcyona, mother of all Ferals, actually had a tail, not to mention a ragged one.
“My boss knows you got family across town. You tell us where it is, fat man, unless you want to see your nephew, Ultan, and your niece, Salestra, cut up into little pieces and sold for cheap in tomorrow’s meat market.”
Crouched on the inside stairs now, Calista let the cellar door fall silently into place, using the back of her head to ease it down. Why hadn’t she turned back? After all, this didn’t concern her, and she was wasting an opportunity to scout the rest of the house unbothered. The cellar was hot, roasting hot, and yet a chill hit her like a frigid wind. She could turn back, but Calista had never been one to turn down a thrill, regardless of how cheap or dangerous it might be.
There was another loud thump, followed by a sputtering cough.
“We’ll make this easy on you, Artemis,” the man said. “You give up the location of that safe, and going forward we’ll waive any fees you owe us for protection. You’re a man of the community, and I know people respect you. They’ll respect you even more when they see us backing away.”
“Respect,” Artemis grunted before spitting out what was probably blood. “All you’ve ever had is ignorance. Fear.”
Shut up, Calista wanted to tell the baker. Can’t you just give them whatever’s in your stupid safe?
She followed this thought with another: There must be something extremely valuable in the safe. Maybe gold coins, rubies, diamonds.
One of the men snickered and grumbled something about Artemis “having some serious stones.” Calista made her way quietly down the stairs. She heard a creak and the wooden thump of chair legs hitting concrete, which could only mean they had tied him down.
Concrete. This basement had a concrete floor. Artemis must be rich!
The men continued their threats as Calista slipped down the stairs and crouched behind a looming shelf. A crack between this shelf and the next created a narrow aisle at the foot of the stairs that would keep Calista hidden, and from there she studied what was going on in the larger space.
The men had Artemis tied to a chair in a space surrounded by piles of aprons, overflowing boxes, and stacked bags. Flour mist hung lazily near the ceiling, lifted by the heat of the beating. In the center, Artemis sat with his head hanging over his chest. His hands had been bound together behind the chair along with his bare feet.
The scene el
ectrified Calista’s senses. Now, instead of the fear she had felt on the stairs, all she knew was the mental vacancy of a machine about to spring into action, its every function already mapped out.
Barely thinking about her next move, she picked a pebble off the floor and flung it over the shelf. It sailed across the room, toward the stairs diagonally across from her that led up to the house, and smacked against the wooden handrail.
“What was that?”
The two men turned to look. Calista dug out the penknife she kept with her lock picks, the one she used for slicing ropes and separating the occasional coin purse from its owner’s belt.
“Go check it out,” the smaller man said.
The bigger one stepped across the room to investigate. His partner followed close behind, pulling a curved knife from his belt. Calista tightened her own grip on her weapon.
Beneath the stairs was a dark nook that could have hidden a small animal. Maybe that’s what the men were assuming. The bigger one approached it, and as he moved, hunched and ready to stab, Artemis turned his bloodied head to have a look in the other direction. He was smarter than these men, knew a distraction when he saw it. Stealing from him would have been a true challenge.
Avoiding the baker’s stare, Calista crept through the aisle that opened into the room. She tilted her head to peer around the corner. The two thugs had their backs to her. Artemis was scanning the shelves, about to lock eyes with Calista.
Come on, come on, baker-man…
“You think something’s in there?” the smaller thug said.
“Guess we’ll find out,” said the larger one, peering into the dark nook.
Finally spotting her, Artemis’s eyes widened slightly, then dimmed again. He gave her a single, cautious nod. Permission to act. It was now or never.
Calista darted silently across the room and stopped at the chair. She cut through the ropes binding his wrists. The baker was a large man, his forearms like loaves of dense bread. He gave off the sour smell of someone pulled from a long, hot sleep, and the tangy scent of fresh blood.
Savant & Feral (Digital Boxed Set): Books 1 and 2 of the Epic Luminether Fantasy Series Page 48