Heart of the Thief

by Katerina Martinez

  “Is anybody gonna open this, or…?” I asked. “It’s freezing out here.”

  Delia and Karkov stopped a few feet from where I stood. They were both wearing matching tailor-fitted, black suits, and neither of them looked interested in holding a conversation with me. Least of all Karkov. I didn’t think he’d gotten over the beating I’d given him last night.

  “I guess we’re standing out here, then…” I ventured.

  I got a good look at the front of the mansion in the daylight, at least. The building must’ve been about four stories tall. Three mighty towers made up the façade, with one tower on each side, and one right in the center; a million windows between them. Looking up against the sun, I could’ve sworn I saw men wearing body armor looking down from the towers. It was hard to tell from down here, but if I had to hazard a guess, there were definitely snipers trailing rifles at my head right now.

  The mansion’s front door opened, and the reason for the delay came sauntering out. It was Axel. He strutted along the cobblestone path from the door to the driveway, fixing the cuffs of his designer shirt. He was wearing a suit again, one of the tailored and super expensive variety. The sunlight gleamed off his clear blue eyes when it touched them.

  Then I remembered the way he’d grabbed a fistful of my hair and tugged it. A shudder raced along my spine.

  “Here to see us off?” I asked.

  The crows parted to let him pass between them. “See you off?” Alex asked, “No. I’m part of this job, too.”

  “Wait a second, part of it? Your father hired to run this job, which means I’m in charge of the guest list, and you’re not on it.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not how it works. You’re in charge of the job, but I’m going along to make sure you go through with it.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “And them? Will they have some role in this that I’m not aware of yet?”

  He shook his head. “They’re here to protect me.”

  “Protect you… from me.”

  “Should you decide to turn on us, sure. If you play for our team like you’re supposed to, then they’ll protect you, too.”

  “I doubt that,” I grumbled.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing. Look, I told you I only needed four people on this, including me, and I knew exactly who I was going to get. Adding you makes it five.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Haven’t you heard of the phrase too many cooks? The more people are involved, the more chance there is that something’s gonna go wrong.”

  He waved a disinterested hand at me. “I’m not here to work out the logistics—that, and just about everything else, is your job. My involvement, however, is non-negotiable. If you’ve reconsidered your decision to take my father up on his offer, I can go and let him know.”

  Delia grinned. I frowned. “No,” I said. “Whatever. Just get me inside of this car so that I can warm up, and let’s stop for coffee, too.”

  Axel walked past me and knocked on the backseat window. A second later, the door unlocked, and he opened it. “Is there anything else you’ll require?” he asked, holding it open for me.

  I paused. “Breakfast muffin?”

  He nodded, then gestured at the car. “Let’s go.”

  I didn’t need to be told twice. I stepped into it, enjoying the feel of the cool leather interior against my back. A moment after Axel shut the door, I caught a glimpse of the crows becoming… well, crows. The birds took flight, disappearing from view altogether. They were going to be trailing us from above.

  Axel slid into the backseat of the car using the opposite door. He looked over at me and arched his eyebrows. “Seatbelts,” he said.

  I grabbed mine and clipped it, and then we were rolling, slowly putting the mansion in the rearview mirror. “No blindfold and cuffs this time?” I asked.

  “If we’re going to be working together, it’s important that we show a little trust toward each other.”

  “Babysitting me doesn’t exactly fill me with trusting feelings.”

  “How am I supposed to be able to keep tabs on you if I hang back?”

  I pointed at the ceiling. “Those guys will probably do a half-decent job, at least. I mean, I know I could lose their tail, but it would take some doing.”

  “You’re pretty confident in your abilities, aren’t you?”

  I angled my head to the side. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean, you have power and you’re not humble about it.”

  “I have skill, too. That’s why you hired me, isn’t it?”

  “It is, but power and skill alone don’t make someone invincible. Take last night, for example. You were so concerned on getting revenge that you exhausted yourself and left yourself open to an attack… by me. Maybe if you worked on your pride a little, you’d be a more complete mage.”

  I scoffed. “You worry about what color ties to wear and let me worry about my pride. How about that?”

  “I need to know you’re not gonna compromise this mission by getting too cocky or too emotional, for your own good.”

  I crossed my arms in front of my chest and stared directly ahead. “I’ll get you what you want, don’t you worry about that. But call me emotional again—”

  “—and we’re gonna have a problem?”

  I didn’t look at him. He’d just parroted what I’d said to Karkov in the foyer. Had he been there, listening in? Or had he plucked that thought out of my mind before I’d said it. His father was a Psionic, which meant he probably was, too. It didn’t always work like that, but strong bloodlines often did.

  If he was a Psionic, he had the power to get into my head and do all kinds of messed up things in there. He could erase memories, implant false ones, make me feel pain even though I wasn’t being hurt… he could even make me think a little more positively about him, his people, even his father.

  My guard was up, and it was going to have to stay up as long as I was around him.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “They call her Danvers,” I said, “But I know her as Cassidy.”

  “And what’s her role in this?” Axel asked. He’d decided to grill me about my picks for the mission. There were only three other people I’d considered for a job like this—three people with the skills, the magic, and the right morals for the job. The first pick on my list, Cassidy Danvers. Why? Because without her, this whole gig was doomed to fail.

  “Let’s just say she’s kind of my good luck charm,” I said.

  “I’m going to need you to be more specific than that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I get to veto your choices. If I don’t like someone, they aren’t getting involved.”

  “You see, I think you’re overstepping your powers here. Your dad may have decided I needed a babysitter, but I’m the one who makes the decisions about personnel. Didn’t we just go over this?”

  “There’s that confidence again,” he said, a slight smirk playing across his lips.

  “Better to be confident than meek.”

  “It’s also better to be sure than arrogant.”

  I scowled at him. “You’re gonna get on my last nerve, aren’t you?”

  He shrugged. “That’s entirely up to you.”

  “Look, I know you’re probably used to being the big scary crime guy, but Danvers’ parents are also big scary crime people, so you’re gonna have to take it down a peg.”

  Axel paused, then his eyes widened. “Wait, she’s from that Danvers family?”

  “Is there another?”

  He shook his head. “Absolutely not. Her family are rivals. We can’t have her working for us.”

  “Will you relax? She won’t be working for you—she’ll be working with me. She’s more of a free agent now, anyway. She hates her family.”

  The car rolled to a halt. A quick look outside, and I saw we’d arrived at chez Danvers. I’d been hesitant to bring Axel and the crows here, but they’d confiscated my phone and wer
en’t giving it back, so I had no way of contacting her to let her know I was coming.

  I stepped out of the car and into the narrow, mostly empty street. The roads here were cracked and broken. The trees on the side of the road had started to lose their leaves weeks ago as fall gave way to winter. And the buildings hadn’t seen a fresh lick of paint in years.

  I hurried across the road toward the intercom and pressed the button for Danvers’ apartment. No one lived here. Most of the buildings around me were boarded up and shut, probably home to squatters and vagrants. It was a tiny world in and of itself; a place everyone else forgot.

  The intercom system itself was a jagged mess of broken buttons and loose cables. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. The crows fluttered down onto one of the nearby trees and started squawking as I waited for an answer. It was a clever disguise, I had to give them that. Good to travel in, too. Vivimancers had things too easy sometimes.

  “Does anybody live here?” Axel asked, his eyes roaming the cracked walls of the derelict building we were standing in front of.

  Static blared through the intercom, then a gruff, man’s voice. “What?”

  “It’s me,” I said.

  The door buzzed, and I pushed it open. Axel tried to walk through in front of me, but I threw my hand across his chest and stopped him. “You wanna get killed?” I asked.

  He scanned my eyes, then threw a glance into the apartment block lobby ahead of us. It was dark, and quiet, but there was a strange scent in the air, and a very slight hum. “Not exactly.”

  “Good, because you were about to step through a ward designed to keep unauthorized mages out.”

  Axel paused and studied the lobby. He was trying to see the ward’s boundaries with his magic senses, but that was about as easy as spotting a laser beam with the naked eye. Unless it was powerful enough to be seen, or you happened to have a bunch of smoke to highlight the laser’s path, you didn’t stand a chance.

  I stepped toward the front door, ahead of Axel. I knew I’d have a free pass because Danvers had me on the guest list, but I’d need to temporarily disable the ward if Axel wanted to follow me in. That’s when the idea hit me.

  After a moment studying the ward itself, I walked through the threshold and into the lobby. There was an elevator on the other side of it. I walked over to it and pressed the button, wondering if it would work. To my surprise, the panel lit up.

  “What are you doing?” Axel asked.

  I cocked my gaze over my shoulder, flicking my blue hair around. “Well, I’m an invited guest… you’re not. So, it looks to me like I’m gonna get my way in the end.”

  “Get your way? What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t want you waltzing into my friend’s place and pretending like you’re the boss of her. That’s gonna get really old, really fast, and it’s probably gonna make her a little jittery. It’s probably best if just go talk to her by myself.”

  “Izzy, I’m only gonna say this once. Let me through, or the job is off.”

  “I don’t know about that. Your dad will probably have a bitch fit if you fire me.” The elevator dinged, and the doors slid open. I stepped inside, but I kept my finger on the door open button. “Tell you what, how about we make this a chance to work on that whole trust thing we were talking about?”

  Axel frowned like he wanted to seriously inflict some pain on me, or maybe hurl a whole bunch of insults at me. He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I’m listening.”

  “Well, you confiscated my phone last night. If you want this job to go smoothly, I’m gonna need to be able to talk to my team. Hell, I’m gonna need to be able to find the other two, and I don’t stand a chance without my phone, which means we’re starting on the back foot here. Give me my phone, and I’ll let you through the ward. It’ll also give you a little taste of what I can do.”

  His blue eyes narrowed. “How do I know you’re even telling the truth about the ward?”

  “Take a step forward and find out.”

  The moment hung in the air, the space between our eyes charged like an electric current was running through it. After he’d had a little time to think about it, he reached into his pocket and dug my phone out. He held it up, a sign that he’d accepted my deal.

  “How do I know that phone isn’t fake?” I asked, “You’re a Psionic. That could be an illusion.”

  “I guess we’ll just have to trust each other.”

  I nodded, walked a little closer to him, and prepared my left hand to trace sigils into the air with. “You slide the phone over, and I’ll disable the ward.”

  “At the same time.”

  I shut my eyes for a second, to let the scent and the hum reveal themselves to me as a pattern in the air that I could follow with my hand. Danvers herself had designed this ward. There wasn’t anything fatal about it—that part had been a lie—but if tripped, the ward would tell her an unknown mage had entered the building, and it would then stun the mage a few seconds later.

  Axel placed my phone on the floor and slid it past the ward’s threshold. At the same time, I traced the pattern in my head into the air with my left index finger, following the shapes as they appeared to me. It was easy, really. Not because Danvers herself wasn’t any good at setting wards up, but because I was way better at cracking them than she was at making them.

  I felt the ward’s power stall like a car engine, and waved Axel over when the moment was right. Then I picked my phone up from the floor, rubbed it against my shirt, and tapped the screen. It had a fresh crack on it, but it also still had a little battery left.

  Axel was a little hesitant stepping into the lobby, but no stunning spell shot out of the air to strike him down.

  “I can feel it,” he said.

  “Feel what?” I asked, checking my emails. Spam. Spam. Irrelevant. Bill. Spam.

  “The ward… it’s gone. I can’t hear the humming anymore.”

  “It’s not gone, just asleep. It’ll be back up in a few seconds, but we’re already on the other side of the boundary, so you’re fine.”

  I headed back over to the elevator. Axel hesitantly followed. It didn’t look like he trusted the look of the box with the broken panels I was asking him to step into, but it was either that or walk four floors up.

  The elevator bumped, and squeaked, and moaned, but a moment later we were on Danvers’ floor. There were no more wards to deal with here, only the door to apartment 13. I knocked, then waited. Axel was standing so close to me I could smell his cologne. I nudged him to step back.

  “Be cool, man,” I said.

  The door opened as much as the chain would allow it to. Through the slit in the door I caught a sliver of a man’s face, a bloodshot eye staring at me from inside. It shifted from me, to Axel, then back to me.

  “Who’s he?” a deep, guttural voice asked.

  “Just some guy,” I said, hoping the son of the most notorious mage in all New York wouldn’t be so easily recognized. “Is she here?”

  “He gonna cause any trouble?”

  I glanced at Axel. “Damn, I hope not.”

  The door shut, I heard a shuffling of metal links, and then it opened again. I stepped through, sticking my fist out for the doorman who bumped it with his own. There were blood stains on his wife-beater, a sea of tattoos covering his muscular body, and two thumb-size bumps on his forehead.

  “Horns are coming in nicely, Rex,” I said. Last time I’d seen him, he’d been bragging about some Demon he’d beaten, and how that Demon had promised to grant him horns. “When do you think they’ll pop out?”

  Rex shrugged. “Hell if I know. This shit isn’t science.”

  True. Demonology is probably a lot more complicated. “Don’t worry. They’ll come in soon enough.”

  Axel followed me into the apartment, and Rex shut the door behind him. There were people scattered around the place, most of them sitting on chairs and working at tables. Each of them had a job to do, whether that was cutting crystals into pow
der, mashing herbs into bowls, or carefully pouring liquids into bubbling beakers and test tubes.

  There was a haze in the air, and a powerful mix of aromas you just couldn’t escape; some chemical, some natural, all nasty. It had been hard to get used to it the first few times I’d been here, but now that I was ready for it, not so much.

  Some of the mages working at their stations stopped what they were doing as we walked through the apartment. One of them looked up at me from behind a series of beakers filled with colorful, glowing liquids. He pulled a cloth back on his table to reveal the gun he kept at his side.

  The message was meant more for Axel than it was for me, but considering I’d brought him in here, it probably applied to the both of us.

  Rex led us further into the apartment. I was careful not to knock into any of the equipment as I went. We found Danvers in her office, the room most filled with bottles, jars, and little dime bags filled with all manner of magic weirdness. Danvers herself had just finished labelling one of those jars and had turned to stack it on a shelf next to a few others.

  Dressed in a private school uniform, complete with its navy-blue skirt, knee high white socks, and matching blazer that sported the St Bernadette’s school for girls, Danvers wasn’t the kind of spider you’d expect to find at the center of this web. She was a pixie that struggled to reach the highest shelf in her own potion lab, but she also wasn’t someone to be messed with. Of that I had personal, first-hand experience.

  “I thought you were dead,” Danvers said, slowly turning her head. Her waist-long, jet black hair slithered around her body like a snake.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I would’ve called, but…” I cocked my head toward Axel.

  Danvers eyed him up and down. “Who’d you bring me?”

  “Not who—what. I have a job for you.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Danvers slowly sat down back at her desk. Leaning back in her seat, she stared at me from across her table that was covered in bags and jars filled with glowing liquids and powders. Her eyes narrowed, her face bathed in multi-colored light.