Reliquary (Reliquary Series Book 1)

by Sarah Fine

  “No, wait—”

  “Stop right there,” said Ho-Jun, but as he reached our side, Daeng made a little choked noise and pointed down the hallway.

  “Should have sensed it earlier,” he said in a hoarse whisper, throwing me a suspicious glance.

  Ho-Jun’s hand closed hard over my upper arm. “What is it?” he asked Daeng. “Is it the sniffer? Is he trying to take something out?”

  Oh God. This wasn’t a pawnshop where I could just run out the door. If Asa had already swiped the relic and headed out without me, it would be a lot harder to catch up with him. Especially since Ho-Jun held my arm in a bone-crushing grip.

  “Not out,” Daeng said, his eyes going round. “In. They’re coming. Very many and very fast.”

  Ho-Jun scowled and looked around. “What?”

  Daeng took a deep breath, his whole body shuddering. And then he raised his arms and shouted, “Headsmen!”

  That word was all it took to make the whole place erupt with panic.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Everyone tried to make it off the dance floor at once, plowing into people who had been streaming up the hallway. Ho-Jun and Daeng had forgotten all about me and were shouting in various languages, waving their arms and shoving to get through the melee. I was carried along by the jostle of elbows and shoulders, yelping as my bare feet were trampled by hard soles. My breath burst from me in gasps as I craned my neck and tried to stay upright.

  “—must have called too much attention to himself,” said an American partygoer, who’d pressed in just behind me.

  “Or he has something too hot to handle and they know it,” said his friend.

  “If they catch us here, we’re fucked.” The guy muscled past, pushing me against a wall as an alarm started to blare.

  The intensity of the jabbing, shoving, twisting, pushing of the crowd seemed to double, everyone frantic to escape. My ears rang as I tried to keep up. We were nearly to the main lounge, where the room opened up and people were sprinting away in all directions. I had no idea where the Headsmen would be coming from, or how many of them there would be, but from the way people were acting, I really didn’t want to meet them. I had no idea where to go, though, or where Asa was. Had he finished his meeting with Montri? Would they be caught together?

  My feet got tangled with someone behind me and I fell forward just as we reached the lounge. The sound of shattering glass nearby wrenched a scream from my throat. Someone had cut the lights, so I headed for the patio, flinching as several sharp cracks filled the night, punctuated by shrieking. Someone was shouting something into a bullhorn, but not in English. I heaved myself up and ran for the outside. The cement was rough against my soles as I emerged into the humid air. Flashing red and blue lights shone from either side of the building, and as I peered upriver, I could see more coming.

  “There you are,” Asa said as he came sprinting out of the lounge, barely slowing down as he hooked an arm around my waist and propelled me along a side path, soft leaves brushing at my calves as I ran. He was carrying something that jingled faintly with every footfall.

  “What’s happening? What did you do?”

  “What does it look like?” His crimson shirt was soaked and he was breathing hard, wheezing every once in a while. “I’m getting us out of here.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No time,” he said, stopping abruptly and pressing me against a wall as he peered around the corner of the building. “Okay, come on. We’re going over the wall.”

  I didn’t bother to question him. As he ducked low and ran behind a row of cars that had been parked along the curving drive in front of the building, I followed him as closely as I could. On the other side of the cars, the red and blue lights painted the front of the high-rise. People were shouting and screaming. A few more sharp cracks nearby made me reach up and grab Asa’s hand. They had to be gunshots. Asa pulled me forward, tucking us behind a security booth a few yards from the eight-foot wall that surrounded the property. There were no guards in the booth—they were probably dealing with the horde of Headsmen that had descended.

  “I don’t know if I can get over that,” I whispered, eyeing the wall.

  “Sure you can.” Asa stepped back and ran at the wall, planting his foot and shooting upward. His fingers hooked over the top, and he pulled himself onto the edge. Then he reached down and wiggled his fingers. “I’m gonna help, though.”

  I grabbed his hand and used my feet to walk myself up the wall, but a shout from behind me nearly made me let go. They’d probably seen my white dress, like a beacon in the night. Asa yanked me up roughly, then dropped to the ground on the other side and pulled me down on top of him as shots rang out. I stifled a scream as we ran across the street, into a warren of dingy buildings that smelled like rotting garbage. I yelped as I stepped on a piece of broken glass, but Asa kept yanking on me. “Can’t stop, Mattie, not n—”

  Two shots cracked into the corrugated metal just above my head, and Asa cursed. I looked up to see his hands in the air as a white guy in a tan suit walked toward us, his gun aimed at Asa. He was blond, handsome but with some wear on him. He was squinting into the shadows where we’d run.

  “You gonna shoot me?” Asa asked.

  The man didn’t lower his gun. “Step into the light,” he said tersely.

  I put my hands in the air and stayed next to Asa as we took a few steps forward into a slant of light from a streetlamp. As soon as the blond man saw us, he lowered his gun, his face alive with emotion. “Asa?”

  “Yep.” Asa let his arms fall to his sides, and so did I, but he didn’t look at me. “Long time, Keenan. I’d heard you’d been stationed out here.”

  The lines around Keenan’s eyes deepened. “What are you doing here?” He looked over his shoulder, back at the Montri high-rise, where screams and gunshots still echoed. “Were you in there?”

  “And if I was?”

  “We got a tip that there was major contraband—a relic we’ve been hunting for a long time.”

  I tensed, but Asa smirked. “Didn’t take you long to pull this little raid together. I’m impressed.”

  “You called it in, didn’t you?” I said quietly, a sick mixture of confusion and dread tingling across my skin. “That’s what you were doing right before you kicked the phone into the river.”

  Keenan’s gaze shifted to me as I stood there, one foot cocked upward and bleeding, my short dress torn. “Don’t you usually work alone?” he asked Asa.

  “She’s not work.” Asa’s voice was tight and strained, and he leaned forward to brace his palms on his thighs. As he did, a necklace fell from the front of his shirt and hung down, glinting in the light. It looked like a locket, but a strange one—the chain was thick and sturdy, and the pendant part was nearly as big as a golf ball. “Mattie, can you . . .” He sank to one knee, and his back arched like he was going to throw up.

  I threw Keenan a careful glance, but his gun was still lowered, so I rushed forward and pulled the necklace off Asa. It was surprisingly light, but had left an angry red line across the back of his neck.

  Keenan stuck out his hand. “I’ll take that.”

  I didn’t move. If we didn’t take it to Frank, Ben might be killed. There was no way I was giving it up without a fight.

  Next to me, Asa was slowly getting to his feet. “What’s it worth?” he asked.

  Keenan eyed the relic in my hand. “It’s priceless.”

  “And you know what it is.”

  Keenan nodded. He holstered his gun. “Of course you’d be the one to find it.” His pale eyes were intense as he stared at Asa.

  Asa rubbed at his chest and winced. “What’s the bounty?”

  “Asa?” I asked, holding the necklace a little tighter. “What are you doing?”

  “Ten million,” said Keenan. “British pounds, not dollars.”

  Asa whistled low, then stretched his arms. “I knew I was being underpaid.” He casually reached down and started to unbutton t
he front of his suspenders, leaving them hanging over his shoulders. “Do you have the cash on hand?”

  “Asa, no,” I said in a choked voice. “Please.”

  Keenan smiled as he looked me over. “So much pain. It’s personal, why you’re here.”

  “She’s engaged to my brother,” Asa said. “Brindle nabbed him to pull me in.”

  Keenan looked surprised. “Ben? Did you two reconcile, then?”

  “Nope.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so,” Keenan said quietly. “Not after what he did to you.”

  I took a step away from Asa. “You said it was them and us,” I whispered. “You said it was going to be us.”

  Asa wouldn’t look at me, but Keenan was staring. “You actually trusted him. You feel so betrayed.”

  “Keenan’s an emotion sen—” Asa began.

  “I figured that out,” I snapped. “I’m not stupid.”

  “But you feel that way,” said Keenan. “You should know you’re not the first person Asa’s fooled.” He let out a sigh. “And you won’t be the last.”

  “Shut up, Keenan,” said Asa.

  “From the moment you meet him, you can’t really help it,” Keenan continued, sounding wistful. “Even though you know you shouldn’t, you just want to trust him. Am I right?” His expression turned hard and bitter. “But you can’t.”

  More gunshots rang out from beyond the wall, but whatever was going on at the compound, there was more action right here. I looked back and forth between the two men. I may not have been an emotion sensor myself, but I could still pick up the tension. The way Keenan was looking at Asa—I swear, his eyes were full of more than mistrust. They were full of . . . longing.

  “Um, how do you guys know each other?”

  “Do you remember the night you left?” Keenan asked Asa. “I’ll never forget. No note. Nothing.”

  Asa stared stonily at him.

  “I was sure you would come back at first. Or at least call.” Keenan took a step closer. We were a triangle of betrayal now, with Asa at the apex. My heart was thundering so hard I could barely hear Keenan’s next words: “It took me at least a year to realize you never would.”

  Asa gave me a sidelong glance before returning his attention to Keenan. “It was just another cage,” he said softly.

  Keenan grimaced, then quickly composed himself. “But tonight, you did call. And you’ve helped us find one of the four relics.”

  Asa stilled. “Frank didn’t mention it was part of a set.”

  “Are you telling me Brindle sent you to steal one of the original four relics without warning you?”

  “The original four.” Asa scowled. “That’s a myth.”

  Keenan shook his head. “We already found the Ekstazo relic.”

  “Did you destroy it?” Asa asked.

  Keenan’s smile was ghostly. “You can’t destroy something like this.”

  I was beginning to sense Ben’s future slipping away. “Tell me what the hell is going on!” I yelled.

  “Some people call us naturals,” said Keenan. “Witches, wizards, mages—so many terms to try to describe us, so many myths and only a few actual truths. And our bible is the tome of the Essentialis Magia.”

  “Another myth,” muttered Asa.

  “Pages have been found,” Keenan replied.

  “And it talks about four relics?” I asked.

  “It speaks to the original meaning of ‘relic’—a body part of a saint, said to have miraculous powers. Catholicism borrowed that from us.” He looked smug.

  I glanced down at the pendant in my hands, a round chamber with a clasp on the side. “There’s a body part in there?”

  “From the original sorcerer himself, Akakios, executed by Roman invaders over two millennia ago. The faithful embalmed his body and saved four pieces, then hid them away. Blood, brain, bone, and viscera.” Keenan was eyeing the relic with laserlike intensity. “These are sources of infinite power. All naturals born in the time since then are nourished by the power, passed from generation to generation, but we’re only faint echoes compared to the source.”

  I pinched the round pendant between thumb and forefinger and shook it, listening to the contents rattle. Asa winced, and I rattled it a little harder just to hurt him. Lord knew he had hurt me. “Is that bone?”

  “It just so happens it is. Strikon magic,” said Keenan, taking another step closer. “But all of the originals are encased in gold.”

  I edged back, whimpering as the glass in my bleeding foot scraped the ground. No way could I run like this. And between Asa and Keenan, they could definitely take me down. I gritted my teeth to push away the pain.

  “Brave,” murmured Keenan. “But you can’t escape.”

  I glared at him. “You don’t care at all that a mobster kidnapped my fiancé? Aren’t you supposed to enforce the law?”

  “Yeah, but whose laws?” said Asa. “Welcome to the big world, Mattie.”

  I looked at Asa. “I will never forgive you for this.”

  Keenan smiled sadly. “I’m so sorry for your pain. I wish there was something I could do. But I need to take the relic now. We can’t risk it falling back into the wrong hands.”

  But Asa reached out and snatched the relic from my fingers. “You get it when I get paid.” His voice had gained an edge, and again, I hoped the relic was hurting him. Bad. “And no way are you bringing me in.”

  “We could iron out the details privately, tonight. No one at the office needs to know you were the source.”

  “Yeah?” Asa asked quietly, moving toward him as the relic dangled from his fingers. “Just you and me?”

  It burned from my throat to my guts, especially when Keenan drew his gun and gave me a regretful look. “Yeah,” Keenan said to Asa. “Just you and me.”

  As Keenan took aim, Asa pivoted and kicked the gun from his hand. Before I knew what was happening, he was behind Keenan, his loose suspenders wrapped around the man’s throat. Keenan’s eyes bulged and his face turned bright red as he clawed at Asa, who merely dragged him to the ground and tightened his grip. After a full minute of struggle, Keenan’s arms flopped to his sides, and Asa quickly let go, leaning down to put his ear to the man’s nose before sitting up again. He tossed the relic at me and dove for my foot, yanking out the piece of glass with a brutal lack of hesitation. The scream was barely out of my throat before he was pulling me to my feet.

  “Is he dead?” I asked, reeling with the turnabout of the last few minutes.

  “Nah,” he said, putting his arm around my waist and letting me lean on him as he guided me out of the alley. “But we’ve got a ten-minute head start, and it’ll be enough if you can move those little legs a bit faster.”

  Together, we limped out to a relatively busy thoroughfare a few blocks from the high-rise, and Asa hailed a taxi, giving the driver an address different from our hotel. As we pulled away from the curb, I put my head in my hands. “Did you actually call the Headsmen?”

  “Yep. You were right about that. As soon as I felt this motherfucking relic, I knew it was big. And I knew they would want it. The Headsmen seize relics that are particularly dangerous, and destroy them, which destroys the magic inside.” He frowned. “Obviously wasn’t the plan in this case.”

  “But you were never planning to give it to them anyway,” I said slowly, peeking at him through the spill of curls that had fallen over my face.

  He shook his head. “I called them because we never would have gotten out of Montri’s stronghold on our own, and they were our escape hatch. But it only gained us a little time.”

  I took a close look at his face, the shadows under his eyes, the lines of strain that bracketed his mouth, the round red mark I could now see on his chest as his shirt fell open. “We have to go upload it soon so no one can sense it,” I said.

  Asa looked like he was biting the inside of his cheek as he glanced at the relic in my hand. “That thing is bad, Mattie. And huge. Bigger than anything I’ve handled before. It
is made of pain. Did you hear Keenan? If he’s right, this is the original source of that kind of magic. You don’t want it inside your body.”

  I shivered at the cold sweat that had broken out across my chest and forehead. “You said I was strong.”

  “You are, but you’re barely tested. We’ve only done this a few times, and I—” He cursed and slammed his hands against the ceiling of the taxi. “Should have brought fucking Lila.”

  “But you said I was stronger than she is!”

  “Not the point,” he shouted, making our cabdriver glance nervously over his shoulder.

  “But Ben—”

  “Fuck Ben,” he snapped, running his hands through his hair.

  “Why didn’t you just give it to Keenan, if you don’t care about your brother?”

  He glared at me, his mouth tight. “I had no clue how powerful it was when I agreed to take this job. This thing could break you, Mattie.”

  “Can we get it back to Las Vegas without uploading it? What if we just packed it up and arranged for a flight out tomorrow?”

  He let out an exasperated sigh. “I’ll call our ride out as soon as we get to a phone, but it’ll take them several hours to pull it together without Montri’s contacts at the airport noticing. And when the smoke clears on that raid, Montri will know the relic is missing, and he’ll know who took it. And that sensor, assuming he got out, will be able to find us. Especially with Montri’s network of people all over the city. We might have until dawn before they come after us, but definitely no longer than that.”

  “Keenan knows you have it, too.” I was still dizzy with what I had just learned about Asa. Or at least, what I thought I’d learned. I had no idea what to think of it. In some ways it didn’t fit, but in others, it made complete sense. “Couldn’t he bring down more Headsmen on us?”

  Asa looked away. “He won’t tell his people about me,” he said quietly.

  We rode in silence, me clutching the key to Ben’s freedom, Asa’s fingers white-knuckled over his own thighs. I wondered if he was waiting for me to say something, to ask him about his past with Keenan, to judge him. He’d told me so many times that he didn’t give a fuck about what I thought of him, and now I was wondering if that was his armor, if he’d had to build it for himself over the years to protect whatever lay beneath.