Rune Thief: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Isabella Hush Series Book 1)

by Thea Atkinson

  Won't stop. My stomach lurched and I buckled. It was damn tough to keep my grip on the bug-out bag, but by God I wouldn't let it go. I heaved up nothing and heard his disgusted groan. Then when I couldn't stop heaving, his palm lay against my back, snicking in between the shoulder blades.

  He patted me there. As though that would help.

  "Don't," I managed to get out between heaves. I held one hand out as I shuddered through the last of it.

  "Are you through?" he said. "Because we need—"

  "To get going, yeah I know." I bit the words out and pushed myself to my feet with the aid of the brick wall. "What in the hell does she want anyway?"

  I inhaled and forged ahead, my legs feeling like lead.

  I peered sideways at him. He was still walking sideways toward the mouth of the alley with all the appearance of a man frustrated at my pace. Was this some con? Was he trying to get me off guard and steal the tile?

  I wasn't on absinthe now. I was terrified, but not stupid. Occam's razor and all. He had agreed to meet me to discuss an item of value. He had seen that tile in the antiquities shop. He was setting me up somehow. It wasn't Errol who had broken into my apartment for the tile; it was Maddox.

  I backed away from him, pulling the handle of my bug out bag. The cat inside meowed shrilly enough to echo off the walls on either side.

  His brow furrowed as he halted and glanced at it.

  "You have a cat in there?" he said.

  I shrugged. "Some girls carry ratty dogs in their purses."

  That was it. Casual conversation. We were too far in for me to pull out the diamond and try to pass him that off. He knew. He knew I had that tile and we both knew now just how valuable it was. Valuable enough for him to hire a female soldier to lay siege to a back alley dive of a bar.

  But he didn't know I'd made him. And that gave me an advantage.

  I'd have to dazzle him with banality until I could slip away. I edged along the brick wall. If I knew anything about human nature, he'd look over my shoulder any time now, act like he was afraid of what was coming at us. Try to make me think this was all a strange, but genuine attack.

  As if on cue, he jerked his head toward the back of the alley behind me. I bolted, using his distracted attention as my chance.

  Another crack of lightning froze my feet. I couldn't help looking back, like Lot's wife, to see what was behind me.

  A ball of light exploded against the wall, then broke into several slithering trails that skittered along the bricks.

  I gasped. I couldn't help that either. And when it struck my bug out bag, it made a sizzling sound.

  There was a snap and the stink of burning leather.

  I dropped my hold on the bag in the same instant as the snapping sound. More out of reflex than anything, but good thing I did.

  Because the bag disappeared.

  Cat and all.

  CHAPTER 16

  A SOUND ESCAPED ME like I'd never heard before. Up until that point I felt stunned, yes, afraid. But this had gone way beyond anything rational. For a gal so good at puzzles, I was having a hard time adding any of these pieces up. Several gears in my brain were struggling to shift and turn to unlock something unlockable. I was frozen with it. So many strange little pieces: a seedy bar. A woman in combat fatigues. A weapon made of light.

  These bits of puzzle weren't fractions and prime numbers or even someone's password made up of children's names and birth dates. None of these pieces fit together. They didn't even look like they came from the same picture.

  I couldn't move for the complexity of the riddle, even when the woman stood in the open door frame, drenched in the hazy light that spilled over her from inside the bar. I got a good look at her then. Cropped black hair, pixyish almost, that framed a face with gracile, angelic features.

  Her fatigues shifted color as she moved, as if the camouflage pattern woven through the material was a living texture. She couldn't have been a hair taller than me, and she reminded me why so many people told me that I looked like a kid in grown up clothes. It always pissed me off, but looking at her, I could see how apt a description it could be. Her diminutive stature made her look harmless even if the entire room had lit with fear at sight of her.

  If she looked harmless, she certainly didn't give off an air of it. She straddled the threshold with both boots set wide apart. Her hands flexed at her sides the way a boxer's did before shoving hands into balls of gloving heavy enough to incapacitate a healthy opponent.

  She gave one last shake of those hands, and then raised one of them again, straight at me, palm facing forward. I watched, dazed, as swirls of blue and purple light abandoned the street lights and neon signs and gathered there on her skin to light the alleyway around me.

  She watched me with her head cocked to the side, maybe trying to assess whether I'd run or fight. I could make out every bit of her expression as she grinned with the slow realization I'd do neither.

  She had me. She knew it. And it was the cold and calculated expression in her eyes that terrified me the most.

  My limbs wanted to explode into motion, they even twitched, but my brain couldn't send the signals out. The synapses were stuck on trying to solve the puzzle like a gummed up ON switch to an old fashioned VCR.

  The light fled her palm and streaked toward me. I heard it sizzle as it gobbled up the air. It was going to hit me. I was dead.

  Rough hands grab hold of me and jerked me sideways.

  Just in time.

  The blast struck the wall behind me and broke off into thousands of splintered stars. I stared at the place it struck in the abandoned warehouse. Rubble rained down the side of the building and fell to the cobblestones. Nothing but a gaping hole remained behind it.

  "Move," Maddox ground out. I swung my stunned gaze sideways to see him hovering over me. So we were both still standing. I hadn't collapsed after all. Strange. I couldn't feel my legs.

  I started to say so, to tell him that I could not move unless a bulldozer scooped me up, but he took one look at me and cursed. His arm went around my waist as though I was a 20 pound bag of flour and that he was dragging me with him as he ran, hoisting me against his hip now and then when my feet bit into cobblestones.

  We fled together, zigzagging up and down back alleys. It was full dark but the city had come alive with light. Crisscrossing iron bars covered the doors of the more reputable shops and floodlights in the eaves of the buildings lit up their façades as well as the sidewalk in front. Blurs of faces moved past me.

  And I recognized the path he was taking. The docks. We were headed toward the docks. A far seedier part of town than even Fayed's bar. A place where no one would be be safe let alone a woman of my stature. Just knowing what he might have in store for me was enough to put some steel back into my spine.

  I struggled out of his grip and managed to get free. But the effort dropped me to the sidewalk.

  My legs were shot. My breath raged in my ears, my heartbeat hammered in my temples. My chest shuddered when I realized that I'd only gotten this far because of his grip on my waist. I was fooling myself if I thought I was participating in the escape. He'd been the one doing the running. I was just being dragged along for the ride.

  I could move faster unburdened by the bug out bag, but the back of my mind kept chanting over and over again that this couldn't be happening and I refused to let go the one last thread that tied me to reality. I pumped my arms, kept flexing my fingers, expecting to feel that handle in my grip. I sobbed each time my fist closed on empty air.

  "You need to get up," he said, reaching down.

  I flipped over onto my side, holding my hand up.

  "Don't," I said. It was one word but it held everything burgeoning in my psyche. My fear. Threat. The plea for this to all be over.

  He loomed over me. His russet hair clung to his face. He brushed it back and re-wrapped it into the elastic. I fancied I heard him breathing hard until he spoke and proved he wasn't winded in the least.

&
nbsp; "I can wait," he said but the words had the feel of a man who wanted to check his watch.

  "What in the hell was that?" I gasped out.

  "You must have pissed someone off, that's what that was," he said.

  "What kind of answer is that?" I refused the offer of his hand and instead pushed back against the step, hugging my knees as I pulled them up to my chin.

  He shrugged at my refusal and crossed his arms over his chest as he regarded me.

  "What kind of question was it?" he said.

  "What do you mean what kind of question? That was some crazy shit back there."

  He crossed one ankle over the other and leaned against the building. I wondered how such a lazy stance could look so coiled with tension but it did. I expected him to pull out a cigarette. Instead he sighed and crouched so he could be eye level—sort of—with me.

  "A crazy question is something one asks when the answer is obvious," he said.

  "And the obvious answer is?"

  He sighed. "You crossed one person too many."

  "Me?" I said. "What makes you think all that was about me?"

  I crossed a lot of people in my time. It was part and parcel of job. But I'd never seen things I'd seen tonight.

  "Because it wasn't about me," he said.

  "That's no answer." I lifted my chin. I'd done a hell of a lot of things in my time, and I knew people. He was hedging. He knew exactly what was going on. His body language was all over the knowledge.

  I'd already ruled out the possibility of him being behind the attack. He'd run too frantically with me at my side him to be anything but afraid. And whatever it was he was afraid of, he was being careful now.

  Not for the first time I wished I'd sent a lackey and sussed out this entire heist. Things had gone from bad to worse ever since I put the sole of my foot down that skylight to steal the Incan gold. Maybe even before that. Maybe even when I'd let that stranger buy me a cup of coffee.

  "Heist?" he said, looking down at me with his head cocked just enough that the streetlight lit up half his face. The half I could see looked wary. I realized then that I was muttering to myself. I slapped my hand over my mouth to keep from saying more.

  "What did you steal?" he demanded.

  "Nothing," I said between my fingers.

  "You just used the word heist." He pulled my hands away from my face and held them. "You must have stolen something pretty valuable to have Kelliope after you."

  "Kelliope?" I said. I'd heard the name before somewhere, hadn't I? And he'd thrown the name out as though I should recognize it and be afraid. In fact, there was a distinct note of awe in his voice that made me uncomfortable. "Is that her name? That soldier from the alleyway?"

  "Soldier?" he said. "Kelly is a soldier the way a Hot Wheels Porsche is a car. I'm surprised you don't know that."

  I didn't like the way he said that name again. It had heft to it. A dread that made me try to inch away from him instead of answering because I had the feeling no matter what I said it would be wrong.

  "Why is she after us?" I said. "Who is she?"

  His gaze traveled my face to my throat, down to my knees and up again.

  "You took something," he said, and his thumb went to my chin. He tilted my face so that he could look in my eyes. The glare from the streetlight made me squint and I felt like I was under interrogation. His face was still in shadow. "Something Kelly wants. So what is it?"

  I squirmed beneath his touch, feeling like a kid and a doomed woman all at the same time.

  "Nothing."

  "Kelly doesn't chase anyone for nothing."

  "Nothing anyone would kill for," I said, and hated the way my voice went all shrill. I was out of my depth, let alone the sheer panic that still coursed through my thigh muscles in memory. I leapt for the only rational thing I could.

  "The diamond," I said. I'd stolen it so long ago, I couldn't remember if the mark had been a woman or a man. How rich they were. If they hired mercenaries. But it was the most likely explanation.

  "So you did steal something." He eyed me with an I knew it look and I shrugged.

  He shifted his hand so that the webbing between his thumb and index finger slipped up beneath my chin, and his fingers lay against my throat. He had very large hands. The palms were calloused. A man who did labor. Hard labor. I wondered if that labor included hurting people. My breath caught. I wondered if he could hear my heart slamming against my ribs. I could feel his palm against my throat as I swallowed the fear down.

  "The diamond. It was in my bag," I said.

  "Not a diamond," he said, shaking his head. "Not something so worthless."

  I didn't dare move beneath his hand, a rabbit beneath a Wolf's paw. Instinct told me to lower my eyes, but I couldn't. My gaze was pinned to his like Icarus's gaze to the sun.

  I made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a sigh. While the hand on my throat didn't move, the other one started running down my shoulders and arms, playing across my waist and into my pocket. I held my breath. I could feel the weight of the tile in the other pocket. If he decided to check there...

  Which of course he did. His hand crossed over my waist and fumbled into the other pocket. I expected him to pull his hand back as soon as his skin touched the heat of the tile. Instead, he withdrew it and held it outstretched on his palm in front of my face.

  He tilted it toward the light. The sound of his intake of breath told me he knew exactly what it was. Despite the fear, a sense of victory took flight in my chest. Yes. Valuable all right.

  "An Odin rune," he murmured.

  "It's mine," I said. Whatever an Odin rune was, I'd earned it with blood and sweat and not a small amount of terror.

  "Where did you get it?" He sounded almost righteously angry.

  "None of your business," I said.

  He let me go at that and closed his fist over the tile. He squeezed. It seemed like he was testing the heat of it, the weight.

  "It's real," he said. "I can feel it." The wonder in his voice was almost painful.

  I wanted terribly to reach out and pluck the tile from his hand but I was afraid to move as he held it to his heart. Some sort of rumination was going on behind his gaze even as it held mine.

  "Where did you get it?" He leveled me with that gaze and when I refused to answer he shook his head. "Never mind." He sounded exhausted. "Doesn't matter where you got it. You're screwed."

  CHAPTER 17

  "SCREWED?" I SAID. "She got the damn diamond." I thought of my bug out bag and the way it had just fizzled into nothing. "Or I guess she got it."

  He canted his head to the left. "It's not the diamond she's after, I told you," he said. "It's this."

  He pinched the tile between his finger and thumb and held it in front of me. I stuck my hand out for it but he tossed it lightly and caught it again in his fist.

  "This is what you came to sell me," he said.

  He pushed himself to his feet and I bolted to mine, thinking he planned to abscond with my future. He held his hand up in a halting gesture.

  "No worries, Kitten," he said. "I'm not interested in the kind of future that's in store for you."

  He said future like he'd heard me say it, and I most definitely did not. Even so, I didn't like the inference in the statement, as though whatever was coming was a thing to dread. Well, maybe it was, but what choice did I have? Run from an insane soldier woman or Scottie. It was all still running.

  I squared my shoulders and held my hand out until he laid the tile onto my palm. I slipped it back into my pocket and patted it from the outside. His eyes followed the path of my hand and rested on my pocket.

  "I've only ever seen one before. A forgery, that one. Nothing like what you have there."

  "So it's valuable?" I said.

  He chuckled darkly. "Oh yes. You've got the real deal there if Kelliope is after you."

  He jammed his hand in his pocket. "At least the Fae believe it's real or they wouldn't have sent their most notorious assassin after y
ou."

  He dropped the words the way a skilled negotiator did. Letting them sit there quietly awaiting comprehension. I heard Scottie do it a thousand times. It was very much akin to 'you can tell me which Fed to talk to or I can break your fourth rib. You can tell me how much of my money you skimmed away or I can make you swallow your teeth.'

  A person needed time to work through both of those things and a good negotiator gave the poor sap all the time he needed to realize that there really wasn't a choice anyway.

  "Assassin," I said, my mind landing on the word that made the most sense.

  I thought of the man in the alley who had disappeared. There'd been a blast of light then too. He'd been afraid. He'd told me a 'she' was behind me. My throat hurt almost too much to speak as the full weight of the realization descended.

  I'd been fooling myself before, setting myself into a tunnel visioned spiral because all I could think of was Scottie and the dread of him was bad enough. I didn't want to think there was something worse. How stupid had I been, anyway? Blinded by bias despite the vivid picture right in front of me.

  "The guy in the back alley," I murmured to myself. "She killed him. She wanted the rune and she killed him for it."

  "I don't know what guy you're talking about, but yes, she will kill for it."

  I shook my head to clear it of the ridiculous thought that a woman could blast a man out of existence with a beam of light. The army was getting pretty advanced.

  "You expect me to believe the army has an assassin unit? And that they want to kill me for a stupid piece of stone." I started to pace, working my way through the information as though it was a trench of muck.

  "Bone," he said and when I gaped at him, he cut off whatever else he was going to say in favor of a new train of thought.

  He peered at me even closer.

  "What are you?" he said.

  I shrugged. I didn't know what he wanted for an answer and I was already too sunk into the forest that I couldn't see the wood.

  "Oh my God," he said. "You're not anything, are you? You've got Kelliope after you and you have an Odin rune and you're not anything."