Assassin (Starlight Book 1)

by D. N. Hoxa

  Ella dropped her pen and took one good look at the sandwich while I stood there like an idiot waiting for her approval. She had that effect on me. Maybe because she looked so much like Mom with her honey blond hair and hazel—almost green—eyes and apple red lips. Her hair was shiny and straight, slightly curled at the ends. I loved those curls.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked after a second, eyeing me suspiciously.

  “Nothing.”

  I turned for the stairs and headed up to my room after mumbling a goodnight that Dad didn’t even return. I closed the door but left it unlocked. Ella would be upstairs soon enough to check on me before she went to bed herself. I didn’t want her to know I was upset. But my angry tears didn’t care. They slipped down my cheeks and made me feel even weaker than normal. I just wished I could turn back time and send James to hell that Monday morning when he asked me out, and like a fool, I said yes. I should have listened to Kate—my best friend. She told me to stay away from him from the very beginning.

  Luckily, I managed to get undressed and into bed before I heard Ella’s footsteps in the hallway. When she came in, I wasn’t crying.

  “What’s up?” I pretended to make myself comfortable just to avoid looking into her eyes.

  “You tell me,” she said, folding her arms in front of her. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Going to sleep and you should, too.” I pulled my blanket up and was tempted to cover my whole face already.

  “Well, if you’re not going to tell me…” she said and walked out of my room.

  A loud sigh escaped my dry lips. Finally, I was alone. I could spend the night crying my eyes out if I wanted to. Except…

  “Move over.”

  I pulled the blanket away from my face and looked at Ella with her pillow in her hands, waving at me.

  “Wha…”

  “I’m going to sleep with you, Star. That’s what you get for not telling me what the matter is.”

  Holy shit.

  “What? No way! This is my bed! It’s my…” but she already had put her pillow next to mine and climbed on the bed next to me.

  That was my sister for you. If she saw I was even a little bit out of it, she wouldn’t rest until she thought I was normal again. Despite my many protests, she ended up sleeping in my bed, her small arm around my waist, the warmth of her comforting me like nothing and no one ever could. So, no, I didn’t spend the whole night crying my eyes out. I actually slept like the dead.

  * * *

  I just wanted to make Ella proud. In the morning, she told me that whatever it was that had me looking like I’d lost hope, I should stand up to it and deal with it. That’s why I threw my lunch on James’s head in the cafeteria, in front of everyone.

  I should have known better.

  I was never one to fight back. That was my little sister’s job. She had the fire that burned in her eyes. She had the passion. But after watching my boyfriend of three months with another girl the night before, and after my sister spent the night with me to keep me from crying, for a short second, I thought I actually could do it, too.

  So when I heard James telling everyone that he’d dumped me after he took my virginity, and when everyone laughed—God, those awful laughs—I just did it. I went over to him and threw the tray filled with food on his head. Not only that, but I shouted at him that he had a small penis. I shouted it at the top of my voice.

  Oh God, oh God, oh God. Now everyone was going to really think I had sex with him! What the hell was I thinking?

  But it didn’t matter. I locked myself in the toilets and waited for Kate to come and calm me down. When she didn’t show up half an hour later, I left school and made my way to Sam’s Bookstore, trying but failing to stop the tears from spilling. I’d cried for over an hour now, and I felt so, so weak.

  The worst part was that I wouldn’t even be able to tell Ella. She would be so disappointed in me. My cheeks burned red at the reminder, but when I finally saw Uncle Sam’s bookstore, the purple sign blinking on and off every few seconds, the tears finally stopped.

  Uncle Sam was the owner of what was probably the oldest bookstore in all of Philadelphia. His was the only store made of wood on that street. That was what had attracted me to it two years ago. The inside had that perfect smell of books, wood and fire combined. Uncle Sam let me help him every once in a while, and he let me sit there and read books without even having to pay anything. I spent every spare second in that place. It gave me a sense of peace. It relaxed me—the whole place, not just the reading.

  And since I now had three more hours to kill before Ella got home from school, there was no other place I would rather be in.

  The bell rang when I pushed the door open. The four main racks took up most of the space, and the shelves on the walls looked like paintings. Uncle Sam was terribly organized.

  “Good morning, Uncle Sam,” I called as I approached the counter in the far left corner. Surprised, he looked up with a half-smile on his face. I could only hope my face wasn’t red.

  “Star?” He looked behind at the small clock mounted on the wall. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “I got off early today. One of my teachers had an emergency, and they couldn’t find a substitute, so…” Lying sucked and I hated it, but in times like these, it was a necessity. Besides, it was a harmless little lie, so I didn’t feel too bad.

  “In that case, I’m glad you’re here. I could use some help.” He waved for me to come behind the counter. I dropped my backpack on the floor eagerly. Uncle Sam was looking at the screen of his computer, an Excel spreadsheet waiting on the desktop.

  “What’s that?” Uncle Sam always kept everything written by hand in notebooks. Said he preferred a pen in his hands if he was to keep his mind clear.

  “I’m crossing over to the dark side,” he said, chuckling. “I’m registering my inventory on this spreadsheet. I no longer have the space to keep books.”

  “Good for you,” I said, grinning. Already, just like magic, James and everyone who’d laughed at me just an hour ago in the cafeteria were far away from my thoughts. “What can I do?”

  “You can enter the data from these books while I go tidy the mess in the back.” He waved at the notebooks with dark green, leather covers right next to the keyboard. Perfect. Exactly what I needed to keep my mind off things that made me want to run to my room, get under my blanket and never come out again.

  “Awesome.” Smiling, I sat in front of the computer and pulled up the sleeves of my shirt. I wouldn’t need to think about going back to school tomorrow for another three hours. It was more than I could’ve hoped for.

  “Is something wrong, Star?” Uncle Sam asked.

  “Nothing at all,” I said way too quickly, but if he noticed, he didn’t comment. “I should start right away.”

  “Okay, well, if you need me, you know where to find me. I’ll be hiding in plain sight.”

  He closed the door behind him and left me frozen for a short second. He always used those words at some point when I went to see him. Hiding in plain sight. And every time he did, my brain just kind of froze. Like it stopped working for a second.

  Shaking my head, I grabbed the first notebook, found the last row Uncle Sam had entered into the spreadsheet and continued from there. Time flew by as I entered name after name, book after book, until the door opened, and I looked up at the clock. An hour had passed.

  Standing up, I smiled at the woman who approached the counter slowly.

  “Hello,” I said to the woman, smiling.

  “Hello, dear,” she said. She had a beautiful, dark green dress on, and her short grey hair made her look slightly older than she really was. She folded her arms on the counter.

  “How can I help you?”

  She looked back at the shelves, still smiling. “Oh, nothing. I’m just looking.”

  Looking. So why was she there, resting against the counter?

  “Maybe I can help. Are you looking for a specific book?�
� I asked, as a strange feeling settled on the pit of my stomach.

  “I guess you could say that.” Her voice was cold somehow, her smile suddenly transformed into a wicked grin. I could have been seeing things, but her eyes began to glisten, too.

  It started at the tip of my toes. The bookstore blurred in front of my eyes, and as the strange feeling took hold of more and more of my body, my hands pulled up in fists. I couldn’t tell you how I knew it, but I was certain that this woman had no good intentions—far from it. She wanted to hurt me, which was ridiculous, but my gut insisted, and it wouldn’t stand to be ignored. A loud breath left my lips as an invisible blanket fell over me.

  “What do you want?” I asked the woman, my voice not my own. I’d analyzed every inch of her already. I knew the way the corners of her eyes wrinkled when she squinted as she analyzed me, too. I saw the tension in the way she kept her shoulders and her excitement when she smiled so big, her upper lip stretched all the way to reveal her gums.

  “That’s okay,” the woman said. “I think we have the next best thing.”

  I leaned back. “Excuse me?”

  But soon enough, I realized that she wasn’t talking to me. No, she was talking to the tiny microphone attached to the collar of her green dress.

  It all happened both fast and slow, like a dream. The backdoor opened, and in came a man, tall and with eyes the same brown color as the woman. I barely had time to open my mouth before he slapped me across the face so hard, I fell on the counter. Screaming forgotten, I tried to push myself away, but there was nowhere to go. The woman had stepped back, and with her arms crossed in front of her chest, she watched the guy grab me by the hair and push me against the wall.

  I had no idea what the hell was happening, but I knew that it was a mistake. Just a stupid misunderstanding. And where the hell was Uncle Sam? I opened my mouth to scream out his name, but the man pulled me back and threw me against the wall again.

  “Shut the fuck up,” he hissed, his mouth right next to my ear. It occurred to me that I wasn’t crying. Perhaps because I was in shock.

  “Let’s get out of here, Jonah. They’re already on their way,” the woman said.

  I didn’t get to wonder who they were because, as soon as the words left her mouth, Jonah hit me hard on the back of my head, and my body and mind let go of me.

  3

  ——————————

  My head throbbed in pain. No, my whole body throbbed in pain. My wrists burned, and when I tried to move them, the pain intensified. My arms were tied behind my back.

  Panic pushed my eyes open and jerked me to my feet. Where the hell was I?

  A strong hand on my chest pushed me back down on the chair I had woken up in. My eyes moved so fast and my body was shaking so badly that it took me a second to register everything in front of me.

  The room was small, dark except for two small lamps, one of them half-broken. There was a leather recliner in one corner, an old kitchen table in the other and a dirty runner under my feet. In front of me, sitting on a chair that matched mine, was the woman with the green dress. And towering above me was her friend Jonah.

  “Wh-wh-what…” My jaw hurt. My voice refused to cooperate with me.

  “There’s no need to panic, young one,” the woman said, narrowing her brows as if my reaction was really unnecessary. “We’re not going to hurt you. All we need is to know where he is, and then we’ll let you go.”

  Lie.

  How the hell did I know that?

  “I don’t know anything. Please, you have the wrong girl,” I said, my voice shaking and breaking on every other word that left my lips.

  “I assure you that playing dumb is not going to win you any favors,” the woman said. “Tell me where Samuel is, right now, or…else.”

  Bile rose up my throat, but I swallowed hard and pushed it back down. I needed to calm down. They wanted Uncle Sam. This was all just a big mistake. All I had to do was calm down and tell her that I didn’t know where he was. She would let me go. She had to.

  “I have no idea. He was in the back of his store, and I was there helping him enter—”

  “I don’t care what you were doing!” The woman’s shout cut me off and made me jump up again. I’d never been more afraid in my life. “Tell me where he is.”

  “I-I-I don’t know, I swear,” I whispered. “Have you checked his apartment?” Uncle Sam lived in a one-bedroom apartment right above his store.

  The woman looked down at her lap as she mulled it over. Her friend Jonah still stood there over me, his hands on his hips, looking at me like he was bored out of his mind. He was beautiful—more so than any other man I’d ever seen—but there was something about his eyes. There was something about both their eyes.

  “Let’s say I believe you,” the woman said, bringing my attention back to her. “You don’t know where Samuel is. But you know where Illyon is.” Smiling, she leaned her head to the side as she watched me. “So where is it?”

  Oh, God. What the hell was going on? What had I gotten myself into? I should’ve just stayed in school and kept my mouth shut.

  “I don’t…I don’t know what that is.”

  Before the last word left my lips, Jonah slapped the hell out of me. My jaw cracked, and blood filled my mouth. Tears pierced my eyes and spilled down my cheeks, mixing with the blood coming out of my mouth before they fell on my lap.

  “Let’s try again. Where is Illyon?”

  This is it, I thought. It looked like my life was about to end because I had no clue what an Illyon was, and the woman didn’t look like she was going to take my word for it. Regret fell heavy on my shoulders. Until that second, I’d never realized just how much I wanted to do with my life. How much I wanted to make my mother and sister proud. And now that I could see my life passing me by, the regret suffocated me.

  “I don’t know.” I would say it as many times as I needed to. “I don’t know what that is.”

  Jonah turned to the woman. “Are you sure she’s the Keeper?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. She fits the description,” the woman shouted, and she stood up to come to me. Her long nails dug into my skin when she grabbed my chin and pulled my head up. “Maybe he glamoured her.”

  “But she’s human,” Jonah whispered.

  The woman bit her lip as she analyzed my blood- and tear-streaked face. “So?”

  “Please, this is just a misunderstanding. Please let me go. I won’t tell anyone, I swear,” I cried. Maybe she could see the truth in my eyes from so close up because nothing was making any sense to me. She had to realize it.

  “Hold very still,” the woman whispered, and she let go of my chin only to frame my whole face with both her hands.

  “What-what…” but the words died on my lips as a sharp cold hit my temples. I tried to scream, I really did, but it wasn’t possible. There was no voice in me. My heart didn’t beat. My eyes no longer saw, and my mind no longer thought. It just…remembered.

  The woman’s face became Uncle Sam’s. His blue eyes were filled with concern. My hands were in his—I could feel them, but I couldn’t move my head to look around. I was frozen in place as he pushed my hair away from my face and whispered…

  “I hide in plain sight. Do not speak. Do not seek. Do not think of The Unique. You shall only sneak a peek, do not ever let it leak.”

  My body moved, but not because I wanted it to. It was because Uncle Sam moved the chair I was sitting on around and turned me until I was facing the bookstore. With his mouth next to my ear, he whispered: “See.”

  And I saw.

  My eyes popped open, and the woman let go of me. She gritted her teeth as she studied my eyes, but instead of her face, I saw the book. The large black one with golden letters embossed on the covers. The Unique by F. R. Thompson. I’d seen that book countless times. I’d even opened it and…I couldn’t remember what it was about, but I’d seen it. I’d touched it.

  And I remembered Uncle Sam saying those weird words befo
re he directed me to it.

  “Tell me where it is,” the woman said as she took her seat again just a couple of feet away from me. Tell her? How could I? Uncle Sam had been clear. I was not to speak of it. I was to lock it inside my mind and never let it leak from my lips. It freaked me out that I understood what those words meant, but that didn’t make it less real.

  This woman and her friend were looking for The Unique, and I was not to tell me under any circumstances.

  “I don’t know.”

  I said those same three words another four times. After the fifth, the woman and Jonah seemed to have enough of me. The pain they caused me could not be described, but it also strengthened my resolve to keep my mouth shut.

  Screaming began to hurt, too, after only a few hours. There was no use because it was obvious nobody was going to hear me. I was covered in blood, my nose was broken, probably some teeth, too. And when Jonah was done hitting me on my face, he began to cut my arms with two small knifes he took out of his pockets. He didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary—he seemed amused by how I expressed my pain, grunting and biting my tongue and lips, because like I said, screaming made a mess out of my throat, and I didn’t need any more pain than he was causing me.

  Unconsciousness didn’t come when I begged for it to take me away from that room. It came when Jonah kicked me with his foot on my chest and threw me and my chair flying to the ground.

  4

  ——————————

  Present

  It was dark by the time I arrived in Lyndor. The large gates of iron opened as soon as I stepped in front of them. Guards everywhere, at least ten. None that I could see, but I could feel all of them. Could tell you exactly what they were, too, if they weren’t hiding behind their shields, which a lot of sups refused to do because it sucked up too much of their energy. It never really sucked any of mine—keeping my shields up—but I was a freak among my kind, so I didn’t really count when it came to things like that.