The Amulet Thief (The Fitheach Trilogy Book 1)

by Luanne Bennett

  I opened my mouth to speak but felt my tongue go slack for lack of the ability to think. I literally couldn’t think, couldn’t logically string together a single thought in my head. I couldn’t speak or tell my limbs to move, and suddenly it was like I was back on that hard floor covered in my own drool. The sensation was terrifying. Nothing was recognizable because nothing existed without the ability to process the images or sounds in my brain.

  Without warning, she turned and started sprinting again. My head darted sideways in the same direction, and in what seemed like a perfectly choreographed response, I took off after her and ran with as much stealth as my guide. We paced each other through the forest until we came to a clearing just outside the tree line.

  “Wow. What the hell just happened?” My grin was as wide as my face as the adrenaline rushed up and down my veins. I felt more alive than ever as a wave of power rivaling an orgasm washed over me.

  Her lips curled into a sly grin. “The reason you couldn’t find your speed was because you were thinking.”

  “Gee, how stupid of me,” I said. “Could you dumb it down a little?”

  “Learn to separate your two selves, Alex.”

  “Still not getting it.”

  “God, sometimes I can’t believe we’re the same. Your power comes from your mind. The body will follow.”

  “And?”

  “Stop thinking. When you need to run, just run. Don’t think about it.”

  “But isn’t that the point of the mind? To think?”

  “You’re confusing the mind with the brain, Alex.”

  We started walking but stopped when we spotted a pile of burnt ashes in the clearing up ahead. I got a sickening feeling I’d been in that exact spot before.

  I moved closer to the pile, glancing back every few steps for reassurance. She approved each step with a barely detectable nod that made me wonder if I was imagining it. Her chest expanded and contracted along with her grin, silently cheering me on as I moved deeper into the pit of soot.

  “This is your beginning, Alex. This is the place where you claim what’s yours. Embrace your power—or let it go.”

  My foot moved the pile of burnt ash to unearth what was left. All that remained was the charred skin of a face and a pair of gray eyes. I gagged as the cloudy oysters stared back at me, and a nervous laugh burst from my lips as the absurdity of the dream registered in my head. As I turned to walk away, a hand emerged from the pile and grabbed my ankle.

  “Need this?”

  I looked up just in time to see a dagger heading straight for me. With a single movement, I caught the blade in mid somersault and positioned it over the face staring up at me, taunting me with animated movements, spitting out guttural epithets. The thing was laughing at me.

  “We’ll see about that,” I said as the blade came down, ripping straight through the center of the eyes. A neat line of crimson slid down the nose, over the mustache, and into the gaping mouth. And as I listened for the sounds of death, the idea that I knew what they would sound like disturbed me more than the act of causing them.

  A hand appeared out of nowhere and grabbed the blade just as it slipped through my fingers.

  “Felt good, didn’t it?” she said.

  I looked up but I was alone. The words had come from my own mouth.

  EIGHTEEN

  Something kept nagging at me, something I wanted to swat with the back of my hand, but I couldn’t figure out how to go about doing it. My arm was wedged under my torso, sound asleep, reducing the limb to a pile of dead flapping flesh. It never occurred to me to use the other. There was something else I needed to do. Oh yeah, open my eyes. I must have still been in my state of sleep paralysis because my eyes wouldn’t cooperate either.

  “Stop,” I mumbled around the thing obstructing my mouth. My shoulder was beginning to feel like a punching bag from all the jabbing, or maybe it was just a bird trying to peck its way under my skin.

  I lay there lingering in a semiconscious state, oblivious to the fact that I was outside with my mouth full of saliva-soaked grass. There were cars and voices blending into a single unified muffle somewhere in the distance, but it was the slap that finally got my undivided attention.

  “All right. Enough!” I snapped.

  My eyes flew open as I flipped over to see who was assaulting me. It was the old woman I’d seen in the park the night I was attacked. Her hand was already in motion for a second whack, when I instinctively threw my good arm up to stop it. I gave her a stern look, warning her of how bad an idea it was to do it again.

  She bent over at the waist and studied me with an accusing glare, and then righted herself to put some distance between us—like I was the threat. Still as a slab of stone she was. Her cloudy gray eyes fixed on me, but I got the eerie sense the woman was looking right through me. It was like looking at a blind person without knowing the person was blind.

  “We see you, witch.” the woman said with a low hiss that reminded me of Indian food and snakes. The sound was more like several voices hissing in unison, and every hair on my body stood erect.

  I was in Central Park. Where else would you find a grassy lawn this big in New York City? Not to mention the old woman I’d seen the last time I was here. I couldn’t remember how I got there, but then I remembered Arthur Richmond’s party. I remembered my finger planted in the middle of someone’s forehead, but that was all.

  I pulled myself up from the ground, but it wasn’t more than a second before I wished I hadn’t. My body was on fire. Every limb burned with pain. I must have been hit by a car. What else could inflict that kind of pain? I swayed back and forth, trying to balance myself and keep from crashing back down to the ground. My difficulty must have amused her because she smirked at me while her eyes dug deeper into mine.

  The smell of flouncy lilacs crept up my nose. Not the pleasant springtime kind I remembered from growing up in the Midwest—the unnatural kind growing in the dead of December in Central Park.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, witch?” she asked as her eyes narrowed. She moved toward me with the speed of a much younger woman. I’d say she glided. I felt the blood drain from my face as a slender, youthful arm reached out from under her bulky coat sleeve. The closer she got, the younger she appeared to be. She was literally getting younger by the second.

  The practical side of my brain was telling me to run, but oddly, the instinctual side was telling me to stay put. As a rule, I always tried to follow my instincts. It didn’t really matter, though, because my legs weren’t moving.

  I swung my head around in every direction to see if anyone else was seeing what I was seeing. A few people walked right by, showing no signs of horror or even the slightest bit of curiosity at what was happening. I seemed to be the only one who could see it, so maybe I was hallucinating. Maybe that hit and run had caused a mild concussion.

  “I said, what’s wrong with you, witch?” The old woman looked as young as me, and ridiculously surreal covered in her ragged old dress and army boots.

  “Why do you keep calling me that?” I asked.

  I took a step back. My instincts were now telling me I might want to go ahead and leave, but I knew that option had expired. Anything that could pull off this little stunt clearly had the upper hand and could squash me like a fleeing cockroach.

  The woman—I assumed—stopped within a foot of me. The blind eyes were gone, replace by something far too beautiful for description. Squinting her emerald eyes, she leaned in and sniffed.

  “What are you?” She looked me up and down, and the bizarre hissing was replaced by a single angelic voice.

  “What am I?” I shot back. “You’re the one morphing here. What the hell are you?”

  She must have found my response entertaining, because she let loose a shrill, high-pitched laugh, reminding me of what a mermaid might sound like.

  Before I had time to react, she extended her arm and grabbed one of my breasts. She actually grabbed a handful of boob and palpated
it like a stress ball.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “What the hell are you doing?” I slapped her hand away, but she continued groping me while I fought her off.

  “Just checking for glamour.”

  “Touch me again,” I warned, “and I’ll show you some glamour.”

  I’d had enough. My head was throbbing and the distracted pain had returned like a freight train. I turned to leave, praying I wouldn’t find myself begging that thing to let me go.

  “Not so fast.” She materialized in front of me and blocked my exit. “You leave when I say so.” She circled me, mumbling unintelligible sounds in a language I didn’t recognize. The exposed skin on her face and hands began to flash with something shimmery and exquisitely beautiful. I could feel something spinning around her, the force barely grazing the edge of my skin. I was sure it would suck me in if she came any closer or expanded its circumference. As quickly as it started, it reversed direction, sending her ragged clothes flying away in a centrifugal spin. What remained was a thin veil draped against her naked torso. She took a deep breath and exhaled a colorful wave of something that looked like a metallic rainbow, the force sending it whirling in a controlled tornado. As the rainbow spun and layered images of light around her, she became a living hologram.

  The beauty of it left me breathless and wanting more. I wanted to feel the other side of that rainbow storm, be in the eye of it. I reached out my hand, hoping she wouldn’t stop me from breaching the orbiting particles of light. The speed picked up again with a violent gust and lifted her one remaining piece of clothing—the dirty beanie hat on the top of her head. I couldn’t silence my gasp when I got a look at what was underneath. From under the hat fell a mane of golden waves, and protruding out from each side, a pair of long pointed ears.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” The voice came from a giant oak tree.

  I looked up at the massive limb that hung just above my head. A figure leaned precariously against the thick trunk, like he was born to lounge in a tree.

  “Constantine?”

  “My initial instinct was to swoop down and snatch you away from that Ljósálfar,” he said, “but my good sense told me to let the lesson be learned. But I couldn’t do it. You’re much too special to ruin, Alex.”

  “A what?”

  “Elf,” he clarified.

  “No way.”

  “Waaay.”

  “Who would have thought,” I murmured.

  “When one plays with fire, Alex, one gets burned. When one plays with treacherous elves, one gets…”

  He slipped from the branch, and his long coat fluttered up like a set of black wings as he descended a good fifteen feet to the ground. His eyes ran from my head to my toes and then back up again.

  “She’s a light one, but a pissed off light elf can be just as dangerous as a complacent dark one.” He glanced at the woman who was no longer sparkling with the glow of a technicolor rainbow. “Unpredictable, those are.”

  “Always nice to see you, too.” Her lips stretched tightly as she forced an exaggerated grin. “Lecherous, inferior satyr.”

  I was so happy to see him I didn’t bother to ask how he’d made it down from that tree without breaking at least half a dozen bones. I was learning that these types of questions were pointless. The more important question was how I’d managed to get myself in yet another dangerous predicament, and how he knew where to find me while Greer apparently did not.

  “How did you know where I was?”

  “I didn’t.” His brow arched. “You must understand, Alex. This is my domain.” He stood taller and adjusted his black turtleneck and the long coat disturbed from the fall. “I’m the King of Central Park. I could just smell the impropriety.” He glared at the creature with the pointed ears and smirked.

  “One day I will suck you in,” she said, “and then we’ll see just how legendary your stamina really is, satyr.”

  Constantine leered back at her with an equal amount of sly as something ripe salted his expression. “Bring it.” I had a feeling they weren’t discussing his ability to stand up to a marathon. Then again, maybe they were.

  I blinked, and she was gone. The only trace of her was the bag on the park bench.

  Constantine slowly turned his head toward me, the motion reminding me of a praying mantis pivoting its head in the direction of an unfortunate meal. “Never touch the shield of an elf,” he warned. “Ever.”

  He looked at me with an invisible question mark hovering over his head. “Where have you been for the past three days? You’re cut, and you’re bruised.” The sharpness of the declaration suggested that this might be news to me.

  Actually, it was. I felt the raised contusions above my eye and on the side of my temple. I winced as I pressed against them, but it was the pain from my leg that drew my attention away from my face. I nearly choked when I spotted the blood caked down the side of my knee.

  When I looked back up, his breath had accelerated and his eyes were filled with rage. “Did Arthur Richmond do this to you?”

  That was all it took. Images of something dark flashed through my mind the second the name escaped his lips. Like Pavlov’s dog, Constantine had triggered some stimulus in me that instantly made it almost impossible to breathe. Something buried was trying to surface and erupt from where I’d neatly tucked it away.

  “Alex, tell me what you see.”

  I slipped deeper into my memories, unearthing a sort of kaleidoscope of scenes containing one incoherent image after the other. Nothing fit. Not one image stood on its own to form any kind of useful memory. I could still hear Constantine demanding that I tell him everything, but his voice was much quieter now, like he was speaking to me from the other side of the moon.

  “It’s okay,” I heard myself say. “I’ll get back to you soon.”

  “Alex, I insist that you come back from wherever you’ve gone to and tell me what the hell happened to you!”

  I growled. At least I think it was me. I had the insatiable urge to show him that insisting on anything from me was a very bad idea. I was such a nice girl, so why did I have such an aggressive urge to knock the teeth right out of his demanding, egotistical mouth?

  “Back off!” I barked with my teeth clenched like a starving dog protecting a scrap of food.

  He must have taken my threat seriously, because I didn’t hear anything from him after that. I spent the next few minutes trying to recall the events over the past few days, shuffling the pieces around like a jigsaw puzzle, hoping to make some sense of the fragments. Boots and guns, those images were prominent. But in what context? And what asshole used my face as his personal punching bag? In that moment, I made a vow to myself to kill the bastard when I found him.

  Kill? Did I really just think that? What scared me most was that I believed I could actually do it.

  “Alex?”

  “What!” My head whipped around.

  “Your eyes,” he whispered.

  I stopped and looked at my surroundings for the first time since my mind wandered off. The sky was dark, and the city lights reflected down on the park.

  “How long?” I asked in a voice so quiet I wasn’t sure if I’d actually articulated the words.

  His head lowered as his eyes concentrated on mine. “Eleven hours. You’ve been standing there, unresponsive, for eleven hours.”

  Constantine stood in front of me as a blazing glow of brilliant blue light illuminated his tall frame, the blue turning his black hair into a shiny mass of gunmetal mercury.

  “Where is that light coming from?”

  “Your eyes, Alex. The light is coming from you.”

  I looked into his dark, shiny eyes and saw my reflection. Blue fire.

  I hadn’t noticed his smell before. He smelled of pine needles laced with musk. A hint of lavender cut through the scent, toning down the testosterone just enough to make him even more interesting. Maybe it was because he always had such a visual hold on me, or maybe it was because I’d never been
this close to him. Underneath all the arrogance and eroticism, I could feel a heartbeat. Just like every other living creature, Constantine had a heartbeat.

  Each long stride took us closer to the entrance of Crusades, and I wondered how much of a ruckus we would cause when those doors flew open and Constantine carried me through the crowd. Would Greer be furious about the disruption of his nightly business, or would he be ecstatic that his prized possession had been returned, slightly damaged but still alive?

  I was still breathing, but I found a quiet place inside myself where I could watch and dream of places where no one was trying to kill me. No one controlled this place but me. I could even shut it all down at the drop of a thought and recess deeper into my new world, shutting out the voices and the faces unless I chose to let them in.

  Neither my lips nor my vocal cords would move. My limbs cooperated, but only enough to obey the barest commands. I was suffering from some sort of mononucleosis that stripped me of my body but left my mind wide open to experience whatever I chose to feel. I just wanted to sleep and dream. That’s where I learned things. That’s where I finally got answers without having to ask the questions.

  Constantine kicked the door open with a force that made a statement. Come get her, it said. His chest moved erratically against my limp body as we walked inside the club, perhaps in anticipation of the battle that would undoubtedly take place once Greer got a look at the spectacle. The place was empty. Thank goodness for small miracles, or maybe it was just Sunday.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Thomas standing near the bar. The bottle in his hand slipped and fell to the floor without breaking, rolling a few feet away.

  “Boss,” he called in a low even voice.

  Greer appeared at the bottom of the stairs, with his fists pumping at his side and his face seething with something between rage and gratitude.

  I waited for the battle to begin and hoped they’d have the decency to place me out of range before delivering the first blows. Greer covered the distance between us in three long strides. His eyes never left Constantine’s as he held his arms out. The two of them stood face to face, carrying on a silent conversation before striking some sort of accord. Constantine delivered me into Greer’s arms in a single smooth glide, the exchange never once erupting into anything hotter than the heat radiating off of the two massive bodies I was now sandwiched between. It was the safest place on the planet.