Academy of the Fateful (Cursed Studies Book 3)

by Eva Chase

  Or he had something in there that was so special it justified the lengths he’d gone to.

  A prickle of apprehension quivered down my spine. You know the feeling when you realize that the thing you’re in the middle of doing might actually be a horrible idea—but you’re so committed already that stopping would feel even worse? Yeah. I lived there so often I might as well have made it my permanent address.

  Which meant I shrugged off the uneasiness and reached into the cloth bag hanging from my belt. I had ways of defeating even a ridiculous lock like this, and I wasn’t going to let some wannabe master of the macabre get the better of me. Once I set out on a mission, I saw it through. And so far I always had seen them through, no matter how tricky the situation got.

  I broke a pea-sized bead off my lump of explosive putty and poked it into the deepest cranny in the center of the mechanism. “Beating you with some goo, eat your fill,” I sang at a whisper to the tune of Duran Duran’s “A View to a Kill.” Mangling ‘80s song lyrics always put me in a better mood.

  Hey, everyone needs a hobby.

  Bracing myself, I aimed my lighter at the cranny and flicked on the flame. The putty burst with a crackle and a puff of smoke—and the tinkle of several antique fittings shattering apart. I held myself totally still for several seconds, my ears pricked for any indication that someone in the house had noticed the sound, but the hall stayed silent.

  When I pressed on the handle, the lock creaked, balked, and then crunched with a harder jerk. At my push, the door swung open.

  Holy mother of mackerels, this was a collection room all right. I’d seen a lot of them, but even so, I couldn’t help gaping.

  The “room” looked as if it had actually been three or four rooms with the walls taken down between them, stretching like some grand ballroom into the distance. Built-in wooden shelves stuffed with books, trinkets, and other objects lined the walls on either side of me from floor to vaulted ceiling. In front of those shelves at regular intervals, globe-like lights beamed down into glinting cages not so different from those you’d expect to house birds. Their vertical bars rose into domed tops, and their bases ranged from the size of my palm to the length of my arm.

  I counted at least a dozen of them spread out down the vast space. It was rare to come across a collector who’d managed to get his hands on more than a few shadow creatures. This dude had been busy.

  I tore my gaze away from the cages to skim the wall and note the thick velvet curtains that covered the room’s narrow windows in the few gaps between the shelves. There were my possible escape routes.

  Another, more massive velvet curtain hung across the entire width of the room at the far end. What in Pete’s name lay past that?

  A reddish blotch caught my eye in the middle of the blue-and-gold patterned rug. That maroon shade verging on brown—it was a bloodstain. One so big I could have lain down on it and not covered the whole thing.

  A fresh twinge of nerves shot through my gut. It wasn’t at all unusual for collectors to experiment with all kinds of supposed supernatural rituals, including blood-based spells, but this guy appeared to have gone all out and not made any attempt to clean up afterward. He’d left the evidence on display as if it were a valuable part of the exhibit.

  There was creepy, and then there was “here’s a fellow who might very well enjoy wearing other people’s skin as a three-piece suit.”

  Before I returned my attention to the cages, I took a few moments to browse the shelves and pocket artifacts from the dude’s non-living collection—whatever looked both valuable and not so distinctive it’d be easily recognized when I sold it on the black market. I settled on a gold bangle, a large ruby set in ebony, and a handful of antique coins.

  That should cover at least a few month’s room and board while I figured out my next heist. A gal’s got to pay the rent somehow. It seemed fitting that the collectors indirectly funded my efforts to shut them down. Call me the Robin Hood of monster emancipation.

  Because that was what lurked in those cages under their spotlights. At least, the collectors called them monsters. And to be fair, for the most part the creatures that slunk through rifts from the shadow realm into our mortal one did fit the standard criteria.

  Those of us who both knew of the creatures’ existence—and had bothered to speak at any length with the ones capable of talking—chose our terminology with a little more respect. “Shadowkind” came in all shapes, sizes, and inclinations, and most of them were a heck of a lot less monstrous than the worst human beings I’d tangled with.

  It was difficult to tell what exactly this guy had caged in his extensive menagerie. Shadowkind could literally meld into our world’s shadows and travel through them, hence the name, but they had to be able to reach those shadows first. The spotlights were positioned to fill each entire cage and the space beyond the bars with light, preventing that sort of escape.

  Distressed by their incarceration and that constant glaring light, the creatures shrank in on themselves. I could only make out a blurred, flickering smudge of darkness in each: a glimpse of spines here, a flash of fangs there. When the collectors wanted to gloat over their prizes, they dimmed the lights just enough to coax their captives into showing themselves more clearly without allowing any full shadows to fall into range.

  Silver and iron twined together to form the cages’ bars and base—true to mythology, most otherworldly beings recoiled from one or both metals to some degree. Most creatures of this size weren’t strong enough to leap into the shadows through the narrow spaces between those bars even if they’d had shadows to travel through. That meant freeing them was a multi-stage process.

  I started with the nearest cage, drawing a dense black cloth from the larger bag on my belt and wrapping it around the light to blot out the illumination completely. Breaking the thing obviously would have done the trick faster, but even the lovers of antiquities often resorted to higher levels of tech when it came to ensuring their most valuable possessions didn’t escape. Chances were high an alarm would go off if the flow of electricity were interrupted.

  The same possibility existed for the cage doors. Instead of messing with the lock, I unhooked the juiced-up knife I kept at my hip, hit the button to flood the blade with heat, and applied it to the bars on the side.

  The titanium tool had been enhanced not just by black-market skills but a sorcerer’s supernatural efforts as well. Its blazing edge sliced through five of the bars in less than a minute. They bowed upward at a push with the flat of the blade.

  The second I’d lowered the scorch-knife, the creature inside sprang through the gap. I got a clear look at it in that instant—a ball of raggedy gray fur from which six spindly legs and two bat-like wings protruded, a glitter of yellow eyes—and then it flitted off into the thicker shadows to enjoy its freedom far from here.

  With a roll of my shoulders to loosen them up, I let out my breath. One down, a hell of a lot more to go.

  Using the same technique, I made my way down the room one cage at a time. It was only when I’d hacked through what turned out to be the thirteenth—what a fitting number—that I glanced up and realized I’d come to the end of the line. Well, almost. I’d reached that vast curtain.

  Bracing myself, I nudged one edge of it aside—and froze. More spotlights gleamed off more silver-and-iron bars ahead of me, but the three cages that awaited me there… I’d never seen anything quite like them. Set back at the far end of the room, a good fifteen feet from where I was now standing, they loomed almost as high as the ceiling and wide enough that I couldn’t have reached from one side to the other with my arms straight out.

  My breath stayed locked in my lungs as I slipped past the curtain and walked toward them. What was this dude keeping in there? It’d have been hard enough keeping his collection of thirteen minor “monsters” properly fed and exercised so they didn’t totally dwindle away. Any creatures big enough to require cages like these—they could have gobbled him up the second he made
a wrong move, if they were so inclined. And it wouldn’t take very long shut up in a cage to so incline them.

  I’d already thought he was over-ambitious and possibly insane. Now I’d have to go with completely cuckoo, and not just for Cocoa Puffs.

  As with the smaller shadowkind, the beings in the huge cages had contracted into blurry dark forms. I couldn’t tell whether the cages’ height was overkill or if all three were simply hunched down in that space, but they all looked like big balls of, well, shadow condensed in the lower third of the space. The ball on the left was about twice the width of the one in the middle, the one on the right somewhere in between. I caught a flicker of pale hair, a glimmer of neon-green eyes—

  My foot landed on the smaller rug between me and the cages, and an electronic shriek pierced both my eardrums.

  Shit! I scrambled back so quickly I could have given a professional tap dancer a run for their money, but the alarm continued blaring through the room and no doubt the whole of the mansion. A pressure sensor under the rug must have triggered it. I hadn’t even thought—I probably should have considering the maniac I was obviously dealing with here—

  No time to curse him out. No time to do anything except the bare minimum I’d come for. Whatever the hell was in those cages, they deserved their freedom just as much as the smaller beings I’d released did.

  With the alarm already shrieking around me, I could throw caution to the wind. I sprinted to the first cage, chopped at the lock itself with my scorch-knife, and managed to sever it with several sawing motions. At my yank, that door flew open. To ease the captive’s escape, I hurled my blackout cloth at the lamp overhead. It covered the light for only a moment before it slipped back down for me to catch it, but in that moment a presence hurtled past me so large and so close the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

  No time to make any formal introductions. I dashed to the second cage, sliced through that lock a little faster than the first, flung my cloth, and raced to the third without stopping for a “How do you do?” No sounds of approaching doom reached my ears through the wail of the alarm, but it was practically deafening me, so that wasn’t much comfort. It wasn’t a question of whether the master of the house was charging toward the room, only how quickly he could get here—and how lethal the reinforcements he’d bring would be.

  As I snatched back my blackout cloth for the third time, I was already digging my final gambit out of my bag. With a pop of the bottle’s lid, I tossed a splash of kerosene across the traitorous rug. Then I whipped the flame of my lighter at it.

  The damp patch caught fire with a whoosh of heat. I glanced around one last time to make sure no living things were left in the place—I hoped my signature farewell would destroy as much of his inanimate collection as possible, considering the uses he’d put it to—and realized that in my rush I’d nearly cut off my route to the nearest window.

  Heat licked my face. I dodged to the side as the fire shot up higher. Smoke seared down my throat, and my pulse thrummed through my body with its own inner burn of adrenaline. If the flames would be kind enough to travel more to the right than to the left, attack those rows of books before it snatched at the window curtains…

  Luck was on my side. The thought had barely crossed my mind when the flames flared with sharper intensity toward the bookshelves at the opposite side of the room, giving me a smidge of an opening. A shiver passed through my nerves at just how convenient that was, but who was I to argue? I dove around the growing wave of fire and whipped the curtain aside.

  Without needing to think, my grappling hook was in my hand. I slammed it into the pane, and the glass burst with a rain of shards onto the patio below. As I leapt onto the ledge, I was already sighting the utility pole just beyond the nearest wall of the backyard. One swing of my arm sent the hook soaring to latch onto the fixture at the top of the pole.

  A shout of rage reverberated through the room behind me. Adios, asshole. With my hands tight around the rope, I launched myself out into the much more temperate night air.

  I aimed myself at the perfect angle to catch hold of one of the metal bars protruding farther down the utility pole. Piece of cake. A flick of my wrist detached the grappling hook overhead. I clicked it onto the back of my belt, dropped down onto the sidewalk, and vanished into the shadows as completely as the creatures I’d come to save had, all ties to the place behind me severed.

  At least, that was how it’d always worked before.

  Despite the weirdness I’d encountered on the mission, everything about my escape appeared to go perfectly smoothly. I arrived back at my apartment in the wee hours of the morning, showered the smoke stink out of my hair, and curled up in bed. When I woke up, the sun was beaming outside, the birds were chirping, and I had new treasures to sell sitting on my desk.

  I poked at them, grinning at the thought of the cash they’d bring in and the collector who’d now hopefully be agonizing at least as much over his loss as his captives had in their cages, and headed down the hall to grab some breakfast singing, “How wrong, how wrong was that dinged-up dong. How wrong, how—”

  My voice jarred in my throat. I jerked to a halt a few steps from my kitchen, which was currently inhabited by three inexcusably stunning—and unfamiliar—men.

  Who are these gorgeous men, and what do they want with Sorsha? Find out in Shadow Thief - Grab your copy now!

  About the Author

  Eva Chase lives in Canada with her family. She loves stories both swoony and supernatural, and strong women and the men who appreciate them. Along with the Cursed Studies trilogy, she is the author of the Royals of Villain Academy series, the Moriarty’s Men series, the Looking Glass Curse trilogy, the Their Dark Valkyrie series, the Witch’s Consorts series, the Dragon Shifter’s Mates series, the Demons of Fame Romance series, the Legends Reborn trilogy, and the Alpha Project Psychic Romance series.

  Connect with Eva online:

  www.evachase.com

  eva@evachase.com