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

by Thea Atkinson

  I wanted to know if there was a chance someone—likely, Scottie's minion—was still inside waiting for me.

  He winked at me, buying into the conspiracy. "No way," he waved the screwdriver the way a fencer might. "I ran him off toot sweet." He gave a meaningful look toward the neighbor holding the burning shears. "He probably found some other place to hole up."

  Relieved, I thanked him and went inside. I couldn't wait to peel the hot pants and Dom boots off. Scottie's minion might be gone for spell, but he'd be back. He might even still be lurking around somewhere unseen, but as long as Mr. Smith was out there he wouldn't risk being noticed again. The next time came, he'd be sure to do so under the cloak of night.

  That left plenty of time to for my mind to skip track into a groove more useful than fretting. Fretting got a gal nowhere. I needed to unload the tile like yesterday if I wanted to get clear of Scottie post haste. And I was sure it needed unloading...and that it would collect a fair amount of cash.

  If I'd doubted it, Errol's reaction to it, sealed my thought.

  I did have one other lead I might be able to use to unload the goods. Kassie. She was a young runaway. Maybe no more than twelve at best, and I tried to give her as much business as I could to help sustain her on the streets. It was my way of keeping her safe in the face of the awful conditions that the street could force a girl to endure.

  I wasn't foolish enough to report her so she could find her family again. She didn't want her family to find her. Whatever she'd run from, she thought it best to be an anonymous tooth in in a very large gear. Much like I had.

  Besides, she always gave me good Intel. I wasn't sure where she got it from, who or what she had to endure to get it, but it was always useful.

  I had already decided to give her a call when I opened the door to my apartment and was struck by the undeniable stink of rotten eggs. I gasped and held my breath. It wasn't like me to forget something like a pilot light or to leave the gas blazing.

  One more bit of evidence that I wasn't myself lately.

  I ran to the windows to lift them open. Curtains billowed in and sucked back out as the breeze wafted in. A horn blared from somewhere outside. I ran to the stove. The pilot light was fine. In fact, everything was fine. Nothing was out of place.

  Then I saw my cat.

  She perched atop the fridge in a tight ball of hissing fury. She looked odd, and not just because she looked terrified of me. Something was wrong with her coat.

  I edged closer.

  "It's okay, cat," I whispered. "It's alright." I held my hands out for her to see, slowing inching up to her.

  I didn't have to get close enough to pick her up to see parts of her fur were burned down to the mottled brown skin.

  Or that the shapes of those scorch marks looked exactly like human hand prints.

  CHAPTER 12

  MY HACKLES ROSE ON the back of my neck. What if the person was still here, quietly assessing me, ready to launch with deadly intent or bolt out the door? What if Mr. Smith had been wrong?

  I froze in my spot, straining my hearing to pick up any noise of the apartment. Nothing met my ears but my own breath. I inhaled deeply and silently. No aftershave. No perfume. No smell of soap or cigarettes.

  I glanced at the cat from the corner of my eye. She watched me back, blinking balefully. No agitation except when I reached for her.

  If the cat had decided the coast was clear enough to glare at me rather than cower from an intruder, then I'd take the evidence of her senses over mine. I relaxed.

  She did too, and I figured it was me who was agitating her. I took another step backward to give her space. She folded her feet beneath her chest and settled into a ball where she could watch me from those slitted yellow eyes.

  I was in the clear, it seemed. For now. No one else was in the apartment, I was sure. And now that I could relax and let my other senses kick in, the ones that made me good at what I did, I could assess the circumstances.

  I would've expected things to be upended, drawers open, things broken the way unskilled thieves did things. This invasion was nothing like that. Everything was as neat and tidy as when I'd left it. Granted, there was the trail of clothes I'd left the night before, the usual pair of socks hanging from the side of my sofa, and the occasional toast crust sitting cold in the middle of the plate, but those were things I'd left. Those were things I was used to seeing. Whoever had come into my apartment, had left no scent, no mark of having been in there at all.

  Nothing was out of place except the cat. She hissed at me from the top of the fridge when I tried to pluck her down from her perch and assess the damage. One swipe at me with claws extended, and I backed off, hands held aloft so she could see them. She could be a handful when she wanted to be.

  "Okay, Miss Hiss," I said. "I get it. Leave you the Hell alone."

  I tried to eyeball her skin from where I stood to see if there were burn marks beneath that scorched fur. Was that a blister I saw bubbling up on her back or just a dollop of olive oil from the decanter she'd knocked over? I used the distraction of righting the bottle with one hand to touch down on her back with my opposite one. She squalled at me and leapt straight from the fridge to the counter top like I'd cattle-prodded her.

  Not injured then. Just incredibly pissed off.

  I crept around the apartment, looking for clues that something had gone missing. Checked my usual hiding spaces. Everything was intact and in its usual spots—even the bug out bag hidden in the ceiling tiles.

  I couldn't exactly call the cops to report a break-in. I couldn't really complain to Mr. Smith either. What would he do? Change a lock? I knew enough not to put stake in that kind of 'protection'.

  Besides: I knew the signs. Whoever did this was looking for something specific. I got the feeling they had not rifled through my things at all. And whoever had left the marks on my cat had done so intentionally. They wanted me to know they had been there. They wanted me to know and be afraid.

  That sounded a lot like Scottie. Part of Scottie's modus operandi was fear, and it worked well for him. I knew the way he worked. I knew how his workhorses did their deeds. It was never in secret. What they did, they wanted the intended to know about it.

  But Scottie's workhorses weren't exactly the subtle type. I doubt it was them. But the problem with that was if it wasn't them, who was it? And how they had managed to burn such a perfect pattern into my cat's fur.

  And following up on all of that awfulness, exactly what kind of message were they trying to send?

  They wanted me to know they had been here, that was clear. If they wanted something, they hadn't searched my apartment for it. That meant they must have thought it was in my possession. Not squirreled away somewhere in a drawer.

  "The tile," I said more to myself than the cat. Only a couple of people knew I had it and only a couple of people saw it at all, but only one of them wanted it bad enough to try to sidetrack me in his back room while he stole the thing right from under my nose.

  So it was valuable. Very valuable. I stuck my hand in my pocket to wrap my fingers around the tile, still strangely warm in my palm. Rather than feeling angry or afraid at being left unguarded, I felt giddy.

  The question was, just how valuable? Was it valuable enough to reach out for Intel? And who would be the best person to do that? Who had the best network available without me having to come out in the open?

  "Kassie," I said, pulling out my burner cell phone and shooting off a text. For whatever spider's web I had been able to create in my three years here, she had managed to make several of them. No doubt she had cobwebs of connections lingering in the dustiest, dirtiest of places.

  I supplied a burner phone to several of my contacts each month and I knew there were still three days left before the time on hers ran out. I snapped a pic of the tile and sent that along for good measure.

  She answered me back in moments. I wrote that I would meet her in the usual place and then I went straight to my closet and pulled off
the offensive Dom costume and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. I pulled a cap down over my hair, tucking up the curliest bits at the temples and the longest bits into a ponytail that I pulled through the opening of the back. Sunglasses. Sneakers.

  Next, I grabbed my bug-out bag full of wigs, cash, and a bunch of granola bars and fake IDs. I wouldn't be coming back to the apartment for a long time, not until I figured the rest of this out. The apartment was to be considered compromised until then.

  I endured several scratches from the cat, but I eventually shoved her down into the bug-out bag as well and zippered her in, leaving a small enough hole in the top that she could poke her head out for air when she needed to. She growled at me from inside but didn't poke her head out. I imagined her all balled up in there, waiting to dig into any finger that reached in.

  I met Kassie behind the upscale sushi joint three blocks away. I always hoped she'd go in after I paid her and ask for a round of fresh California rolls. I worried she didn't eat enough. She was so damn skinny.

  "Your purse is meowing," she said, but there was no look of interest in her expression. Mostly, she just stood very still, as though the act of moving was painful.

  It had taken me all of three years to get the girl to give me more than two extra words at a stretch so I was surprised enough to answer her.

  "My cat's in there."

  She stared mutely at me, and I had the sense she was thinking I was an animal torturer or something.

  "She needed the air," I said. "It's not good to coop things up too long in a stuffy apartment."

  Kassie ran fingers through her crop of orphan Annie curls as she considered that information. She blinked at me but didn't move until I pulled at the zipper to see if the cat would poke her head out to prove she was just fine. True to form a double-paw shot out and scratched me. I yelped and pulled my hand back, sticking the wound in my mouth.

  "Damn thing," I said.

  Kassie snuck closer, leaning down to peer into the gap in the zipper. I thought I saw a hint of a smile.

  "It needs a name," she said.

  "She'll get one when she learns to behave," I said. "So. Did you get my text?"

  She blinked several times at the question and then rolled her shoulders the way a fighter might before facing an opponent. She looked over her shoulder. I knew she hated coming out in public at all, even if it was the back of the sushi place. The location was very close to a busy street and she was antsy, skipping from one foot to the other as she watched me. I thought I heard her counting beneath her breath.

  I placed the bug-out bag on the cobblestones between us. She nudged it with her toe, straightening it out so it was parallel to the building.

  For a punk kid, she had her fingers in a lot of pies. A lot of connections. I might have pitied her if she was pitiful at all. She was a tough little thing and was always discreet. My entire enterprise depended on discretion when I couldn't do things for myself. And I trusted Kassie. Enough to go out on a limb and push her further than seemed normal, even for her.

  "You got the picture, then?" I said.

  She made a sound that might have indicated she agreed, but I never knew what those noises meant. She rarely said much that wasn't a straight answer to a probing question or to detail her Intel. I waited to see if she would name a price for the Intel. I hated to start off the bargaining.

  I knew she didn't have the same aversion. She'd give me a price that was way too high and I'd give her a hundred bucks. She never refused it. Sometimes I suspected if I tried to give her anything other than the hundred, she'd run shrieking down the alley way in panic.

  "What do you think of the tile?"

  She shrugged, again nudging the bag with her toe.

  "Throw it in the trash," she said.

  "You mean it's worthless?"

  I didn't think so, and I didn't think Kassie did either. I waited patiently but it took a long time before she spoke again.

  "You don't want it," she said.

  I jammed my hands into the pockets of my jeans to keep from giving anything away in my body language.

  "I sure as hell don't want it," I said. "But if it's valuable, then I need it, or at least I need the money you can bring me if it's worth it. I've got people on my tail. I need to know if it will pay my way out."

  It wasn't fair to press so, to even bring up the question of my own safety in light of her own tenuous lifestyle. And especially when she seemed so reticent, but I couldn't afford to think about her sensibilities. Not with Scottie breathing down my neck.

  "My life might even depend on it," I said.

  She met my eye for a long moment before she dropped it again to the bug-out bag.

  "I won't help you," she said.

  I listened carefully with my eyes as well as my ears. It was often the things Kassie didn't say that were the most valuable. For example, I noted she said wouldn't help me not couldn't. She wouldn't look me in the eye, either. Not particularly strange for her, except she wouldn't look at the tile in my hand.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Just get rid of it."

  I stepped closer, fully expecting her to bolt. When she didn't, I pressed on.

  "You can come with me," I said. "If you're scared. If it can pay for the both of us, I'll take you with me."

  She gave me a strange look, one of disbelief and surprise, but not one of hope like I expected. Instead of taking me up on the offer, she sighed and kicked the bag. The cat inside yowled.

  "I know a guy."

  "Someone who will buy it," I said, pushing aside my discomfort at her ignoring my offer and grounding myself in the reason I was there in the first place. "It has to be someone who will buy it, or someone who has a connection who will buy it."

  I hoped it was the first one. I didn't want to add too many links to the chain.

  "He's got no scruples," she said. "Dangerous. But he'll probably buy it. Probably the only one who will."

  It was more words added up in one moment than in a full year of dealing with her. I had to fight the urge to hug her.

  "Thanks," I said simply. I pulled out a one hundred dollar bill from the bug out bag and passed it over. She took it without touching my fingers and shoved it in her shoe.

  "So where is this guy?" I said. "I'll give you ten percent of the cut and take all of the risks. You don't have to worry about getting caught in the middle."

  "Show me," she said.

  "Show you?" I crinkled my forehead in confusion. "You mean the tile?"

  She nodded. "If I send you to him, I need to see it."

  "What does it matter?"

  She shrugged. "Is it real?"

  "Real compared to..." I let my thought trail off because, as usual, she was confusing me. "I showed you the picture," I said. "It's real enough."

  She pursed her lips as though she thought I was being dense. Maybe I was.

  "Authentic," she said. "He'll know. He knows stuff."

  "What kind of stuff?" I wasn't sure why she stressed the word so strangely. "Is he mafia? Yakuza?" I would have to stay clear of this contact if that was the case. No sense getting my little panties wadded up again with that pile of dirty laundry.

  She gave me a peculiar cant to her head that made me think she was trying to decide something about me.

  "I can take care of myself," I said, not wanting her to feel responsible for the information.

  She grunted with one of those inscrutable noises again.

  I reached for the tile from my pocket and she edged expertly sideways the way a practiced germaphobe might.

  I held my hand up, tile facing out at her from my palm. She was particularly skittish for a kid that rarely reacted.

  "I just need to know if he can move this for me and if I can trust him," I said. "That's all."

  "He can," she said. A certainty to her tone.

  "So. A name. Description? A way to contact him."

  "Someone like you doesn't contact him."

  "Someone like me?" I said.
<
br />   "Yes," she said. Very formal.

  I told myself she no doubt needed to keep some things to herself if she was going to keep on eating.

  "Okay," I agreed. "No problem. So you set it up."

  She gave me a curt nod. "Fayed's bar. Night fall. His sort hangs out there."

  His sort. I tried not to feel anxious about that. Not just for myself but for the girl who might know that 'sort'.

  "A name?" There. I did a good job of not letting the concern show in my voice.

  She sighed. "Maddox."

  The tile fell free of my hand with a clatter to the sidewalk at the name. I remembered the way Errol had quailed at sight of the Maddox I'd already met. It was an unusual name, certainly not one a gal ran into often.

  I told myself it might not be the same guy even as the dread clogged up my throat. With the way my luck was running, there was no doubt about who it would be.

  I leaned to pick up the tile because it gave me a moment to recover and to phrase a question just the right way to the girl. Like, what the heck was she doing connecting herself to a man like that. My fingers closed around the tile and I yanked my hand back when it burned my fingers.

  "This damn thing keeps burning me," I said to her.

  I craned upwards but she had already melted away into the buildings or alleyways. One moment she was giving me that baleful, non-affected stare, and the next she just disappeared. I hoped she went into the sushi joint, but I imagined she wouldn't stick around any longer than she needed to. I was never sure where the girl came from or went to.

  I yanked my sleeves down over my hand and leaned down to work the tile off the sidewalk and into my pocket. I gave it a pat from the outside of my jacket. Still warm. In fact, my entire waist grew warm beneath its heat.

  Stranger still, my wrist, where that strange little henna mark sat, burned. I eyed the sidewalk where the tile had landed, bewildered and sure I could figure out what the root cause was of the heat.

  Pushing the improbable into the realm of impossible, there on the pavement was an exact stamp of the marking from the tile.