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

by Thea Atkinson

  No harm would come to me. I inhaled slowly. It was ridiculous to believe Fayed's words could give me the courage to swing around on the stool and face the man I knew waited behind me, but it did. Fayed didn't seem the type to deliver warnings like that.

  I spun so fast I was surprised to see him as close as he was, and was dizzy for a second as I tried to let the blur of him come back into focus.

  There Maddox stood, all six foot eight of him. Closer than I expected. I should have felt him long before this if he was that close. Smelled him even, but I hadn't. Chalk one up to my fear factor, losing track of the basest things.

  He wasn't wearing the man bun he'd wound into his hair the first time I'd seen him. Electing instead to wear his russet hair down around his ears. In this light, admittedly neon-sign lit with a taste of shadow from the darkness of the room, his hair reminded me of a fox's. It spiraled in loose waves that some men might call effeminate but most women would die to twirl their fingers in.

  I swallowed down an unexpected clump of lust. It was just nerves and the giddiness of dodging Scottie and his henchman, best I remember that.

  I noticed that the men at the door had vacated their spots beside the exit and retreated to the shadows, leaving Maddox with nothing behind him but a gaping door and several upturned chairs.

  I didn't want to think about the kind of man who could make hardened criminals like the ones I knew frequented the bar turn their chairs over in their haste to make a wide berth of him.

  Fayed's warning echoed in the back of my mind as I extended my hand for an introductory handshake.

  "Ms. Foster," I said, deciding to use my alias rather than my real name.

  I didn't use multiple personas like some thieves and cons. Far too easy for a girl to forget herself. I relied on my careful networking to keep me invisible. My real name was one most people didn't know, and I'd used my alias so often it came easily enough from my lips to sound genuine. It was a recent thing that it didn't also bring to mind the foster homes I'd languished in, so I used it often in place of my true surname.

  "Isabella," I tacked on.

  He looked at my hand held out in the air, a slight quiver making it shake, and when he didn't take it, I pulled it back against my side and shoved it into my pocket. I wanted to call him an arrogant prick, but I remembered how badly I needed that money.

  "You have something for me?" he said.

  "Maybe," I said, trying not to sound surly in the face of his rudeness. I couldn't help thinking that he had seemed a lot more interested back at Errol's shop. But then I had been dressed as a dominatrix with a blonde wig. Now I was just me. The ball cap I imagined interested him far less than the blonde tresses. No doubt he had no idea I was the same woman and had already decided I wasn't worth his trouble.

  "I don't have a lot of time for coyness," he said and laid a hand along the surface of the bar. He tapped it twice, obviously trying to get Fayed's attention. He needn't have bothered. I could tell Fayed was watching the exchange keenly. "I have things to do."

  "So don't we all," I said and met his gaze with more courage than I felt. "You think you're the only one who is busy?"

  His gaze took in the ball cap, and the way my hair had escaped its confines along the temples and lay plastered against my face by sweat. I would have given anything in that moment to yank out my blonde wig and shove it on my head and remind him that he had once tried very hard not to look at me.

  I felt exposed. I wished I had just said that homeless guy here for me to do this part. He would have been easy to find, and I might even have been able to give Scottie the slip without feeling as though my lungs were on fire from running. It was ridiculous of me to take this sort of risk. Even wearing a cap and jeans, I was too easily be recognized. But then Scottie did that sort of thing to me. He took my last nerve and ran a cheese grater over it.

  No doubt I was off my game, and it would be foolish to try to make a deal when I wasn't in my right mind set. Desperation almost always ended up in stupidity.

  "Well," he said when I didn't answer. "What do you have?"

  I hesitated. Was I being desperate? I didn't even know what I had, how did I know how valuable it was?

  He rolled his eyes in the direction of the ceiling, heaving a sigh at the same time.

  "If Ms. Foster here feels like she needs to be wined and dined then maybe you should get us a couple of glasses," he said to Fayed.

  Fayed turned around and headed for the more expensive bottles toward the left of the bar. I secretly smiled to myself thinking he obviously didn't like this Maddox one bit and planned to make him pay handsomely.

  I was inclined to agree.

  "I'll take the Dom," I said over Maddox's shoulder. I didn't pretend not to see the sly smile Fayed slipped in my direction.

  To his credit, Maddox asked for the same without complaint. Then he turned to me with a smile that looked pasted on. I wondered how gorgeous he would look if he truly smiled with full-blown authenticity. Even his pasted on smile made a girl's heart race.

  "What? Are you going to make me wait all day?" he said. "Are you going to try to pawn off another bag of crap?"

  "What makes you think I have junk?"

  He shrugged. "You didn't have much more than junk for sale at the pawnshop."

  "To be clear," I said. "I was in the pawnshop, but you've got it all wrong. That old guy was selling his own junk. I wanted the ring. That's all."

  "That's how I remember it happening," he said. "But that doesn't mean that's the way it went down."

  "If you thought I was going to pawn off crap, then why are you here?"

  "I am here," he said, "because a mutual acquaintance thought I should meet you. You obviously managed to con her."

  He threw a wad of cash at Fayed and pulled at the two champagne stems, pushing one toward me. He settled onto the stool next to me and it was only then that I caught a fragrance that might have been aftershave. It smelled strongly sexual but I couldn't name it. I edged a little further over on my stool so I could catch a better whiff.

  "So," he said and slid the glass closer to me. "Assuming she wasn't conned, you must have something worthy of my interest."

  I lifted the glass to my lips, peering over the rim at him and pretending to drink. It might have been a mistake, ordering the booze. For some reason, I was already feeling dizzy. I toyed with the stem. He was deliberately trying to sway me, trick me into divulging my goods.

  "Look, I know you've got something," he said over his glass. "Kassie doesn't ever reach out to me, and she certainly doesn't set me up. So whatever you've got, she thinks it's worth my time. I only want the rarest, most unusual of things."

  He took a long drink of his champagne before setting it down purposefully on the bar.

  "Think of me as the godfather of pawn," he said with not one trace of humility. "No one calls me to sell their grandmother's necklace."

  I felt decidedly queasy at the use of the word godfather. Two people had warned me about this guy. I needed to be careful. If he was the godfather of pawn, he'd not stop till I showed him something and I most definitely wasn't going to show him the tile. Not till I sussed him out.

  I kept a rose colored diamond in my bug out bag along with some cash for emergencies. He wouldn't want it, I knew, but it would get more in the way of Intel than just blindly passing off the tile. If the tile turned out to be something connected to a nefarious group like the mafia, then I definitely didn't need that.

  I peered sideways to see Fayed busily scrubbing the bar nearby. Just out of earshot but close enough to intervene if I needed it.

  I shot him an encouraging smile that I didn't feel.

  I pulled my bag from the stool next to mine and slipped my hand in through the hole I'd left in the zipper for the cat. I felt around what I knew were several pairs of panties and a wad of cash. The cat's belly, soft and hot, met my fingers then shrank away. It was right about when I got my fingers deep into the corner of the bag that I noticed tha
t all those burly, nasty looking men previously huddled about pitchers of beer had slowly but decidedly begun herding toward the back exit.

  Strange thing, that. And not at all a good thing.

  Not when a gal was in a bar of derelicts.

  I froze, my fingers touching the diamond finally, and I glanced at Fayed. He was clenching the cloth as it lay on the bar surface. His eyes darted to the space beneath the bar where I knew he kept a gun. The cat hissed from inside the bag and dug into my hand as she tried to scramble out past my wrist.

  I was still jamming her back inside and trying to duck down at the same time when Fayed leapt toward me.

  No harm, he'd said. The words flashed through my mind as I spun stupidly, like a dazed drunk to meet whatever danger he figured was threatening me. I assumed that danger to be Maddox. He wanted what was mine and would take it by force if he had to, just like Scottie had and leave me with nothing.

  But that wasn't it. Not at all. Maddox was turned back to the door, and his expression was shifting from curious interest at what I planned to pull from the bag and realization that something—everything—had changed behind him without him noticing.

  The lag pulled out like taffy, sweet in the way it gave you time to react, but laced with the dread that what it allowed you to see was definitely not good for you.

  That one second that pulled out time into threads of sticky goo revealed a petite woman dressed all in fatigues. She didn't look frightening enough to send a bunch of hardened men running for the exit.

  Yet they ran none the less.

  There was something different looking about her. Something peculiar, as though she didn't belong.

  I was still trying to work out what was wrong with her when Fayed slammed into me over the bar and carried me, stumbling to the floor. It was then that I realized she had lifted her hand, palm facing toward me, and that a ball of purple light had gathered there in her palm.

  It sizzled that light, and in the moment Fayed struck me and knocked me into Maddox, that glow flashed forward and struck the bar where I'd been standing.

  It splintered like a tree trunk and sound rent the air even as my scream died in my ears.

  CHAPTER 15

  ANOTHER BLAST OF LIGHT came hurtling across the bar at me, narrowly missing my temple but only because Fayed pushed me down onto the floor hard enough my teeth rattled when I struck it. The light skidded past me, hopscotching along the floor till it met a patron's foot on the other side of the room. Evidently, he wasn't as fast as Fayed, and he howled in pain.

  He went down hard, grasping for his foot, which by then was nothing but a mangled mess of blood and flesh.

  I caught a whiff of burning hair and skin as the man raked at his pant leg in an effort to cradle his foot. The light was dim enough in the bar that I couldn't make out how much of his foot was ruined in the strike, but I could clearly see his leg was covered in a pelt of hair.

  I thought of dogs and bears as I gawked at it. My mind reeled as it tried to piece together animals and legs and human men, and then it bucked back, resentful and furious when I tried to add a bolt of lightning to the equation that could do that to a man's foot. A bolt of light that had apparently been marshaled from a woman's palm.

  Exactly why that man's foot was so hairy at all, I didn't want to stuff into the complexity of it.

  Fayed grabbed for my hand. His fingers dug into the skin as he yanked me behind an upended table and we fell onto the floor behind it, both panting.

  I felt the hot well of blood, and he sucked in a breath at the same moment I did. I imagined he must have hurt himself, the inhale was so sharp.

  "You need to get out of here," he rasped.

  "What the hell was that?"

  I stole a look sideways at him, hoping he'd have an answer that made sense. His face looked strange, all feral brow and pointy teeth.

  I gaped at him, still trying to process all the discordant images and make sense of them. Fayed didn't look like Fayed anymore. A streak of light had cracked a hole in the bar, and some woman as small as I was had sent an entire room full of hard-core criminal types for the exit.

  I was obviously fear-drunk. Too glutted on my terror to get away from Scottie, the anxiety of meeting someone no one seemed to think was a good idea, and the knowledge that where I'd felt safe really only tolerated me, to really be capable of making judgment calls on what was happening around me.

  No absinthe or booze this time. My senses were simply on hyper overload. Whatever part of my mind delivered reality and sorted out peripheral thoughts had shut down. My brain had started serving me up living nightmares instead.

  I absolutely would not, and could not accept that Fayed now looked like a creature from a cheesy vampire movie.

  I felt stupid and slow with it all. Shock, some still working part of my mind whispered. My body felt icy with it. Even Fayed was cold. He wasn't even breathing.

  The woman bellowed that she wasn't after a drink. That Fayed had better serve up what she wanted or else.

  "Fayed," I tried. I wanted him to help me make sense of all this.

  "Isabella," he barked. "Get the hell out of here. Now."

  The sound of combat boots tapping across the floor echoed against my cheek as I lay there. They paused. Tapped twice in thought.

  Fayed buried his face in my shoulder.

  I tried to move. The silk of Fayed's hair brushed against my cheek.

  "I can't," I whispered into the mass of it. "You're lying on top of me."

  He grunted but he didn't move. I felt him trembling against my body but I didn't think it was from fear. It was something else. Like restraint.

  "Fucking idiots," hissed Maddox. Because I was squashed down beneath Fayed, I had no idea he was with us behind the table, and the sound of his voice startled me.

  "You're going to get yourselves killed," he grumbled.

  The pressure of Fayed's weight eased up a bit, and I realized it was because Maddox had begun to haul on his arm. He gave two rough yanks but Fayed was stuck to me like a bug.

  "Let go of her," Maddox ground out. "You need to relinquish her."

  Relinquish. It was such an archaic, prissy word. I almost laughed. Almost. Except for the combat boots clunking about, coming our way, and the smooth, whiskeyish voice that accompanied them, I might have.

  "Fie fi fo fum," a feminine voice said and then she chuckled, a horrid, light and tinkling sound that was more frightening than seeing Fayed's suddenly feral features.

  "Fuck," Maddox said.

  The combat boots scuffing along the floor paused. Maddox growled at Fayed to let go and then I was stumbling to my feet, clawing my way out of both their grasps as I grabbed for my bug out bag.

  "Run," I heard Fayed shout.

  It was a crisp sound that shot out amidst the din like a bullet and I wasted no time to see why his voice went dead flat in the next instant.

  A thud sounded like a heavy bag being struck by a boxer. I knew without having to look that he had fallen to the floor. Injured or dead. If he had taken a hit to give me the chance of escape, I wouldn't waste it. I didn't think about why I needed to. I just ran.

  Next I knew, I was sprinting headlong across the bar and thanking my lucky stars that I was small enough to dodge in and out of tables and chairs as wood splintered around me and balls of light sailed past. I had one thought: get the heck out of there.

  The glowing Exit sign over the back door was nothing but a blur as I panned the wall for another assailant. My life with Scottie had taught me a good many things I never wanted to know, but they came in handy now and then. Like where there was one killer, there was another. Backup in case the first one fails.

  The exit was only a short sprint away. Sizzling and cracking sounds much like thunder and lightning splintered around me. I was vaguely aware of someone chasing me, of my cat yowling in her bag. I pretty much agreed with her. I was terrified too.

  I didn't have the time or inclination to check and see what happen
ed to Fayed or Maddox. For all I knew, they had been struck by whatever weapon the female soldier struck them with. It was even completely possible that she was in cahoots with Maddox and was the bad cop backup to his good.

  I was pretty sure I could get away, but I needed a contingency plan in case I had to drop the bag. The tile wasn't safe in there, and I already decided it was more than just valuable. It was priceless. Deadly priceless.

  I dropped the tile into my pocket as I hit the back door. Whoever or whatever was behind me was breathing hard. Anxiety or nerves, or just plain out of shape. Didn't matter to me. I just wanted out of there.

  Something caught my foot and made me stumble as I burst through the door into the same alleyway I'd met up with the stranger the night before. It smelled the same. The same rat huddled next to the dumpster. I spilled over the threshold onto my face, and as I struggled to find my feet again, strong hands grappled for me beneath the armpits and hauled me along with him.

  I staggered and fought to keep up, juggling the bug out bag with the cat inside, unbalancing it in my grasp with every step.

  "Drop that stupid thing," Maddox said. "If you can't keep hold of it."

  My lungs were already burning enough to make answering him nearly impossible, but it didn't stop me trying.

  "Fuck no," I wheezed out.

  My legs from the earlier full out run hadn't yet recovered enough to power me through another terrified sprint. I stopped dead in my tracks, hanging over my knees. The bug out bag hung between my legs on the cobblestones. The heaving of my lungs as they tried to pull in oxygen was making me nauseous. Sweat had broken out all the way down my back. I knew I was going to be sick.

  I was making horrible wheezing sounds.

  "It's mine." I rasped out.

  He shoved me ahead of him, ignoring the fact that water had begun to run out my mouth. I was going to be sick. I couldn't help it. I stumbled and fell to one knee.

  "Now is not the time to be clumsy, little girl," Maddox said. "We have to keep going. She won't stop."