by Eva Chase
Shadow Thief
Book 1 in the Flirting with Monsters series
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
First Digital Edition, 2020
Copyright © 2020 Eva Chase
Cover design: Yocla Book Cover Design
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-989096-74-1
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-989096-75-8
CONTENTS
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Next in the Flirting with Monsters series
Claimed by Gods excerpt
About the Author
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1
Sorsha
The story of how I was going to end the world began not with a bang or a whimper but a kerplink.
The kerplink came from the latch of an arcanely ancient window lock hitting the sill as it disengaged. Adjusting my position on the ledge outside, I withdrew my equally ancient wedge and probe—gotta have tools that fit the job—from beneath the sash. At my tug, the window slid upward with a faint rasp.
Shadows draped the hallway on the other side even more densely than in the backyard below me, where the glow of the mansion’s security lamps cut through the night. Less work for me. Dressed in black from head to toe, with my hands gloved to avoid fingerprints and my vibrant red hair tucked away under a knit hat, I blended in perfectly.
I slipped from the flutter of the warm summer breeze into the stillness of the hall and eased the window shut. The ceiling loomed high above. The tangy scent of wood polish tickled my nose. No doubt the floorboards that showed at the edges of the Persian rug gleamed like glass in daylight.
The thick rug handily absorbed my footsteps as I slunk along it, eyeing the doors. If I’d been able to get a good view from outside, I’d have snuck straight into the room I was aiming for, but with the coverings on the other windows, it’d been impossible to know whether I’d hit the jackpot or stumble onto inhabitants I wasn’t looking to meet.
Looking around now, there were a couple of signs that this wasn’t the home of your typical collector. Most of them kept the rest of their living space free of anything that would hint at their secret interests, a portrait of normality. Here, paintings of eerie, twisted forms with glowing eyes hung on the walls. Farther down, a patch of thicker darkness streaked across the pale paint of the ceiling as if it’d been scorched. What the heck had this dude gotten up to?
But then I spotted the door that had to lead to his collection room, and that question fell away behind a tingle of exhilaration.
I couldn’t tell exactly what kind of security I was dealing with until I got right up close and flicked on the thinnest beam on my flashlight. The sight made me grimace. Son of a donkey’s uncle.
In my experience, there were two kinds of collectors. Some went all in on traditionalism, preferring esoteric fixtures and devices of times past—the older the better—to match the nature of the creatures they’d stashed away. Others valued modern tech over keeping a consistent ambiance and secured their collection areas with the most up-to-date electronics.
I preferred the former. Forget fancy do-dads hacking digital codes—it was much more satisfying getting to tackle concrete objects hands-on, like a puzzle I was putting together… or, more often, pulling apart.
This guy clearly leaned that way too. Except he leaned it way too far. One look at the mass of interlocking metal around the door’s handle told me my standard picks weren’t getting anywhere with that lock. I didn’t encounter many that required more forceful methods. Tonight’s collector was awfully paranoid about protecting his treasures.
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 c
ollection 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.
