The Amulet Thief (The Fitheach Trilogy Book 1)

by Luanne Bennett

  I refocused on the sidewalk in front of me and watched her out of the corner of my eye as we walked at the same pace. A knot twisted deep in my stomach, but when she never once looked in my direction, I realized I was being paranoid and vilifying an innocent pedestrian.

  My shoulders loosened as the window announcing Shakespeare’s Library came into view. I looked across the street just as the woman disappeared into the entrance of a restaurant.

  “Get it together,” I whispered as relief cut through my nervous energy.

  It was a few minutes after nine, so the shop had just closed. Katie would be going through the closing ritual of counting the register and straightening the piles of displaced books from the day. Her head popped out from one of the aisles when I knocked on the door. She hesitated because that’s what you did when someone knocked on the door after closing. It wasn’t unusual for a customer to beg you to let them in for that book that couldn’t wait until morning.

  She stumbled over a pile of books as she headed for the front door. “Alex?” Her eyes widened as she opened it. “What’s wrong?”

  “I need a favor.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Katie was wearing a miniskirt and a pair of stiletto ankle boots. Her signature tank top showed off pieces of her tattoo, encouraging you to look harder to see the rest of her canvas. She was beautiful and smart, which probably confused those who assumed that because of all the ink, she was a party girl incapable of an intelligent conversation. She was the perfect example of why stereotypes were unreliable.

  She eyed my cat burglar attire and read my wired expression. “Looks like you’re up to no good.”

  “You should talk,” I shot back, eyeing her outfit and realizing she was just getting her evening started.

  “Want to hang out with me tonight?” she offered. “It’ll be fun.”

  I thought about the offer, visualizing a club filled with the likes of her. It would be fun if I didn’t have the fate of the world resting in the pages of a small book I hoped was still in the shop.

  “You have no idea how much I’d like to take you up on that, but I can’t.”

  I made a beeline for the section where I’d placed the book a week earlier. Failure to find it was not an option, because I doubted another copy existed. Even if it did, I didn’t want another copy because this one seemed to know me personally, and who knew what else I might find in those pages if it actually belonged to my mother.

  A sick feeling rose from the pit of my stomach as my eyes moved along the shelf. It wasn’t there, and I questioned whether I’d ever really seen the book at all.

  “Need help finding something?” Katie was watching me with her arms folded across her chest and a suspicious grin creeping up one side of her brightly painted mouth.

  “There was a book here.” I pointed in the general direction of the spot I’d last seen it.

  “Imagine that…a book…in a bookstore.”

  “I need that book.” I continued to scan the shelf with OCD precision. Maybe I’d missed it on the first seven or eight passes.

  “And you just happen to need it tonight? Don’t bullshit me, Alex.”

  I had to tell her something. Katie wasn’t exactly your run of the mill conservative, but the truth would be a little hard to digest, even for her. Maybe someday when this was all over, we’d still be friends and I could share. But for now, a little white lie was justifiable.

  “I’m working on something, and I need this book.” I decided to try honesty without all the details. “I remembered seeing it here last week, and I was afraid it would be gone before I came in tomorrow afternoon.”

  Her brows flattened as her bullshit indicator went off.

  “It’s out of print!”

  “What’s the title?”

  “Prophecies. Subtitled A Spell Within a Spell.”

  Her brain started working as her eyes thinned and pierced mine. “Into a little magic, are we?”

  I ignored the question and kept looking, expanding the search to the rest of the shelves lining the aisle. An hour—or maybe it was a few minutes—went by before she extended her hand over my shoulder.

  “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  My eyes shut as the air left my lungs. “Where did you find it?”

  “In the pile on the floor. Someone’s been looking at it. Good thing they didn’t like it enough to buy it.”

  “I’ll pay for it tomorrow.”

  “Sure.” She shrugged. “Or you could just borrow it and bring it back in a few days.”

  “This one’s a keeper,” I said. “Finish up. I’ll wait.”

  Katie went back to closing while I sat down at the old library table to take a look at the book. I expected something magical to emit from it. But now that it was on the table in front of me, it looked, smelled, and felt like any other book. I opened the cover. There was no front matter—no copyright page, no dedications, no preface or forward—just a bunch of blank pages. I was sure I’d seen something referencing its publication information when I found it online. Maybe this was an older edition produced before the ISBN standard was implemented. But I remembered reading that it was first published in 1974, years after the ISBN standard was established.

  “Katie,” I yelled across the room, “can you do me a favor and look up the title in the ISBN database?” As a bookseller we had access to all books with a registered ISBN.

  “Hold on.” She went to the computer and typed in the name. “Can’t find it. It’s not in the database.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I muttered. “Can you check again?” I headed for the front desk to see for myself.

  “Nope. Not there.”

  I reached for the keyboard and entered the exact search I’d done earlier that evening. I got the usual results back, but the seller that came up earlier wasn’t one of them. I searched several more times, varying the title just in case I missed a space or misspelled a word. “That’s crazy. I did this same search earlier tonight and found an exact match at a small bookseller’s site—with an ISBN.”

  “Do you remember who the seller was?”

  “No. I should have written down the name, but I didn’t expect it to just vanish.”

  I went back to the table and stared at the book, half expecting it to open on its own and laugh at me. “Okay, let’s see what you have to say, book.” With one finger, I opened the front cover again. When I got to the first page that wasn’t blank, a shiver raced from the bottom of my gut up to my chest. The book had a table of contents scribed in perfect calligraphy, just like the big book of magic.

  There were only three chapters listed. The first two I didn’t need to read because I already knew how those chapters turned out. Greer had already told me the history of the first and second prophecies. The third chapter was appropriately titled: “The Third Prophecy.”

  I began reading the pages of the third chapter, knowing without a doubt that secrets would finally be revealed, not only about the prophecy itself, but about my mother. Call it my the-shit-stops-here radar. It was time to put on my big-girl pants and be prepared to accept my orders. My mother had gone to some pretty creative lengths to get me here—sitting in front of this book—and I was ready.

  The first page basically reiterated what I already knew. The vessel held secrets of unspeakable power, bestowing its holder with the ability to control space and time. Greer’s description of it matched the book’s dead on. What Greer hadn’t mentioned was the part about the Oracle.

  The Oracle will be born of mutated lineage: a sire of black, a dam of white. Unparalleled power will be invoked and the key will be made manifest. The vessel answers only to the true Oracle.

  My mastery of cryptic messages was improving with experience, so it was pretty clear that this was an elaborate way of saying that the Oracle—a.k.a. my mother—was the boss of the key. I guess I was the default Oracle now, seeing how my mother passed on executorial power to me just before she died.

  None of this
was news to me, though, and I was beginning to think this whole scavenger hunt was a waste of time. Maybe this was meant to be a backup plan just in case Greer never found me. She’d done it before when she told Melanie to steal the amulet and hide it in the book. It was her clues that led me back to it. Maybe this was her way of letting me know about the prophecy if Greer hadn’t found me.

  “Yeah, yeah. Get to the good stuff,” I mumbled.

  The good stuff, it turned out, was on the last page. There was a picture of a black circle with three thin lines forming an inverted triangle in the center, and I knew I’d seen it before. The memory was right on the tip of my brain. Glimpses of it flashed in my mind, but the damn image wouldn’t stay still long enough for me to pinpoint what it was. The caption below the illustration answered my question: THE MARK OF THE ORACLE.

  “Of course.” My mother had a birthmark behind her right ear, just beyond her hairline. The mark was raised from the surface of her skin like a brand. I used to trace the edges of it with my fingers. The book wasn’t accurate though, because my mother’s birthmark was slightly different. The mark on her skin had only two lines, forming a V in the center of the circle. But here it was sitting in front of me, documentation that Maeve Kelley was the official Oracle of the prophecy.

  Katie’s look told me I’d outstayed my welcome. She had plans for the evening, and every minute that I sat at that table was ruining them.

  “Sorry,” I said from across the room

  She smiled back, reassuring me that she’d get over it.

  I slid the book in my bag and got ready to head home, but one thing kept nagging at me. The business of prophecies, especially those with the potential of altering the world, would be much too stringent to allow even the smallest discrepancy. My mother had the mark of the Oracle. That was indisputable. But why wasn’t it exactly like the one in the book? Weren’t there rules on prophetic precision? I could almost feel my mother’s hand twisting my ear and telling me to think, or Constantine badgering me for my lack of attention to detail. Maybe I was just getting better at seeing all those nuances, or maybe my mother was whispering in my ear. Whatever it was, it worked.

  A false prophet serves no purpose.

  Oxford Dictionary: PROPHET: synonyms (forecaster, seer, soothsayer, clairvoyant, fortune teller, ORACLE)

  I dropped my bag back on the table and grabbed the book with my shaky hand. The mark wasn’t right. All the pieces fit, but the mark just wasn’t right. Maybe my mother wasn’t the true Oracle. Maybe that’s just what she wanted everyone to think—a false prophet.

  “Katie,” I choked out, “can you do me one last favor, please?”

  It could have been the graveness of my expression or the timbre in my voice that brought Katie to my side. The woman who knew me for less than the span of two moons stood next to me with unconditional friendship, offering me more of her precious time.

  “This is going to sound weird, but I promise you, there’s a good reason for it.” I was completely aware of the absurdity of what I was about to ask and wouldn’t have blamed her if she kicked me out. “I need you to look at my scalp,” I pointed to the area behind my right ear, “and tell me if you see anything. A mark, a scar, anything other than plain white skin.” Most people would have asked me if I was smoking something, but not my Katie. She was a smart one, recognizing the strange but dead serious nature of the request. Whatever the reason, it was legitimate to me and that was good enough for her. I had a feeling we’d be friends for life, and for a moment I felt sorry for pushing her down that rabbit hole.

  Without a word, she began burrowing through my thick auburn hair like a chimpanzee grooming for fleas.

  “Hmm…”

  “What? Did you find something?”

  “You’re a natural redhead,” she said. “I can tell.”

  “Of course I am,” I mumbled.

  With one side of my head thoroughly inspected, Katie declared that I was clean.

  “Try the left side.” The book didn’t indicate an exact spot for the mark. My mother’s birthmark was on the right side of her head, but it was possible that it could be on the other side.

  Katie repeated the grooming movements on the left side of my head, proclaiming I was clean on that side, too. It was only a thought, so I wasn’t surprised by the news that I didn’t have the mark of the Oracle.

  “I don’t see anything. Now, are you going to explain all the foreplay with your head?”

  I let out a deep sigh as my chin dropped to the hollow of my neck. “You’re going to think your new friend is a psycho.”

  “There’s something right here, though.” She poked her finger about two inches above the hairline at the base of my neck. “Looks like a big fat tick.”

  I slowly lifted my head and craned my neck to look at her. She had her iPhone in her hand as she shoved my head back down to my chest. “Hold still.”

  Before I could push her hand off of my head, her iPhone was shoved under my face, displaying a clear picture of her fingers holding my hair away from a mark just like the one in the book. I flipped it open again and gawked back and forth between the illustration and the iPhone image of the back of my head.

  “Girl, what kind of shit are you into?” she asked.

  There it was, the exact mark. Maeve Kelley was not the Oracle—I was.

  I wondered how I could have gone my entire life without noticing it, never once feeling the edges as I worked my fingers through my hair, clueless that underneath my thick mane, I was marked with the same brand as my mother. But the reason became clear as I ran my fingers over the spot and felt nothing. My mother’s mark was raised above her skin, but mine was flat. It wasn’t a brand at all—it was a part of me.

  An odd feeling of relief washed through me, knowing that my mother had accomplished her goal. This is what she needed to tell me, and I was clever enough to work with her beyond the grave to find it. But the next thing that entered my mind made me grieve for her as if she’d died that day. My mother had been hunted down for her supposed birthright, only to be revealed as an impostor. The mark was wrong, and it must have been blazingly obvious once her captors got a good look at her.

  A false prophet serves no purpose. My mother was slaughtered for nothing more than a misunderstanding. She was good and decent, and she used herself as bait to protect me.

  All of this started as a need to have one question answered: why would anyone want to kill my mother? I had my answer. Now I had a new question: who?

  THIRTY

  Of all the things I could have been in the eyes of Katie Bishop, a psycho was not one of them. I explained that the shit I was into was a sensitive subject that I wasn’t at liberty to discuss yet. I also told her she’d be the first to know when I was.

  “Nice,” she smirked.

  With the book back in my bag, I left the shop hoping to make it home before anyone noticed I was gone. It was just after ten p.m. and the streets were still packed with people, giving me a false sense of security. I made my way past the establishments along Columbus Avenue. Some were closing, while others were just getting started for the night. The restaurants were in full swing. Most of them offered outdoor dining once the weather warmed up, but others kept their tables out year-round for those not intimidated by the cold. The idea of sitting at one of those tables like a regular girl with a margarita, food, and good friends made me yearn for normalcy. It was something to look forward to.

  You have no idea how lucky you are, I thought as I passed a cafe. Several of the men sitting by the window groped me with their eyes as their girlfriends or wives chattered in the background. I’d do without before I let a man treat me like that, but I guess a lot of women would tolerate just about anything if it meant not being alone.

  I approached the last restaurant before my turn. The glass windows were folded back on one side where tables spilled out to the sidewalk. A set of eyes followed me as I walked along the short iron fence separating the tables from the pedestrians. He was
sitting by himself, and the first thing I thought about was why a man like that would ever eat alone. A man like that would have more than his share of women sitting next to him. With his sharp blue eyes and intrusive stare, he was the kind of man you couldn’t ignore.

  I fought the powerful pull of his stare and focused on the sidewalk. When I looked back up, his eyes were still on me, tracing my progression as I approached. My fascination with his cockiness outweighed the impulse to look away again. I passed his table within a dangerous two feet, craning my head to keep contact. He locked my eyes with some sort of MiG radar, pummeling me with an uncomfortable sensation of both lust and fear simultaneously.

  The thick bubble that separated me from my surroundings burst as I managed to avoid a head-on collision with a couple approaching from the opposite direction.

  “Sorry,” I apologized, embarrassed by my clumsiness.

  When I turned down the side street at the next intersection, I looked back and saw that he was now sitting in the opposite chair, watching me from the rear. His familiarity nagged at me for a good half block before I realized the street had no working lights. There were no people either. “Oh, yeah,” I muttered, distracted by the revelation of why the man looked so familiar. His silver hair and blue eyes were a perfect match to the woman I’d seen on my way to the shop. They could have been twins.

  In hindsight, I should have listened to the warning signs telling me that the odds were pretty slim that it was a coincidence. But before I could move my legs and run, a searing pain slammed into my back. One minute, I was a healthy, young woman walking into a storm; the next, I was the storm.