by Tate James
“I think I might know where Daniel’s going,” she said, and then the heels fell from her hand and she collapsed on the sidewalk—right next to the faerie digging through the trash.
My name is Arizona Smoke, wine aficionado, ex-barista, and wife to four … five … six supernatural plumbers.
I just can’t decide if I’m lucky … or completely out of my fucking element.
Maybe a little bit of both.
To Be Continued …
Authors' Note
You've reach the end! Congratulations! Writing this book was such a treat, we hope that reading it one was one, too. Who doen't love sexy plumbers, elemental dragons, and bad guys named cuntmuffin? Prepare for the next book, "Elements of Ruin", the second in the "Hijinks Harem" series, coming soon. Turn the pages for some stalking links so you can be the first to know when it comes out.
Kisses.
C.M. and Tate
The Sequel to "Elements of Mischief"
Seven Alpha Males, One Strong Alpha Female.
The Vixen's Lead by Tate James
Flip the page for an axcerpt of chapter one!
Chapter One
In the background, the shadowy outline of a naked woman haunted a painting of lilies. The rich imagery held me captive. Reportedly the work was worth a few hundred thousand dollars, but I couldn’t decide if it was because of the image or the person who painted it. Maybe both. Whatever the reason, the Beverly Hills gallery had it on its walls, which meant it was without a doubt expensive.
“Nine minutes and thirty-four seconds until security systems are back online. Stop gawking at the paintings and hurry the fuck up!”
How the hell had Lucy known what I was doing? Our comms were audio only. Still, Lucy had a point. I left the painting and crept down the corridor on silent feet. At the end a large, open room held several ostentatious pieces of jewelry displayed in glass cases on pedestals. They were part of a colored diamond showcase in which the wealthy allowed their prized possessions to be displayed for the common folk to drool over. It was a clear night, and the full moon streamed light through the windows. The moonlight refracted against the jewels and created a rainbow of Christmas lights in the darkness.
Pausing at the entrance to the room, I fished my phone out of the pocket in my black jeans and ran an application labeled “You Never Know,” which Lucy had designed to scan areas for hidden security features we might have missed in our mission planning. It took a minute to fully probe the room, and while waiting, I snaked a finger under the short, black wig I wore and scratched at my scalp. Using a disguise was just sensible thieving, but seriously, wigs itched something awful! Maybe next time I would try a hat. The image of myself pulling a job while wearing a top hat or a Stetson made me chuckle.
Seconds later, my screen flashed red with an alert and surprised the hell out of me. It was the first time the app had actually caught something.
“Are you seeing this?” It was a pointless question. She had a mirror image on her computer screen.
“Huh. That definitely wasn’t there a week ago when I did a walk through,” she muttered, and her furious tapping at her keyboard echoed over the comms. “Okay, it’s a laser beam grid linked to a silent alarm that will trigger the security shutters on all external access points. I don’t have time to hack into it and shut it down, so...”
I could picture her shrug and sighed. “So, don’t trip the lasers, yes? Got it. Send me the map.” An intricate web of red lines appeared on my phone, overlaying the camera’s view of the room. If I watched the screen and not my feet, it would be possible to avoid the beams.
Conscious of the ticking clock, I carefully started stepping across the floor. All seemed to go well until I got within ten feet of my intended loot. Suddenly my nose started twitching with a sneeze. “Dammit,” I hissed, then fought to hold my breath.
“What’s going on in there, Kit?” Lucy asked, worry tight in her tone.
I wriggled my nose a few times to shake off the itch before replying, “You know how I often get pretty awesome hay fever in Autumn...?”
Lucy groaned like I was doing this to deliberately test her nerves, but I wasn’t trying to tease her. I might actually sneeze.
“I think it’s gone,” I said, relaxing minutely, and raised my foot for the next step. Of course, Murphy’s Law prevailed, and the second I shifted my weight, the urge to sneeze returned full force. I clamped my mouth and nose shut, but I lost my balance even as I tried to swallow my sneeze. My leg rocked into one of the laser beams.
“Shit!”
“Fucking hell, Kit! You have thirty seconds until you are trapped. Get the hell out, now!” Lucy yelled in my earpiece.
Already screwed, I lunged the remaining distance to the display case. The current tenant was a ring with an obnoxiously large, canary yellow diamond surrounded by smaller chartreuse colored diamonds, all inset in a band with pink sapphires. The overall effect was a bit sickening, but who was I to tell the wealthy how bad their tastes were? I often wondered how many of them deliberately wasted their money on tasteless items with obscene price tags simply because they could.
Aware of the ticking clock, I whipped my arm back and smashed my gloved fist straight through the toughened glass. It shattered under the force I exerted. After snatching up the ugly bauble, I dropped a little plastic fox—my signature calling card—in its place.
“Kit, quit dicking around and get out!” Lucy screeched over the line at me. “Twenty-two seconds remaining, don’t you dare get caught, or I swear to God I won’t let you live this down!”
Satisfied at having grabbed my target, I raced out of the room and down the corridor, not hesitating before crashing straight through a tall picture window and plummeting thirty-odd feet onto the rooftop of the next building. I tried to break my fall by rolling as I hit. Instead, landed awkwardly on my left shoulder. It popped out of its socket. Hissing with pain, I glanced up at the gallery just in time to see the steel shutters slam closed on all the windows simultaneously.
“Kit,” Lucy snapped, barely masking the tension in her voice. “Give me an update; are you clear?”
The evil little devil on my shoulder wanted me to mess with her, but my conscience prevailed. “All clear,” I said, then added with a laugh. “Plenty of time to spare; not sure why you were so worried!”
“Any injuries?” A growl underscored her words.
“Nope, I’m totally fine. I mean, if you don’t include my shoulder, which is for sure dislocated, then all I have are a few scratches from the glass and a tiny bit of swelling in my knuckles. I got the God-awful ring, though!” I was rather proud of completing the job we had come there for.
“That was too close this time, Kit,” Lucy admonished me. “You’re bloody lucky you heal so fast, but it’s still going to hurt like a bitch getting that shoulder back into place. Get sorted then drop the ring to the courier, and call me if anything goes wrong. Otherwise, I’ll see you when you get back. Stay out of trouble.”
My best friend occasionally cursed like an Australian ever since she developed a Heath Ledger movie crush. “You know, most people would say ‘good luck.’ You say, ‘stay out of trouble.’ Should I be offended?” Teasing her was fun, even if my track record wasn’t the cleanest. In my defense, I always got myself out of trouble without too much hassle. Lucy didn’t dignify me with a verbal response and left the dial tone as she hung up to serve as her answer.
Tucking my earpiece into a zippered pocket of my leather jacket, I headed over to the A/C unit on the far side of the roof. Using it to leverage my shoulder back into place, I kept my cursing to a minimum. It slid back in with a sickening pop, and the relief had me wavering on my feet. After catching my breath, I brushed some glass out of my wig then swung over the fire escape and descended to the street below. Stripping off my gloves, I blended into the crowd. Even though it was autumn, it was still nowhere near cold enough to be wearing gloves unless committing a crime. I nervously checked the time on my watch.
I had a very long drive ahead of me to get back to school and still needed to drop the stolen ring off with our middleman.
Spirited by C.M. Stunich
Flip the page for an excerpt of chapter one!
Chapter One
Brynn
The instrument of my own destruction loomed above me, casting a long shadow in the bloodred rays of a dying sun. Its crumbling facade was decorated with a morbid metaphor of a face—soulless eyes, a gaping mouth, tangled green locks. Okay, so I was exaggerating the broken windows, the front entrance with its missing doors, and the cluster of wild blackberries that had morphed into a monster of their own making, but come on: the former Grandberg Manor was bust.
“This is the place?” I asked, hoisting my equipment up on one shoulder and eyeing the crumbling old house with a raised brow. “It looks half-ready to collapse. You know me—if there's an even the slightest opportunity that I might trip, I will. Just be honest: am I going to fall straight through the floor?”
“Probably,” Jasinda said, moving around me and over the twisted, rusted remains of the front gate. Once upon a time, this place was crawling with nobility from around the world, and its gardens … even the drawings were enough to make my mother's green thumb well, green with envy. “Air and I have a bet going on whether or not you'll make it out of here alive.”
She thew a smirk over her shoulder at me and I pursed my lips.
Jasinda and Air were always making bets about me despite the fact that Air was the flubbing prince and shouldn't be making bets with anyone, let alone my handler. I had to admit though: if there was anyone around that was worth betting on, it was me.
First off, I was a half-angel which meant I could see spirits. And second, I was a half-human which meant those spirits actually deigned to communicate with me. A full-blooded angel was too haughty and highbrow to give any ghost the time of day, and a full-blooded human couldn't see one if they tried.
This special ability of mine did end up getting me into heaps of trouble. For example, there was that one time I followed a ghost straight into the queen's chambers and found her, um, indisposed with the head of the royal guard who, you know, also just happened to be my mother.
Then of course, there was the fact that I had the small, slight frame of my mother's desert dwelling ancestors but the wide, heavy span of wings from my father's side. Let's just be frank and say I toppled over a lot. Oh, and I ended up having long, in-depth conversations with people who weren't really people but were, in fact, very tricky ghosts. Even my first kiss had been with a spirit.
I took a deep breath of the cool, lavender scented air and followed after Jas, tripping and cursing in my own made up language.
“Go flub yourself,” I growled at a thick tangle of blackberry that had gotten wrapped around my ankle. “You bleeding blatherer.”
“Are you making words up again?” Jas said, parking her hands on her hips and sighing at me. “Can't you just say you bleeding bastard like everyone else? And don't even get me started on you using the work flub instead of fuc—”
“Hey!” I snapped, putting my palm over her lips with one hand and pointing at myself with the other. “Half-angel over here. Just hearing somebody use a word with an extreme negative connotation makes me lose a feather.”
“Oh, please,” Jas said, pushing my hand away from her full red lips and smirking at me as I tried to rub her makeup off on my breeches. “That's a myth and you know it. Air told me that when you were kids, he used to chase you around the castle saying damn and bastard and the like, just to see if you'd lose any feathers—you didn't.”
I narrowed my eyes on her as she turned and headed up what was once an impressive flight of marble steps, now cracked and chipped like an old beggar's teeth. I shivered and followed after her, examining the red stain on my palm that stunk like copperberries. A lot of women painted their mouths with the stuff, but to me that fragrant floral scent was tinged with a metallic sting, like copper. Like blood. Thus, the name—copperberries.
As I hurried up the steps, I kept my eyes on the decaying black facade of the manor, all its intricate moldings and details stripped away by time and rain, the harsh winds that curled across this part of the kingdom in summer.
“Let's do a quick walkthrough and see if you can't sense any residual energies,” Jas suggested as I set my black leather satchel on the floor and knelt beside it. The ground around me was littered with debris—leaves, twigs, bits of crumbling plaster, a dead mouse.
“Oh, that's flubbing sick,” I whispered as I caught sight of the creature's spirit hovering nearby, its furred sides almost completely translucent as it took long, heaving breaths. Of course, the mouse didn't need to breathe anymore, but it didn't know that.
I pulled a dagger from the sheath on my belt—please Goddess, don't actually ask me to use this thing in combat—and prodded at the mouse's body with the jeweled hilt.
Fresh blood stained the white leather pommel and made me shiver.
“Jas,” I started, because a long dead carcass was one thing, but a fresh one? Hell's bells—since Hell was an actual place it didn't count as a curse word so no lost feathers for me—but I hoped it was just a cat that had taken the rodent's life and not … something else.
“Brynn, you need to see this!” Jas shouted and I sighed, wiping the mouse's blood on the already dirty leg of my breeches and tucking it away. Before I stood up, I clasped the silver star hanging around my neck with one hand and reached out to touch the mouse's spirt with the other. The poor thing was too scared to even shy away, its soul becoming briefly corporeal as my fingers made contact with its fur.
“Goddess-speed and happy endings,” I whispered as the image of the mouse morphed and shivered, turning as silver as a beam of moonlight and fading away until there was nothing there but the warped and rotted boards of the old floor.
I stood up, leaving my satchel where it was on the ground and rubbing my shoulder as I followed the sound of Jasinda's voice. The road up to the manor was riddled with broken cobblestones, weeds, and the skeletons of long abandoned carriages. It was too rough for any sort of pack animal to make the trek, so we'd had to carry ourselves on foot, lugging all the equipment that a spirit whisperer—that's me—might need to exorcise a ghost or two or ten.
“Jassy?” I asked as I moved past the formal foyer with its double staircases, and down a long receiving hall that would've been used by servants in times past. The wallpaper was peeling like old skin, leaving behind water stained walls and flaky plaster. At some point, thieves had come in and stripped the old place of its wood moldings, sconces and chandeliers; they'd left nothing but a skeleton behind.
“In here!” she called out, drawing me through an empty archway where a swinging door might've once stood and into the kitchen. As I moved, I was conscious of keeping my wings tucked tightly against my back. My clumsiness was not limited to my feet. I was notorious among the castle staff for breaking things with the feathered black wings that graced my back. As a kid, they used to call me Pigeon Girl because I caused ten times as much damage to the royal halls as the flying rats that plagued the old stone building.
“What is it?” I asked as I leaned against the wall outside a small servant's room—a tiny square that would've belonged to the head cook. “Jas, there was a mouse—”
“Flub mice,” she said, only she didn't actually say flub but I wouldn't lose a feather even thinking about the F-word that famously rhymes with duck. As a half-angel, my powers were bound to the light goddess and she was a serious stickler for avoiding words with negative connotations. I supposed I couldn't blame her; the very words I spoke held power. The more positivity and light I imbued those words with, the more powerful I was. “Look at this, Brynn. There's a distinct spiritual signature written all over this room.”
The room itself was so small that with the collapsed remains of a small bed and a sagging dresser, there wasn't space for us both. I waited for Jas to step out, pushing her long dark hair over he
r shoulder, sapphire blue eyes sparkling with a scholar's excitement.
“Brynn, this could be it,” she said as I took a deep breath and stepped into the room. “Our big break.”
Jas was always looking for that one case, that one unique spirit that we could exorcise that would prove our worth to the scholars at the Royal College. In just two weeks, I'd be turning twenty-one and that'd be it; that was the cut off date for acceptance into the prestigious training facility. It wasn't that Jas cared about the status of being a student there, or the potential for a high-ranking position after graduation, it was the library. Only students of the Royal College were permitted to use the vast, twisting hallways of the catacombs. There were books there that couldn't be found anywhere else—not to mention ancient artifacts, exemplary professors, and vast resources that could be used for research.
It was Jasinda's dream, even if it wasn't mine. I hoped she was right; I hoped this was it.
I stepped over a small hole in the floor and into the tiny windowless room.
As soon as I did, it hit me, the pressure of an angry spirit, bearing down on me with the cold burn of something long dead and waiting. Waves of icy winter chill tore across my skin like knives, despite the warm evening air that permeated the rest of the building. Whatever this was, it was powerful.
I grasped the silver star at my throat and closed my eyes.
“Haversey,” I whispered, invoking the name of the light goddess.
If I were Jas, I knew what I'd be seeing: a girl shrouded in silver moonlight, her tanned skin pearlescent and shimmering, her hair as white as snow lifted in an unnatural breeze.
I opened my eyes slowly and bit back a gasp.
Every inch of the walls was covered in the word Hellim, the name of the dark god. What I had originally thought were decorative splotches on the wallpaper were actually his name, written in blood a thousand times over. It had been impossible to see in the dim half-light, but now that I had my second sight open, the letters glowed with a strong, angry spiritual signature.
