The easiest heist in Alex Rhoden's career is also the most dangerous of all.
Kaleb was born in a convent in France in 1593.
16 years later, he was deemed a witch and burned at the stake.
But he didn't die.
He couldn't burn.
The Church had another weapon against his kind, though, and they anchored him in a stone.
Four hundred twenty years later, the young art thief Alex Rhoden is sent on the easiest heist of his career.
Getting that stone was no problem.
But he's not the only one looking for it.
Kaleb is feared among his own because he's the product of the forbidden unity between a demigod and a witch. Learning to control his powers and be a normal teenage boy is half the battle. The other is to protect Alex from known and unknown adversaries.
Excerpt:
Chapter One
It had been more than fifteen years now, so he guessed he could call himself a professional. A professional pickpocket.
He still had it. That thought. It slithered in as his hands sneaked out the object of interest from people's pockets or bags or whatever. That thought. What would happen if he got caught?
He'd been caught. Of course he had been caught—everybody would get caught doing something if they did it long enough. And after that, if they continued, they might just get to be good enough at it that they wouldn't get caught again. But if the punishment was terrifying enough, they'd either stop doing it all together, or they'd always have that thought. At least when doing a challenging job.
So, there he was—on a train, bumbling its way across the border. He was headed for Paris, France. He'd just finished a job there and had been on his way to Germany when he'd told to go back to Paris with the artifact still in his possession.
That thought nagged again.
The request was off. Somewhere, deep in the pit of his stomach, restlessness stirred.
So, maybe he should just stop thinking about it? Stop thinking about why the transfer was to be done in Paris and not in Germany as first agreed upon.
That thought. What would happen if he got caught with an incunabula worth seventeen thousand euros he'd just stolen not a hundred miles from his current location less than twenty-four hours earlier? Probably a lot more than when he'd been caught by the guy who'd sent him on the job in the first place. The guy who was the reason for that thought. The guy who knew how to punish an eleven-year-old pickpocket caught on the grounds of a traveling family fair.
Well, he and his dad hadn't been traveling with the fair—they'd just followed a few of them all over the states and scammed and picked pockets and tried to keep away from anything resembling authority.
He didn't think he had ever been so scared in his short life, and at that point, he had been pretty sure his life wasn't going to be much longer than another twenty minutes.
He hadn't thought about it in years, and yet his mind took him back.
Sixteen years earlier
It was big, it was white, and it was empty in a way I had never known. The room had one door, one chair, and one table, but it was spacious enough to hold at least ten more of each. I had been carried through the door blindfolded, planted on a chair, and handcuffed to the table. A hoodie-clad guy had pulled off the blindfold and left me there alone in that big, white, and empty room. My heaving breath echoed back to me.
At the age of eleven, fear is that creeping feeling triggered by that faceless thing that goes bump in the night. Or the monster under your bed that the other kids told you is called the Boogeyman. It's that thing that makes you wait until you almost pee in your bed before you hurry to the bathroom in the dead of night. At this age, I didn't even have a word for the feeling that this big, empty room breathing back at me caused. I do now. Terror-stricken.
Whether it was the vastness of the room's size or all the white that sucked up time, I cannot say, but to this day I still have no idea how long I sat there alone. I do, however, remember the deafening thud of the door as it was pushed open with enough force for the handle to make a permanent indentation in the wall.
Three men entered—one of them being the guy who'd left me there. He still didn't say anything, and he still didn't look like he intended to anytime soon.
I studied and weighed them. It was something I'd taught myself over the years as my dad and I had sought out the next sucker to pay for our next meal or Dad's next drink. I would categorize the targets on a scale from one to ten, which ranged them from gullible to cop. No need to mention that once we got close to cop, I'd start to look around for another sucker. But here was a whole new kind of number ten. Dad had told me about what we had to stay alerted for—cops and bouncers were our usual ten. He'd mentioned another ten once. He'd mumbled it as I pulled him from a pile of trash, and he smelled of vomit and blood.
"If you ever have to run in your life, son, then run faster from the ones you owe money than anyone else."
When reaching adulthood and having to stand on your own two feet, it's nice to have a collection of wise words from your old man and…this is what I got. Oh yeah, and my favorite.
"Never trust anyone who can profit from stabbing you in the back." Good advice, actually. I learned the gravity of this one at a young age, and it began with this whole new kind of ten standing in front of me.
He was about as big as the door, crewcut closely enough to almost look bald, and he wore a suit. Gray and shiny and clean. The other two wore jeans and hoodies. They were neither shiny nor clean, so they were there to do Shiny's dirty work, I guessed.
"Listen up, you little shit," Shiny said as he leaned forward and looked me in the eye. I feared him from that moment on. "You better still have that coin you lifted from my pocket or may whatever God who has just a second to show mercy give you all of his fucking attention. Where is it?"
"I don't have it." It hadn't occurred to me that I should probably have chosen my words more carefully, but I caught on quickly. I had only met a few fuck-ups until that point who were nasty enough to grab me hard by the arm. This guy didn't stop at that. He swung his hand, and the room sailed and my ear sang. His hand must have covered half my face because that was how much felt like it was on fire. He hit a lot harder than my dad.
"Let's try that again," he said calmly, while I fought my stinging eyes.
"I can get it back," I said.
"Very good, Kiddo, now we're getting somewhere." He stared at me for a long time. He leaned over me and whispered into my ear. "I really hate kids. You never learn. Or you think you'll get away with anything. But I'll make sure you remember me."
He stood up with a sadistic smile. I had no doubt that he was telling the truth because at that moment I was sitting on the evidence that he was one nasty piece of work. Shiny smiled, pulled out his jacket and reached in. His face froze, and he began searching his pockets methodically. Finally he stopped and stared at me wide-eyed. "You dirty little thief! You picked my pockets while handcuffed to a table?"
I raised my hands. I was going for the all-innocent expression, but let's face it—growing up in my family, I didn't have a whole lot of innocence left, and certainly not enough to fool those old cons.
The guy's brown eyes twinkled in amusement, and he nodded at one of the others. The other guy lifted me from the chair. I winced as the steel kept my hands by the table even though my body was hanging midair. And there, on the seat of the chair, were the pliers I'd just lifted from his inside pocket while he'd been whispering in my ear.
"Sit him down, no one do anything. I think we might have a winner here."
Shiny left the room and returned with an elderly guy in a suit as nice and clean as his own, but the jacket strained around the midsection of the aging man. I'd seen him a few days earlier in town as I ran an errand for my dad. He'd gotten out of a limo along with two young men and three young women. They'd called him Mr. Henry.
Mr. Henry came over, smiling, as if he was excited to be shown something. "Can you do that again?" The old man studied me a beat, then chuckled and leaned over me. "Do that again, and I'll let you go," he whispered. For a second, I thought I'd better keep my hands to myself, but that was like telling a cat not to drink the cream placed in front of it. I simply couldn't help myself even though my mind had begun to feed me images of what Shiny had planned for the pliers and my grubby little fingers.
Mr. Henry stood up and went through his pockets. He smiled, held out his bare hands, and turned around for all to see. No one seemed to get it, though, so everyone looked at me, including the smiling Mr. Henry.
I held up a key—a big, old one with a piece of red string attached. The other hand I tried to keep out of sight, as his watch was too big to be covered completely by my hand.
"Very good, my boy:" Mr. Henry reached out. By doing so, his sleeve slid back. He froze and stared at his arm. I held up the watch. A big smile broke the stunned expression. "Excellent!"
He took the key and his watch, checked his pockets again, apparently finding that he still had everything else, and left with Shiny.
Shiny came back a few minutes later. His expression had changed. "If you ever steal from me again, I don't care what Mr. Henry says, I'll cut off all your little fingers and have you watch as I feed them to my snake, Thelma. Do you hear me?" I nodded vigorously. "We're going to go and retrieve my coin now. If you try to escape or in any way double-cross me, I will spend every waking moment hunting you down. And when I find you, I'll feed all of you to Thelma…while you are alive. Understood?"
I nodded even more vigorously, trying not to picture just how big that snake could be. And I failed miserably.
Meraki P. Lyhne is a Danish author who mainly writes contemporary paranormal and space opera, some with a HEA, some with a HFN, and some with white-knuckling cliffhangers. Some of it is sweet, some of it is hot, and some of it tethers on the border to the dark.
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