Chapter Four #2
“Jabmead.” He made a dismissive gesture aimed roughly northward.
“They’re a proto-Finnish mercenary group.
Their leader says they are drui, seeped in old earth magic, but you know how those radical groups get.
Is she persistent? Yes. Does she ask me for the impossible?
Also yes, but she’s nothing I can’t handle.
That’s because, unlike you, I’m highly organized, and can deal with more than one demand on my time. ”
I ground my teeth for a good ten seconds, so annoyed and frustrated that I almost walked out of his office, but a reminder of just how much havoc he could invoke in my life forced me yet again to set my feelings aside.
“Dree?” I asked, confused enough to stop seething over his digs at me. “Neo-druids, you mean? The tree huggers?”
“No, drui.” He spelled it, waving his hand in a vague gesture, turning his face so the pale sunshine streaming in the window highlighted his scar.
He’d told me once that it was the best thing to happen to him, since it caused men to respect him, and women to swoon at his dashing appearance.
“They’re kind of a cross between mages and druids, heavily into natural magic. Roots and things.”
I dug around in my memory. I’d never heard of drui. “Like a hedge witch?”
He made a face. “There are some similarities. Drui tend to be chaotic and resistant to structure.”
“I assume you dragged me here because that big job you’ve been hinting at has finally come to fruition?”
“You’d assume wrong,” he said, finally looking up from the laptop to consider me. He was a handsome man with an attractive Spanish accent, but I knew all too well how a pretty exterior hid a reprehensible character. “You look well.”
“Thank you,” I said after a moment’s struggle to be polite. I knew what was coming.
His eyebrows rose as his gaze roamed over my torso. “Gained a bit of weight, though. Jean-Philippe let you get away with that? Or are you the company’s designated overweight dancer intended on soothing the souls of large female patrons?”
“Why did you drag me here if it’s not for the job you’ve been holding over my head for the last year and a half?” I answered, ignoring his insult. He’d used digs about my body against me for years, well aware of how deeply they cut.
Papi smiled, knowing he’d scored a point.
“As a matter of fact, the deal I was brokering fell through.” His expression turned sour at the words, his lips twisting as he added, “One of the former Sovereigns has been interfering with the group I was negotiating with, until they got skittish and decided not to work with us. The job I have for you is a simple one: I have a dragon client who wants a specific weapon. The last four thieves I sent to take it have returned ... damaged. That leaves you.”
“Me?” A little skitter of fear rippled down my back. “I’m no thief, as you well know.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, pinning me back with what he’d once described as a masterful gaze.
“You’re all I have left, and the client is tired of waiting.
You’ll need to take a portal out to the West Coast of the US.
I’ll send you the information, but you need to get the job done by tonight. The client won’t wait any longer.”
“But I’m a reaper!” I protested. “I don’t know the first thing about stealing objects, let alone weapons.”
“That doesn’t matter, not if you want to pay off your debt.
” His gaze held mine, making me alternately furious and frightened.
“Of course, if you want me to tell the Akashic League, the Court of Divine Blood, and the L’au-dela that, in exchange for a fat wad of money, you took a demon lord into an Otherworld he was forbidden to access, then you can feel free to refuse the job.
Otherwise ...” He let the sentence hang, his eyebrows arched in mock concern.
A familiar stab of guilt pierced my soul.
I wanted to curl into a ball and cry about having been deceived into doing something very much against the laws of the Akashic League, but that would make Papi feel more empowered.
“If I agree to steal for you, that will wipe my debt to you? Completely? You’ll destroy the compact? ”
He pulled open a drawer and dug around in it for a few seconds before withdrawing a round plaster seal upon which the details of our agreement had been scribed: in return for Papi lying to all the authorities about my action two years earlier, I would work jobs for him until the debt was paid off.
“You can do the honors yourself,” he said, gesturing at it. “I’ll bring the hammer. Just as soon as you get the sword in question.”
“A sword?” I swallowed down the horrible mixture of guilt, worry, and a profound sense of helplessness. “You want me to steal a sword? That’s kind of hard to smuggle.”
“Regardless, it’s what our client wants.” He tucked the compact away into the drawer and returned his attention to his computer. “The sooner you get going, the faster you’ll be back, and I’ll hand over the compact.”
“All right,” I said after a full minute’s silent struggle.
I stood up, trying to quell the uneasy sense that the next step I took would redefine my life, and accepted the inevitable.
If I wanted to be free of Papi and his demands, I’d just have to squash down my morals and steal a sword. “I’ll do it. Where am I going?”
“Portland, Oregon, US, is the closest portal,” he answered without looking up. “I’ll be here until deep night.”
I wanted to argue, to scream that it wasn’t fair, that I’d been tricked by a demon lord, but I’d been through that for two years, and it never did any good.
Instead, I hurried out of the building, breathing in the early spring air with a sense of gratitude. “It’s just a sword. One single sword. Maybe the owner won’t notice it’s gone.”
My phone pinged just as I was paying for a portal out to Oregon.
The text consisted only of an address and brief directions to the location, and the notation that it was a basic compound with twenty or so cabins scattered on thirty acres, in the center of which was a massive lodge. The sword was located in the lodge.
The following text had a description of a two-handed sword bearing runes and green gems.
“OK, it’s the sort of sword someone would notice being gone,” I said, taking a deep breath before entering the portal. “Especially the sort of person who owned a lodge.”
An hour later I sat in a grim hotel room. It was near noon, and I knew it would be at least nine hours before it would be dark enough to start my job. “Sorry I woke you. Although ... wait, you’re eight hours ahead of me. It’s like, what, six there?”
“Seven,” my friend Berry answered, her voice unusually breathless. “And we weren’t asleep. Owain has been gone a few days trying to help a friend find something, and he got back a few hours ago. What’s up?”
“Oh man, I’m sorry,” I said, blushing despite the fact that there was no one to see me. “I didn’t know you guys were—I’ll call you later.”
“No, it’s fine. Owain’s typing up some research he did on the history of Abaddon. What ballet are you rehearsing now? And are there tickets available? I told Owain that you were my old roomie from college, and he’s interested in seeing you dance.”
“Sadly, nothing right now.” I quickly explained the situation with the ballet company. “I’m doing a non-reaper job for someone, and since you stopped being an official thief taker, I thought I’d pick your brain.”
“Sounds intriguing,” Berry said. “What sort of job? And what do you want me to brainstorm with you?”
“Have you ever had to take something from someone?” I asked, at a loss as to how to explain what I needed.
“Like what?” she asked.
“Like ... something valuable.”
Silence filled the room. “Er ... not really,” she said slowly, suspicion tainting her tone. “You took a job to steal a valuable object?”
“It sounds horrible, I know, but there are extenuating circumstances. Kind of,” I answered, now fully immersed in guilt and regret. “I just need to know the best way to go about taking something that ... er ... doesn’t belong to me.”
She took a deep breath. “I’m not going to ask questions or lecture you, because I know you, Mabel, and you’re not the sort of person who does something like steal without a very good reason, but I will warn you to be careful.”
“Thank you,” I said miserably, staring out the grimy window.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have any sage advice regarding the theft of objects, but I’ll give you my cousin Savian’s number. Do you remember him?”
“I think so,” I said, digging through memories of about twenty years before. “Tall, long face, handsome?”
“That’s him. He’s married to a dragon now, and has three kids. Anyway, Savian is also a freelance thief taker and tracker, and has a number of what he calls morally gray acts in his past. If anyone can tell you how to steal something without being caught, he can.”
I thanked her, and we spent a good ten minutes chatting about our lives before I called her cousin and explained what I needed as best I could. “I’m sorry for being so vague,” I finished. “And I know what I’m asking for is highly problematic, but ...”
“But you’re between a rock and a hard place,” Savian said smoothly, his English accent reminding me of BBC presenters, all liquid vowels. “Don’t worry, I’ve been there. So has my wife. She’s a dragon and has endless trouble with some lawless kinfolk. Tribes, you know.”
“Tribes?” I asked, my mind immediately going to Hunter. I wondered what sort of a dragon he was. Most defined themselves by colors.
“Dragon tribes. As opposed to septs, which are the official groups. The tribes are made up of those who left the septs, or were kicked out. There’s a group of them out after Maura’s blood, but the weyr is helping keep them from doing any more harm.”
“I hate to ask—” I started to say.
“Weyr is the collective of dragon septs,” he said with a chuckle. “Right, let’s go over the basics of successful light thievery.”
Seven and a half hours later, I pulled the car I’d rented in Portland onto the shoulder, double-checking my GPS before looking up at the gate blocking the drive to the lodge.
“Good, there’s sufficient cloud cover to keep the moon from exposing me. I just have to climb a wall, then sneak up to the lodge, find the sword, and get away without anyone knowing.” I spoke aloud in an attempt to buoy my sunken spirits. “It’s kind of James Bond–ish, really.”
I didn’t want to get out of the car, didn’t want to do something so heinous as stealing another’s property, but the alternative—a lifetime spent in the Akasha—was unthinkable.
“I’ll make it up to them,” I swore to myself as I got out of the car, and started toward the wall, mindful of Savian’s advice. “I don’t know how, but there has to be something I can do to repay them.”
The words hung heavy in the air as a flash of light caught my peripheral vision. Like other reapers, I used a moonstone pendant to act as a focus, which explained the glint I caught from the corner of my eyes when the clouds parted.
The odd conversation with Sally came to mind; I hesitated a moment before taking off the moonstone and hiding it in the car. With a deep breath, and a mental promise that I would make things right with the owner of the sword, I forced myself to look for a place to climb the perimeter fence.
“It’ll be OK,” I told myself in between grunts as I hoisted myself up once I found a likely looking spot, avoiding the bits of broken glass embedded into the top of the fence. “Just one quick job, and it’ll all be over.”
The words hung in the air like lead balloons.
Ones that didn’t in the least believe my optimistic statement.