Chapter 4
Up on top of the house, a dark figure climbed over the roof ridge and silently made its way down toward the balcony. When she got near the edge, she froze.
There were two men on the balcony, dressed in black from head to toe—black pants, black turtlenecks topped with many-pocketed combat vests, and ski masks.
In fact, they were dressed exactly like her.
Shit. Did all the kids in the class call each other this morning and decide to wear the same thing? And rob the same damn house?
Silently, she cursed her ex-boyfriend. She should have known better than to get involved with any scheme involving Jack Harper. Or a sorcerer. Definitely not both. But the job seemed straightforward, and the money was too good to turn down.
She should have known that meant ‘too good to be true.’
She should ditch out on this job, right here right now. But there was another reason she’d agreed to take this on, a personal one.
Blaze McKenna was a rogue witch who made her money from dealing in dark artifacts.
Rebel hated rogue witches.
Rogues had killed her parents, putting her and her little sister out on the street, to claw their way up a food chain that had way too many predators.
And this one was living large off the misery of others, in her overpriced villa that spilled recklessly down the forested ridge overlooking Portland.
Now, according to Jack’s employer, she’d acquired a dark artifact that could put the entire city in danger. She needed to be stopped.
If Rebel could make a good payday at the same time, it was a win-win.
Rebel eyed the two men. Chances were good they were after the same thing she was. They had their heads tilted back, looking up at the master suite windows on the top floor. Watching for the lights to go out. Waiting for the witch to fall asleep.
She had to beat them to the artifact.
They were blocking her preferred entry point, but she had a plan B. Rebel always had a plan B. All she had to do was use her secondary entry point, and get to the vault first. As silently as she’d come, she crept back up the roof, keeping low and staying out of their line of sight so the movement wouldn’t attract their attention.
She felt the familiar thrill she always got when a job was underway. She loved everything about breaking and entering: the skill involved, the secrecy, the feeling of being somewhere she didn’t belong when all was dark and quiet, and everyone was asleep.
Knowing that she could slip in and out like a shadow, knowing that she was the best at what she did. That no one and nothing was safe from her skill.
She climbed back over the roof ridge at the end of the house and ducked behind the chimney. She clipped her grappling hook to the top of the chimney, tested her harness with a tug, and let herself down slowly until she was hanging outside the attic window, out of sight of the two men on the balcony.
She put her hands lightly on the sides of the window frame and concentrated, feeling for the electrical energy that meant an alarm, or the different kind of energy that meant magical wards. She’d always been able to elude both, sensing the energy fields and slipping through them, though she’d never been able to say how. It was an inborn talent.
The rogue sorceress had both magical and electronic alarms. Rebel tuned into the energy and directed its flow around her, as if she were part of the window frame.
No bells or whistles split the night. It was all good.
A minute’s quick work with a glass cutter and a suction cup, and there was a neat hole in the windowpane. Rebel reached in, unlocked the window, and slithered inside.
Blaze finished getting ready for bed and sat on the edge of the mattress in her nightgown, gazing unseeing at her cozy, comfortable bedroom.
Two men were coming into her life, and soon. Both linked to the idol. The first one she’d recognized—Silas. Just like she’d feared, he was still in power in the coven. And he was still hunting her.
But the other man… the Knight of Flames. Were they both members of the coven? Were they working together, or not?
Why had his card burst into flames when she got it near the idol? She’d never seen anything like that happen before.
It might mean he opposed the power of the idol. Or it might mean he was even more closely tied to it than Silas.
And that the fog… the image of it reaching for her, like some horrible monster’s dark tentacle, wouldn’t leave her mind. Goosebumps shivered over her skin.
Blaze closed her hands into fists, refusing to let them tremble. She’d been fighting that darkness for years, and she wouldn’t give in now. She wouldn’t let it take her.
But it had come so close.
She let her gaze rest on the overstuffed leather chair in the corner, where she loved to sit and read. An afghan was tossed over the ottoman—soft deep greens and blues, like the Caribbean ocean.
She’d always hoped to see that ocean one day.
For the millionth time, she thought about leaving town. Just getting on a plane or a train or a boat, going far away from here and never coming back.
But she’d never been able to do that. Taking the idol away from Portland would be a disaster—she’d sensed that whenever she’d tried. Leaving it behind, with no one to keep it from the coven, would be a worse disaster.
For ten years she’d kept that disaster at bay, knowing deep down they were coming for her.
Her coven. Her family. The people she’d betrayed and abandoned all those years ago, in the hope of saving them.
In the hope of saving so many others.
She’d hoped they wouldn’t find her, and feared they would. Feared that everything she’d sacrificed for them had been for nothing. That removing the heart of darkness from the coven hadn’t saved them, and they would come to take it back.
Now they were nearly here. She couldn’t run. The battle she’d hoped never to fight was coming, and it had to be fought here.
But not tonight. Tonight, the idol was safe in her vault, inside its lead-lined box and its rune-embroidered wrappings, with all the magical protections she could put on it. That was all she could do.
She picked up the music box off her night table and smoothed her fingers over it. The polished wooden lid was blank, but when she opened it a jeweled dragonfly popped up, sparkling with tiny gemstones, its wings shimmering with iridescence.
Music began to play—a Chopin waltz, “The Dragonfly.” Blaze listened to it, the music soothing her as it always did. Her mother had given her the music box for on her sixteenth birthday, just before she’d succumbed to the long illness that had claimed her life. The illness Blaze suspected Silas had sent, when her mother opposed him for using the idol’s power.
But she didn’t want to think about that. Holding the music box always brought her happy memories and soothed her fears, as if some of her mother’s love still lingered in it.
The music box was the last gift her mother had given her. Well, the second-to-last. The last one was her eternal love and protection, transferred by magic and emblazoned on the skin of Blaze’s lower back like a tattoo.
I’m doing this for you, Mom. And for her father, and the others in the coven. She still missed them, didn’t even know if they were dead or alive. She’d been afraid to know.
She thought again of Silas’s face. The King of Swords. The leader. She’d barely recognized the face in the image. It didn’t just look older, although he’d be thirty-one now. It had shifted and blurred, almost as if he were someone else. Cold. Cruel. Inhuman, with no kindness or compassion left in him.
All these years, she’d cherished a tiny hope that without the idol, Silas and the coven had somehow broken free of the evil it wielded. Now she knew they probably hadn’t.
And who was the Knight of Flames? What role did he play in all this?
Her fat black cat, Bucephalus, jumped up onto the bed and rubbed against her, purring. She slid her hand down his soft, sleek back, and he butted her imperiously, demanding chin scratches.
She wound the music box and let it play, her mother’s love washing over her with the sound, filling her with strength. Her life had already come crashing down once, and she’d survived. Whatever was coming, she might not survive, but she would fight. She always did.
But not tonight. She wanted one more night of oblivion.