Witch, outcast, dead person—according to official records, anyway.
I’m a lot of things.
Including directionally challenged.
That’s really biting me in the ass right at this moment in time.
I’m so close to being done with my job for the day, I can almost taste sweet, sweet freedom. I skid to a stop at my planned exit… or at least I think it’s my planned exit. I jiggle the door handle, ready to get the hell out of here before anyone notices my presence.
Nothing happens. The damn thing is locked.
Dammit. I’ve been in the Moonshadow coven’s house for over an hour already, casing the joint ready for my job tomorrow. So far, I’ve managed to avoid seeing another person the whole time I’ve been here. I’ve had to keep myself cloaked with a thick glamor the entire time. My scent, my image, my damn aura are all blanketed in a thick layer of magic, so I won’t trip any of the wards. The last thing I want to do is trigger them. I can’t afford to alert anyone to my presence, since I’m not supposed to be here.
I pull and push at the door before trying to force a little magic into the handle. I’m hoping that it’s just stuck and maybe a bit of elbow grease will have it flying open any moment.
No such luck.
This particular wood and iron monstrosity does not budge an inch.
Yeah… it’s definitely the wrong door.
Shit.
My heart is pounding already after running around this place. The Moonshadow coven is a mid-tier coven with its residence right in the middle of Arcanum city center, and my mark for this week’s bit of larceny. My client has requested two of the magical artifacts the coven has currently sequestered away. Today’s job is a bit of prep work and reconnaissance before my actual mission. Good thing too, or I’d currently be struggling to get out of a locked door while cloaking the magical signatures of two very powerful objects.
Apparently, the coven used to be larger before it broke in two. When they split, the coven Mother took both artifacts. My client has tried talking things out, but that didn’t work. So here I am with this gig, to find and retrieve the artifacts.
Lucky me.
I’ve got a sweat going since I’ve got my hood pulled all the way up. My armpits are clammy and I can feel sweat dripping and pooling at the small of my back.
No one ever said this job was glamorous.
I can’t afford to mess this up. Things are always tight at home. But after an incident involving me trying to retrieve an illegal dog-slash-chimera mix that had been stolen from its owner, and a fire escape, I sprained my ankle and I’ve been unable to do any hands-on work for weeks. Instead, I got relegated to the boring busy work which doesn’t pay nearly as well.
I need to get out of here. I reckon I have about twenty minutes before my magical batteries go flat. I’m already going to be in desperate need of sugar and caffeine to get me home without passing out on a park bench.
Been there, done that, got pooped on by a pigeon for the privilege.
“Hey, Ember?” I send the thoughts through to my buddy, my pseudo-brother, and fellow outcast. He’s a telepathic whose family kicked him out as soon as they realized the powers he’d manifested. He was ten at the time and spent an entire year on the streets before the rest of us found him. Unsurprisingly, he hates his powers and rarely uses them.
Well, tough titties for him. All of us outcasts and weirdos have a complex relationship with our powers. They’re the reason our society shunned us all.
But right now, I really need him.
“Ember, man. Buddy, ol’ pal, I need a little help here.”
I’m the only person we know who can push my thoughts into Ember’s head. I know he hates it when I do, so it’s not something I’ll force him into unless I have to.
“Silver.” His voice growls inside my head and I let out a huffed breath of relief. “You in trouble?”
“My exit is blocked. I need Rook to come up with another route out of this place. Is he with you?”
“Locked door tripping you up? That’s not like you, Silver.” His raspy chuckle is right in my ear, like he’s standing beside me and I roll my eyes, even though he can’t see me. “You sure you didn’t get confused between upstairs and downstairs again?”
These guys might be my bodged-together family, but that doesn’t stop them from being assholes. It’s a running joke that I can do absolutely anything. I’m a jack-of-all-trades most of the time and my skill set is pretty… diverse.
Unique.
One of the reasons I’ve spent most of my life hiding exactly what I can do. But I can’t do everything.
Like opening stupid locked doors.
Or finding my way out of a well sign-posted room. Doesn’t seem to matter if I’m inside or outside. Half the time I barely know my left from my right.
I’m not so hot on getting out of places, in general. Or anything that requires a huge amount of patience, or a gentle touch. I’m more of a wham bam, thank you ma’am type.
I could just draw on some of my magic and blast a ball of fire at the door, but that’s not exactly going unnoticed.
Dammit, I knew I should have brought someone with me.
“Seriously, a little help, man? I’m trying to fly under the radar here, and if I blow up the door, it’ll set off the wards. There are people upstairs and I need Rook right now.”
“Sure, sure. Deep breath, Silver. I’m on my way to him right now and we’ll get you out of there.”
Rook’s our resident escape artist. He’s a few years older than me and helped me to find my feet when I was twelve years old and had just been kicked out of my coven. If he hadn’t happened to be in the same cell as me when I was first apprehended, I doubt I ever would have escaped from the execution that was planned for me by the city judiciary.
As it is, we worked together and managed to escape from the judiciary, with both of us officially recorded as having died in our cell.
It’s a knotty, dark past the two of us share.
Rook has got me out of more than a few jams in the past. More than that, I’m pretty sure he’s the reason I’ve survived this long.
I just hope this is another jam he can get me out of.
Another minute passes and my palms are sweating so badly they’re slippery as I slink away from the door. I head toward a little antechamber close to the bottom of a huge wooden staircase, keeping an ear out for movement. I know the witches in the coven have been busy in their morning rituals. I heard the chanting when I skirted around the back of the house earlier, but that’s bound to finish soon.
And right on time, I hear them.
Voices.
They’re heading down the staircase toward me. I pull on more of my magic, shoring up the cloaking spell I’ve got going on, barely breathing as they pass by.
“Silver?” Ember’s voice in my head makes me just about shit my pants.
“Still here,” I tell him.
“Okay, so listen very carefully.” I roll my eyes at him, even though he can’t see me. “Rook says there’s a door just behind the staircase. It leads to another room with a back exit. Head through it and then there should be a window you can use to get out of there. No lefts or rights for you to get muddled up.” His voice is heavy with amusement, and I mentally flip him off.
“Thanks, guys.” I wait another moment to make sure the owners of the nearby voices have moved on, and then make a mad dash toward the door behind me.
Rook’s come good again. This door opens easily. I push it open slowly and find myself in what looks like a mud room. There are coats and cloaks and boots scattered all over the place. And jackpot, there’s a massive window leading out onto the street outside. I peer out and see that it leads to a quiet side street, which is currently deserted. Yanking it open and cringing as it creaks slightly, I fling myself out onto the concrete outside, wincing as I land heavily on my dodgy ankle and then slip out onto the main street.
The city of Arcanum is bustling, despite the fact it’s drizzling. I keep my hood pulled up over my face and hurry along, joining the crowd and heading back toward the Salvage Yards.
Home.
It’s not until I’m hidden in the crowd. I let out a long relieved breath.
Fuck, that was more stressful than it should have been.
“You get out all right, Silver?” Ember asks.
“Sure did. I need a coffee, a doughnut, and a nap.”
“Uh huh, see you soon.”
He doesn’t sound impressed with me, but I shrug his displeasure off. He doesn’t like me doing these kinds of jobs. Ember’s an artist and he’s the one responsible for most of the artwork covering the shithole warehouse where we live. Sometimes he even deigns to sell a few pieces of his work under a false identity and brings in a few coins, but it’s never an income we can rely too much on.
Not that any of us can have jobs that are steady. There are no nine-to-five office jobs in our futures. That would mean being included in a database, having our names and addresses filed away somewhere. All things that you can’t have when you live your life in the shadows.
When you no longer have a name that you can claim ownership of.
Or like Rook and me, you’ve been dead for the past decade and are living under false identities.
It’s not like anyone would want to hire us for legitimate work, anyway. We’re the forgotten dregs of society and that works for us. We make it work.
Ember doesn’t seem to get that I can’t go around turning down jobs, just because they’re a little high risk.
After all, our entire lives are risky.
*
Twenty minutes later and my feet are burning in my cheap boots as I hotfoot it down the hill to the Salvage Yards. Our place is one of the old warehouses in an entire district of them. The district has been abandoned for at least fifty years, ever since the city got an influx of magic users and most of the humans moved out. All the warehouses and the factories got shut down, and they were left to grow cobwebs.
To rot. Just like those of us who choose to live here.
Ten of us live in an old textile warehouse, one that’s absolutely plastered with graffiti—all thanks to Ember and his need to decorate everything he has to look at for more than five minutes. The inside is a hodgepodge of furniture we’ve rescued over the years and out back there’s a little oasis of a garden, thanks to our resident potion maker and herbalist, Luna.
It’s not all sunshine and roses, though. We barely have a waste management system since the city authorities don’t bother to stretch this far, considering no one is supposed to live way out here. No transport runs within about a mile of us, so we all do a ton of walking since none of us have the cash to even consider buying a car. We barely have working plumbing either, and the system our electricity works on is unregulated, which means it goes on and off at odd intervals.
The only other people around are those that aren’t welcome anywhere. Most of the time, they’re no trouble. But every so often, we wind up having people dipping in and out, where we wake up one morning with all our wiring stripped out or our savings swiped.
The whole place is a dive. But it’s all we’ve got, so we make do.
As soon as I step through the warehouse door, I’m accosted by two teenage girls who can somehow scent the bag of doughnuts I picked up on the way home. Seriously, the two of them are like bloodhounds when it comes to sugary treats.
Una and Mona, twins that have only been with us for the past few months.
And I have to say I’ve got a soft spot for the two of them.
I thrust the bag at them and grin. “Breakfast of champions.”
My offering is met with two very high-pitched squeals that echo off the high ceiling and I wince slightly. Hopefully, everyone is up already. They’ll certainly be awake now if they weren’t.
“Not sure that’s what counts as a healthy, balanced diet,” Ember grumbles from behind me. I spin around and shoot him a shit-eating grin. These two kids spent a couple of months living underground in The Buried Citadel before they found their way to us. It's a labyrinth of tunnels, old sewer pipes, and catacombs where only the really desperate outcasts from our society go. Things must have been pretty dire with their mother for her to send them down there and it’s clear the two of them have seen more shit than they should at their age.
I can’t see a sugary breakfast damaging them too badly.
“So today went well,” he says drily. “You’re not still planning on doing the job, are you? If you get caught, there’ll be no saving you. You get that, right?”
I roll my eyes at Ember as I feel the waves of his disapproval in my general life choices rolling off him.
But screw him. The guy might be like my brother, but he’s not the one who can do the things I can. He’s not the one who ends up getting most of the jobs that put food on our table. Who buys us clothes and medicine, shoes for us all and whatever else we might need.
This job should keep us sitting pretty for a couple of months at least. We might even be able to get our water heater fixed so that it doesn’t scald us randomly. We’ll have to pay a massive premium to anyone willing to travel this far out to fix it. And while we all try to be handy and fix stuff ourselves as much as possible, the system is ancient and doesn’t respond to either coaxing or threats.
Ember must see the resolve in my expression. He sighs loudly and puts his warm, stained hands on my shoulders.
“Fine. Let’s go find Rook and see if we can find you some alternate escape routes. Something tells me you’re going to need them.”
*
I blame my shitty sense of direction for what happens later that night too.
One wrong turn and I wind up in an alleyway right on the edge of the Nexus District, a place known for its underground clubs and bars and an anything goes nightlife scene.
One wrong turn and I’m not where I’m supposed to be.
Which is meeting with one of my repeat clients. He messaged earlier and asked to meet here to discuss another job, probably another bit of minor stalking of his ex-boss. It’s simple enough. I hang around their work, follow them around a bit and report back that they don’t seem to be struggling too badly without him.
Which is better than him stalking them himself, I guess.
And it’s not like I don’t have morals when it comes to the jobs I take on. I don’t hurt people unnecessarily. If he was a red-flag ex-boyfriend, I wouldn’t be involving myself in his business. But it’s hard to have bold lines when you have a bunch of people to feed. New shoes to buy for the younger kids who can’t earn money for themselves yet.
I can’t be too picky and I didn’t want to lose this guy’s business, even though he asked to meet in a bar at close to midnight.
I’m up at the ass crack of dawn, so I want it all to go smoothly.
Too bad I don’t have a clue where I’m going.
I should be at a bar called Mystique. The client said that it didn’t have a super obvious sign, because they liked that kind of shit around here.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
But searching for a sign-less door led to me not paying attention to where I was walking, I got turned around somehow and then must have taken a wrong turn.
Leading me here.
Down an alleyway that smells faintly of garbage and smoke.
I turn around and bump into a growly wall of a man.
… two minutes later and my back’s against the brick wall sucking in deep breaths of a stranger’s spicy scent.
I don’t exactly know how this happened…
One minute I was wandering around like an idiot. I turned on my heel and slammed into this guy’s broad chest, then he growled at me like an angry bear. My eyes flicked up to see two dark eyes and a head of curly dark hair.
He’s gorgeous in an intensely good-looking way. Like it almost hurts my eyes to look at him
“What are you doing hanging around out here, doll?”
I stare up at him, our chests brushing, breaths mingling.
“Pretty sure I took a wrong turn somewhere,” I tell him. “Story of my life.” That’s delivered with a little grin and a wink, causing him to step impossibly closer.
He runs his fingers up my arm, tracing the skin of my neck until it reaches my pounding pulse.
“So you’re saying you didn’t follow me out here?” he asks with a cocky eyebrow raise.
The question is so ridiculous, I let out a laugh that came out breathier than I’d have liked.
“No, I didn’t. I’m sure you’d have liked that though, wouldn’t you?”
One eyebrow goes up as he studies me with a little smirk. “Well, you’re here now, aren’t you.”
My heart pounds in my chest. Everything about this situation should be setting off alarm bells. Meeting random, massive men in deserted alleyways doesn’t seem like it should be on anyone’s list of good life choices.
I’m weirdly not afraid though.
Not just because I know I can take care of myself. I have plenty of things up my sleeve I could pull out if needed. I have no idea if all sense left my brain when I left the warehouse tonight or something, but all I feel toward this man is heat.
A primal kind of attraction I haven’t felt before.
He has this raw kind of energy pulsing off him and instead of it repulsing me, I find myself drawn to it.
“How about I persuade you it was a right turn you took,” he growls, eyes darting between my eyes and my lips with obvious intent.
My answer is to surge upward and press my lips to his.
And fuck, if I thought he was magnetic before, kissing him is like pressing my lips against a livewire. Energy floods through me as he lets out a low groan, pressing my back hard against the brick.
I gasp and writhe against him, squeezing my hand against his hot, thick cock still zipped in his pants.
I quickly rectify that, feeling his hot length against my palm as I pump up and down and he lets out a delicious groan.
“Fuuuck. Keep doing that and I’ll come in my pants.”
He doesn’t back up though, instead taking my lips again in another devouring kiss. I continue to pump my hand, squeezing around the hard length of him as he pushes his hand down my pants, massaging my clit with sure strokes.
“So damn wet. Fuck.”
We continue to frantically get each other off, like two teenagers that have just discovered the fun you can have with your pants down. It’s hot and senseless and a couple of minutes later, he’s letting out a deep groan as he comes all over my hand. I clench around his fingers as an orgasm overtakes me almost simultaneously.
We’re both panting, sticky messes when we finally break apart.
Then, like a spell is broken, he pulls away. The bear of a man then extracts his fingers and sucks my juices from them with another guttural groan.
“Fuck, I feel like a fucking teenager, jizzing all over myself.” He zips his pants up with a scowl. “Guess that’s the end of my night then,” he mutters.
I shoot him an uncertain smile as I yank up my own pants.
“Yeah, me too.” His release is still all over my hand and is cooling fast. My own panties are wet and I can’t wait to get out of them.
This is the awkward part. The post hook-up, post orgasm clean up and disengagement.
He doesn’t offer to walk me home, or to get me back safely.
Not that I expect him to. It’s not like a quick mutual handjob is the sign of superior manners on either of our parts.
“Well, good meeting you, doll.”
With that he spins on his heel and heads through the back door of the club, leaving me alone in the alleyway.
Damn sense of direction leading me astray.
