CHAPTER1
LUCY
This is fine. It's fine. It's only a spooky tomb hidden in a long-forgotten burial mound in the Welsh countryside. It's definitely not booby trapped and cursed.
Definitely not. Fuck, it's my sixth tomb of the year, and knowing the way my luck has been going, it's probably a thousand curses strung together with a trip wire, waiting to turn me into a poisoned-dart pincushion.
I groan and look up toward the gray sky. It hangs low over the countryside, blotting out the light of the waning moon, heavy with rain, snow, or a shitty mix of the two that'll make driving back into town on mud and gravel roads a real bitch. If I survive the spooky tomb, that is.
Okay, big girl panties. Big. Girl. Panties. In my career as a treasure liberator, I've scoured dozens of spooky tombs from top to bottom and I've only nearly died like eight times.
Eight.Hm. Balls, maybe I'm some kind of cat shifter fae creature? Am I on my ninth life, about to get a spear through the chest and shuffle off this mortal coil for good? Hah, would that make me acatburglar? I crack myself up.
Either way, I don't relish the thought of my imminent demise.
No one knows where kin go when we die, but I'm guessing there's some special hell slipped in among the seven realms for me. I can only imagine kin hells are like the bottom of the ocean. We could explore it. We really could. Only, have you seen the eldritch horrors that lurk down there? No fucking thank you. Hard pass. I’m a magical being with a propensity for daring my way into danger, and even I have no interest in plumbing the proverbial depths of the shadow realm's ocean floor.
Unease churns in my gut, sourness burning at the back of my throat. The shadow realm hasn’t always been so shrouded in darkness. It’s not the fire-and-brimstone hellscape humans imagine when they think of where demons and other creatures that go bump in the night might come from—or at least, it didn’t use to be. For the longest time, it was a realm like any other. In perfect cosmic balance or whatever woo-woo nonsense. Without darkness, there is no light and vicey-versey. That kind of Jedi-Sith ish. Anakin was the chosen one, damn it, the one who was supposed to bring balance to the force, not lead it to darkness.
The shadow realm, like the force, got Anakin Skywalkered.
Now, evil festers where the light that once cast the shadows no longer reaches. Wickedness breeds in the darkness. So says my grumpy demon foster dad of sorts. He escaped the shadow realm and only goes back to rescue orphans like the absolute baller he is. If there's a kin heaven, he sure as shit has a first-class ticket to it.
You'redoing this for Aronael and Shadow House, I remind myself. Half a billion dollars can save a whole bunch of orphaned kin, just the way Aron and Shadow House saved me. But if I'm being honest (and I try to be, occasionally), keeping the kin orphanage slash community shelter standing is how I justified taking a job I already wanted. Aron's always said I never think before I leap. Or was it never think at all?
Yeah, Aron canneverknow the kind of shit I've gotten myself into this time.
Because someone with scads of money and magic as unidentifiable as mine is trying to find me so he can dig ancient arcane relics out of my chest, by any means necessary, and I know they're going to be reallymeanmeans.
About that.
Scary mother trucker Khadyr Blackmore dangled the dollars in front of me and I almost didn't bite. I've always found jobs and the associated treasure-in-need-of-liberation easily enough. I could have found quicker and easier jobs to save up the scratch for Shadow House, but then he showed me an old drawing on a withered scrap of vellum and, hells bells, I would have taken the job for free. I would imagine that it's hard to make an ink drawing on goat skin lookshiny, but fuck me if that sun shard didn't downright glow on the page.
I've always been powerless to resist the call of shinies.
Truthfully, I didn't put too much energy into resisting the half bil either, and so I signed a contract in blood (gross, ill advised, do not recommend) and now a mysterious freak of nature is trying to find me. Because Ididfind the sun shard for him. I liberated it from two demonkin after a lot of hard work and oh-so much play. Did I play myself in the process? Yeah. I leapt. Didn't look. Fell in love. But I did the job as it had to be done. I got as close to the demon and incubus as lips to skin, snatched the shard and scrammed. I mean, shit, I would have done the job just for the existence-shaking orgasms they gave me.
I almost couldn't bring myself to steal the shard from them after the months I spent in their bed, but it was shiny, and I needed the dough for Shadow House before some evil robber baron bought up the land or whatever.
And Ireallyneeded Khadyr Blackmore to not rip my spine out and wear it as the oh-so-fashionable belt to a jacket made from my skin. I rub at the spot where said spine meets my skull, cold sweat making the fine, small hairs at the back of my neck icy against my skin. Khadyr isn't someone you fuck with if you like your skin where it is, and I do. Okay, maybe the skin coat thing is an exaggeration, but it's only because no one knows a fuckingthingabout the man other than he earned his reputation for ruthlessness in blood.
He's kin–magical–like I am, but no species of kin anyone recognizes. Just like me. Not faekin, not earthkin, and not demonkin. He'sother. Unknown. I hate that I have that in common with him. No one knows the nature or the extent of his powers, but I'm damn sure I don't want to personally find out when I don't find him another sun shard.
Because the one I so skillfully procured in between having my mind blown by two very sexy demonkin?
Yeah, um, it sunk itself into my chest and magically lodged itself behind my breastbone. Shittiest surprise ever. I visited fae healers, shamans, even a bog witch (0/10, do not recommend, had to burn my stinky boots with faefire afterwards, will probably have nightmares for the rest of eternity) trying to find a way to get it out. No luck.
No luck with the other four liberated shards I've earned myself, either.
See, this isn't my first Tomb Raider cosplay (if Lara Croft wore snow boots, a pom-pom hat and the puffiest puffy coat ever) of this job. In fact, this is Tomb Number Five of this job, and I'm really running out of tomb opportunities for magical trial and error at this point.
I know I've got an excellent rack, but I'm starting to resent just how attracted to it the shards are.
I tried tongs in the first crypt, thinking I'd be safe from being chest-sharded if I didn't actually touch the thing. You can guess how that went. I became the pod to two arcane relic peas.
I tried bespelled gloves (which were, admittedly, veryfunto liberate) in the second, and in the third, I even brought in a vampire associate of mine, armed with a warded chest, for the grab and stash. The shard never made it into the chest. Well, it made it intomychest. Wrong chest. In desperation, I tried wearing a shadow-steel breastplate I borrowed from the rightful owner of the last tomb I raided. No dice. The shard sucked itself right through the armor and into me.
This time, I've wardedmyself. No magicked armor or containment vessels. I'm the problem here, so I've covered myself in wards. The shiny shit I had to fence to pay for these wards... I sigh. But they'll be well worth it if they work because I've already got about five too many shiny magical artifacts lodged between my heart and lungs and no way to get them out.
