Hi Darlins!
It's a new release day, and I didn't have the bandwidth for more Rivalries leading up to this. I promise a fulsome and very exciting chapter next week! In the meantime, please enjoy the beginning of the book that came out today, Reclaimed, the third story in the Treasured series. You don't have to have read the first two to get the gist from this ;) If you're interested in it, though, there's a buy link and a blurb here!
Everything seems perfect for Daniel Hart, all set to graduate from grad
school and deeply in love with the attentive but mysterious Rhys Daveth,
a doppelganger and wanted criminal. But Daniel's happiness is shattered
when he has to make a painful choice between the man he loves and the
vocation he's meant for.
Even worse, a jealous figure from Rhys'
past is determined to remove Daniel from the picture, which for him
means taking Daniel's shape and killing the original. If Rhys can't
find him in time, Daniel will die, and Rhys will fall into the hands of a
maniac who would rather destroy him than let him go. Daniel and Rhys
will have to use unreliable, unprecedented magic to save each other...or
die trying.
***
Reclaimed
May 2013
People said you get what you deserve.
One of the few theological constants the world over, at any time in history and in almost any culture, was the idea that the things you’ve done directly affect the things that would be done to you, whether by God, or man, or nature itself. Barring instances of extreme good or bad fortune, if you’ve treated others well, then you could expect to be treated the same way. If, however, you’ve treated others with disdain or abuse, then the wheel of life would turn and punish you for your arrogance.
Well, I’d always considered myself to be a fairly average person, not especially good, or kind, or brilliant, but definitely not bad either. I didn’t steal, tried not to lie, and was raised to be respectful. I didn’t cry out for attention or demand notice, and usually stayed within the lines society had drawn for me. I was a student, a scholar, and an introvert, and happy to be that way. I didn’t ask for anything incredible in my life…but incredible happened to me anyway.
In the form of Rhys Daveth. Liar, imposter, thief: Rhys was all of these things. Every time he visited me he brought fun, sex, and trouble with him.
One serious side effect of that was my ostracization from my former mentor, Dr. Constance Glau. The only reason Rhys and I met in the first place was so that he could rob the museum I was working in, and use what he got there to rob an even bigger museum of the priceless magical artifacts it was showcasing. Dr. Glau had known of Rhys, known of his crew, and blamed them—rightly, even if she couldn’t prove it—for the heist. She blamed me as well, for being the one to bring him there, for being easy on him, for going sweet on him. And to be honest, I blamed myself a little too.
Rhys wasn’t perfect, but I loved him, and since that first incident he’d gone out of his way to make things up to me. I was trying to let his actions speak louder than his words. He was still a thief, but I liked to think that wouldn’t last forever. He was so talented, there was so much he could do…surely stealing from museums and private collectors wouldn’t appeal to him forever.
There was also the other side effect that had sprung up as a result of meeting him, springing from the magical amulet he’d stolen and given to me as a gift in order to increase my limited futuresight. That side effect, I didn’t have as good a handle on.
That didn’t mean Rhys and I didn’t take advantage of it, though.
“What did the doc have to say about our little connection, Danny?” he asked languorously over the phone one night. Muggy winter was finally giving way to spring, and it was so nice outside that I left my apartment’s single, dinky window open so I could smell the fresh air.
“I’m pretty sure he thinks I’m making it up,” I replied, laying back on my couch and looking out at the sky. It was just turning evening, and broad brushstrokes of peach and lavender filled the sky as the sun slowly sank. “He said he couldn’t be specific unless I gave him the amulet to study, and I wasn’t about to do that.”
“Had some theories though, didn’t he?” Rhys pressed. I could hear him shifting around on something, probably silk sheets, knowing him. I had no idea where he was or what the time was there, but Rhys was never the kind of person to deny himself a luxury, and he liked to sleep on silk sheets. He’d bought me two sets for Valentine’s Day, and we’d gotten both of them dirty before that particular night was over.
“He said it all depended on the magic. You carried the amulet for a little while before I did, and once it had a taste of both of our abilities it might have decided to bind us together for some reason of its own, an intrinsic part of its spell that we just don’t know about. Or it might have something to do with my futuresight, or it might be something you’ve absorbed off of one of your shells.” On very rare occasions, when Rhys took the form of someone magically gifted, he also possessed some of their gift while he wore their shell. That was how he had learned over twenty languages in a single evening, by seducing a prominent linguist who apparently had more than enough ability to go around.
“Or the Eye could just be the trigger for a spontaneous connection,” I continued, joking, and Rhys chuckled into the phone. Spontaneous magical connections were the sort of things that soap opera writers put into plots when they needed two people to fall in love fast. They were a one-in-a-million sort of thing, where two people bonded to each other so intimately that they could influence each other’s thoughts and emotions.
Rhys and I could do that with each other, to a certain extent. When he wore my shape, I could see what he saw as though I were him, and when he focused, he could see and feel what I was doing as well, although not as often or as easily. The bond affected my dreams too, so I experienced hours of his actual day while I was sleeping.
To my surprise, the sudden lack of privacy didn’t bother me at all, and it certainly didn’t bother Rhys. I had never felt so close to anyone before this, and I never wanted it to end.
Life was pretty damn good. I was graduating with my doctorate soon, I had several job interviews already lined up, and my incredible boyfriend was coming for a visit in less than a week. I couldn’t help being anything except happy, even as a voice in the back of my mind quietly worried over what was going to happen to us when Rhys’s career and mine intersected again.
~* * *~
I was in the middle of packing up my office when Constance stalked in. I was a teaching assistant for several freshman-level History of Artifacts courses, but since I was graduating, I had been excused from keeping up my office hours through the end of the semester. The rest of the graduate students, with whom I shared the closet-like office, would pick up the slack for the final exam.
Everything I personally owned fit into one 24-inch square cardboard box, and almost all of it was books, so I didn’t anticipate clearing out would take long. Besides, I was motivated to go quickly; Rhys was due any time and I wanted to be ready for him.
I looked up when Constance entered and felt my heart clench a little. Professor Constance Glau, who ran the campus museum, had been my advisor during the first two years of my graduate studies. After Rhys broke into the museum wearing my shell, she had accused me of being the thief, and nothing I said could convince her otherwise.
I was eventually proven innocent, but the gulf that had opened up between us just couldn’t be bridged. She had her suspicions about Rhys—not facts, no one else knew the facts. She knew I was still seeing him and couldn’t forgive me for being with someone who she thought stole from museums, her life’s focus. Constance and I had mutually ended our professional relationship, and I hadn’t spoken to her except at faculty meetings for months now. I felt guilty about what Rhys did, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel guilty about loving him, or being happy with him.
Constance was a small woman, very pretty, with dark hair held back in a bun and gold-framed glasses. The top of her head reached about to my shoulder when we stood next to each other, and she wasn’t usually an intimidating figure. Right now, though, she looked furious enough that I actually rolled my chair away from my desk, giving me a few inches more space as she marched up to me.
“Look at this!” She slammed a newspaper down on my desk and pointed with one manicured nail at the headline. It was the Arts section of the local paper, but instead of featuring an interview with an actor or covering the latest museum exhibit, the headline decried in a bold header: BRITISH MUSEUM ROBBED!
Beneath it was a picture of the director of the museum standing on the front steps, talking to policemen and looking distraught. The caption read Museum staff and investigators alike were stunned to discover the theft of the British Museum’s Trojan Treasure and other invaluable pieces.
“Did you know he was going to do this?” Constance demanded, stabbing at the page with her finger. “Did you know?”
“Know who was going to do this?” I asked, bewildered.
“Who,” she mocked me scathingly. “Your lover, Daniel, your thoughtless, greedy fool of a lover! Oh, I know of him,” she continued, starting to pace. “I know of him and his colleagues, Zahra Khugayev and the others. They are infamous in Europe, and have clearly expanded to America now. No museum is safe from them, no artifact, nothing, especially not when they have an ally on the inside.” Constance inhaled deeply, trying to regain some control over herself. “I hope you’re happy.” She turned around and left, slamming the door behind her.
I picked up the newspaper in shaking hands, reading a little further into the article. Thieves had somehow broken into the British Museum, the most heavily warded museum in the world with the finest collection of ancient magical artifacts ever amassed in one place—thanks to colonialism. They had somehow managed to make off with almost the entirety of the collection of copper tools, bronze weapons, and gold jewelry that had first been excavated from Troy in the 1870s: the famous Trojan Treasure.
It had been my favorite display when I visited the museum with my parents as a child. When I’d found out last year that it was going to be repatriated to the Turkish government, I’d been happy—taking measures to repatriate artifacts was something that needed to happen in every Western museum in the world.
Now no one but people with their hands on the pulse of the black market would ever see these treasures again.
It might not have been them. Rhys had told me they tended to avoid the big-name collections like this one, that they were too hot to move even on the black market.
Had he lied?
I read more. The heist had been slick, a combination of magic and technological know-how that made my heart drop through my diaphragm and end up somewhere beside my feet. It was an exact description of the capacity of Rhys’s crew, from the talismans needed to break through the shielding to the way they’d bypassed the security alarms. One museum guard had originally been implicated in the theft, then let go.
Yeah. That had Rhys’s signature all over it.
Fuck.
“Oh, my God.” I covered my face with my hands. Everything I hadn’t wanted to think about, things I had been relentlessly pushing to the back of my mind for the past year, surged forward again. She had been right. Constance had been right, but I had been too afraid to face it.
I don’t know how long I sat there at my desk, trying to regain my composure. Eventually I managed to load up my box, get to the bus, and make it back to my apartment before the thoughts overwhelmed me.
I took the God’s Eye out of my pocket, unwrapped it, set it on my coffee table and stared at it. It was beautiful, about the size of a silver dollar. The iris was lapis lazuli, the white was mother of pearl, and the whole thing was lined with a band of thick, shining gold, so pure it was practically soft to the touch.
This was history, something that belonged to everyone, and I had selfishly accepted it and hidden it away for months. This was Rhys’s first gift to me, a grand gesture at the time, but even then I’d felt uncomfortable accepting it. Months of being under his influence had changed me, made me ignore the violation that I knew keeping the amulet was in favor of how it made me feel, like I was special.
Ha. I wasn’t special. I was just weak.
Would I have tried to stop Rhys from robbing the British Museum if I’d known he was going to try? I wanted to think so. But then, I already knew about other jobs he’d done, other museums he’d robbed, and I hadn’t done anything about those. Not just my own museum, but the Cairo Museum, the Smithsonian, even the Louvre… I knew he’d done multiple jobs there, he’d tacitly admitted it to me time after time. I’d ignored it in favor of the joy I got from being with him.
It was selfish of me, so selfish.
Going to England was the last big vacation we’d had while my father was still alive, and the British Museum was the last place we’d gone. We’d spent all day wandering from one marble room to the next, admiring the exhibits. While the Trojan Treasure was my favorite, I’d spent an hour staring at the Elgin Marbles, sculptures that had been removed from the Parthenon in Greece and brought to London in the early nineteenth century. I thought they were fantastic, but my dad had taken a more cynical view.
“They’re very impressive,” he’d told me, one hand on my shoulder as we looked at statuary from the East Pediment. “But you know, they really should have been left where they were. Stuff like this, you shouldn’t be allowed to buy and sell it.”
“Why not?” I asked him.
“Cause it belongs to everyone, not just anyone, Dan,” he told me. “Nobody should get rich selling something they didn’t make for themselves.” My dad had been a carpenter, and he took a lot of pride in the things he made. A lot of people called his viewpoints old fashioned, my mother among them, but he never let it bother him.
He died two years later, in a hit and run, and we buried him in a coffin he had made for himself years earlier. He’d planned ahead, my dad.
I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to face it, but I couldn’t stop myself. I might have been willfully blind, but I wasn’t going to be a coward, too. I wiped my eyes one last time, turned on my computer, and spent the rest of the night researching museum thefts on the web. I searched as far back as ten years, not knowing how long Rhys had been at it, but figuring it couldn’t have been much longer than that. I made a list of all the major heists and read everything I could find about them, trying to determine how they were done and who might have been behind them.
I knew how Rhys worked. I knew who he worked with. Zahra Khugayev was the ringleader of their band of thieves but there were more of them, three more apart from Rhys. Jenny and Jeremy Murray were twins, both of them brilliant, one a sorcerer and the other a tech wizard.
There was also Christine, a hybrid shifter, created by the same secret British government program that was responsible for Rhys’s existence. Christine had more power, more strength, and more speed than a normal shifter, and she was built on top of that. And Rhys, well, let’s just say doppelgangers were naturally quite rare. He was one of God only knew how many that had been selectively bred and trained to be spies for their government, and he was quite possibly the only one who had ever escaped.
I felt so bad for Rhys. I knew he must have had a terrible childhood, between what he’d told me and what the man who had briefly captured him while we were in Venice had hinted at. Rhys was a hunted man, a haunted man, and a man who loved a challenge. He didn’t rob museums because he needed the money; I think he did it for the thrill of outwitting someone else, for the rush that came with besting some of the world’s greatest minds with the brilliance of his own team. They were like family to him.
And I was the lover who never said anything, never brought it up, never told him to stop. I was the man who loved him so much that I blindly ignored all of his faults for the privilege of basking in the glow of his sun.
That was going to have to change.
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