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.
