Operation: Petty Revenge

Lilah · Chapter 1 of 5 · 8-minute read

Professor Drusilla Saint Augustine always knew how to push just hard enough. Not so much that you’d break, but enough to make your bones hum with warning.

Case in point: sending Raven and me on a “quiet” break-in mission to spy on my ex-boyfriend and his ethically challenged wife. Dru had even dressed it up with a gift certificate—hand-delivered to Charlie, no less—for the same local restaurant he’d once taken me to after a successful book retrieval assignment down in Miami.

Subtle.

Publicly, the dinner was a reward for good performance as our only credentialed librarian in an archive full of pretenders and protectors. She’d even announced it in front of all the Special Collections Library staff and the few patrons present in the least secure of the nine vaults that protected the Priesthood of Daegan’s most dangerous books. Privately, the certificate was bait. Dru needed them out of the house long enough for Raven to plant surveillance gear and for me to poke around for stolen books.

I wasn’t thrilled, but I didn’t argue. Some missions are for the good of the Daeganean priesthood. Others are for the satisfaction of knowing you might remove the label on every canned veggie in your enemy’s house and feel better afterward. This one was both.

We waited in darkness behind their neighbor’s back fence, low in the alley where the broken slats offered just enough of a view as the last of the sunrays disappeared over the roof of the house I’d practically lived in with Charlie. I pressed a hand to the ground, not for balance but for the feel of the energy flow. Nothing magical here this far from the blue tint of a streetlight going bad. Just ants, oak leaves, and a few old beer cans.

“Do we have confirmation they’re gone?” Raven asked, his voice barely audible as we crept toward the fence that bordered Charlie’s backyard.

I checked the updated smartwatch that Dru had commissioned her tech team to create for assignments like this one. “Five minutes ago. They took the car.”

Of course, Dru and her security team knew this because Dru had planted a tracker on Charlie’s fancy new inexplicably-expensive-on-a-librarian’s-salary car. Dru knew exactly where he went and for how long, even though she had not yet found what she was looking for.

Unfortunately, we’d now wasted five minutes. I probably should’ve spent more time figuring out the new watch. This one had haptics to notify me of messages with a silent tap on my wrist. I’d managed to turn off the audible notifications but hadn’t quite figured out the vibratory alerts yet.

I glanced at my watch again as another message scrolled across the tiny screen. “Dru says they shouldn’t be back until at least nine. Later if they have dessert. She says they’ve barely cleared the neighborhood.”

Bracing myself for the mission ahead and the emotions I didn’t want to deal with, I pulled the hood of my zippered top up to cover my long braid and then looped my empty backpack over my shoulders. I repositioned my pewter cuffs, especially the one touching my watch.

“We have plenty of time,” Raven assured me. “You can stop fidgeting.”

Easy for him to say. He didn’t have one of the upgraded smartwatches yet, so he was depending on me for the alerts.

He touched the small daggers he used as hairpins in his topknot, then adjusted his backpack full of spy equipment. If he had a pre-flight check for any mission, this was it.

“Just stay focused, okay, Lilah?”

“What makes you think I can’t stay focused this time?”

“You know why.” He cupped his hands, fingers laced together like a foothold. “Ready?”

I just stared at him. “You do realize my favorite form of exercise is barefoot parkour on six-story rooftops, right?”

He gave me that slow, amused blink he always used when I tested his patience. “Humor me.”

With a theatrical sigh, I planted one shoeless foot on his hands and vaulted the fence anyway, landing softly in the grassy backyard. I turned, grinning. “You’re lucky I like you.”

He cleared the fence silently and landed beside me, sleeves rolled to the elbows. The Walking Lightning bind rune on his right wrist—a symbol of his status as a High Priest—was barely visible in the streetlights. Unlike me, he wore military-style boots built for chasing shadows, not ceremony. Unlike him, I moved better barefoot, especially when sneaking into a house I knew like the back of my hand, right down to which floorboards creaked in the kitchen.

“This feels like the easiest assignment we’ve ever had,” I fibbed in a whisper, adjusting the straps of my bag yet again. “In and out. Look for pilfered books. Plant some electronics. Give Dru the evidence she’s looking for. Easy-peasy.”

Raven didn’t answer right away. He just gave me a long look, then spent a beat too long adjusting a strap that didn’t need adjusting.

“What?”

“Dru was worried,” he said. “About how you’d handle this.”

Of course, Dru would worry about me. She always did. But she also knew I was a pro, and I’d tamp down any emotions that might stop me. She needed an empath for this job, and I was the only one she knew who was better than Dru herself. Plus, I knew the location like no one else but the occupants. And then there was the fact that she’d sent Raven with me. She knew he’d be an emotional buffer for me if I needed one.

“It’s just a house,” I muttered, but the lie stung on the way out.

I was absolutely in control of my mission. My emotions? Not so much, but since when was I ever really in control of my emotions? Unlike Raven Darbyshire, who wrangled every stray emotion he had to the ground and hogtied it with one hand while pointing me to safety with the other.

It wasn’t just a house. It was Charlie’s house. Worse, Charlie and Rune’s house. The one Charlie and I used to talk about buying from his landlord and renovating someday. The one he bought without me two weeks after marrying Rune. The one with three lamps I’d set up on timers all those months ago, timers that—judging by the glow inside the house in front of us—apparently Charlie had never changed. What Dru understood was that it was best for the priesthood to keep a close eye on Charlie and the international book thief he’d married on a whim, but it wasn’t best for me. I could put the past behind me and forget all about Charlie’s betrayal, but not if I had to see him every day at the library, and half of that time with Rune hanging all over him and smirking at me.

I didn’t say any of that out loud. Instead, I nodded toward the back door. “Let’s get this over with.”

I still had a key. Charlie had never changed the locks. My guess was that he’d never told Rune I’d had a key or surely she would’ve had a locksmith at the door the next day. But just in case, Raven could pick the lock in half a minute with one of his Daeganean hair sticks.

Holding my breath, I slid the key in and turned it until I heard the soft click. I just shook my head. Other than marrying sneaky liars, Charlie was totally predictable.

Except for the lamps on timers in three rooms, the house was dark but not silent. A slow hum from the refrigerator, the tick of the wall clock. Where it had once smelled like leather and coffee, now it smelled of coconut and lime with a hint of cigarette smoke. The layout hadn’t changed. Neither had the feeling—equal parts memory and nausea.

Raven moved first, sweeping the living rooms ahead of us with a device that looked like a USB stick crossed with a prayer bead. “No active enchantments,” he murmured.

I shrugged as I reached for the clock on the living room wall. “Neither of them know anything about magic except what they’ve read.”

“I know, but that doesn’t stop third parties from poking their noses where they don’t belong, and until we know more about Rune’s network, let’s play it safe. She hasn’t shown much interest in the priesthood, so I’m inclined to think she’s just an ordinary thief who— Hey, what are you doing?”

As nonchalantly as possible, I finished setting the clock one hour behind and rehung it.

Raven shook his head and chuckled. “Don’t overdo it, Lilah.”

I wandered toward the bookshelves in the hall. They were neater than I expected. Rune probably color-coded them for aesthetic purposes. That, or she didn’t actually read. She never struck me as someone who actually cared about the books she stole. I held my palms out over a few of the spines, checking for magical signatures. Nothing. Just paper and glue. Nothing special here.

Which made sense. The books we suspected her of stealing recently weren’t dangerous—just rare. Priceless. Irreplaceable. Not Daeganean. Dru had kept a close watch to make sure Rune didn’t remove anything of value from the library, and every book in any vault Charlie could access had a tracker the size of a grain of rice hidden in the spine. The only chance Charlie had had in the last year was with new books that hadn’t been processed yet, and only Dru personally logged anything valuable.

That meant he was becoming less valuable to Rune. So what was keeping her here?

He circled me and headed toward the narrow hallway where a familiar book stopped me. I picked up a slim leather-bound copy of The Templar Index: A Concordance and flipped through the pages. “Hmmm, not one of ours. Just a nicely done reprint.”

“Leave it then. Like the professor said. We take only books that belong to us.”

“I know, I know. Gather proof, plant surveillance, track Rune’s network quietly. Cleanly. Got it.”

“Great.” He edged past me in the narrow hallway as he dug through his backpack. “I’m going to get started on switching out the smoke alarms.”

A key scraped in the front lock—we had seconds. The front door was already opening.

Chapter 2: Tight Spaces →

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