Steal the Light (Thieves #1)(8)

As he opened the door to leave, I managed one last question. I wasn’t sure he would bother to answer, but I needed to know.

“Why did you come back?”

It was the first time I had gotten the courage up to ask that simple question. Up until now, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but this distance was getting impossible to take. My heart ached every time he walked out the door.

Daniel paused but didn’t bother to look back. “I came back to make sure you didn’t kill yourself with this business.”

“Well, you should feel free to go.” I had been right. I didn’t want to know the answer. “I can handle myself.”

“The case on the table tells me differently, Z.”

The door closed behind him, and I was alone again.





Chapter Three





Companion.

The word played through my brain as I drove toward what was hopefully my final destination. Hours had passed since Daniel had gone, but my mind was still wrapped around that one word. The one Daniel hadn’t said.

My craptastic car coughed and sputtered as I turned onto the lonely road that led to the third bridge I’d decided to search. Neil wasn’t the only one who needed a car. The trouble was I needed way more than a car. Money couldn’t buy what I needed. I needed a totally new life, but I was stuck holding fast to the old one.

At one time, I had been planning a life as Daniel’s wife. Actually, when I thought about it, I had spent most of my existence planning to be Daniel’s wife. Ever since we met at the age of eight, it had been in my mind. Needless to say, I was a kid who moved around a lot and struggled to maintain friendships. Daniel was a constant in my life.

My father had been the one to take in thirteen-year-old Daniel after George Donovan died on the job. He’d been a thief like my father, but not as careful. We’d been together after that and nothing could separate us.

Well, nothing except the Vampire Council.

I pulled off the road and parked my car behind a group of overgrown bushes. I looked out at the bridge. It crossed the Trinity River in a relatively unpopulated section of the city. An out of the way place, the bridge was home to a number of creatures. The bridge was one of those in-between places, not big, not small, not enormously popular, but by no means vacant. This was a mediocre place that no one really thought about, a quiet place that the police didn’t routinely check and the homeless didn’t think to seek shelter in. It was perfect, and I knew I had found the spot when I smelled soup.

I grabbed the small cache of items I’d tossed into the car when I’d given up on researching the object. I hadn’t found much.

The Light of Alhorra was supposedly a mythical object of faery origin. It had been missing so long from the human world that it had passed into legend. I had found an artist’s rendering on a web site, but who actually knew if it was real? It was hard to see the carvings on such a flat medium as paper, but there was a beauty to the piece. The artist believed that the carvings represented a story of faery kind, perhaps even a creation myth. The box was supposedly locked with a golden seal, and it was said that only one with pure intentions could open the box and receive the blessings inside.

It had been stupid to waste time on the Internet when I had a font of information just waiting under a bridge. And all it would cost me was a couple of bottles of cheap wine and some chocolate.

When wanting to learn about a Fae object, it was best to seek out a Fae creature.

I closed the car door quietly, and as I climbed down the embankment, I was grateful I had thought to trade my strappy sandals in for a pair of sneakers. As a semi-forgotten place, the grass hadn’t seen a city crew in a long time.

“Hello?” I sent out into the darkness, not wanting to frighten anything that might be waiting. Some of them had extremely sharp teeth.

“Stop.” The voice was loud but held a tremble that told me he was as afraid of me as I was of him. Actually, he was probably more afraid of me since I didn’t find him particularly threatening.

“It’s Zoey Wharton bringing greetings to Halle the Loyal,” I said in my most formal voice.

“Only greetings, Zoey Wharton?” There was no way to miss the disappointment in the question.

I smiled. “I bring greetings and a few gifts.”

“Please come in and be welcome.”

Trolls get a bad rap. Sure the mountain trolls one might find in the wilds of Norway or close to the Arctic Circle might be gigantic and completely terrifying, but your everyday, ordinary, under-the-bridge troll is really no big deal. As long as you treat the troll with respect, they treat you with an enormous amount of old world hospitality. When most people think of faeries, they think of tiny creatures with gossamer wings, but the truth is there are many different creatures who make up the Fae world. Trolls are one of them.

Halle the Loyal was one of the Huldrefolk, a branch of the Fae that originally was native to Scandinavia. Faery kind can be found on almost every continent, but the Northern Europeans were particularly populous at one time. Sometime in the distant past, when humans began to take over the planet, the majority of Fae had chosen to find another plane of existence. It was a historical time the Fae referred to as Passing Beyond the Veil. Some had stayed and adjusted to life with humankind. Halle and his wife, Ingrid, had immigrated to the New World sometime in the 1800s. My father had befriended the pair before I was born. I had been visiting them for as long as I could remember and was well versed in greeting protocol.