Page 41 of Misfit Monsters (Pack of Outcasts #1)
I f you love possessive and morally questionable supernatural men who’ll stop at nothing to protect their woman, you don’t want to miss my Flirting with Monsters series! It’ll introduce you to the cheerful phoenix shifter long before she became Jonah’s guardian.
Sorsha has no idea what she’s in for when three monstrous hotties follow her home from a robbery and drag her headlong into a paranormal conspiracy in Shadow Thief …
SHADOW THIEF
The story of how I was going to end the world began not with a bang or a whimper but a kerplink.
The kerplink came from the latch of an arcanely ancient window lock hitting the sill as it disengaged.
Adjusting my position on the ledge outside, I withdrew my equally ancient wedge and probe—gotta have tools that fit the job—from beneath the sash.
At my tug, the window slid upward with a faint rasp.
Shadows draped the hallway on the other side even more densely than in the backyard below me, where the glow of the mansion’s security lamps cut through the night.
Less work for me. Dressed in black from head to toe, with my hands gloved to avoid fingerprints and my vibrant red hair tucked away under a knit hat, I blended in perfectly.
I slipped from the flutter of the warm summer breeze into the stillness of the hall and eased the window shut. The ceiling loomed high above. The tangy scent of wood polish tickled my nose. No doubt the floorboards that showed at the edges of the Persian rug gleamed like glass in daylight.
The thick rug handily absorbed my footsteps as I slunk along it, eyeing the doors.
If I’d been able to get a good view from outside, I’d have snuck straight into the room I was aiming for, but with the coverings on the other windows, it’d been impossible to know whether I’d hit the jackpot or stumble onto inhabitants I wasn’t looking to meet.
Looking around now, there were a couple of signs that this wasn’t the home of your typical collector.
Most of them kept the rest of their living space free of anything that would hint at their secret interests, a portrait of normality.
Here, paintings of eerie, twisted forms with glowing eyes hung on the walls.
Farther down, a patch of thicker darkness streaked across the pale paint of the ceiling as if it’d been scorched.
What the heck had this dude gotten up to?
But then I spotted the door that had to lead to his collection room, and that question fell away behind a tingle of exhilaration.
I couldn’t tell exactly what kind of security I was dealing with until I got right up close and flicked on the thinnest beam on my flashlight. The sight made me grimace. Son of a donkey’s uncle.
In my experience, there were two kinds of collectors.
Some went all in on traditionalism, preferring esoteric fixtures and devices of times past—the older the better—to match the nature of the creatures they’d stashed away.
Others valued modern tech over keeping a consistent ambiance and secured their collection areas with the most up-to-date electronics.
I preferred the former. Forget fancy do-dads hacking digital codes—it was much more satisfying getting to tackle concrete objects hands-on, like a puzzle I was putting together… or, more often, pulling apart.
This guy clearly leaned that way too. Except he leaned it way too far.
One look at the mass of interlocking metal around the door’s handle told me my standard picks weren’t getting anywhere with that lock.
I didn’t encounter many that required more forceful methods.
Tonight’s collector was awfully paranoid about protecting his treasures.
Or he had something in there that was so special it justified the lengths he’d gone to.
A prickle of apprehension quivered down my spine.
You know the feeling when you realize that the thing you’re in the middle of doing might actually be a horrible idea—but you’re so committed already that stopping would feel even worse?
Yeah. I lived there so often I might as well have made it my permanent address.
Which meant I shrugged off the uneasiness and reached into the cloth bag hanging from my belt.
I had ways of defeating even a ridiculous lock like this, and I wasn’t going to let some wannabe master of the macabre get the better of me.
Once I set out on a mission, I saw it through.
And so far I always had seen them through, no matter how tricky the situation got.
I broke a pea-sized bead off my lump of explosive putty and poked it into the deepest cranny in the center of the mechanism. “Beating you with some goo, eat your fill,” I sang at a whisper to the tune of Duran Duran’s “A View to a Kill.” Mangling ‘80s song lyrics always put me in a better mood.
Hey, everyone needs a hobby.
Bracing myself, I aimed my lighter at the cranny and flicked on the flame.
The putty burst with a crackle and a puff of smoke—and the tinkle of several antique fittings shattering apart.
I held myself totally still for several seconds, my ears pricked for any indication that someone in the house had noticed the sound, but the hall stayed silent.
When I pressed on the handle, the lock creaked, balked, and then crunched with a harder jerk. At my push, the door swung open.
Holy mother of mackerels, this was a collection room all right. I’d seen a lot of them, but even so, I couldn’t help gaping.
The “room” looked as if it had actually been three or four rooms with the walls taken down between them, stretching like some grand ballroom into the distance.
Built-in wooden shelves stuffed with books, trinkets, and other objects lined the walls on either side of me from floor to vaulted ceiling.
In front of those shelves at regular intervals, globe-like lights beamed down into glinting cages not so different from those you’d expect to house birds.
Their vertical bars rose into domed tops, and their bases ranged from the size of my palm to the length of my arm.
I counted at least a dozen of them spread out down the vast space. It was rare to come across a collector who’d managed to get his hands on more than a few shadow creatures. This dude had been busy.
I tore my gaze away from the cages to skim the wall and note the thick velvet curtains that covered the room’s narrow windows in the few gaps between the shelves. There were my possible escape routes.
Another, more massive velvet curtain hung across the entire width of the room at the far end. What in Pete’s name lay past that?
A reddish blotch caught my eye in the middle of the blue-and-gold patterned rug. That maroon shade verging on brown—it was a bloodstain. One so big I could have lain down on it and not covered the whole thing.
A fresh twinge of nerves shot through my gut.
It wasn’t at all unusual for collectors to experiment with all kinds of supposed supernatural rituals, including blood-based spells, but this guy appeared to have gone all out and not made any attempt to clean up afterward.
He’d left the evidence on display as if it were a valuable part of the exhibit.
There was creepy, and then there was “here’s a fellow who might very well enjoy wearing other people’s skin as a three-piece suit.”
Before I returned my attention to the cages, I took a few moments to browse the shelves and pocket artifacts from the dude’s non-living collection—whatever looked both valuable and not so distinctive it’d be easily recognized when I sold it on the black market.
I settled on a gold bangle, a large ruby set in ebony, and a handful of antique coins.
That should cover at least a few month’s room and board while I figured out my next heist. A gal’s got to pay the rent somehow. It seemed fitting that the collectors indirectly funded my efforts to shut them down. Call me the Robin Hood of monster emancipation.
Because that was what lurked in those cages under their spotlights. At least, the collectors called them monsters. And to be fair, for the most part the creatures that slunk through rifts from the shadow realm into our mortal one did fit the standard criteria.
Those of us who both knew of the creatures’ existence—and had bothered to speak at any length with the ones capable of talking—chose our terminology with a little more respect.
“Shadowkind” came in all shapes, sizes, and inclinations, and most of them were a heck of a lot less monstrous than the worst human beings I’d tangled with.
It was difficult to tell what exactly this guy had caged in his extensive menagerie.
Shadowkind could literally meld into our world’s shadows and travel through them, hence the name, but they had to be able to reach those shadows first. The spotlights were positioned to fill each entire cage and the space beyond the bars with light, preventing that sort of escape.
Distressed by their incarceration and that constant glaring light, the creatures shrank in on themselves.
I could only make out a blurred, flickering smudge of darkness in each: a glimpse of spines here, a flash of fangs there.
When the collectors wanted to gloat over their prizes, they dimmed the lights just enough to coax their captives into showing themselves more clearly without allowing any full shadows to fall into range.
Silver and iron twined together to form the cages’ bars and base—true to mythology, most otherworldly beings recoiled from one or both metals to some degree.
Most creatures of this size weren’t strong enough to leap into the shadows through the narrow spaces between those bars even if they’d had shadows to travel through.
That meant freeing them was a multi-stage process.