Birthday Shift by Desconhecido(a) Page B

or
sword had to compensate for that flaw and the extra seconds it took to steady
the weapon gave her opponent the advantage.
    Inside the building, the
object she’d come for called to her. Her body hummed like a tuning fork despite
the fact that her magic – and all magic – had no power in Crossroads. Still,
the heartstone drew her like metal shavings to a magnet. Her heart thundered,
her breath quickened, and painful memories wrapped around her, clouding her
perceptions and numbing her to everything but the heartstone—and her memories
of a happy past.
    Tait pulled the cloak tighter
around her. She adjusted the mesh veil portion of the hood so it obscured the
lower half of her face. Burrowing deeper into the hood cast her face in shadow.
She knew the hood and veil made it difficult for anyone to see her features
clearly, but that was the whole point of the cloak. Anonymity.
    Silence enveloped her when
she stepped into Spellbound Treasure. The eerie quiet set off alarms inside her
head.   Her back burned; someone watched
her from a hidden spot. A door opened and a tall man entered, a rueful smile on
his handsome face. Tait’s nose twitched as she caught his scent. Her well-trained
sense of smell sent up the alarm. Demon!
    The man’s brows rose as if he
could hear her thoughts. “Can I help you?” he asked politely.
    Tait would wager a commission
that he knew exactly why she was there. “Etienne told me to come. She said the
man who won the heartstone auction would be picking it up today. She said I
could speak to him about offering more money for it,” Tait replied, her voice
gruff.
    It went against her instincts
to come to Crossroads, begging for the chance to buy the heartstone from the
anonymous man who'd outbid her for it online. But she needed the stone almost
more than she needed her next breath. Now that she stood inside the building
where it resided, she could hear it humming, singing to her soul. Her eyes
closed for a moment as pain lashed her sharply.
    “Are you alright?”
    The tall man’s cool voice
pulled her from the raw ache that threatened to consume her. She shuddered, the
movement hidden within the voluminous folds of the cloak.
    “You know, weapons aren’t
allowed in Crossroads,” he told her in a matter-of-fact voice.
    “Then you should have a gun
check at the portal,” Tait hissed. The fact that she’d expressed her momentary
annoyance proved that her control had already unraveled to the dangerous point.
She needed to complete this transaction soon, before she fell apart in front
the proprietor.
    The man eyed her
thoughtfully, refusing to rise to her bait. He gestured toward a chair in the
corner. “You’re welcome to sit and wait. Can I get you anything? A glass of
water? A cup of coffee?”
    She shook her head. “No.
Nothing.”
    The chair he’d pointed to had
mismatched legs but looked comfortable nonetheless. She sat down, her eyes
shifting to survey the room automatically, checking for other entrances and
exits.   After three years of searching
for her heartstone, she’d found it at one of Spellbound Treasure’s online
auctions. The moment she’d seen its photo, the stasis she’d lived in for six
years had cracked open. She needed the stone.   Her body ached to hold it in her hand, and let its magic, and the
emotions trapped within it, heal her. Her old life might be gone, who she once
was might be gone, but that stone lived on, and her heart needed it badly.
    She’d bid relentlessly on the
stone. She hadn’t cared how much it cost. She could afford it. Living frugally
while making huge commissions for kills meant that she could pay almost
anything for the heartstone. Yet, every time she’d upped her bid, someone had
topped her. She outbid him, and he came back with another higher bid. For a
week, they had dominated the auction, pushing the price into a zone most buyers
couldn’t touch. In the end, the rat hole she lived in with its spotty
electricity had lost her the