Death Wish . Amy Blankenship
fine and you’re home now. You are staying… right?” Gypsy asked letting the hope shine in her eyes.
Lacey started to say no but paused, biting her bottom lip as she tried to wrap her mind around something her cousin had said. Raising her chin, she locked her gaze with Gypsy’s wondering if she’d just found the safety net she’d been searching for. If it kept the demons from finding her for a little while longer, then she wasn't going to complain.
“Wait a sec… were you serious when you said that demons can’t come into this building without your permission?” she asked knowing when something sounded too good to be true… it usually was.
“It’s true,” Gypsy confirmed with enthusiasm. “We even tested the spell just to make sure that it worked, and well… it works brilliantly.” She tried to keep herself from grinning as she remembered Nick and Ren being sucked out of the store.
“Now that is the sweetest thing I’ve heard in hmmm… about a year,” Lacey said truthfully and felt some of the tenseness drain out of her shoulders and back. Maybe if she stayed, she could buy a little more time before facing the grim reaper. “And you say this was one of the spells that has been in the safe all this time?”
She silently wondered if it had come from the same spell book that she knew held the spell to counteract the power of the demon mark she was now wearing. The way she understood it… by casting a distortion spell over top of her demon mark, it would be near impossible to track her. It wouldn’t remove the mark but it was the next best thing.
She needed to find out where they’d taken that book. Her next step would be to locate the most powerful witch’s coven in the city and convince them to help her perform the spell. Problem was… someone had moved the damn book.
Gypsy tilted her head to the side in concern when the relief in Lacey's eyes faded back to worry. “Lacey, where have you been for the last year? What happened to keep you from coming home?”
When Lacey didn’t answer right away, Gypsy lowered her gaze to where their hands were still locked together around the crystal. “You have to know that Grandpa was worried sick when you vanished. He tried to hide it from me, but you stayed away for so long that he was finally convinced you were never coming back… that something terrible had happened to you.”
Lacey made a slight face knowing Grandpa was the last person responsible for the mess she was in. This one was all on her.
They had always kept Gypsy out of the loop but now that Grandpa was gone, there didn’t seem to be anything stopping her from telling at least part of it. Besides, when her past caught up with her, then at least Gypsy would know what really happened to her and maybe even place a grave marker next to Grandpa in memory.
She felt herself calm as she made up her mind to let her cousin in on the family’s extracurricular activities.
“Grandpa always sent you to the auctions and safe places to get the artifacts he wanted for his collection or needed to appease his clientele. That was your job and you were very good at it.” She smiled fondly at her cousin before adding, “But me… I was good at something completely different.”
“What are you getting at?” Gypsy asked with a frown. She had a suspicious feeling that she wasn’t going to like whatever it was Lacey was about to tell her.
Lacey shrugged as if it wasn’t that big of a deal, “Grandpa sent you after the things that were available and easy to get a hold of… just make a few deals in secret, with the help of a highly sought after trade or huge wad of cash. He sent me after the things that were not so… easy to obtain.”
“Like what?” Gypsy asked.
“Like things people did not want to part with,” Lacey supplied and watched as her cousin’s jaw dropped.
Chapter 2
“He sent you to steal things?” Gypsy's voice rose in bewilderment. “I can’t believe Grandpa would encourage you to do something so dangerous.”
“How do you think he got into this business in the first place?” Lacey asked with a slight smile.
“I’ve only heard rumors,” Gypsy whispered more than a little amazed by the confession. Some of the highest ranking people at the underground auctions had been throwing her hints for the last couple years. She’d just nodded politely at them and smiled, then bleached the rumors from her mind not wanting to think too hard on them.
She sighed as she admitted, “I just shrugged it all off thinking they were picking on me because we often got a hold of things the others wanted very badly.”
“They had every right to be jealous. Grandpa was a notorious cat burglar in his prime and he was able to get his hands on a lot of valuable items during those years,” Lacey confirmed with pride in her voice.
“His specialty was supernatural items… old spell books, journals, paintings, and various magical items. Underground rumor mills say that he actually found the Holy Grail and hid it from the man that hired him to find it. I seriously doubt he did, but it only adds to the myth that surrounds Grandpa.”
Gypsy frowned, “How did he stay alive all these years going after such dangerous items?”
Lacey shrugged, “Who knows? Grandpa made a lot of enemies before he retired from his favorite pastime. No one could prove it was him because he had mastered the art of thievery. One of the first things he’d stolen was a cloaking device that rendered him completely undetectable. His shield against most of those enemies who did suspect him was the fact that a lot of the things they thought he might have stolen were powerful enough to be used against them if they retaliated.”
“A cloaking device,” Gypsy repeated with wide eyes. “Like Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak?”
“I don’t know… I never got to see it since it disappeared before either of us was born,” Lacey answered. “I guess someone else was an even better thief than Grandpa.”
“No wonder what’s left of our family moved out of the city and warned us about hanging out with Grandpa. I thought it was just because they assumed that he was a nut for believing in the supernatural and running a store like this.” Gypsy shook her head remembering all of the times she’d stood up for him. She still didn’t regret it though. She had loved him and that was all that mattered to her.
“Oh no,” Lacey contradicted her. “The family has no idea. He wanted it that way. He would always act strange around them on purpose… so that they would label him as a weird outcast and stay far away. He didn’t want to put any of them in danger if someone did come after him.”
Lacey's lips hinted at a sad frown as she thought back to when she’d first moved in with Grandpa… right here in this store. When she’d been nine years old, her parents had been killed in a freak accident and her grandfather had showed up to claim her within hours. He had no way of knowing if the accident was truly an accident or not and had confessed that secret worry to her after she’d learned the truth about him.
It was the theory that her parents might have been murdered over some paranormal trinket that had eventually made her want to seek revenge against anyone hording supernatural items in hopes that she’d run across the one that had killed them. Nothing had ever turned up though and she’d quickly become addicted to the thrill of the job. That… and the money wasn’t bad either.
“It was my idea to follow in his footsteps and he was against it from the start,” She reminisced. “But after a while, I wore him down by going out and thieving on my own. I made sure he caught me doing it so that he had no choice but to train me on how to get in and out without being detected. It wasn’t his idea but I left him no other choice. It was either let me do it on my own and get myself killed, or teach me all of his tricks and hope for the best.”
“I see,” Gypsy shook her head at her devious cousin and almost felt sorry for her grandfather. “Poor Grandpa didn’t have a chance.”