For something that existed on a server so hard to access it made the dark web seem positively fluorescent, the site looked surprisingly innocuous, the listings similar to what you’d see on a normal auction house website. Pictures, descriptions, soothingly bland language.
The difference was, where those other auction houses were selling paintings, pieces of furniture, or jewelry, this nameless site was selling . . . well, paintings, pieces of furniture, and jewelry, but a lot of it could kill you.
Tonight, however, there wasn’t much on offer, or at least nothing Tamsyn thought Bowen might be interested in. Mostly crystals, one creepy-looking journal, and a pair of cuff links that were allegedly made from—
“Oh, ew,” Tamsyn said, pushing her noodles away.
She kept scrolling, but nothing else caught her eye, and she was about to close her laptop when she found her cursor hovering over one of the tabs at the top of the site.
The one that said Requested.
She hadn’t clicked on that in nearly a year, not since she started working for Bowen. That was the deal they’d made, after all, that she was acquiring for him exclusively, and she’d stuck to that even if Bowen didn’t pay as much as some of her other clients had.
But then Bowen had never asked her to get anything truly dangerous, and some of the requests that came in weren’t so much “acquisitions” as they were “suicide missions.”
Tamsyn pulled her lower lip between her teeth, one foot tapping underneath the table.
“It’s just looking,” she reminded herself. “You’re not going to take anything. You’re just gonna see if there’s anything interesting. Or something Bowen might need to know about. You’re being . . . dedicated. Proactive. Working well with others.”
That was the thing about talking to yourself—nobody around to call you on your bullshit.
So she clicked.
The first few listings were nothing special. As always, there was some dork offering to pay millions for the Philosopher’s Stone, and someone else was asking for something from Salem, even though there hadn’t even been real witches there, according to Bowen.
Still, Tamsyn kept clicking, drawing one foot up onto the bench, her arm wrapped around her knee as she scrolled with the other hand, and her playlist switched to Dolly Parton mourning her “Hard Candy Christmas.” She was just about to call it a night when she saw the brooch.
It caught her eye because, unlike most of the illustrations accompanying the listings, there was a color photograph, not a sketch from some ancient tome, and the jewels sparkled, a spiky cluster of gold and emeralds and rubies that wouldn’t have looked amiss on top of a Christmas tree.
The description was brief.
Y Seren: Brooch consisting of emeralds, rubies, Welsh gold. Currently in possession of Carys Meredith, Tywyll House, Wales. Piece MUST BE ACQUIRED by 12/24 of the current year. Due to high-risk nature of retrieving brooch from home and accelerated timeline for delivery, compensatory pay offered beginning at US$1M.
“Holy Noodz,” Tamsyn muttered.
She’d had well-paying gigs before, but a job that started at a million? That was a first. And she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a listing with so few details. Nothing about what the thing even did. Which, in Tamsyn’s experience, meant that either it was a complete dud—just a piece of jewelry someone had decided must have magical powers—or it was something genuinely powerful.
For a second, she thought about calling Bowen. Or at least texting him since talking to him on the phone was usually a nightmare. Not only did his service suck up there on that mountain of his, but the man was truly terrible at calls in general. Tamsyn felt like she asked “Are you still there?” at least fifteen times per call, and sometimes he wasn’t—that shitty service—but more often than not, he had just gone completely silent because Such Was Bowen Penhallow.
So yeah, if she was going to get in touch and ask him about this, definitely going the “written communication” route.
Reaching across the table, Tamsyn grabbed her phone, but once it was in her hand, she hesitated.
That’s right, Bowen wasn’t in Wales right now. He was in Graves Glen.
Where he would be until Christmas Eve.
Her eyes went back to the brooch.
“This is bad,” she said out loud because it was clearly something she needed to hear. “What you’re thinking? It’s bad.”
Or was it?
No, it was, definitely.
“One last job” was such a cliché, and Tamsyn was pretty sure it was also the kind of thing that inevitably got you killed.
“Because of the irony,” she said around a mouthful of noodles. One benefit to living alone and talking to yourself was that you didn’t have to worry about table manners.
Still, her free hand kept drumming on the keyboard, her eyes fixed on that brooch.
Even in this old, low-quality picture, the emeralds and rubies sparkled, and while Tamsyn understood the monetary value of the piece, she was having trouble working out what was magical about it. The buyer wasn’t saying, that was for sure.
Everything about this was fishy as hell, she knew that. And she also knew she’d made a deal with Bowen to tell him about any artifacts that might be dangerous, to give him a chance to buy them first.
But . . .
This was a million dollars.
Bowen wasn’t going to pay her that. Bowen almost certainly didn’t have that, no matter how fancy his dad had been.
And it was a real test of her skills, the kind of job she’d once run straight toward until tangling with that ghost in Graves Glen a couple of years ago. Wouldn’t it be fun to see if she still had what it took to pull this kind of thing off?
A challenging magical heist.
A million bucks.
And then . . . maybe an end to this line of work?
