Athena's Jewel (Aya Harris Collection 2)
Prologue
The man yanked her through the backdoor of the club, ignoring her hisses and snapping fangs. Only a minute ago, he’d been flirting with her over a bloody margarita. She’d liked the easy way he smiled and the strong pulsing of the blood running through the vein on his neck. This wasn’t how she imagined the night would end.
With a quick hand, the man snapped a metal collar around her neck, and stepped back as her fangs disappeared and the strength in her arms faded away.
“I’ve got another one for you, Timur,” he called into the darkness of the alleyway. “A vampire.”
She jerked back when out of the gloom, a moving truck inched forward. The truck’s fog lights lit up the small patch of wet cement in front of her and a pile of discarded Bacardi boxes. A giant man dressed in a thin t-shirt and cargo pants stepped out of the passenger seat and approached them. He bent down low to get a good look at her, his rank breath hot and heavy on her face.
“She’ll make a good addition to our haul,” the giant said in a gravelly voice. “Throw her in the back with the others.”
The drug they’d slipped into her drink began to cloud her head, like a heavy fog descending on a valley. Her friends had left her to hit up the new club down the block. No one knew she was missing. They’d never find her.
“Don’t worry, pretty thing,” the giant said, stroking her face with his huge index finger. “We’ll take care of you. We take care of all the girls that work for us.”
They threw her in the back of the truck, slamming the door behind her. As the truck began to sway down the alleyway, she peered into the darkness. Five sets of eyes stared back at her – reflecting the same fear boiling beneath her skin.
Chapter One
The fire breathing toad gave one last belch of acrid smoke before hopping into a mess of boxes in the storage room. I jumped in after the amphibian, careful not to squish it. The last thing we needed was for our storage room to go up in flames. Ancient parchment and wooden artifacts didn’t hold up well against fire. No matter how magical they were.
“Do I have to remind you, Mr. Jones, that this is a museum? Not a zoo?” I said through clenched teeth.
Mr. Jones held the empty toad cage and laughed, his bulging belly bouncing up and down. “My dear, this is a supernatural museum and that is a supernatural toad. He belongs here as much as anything.”
Shaking my head, I kept silent. Mr. Jones had acquired the toad on his latest expedition to Egypt. Along with it, he’d found a staff that was enchanted to locate gold, the mummified head of an Egyptian magician, and a wooden flute that could send anyone into a coma with its lullabies. I didn’t mind dealing with his crazy and dangerous items, but animals were another thing altogether.
“Watch it, he’s going for the magic books,” I yelled, spotting the tawny rough backside of the toad squeezing between two overflowing bookshelves.
A wisp of black smoke trailed into the air. The toad was gearing up to let another belch loose. He’d nearly singed me earlier when I discovered the empty cage, on my way to grab another bag of souvenir plastic shrunken heads for our younger visitors.
After my encounters last month with my brother Nicky and his demented Gorgon friend, Theo, I was a little fire-shy. My friend, Angel, had healed me well enough. But once in a while, I still woke up screaming from my nightmares, thinking I was on fire.
The toad popped his head out from behind the bookcase and I snatched him up. Juggling his squishy little body like a hot potato, I shoved him into Mr. Jones’ cage and slammed the door shut. The toad croaked and stared at me with one beady eye, smoke leaking from his lips.
“Take that,” I said, dowsing him with the remaining water from my coffee mug.
The water hit him with a sizzle. His flame extinguished, the toad wiggled under a plastic rock and buried himself in the sand.
“Well, that’s no fun,” Mr. Jones pouted. “It’ll take him at least a month to get his fire burning again.”
I smiled in victory. No toad was going to burn down my Arcana Museum of Supernatural and Occult.