Running the Gauntlet
Too late to let go
Buried weapons of magic. A killer only they can stand against. Or does removing them unleash something worse?
Colin and his family guarded and managed the town’s historical house for years… until a thief with wall-shattering claws came tearing it apart in search of more power.
Someone has to stop him. Colin hunts for the truth behind that history, and the key to wielding a strange, shapeshifting gauntlet—against an enemy that appears without warning to kill anyone in the way of his power.
Someone has to stop him. But who is Colin saving from who?
The sister whose disappearance still haunts him…
The detective he’s drawn to, and not only because she knows the case all too well…
His old friends who have their own ties to the magic…
Or the truth behind the whole town? Which one is the real threat, and who is the next target?
Someone has to stop him. And Colin has to try – whatever the cost may be.
Running the Gauntlet is the first book of an exciting new urban fantasy series. If you like thrilling action, back-alley mystery, and Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, this is the book to grab.
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Sample
The intruder leaned around the corner, peering on up the stairway. Colin stood frozen—beyond those shoulders, the man had no head.
Then the moment passed, the figure stepped on around the corner, and Colin blinked and glimpsed a head in a ski mask after all as the burglar moved on upstairs. Still missing how Colin had walked in behind him.
And leaving the inspector slumped on the floor.
Blood spattered the victim’s bald head. The footsteps faded up the stairs into the building’s stillness, and Colin crept forward to the motionless man—Mike, why was he blanking on his last name?—to probe for a pulse. Weak but there.
He glanced up at the stairs. His fists clenched, and he wished he could hear the bastard descending from the library floor above. To have someone attacked, right here…
Mike’s head lolled sideways. He croaked “someone… following me…” and the words slurred. A patch on the back of his skull looked sunken, the source of the blood.
Bashed from behind. Did that thief think someone he’d hit would just wake up unhurt in an hour, or did he not care? Just half an hour ago Colin had been showing Mike where to start the inspection here.
He grabbed for his phone. His finger slid so easily into 911.
“What is your emergency?” chirped the voice.
“I’m Colin da Costa, at the Vargas House. We have a burglar, and a man down—I don’t want to move him.”
“Understood. Can you get to a safe place?”
Sure. But I’m Security here… my mother and I asked Mike to do his quake inspection after hours, that’s why we’re alone… No, don’t start thinking it’s my fault again… And that missing head must have been a trick of the shadows.
Thunk.
The sound came from upstairs, a muted crunch like something slamming into wood. Colin was on his feet stuffing the phone away and heading for the stair, quiet as he could move and straining his ears for another blow, another footstep, filtering in through the street noises outside.
He crept up the stairs. The lights above were off, since Mike turned them off when each section was done. With each step up the wide boards wrapped the building tighter around him, all the turns and creakings he’d grown up with, and left a stranger’s footsteps at night simply alien against it all. And this intruder was chopping into the place itself—
The footsteps above shifted. Colin froze. If the burglar heard him now, if he caught him on the stairway and had a gun… Too late, too many steps up or down to get clear. And I’m still unarmed.
But the feet above only moved around the library. Colin edged to the top and stepped into the dimness, pausing at the side of its doorway.
A good position. If the burglar came past him he could grab him right there, keep him from getting at Mike or using any weapon he had.
For one moment Colin wondered, would I even be trying this if we hadn’t asked Mike to come here at night, or if it wasn’t an earthquake inspection that this attacked?
Another thunk rang out. He peeked through the doorway.
By the moonlight through the tall windows, he saw the figure crouching at one end of the library. Right at the base of one of the columns, a stocky shape in dark clothes and that ski mask. Nothing strange about his head now.
A shape protruded from one of his gloved fingers, what looked like a pencil-thick blade. A useless thing that should snap itself or the single finger it attached to. But the intruder was drawing it back, sliding it out of the base of the column. Where he’d stabbed it into the wood.
The impossible how burned away from Colin’s mind in a rage of what he saw: this man was slowly tearing, breaking, the House’s support columns, enough of that and this place could come down too like the quake buried my sister—
A croak tore from his throat. A faint, helpless sound.
The masked man shifted in his crouch.
Colin ducked back behind the doorway. How loud had he been? If the intruder stepped too far out to check, he’d come within reach. Colin’s heart hammered in his throat, his fists readied.
The burglar’s footsteps walked deeper in.
“No skein here,” he muttered.
Skayn, the word sounded like? What?
Colin peeked around again. The masked man stepped toward the wall, to the roped-off side, where he walked past the shelves of books and animal sculptures to stop at one of the paintings. The pale shape of Matt Vargas’s painting of the library itself.
“There’s the dragon.”
The burglar’s tone was a guttural sound, so low and thick with smugness it seemed like no voice Colin had ever heard. But he was walking deeper into the library, past one column after another in the row. The blade on his finger was gone.
Colin pulled back, listening. Whatever the masked man was up to, confronting him was still a risk, and the police would be on their way. The one who really needed him was Mike downstairs. But…
Is he sabotaging, searching? I don’t even know how.
The pillars stretched in a row down the library, with the intruder walking toward the far end. Colin slipped into the room to crouch behind the nearest, with the whole line of supports to hide him. The old-paper smell of the room thickened around him.
Thunk.
From the far pillar—he was stabbing into that column too? Colin could just see him crouching by it, but his back and the row of pillars hid everything else.
Colin crouched down at his own pillar. In the moonlight the hole in the wood might have been a gray stain, but the masked man had punched something right into it. Two joined holes.
He slid his finger in. The gap felt wider inside, and he wiggled around.
Instead of splinters, he touched a plastic smoothness. A bomb—but the shock was gone in an instant: even if the masked man had stuffed plastique in there, he couldn’t have gotten a detonator in yet. Colin hooked his finger in the stuff, and drew it out.
With a softly sucking whisper, a dollop, a whole stream of some kind of putty slid out of the pillar. It looked colorless in the shadows, and it flowed like syrup—why would so much of it hold together and slide out? He caught it, and it pooled out and filled his cupped palm.
“Police! Anyone there?”
The sharp voice came from down by the House’s front door, and the rapid footsteps showed they weren’t wasting time before closing in. We got you now!
“Damn you—” The masked man’s growl was pure viciousness, and he dashed down for the doorway.
Going after Mike. The thought crashed through Colin in one heartbeat, and in the next he was up and charging at the intruder’s back as he passed. He had one instant to shuck the goo off his hand. Then he slammed into his target to shove him at the side of the doorway.
The stuff was still stuck to his hand, and his grip twisted. The thief wrenched away. Clothes shifted under his grasp as the thief wrenched free and shoved back.
Colin rocked back, ready. The thief stood just out of reach, bracing for one grand, telegraphed punch—
Something squirmed over that fist—
Colin blocked but the punch slammed against his deflecting arm, and burst against the wall with a savage crack. Colin stumbled away. The smell of sawdust bit at his nose.
The thief whirled and ran.